Category: Writing

I’m at the Aerie, and the world is a blur of Turneresque clouds with a hint of sun somewhere. Mike took me to Chronic Taco last night and I had the salad bowl with beef and a draft Parallel 49, which was absolutely what I wanted.

I’ve been promised breakfast. I’ve already broken into the Starbucks hot chocolate so I’m ready to wait another couple of hours before Mike achieves consciousness. I’ve been up since 5:30.

Wrote 453 words yesterday and today… who knows!

I need a substitute for awesome right fucking now.

Paul took Jeff and I to breakfast at IHOP, it was delightful.

Writing now. I’ll check back in three hours.  wordcount 453 – working on Harri’s soliloquy

We had a lovely visit to the fOlks’ place. The pterodactyls visited the bird feeder, we went for a lovely walk to the playground by the ocean, we had a meal at Sassy’s and we went to the Butterfly Sanctuary. Little E was not in evidence.

Alex is a really lovely human being, but man, he needs to get enough sleep.

On the cards for today, laundry and getting my desk set up properly for production of WURDZ, unpacking from trip and meal planning.

mOm had ALL OF HER DESCENDENTS in one place, although not at the same time, yesterday.  Jeff headed back yesterday, and we arrived – Paul, me, Katie, Keith and Alex. It was made even more wonderful by the presence of Auntie Mary. The wasband says that he tried six times to use audio search on Google to find something and all six times my aunt started talking before Paul could get it to search

Today we go to Sassy’s, the butterfly house and then the ferry to go home. It was a lovely lovely visit and I’m looking forward to renewing my love affair with Little E the Eclecticus Parrot.

Back’d up ye harde drive.

Cleaning of my room continues.  There’s so much floor the kitties are pacing and mewing their disapproval.

Called friends.

Back to the horrors of cleaning.

Katie phoned in tears the other day. She went through a garbage bag stored in her room and learned to her grief and shock that it was all of John’s old badges and con pins, plus the quilt J. made for him out of a selection of his t-shirts.

Katie could smell him.

It goes to the back of your brain.

I walked over to Planet Bachelor – I suppose I should call it something else now, possibly Bachelor Village since it takes a village to raise a child – and we comforted each other for a while. Alex was at his dad’s.

Alex’s aunt is in a psych ward right now. Poor Suzanne had to take shelter at Bachelor Village for a couple of nights last week.

Over and over again I told the kids when they were little that the fights they got into would all be washed away as adults and they would have an awesome relationship and I’m a little teary at how right I proved to be. Katie and Keith are putting it together, and Keith loves little Alex with externally gentle ferocity. He’s also learning how to discipline a toddler, a worthwhile endeavour.

And I miss John this morning. He would have loved that I bought a dulcimer. I was crying as I practiced earlier. I played louder.

The kitties are running all over the house looking for Jeff and staring angrily at his closed bedroom door. He’s off to the Island, and I hope he’ll have a fair journey.

I’m cleaning my room. It’s a pre-hurricane tornado.

Activist thoughts.

I am now past the shoals of “I don’t see colour”. I understand why it’s a terrible fucking thing when white people say it, or anybody, really, but mostly white people.

I have escaped from the grip of the tone police. When activists are angry and use salty language, I support them by a) listening without judgement b) boosting the signal if what they say (not the tone) is important c) understanding where the anger is coming from and why suppressing it from delicacy is white privilege and d) enjoying the reactions of white people further back the ol’ social justice supply chain. Did I say I was perfect? Enjoying other people being stupider than I was 4 years ago is one of my few thrills.

I am still completely unsure of what to do next, but I know that in the end I must reconcile with the Treaty 6 people, since that’s where my family stole the most land. I don’t wanna. I want to go on pretending that the Queen isn’t a symbol of genocidal colonialism, that she’s a tough old broad with a sense of duty you could use as a heat shield on a fucking spacecraft. I want my comfy lies.

I shall apply Chelsea Vowel’s Indigenous Writes to the burn, and see what happens.

