Category: Whining

last night I dreamed I died in bed

and everybody was mad at having to clean out my room LOL

1 kudo. 10648 words. Every time I think about writing the next 2k words I’m bored… I’m more interested in what comes after, and that is problematic in terms of word production.  I haven’t given up, and poked around in a couple of unpubbed stories to see if I could work on them instead, but not a sausage.

Brief and pleasant walk with Paul yesterday. He was in the US again for a while, so it seems he’s figured out how to get back into the country without paying thousands of dollars in fines.

This morning’s wordle was a BEAR. I am so lucky I guessed it in six.

Mariupol hasn’t fallen, but it’s a matter of hours. The Russians are calling it liberation but the city has been flattened, and they’re taking civilians they murdered 20 k out of town to bury them in a mass grave. I am numb, wherever I’m not angry and sad. The Estonians, may they be upheld, have as a nation declared Russia guilty of genocide, and have asked other nations to do the same. I believe that I have previously made a reasonable case that Russian troops and leaders have already committed war crimes.

As Fark remarked this morning, a psychopath with 6000 (some restrictions apply) nukes is holding the world hostage.

This is a repeat, but it is one of my faves of my own art. Best of all, people who knew me growing up know what this picture is an homage to.

They’re saying that Will and Jada Smith could have one of the ugliest divorces in Hollywood history, and you know what? I think they’re going to reconcile and stare everyone the fuck down. Well, that’s what I want them to do.

Suzanne will likely be here today. Everyone have a shiny day!

 

 

background work

side by side a ukrainian soldier defends a pram, a russian soldier shoots at one
48 days into the war

Still adjusting to the meds change; I appear to be somewhat more diurnal, as I slept from 8 until 5:30 this morning. Jeff and I are going to go see the mini vampires at some point this week, and then I’m spending the day at Caspell Junction on Thurdsay, and also at some point we should shop as we are actually OUT OF some things and there’s always more toilet paper. (Constant readers will note that I buy more toilet paper than is required because I’m afeared to not have enough in a true emergency.)

IT FUCKING SNOWED yesterday it’s all gone but even though they warned us it was most unpleasant, and Buster was unimpressed as hell.

New word: Nexterday for tomorrow, invented by some kid whose parent reported it on twitter.

Now that we have CRAVE we’re getting the ads for show renewals and Jeff was so happy to see the ads for the Flight Attendant, which is a show he wouldn’t have watched if Dave hadn’t recommended it, so that was a nice little frisson of connection.

No kudos, no progress on the story. All my mental work on the story is managing the “I’m more into you than you’re into me and it’s breaking me” part of it, plus working the ‘gay guy’s straight friend’ into it because the idea of a fairly uptight gay man getting romantic advice from his sassy-pants straight friend is too much for me to dodge, it’s just so up-to-drip and tropey. Also I want two men who aren’t romantically involved to talk about sexual assault. I mean I’m not going for maximum damage but our hero is pretty messed up and he needs someone to tell him that a very common response to sexual assault is hypersexualization. The first time I heard that I went BULLSHIT but apparently it’s a mechanism whereby you reestablish control over, and agency over, your own body and while it just seems wrong from my lived experience, thousands of hours of research don’t lie.

Got wordle in three today, I’ll post it for tomorrow because I found the word combo weirdly funny.

Have some ice, from Iceland. It was just above freezing, the rain was coming sideways, and the biggest of those chunks of ice is about four metres across. And yet the curlews were on the beach trying to make a living. Four years ago now. I occasionally remember aspects of this trip as if I were still there. How I wish I could go again. It felt like part of my home on earth. But as mentioned I’m never getting on a jet again.

wind

Exceedingly windy right now, I’m worried a bit about our travel plans

My head’s empty and my mood is blank. I have a ton of things to do before I leave.

Heard from Mike. It was good to hear his voice.

Heard from Paul. He was having trouble with the website that you have to fill out a form for in order to return to Canada. After I, like a fool, volunteered to help him I learned that I had to actually be logged in to the site which I couldn’t do, so I told him to go talk to Hank (where he’s a houseguest) about that. Hopefully he’ll make it home, the alternative is an enormous fine.

7623 words, quite a bit of ratchet editing; two kudos overnight. If the averages hold, that means that twenty people across the surface of the planet were reading my fanfic last night.

I really should pack, lol. The wind better die down or they’ll cancel the ferry.

