Category: My bad

running

That would be my nose that’s running. Every scotch broom bush in the lower mainland is blooming and the pollen is piling up in minuscule yellow banks everywhere. I sneeze, I run, I blow, I sneeze.

Saw Mike yesterday. He took me to a U2 concert (checks notes, oops he already took me to a U2 concert) a U3 concert, plus the wonderful teachings afterwards. (There was a workshop, and I learned more about strumming in fifteen minutes than in my previous lifetime so that was fun.)

It would have been lovely except that Mike is now convinced that he was subjected to racial profiling while he attended (for being egregiously Chinese with long hair, apparently) and is asking me to think about whether or not this is true.

Since I’ve never been racially profiled that I know of, and do not feel the almost hourly social sting of racism, I would like to plead the following.

I am autistic. I was put in a room of gabbling white people, 4% of whom where wearing masks (NIOSH N95’s WERE GIVEN OUT) in which the noise level was as you can imagine from a very very very live room full of people trying to order cider and admire ukulele setups. Asking me to notice a racial aggression when I am just fucking sitting there trying to autistic mask when I want to flee to the bathroom and stay there until all the people stop gabbling is a legit request but awkward white ha ha, no.

If someone of colour believes they’ve been subjected to that it’s my job as a friend to fucking believe them and centre their experience, not mine. If he says it happened it did. Whether I was off in my own little world at the time…. I mean, I WAS off in my own little world.

Work for Mike right now is absolutely horrific in ways that need not concern this blog except for that. He and I did not enjoy the trek out to the concert venue and back – the traffic was gross given it was a holiday Monday – but we did enjoy the beautiful setting at Labarge Lake.

He got his ticket checked twice after getting ignored by the ticket taker. I watched it happen, and my interpretation was not as negative as his.

I’m going to leave it at that. My ability to ignore things is very high.

xxx

 

a Vancouver moment

Mike got us dinner (Jeff got a chicken donair, I got a lamb donair – Halifax style, never had the sweet sauce before.) Then just before we went to the uke jam he got me a gelato and we ate them watching the street scene at Robson and Hamilton of a warm evening; it included a complete  buggering of traffic by what proved to be a false fire alarm, so I got to watch how fire trucks back up when they’re blocking traffic. Three fire trucks were called, plus a supervisor. <—-a Vancouver moment

Mike was NOT the only person of colour at the ukulele jam last night. <—a Vancouver moment

And he did something he’s never done before.

An open mike. I know, right? He’s been the soundtrack for fifty campfires and other people’s vacations and music nights for decades now, at least for me, but he’d never gotten up and played in a public venue.

He played a uke version of Toto’s ‘Africa’. (Jeff’s heard it.)

I played too, “And then he done her wrong.” So this involves me BLOWING three verses. THROUGH A KAZOO while playing uke as ominously as I can.  At the end of each verse I whip the kazoo out of my mouth and sing, “And then he done her wrong.” The last verse I do double time, so that the musicologists in the audience can realize that the last verse is to be played on the way back from la cimetière, N’Awleens style.  You can check with Mike if you think I’m fibbing, but I got half of a standing ovation at the end of it. I watched people springing out of their seats with my mouth hanging open and bowed back to them.

I wore Tom’s hat, that was mine, and I gave it to him, and Peggy gave it back after he died; that probably did it. Not my protean fucking talent nawssir.

I had a guy tell me that I was an ‘inspired’ kazoo player. This just means that Jeff, who sadly did not know about my kazoo leanings until after he moved in with me, has been gazing dubiously at his bathroom wall (the music room / spare room is on the other side) for more than a decade as I attempt to blow my brains out on the kazoo in ever wilder attempts to control what the damned thing does (I’m especially fond of imitating electric guitar lines.) As far as I can tell I stayed on key. Please spare a thought to Jeff, who has suffered.

