Category: Writing

NOBODY CARES BOUT MAH POOP

except me, of course.

So I was communing with my output in the water closet this morning as one does when one is a hypochondriac like I, and thinking TERRIBLE THINGS ARE HAPPENING TO MY LIVER and then I chanced to remember two facts. One, I’m looking at a perfect 3.5 on the Bristol scale, (so firm, so cylindrical, so fully packed) so relax, ya cheesewit, and second, I’ve been eating nothing but leftover pizza, egg salad with a ton of paprika and half a dozen mandarin oranges for the last two days, so that dreffle bright orange colour is…. nominal.

ah, the relief.

I stopped making masks for a while because Jan in Toronto nearly put her fucking eye out when a needle broke while she was making masks. Mask making involves really large changes in the height of what you’re sewing together and if you go too fast it’s super easy to break a needle. (She’d never had one break….fortunately spouse was home and dealt with the bloodination.)

I realized I was doing it bare-eyed because I don’t have functioning bifocals (I hate them) and realized I was asking for an industrial accident. Fortunately Jeff had a pair but he said the elastic had perished. I learned that I had THE IDENTICAL elastic and both cleaned and maintained the glasses, which are now waiting for me by the sewing machine, so I have no further excuse for my dilatory mask making ways. I also found a bunch of still useful stamps from my granny.  They were on a poster like this.

John H. Talman - Stamps for Sale - Auctions and Retail

courtesy John Talman stamps for sale

I thought pOp would like to know that when I mail him some masks the stamps will be from his mOm, who continues to look out for him, the way mOms do.

 

Starting to think about UPSUN again. Couple hundred words on latest fanfic.

Made raspberry scones this morning.

East Van love

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Jennifer Yaeger LPC in Newnan Georgia has this to say

Peggy took me for a walk

we mostly maintained 2 meters, we certainly didn’t hug

It was snowing when she called me, tiny wispy pellets, but it was just windy af as we toured Hilda Ave Park, (should be Hilda STREET Park, come on folks how hard is it to get the fucking sign right) slowly, round and round many times. I wore an N95 mask out of the house for the first time, one of three I bought for the fires that did not come last summer; they are most uncomfortable but in cold weather they really help you keep the heat and moisture in, so that’s good. I can’t imagine how looking after sick people in 36 degree heat would work for health care workers, I’d have heat stroke in fifteen minutes unless I had some kind of personal coolant device.

Pegg has very kindly offered to try to find flour, sugar and biffy roll for me. Jeff and I are good for at least another week, possibly two on TP, but I worry when the stock gets low. We have half a container of sugar and a couple of kilos of white flour. I also recently checked for where my bogroll for emergencies is. Did you know my hand sanitizer in my earthquake kit is completely solid? Exp date something thing 2008. But I have a nice dense single roll of quality TP in case things REALLY GO SOUTH ha ha ha schnufffle.

She spoke of how happy she was that Ben and Josey (son and granddaughter) had a distance socializing walk.

Omfg, Playland is advertising for summer jobs.

WHAT IN THE WHIFFLING BUGKNUCKLES IS THIS.

THE VENEZUELAN NAVY DECLARES WAR ON THE GLOBAL CRUISE SHIP INDUSTRY, unfortunately loses battle IGNOMINIOUSLY.

Chuck Wendig took a photo of a golden crowned kinglet

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today for sure I make masks

The 40 second Philippino style mask will work in a pinch but I need ones I can tie.

Katie’s promised a social distancing walk on Sunday, I’m so looking forward to it.

Another agent has rejected me. It’s okay. I’ll be dead before any of these books take off, it’s kinda how things are going to work with me. I already got issued all my luck, I can’t expect more.

LOLOLOL

above-noted link goes to a frog knocking a bug off a wall. IT IS SO FUNNY

below-noted link goes to a visualization of the cause of death stats in the US

NOTLOLOLOLOL

copied from Twitter:
George Hulston
@medichulston

22h

Last night I certified far more deaths than I can ever remember doing in a single shift. The little things hit you: a book with a bookmark in, a watch still ticking, an unread text message from family. Pandemic medicine is hard.
He’s a doc in London UK
Leora Horwitz a doc in NYC says and I quote
I kept underestimating their exertional hypoxia. Learned my lesson when I transferred one pt to lower acuity floor and he had a syncopal event getting from wheelchair to new bed. Walked all patients with pulse ox prior to d/c.
IF YOU HAVE A PULSEOX —use it—-

 

Curioser and curioser

 

Will the pandemic produce its own corona baby boom generation?

asked Michael Balter on twitter

That is the funniest question, all those assumptions.

