Category: Writing

House filk

attendees: Cindy, Peggy, Paul, Tom, Mike

Songs: Alexios (the Murder Hobo), Frobisher Bay, Lousy Co-pilot (original and SG Atlantis version), That God-forsaken Hellhole I call Home, Dandelions Dreaming, Blues for Dumuzi, The last page, Two Worlds, Those Magic Changes, two songs from the Skyrim soundtrack, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a filk song we found by accident in my Canadian women’s folk songs book called Susan COD, It takes a lot to laugh it takes a train to cry, Gentle Arms of Eden, Lady of Komarr, Some Other Planet, and there were more but you get the general idea.

monch food sing choons

It was absolutely loverly

Land acknowledgement

The world is now awash in land acknowledgments. The Aussie one at the end of many TV productions sounds like it went through a glass-cutter:

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

See, in my conception of the local Indigenous practices, they don’t own land. They’re in a permanent (in planetary existence timescales) and precious relationship with their land and their language and their people, and to call the land part of the relationship ownership is everything that’s wrong with colonialism in a single sentence.

I see that acknowledgment as shown above and I feel a gaping lack.

(However I urge you to look up how the word ‘country’ is used in English by many Indigenous people living in Australia, because it’s beautiful and resonant.)

As of 2019, this is my land acknowledgement:

I acknowledge that nothing short of complete restitution of Indigenous lands across this Earth will do.

I acknowledge that reparations for the land, war crimes, genocide, language extinction; theft, despoliation and destruction of great works of art and cultural centred-ness; as well as yet unknown damages to Indigenous people caused by sequelae from these events, are due in full measure, and I hate that capitalism is going to make that reparation virtually impossible even if it completely fails, as I hope it does.

I will hold up Indigenous rights and ask Indigenous persons no rude questions, tell no rude lies about them, and may study with consent but co-opt none of their spiritual or artistic practices for praise or pay.

I will pay Indigenous editors to read my fiction, some of which is already published, but which needs to be vetted by someone without my biases, so that it may be changed, and changed again if need be; the future comes on fast.

(note, from August 2021… this is proving more difficult than I had originally anticipated)

This land, the land I live on, belongs in the human care of Coast Salish people, specifically to the peoples of MST country, nations among whom made their own agreements, under their own systems of justice and negotiation. I hope to keep living here, after it’s been released from colonial bondage and theirs in the sense that they may be in their traditional relationship with this land, without colonial interference. I hope to live here when the sign at the city limits comes down and there are no longer any artificial colonial barriers between any of the lands here.

I’m a settler here. My descendants will most likely be settlers. I will never again commit the violence of ‘owning’ land under the stamp of the Province of British Columbia again or indeed anywhere in what is now called Canada, and I encourage my children to do likewise. I am unemployed and cannot pay the rent I owe to any local nation, but I acknowledge that I owe it and may be called upon to pay it some other way.

the baggage retrieval system at Brexit

This week has been researching billionaires so I can kill them in fiction, worrying about Brexit (the isotopes for cancer treatment in Britain aren’t made there and so I’m thinking about having cancer and learning that your politicians are TRYING TO KILL YOU after your own body had a go at you), trying to gird my mental loiny-woinies up to edit that fecking homily, having the shit scared out of me by a ‘worst anchor drops ever’ youtube video (Russians have the best ones), seeing Spiderman:Into the SpiderVerse and blowing my brains on ALL THE COLOURS, talking myself out of buying Jeff brekkie by making it instead (walnut and apricot bread make rilly nice French toast), worrying about Alex and his future on a stressed-out planet even though he’s doing fine and adapting well to the weighted blanket at the moment, avoiding buying a hurdy gurdy (it wasn’t tuned and the crank was not trued up with the playing surface on the wheel MOANING COWS rather than pirate music), more or less getting enough sleep and feeling like I’m not, and generally coming out of the funk I’ve been in. Also playing with this.

Shit’s still bogus, but I’m not.

lane change

2000 words of new fanfic – but I’ll be good and work more on HOTM today. You buhlieve me doncha mither.

Invited folks over for filk music on Friday night. am anxious

All this pre-anxiety will vanish – likely the people I’m worrying about will find something else to do on a Friday night, and we’ll have five people here instead of gulp ten.

Thirty people

So what do you do when you’re in a social milieu and people are being pretty much continuously racist. I must have been red faced pretty much continuously.

Breathe.

Anyway, it is what it is and until I can unpack everything and look at it, I will probably stay quiet.

Yesterday, lunch bunch but no Osteofit due to a kid illness in the instructor’s family.

The soup was a success but Dennis wanted a little ham in his.

Had the pork and bean mix in a corn tortilla; it was nom.

 

Thirty people read my blog on a regular basis or did the last time I checked, which was since the web redesign. Years for sure. I don’t read my user stats; don’t even know where to find them and no that’s not a hint.

I don’t like changing things too often. Makes you look like you don’t know what options are and want all of them.

It’s good, being me. I hate it, a lot of the time, but that’s not my fault. I only started noticing the bad that held up all my good well after I turned fifty, and considering that I’d been pretty left wing on social issues and a complete wingnut on economic issues most of my life my lateness to the “it’s all stolen / misappropriated land” gala …. doesn’t startle me at all any more.  The racism inherent in the daily speech of my fellow candidates for a Canadian passport is daily harder to stomach and I’m going to be a FUCKING CRANK like my greeeeat g. back when and the idea just covers me in cold slime and leaves me in a dungeon.

I don’t want to be that person.

And yet, God gave me such a fucking mouth.