All lyrics and chords for the jams were on the screen and THEY HAD A BAND percussion and bass!! to accompany them. A broad range of music from the last century, including Beatles (the song suite from Sgt Pepper) to Dua Lipa (‘Levitating’) was covered. Most professional. I got overwhelmed about 45 minutes in and I could either sing or play, not both, and they were using chords that no Christian would intend, so that’s what I did, put the uke down, and I didn’t try anything on any song I wasn’t familiar with. Even songs with three easy chords were tricksy because of the strumming patterns. It was a brain challenge for me for SURE.

So that all happened. I am so proud of Mike getting up there and blowing everybody away! His anxiety is such that he can conjure up being booed off stage (there was no stage, it was a function room in an absolutely right downtown high school, across from the Fringe NY headquarters LOL the VPL) and I noticed that he shook almost all the way through but he was superlative. (Told him afterwards that he stood with bent knees as if he was expecting to get assaulted, which OF COURSE NO ONE DID) https://vanukes.ca/ is the site name, but be warned they are broke and it might stop happening. <— this too goddamnit is a Vancouver moment

wordle in 2 this morning

Bit of writing yesterday.

 

 

Nothing but electronic horn stabs

Don’t waste your ears on this, I’m just posting it so I can find it later. It is entitled, Brought Before My Oppressors, and it’s BAD VIBES and TOO MUCH VOLUME BLASTS CAN’T YOU EQUALIZE THIS JFC and the bitter grinding sameness of fascism. So, like, I frikkin’ warndja. And of course (pfffft, blowing through lips) PROCESSING? I dan do processing, man. It’s an outrage, but there you have it.

I really don’t want to post the Kaossilator settings for this one since it’s just evil in a bag like Satan’s cat horking up a woolly one and one should have a conscience, but I know for a fucking fact that if I don’t record it, it will be as gone as the (deep breath and avoidance of anecdon’t let’s just say the day before yesterday is a gift that keeps on holy shit what now?ing at me).

BPM 20 – ze lowest setting, which is one of the reasons the sound is so vertiginously choppy.

L02

G08 (Gate arpeggiator set for the first half of the first beat in every four beat bar.)

Minor Third scale

Low C

HONESTLY I WARNED YOU two minutes of audio torture but of course if you use it to drive cockroaches from your home, and use snippets of it in funny animal videos you’re editing, that’s on you.

 

left for the 5 pm

didn’t get home until 10:30 pm. BC Ferries was completely and utterly borked.

The Celebration of Life for Jim Palmer was perfect in terms of weather, company, food, location, and meaning, and it ended with us toasting him and singing “Always look on the bright side of life”. I baked almost 200 biscotti and nobody et them so I took them to Barry and Jackie and my fOlks.

Hi Glenn it was great talking to you and sharing space. scrivener r u l e s

Hi Leo

Hi Linda

Hi mOm

Hi pOp

Hi Dave

Content warning – assault, dementia, me being over sensitive.

Continue reading left for the 5 pm

did NOT make wordle this morning

That was sad. I mean I was actually upset for a moment. Two top fives in Lumosity, 1189 words on the fanfic. Coffee has been consumed, the day has begun.

Confirmed that we’ll be at Barry and Jackie’s overnight after Jim’s memorial. It conflicts with a Bahá’í festival but that’s just our luck – everything always happens on the same day.

SCORE! the weed joint had Trainwreck. I named a fanfic after the strain before I’d even gotten to try it but the weed sommeliers were not lying – absolute gem of a strain – calm blissful body buzz and zero anxiety.

Today I’m going to try to do health oriented things, get some letters in the mail, call a couple of friends, do some more sorting for the yard sale – matters of that nature. I can be upset or I can try to make progress and they don’t usually go together.

Charge your devices! Natural and infrastructure disasters are always only a tick of the clock away!

DeSantis threatening to build ‘another theme park’ to compete with Disney is extremely funny since as far as I know the only two documents he has any interest in are the Bible and the Constitution and neither of them have any fuckin’ IP. What’s he gonna do, ask Veggie Tales to put up the money?

Today’s Trotsky Tuesday guest is Alexander Berkman, who for a long while was Emma Goldman’s sweetie.