I am cautiously pleased about the price I should be getting for some books.

thinking of John tonight, this is a drawing by Brooke…

another cat pic

don’t break the internet while I’m gone

7539 words, no kudos. Felt absolutely terrible yesterday until just before supper time, at which time I felt much better (I’m assuming it was food rumblies based on, er, throughput and truly remarkable pain) and I’ve felt better ever since. Got my prescriptions delivered and we paid our rent. I also fell for NO FEWER THAN three April fool’s jokes, I must have looked batty to my friends.

Ducreux self portrait of man yawning repurposed to say I'm off to bed you fuckers, don't break the internet while I'm gone.

For the first time since I stopped withdrawing money from what’s left of my retirement savings, the dollar amount has gone down. THANKS VLAD YOU ASSHOLE

Theo Moudakis of the Toronto Star made this thing:

Editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis/Toronto Star showing a man with his back to a wave cheering over a sandcastle Yay, Finally open for business again. The man looks remarkably like Doug Ford about to be drowned.

beautiful day for a pap smear

So I saw the doc, got a pap smear, had to wait an hour and a half. “Everything looks fine down there” what a relief eh.

Something odd came out of the overnight BP study. A couple of hours after I went to sleep that night my BP crashed and stayed there for about two hours. I mean crashed; literally so low that I’d be hospitalized. I guess I just have to be a weirdo. Otherwise the drugs seem to be doing their job and I’m not in Sky High About To Pop a Clog territory any more.

Jeff gave me a no-SMS-card phone so I have a calculator and alarm and game platform and I have now killed both of the chargers he loaned me so I have to replace them.

Got my meds re-upped – yet another change, this time because the drug is literally so old the drug company doesn’t want to make it in that formulation anymore, sounds like me. Anyway that’s set up and I should have enough prescriptions to cover me during an earthquake. I’ll be going off the inderal eventually. Very glad I’ve added vitamin c to the mix of pills I take every morning – as is often the case my teeth hurt less.

Today maybe I’ll get that bloodwork done, but it’s more likely because I have to go to the same building for my prescription,

Katie, Alex, Ryker and I are going to travel to Victoria at some point. This means that M&D have to re-jig their visiting from other relatives which I kinda feel bad about but it would have been hella worse if the unvaxxed baby breathed all over the immunocompromised elder, so at least everyone involved has consent. We’re also going to do RATs before we leave to ensure none of us are actively illin’.

I am not going to comment about the assault at the Oscars because as far as I can tell, with maybe one exception, every single white person whose comments I’ve seen has applied all the intersectionality of non-Euclidean geometry and all the nuance of a cast iron frying pan flung across the kitchen. Given that I am not the great white hope (sarcasm alert…. sarcasm & POOR CHOICE OF PHRASING alert) of contemporary anti-racism activities and thought, I won’t do better and therefore, if you want to know how I feel about it (I have three main points to make) you can ask me in person, and of your kindness, wear the rainsuit.

I am not going to comment as much about the Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. I’m against it; I continue to donate and send letters and whatnot in the background; Putin won’t give up until he’s dead or deposed; Canada is as involved as it reasonably can be and maybe even more so anyplace it can get away with it; Russia and India and China are now doing a pavane and in the end China will crush Russia. In terms of will, planning, execution and numbers, China can’t do anything else.

The suffering of the Ukrainian people, and the Russians dragged into this war by violent paranoid old bigots, is not imaginable by those not experiencing it; we uphold their courage and denounce the frauds who’ve started this terrible slaughter.

6646 words, still waiting on further oomph to finish it. Haven’t seen any kudos yet this morning. I got the wordle in 5 this morning, but it was a complete bear of a word.

 

 

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

Low energy day

Once again, another day of being tired. I felt dizzy after we got back from the store (didn’t last long, but my balance was shot all day) and after watching a Time Team with Jeff I went back upstairs and …. slept until supper time? I mean I woke up around midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep so more sleep was in order, and I just had a normal night of sleep and feel fine, but that was weird. Fortunately Jeff had both lots of work and lots of squeaky squeaky time (March Madness) to watch.

The little tweety birds have a series of songs and dances that they do to encourage me to put down more seeds. (Juncos and chipping sparrows.) Bought peanuts yesterday for the corbies. They made what I put out disappear in a real hurry.

I mentioned that I ordered a Fluent Pet starter board which will ‘allow’ Buster to talk and they emailed me a 36 page starter guide to read before the six buttons and the panels they sit on get here. I think Jeff is quite dubious, but I am really looking forward to it.

