Reading

Entry tags:

The Interview

Back from Ithaca.

I liked Justine, Nelson, Joannah, & Caitlyn—the residents of the co-op house.

And they liked me!

In fact, the three women and I had a pretty remarkable conversation, sitting out on the back porch overlooking the beautiful flower garden (wild flowers, echinacea and black-eyed Susans), sipping lemon water. We talked about conflict resolution and it evolved into a discussion of a highly toxic situation Joannah has been involved with at her chiropractic school where a horrible instructor had taken an extreme dislike to her and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it except stay calm & resolute & stay the course.

Of the three women, I liked Justine, the Cornell professor, best because she, too, has the Bread & Puppets Why Cheap Art Manifesto hanging in her bedroom:

But Joannah has this absolutely seraphic quality that I can't recall ever coming across before. If there are angels who occasionally have business dealings on earth, honestly, they'd manifest like Joannah.

She also has a rare blood cancer that requires monthly interferon infusions on a monthly basis. She walks with death. Literally. Maybe that accounts for her otherworldliness.

"I have a hard time with conflicts," I said. And explained that usually I let conflicts build until they reach some kind of critical mass & I can explode in anger.

"But I'm working on it," I added.

They were all very bemused by this. Why? they wanted to know. Was it because I was afraid people would stop liking me? Was it because I thought what was upsetting me was too ridiculous?

No, I said. It was because I thought the people who were upsetting me wouldn't care that they were upsetting me, that either they would laugh at me, or I would be invisible. Anger gave me the ballistic force to make sure I'd be taken seriously and that I'd be seen.

"Ah, childhood traumas," Joannah said gravely & gently.

###

At the end of the conversation—it went on for an hour and a half—Joannah said, "It's sort of like the future me is looking at the four of us and saying, Yes, we belong together."

And we embraced.

BUT there is a sticking point, and this is it: Nelson is somewhat allergic to cats.

I told him there is an anti-allergenic cat food that is quite successful. RTT, who is allergic to cats, uses it with the kitten he adopted a month ago and reports he is now completely asymptomatic:

And if that didn't work, I'd rehome the kiskas.

"I'll think about it," Nelson told me with a sweet smile.

And I believe he will.

###

Molly & Mabel, though, would actually be very difficult to rehome.

They are such mistrustful kiskas! They hiss at strangers! Not because they are aggressive, but because they scare so easily.

It's obvious they love me in their idiocyncratic kiska way, but occasionally, they will still hiss at me. They must have been abused or otherwise traumatized as young cats.

I'm fond of them.

I certainly don't love them the way I loved Sybyl or Rutger.

But I feel very strongly that the Universe assigned me to be their Protector, and it's a covenant I can't voluntarily break.

So!

What will be will be.

("But you did say you would rehome them if it doesn't work," said Joannah frowning slightly. I think she will advocate on my behalf.)

###

There's a lot more to write about, including the immensely beautiful Airbnb I stayed in and the absolute panic attack I worked my way into on the drive up to Ithaca.

I texted the BoyZ: House interview is tomorrow morning & I am having an anxiety attack a la “I’m such a loser, so who would want to live with ME?” Hopefully my self-esteem returns by tomorrow—

—and the two BoyZ offered reassurance in typically characteristic ways:

Ichabod: Don’t worry about being a loser. I think if this person was going to think you were a loser, they would already and you wouldn’t be going to visit. Also if she thinks you’re a loser it’s not where you want to live anyway so better get that out of the way.

RTT: Don’t be a pussy mom. You got this big dawg. You’re gonna come in there and impress her so much she questions whether SHE belongs there

But I have a huge amount to accomplish today and have already wasted too much time writing.

This is not the retirement you are looking for

Things are hard. Every time I breathe out and think that it's ok and all the bad stuff is done, some other horror does the 'surprise, motherfucker' meme.

( more than you wanted to know )

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.

* Don't.