Murphy

In other news, Murphy the male bald eagle who wanted to be a DAD SO MUCH that he incubated a rock, has been given a (sadly) orphaned eaglet and he is a) feeding him and b) bonding with him, and it’s actually one of the few things giving me hope right now. How oft we struggle to be what we truly are.

In other news, an extremely endangered hellbender that was raised in a reintroduction facility has fathered a new generation (he was tagged before he was released into the wild). The scientists involved in the project are gleeful and so am I, for them, to have evidence that hellbenders raised by humans can be successfully reintroduced.

In other news I am going to try really hard to have a good day. Off to church with Keith this morning; perhaps today’s the day I’ll be able to restrain myself from verbally assaulting someone who’s harmless.

In other news Renaissance Books is for sale – it’s been a fixture in my neighbourhood since I moved here and I don’t imagine it will survive – they may have trouble selling it. I couldn’t find anything I wanted when I was in there last (it’s right next door to the Bohemian) so I bought two very pretty cards and I’m going to send them to my mOm and my ontie, with a letter inside.

In other news This Is What It’s Like to look for an apartment. LOOK AT THOSE FUCKING PRICES.

In the grand theatre of perception who’s playing god

Don’t act like it’s God’s job to hate; to this atheist that all looks wrong. It’s not God’s job to hate! It’s God’s essence to be BIG. Bigger than our categories, our lusts and spites and thefts. Big enough to get us comfortable with how some things were, are, and will be, big. God always cozies up to physics and mathematics! They’re some of the few other essences rolling about the universe that are big enough to be decent company.

pleasant times

Lovely indoor walk with Paul yesterday at Lougheed. He seems very beaten down and oppressed by his illness but cheered up for the walk. It always cheers folks up to eat, so we got some lo mai gai, which was particularly fine in comparison with previous outings, and there was a lone har gaw in there because they were out of enough lo mai gai to fulfil my order, and the hot and sour soup was as good as I ever remember it being there. We went to Cobb’s but I didn’t buy treats, just spongy crusty white bread which is my kryptonite for stuff I’m s’posed to lay off for my liver.

Continue reading pleasant times

bad friend

As much as I might think I have the mental and physical energy to hop on a plane and go to Toronto to assist Dave with cat care, I don’t. Yesterday was full of panic attacks and self-excoriation for being a bad friend. I should not have volunteered. And now I get to phone someone who’s sick, lonely and literally isolated and tell him that. Thank all the anarchist saints Catherine volunteered.

It’s not about me, but I can’t help. Just the idea of going to an airport fills me with LITERALLY existential dread. I mean, I probably just got over a silent case of COVID (I lost my most of my sense of smell and as things stand now I have to hold things up to my nose to tell what they smell like) which the Canadian government has just admitted was all part of a mass-disabling event, and now I want to get it again? Just thinking about taking my medications, or having to transit everywhere, and then having to come home; I’m on the ground wailing.

I wish I had any good news to share.

 

bathtub dive and Alex pickup

I just found out you can sing into the extra soundhole on this Riversong ukulele and get absolutely wild harmonic effects. Also, yesterday I learned THE ORIGINAL LYRICS to the ‘2 & 20 Blues’ and they completely change the tone of the song. I shall herewith demonstrate: The very first line is “There’s evil men in this DOGGONE town” but the way my ex (and Dr Filk) taught it was ‘GODDAMN’ and that really changes things. First is worldweary, second is angry, and the song is resigned, not angry. The very last line is “You may say that I’m wrong but you know I FEEL all right.” I was taught ‘I’LL BE’. The singer is OKAY IN THE PRESENT, not sometime in the future. But right now! The song’s about grabbing life where and when you can, not hoping you’ll be happy sometime.

Thank you for attending this bathtub dive into 2 & 20 Blues by Linda Morrison, pressed 1981.

Continue reading bathtub dive and Alex pickup

dying inside a little

I’m going to find and start going to a dementia support group. I can’t spend all my spare cycles whining to Jeff and mOm and expect to actually improve in my ability to cope with it. I need strategies and people going through this to provide their experiences. Yesterday was very humbling and I wish I was a better person. I need better strategies on what to say to Paul when he starts talking about driving again.

