Category: Writing

Yup, gonna spend my twilight years watching fascism and climate change destroy the planet. But I’m going to keep singing, I guess. Booking another recording session.

Jeff and I went to ratlands for drivethrough brekky; I have ingested enough salt for two days’ worth of consumption but damn I enjoyed that, and I skipped the coffee. We know we’ll never break our addiction to coffee, not really, but we can choose not to drink it today.

I don’t want to talk about the Trump Coup, which is still, just as Sarah Kendzior promised, hiding in plain sight. He still has the nuclear codes. He’s an evil, vindictive and ingloriously ignorant human, and him lashing out has real world consequences for all of us, not just the marginalized upon whom most of his ugly behaviour has been unleashed. So that’s in the back of my mind as I say anything these days.

Called Paul and Keith yesterday to find out how they’re holding up and Paul came and took me for a walk (finally mailed those letters to the Daves) and we walked out into THE MOST GLORIOUS SUNSET and it was a stripe of brilliant butter yellow rectangular sun between layers of gold, grey and pink cloud. ABSOLUTELY EYE POPPING. My brain reset to considerably more cheerful.

850 words on BRITW today. I just don’t know what to do with myself, so I threw in a plot complication.

written about toronto but could be anywhere

Despite all of this I remain hopeful.

I found a place to donate books to, I’m going to talk to Paul about it.

the rant

You start helpless. You may end helpless. It is one of the arcs of a human life.

The arc is about autonomy.

I think.

If story is the underpinning, then you are a story and there is an arc. You may define your autonomy in terms of ‘what I can meaningfully achieve for myself as framed by the customs and traditions I was raised on’ or you may define it as self-will, which (candidly) never seems to play out quite as well as including others in your self-definition.

Part of the arc is your contribution to the lifestream – whether you have children, and your children have children. But it’s not the most important part. Everyone can make a contribution to the human family, it doesn’t have to be genetic.

The persistence of saints that I speak of today is not the virtue of persistence, or steadfastness to duty which is customarily among the reasons they are saints at all. Nope, it’s the fact that those suckers stick around.

The persistence of saints has to do with their value to people after they are dead, for gain and the glory of a deity (or deep conception, or, since my religious and ideological tent is quite immense, even mere curiosity).

Where people are squeamish of god, they are rarely squeamish of saints, a fact I attribute to how you can meet a person any day of the week, but gods are so scarce that it’s easy to believe they’re not taking appointments this year, or any other. Even very secular people, folks with no religious affiliation, will follow cultural folkways about where to put pictures of important people in their moral formation; existential authors, rappers, midwives, farmers or dive instructors.

If I were to put a pin through any picture of an existentialist to suspend it in a saintly niche I suppose it would be de Beauvoir. She really cuts the crap on things especially on this whole evil thing.  -“Insisting that the future is undecided and that its form will be shaped by our present decisions Beauvoir argues that it is only by insisting on the dignity of today’s human beings that the dignity of those to come can be secured.” – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I would put it over my desk. Or at the end of my bed, where I’m more likely to actually look at it.

HOW doth the little anarchist
Improve each shining hour,
And gather intel all the day
With all her might and power.

How skilfully she builds her cell; 5
How neat she pubs her works,
And labours hard to feed it well
and shelter it from jerks.

In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too; 10
For fascists find some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or armed revolt,
Let my first years be passed;
That I may give for every day 15
Some good account at last.

So, you may ask, where in the entire body of Christ did this come from, and my abashed answer is that I was writing a hymn, which just came to me sudden-like.

Shall I improve
this shining hour
with some new good
oh my lord
I will take shelter
in your song
Though days be hard
and nights be long

And then of course I stopped, because I knew that ‘improve the shining hour’ was a quote, and apart from being certain it wasn’t shakespear I was kinda stuck.

So I looked it up, and it was Isaac Watts, “How doth the little busy bee” and I immediately took in the poem and decided within about five seconds to rewrite it as an anarchist children’s poem. So here it is. I leapt from one song to another in the space of a heartbeat, and that really does sum me up don’t it.

I made brown dinner rolls for Tom and Peggy and delivered them still warm. They were having turkey soup, so good call on my part. I should feel warmed myself but since I got home I just can’t stop crying. I think I’ll just stay in bed and try to find something as mindless as possible to do.

Apart from eat too much and watch Lord of the Rings (Fellowship) yesterday…. not much. OH…. I made veggie pizza for Jeff but apparently I made it wrong. I didn’t actually make it any different than I do Called Paul but it was too early in the morning.

Mike came by (we talked outside in the back yard for a while) and dropped off an oculus headset AND BABY YODA MASKS I am so happy.

ALSO we got a DELIVERY yesterday. I DIDN’T KNOW that couriers were working Christmas.

also merry christmas

Jim and Jan and Barry and a different Jan!!! I have letters from all of them to answer write now. SO of course I don’t want to.

I have no idea who’s responsible for this work of genius, but imagine if THIS was the dude coming down your mfing chimney!!! Ludwig Göransson’s theme song for the Mandalorian is now crossfading with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer….