Settler words&music in S'ólh Téméxw, (leanpub.com/upsun) living where privilege meets precarity in MST country. she/her/they———– Novels: Midnite Moving Co., Upsun; Sweep Off Those Waves coming soon, Hair Sinister after that. —Restore All Indigenous Lands!
I’m really missing walking with Paul. He’s in Ontario helping clear out his mom’s apartment. I hope he has his sisters helping; I certainly assume so.
Had a lovely visit from Alex on Sunday. His hair is getting so long! he insisted on spending time alone with Smokey (a guitar) so he could write a song.
Watching Vera. Mostly those tales are very sad.
The sage went to the people and said “DO!” and they did, in all the ways of the people. They returned to hear his next words and he gently picked up a toddler and loudly said, “DO DO!” and the child soiled itself in terror. The people were not happy with the sage and a drummer, speaking from the crowd, rebuked his next message, “DO DO DO!” by saying, “I really hate waltz time.”
The sage was sent for neurological assessment.
The people swore off sages.
There was nothing wrong with the sage.
A couple of days ago, Misha Collins, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki got on social media to announce that the TV show Supernatural is ending next season (season 15, over 320 episodes) and the finale of all finales will thus be next season – their choice, most likely. A couple of them had been crying, which doesn’t bother me, I’d be crying too if I moved along from the best job I’d ever had even if it was my choice.
Inside the fandom, for the show, there is a substantial chonk of LGBT and straight cisgirl fans who absolutely love on the idea of a romance between Castiel the angel, who appeared season 4, and Dean the Hunter, who, along with his brother Sam the Hunter, carries the show week to week.
There are also Supernatural fans who write fanfic in the A/B/O universe (don’t look, it’s a concourse of poorly realized paraphilias and it’s even worse when you realize that (never mind, just more fandom bs) and I have read precisely one decently written A/B/O fic so I know it’s possible but Jesus it’s GROSS) and write explicitly incestuous fic (it’s called Wincest, and I haven’t even let my eyes roam over one of them, thanks).
Neither of these two things are supported by the show; Destiel, which is the mashup of the names of Dean and Castiel, while not supported word for word in script canon, is teased at, at least once a season, all through the show. I won’t go into the list of specific callouts as to there being romance in the air, just go to the Dean/Castiel page on Superwiki, where it’s all laid out in prim detail.
It’s my belief that the show would rather kill one of the characters than let any of them wander off into the sunset, encoupled. From a strictly ‘whose body is this’ standpoint, there’s no longer any squick about who Castiel’s vessel is, which removed a lot of the hassles about a canonical romance. But
it doesn’t fit the show. And Castiel, although he can be briefly physically affectionate, has not been represented as a sexual being, at least not successfully.
So yeah, I’ll write fanfic because it looks like love, romance and lifetime commitment to me. But anybody who thinks Destiel is gonna be canon is a fucking idiot, because the lead actor, the gold standard of a richly successful franchise, is happy with how things are.
The queer-baiting will continue until you make your own art, folx. (Definition of queer-baiting on the page linked to above.)
Katie and I had a lovely long talk this morning about how hard it is to separate out ones feelings from the list of things one has to do. Among other things. There was a lot in there.
Up at 1 am. Back napping at 10, up at noon, back down at 2, up at 7:30, back down a little after that. Now it’s 2:41 in the am and I’m still awake.
I don’t know if it’s allergies or a cold but unless I start feeling much better soon I won’t be going to Osteofit.
Rewatching GoT and I’m doing a complete watch of Vera with Jeff. It’s been renewed again for 2020, so there will be 10 seasons of it….. so far.
Sneezing like mad in consequence of the balmy weather, of course. Spoke briefly to Sue and Dave and Tammy. Hoping for a musical evening this week.
They are burying Phyllis today. She was a magnificent woman, a reminder of a very different time.
I’m off to Mike Beach!!! At least we arranged yesterday to get together today and it’s my intention to let the sun hit my bodday. What a strange month for weather, snow and sun in abundance.
I have my first cup of coffee and I have trawled the interwebs for various kinds of news. Burnaby one bedroom apartments average to 1500 a month, did you know that? it’s insane what these things cost, and here I am in a tear down house… we could lose this joint at any moment, although we got our re-up lease for next year already.
I know what a roundy is now. My attempts to understand at least the words and concepts of Indigenous culture in what is now Canada continue.
(It’s a round dance.)
Ontario is using the honour system to keep track of vaccinations, don’t you feel better?
Katie took me out to breakfast and I was most breathtakingly rubbed into my stupid whiteladyness and I’m sore about all what happened as a consequence (all I did was go to the fucking bathroom!!! that’s all I did), and everything went sideways. I came out and the waitress was telling the Haida guy, who had been conversing with us, to leave since he hadn’t ordered anything and then she asked him to prepay and shit got ugly. No yelling, just dark clouds of ugly.
Katie’s fine, our convo fantastic.
Then we went back to our previously scheduled lives.
Then we reformed for a Value Village run. Got a box of books out the door. Got out the house. I finally got an old lady friendly nightgown that is literally two sizes too X for me so it’s gonna be like a big blue gunny sack and happy I am about it. Also picked up a bunny hug for brO and wild socks for me and then.
Ran a laundry. Tried to grok that I had experienced a racist incident, that I feel like I could have done something about and I fucking froze, I froze like a prey animal.
Capitalism is preying on me, it’s preying on my will and my mind.
The short version of the homily is done. I’ll leave it another week and come back at it, but it’s done, and I’m not going to have any last minute changes of heart on that subject. Writing for pay is a different proposition, yanno.
Now I must transfer laundry from wet place to dry place. NEW NIGHTY YAY.
And Jeff et my leftovers, per plan.
Just.
Wow. Upsidedowndulous day.
Hoping to get a nap and then get out tonight for the Capilano Review ish launch; the art in this issue is so wonderful I LOVE IT. It’s so feminist. So unruly and unflinching and playful and bitey.
I need to take myself on an ‘artist date’ and see it tonight from 7 to 9 but maybe a nap first.
I am getting some.
Talked to a family member about additional therapy time; we’re waiting for an appropriate time.
Jeff is helping me with my taxes. I’m probably owed something like ten grand over five years of returns so it’s very kind of him to wade into my bs. I shall have to think of something nice to do for him. And yes, this was completely stupid behaviour on my part, I don’t need a pile on.
My laundry’s put away, the dishwasher is running, and later on today it’s Lunch bunch and exercise; hoping to hear from Peggy.
Also got two loads of laundry done and made a banana cake.
Paul phoned me to let me know that Phyllis, his mother, passed away this morning.
I asked him to check with his family if they want me there, and will go if needed.
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
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.
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.
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.