It was a nice walk. Gut punch that Cobbs Bakery is gone from Market Crossing. I was going to bring croissants home to my excellent housemate and nah girl it’s gone.

I also need to incorporate social activities with Paul in a proper schedule and quit doing the by guess and by god thing; Mondays and Wednesdays look good for various reasons.

I am continuing to make assumptions about our family situation without cause, and getting bit in consequence. I’ve been up for hours stewing.

Twitter told me I exceeded my post limit for the day. Which wasn’t true, but it happened to almost everybody else on twitter yesterday. The outrage this morning is as predictable as it is weary.

Persistent hiccups. 17766 words. Suzanne’s coming today and all I can think about is how I was so interested in following Paul around that I didn’t do all my own errands so now I have to make a quick cash stop this morning. At least I put gas in the Echo yesterday, it was bone dry.

I literally have to pacify myself for a few minutes if I’m leaving the house in the car. If Jeff is driving not so much but Paul’s new behaviour is relentlessly critiquing my driving and strangely getting my own fed back to me is not cheering me up. Because of course in the Before Times I was on Paul all the time about it….

Some dude named Mic Wright in UK @brokenbottleboy on twitter has made a journalism about all the nepo journalists in the UK AND You Would Think He’d Killed his Mam on the basis of the parade of butthurt journos dragging themselves like sentient target practice through his feed. Here’s the link, and it keeps changing. He added a professional magician to the list mostly out of spite, since literally people are texting him and asking to be added while others mock him for doing it and telling him ‘he’ll never work in journalism’ and it’s like YOU FUCKING IDIOT, WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT THIS IS??? LIKE SERIOUSLY are you the stupidest person in the world besides me?

So I’ve been avoiding watching the Supernatural spinoff the Winchesters because that show tore my heart out through my solar plexus and I don’t need more, so I’m laughing this morning about how the writers really messed up by (checks notes) burning a Golem in an oven and let’s just say that throwing a NOTABLY JEWISH supernatural monster INTO AN OVEN was a big whoopsie and the fandom is shuffling its feet and saying ah guys antisemitism but not in a mean way because everyone’s scared of the irrational fuckers who run the network. So I’m just here to say if this is accurately represented yes it’s antisemitism. It was bad yesterday too. I predict it will continue bad, since antisemitism is the first structural member of a modern fascist.

Told a rich white guy on twitter to stick to aviation because as a semioticist he bites burls, so that tells you how particularly ‘squid with spicy salt’ I am this morning. He was fucking bloviating about AI.

ANFSCD: If your children aren’t drug addicts and voluntarily speak to you, please be grateful. You don’t know how good you have it.

things I ponder

Does Andrew Tate (gleefully known as ‘Taint’ among the ruder orchestral instruments of the great twitter symphony) have any clue at this point how much trouble he’s in, or does the fact he gets a full 30 days – at leeeeast – of pre-trial detention in a pokey in Bucharest give him enough time to percolate this through the miasma of misogyny that renders his brain impenetrable to softness and long term thinking? I pity his lawyer, I pity his co-conspirators, and while there was a rumour he was assaulted in prison he actually went to hospital so the authorities could testify what shape he was in when he was incarcerated. As it is he gets an hour a day outside his cell. Your booooogatti won’t save you now you verminous clownbag. You rape and exploit women and then sell your precious ideas about how to treat women as ‘entertainment’ for men who already hate women and want a rich celebrity to tell them that their fantasies can all come true. That women want to be raped and it’s their fault if you give in to your extremely normal masculine urges. You are one of the single most hateful excrescences of the New Misogyny. I hope you lose the ability to communicate.