 

NOT

VOLUNTARILY

 

The birth rate will go up in some places, actually a lot in some places, but they won’t be places where the survival rate of the children is likely to be very high, because of future pandemics, the social chaos brought on by the current pandemic, and climate change, which is not likely to back off just because we’re all having a horrible year. What you’re doing, when you’re being a hypothetical god of ideas looking at a screen upon which moves a nineteen year old Bengali woman who looks forty and has three kids in the ground already, is demonstrating readiness to be calmly philosophical about real human suffering, which I suppose is a great psychological advantage in this dress rehearsal for the fucking end times.

Anywhere there exists effective birth control, civic order, and interpersonal alternatives to the standardized hegemonic heterosexual-congress-while-married rules with which lovers of liberty must inevitably come into conflict, (ha ha, a little levity in the midst of this panorama of disease, greed and contempt) the birth rate’s gonna plummet. It will blip in a couple of years due to pent up demand and glue for new marriages for the sudden crop of ‘fuck I’m in my 30’s, a parent and I /we lost a partner’ 2nd marriages we’ll see over the next three years.

I believe industrialized world women who up until last Christmas were planning children are going to watch the slow motion chaos of the US response and think, no, I don’t think so. They will watch the global economy collapse and realize that they have a choice about whether they want to bring their kids into this mess or not. Especially after what I imagine will be more than one mass murder event in a major American hospital, when masked gunmen walk in and kill everyone they can find to ‘start a race war’ or ‘stop the hoax’ or whatever toxic bullshit youtube’s spun them up on.

As things go bad, we’re going to see the children of single parents who’ve died during the pandemic disappear into child trafficking, sex and cooking and agricultural slavery, and many women will say, if they have a choice, that they don’t want to make food for Moloch, the devouring god that modern capitalism always was before it became too big to fail. They won’t want to be forced into sex work to feed their children. And as the welfare state implodes, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities, so why bring a child into that? The wealth transfer from the older generations who are dying in higher numbers for this pandemic  will come in the form of property, which is great, but there won’t be any cash, so nothing to start a new life with.

Also, modern men are trash. They do not know how to give head, they are unclean, jealous, spendthrift, cowardly, lazy and a sack of wet mice does better on an LSAT. Why would any woman in her right fucking mind want a child with one?

There won’t be any decent pre-natal care because there already aren’t enough obstetricians and up to four percent of them will die in the next eighteen months since the US is having such shitty outcomes for coronavirus when it gets to ARDS. After that, we’ll have a vaccine, yippee! With more than a 15% refusal rate, because it is imbedding a chip into us! Boo. And then after that, the general strikes, the food riots, more wars, and then – the real pandemic, which has yet to arise.


Could be Tennessee, could be Indonesia, could be China, could be Canada. We don’t know where the next one is coming from, and it will be coming into a world stronger in some ways in its response than today, but in many other ways weaker. We’re not coming back from this. Mass unemployment, structural unemployment on a scale not seen before in industrialized societies, will be a continuing feature of life, because pandemics will force so many people to stay home for at least one fifth of the next decade.

Also, this pandemic is leaving kids under five alone.  If you think the next one will be so kindly, Atropos would like a word.

Atropos, from a mosaic from the House of Theseus in Paphos

So no; there won’t be a baby boom. But isn’t it pretty to think that capitalism, after having shit on women in general and women of colour in particular, expects us feeeemales to do our duty to throw babies on Moloch’s pyre. Now why the fuck would any sensible woman do that. seriously

 

why

 

family news

Keith has been laid off. He started a whatsapp for the laid off workers as an act of mutual aid.

Katie is now the only working adult in her household. You know what that means! Well what I hope it means is that the menfolks start cleaning more, but what are the fuckin’ odds, eh

414k infected 18.5k dead, Italy using skating rinks for morgues.

A new resource.