Entry tags:

Chronocrator

The women who loved Brian. The women Brian loved.

I wish I could say I was in a better mood when we all met up for dinner, but in fact, I was not.

(Patrizia needs to be walked, Brian used to say.)

I covered reasonably well. Maintained, as I used to say back in my druggy days.

I don't know why I wasn't in a sunnier place. All day long, I entertained vague intestinal complaints that I knew perfectly well were psychosomatic. If I tried to think about that for very long, I knew that I was a failure & that nothing very good or very interesting would ever happen to me again, so I didn't think about that, I let the edges blur, and instead I thought about the economic implications of the shift in nurse practitioner licensure to the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, and the pie I was baking Flavia, and whether pigs have wings.

The pie did not turn out well. I am not good at making crusts, plus Icky's oven turns out to be just as difficult & undependable as Icky himself, so the crust burned:

It will taste good, though.

###

When I got back from dinner, I sat outside & watched the darkness rally.

It's practically the end of firefly season.

It's practically the end of summer.

I can't really remember anything much about this summer. This summer followed Brian into the void.

The day had been stormy, but the night sky was clear, and far above my head, I saw the conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn, the Chronocrator medieval astrologers called it, for it presages significant social change, a new 20-year cycle:

Propitious!

Current Music: Deus King: Why

Entry tags:

Temporarily Protected and other statuses

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Entry tags:

Martha Stewart

Hacked out 2,000 words yesterday, and I do mean "hacked:" Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I had a fantasy that my life was a massive hunk of stone—well. not so massive anymore—from which I was whittling huge chunks in meaningless pursuit—well. not so meaningless—of filthy lucre.

Sigh...

As a palate cleanser between Remunerative bouts, I watched multiple documentaries on the life of Martha Stewart.

My horrible cousin went through a Martha Stewart phase sometime in her early 20s. Alicia was constantly pumping out gilded wreaths & sachet bunches that made me want to barf. Thing is, though, Alicia has horrible maudlin taste, which came across in all her crafty shit, whereas Martha Stewart has excellent taste. The gilded wreaths in these documentaries were really quite exquisite!

Of course, Martha Stewart comes across as a horrible human being. All the PR manipulation in the world can't scrub the taint of "cold abusive bitch" from her.

Apologists throughout the documentaries kept saying, "If she were a man, you wouldn't be calling her cold abusive bitch."

Right! I'd be calling her "cold abusive bastard"!

I don't value late stage capitalism's instruments of validation at all.

###

The magnitude of Martha Stewart's accomplishments is impressive, though.

She singlehandedly invented both the lifestyle industry ($6.3 trillion globally) and the DIY industry ($861 billion).

How did she do it???

Intelligence. Vision. Innate talent. Being in the right place at the right time.

Also, apparently, she only needs to sleep three hours a night.

This must be why I am a failure. If I don't sleep eight hours a night, it's hard for me to function.

Reddit is just filled with people who only wanna sleep three hours a night!!! Just think of all the stuff I could do if I had five more hours in the day!!!

What? Watch more True Crime documentaries on Netflix? Scroll on your phone more often? Play more video games?

Plus, if you don't sleep, you can't dream, and dreaming is the most fabulous thing there is.

###

Today, I must hammer out another 2,000 words. And bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia—Brian used to bake her one every year, & I went sour cherry picking in July with the express intention of making one for her.

I will bring the pie when I meet up with Flavia, Mimi, & Daria tonight.

I am in a prickley mood, so I am actually not looking forward to this.

The Women Brian Left Behind! UGH.

I mean, I loved Brian. I miss him. But what are we supposed to do? Build a suttee? Immolate ourselves on it?

