Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
Alex is helping me feel better every day. Cuddles, jokes, a few words about school. Sometimes we record stuff.
Part of the happiness is watching him and Jeff interact.
Yummy Alfredo from White Spot last night, Jeff had the chicken strips and then helped me finish the Alfredo because for some reason his order didn’t come with fries.
Hoping to get some writing in today, who knows.
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.
The UConn Huskies won it all at ‘Squeaky-Squeaky Time’ which is how we refer to March Madness.
Two best of scores in Lumosity, Wordle in 3 and it only took 20 seconds, and I think I wrote two words yesterday.
Since I was up at 1 after going to bed at the regular time, I napped quite extensively. Got a coffee in my belleh right now and I’m about to label some of the family history books mOm sent us and then take them to their new home downstairs since I poached the shelf they were in for my own room.
We ordered fish for supper. It was really good.
Ran the dishwasher, emptied and refilled it, also did me a load of laundry so I am ONCE AGAIN CAUGHT UP …. can you fathom it.
For Trotsky Tuesday, enjoy: A rebellion.
A reminder that I wouldn’t have my current crop of grandchildren if Paul’s Great grandmother hadn’t refused to get on the Titanic.
Today I’m off to Caspell Junction in the morning to make travel arrangements for Jim’s Celebration of Life and talk about the garage sale. I’ll either take Paul for a walk or we’ll run errands somewhere in there. Moar Later.
Jeff very kindly got me a copy of ‘Road Food’, Misha Collins’ show about regional US cuisine. Really enjoyed the first episode. Jeff is no fan of Vietnamese cuisine, but I am; watching the show start with Pho for breakfast (when I used to have it after I got off midnights all the time at the 24 hour place (name keeps changing) on Kingsway) was MOST enjoyable, I could practically smell it through the screen. His former castmates have started a new ‘Winchester property’, it airs for the first time this month.
We watched ‘Catherine called Birdy’ and enjoyed it mightily. The closing credits are absolutely delightful, and everything beforehand was very well done; a perfect star vehicle for the inimitable Bella Ramsey (previously from Game of Thrones and Worst Witch.) I find it amusing that if I’d known Lena Dunham was behind it I probably would have given it a miss, but many of the writing and interpersonal lapses of her past incarnations are not seen here. A woman’s allowed to get smarter. I won’t infest my site with it, but if you care, google Lena Dunham controversy and be prepared to wonder if she has any friends who don’t share their drugs with her. I mean, I could easily say a hundred controversial things before breakfast but she acted like she literally didn’t understand what she was being called on half the time, and dissolved into tears at charges of racism.
Please note that if you’re a settler accused of racism, it’s probably true! Screaming about it doesn’t help. Sit with it and stay off social media until you can represent yourself as a person capable of self-improvement. Not saying I am that person. I have moved my views somewhat but I’m in the post-wallow stage of antiracism (sample of wallow: ah me! hoW CoudL I haveKN OWN … my PAreNTS did their best – there were only two people of colour in my entire grade school, blah blah blah yes I’m 63 and white in Canada, of course I bathed in racism and ableism erryday) in which I feel a brisk disdain for white crybabies and prefer deeds to words on the subject.
There are 50K Beavis and Butthead fanfics on AO3. Jest reviewing my life choices over here.
5278 words on Part II.
For Trotsky Tuesday, please enjoy the famous combination of anarchist ideals like free love and nudity plus scientific excellence embodied in this wikipedia article about ´Élisée Reclus.
I’ve gotten to the stage in the pandemic where I’ve now imagined all my friends and relatives dying of COVID (except Onty Mary because she just WON’T, THAT’S WHY! I DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN THAT TO ANYONE) or sequelae and gone to their funerals in my mind. Somehow I get to arrange all those funerals too so I get things how I want them. As you know I enjoy funerals and memorial services and do like a good one. Anyway, if I sound like I’ve been randomly crying throughout the day, here’s what made me cry.
