I don’t know their names

Fifty three dead migrants in a truck on the wolf’s mouth highway; dying of heat prostration in an airless container for a better life is a refinement of cruelty.  Six hundred have died making the perilous crossing from North Africa to Greece and Italy from Tunisia and Libya so far in 2022.

Now think about what happens when those fifty one are fifty one thousand. When six hundred are six hundred thousand.  Nothing will stem the tide of migrants, alive and dead. Between autocratic governments forcing people to starve rather than express their rights and climate change drying up water for even an inadequate life, people will migrate. Technologies will be made available for food, for light, for water, for shelter, but here’s the thing; the gap between what is possible and what gets done is going to be monitored and posited and funded and ideologically supported by and profited on by previously existing academics, disaster scammers, politicians and wealthy families. The best solutions will be stick handled out of the way at the top; we’ll be taxed like beasts to support solutions that actively make things worse and then be blamed for having supported it (however involuntarily) when things go wrong.

It’s why it’s imperative to think about local solutions for problems. No-one’s going to save us; there will be a million photo ops and no help, like Doug Ford everywhere all the time. Something weird is happening inside my brain. Maybe it’s the chocolate. Maybe I’m angry enough to feel really vengeful, but in a new way.

Maybe I’ll go back to write. I have a little bubble of energy left I think. And something else happened today that’s knocked me down, and I don’t want to feel this way, I want to shoulder it off.

 

 

First 2 eps of “Only Murders in the Building” were funny, VERY FUNNY in spots and embarrassing (as in I THREW MY BLANKET OVER MY HEAD IN AN AUTISTIC ATTEMPT TO SPARE MYSELF THE EMBARRASSMENT) anyway, quite witty and in retrospect pretty damned funny, oi the bleedin’ parrot.

R. Kelly American singer, songwriter, record producer, and convicted sex offender got 30 years in jail for raping and otherwise sexually abusing women, mostly minors. I don’t support the existence of the carceral state and believe he should have been forced to give everything down to his shoelaces away to his victims now and anything in future so he gets ten percent or a living wage, enough to keep a car running, and they get everything else and otherwise he’d be allowed to walk free. Jail just makes money for asshole white investors and asshole food service companies and asshole jailers. It’s no place even for a rapist.

I read to my amusement that ‘this here haunted doll for only 60 bucks can be yours because THE LAST BUYER BACKED OUT what no reason did I tell you this doll is haunted’ is for sale. Still, what a bargoon.

I think one of my favourite things about the Slash/Back script is how Canadian it was. It was cadenced completely differently than an American movie. Anyway.

Just in case you think I’ve gone off the deep end, a return to my normal levels of lunacy. I couldn’t find attribution.

KISS FM IN SOME KIND OF PUBLICITY STUNT or possibly because of angry fired people is playing RATM’s Killing in the Name of NON STOP and a) it’s a supremely kick ass tune and b) if it’s not a publicity stunt it’s an interesting choice of tune. anyway, this is six hours and a bit now they’ve been doing this. I think it’s very funny either way. oh well I HAVE NOW BEEN LISTENING FOR MOST OF AN HOUR if this is a publicity stunt I don’t get it and they’re going to collect a CRTC fine for this.

 

Extracurricular Incoherence (new poem)

Perhaps this is the ‘now’ I have attended. Dreams mean nothing when the machine that can record them has settled into rust only imagination and the sun and X-rays can reassemble. I can’t remember my dreams because I am a brkn mchn. Sliver of mercurial glass! slide into my foot! assert yourself, the cold remains of another broken miracle. As a species we taught water and glass and steel to lie flat, hold still and do our will. When mirrors break it always feels like a failure.   The mirror is inseparable from the eye.   Parasite or epiphyte, the half-mirrored child appeared at a whim, then hardened into quotidian slots AND LONGER, hard seats in the ER smoking outside in the snow as far away as you can so’s not to bother the person you got a smoke from, standing someplace you won’t make shittier by weeping. There was nothing ambiguous about that moment, when I started to loathe flowers. Pretty flowers, death shorn and hacked is what you are – I see you in your unobjectionable patterned paper. What discipline will bring us flowers in the future; where will barley grow for beer? Everything good and decent is far apart and kept that way as fear and boot heels force their alarms into the collective breath. Carbon dioxide ratchets up, with it anxiety; it wasn’t in the syllabus; we’re conspiring in the dragon’s exhalation now – this is a vapour fit to kill.