No work on the story because I slept all day but much pondering – the next convo is going to be hard to set up and write so that it flows correctly. One lead character is being an asshole to cover how traumatized they are and the other lead character’s about to drop the hammer and explain (kindly, firmly) that ‘your trauma doesn’t suddenly give you an all access asshole pass’….. Four kudos overnight. The gal who’s reading all my stuff on AO3 is, as promised, reading all my stuff. Squee.

Alex is coming for a sleepover tonight. I’m thinking of doing things a leedle differently than normal but mOm I’ll be trying to give you a call before bedtime tonight so you get to hear his voice. Tomorrow, bouncing around the lazy river at the community centre with my grandsons and co-grandma and Mamabear.

Fuck Ginni Thomas, I hope she goes to hell through a cenote-style sinkhole appearing in the goddamned floor. Stories all over the internet about what a great *** she is.

Despite everything that’s wrong with me yesterday I wrote A NEW INTRO for Gelis and Niccolo (I cannot let go of that song) – one that uses fingerpicking style rather than hammered guitar – and I’m thrilled with it because it just came to me in a lightning flash and there’s a really wonderful rhythmic change that makes me feel like I am, you know, a musician with a little flair, a little showpersonship.

Vyshyvanka are about to get reaaaaallly popular. I predict it. They are the Ukrainian national shirt. Go to Etsy and look it up for examples. The black shirt with buff and gold embroidery made me DIE OF WANT.

Here’s a photo that is really hard to interpret because none of us speak or read Russian. Here we go:

So there we have some bog standard Russian iconography from the days of the Soviet Union. This looks not particularly rude in anyone’s terms, it’s a hammer and sickle with the words “Mow” “and” “Hammer” BUT according to Alexey at Meduza, it’s an extremely sophisticated visual pun.

Why? because ‘Reap’ (aka ‘mow’) is Russian slang for DODGE THE DRAFT and ‘Hammer’ is Russian slang for IGNORE DRAFT NOTICES. So this means that the iconography of the former Soviet Union is now UNIVERSALLY ESTABLISHED as a symbol for draft dodging, inside Russia, and that is to my mind so fucking hilarious I want everyone who reads my blog to know about it!

There’s also a joke going around (not in Russia) that the reason the current war symbol is a ‘Z’ is that, thanks to Russian Engineering, the other two arms of the swastika fell off.

this is Mariupol:

Medvedev is threatening Poland now how charming

2876 words. Very frustrating, had to delete about four hundred words because I was backing myself into a corner. However I’m in good shape now.

Rained nonstop for a day now, but not too heavily.

Three kudos overnight, two for the most recent and one for the one about crashing a glider in a cornfield.

It’s 5 am… think I’ll take a break (I’ve been writing, playing games and cruising Twitter) and consume some terrible media (Taboo.)

Called Mike last night, no answer.

Russia has demanded Ukraine turn over Mariupol this morning, which is a smoking shell of a modern city. Blowing something up and then demanding it, so adult. They’re preventing people from leaving, but at the same time word comes that they’re kidnapping UA citizens and transporting them to captivity in Russia. The spectre of nuclear war or a nuclear exchange flows over us.

from the Kyiv Independent (a more or less accurate news source) on twitter just now:

Greek diplomat after returning from Mariupol: ‘What I saw, I hope no one will ever see.’ Manolis Androulakis left the besieged city on March 15. He said it was joining the ranks of places known for having been destroyed in wars such as “Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny.”

Breakfast at the Foreshore diner

I had french toast an’ swossage and coffee and Jeff had the regular breakfast with bacom and coffee and it was very tasty and lorge. Leftovers in the fridge for pecking on throughout the day.

Horrifying Frontline about Putin’s war. It’s available on line but jesus I’m not recommending it because it put both me and Jeff in a foul and bleak place.

mOm got the story in the email finally. To make reading easier, I am thinking of having a password locked area of the site for people to read stories if they log in but I will leave off thinking of the mechanics for when Jeff is not buried in improvements for paying customers.

Happy St. Patricks for those who drink…

555 words into the new story.

Our old home at Valley Springs Ranch – the cottage Dad built. Roberta, David, Mary – we were visiting from Borden.