A newborn calf with really bad respiration after a tough birth, dying in its owner’s arms. A Ukrainian woman making a video for her boyfriend on the front and her apartment takes a direct hit while she’s making it. Dozens of Canadian disabled people on twitter begging for food because they have nothing in their house for Thanksgiving. Not being able to do Thanksgiving with the family. Being too lazy to cut olives for pizza. Wondering if this phone call to my mOm will be the last one. Being glad that my daughter trusts me enough to talk to me about important stuff. Being terrified to lose this housing situation. (This place is literally 50% cheaper than any even close to equivalent housing situation in all of the lower Mainland.) Being so tired that I forgot my evening meds. Every time I go to the grocery store now, I cry. I cry about the abundance of food that’s going to disappear into the maw of climate change. I cry every time I put something like coffee or almonds or chocolate in the cart. Not much, I’m not sobbing, but I’m leaking.
The pandemic is dragging us all through a slow motion mass casualty event. We’ve been abandoned by politicians but the wise expect that. What we never expected was neoliberalism is such an indelible feature in our world that it has made the people we thought we could trust – the public health authorities and epidemiologists – into villainous murderers.
During and after the Great Mortality (as the black death was known at the time) people became much more selfish, lonely, profligate, violent and distractable (by contemporary accounts, anyway, as I read in Tuchman’s ‘The Distant Mirror’.)
It’s all happening again now, and I’m in the middle of it with everyone else. These moments of sadness are because it’s easy for me to feel sad. Many beautiful things are dying, but we must rush on regardless and be adults and hide our grief.
Kanno Sugako was a Japanese Anarcho-Feminist.
Radicalized by rape, she tried to assassinate the Emperor. Maybe the second world war in the pacific wouldn’t have happened if she’d been successful.
warning this gets weird
Here’s a bio: Leah Feldman who worked with Nestor Makhno. He stole my rellie’s watch, he won’t get his own page even if I read that dreffle book. (History of the Makhnovist movement.) (ALSO THIS ***IS*** HIS OWN PAGE, THIS POST IS ALMOST A THOUSAND WORDS LONG AND I HARDLY MENTION LEAH FELDMAN, WHO WAS A MENSCH.)
I almost want to translate it (History of the Makhnovist movement) into internet-friendly contemporary English ’cause the translation verbs the galactic noun into a state of noun. Why am I compelled to pay attention to him? is it because he was one of John’s special favourites?
check out the turgid first three paragraphs, administered first aid by yours truly in italics.
a hunnert pages of this…. I have to finish Moloch and UPSUN’s HOTM before I even touch that as a side project, that seriously would be something I’d do in jail.
So I continued anyway…..
On the one hand, the Makhnovshchina (Mack NOV shin a) [Makhnovist Movement.] – an event of extraordinary breadth, grandeur and importance, which unfolded with exceptional force and played a colossal and extremely complicated role in the destiny of the revolution, undergoing a titanic struggle against all types of reaction, more than once saving the revolution from disaster, extremely rich in vivid and colourful episodes – has attracted widespread interest not only in Russia but also abroad.
The story of the Macknovshchina is so powerful, colourful and historically important that interest in the story is not confined to Russia. Fascists and reactionaries hate its truths, deride its outlandish tales of luck, betrayal, revolutionary fervour and derring-do, and cast doubt on its morality, as well as that of Makhnov himself, in an effort to dislodge him and it from the collective memory. That’s mostly because he kept the fucking revolution alive along with his anarchist principles and when he diverged organizationally from the soviets, they didn’t want to be beholden or get into it ideologically so he had to go — and to the horror of those who loved him he ended up drinking himself to death in exile. But we’re not going to talk about that part of his life in this book, that’s for the Netflix series. NOW THEN, IS THAT NOT BETTER AND MORE USEFUL THAN THE TWO PARAGRAPHS I COMBINED INTO ONE ??? (ie the foregoing paragraph and this next one, which is clunkier than a 30 year old Corolla.)