no writing

took a day off to let my brain cool from the fiction I’ve been writing.

wrote a poem in response to a poem Dave wrote instead. I’m not posting it because he’ll probably ‘put something in there’ ie edit it (I don’t really think he can help himself) and of course I can’t post what I’m responding to. Anyway his original poem provoked a reaction, which was me riffing on grief and resistance and climate change.

Got a call from Tammy and how good to hear her voice.

I keep forgetting how much I like Burn Notice.

Dr. appointment tomorrow by phone. Prescription renewals.

low key day

23828 is the count.

Yesterday I wrote 870 words ran the dishwasher did my brain exercises got the Wordle in 5 played waffle half the day (it’s a game on the cbc website) watched a Burn Notice (season three summer finale, Michael finally shoots Strickler and joy was unrefined) gave someone 30$ on Paypal to honour my Settler Saturday commitment so she can get away from a bad domestic situation, skritched the cat and talked to Dave on the phone.

He’s got a book coming out and his description of the difficulties involved with punctuation was (probably not to him) quite comical. (Once upon a time I had an Anelia font Brother printer and I helped lay out one of his poems and let’s just say it’s better left to experts. And I don’t think he’s overly fussy about any of it, it’s a component of his greatness as a poet; I’m just not as particular and definitely not as internally consistent, go go Allegra ADD.) I spent rather more of the conversation than I should have telling him WHICH social media platform he should be on, of course twitter, and how he should go about ‘developing content’ for it now that he’s a luminary of Canadian letters. I even told him that if he felt like paying for it I’d jump on a train and come visit him (but he’d also have to pay to get rid of me, ALAS TIS THE ALLEGRAGELD which considering how I eat shouldn’t be too hard a sell) if he wanted to do a reading or (bless) won an award. He even riffed on an account name, which I won’t repeat in case he decides to actually do it, and I nearly laughed my lungs up through my nose.

I got a thousand karma points on reddit yesterday by saying something uplifting about someone’s stepdad for father’s day. Happy father’s day Paul: you were a good one. Things change. We get older and less useful to our children (in some cases) but the gratitude for the experience of having been a ‘working parent’ remains.

Happy father’s day pOp, you are one of the sweetest men ever. You were a little crusty when I was growing up and Liz was scared of you remember when I told you she said of you “King Fear gripped my heart with icy fingers” which is (truth be told) a quote from a Lobsang Rampa book (and DID YOU KNOW that after being hounded out of England as a goddamned phoney he moved to Calgary and died there in the 80s?, I mean what would an Allegra father’s day greeting be without a completely parenthetical comment?) but honestly, with mOm’s help you were the best dad out of all of the dads of all the kids I knew. I did have a few minutes when I thought you and mOm must have adopted me because you – ¿ARE YOU KIDDING? – set reasonable limits on my movements and what you spent money on for me but other than that, it was pretty clear you were . the . best . dad, and your continuing kindness and support for everyone in your family, is but one external token of how wonderful you are.

Did you know that there isn’t a single googleable picture of him on the internet? if I post pics of him I don’t put his name in the alt or the metadata

ALL PRAISE THE MASTER OF NOT CARING WHAT THE WORLD THINKS.

I’ve been laying off posting about Ukraine, but check this out, open in new page if you can’t read it:

armed fucking standoffs between officers and troops on the white blue and red side? g’damn.

Suzanne supports writers

Well she sure supported me yesterday. She was cleaning and I was writing my ass off. Normally we hang out a bit, but I was electrically charged or summat.