A twitter exchange:
Social Distance Warrior
I am wearing a crew neck t-shirt, how in hell did I still manage to get crumbs in my bra
GrandmaOgre Washes Her Hands
@TheCorrection
Replying to

@vixy
how long is your hair? For oft have I known the mangled, wily crumb to abseil into lingerie unseen
1:20 PM · Mar 24, 2020Twitter Web App

lutte loose

‘Twas thirty-nine years ago this summer, that I first laid eyes upon the comic masterwork, ‘Green Tits and Fur’, a adult-oriented Suess rip-off, set at a furry convention. I thought it was hilarious. I have since realized it was arguably exploitative and totes appropriative. I have an appropriative and cruel sense of humour which I attempt to quell, so my fandom of that – and Crad Kilodney – makes sense. I don’t feel shame the way other people do (or so —— have you guessed this is 2020 talking —— 61 coddled years have shown me) but I make up for it by acknowledging where I erred, hopefully to make it easier for other people. Because… you know, this isn’t all about me, it’s in very minor part about helping people understand how they think, how they prune their own brains.

Better arts in the now soothe (in sooth!) the sting of not-that-great arts when you were young and impressionable. If you’re lucky you got older and stayed impressionable. I know I have. It’s what the ADD will do to you.

—–

I think I’ve talked before about mOm and pOp and brO as being my way of customizing my own family into English. I like the visual pop of the words. I find it amusing —–I found some evidence today that the design of a piece of my childhood might have had something with pOp’s moniker as in looooook belowwwwww. But as I was looking at them again today, and why not, my thought processes have galumph and will travel, I thought how Jeff and I were inside the ring of being cared for, so the m’s in mOm are hands, like one hand out for each of the kids or caring for them. And the p’s in pOp are arms. Also guns. Pew pew. Facing forward. mOm is books. When you look at the m’s can you see books open, being read, the curve of the pages in the m’s. brO is the comrade at your shoulder. I am next to him. And brO is for the solid unassuming wholeness that Jeff is. brO is a goofy looking word, and he is goofy, though that’s hardly his distinguishing characteristic. That O is the emblem and stamp and sigil and symbol and visual hug that says you can say bruh or brah or bro or mah brother but this is my brO and I set the words down to make that entirely clear.

Image result for pop shoppe logo

As for the goofy, I have recent evidence. They closed the playground equipment at the end of the street; Jeff makes his feelings known. Isn’t it a handsome hoodie she hinted hintingly with lollopping Monty Python eyebrows.

 

From 60 things every white woman over 60 should know

This lecture will be improved markedly in humorous intent if read in your mind using the auditory prosthesis of the voice of the immortal Mel Blanc, performing his no longer inimitable Daffy Duck if the wikipedia article is anything to go by.

why your feminism likely sucks and what to do about

Let’s start off with you thinking that you’re a feminist

If you don’t want to be the ally of Black women, disabled women, trans women, Indigenous women, sex workers of all presentations, and every distinct racial group that finds itself defined against whiteness, then perhaps this is the time to put the book down, and look off into the distance, as if you’re possibly being made to think.

Then, bust the problem out and ask yourself why.

White women have this really weird, inconsistent response to their own structural praxis of superiority which is like Bunbury. Bunbury’s always sick and always calling you away from whatever it is that you don’t want to be supporting, buuuut Bunbury is er, um, now I hope you’ll understand my difffficultiesh here, folks, but HE AIN’T HERE RIGHT NOW. No matter where you are he’s unfortunately not. (Holds up sign saying Oscar Wilde reference, ain’t I cultured???)

Can’t do anything about disabled women because I’m all about the Indigenous women.  Well sister ….you know of course that a higher percentage of Indigenous women are disabled than white women, so you’ve just shot yourself in the rhetorical ass.

But nooooo, runs the argument. Because it’s better to pay attention to one small aspect of a larger injustice (waves arms wildly, knocks over podium) and have more sway. Or don’t derail my efforts to make a better world with your pickiness about cripples and their parking requirements. (kicks podium away in a huff, folds arms over, panting wild-eyed. Calms down, sighs.)

Shit, you can try that, but it doesn’t often work. That’s weak, and it covers for, (please allow yourself to imagine how Daffy Duck would visually represent the following ideas) “Wheelchairs and crutches and braces and cerebral palsy and communications challenges all freak me out because I’m white and I literally don’t have anybody in my life who’s disabled because that’s how I curate my social ties and family.”

 

 

(eventually bunbury will lead back to the intersections of these points. I will not talk about roads. I will talk about the mind cage of my childhood, the literally actually thing.)