TLDR I am dying it’s ages since I saw Alex and in the pursuit of self-possessed reserve NOT EXACTLY MY STRONG SUIT IS IT I can’t brag about the stuff that’s going better than splendid in my life right now. I am having thinky thoughts about slashfic that are making me completely insane – I’m out of the writing mania and into the ‘where does this fit into intersectionality/problemas map of social justice’ mania instead, which I vastly prefer. I’ve been schooled on the sociological fly in the slashfic ointment. AND I AM PISSED AND HOWLING INTERNALLY LIKE SEPARATED TWINS. By which I mean autonomous toddler twins taken away from each other, not -never mind, I’m obviously gaga.

Spent yesterday afternoon with Mike; so hot in his apartment I felt noodlelike when I left. Lunch was a delicious lamb donair, from the best donair place in New West. Mike had the chicken platter. Aren’t those prices insane?

Persephone Golden Goddess is back in stock at Liquorgate! me happy. First time I drank it was with Mike but Paul and I have demolished a fair few of those as well. Paul’s totally hung up on Lost Lagoon, a beer so hoppy it will make a raging erection turn into a squinting afterthought. I had no idea brewer’s droop was real. I suppose I should warn him. Yes I’ll tell him.

I hate doing this, making decisions while all three of you are watching me with your globular unblinking peepers of dwoom. Plus John of course. He hasn’t had a hand in any of my recent decisions (cause he’s dead, no duh), but he’s certainly been chaffing me from various angles. His spirited defence of anarchism, gee whiz. I wish I could bring it to life at will. All his delightfully useful ideas.

Now here I ramble. It’s okay now; pOp didn’t make it this far down and mOm’s gonna take shotgun on ‘picking the music’ which means she gets to read this and then phone me about it afterward. Shotgun was a Supernatural reference. Nobody reading this will get it. I wish I could convey how annoying that was.

Caveats

I’m genuinely sad about this. I wish I could find something realer to be sad about, but for me this is like two of my second-tier best friends having the most beautiful and hauntingly star-crossed love affair OF ALL TIME in front of me where I get to go to a wedding and eat popcorn for the whole damned thing and THEN IT TURNS OUT IT WAS ALL A LIE and you hate yourself.

You hate yourself for believing it. You hate yourself for spending so much fracking time on it. You hate yourself for having your friendships reduced to a thought experiment (“Did we ever actually believe or think similarly about anything for any length of time and did we actually think/believe nothing was perhaps a little bit non-conformant with consensus reality?”) You hate yourself for the time you spent on it in new and different ways.

You comfort yourself that you’ve met wonderful people all over the internet. They are young, they are fierce, they make wonderful memes twenty minutes after that episode was released. You’ve read a lot of fanfic. Some of it was so good it read like (this line deleted as I expect it would give my mOm the pip) well anyway it was witty, hot, dark and completely true to the character’s voices. Some of it was so bad you had a moment to reflect on your bigotry as you tried to guess which country this Enlgish speaker was living in.

Thailand? South Korea? Poland? The smart ones find beta readers and they close the usage and cultural cracks.

No spell checking, no punchuation, I can’t breath no seriously.

If the first page has more than three errors and ghastly dialogue I bail. THat wAs eaSY.

I’ve learned a lot about butt sex. The learnings are academic and applied. This is not the worst thing that ever happened to me, and it’s very useful as an antidote to various kinds of gay panic you may have lingering in your sensorium. Jes sayin.

and now it begins and it starts elliptical so I want you to think of how this is written as an analogue to falling and moving forward  : like an orbit. I’ve been knocked out of mine a little.

My twitter badge reads “ALL MY FANDOMS ARE PROBLEMATIC”. I left the red underline under FANDOMS when I did a screen shot of it from Word for Mac in the colour and font I wanted. Because of course the word FANDOM can’t be plural. The word fandom may not exist in your thesaurus.  THE SOFTWARE I USE IS JUDGING ME. The software I used has not caught up with me. And it’s worse if I’m not as privileged.

I’m telling the truth. All my fandoms are problematic.

Dunnett had a magickal negro in the character Salamanca, in The Disorderly Knights and Pawn in Frankincense. He’s wise and calm and servile. He dies defending Our Hero Francis in Pawn in Frankincense.