Current word count stands at 22164; total word count for yesterday is a hair shy of 3000 words. As far as I can tell there’s no drop off in quality. I guess mOm, who’s been reading it as it flies off the keyboard into a pixellated state, would have to weigh in on that.

The lads in the story are on an airplane headed home. I am already up to 250 words today.

Paul’s gone to the US for Father’s Day. There are memes to cover this so just imagine me staring unblinking at you.

big day

1600 words on Totally Boned. This includes TWO gunfights, a government coverup, a Burn Notice-worthy use of a chokepoint in a hotel, Our Hero #1 barfing all over the crime scene after realizing that he’s not used to shooting without ear protection, the fixer providing everyone with unregistered handguns AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT as part of the government coverup and our lads getting to the airport and getting away clean.

 

or do they???? mOm is ready for more, but I think I shall rest for a while. I sure wasn’t expecting to write like a fiend today.

total now stands at 20863 words

Suzanne plus Alex plus Katie

& I spoke with Mike today. The cup is full, the house is much cleaner. I love the world right now and need to sleep.

New Kaos: b.38/g10/bpm20/C_/gyp (music for a video game, a slow heartbeat sound quite ominous) … can you tell Alex was playing with it today and got me all inspired. Absolutely shredded Gelis and Niccolo today, I got sounds a guitar doesn’t readily make.  And I wrote a hundred words today, and washed the rugs, and made Alex lunch, and watched Elementary with Jeff. This is what a successful day looks like.

Weather quite variable today but mostly not windy, and warm.

COVID is still kicking the world’s ass. Monkeypox is established in at least twenty countries with a thousand known cases and an obscured iceberg of infections not currently recorded or understood; plus the presentation is different than the textbooks which is really not helping.

I grieve with Ukraine, what an unholy mess.

annoyances

Tim Horton’s has been scolded by the Privacy Commissioner MAN I’VE NEVER BEEN SO GLAD NOT TO HAVE A CELL PHONE

Leo and Linda have safely arrived back in Victoria. Or so I assume, no wild phone calls.

Duggy Sluggy got back in in Ontario. The media and Russian money really are doing a number on Canadian politics. I predict that disabled people will be killing themselves en masse on his doorstep before this is all over.

16166 words

JUST FOUND OUT ALEX IS GOING TO BE HERE SATURDAY because he’s having a sleepover with grammy Suzanne and we rearranged cleaning dates this week so he’ll be with her. SO CHUFFED. I am so glad she’s part of my family. She didn’t have to ask but she did because she’s CIVILIZED which I told her.

The Addams Family in Japan by Matsuyama Miyabi scanged from tumblr user dduane

 

not another project, must be AU Monday

It’s called The Trust Issue, and it’s a nested set of received opinions about how to trust the ourselves, the world and how we move through it and eventually out of it. I am thinking of it in terms of being on three scales; personal, familial (via family history, which is basically me saying HEY MA I THINK I FOUND ANOTHER USE FOR THE GAZILLIONS OF PIXELS YOU’VE SLAUGHTERED), and linguistic, but not in any academic sense, just in the sense that I have to use English to actually, like, do anything. English as often noted has many limitations in terms of felicity of precision *and* metaphor, at least for me, so I must perforce be appalled at operating within its tiresomely inevident confines. I know I am stuck here, in English, for I have neither the life expectancy nor the will to become able to write with ease and style in another language. The very idea makes a mockery of trust in any degree, but so be it. I shall scale Mt. Impossible because I dare not leave my room! The idea of actually making it fit into any politics, including the increasingly deadbeat anarchism I claim to claim (know what I mean) is loathsome to me so I am avoiding the political or public sphere, and I don’t think I could do it in less than 20000 words and suspect it’ll be closer to 70K.

sing wet bones

late at night
not every night thank god
I can hear my bones singing
If I thought they could hear me over the din
I’d ask them why they think that it’s okay
to flap themselves so, like my tinnitus needs drowning
and as soon as I pose the question
the bones have formed a Wunderkammer
and wish to impose their wet vibrations on a wider audience
they grind in a basso and say
you don’t move us enough
and now you will pay

that lentil soup is nommers

I’m going to make more soup today so I have instant meals when Leo and Linda come CHICKN BARELY! I meean, chicken barley.