Three loads full

I give thanks to the people, the land and water, the sky and creatures, the weather and the seasons, of this place. I will keep working to restore the stewardship of the Salish peoples and uphold their immemorial relationship to the beautiful lands and waters. It is not mine although they share it with me. #LandBack

Three loads of laundry yesterday. I haven’t dragged it back up the stairs to put it  away but, apart from my lilac hoodie which I neglected to include and must be laundered right away because it’s foul with spilled food (sigh), my clothes be clean.

Schrödingers dishwasher – did I run the damned thing or not.

Cleaned out Buster’s gammy ear this morning. Normally he bats at me and protests, but he was purring and gave me a little thank you chirp when I was done, so I think he was mebbe a little itchy.

Paul straightened things out with his housemates, and acknowledged to me by phone that his behaviour was boned. But Katie’s mellowed and I have not talked to Keith. Still thinking about the driving issue.

Curls fell out of my do but it’s still really cute and I love it. A bad haircut can ruin you but not for long and a good haircut just makes everything better. Interestingly I thought my hair was all the same colour but the ends were both darker and more washed out, if that’s possible, and now all the hair colour seems quite even to me, and the silver shine is (according to my stylist) something people pay thousands of dollars to obtain and maintain. God (for some reason) thinks I’m cool to extrude this stuff, and it’s great, because I can be harassing someone on reddit or going to the bathroom and I can still grow hair with undiminished vigour.

I told the stylist that one liner from James C., one of my all time favourite coworkers at the big X. About 15 years ago, at work, I read something like, “Hair is a sexual signalling device” so I wrote all the coworkers that I liked a little email, asking what their hair says about them, and he said, “My hair stands straight up,” and it was the best joke ever because he didn’t swear or even say anything particularly rude but it SURE got the point across and it makes me helpless with giggles every time I recollect it. And that email would get me fired these days and I’m okay with that.

I want that turkey sandwich from Big Star with cranberry sauce for lunch, calice. If it’s as good as the number 27 I’ll be happy. If you charge twelve fifty for a sammich it had better be good, and that was superlative.

Fourteen kudos this morning including one from my third fave fanfic writer. So that was pleasant. I’m thinking of sending mOm a variant of the drunk on the beach story (I ended up writing THREE VERSIONS OF A SINGLE STORY – I wrote one version in word (I never do that) and LOST IT LIKE WHOOSH INTO THE ETHER WHAT IN THE ENTIRE FUCK and then rewrote it, and then rewrote it again to be even more sappy. BABY GOATS BRINGING THE RINGS TO THE GROOMS AT A WEDDING NOOOOO. Actually not but the idea of a baby goat gambolling down the aisle at an outdoor wedding and then running off with the rings made me laugh so hard I put it in to troll one of the characters.

STOP WAR AND EAT POUTINE says the pic from a recent antiwar demo in Paris. Apparently Vladimir Poutine is what some convoyancers call Justin Trudeau.

Pierre Poilevre has a fortune of 9 million dollars – which he got pandering to oil companies – and it’s more than Trudeau has – and he’s speechifying about Trudeau being a rich elitist etc. Get bent Pierre and while so posed please do ram a caltrop through your scrotum, you’ll never be PM. Some people want Trump to run Canada But I Sure As Fuck Do Not.

scanged from WorkingClassHistory on Insta:

Women Anarchists have become the terror of world’s police – Their Daring Crimes are said to have outstripped the deeds of brothers of the red

Search for the woman is becoming a safe rule in crimes proceeding from anarchistic violence – the guardians of the world nearly always find a woman implicated when a ruler is stricken down – EMOTIONAL WOMEN LOSE SENSE OF FEAR.

yeah baby

existential crises have I one

I will have none whenever I’m done
pleasantly cynical isn’t the style
so I’ll
resurrect a ‘childhood horror’

Nobody knows but me
It isn’t your burden to bear
Nobody knows but me
And, fuck it all, I’m gonna share

in the first years of my teenhood
abysmally utterly greenhood
I lie each night and the bedbugs that bite
are mushroom clouds and Auschwitz crowds
that aren’t just a sigh in a closet
history runs we can’t pause it
but I do not want to be in it
not even for one single minute

If it’s like that

_______________________________________________________

and it’s like that again

If Putin is blowing up dreams in Europe
I now have three questions to ask
when did I notice and when did I act
Is history now Putin’s tale to redact
I for one think that the world’s on the brink
while reliving my childhood terror

unattached to the foregoing::
during the writing of this poem my daughter called me laughing and joking with Alex, they’re doing spelling homework and using it as an opportunity to work the spelling words into song parodies (‘scale’ into “Sail” for example, and to register the Allegra contextual impact you have to know that this song was part of our morning warmup tape when we had the shop). . .and I couldn’t respond properly. In addition to this on going mood I’m in, I have a 24 hour blood pressure cuff on and it KEEPS TURNING ITSELF OFF which is not assisting my apocawyptic bwoodings. I’m migraining as well, horrific multicoloured jagged swirls mostly in the left side of my visual field.