He was written over 1964 to 1968, and he has about as much agency as a Negro character written during that time by a white person who did not come into daily contact with black people could have. Dunnett makes it plain that he is a free man serving freely; he talks back to Lymond and gets away with it where other people, white people, would get verbally punched and bored and turned over to the maggots.

Umar, in the Niccolo Series, is a completely different story. He starts as a literal slave names Lopes, and is returned to his high status life as a high-born Muslim jurist in Timbuktu in part by making a deal with that devil Niccolo to participate in the exploitation of his people (sort of, the war die are already cast when we meet Akil) and of his neighbours, although one could argue that Umar didn’t see it that way. He has a backstory and a current story and he is presented in some respects as an intersectional foil for Niccolo, and as a righteous scolding for people who hold colour, sex and birth to be more important than merit, an ongoing maternally cozy series of slaps in the series.

Francis gets up and looks back as little as possible when Salamanca dies — although his death is recalled to his mind more than once over the remainder of the series; Niccolo folds in half when Umar dies and part of the complexity of his grief is that there is now hardly anybody on this earth he can share the full extent of his intellectual being with. That the news is given him — as he is climbing the stairs to bang Gelis after !finally! marrying her — by that fucking slick nonentity Tommaso Portinari (I’m not actually consulting the books right now, so any o’ you Dunnetteers who know better will forgive me should I err in personnel) is arsenic sprinkled on the icing of commerce.

The whole point of the trip was to get gold.

To strip Africa of riches. To trick and sneak and kill and lie. To pretend to abide by customs that are not theirs; to ignore the reach of Catholicism when it suits them; to deal with their competitors with deadly contempt; to fuck local women (access pass granted by the local leader, offering up only so many of the wives are already pregnant and feel like it, which is a nice touch you must admit, given the complexities of the situation). The description of the evening which is whoo hoo enlivened with aphrodisiac drugs (since Dunnett somehow felt obliged to write this scene — which easily could have been left out, srsly — and could not escape her own take/cultural envelope on the distortions of racism and the sexualization of African women, but worked through her unease by making all the sex cheerfully consensual in a non-judgemental pocket universe, a fanfic maneuvre if I ever fucking saw one) skirts prurience by one curly hair.

And to escape through the Sahara!: you have to admit that the final ride with Umar, under circumstances of extreme personal peril –  to the extent that they set fire to the camels to get them moving again – is a quietly terrifying one especially if you’re like me and really fucking hate sand in the bits. Such is Dunnett’s imperturbable description that I only now, reading this compression of the scene back to myself, get a sense of how desperate things were, and I’ve re-read that scene a dozen times at least since the book came out in 1991.

You want me to get to the point, but I’m falling inward to a black hole. The course is set, but it is not direct, and I’ma hit shit first.

There’s no hint in any of the Dunnett canon that Umar and Niccolo had sex. They get twitted about it by a number of people ’cause they’re of a size and equally smart and attractive, although Niccolo is the deadlier of the two, so who wouldn’t make fanfic outta that in 1470 ish.

Okay, slip slide over here while I decorticate my mostest problematic fandom. Grease your feet on a little mutton stew (call back to the lamb donair – you didn’t think I’d pass up on that didja now seriously) while we move into the Mostly Completely Fucked Up Destiel Fandom Antechamber.

Supernatural is a long running (13 seasons this fall) CW show starring Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as brothers who hunt and kill supernatural critters, and save the world multiple times, and die, blah blah blah. A long time guest star is Misha Collins, whose been in about half of the episodes aired so far.

 

Anyway, there is a special quality to the interactions between Dean (Jensen) and Castiel (Misha) which made the fans, mostly tubby emotionally flexible women like me, smell blood and think ‘this is a sexual relationship’. And it wasn’t. There isn’t anything in 9 long years of canon to indicate there’s any sex. There’s been enough queer-baiting – when the writers and directors of a show dangle the possibility of a queer relationship in front of us until we’re as savage as underfed dogs – to last through ten other shows.