This afternoon, me, Cindy (Hopes hopes) and Peggy will get together to sing and play PEGGY WILL BE HEFTING BASS I am so happy.

Leo and Linda have been to the mines at Britannia Bay – and I’ve been living here decades and never been, although Paul and the kids have.

Confidential to mOm I think I'm going to write a scene in which the wicket stepbro asks Omar if 'he's going to let her' (her being Blossom) 'get away with that' and he and Brad are going to slap each other laughing like frat boys and say NO YOU DON'T GET IT SHE'S THE BOSS and then she's going to say, in 'visiting professor' intonations "I THOUGHT WE WERE AN AUTONOMOUS COLLECTIVE" and they all lay about laughing. It's stupid but every time I imagine it I smile. I think I know how this is going to end now. The story logic is INEVITABLE.

I need another 15-20k to get there though. 15,302 is current count

Good morning, morning, blues how do you do

not all pigs are beautiful (sus barbatus)

15010 words Brad is such a weirdo I love him.

It’s another beautiful day in Vancouver.

Yesterday the winds in Toronto were turning trucks over on the highway; I was talking to Dave and he reported nothing like that in his end of Toronto. As he pointed out it’s a large city.

However parts of Toronto are without power for 24 hours and the sound of chainsaws in some neighbourhoods is pretty much continuous.

Liz from London says they experienced darkness at noon and the wind blew something terrific.

I will get Alex next weekend for an overnight, hoping the crick don’t rise.

Hope to keep writing and doing laundry today

Also hoping to get out for a walk.

My new fan left five kudos overnight, sweet lady.

14187 on ‘Totally Boned’

I have lots of opinions on many subjects this morning but the major things on my mind are:

from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

and no, it doesn’t rhyme in Arabic.

I mourn the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, murdered by IDF. State armies murdering journalists is so 21st century…

the 170K people in Mariupol who can’t get food in and can’t get people out

the way Russia keeps trying to arm up Snake Island and keeps getting punched in the nose

the way China continues to build up its military forces in a pretty obvious push to remove Taiwan from the list of democracies, plus how it’s arresting people in HK

Tony Hawk doing skateboard stuff in 1/6 G (in the vomit comet)

The fact that you’re expected as a disabled person in BC to get by – rent food etc on 1400 bucks a month. I COULDN’T DO IT. It terrifies me.

Doug Ford acting like he didn’t prepare for the debate yesterday. Autistic child waitlist for care and assessment has doubled on his watch. a thousand seniors died in care and his friends are still allowed to build care homes FUCK DOUG FORD thank you

Gove (who has previously admitted to cocaine use) appearing on UK breakfast television higher than Fearless Freep on cocaine in the same week that cocaine addicts complain about how the new five pound note will scratch your nose when you’re doing a bump and yet somehow Boris Johnson appears in public with a scratch on his nose and everybody in the UK from pundits to punters is going MMMMHHHMMMM could it be that the terrible performance of virtually every Tory minister??? …. naw, couldn’t be.

being sad about not seeing my grandkids for a while since people keep insisting on catching COVID

wondering if mOm and pOp still have the 1963 vinyl album “My Fellow Canadians”

a comment on a story

This was very sweet. ??

The story was ‘The Accidental Mr. Right’ which is one of my personal faves, so that’s delightful.

 

THEN from the same person, later, for a different story…

Cas deserved to hear ‘I love you’ more than any character ever created, I truly believe this. Thank you for this one.

Oh, she must be reading them in rapid succession now LOLOLOL, ‘CAUSE HERE COMES ANOTHER ONE

Have to say this one surprised me, lol Both dreams were…perfect.

 

and I wrote 837 words today on “Totally Boned”

THEREFORE: I am doing fine thank you as of this minute.

INTERIOR, DAY

ALLEGRA sashays downstairs to wait for the Indian food she ordered. SHE IS HUMMING