Who gives a shit about nepo babies? Nepotism is how a social system under capitalism works because WE HAVEN’T INSTITUTED ANY SOCIAL, LEGAL OR CULTURAL TRADITIONS TO PREVENT IT! And one can argue that hereditary and traditional culture carriers in Indigenous nations are nepo babies, but just herding those words into an English sentence made me want to pop a gummy and lie down for a while. Cause it’s a racist thing to say. Yes, there was enough food on the west coast for some of the Indigenous nations to develop (deep breath) a class system (yeah, sorry, as long as you keep slaves YOU GOTTA CLASS SYSTEM and I’ll be interested to hear the opinion of someone closer to the research than I am) because there was surplus sufficient not only for culture in the making of things in the wintertime but surplus sufficient for people to sit around doing nothing but enjoying other people’s output while eating the last of the berries that were supposed to last until spring. AND YOU KNOW WHAT THEY DID? Potlatch. Here’s a cultural issue, here’s the cultural collective response. Also, re class, in most traditions slaves weren’t allowed to either host or guest. They had ten millennia at least to think about it. Capitalism scorns such a levelling. Some houses got together and threw joint potlatches, imagine what that might have been like, hundreds of attendees from up and down the coast….  The Jews got to think about inequality too. What did the Jews do? Debt forgiveness and baked-into-the-calendar manumission of slaves. Things get unequal, ya gotta reset the table, shake out the cloth, and make sure the dice aren’t loaded. In the meantime, generational wealth transfer is a thing, and some of it is …. IP. One has the right to keep family secrets my dears.

I am pondering with happiness the arrival of  series 3 of Miss Scarlet and the Duke. The first episode aired on PBS Masterpiece last Sunday but it’s not showing up in Duckie, the program Jeff uses to keep track of all this stuff. Whilst rooting around on the internet for that tidbit I also learned that there will be a series 2 of Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries coming soon!

I am pondering trying to get back into the CRA website, but I have to enable javascript on Chrome first?? what

I am pondering the chili in the fridge. I consider eating it for lunch or dinner. If I’m not eating it for lunch, what am I eating for lunch?? I’m thinking EGGIES.

I am pondering phone calls and emails.

I pondered what info would be useful and put my eyeglass prescription in my online care sheet.

 

 

 

 

Never fails

The more useful my blog is to me and my family the less interesting it is to other people… down to five people looking at it per day, including someone I live with. I suppose if Buster could read he’d be in there looking for references to his cattly self too.

Wordle in five this morning. I am endeavouring not to cheat and haven’t for about a month now. Hard to believe I’ve been doing it for more than a year, seems like less time.

Keith is going to his G&G for part of the weekend and I’d go with him if I thought I’d be welcome. We are definitely on the mend relationship wise though so I’m gonna stay out of his show. He’s taking his pOp to an important medical appointment today. Last night I dreamed that Paul completely showed insight into his condition including that his vision isn’t great and when I joyfully said, “So you’re okay with not driving then?” he turned from where he was sitting on the floor at his place watching the same aviation themed movie Jeff and I watched last night (“Devotion” recommended for war movie and civil rights fans, directed by JD Dillard and score by Chanda Dancy (I did like the score)), put on the meanest facial expression possible (literally one I’ve never seen on him before because he is not a mean person) and said, “Of course not, I’ll be driving again soon.”

And then I woke up. Given that it was my own brain that dished out this ghastly bit of me attempting to work through my emotions on this (waves arms helplessly in general direction of undesirable events and outcomes) I guess I’m going to look over to my Ontie Mary and her life experience and pray for guidance. I try to do the right thing but I’m lazy and self-involved. He deserves the very best of care, the world knows he gave it to me many times when I needed it. Keith and I left it that I am ready to take Paul at 10:30 just in case for whatever reason Keith can’t and then we’ll swap out cars and I’ll take Paul. If I don’t hear from him by eleven I can assume I’m excused duty. So I’ll back Keith up but I’m going to operate on the assumption that I don’t have to today.

And I’m sitting here crying like a fool. Must get up and walk around today.

Echo goes to the Krankenhaus Thursday which is great because it’ll be out of the driveway for Suzanne. Suzanne FINALLY HAZ CATT His name is Lucky, he looks like Bounce, and he’s a rescue purr factory.