 

Some greek to go with the site branding

“As a student of philosophy, he was coarse and heedless in appearance, and his clothing was squalid”

-Philostratus, from the @sentantiq twitter account

and here’s something you don’t see every day on menus (found it yesterday while thinking about dinner):

If you don’t know what Cordyceps Militaris is, GOOD. That means you can ignore the next three sentences if you want to. It’s a fungus that grows on living, and then dead, insects. SHUDDER AND HURL. I am a very white person and I think there are a lot of perfectly edible things I can’t eat because I have culturally enabled squeamishness.

I found a new font called Truefesse yesterday (fesse meaning bum in french) and so I made this (Amelia script, also know as the Live, Love, Laugh font, is the handwriting font):

and here’s a list of Russian media outlets that died this past week per Alexey @ Meduza:

Gary Kasparov in 2014:

 

 

Not too much about Ukraine

It’s terrible. The Russians are being indiscriminate with the bombings, but so are the Saudis and the Americans right now. The hypocrisy is thick as jam, and as sticky.

I think the next stage in my psychosocial development with respect to politics is to really examine how I am untrue both to my grandfather’s approach to other human beings, which should, since he was gentle and helpful, be a guide to me, and to my sparse and weedy ethics, infested as they are with my own version(s) of gender essentialism, ableism and libertarianism, not necessarily in that order on any particular day, and I’m sure in almost 20 years of doing this I’ve revealed enough of my other bigotries to hang myself twice, were such things possible.

I mean if I’m going to bust it back to first principles. Is it a material universe – the commonality of detectible ‘reality’ – or is it an imagined and engineered projection, taking place in real-time, or is it a natural phenomenon which one can interrogate without ever knowing the full truth of, or is it God’s Creation, or (all the Creation gods’ names)’s Creation or something else entirely? I mean, I know which way I play it, every time, but is it a material universe? Should it make a difference? Should I be ashamed that the best argument I’ve seen for it NOT making a difference was from Buddy, in Free Guy? Anyway, can’t have a philosophy without taking that one one.

Sorry about the late post, I had yet another disturbed night of sleep and when I went back to sleep I slept late, it’s now almost 10 am.

2249 words on story thus far. I think I’ll try and go back to finishing the landslide one.

Yesterday was wonderful.

We went to breakfast at IHOP (it was deserted), came back here for some TV. Paul called and we went for a walk in Fraser Foreshore (I masked, he didn’t, I drove) and I took my camera, secure in the knowledge and belief that I WOULD GET PICS for my mOm, and I sat in the appointed place at close to the regular hour, and Paul and I couldn’t even hear the tweety birds, let alone see them.

Much abashed, I trudged back to the car, grousing in a desultory way at Paul, and then I saw one of the other unofficial feeding stations and put down a handful of non salted raw Styrian sunflowers and next thing I know, there’s a chickadee in the bush on the other side of the trail making the excited food song, which is the same as their regular song but buzzier, louder and with an extra DEE in there. I had put away the camera.

So I got my disney princess moment, but didn’t get a picture. BIRDS YOU ARE ANNOYING. But cute.

CW Picture of Tom Lunderville; Paul and I went to Peggy’s after that, to pick up the hat that I gave Tom after wearing it for a while. Now I’m getting it back again. He ruint the crown but I’ll reblock it. We got tea and soup. We chatted for a long time. She’s in relatively good shape all things considered and coping as best she can with how different her life is now. We talked about Ukraine a bit.

We left to go pick up my library book from the main branch of New West Library (‘this is how you lose the time war’) and then came back to Geekhaus to eat – soup Peggy gave us and borscht and lentil soup. I also showed Paul some of the stuff online that I’ve been telling him about Ukraine.

Then I ran a couple of loads of laundry and napped and cleaned out the microwave. It was a lovely sunny day, and I’m glad I wrote about it, because I was happy yesterday and I needed a reminder.