 

moar food

Made a Southwest style pork and beans this morning. Beans were soaked and soaked and soaked (16 hours) and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed (I rinsed them three times) and then Instant Potted for 30 minutes. I cooked them in chicken broth. The results are bland but you can always add salt and pepper.

Alex is apparently sleeping longer and not grinding his teeth as much. This is very happy grandma news. I knew Katie would like the blankie, but as much as I enjoy making her feel better this was all aimed at Alex.

Paul and I were supposed to go walking yesterday but you know what happened? He said can we run errands and I said BUT OF COURSE. I helped get Katie’s new car back to their house and I used to opportunity to fetch Jeff some pie from the Pie Hole (Dean Winchester’s business in another AU) and to buy some meat from the butcher then we drove to Oakalla (the old name for one end of Deer Lake Park) and there was FUCKING ICY SNOW EVVYWHERE. Paul said, shit I’m wearing Crocs and I said shit I didn’t even wear socks and we just sadly put the car in reverse and went back home and I said I wanna go to Langley Farm Market but … so we did, and we ran errands and I don’t care, I got out of the house. Day before I got my new Library card from Burnaby… so the replacement of ID continues.

Today, a brief foray out into the world for an errand in the AM, then Lunch Bunch and then Osteofit and mebbe some laundry.

 

steak yeah

Mike fed me steak! Yes.

This morning Paul called and we walked in the neighbourhood. I picked up an additional piece of ID so go me for actually knocking items off a to do list.

There’s a nesting pair of bald eagles in the neighbourhood. Paul and I heard them chittering in the firs this morning, back and forth. Local crows are pissed. Hopefully Buster will avoid them.

Feeling really happy about the sunlight, on the beautiful white snow.

sleep

Another excellent night of sleep, so I’m feeling quite chipper, even though my blanky migrated.

Keith loaned Katie the car money, so she has a new Yaris (no more Echo Echo Echo out front of Planet Bachelor, sadly). Paul, in one of his forays into being a complete duckwit, told Katie he wants to sell the dangerous piece of shit she’s been driving for the last two years (WHYYYYYY??) and so she had to pay for two weeks of not having a plate because Paul wanted the plates on the car to sell it. He’ll get 500 for it tops and made her spend $300 on the plate and it’s just a standard father knows best thing that inconveniences people around him. Fortunately he’d rather be dipped in dogshit and set afire than read my blog, so my uncharacteristic foray into whining about Paul (I so very seldom have reason to) will go unremarked by him.

Spent a bit of time with Katie and Alex the other day; I got to watch him in the toddler pool and the little **** ran off almost immediately and I WASN’T WEARING MY GLASSES FOR ONCE usually I do, so there’s me rotating like a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket and panicking ever more deeply until he comes down the slide and I nearly peed in relief.

Katie got three goes at the hot tub while I minded Alex. We were playing with splashy things and my god that kid never ceases moving. Keith and Kate were absolutely Nothing Like This.

The new car smells a bit and listening to Alex complain about it you’d think this was the worst thing that ever happened. But it will never have smokes in it, Katie quit in January. I’ve had two smokes since the beginning of January, yes I’m vile.

House filk on the 8th March, except it’s more likely to be a folk gathering.

blankety blank

Called Katie – she slept great  but li’l Alex reeeefused to get under the blanket. Katie don’t care, she’s keeping it. I ordered it from gravid.ca if anyone wants to know. Please note they are completely slammed for orders and delivery will be a while.

Jeff took me out to brekky this morning, it was nom.

Rachel Notley’s headdress was given to her by the powwow organizer; NOBODY in the Blood or Blackfoot nations organized it. Also, it doesn’t matter how many times Jordan Peterson says he’s Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw he isn’t. Nobody claims him.

I don’t know why it is that settlers think they can call themselves members of an Indigenous nation without a kokum, but there ya go.

 

THE WAR ON CHERRIES not

blanky part le deux

Success! I slept an additional 2 hours with the blankie, garnering almost 7 hours of (almost) uninterrupted sleep. I think Katie will be pleased when I hand it over to her this morning for non-destructive testing on Alex.

This is me 30 seconds before I found the box on my step. This is the weather their delivery company dealt with. We got two inches of dense, slippery af snow pounding down over about four hours, then it abruptly stopped and a watery sun came out and said oops.

When that snow all turned to water at once, that was an interesting moment.

Katie took me to breakfast – it’s a grey day, but much warmer and the snow’s off the walkway.

Stanley Donen is dead. The man who directed Charade is gone. But here he is being fucking amazing in 1997.

another busyish day

Yesterday I got back in the swing of things with Osteofit, worked hard and felt very pleasant afterward, such a nice change from all the formal exercise I ever got. Informal exercise — walking, swimming, canoeing and skating, I’ve always loved. Also went to Lunch Bunch and I’m some expletive glad I made cake, because two of the Especially Elders had preachments about people coming to lunch bunch and not contributing.

My takeaway was that adults ask for help, and administering a means test for Lunch Bunch is just about the most settler colonial thing I ever heard of, but seeing as how I’m busting out all anarkista these days I’m going to leave my whining about this to die in another timeline. May the mother Api in all her forms bless Laura and her soup.

Osteofit – despite that incredible tumble I took earlier this week, holy shit – has been so good for my balance.

Also, any day that has Moar Peggy in it is by virtue of her virtue, better.

Got some picatures from my half-century friend. I am waiting with anticipation for the pet pics.

Today, my replacement DL fussola, first thing so I don’t have to wait too long at the licensing office in Metroclown.

Fuck Metrotown. But thither must I wander. At least, thanks to my expotition on Wednesday, I know where the South Burnaby Neighbourhood House is.

 

Personal note to my cyberstalker: Until you tell me who you are, your opinion is worthless. You know that, right?