But there’s no sexual relationship beyond the ‘comrades-in-arms fighting eeeevil’. Right.

So the fans said okay fine we’ll make our own. There’s about five million words, no fewer, set in this particular subcategory of this fandom on AO3 (quite of few of them, alas, are mine) and a metric crapstack on LJ and various fan and fanfic sites. Many of the tropes in the stories are directly from the shows – there’s a shared universe of sacred objects, people and locations which all weave in and out of each other in novel and improbable ways.

I thought it was okay. I had fun with it. Learned a lot about buttsex. And a lot of it is sexist bullshit.

This culture pisses on male friendship from a great height. Middle aged men, especially ones who’ve ended up single due to death or divorce, are the loneliest people there are. Any softness or compassion men show each other is stomped on by women AND men as being inappropriate behaviour.

So it’s not the slash fic I’ve written 200K words of since New Years’ that’s got me upset; it’s that I didn’t realize that the base line assumption of this particular slash fic (there’s slash fixed in canon on other shows/books, so it ain’t all bad) was ultimately a slap in the face to men who would like to pursue intimate and emotionally satisfying friendships (like women do, glory be) with OTHER MEN.

There’s no reason for it to be sexual. If the show goes there I’ll dance like a fool for joy. If it doesn’t, I’ll take my epiphany and quit trying to make Harlequin Romances out of the eyefuckery of straight actors.

 

 

lovely walk at Oakalla and Hayashi Udon afterward at Sushi Garden with Paul

Muggy and hot here. The planned power outage will start in a minute.

 

 

Jeff heard Alex and Katie arrive so I went upstairs to greet them (the family door is the back door, the company door is the front door) and Margot of all things decided to join me in the formal greeting on the back deck and Alex zoomed up toward her and she, of course, made tracks.

We did the traditional “mama and zizi R getting coffee you must wait FIVE MINUTES before you get PINBALL”. Slow motion chase of Miss Margot ensued. Then he announces I AM PLAYING XENON FIRST. VVVVVVery cute.

We jumped on the bed (ALEX IS SO INSISTENT THAT I SING THE JUMPING ON THE BED SONG) and we went to the park and we played in the sand and I carried him and he weighed himself in Jeff’s room (still 32 pounds Jeff said. still 32 pounds Jeff said. still 32 pounds Jeff said). Like Keith at the same age he is CRAZY FOR GAUGES.

Then something truly remarkable happened. I have possibly mentioned my fondness for the Western Family branded Chicken Korma dinners OH MY THEY ARE TASTY and I nuked one up for myself while Alex was there. This was an extremely selfish and stupid thing for me to do but I was starving and Katie had already announced that they were going home for macaroni.

ALEX INSISTED ON EATING IT. And the thing about Alex is that he has two food settings “I don wanna” and “Human intake valve” so he motored through about two hundred calories of chicken korma (he insisted on feeding himself, which was like watching the candy droop in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) despite the fact that it has, LIKE, SPICES IN IT in about, oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty seconds.

He ate Chicken Korma with enthusiasm and the toddler version of finesse.

Katie and I looked at each other trying to cattleate how far our gobs been smacked.

Then Katie called me and asked me to go to the pool, and going to the pool with Alex is wonderful, and he comments on everything, and it’s very civilized and funny and huggy.

After we picked up some dins and Katie took home a couple of Chicken Kormas. Just cause.