The Makhnovshchina has given rise to the most diverse feelings in reactionary as well as revolutionary circles: from feelings of fierce hatred and hostility, of astonishment, distrust and suspicion, all the way to profound sympathy and admiration. The monopolization of the revolution by the Communist Party and the “Soviet” power forced the Makhnovshchina, after long hesitation, to embark on a struggle – as bitter as its struggle against the reaction – during which it inflicted on the Party and the central power a series of palpable physical and moral blows. And finally, the personality of Makhno himself – as complex, vivid and powerful as the movement itself – has attracted general attention, arousing simple curiosity or surprise among some, witless indignation or thoughtless fright among others, implacable hatred among still others, and among some, selfless devotion.
anyway you can understand why the project has some appeal, it’s essentially a complete gloss / rewrite, but it could really be fun. It’s also fanfic in a really hilarious way. Oh, oh, oh I just had a story idea.
I posted this in early January, and on the 18th I woke up from a sound sleep with THIS in my head
TTTO Battle Hymn of the Republic
Nestor Makhno stole my great great uncle’s watch
Nestor Makhno stole my great great uncle’s watch
Nestor Makhno stole my great great uncle’s watch
He sold it to buy beer (or guns, that works too)
I like Rosa Luxemburg because she always was an independent thinker, and never actually toed anybody’s party line despite how clearly committed she was to socialist / communist ideals.
Her murder by fascists was celebrated across Europa by the enemies of freedom.
Bertolt Brecht had something else to say:
Red Rosa now has vanished too,
And where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life’s about,
And so the rich have rubbed her out.
May she rest in peace.
The reason I like Pyotr Kropotkin is because he started rich and made common cause with the poor; he was kind; he was a scientist; he didn’t believe that nature was evil.
Also, he wrote the article on anarchism for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I found hilarious when I learned it from the lovely and talented John Caspell. It’s possible that you, mOm and pOp have an edition with his writings.
20000 people came out to his funeral.
I used to think that I wanted to make a baseball card art collection of anarchists and revolutionaries, but I’ll do this instead. Each week I’ll present an agitator new to me — or an old friend. I don’t know if I would have liked Emma Goldman in real life… she’d have a lot to say about how lazy I am, although I’m working on it.
Emma Goldman on Wikipedia.
A review of her autobiography on C4SS
She lived in Toronto for a while. Every time I walked or took transit past Dundas and Spadina, I would think of her. I wrote a story about her and Kropotkin when I was living in Montréal; if I find it I’ll append it although I will probably need to retype the damned thing if I do find it.
So for 2021, this blog is going to change up a bit. There will be at least one drafted post that goes live every day. (I’ve started pre-posting awready.) The hope is that I will put together useful or historical facts or just … information that’s easy to find arranged by subject PLUS post a song every day.
Now this involves many different KINDS of posts; some will be PDF’s, some MP3s, some videos, but there will be a song a day. I thought about posting it to youtube, but…. it’s a toxic waste dump that I have virtually no control over. And yes, some of the song posts will be from previous posts, but there will be a particular category: Song a Day 2021
And then, if I have the energy, I’ll write about laundry and cooking and grandson goo and boring domestic shit and progress on my writing projects — that none care about but me.
The point is that I am going to highlight my lifetime of achievement because I’m tired of always thinking to myself that I haven’t accomplished anything in my life. Taken all together, why yes I have. I was autistic and had ADD and mental health issues the whole time, too.
I’m considering password protecting my content or at least some of it, and I’m considering moving the blog to a VPS, after non-definitive discussion with Jeff.
I’m also thinking about money and immortality, a lot, but it’s nothing bad. I just want to eat steak for a thousand years while I drink beer and write nasty shit about misogynist slurs like Jordan Peterson.
By the way mOm the cat poets are Lu You and Liu Zhongyin