I'm sure I'm just being unbecomingly contentious and will recover my equanimity by this evening.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I went to art school semi-on-purpose. Which is to say I always loved art, loved drawing, but was it my passion? Who knows what a 13-year-old's passion is? I was nerdier about other things. But I was bullied in grade school and wanted only to get away from my tormentors when I finally graduated, and so I auditioned for the art school as an escape. I was good at drawing, good enough that they plucked me out of my boring town and away from everyone I hated. There I had teachers who truly were passionate about art, and art history, and I fell in love with not just the paintings and sculpture and architecture but the stories and personalities behind them. We scrimped and saved so that I could go on the school trip to Italy and there I got to see the art, and fall in love with Florence in particular, and walk in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and it was the most incredible thing to happen to me in my life thus far.

So anyway reading this book was like reliving that, only—as Ada Palmer says throughout the book—"Ever-So-Much-But-More-So." Because there is more history than I knew, or learned since, more stories, more people, about 100 pages of footnotes, and it's contested history, histories complicated by someone who loves this era even more than I do. Despite the book's heft, it's a very fast read. Also I cried a l'il. Fight me. But read it.

Currently reading: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a re-read of my favourite SM-G book For Reasons and my God, Meche is even worse than I remembered. I love her. Ahaha. What a nightmare child.

Entry tags:

facebook,
politics

I Can Pee Anywhere I Want

The heat is back, but not the humidity. So, the heat is actually... kinda pleasant.

I worked out ferociously at the gym yesterday and was rewarded by eight hours of perfect sleep (from which I did not wake up once) and wonderful dreams of a complicated alternate universe that I forgot two seconds after I woke up.

Three seconds after I woke up, I remembered that I was living in the Weimar Republik, and my mood plummeted.

Yes, the National Guard crashing around through Washington D.C. is strictly performative, and one might almost be tempted to feel sorry for the poor schmucks marching about in those heavy uniforms, toting those guns, in 90° heat & matching humidity.

Here's the thing, though: It's meant to normalize.

So when the real coup comes after Trump's minions fail to win the next election, we won't realize that anything outside the ordinary is going on.

###

Over on FB—which must be my window into the world today because I've really gotta chain myself to this desk and pound out the Remunerative verbiage—the über-performative Zen Buddhist priest posted her latest koan about how needing desperately to pee, she wandered into a McDonald's in downtown Berkeley.

Since a woman was just pushing her way into the woman's bathroom—the Zen Buddhist priest let us know she was a seriously homeless lady with a shopping cart & everything—the priest turned toward the men's bathroom—

Hey! I pee in men's public bathrooms myself all the time! Fuck those architects (who must all be males!) who never design enough stalls.

—and heard a booming voice: CAN'T YOU READ. GO TO THE LADIES ROOM YOU ARE NOT A MAN.

It was coming from another homeless woman.

I was hoping the punchline would be, And then I pissed myself.

But, no! The Zen Buddhist priest—humble Zen Buddhist priest that she is and tremendously adept at milking every last elusive "like" off the unseen audience of FB lurkers—meekly waited her turn because, you know, she's just a privileged white lady who needs a place to pee—

I just wanted to scream when I read this.

Are you fucking insane? I wanted to ask. People like you are the reason why Donald Trumo won the last election! There is no grace whatsoever in letting crazy people deflect a common sense plan! Nilch! Nada! Niente!

A single rogue commenter observed, Honestly who cares what a rando booming voice says?

Which gave the performative Zen Buddhist priest the opportunity to parade her coup de grâce: It was their house and I was a guest. The best they can hope for is a cup of coffee to nurse which will buy them a place to sit for a while. I can sit, and I can pee, anywhere I want.

Fucking gag me, bitch!

No, McDonald's is not their home, and the whole point of your story is that you couldn't pee anywhere you wanted.

Stories like this are why I hate liberals almost as much as I hate Trump.