1. Referring to the rape victims of previous American presidents as ‘black slave mistresses’ makes the rape sound less rapey and more consensual. Please the fuck do not sit still for it.
2. Yes I’m a racist. I have biases toward people of colour which I can only clearly understand and can frame when I take something like the Harvard Implicit Bias test. That said, I also hated certain European accents back when and assumed the worst of people who spoke with it when I was living in TO and it wasn’t until I had a Polish coworker (thank you Wieslaw) that I finally stopped being an ass about Polish people. The point is that I have some nuance about my own racism and bias. I try not to find it funny, because racism is a kind of social death, but I do make allowances and I don’t wander through the world failing to interrogate my bias. Your senses will deceive you, and your feelings even more. Gotta challenge those bastards
3. Despite the protestations of some of my friends to the contrary, the language you choose around racism is important. It’s irresponsible to think my words can’t hurt people who are already disadvantaged. If your only disadvantage is that you don’t want to challenge your bias, I’m not going to be tender with your feelings.
4. I’m still mad at AJR for saying that the personal isn’t political. How a secular Jew could say that blew my fucking mind. <—– bias. On my part. People from disadvantaged groups have more experience of the pointy end of racism and discrimination, but not necessarily the desire, capacity or time to speak eloquently about it. My ire with Alan’s political views had more to do with his refusal to see any sexism in his behaviour than any of his other problematic behaviours, which I could go on about at great length. I learned a great deal from him, but I must acknowledge that the desire to judge badmouth people for not being perfect exemplars of whatever political stripe they own is an ongoing sore trial in my heart and a facet of human behaviour that appears impossible to root out.
5. There are a lot of statues that need to come down. Ten years ago I thought the statue of Lord Stanley was the best thing ever (because of the words written on the base.) Without understanding the implications of What and Where it was. Now that mofo needs to quit standing on Musqueam land.
6. I’m a coward. I do not want to tell other white people what to think and I do not want to quote the ‘my black friend says’ and the last three times a white person used openly racist speech I sat like a goddamned idjit and said nothing.
7. I no longer use Turtle Island black slang to the maximum extent possible. I try to ensure all of my humour codes white. “Ermagerd.”
8. I no longer tone police angry BIPOC. I used to. Even like two years ago. Now I understand it for the social violence it is. I really, really really had to have my nose rubbed in this.
9. I never ask BIPOC for an explanation of what they say any more. If there’s something I don’t understand I look it up, get context, and stay out of their mentions. (this means not replying to the BIPOC when I have questions because Black, Indian and Persons of Colour are not my magical mentors, they are human beings living in the world and they don’t owe me anything let alone a gold star for participation in what for me is an intellectual debate and for them is an existential threat)
10. If I need to go slap a person upside the head for racism and sexism on social media – for the lulz, or for the grandmotherly kindness it represents, who the fuck cares – I talk to them and them alone. I do not drag the person of colour back into the debate looking for cookies about what a great ally I am. In the first place I’m NOT THE GREAT WHITE ALLY AND in the second place it’s harassing the wrong person.
11. Nothing in the world looks the same and I fucking hate it. I’m crying as I type this. When I watch TV and it’s the stock magical negro warrior, or sassy black friend, or stone faced FN warrior in greasepaint, do-ragged felon, high-cheeked shaman in feathers and leathers, I see the blood in the gears of a finely meshed racist capitalism. I see the hushing of uppity women and the crushing of tender-hearted men. I see the eradication of humans in the desire to simplify life for lazy people. I see how any exploration of gender and class and race is compressed to soundbites and aphorisms; MLK quotes hang around the necks of confederate generals and there’s neither irony or history involved.
12. speaking of history, white Canadians got a really ghastly, edited, racist, Christianized and genocidal version and finding something better isn’t easy

 

oldfud version: Who the hell knows what Allegra is angry about now. Hope she feels better, lancing that boil.

I was thinking of sharing it on social media but no. I’m saving this for the blog.

 

an almost dried drop of blood

is occluded by

a fresh-fallen, scalding tear

Keith, Paul and I went for a walk down at the Quay and picked up lunch (which was also dinner for me – two shrimp Pad Thais one each for me and Paul. They aren’t the ketchupy noodlescapes of ordinary, they’re like real Thai street food from Yellow Tail Kitchen. Keith got bbq brisket from Re-up and he got something for Jeff for takeout, and then we watched two episodes of the Expanse and one of Miss Fisher’s.  Very pleasant afternoon!

I also ran the dishwasher, which has started leaking again, and a load of laundry, and hacked away at various writing projects.

My will is 20 years old, I should probably revise it.

Huskies are work yall  Please do not buy a large, active, working dog without space and temperament for it!!! Huskies have a tremendous urge to be doing things and if you don’t run their asses off they get snappy.