Jeff and I have both been having insomnia and ‘sleeping at weird times’ issues but they seem to be resolving. We were BOTH up at 1:30 the other morning.

Really enjoyed Brisco County Jr but we’ve finished our watch of the first and only season. RIP Julius Carry you were epic as tracker/bounty hunter/bon vivant Lord Bowler and I think I loved your outfit almost as much as I loved you.

Coming up to the end of season 3 Expanse – still an amazing show!

14151 words. We’ll see what I’m up for today, but progress once again seems possible.

Lumosity brain exercises up next. I am never going to achieve the same scores for them as I did in 13/14 but I’m getting close for some of them.

Briefly thought about adding chat to this website. That would be funny.

New burner to replace the one I melted Jeff’s container on has been installed. Oy me. Hey, it only took two weeks.

There was a rat under the sink last night. We may have to call an exterminator, Buster doesn’t seem up for the job.

Confidential to Glenn dangit I ain’t even opened it yet.

quietly productive

I emptied and ran the dishwasher, wiped down the hellhole surfaces in the kitchen closest to the compost buckets and got most of the rain of tomato out of the microwave, trained the cat, made and thoroughly enjoyed a coffee, possibly wrote a song, did my wordle and lumosity training, clipped Buster’s claws, made ‘meat and potatoes’ for lunch, sent a thousand words to mOm, figured out what my next couple of scenes are (although I’m not putting pressure on myself to write) and I generally luxuriated in the life of a retired person. I took my meds at the right time. I stayed hydrated. I put in eyedrops before I went to bed.

That’s what I’m supposed to do, right?

Watched the Netflix film the Pale Blue Eye. Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe was wonderful. Harry Melling’s grandad was the second Doctor Who, who knew. Gillian Anderson’s bizarre mom to a bizarre family was …. bizarre and hypercreepy.  Christian Bale as the haunted detective was quite effective. I really enjoyed the script. Unlike many scripts (many, many; hear me whine) set in historical times, it neither gracelessly dropped modern slang like horseshit into a griddle nor overdid the ceremony and style of days of speech in days of yore. I didn’t hear a single anachronism. Do you have any idea how pleasant that is for a writer? I mean there were many constructions that would likely not have happened in the 1830s, but nothing so far from contemporary usage that it was repellent. For that alone, huit sur dix.

Jeff Bezos, may the intertwined Fates of a thousand cultures give him his reward, has, through Amazon, bought an Indian publishing house called Westland Publishing. It is one of the few publishing houses in India that has the wit and courage to publish ANYTHING that challenges Hindutva. (Spoiler alert, I think that all countries are idiotic, but once you have a settled state that calls itself a democracy, you should perhaps not support a political ideology that FIGHTS LIKE HELL AGAINST PLURALISTIC DEMOCRACY BECAUSE HINDUS ARE JUST BETTER, KK? Plus the caste system is groovy, men own women’s bodies, marital rape is super cool, cops can kill women who report rapes after raping them again, and Muslims are arson targets) OKAY maybe I’m being a racist asshole, oh look, I’m not. I really don’t think that China and India holding hands over kicking the shit out of Muslims is a good look for either country; people are dying in riots pogroms and political reeducation camps in both countries. Anyway, Bezos is literally supporting global fascism by doing that and we already knew he was a cruel billionaire, but HONESTLY can’t he just fucking stop.

Anyway, the closure of the publishing house means that hundreds of titles are no longer available. Absolutely no word on how and when they could be available elsewhere. There’s more than one way to be fash. Having the money to buy good things that support democracy and discourse, and destroy them (huLLLLLO Elongated Greaserat) is fascist.

a six year old is in custody for shooting his teacher. The cops didn’t arrest the person responsible for leaving a loaded pistol out. Everything you need to know about gun culture in the US in one story. (from CNN website, 6-year-old in custody after shooting teacher in Virginia, police chief says By Amanda Musa and Jennifer Feldman, CNN
Updated 7:19 AM EST, Sat January 7, 2023)