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

Today's post is ICHH's "Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting." Gare and Mia take a deep dive into what is, superficially, a comparatively minor issue—that of conspiratorial thinking on the left. They take as their jumping off point a tweet from the Gestapo featuring John Gast's "American Progress." It's an overtly fascist tweet because the artwork itself celebrates the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the text reinforces that the poster thinks that this genocide is a good thing, and also because an overtly fascist organization that is currently carrying out a genocide tweeted it. If they'd tweeted a picture of kittens, it would still be a fascist tweet, because it is a fascist organization posting on a platform owned by fascists. Nevertheless, certain segments of the extremely online left and liberals have convinced themselves that there are also secret fascist messages in the tweet.

The basic thesis of the episode is, "no, you fools, they don't need to dogwhistle anymore because they are in power and doing fascism." But there's another, even more important point here, which is that we're all still basically stuck in 2016-7 and we need to be updating both our thinking and our strategies. I feel a certain way about this because for all that I mocked it back in the day, conspiratorial thinking worked very well for the right, and I sort of disagree with Gare and Mia that it won't reach a particular type of low-information voter who likes to feel privy to exciting secret knowledge. But also, it is counterproductive and has people who might otherwise be useful and productive chasing their tails playing numerology on X, the Everything App.

At any rate, it's an interesting psychological insight and as someone who is not immune from Extremely Online Thinking, it's a useful check-in.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Nothing, this book is 768 pages long.

Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. It's so good. The middle of the book tells the story of 15 Renaissance figures, both famous and obscure, on various sides of factional political fights, theology, and modernity. After a sympathetic look at Lucrezia Borgia (who did nothing wrong), I just finished the chapter on Michelangelo, which despite being one of the longer chapters (I am weirdly relieved whenever we hit someone I like who didn't die horribly and prematurely) and focusing on the political infighting of the time, didn't even cover his imprisonment. To be fair, he did a lot of stuff, and it covers his love life admirably, which is juicier. She uses it in part to talk about the degree to which art was wielded as a weapon of political influence, often at the expense of the artists and craftspeople themselves, and also the complex history of queerness in the era.

There's a particularly good exchange between Galeazzo Sanseverino (the lover of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who lived openly with him along with his wife Beatrice) and Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella d'Este. Sanseverino had challenged Gongzaga to a duel, to which Gonzaga replied, "Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture and a fig sign," and that when he had gay sex, "I do it at the door of others while you do it at your own." (I.e., he was a top.)

Anyway this book is great. I'm only highlighting this because it was the last thing I read before I passed out last night. It's all like this, though.

Current Music: Os Mutantes: Hey Boy

Entry tags:

a tiny ecosystem

I let a lot of milkweed grow in my yard. In part it's for the monarch butterflies, in part it's so I can harvest the fibers, in part it's because I like the scent of the flowers. I've also enjoyed eating the young pods (carefully cooked) sometimes.

This year, the milkweed's been afflicted by a bright orange-yellow aphid called the oleander aphid.

( beneath a cut in case seeing a whole lot of aphids isn't your thing )

My approach to minor infestations of things has been to try to wash them off, but these guys had determination and numbers on their side. I looked at online communities, and it was interesting: the people who grow milkweed aren't farmers growing it for a living; they're by and large people who are growing it for the butterflies. And if you're growing it for the butterflies, you don't want to do anything that's going to endanger the butterfly eggs or the caterpillars, so you're not going to use pesticides or even indiscriminate washing. So most people were saying they just left the aphids alone. "They don't kill the milkweed," someone wrote. "Predators like ladybugs end up finding them," someone else said.

Do nothing is my favorite advice, so although I didn't like the look of the aphids on the plants, that's what I did. Sure enough, ladybugs appeared.

( a suite of three ladybugs )

The aphids have most definitely not disappeared. This live-and-let-live approach wouldn't work for something you're depending on for your own survival--your own subsistence crop or your livelihood--but that's not my situation, so it's been interesting to see it all unfold. The milkweed hasn't died, the ladybugs did arrive, and the monarch females have been floating around, visiting lots of plants and, presumably, laying eggs. And hopefully the fibers still end up being good, in spite of the aphids.