Weaving in the Ends

* * * Please visit me at my newer blog, Noodletoon, where I post regularly:
noodletoon.blogspot.com
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Weaving in the Ends

Longtime bloggers sometimes disappear without a trace, their blogs left hanging in the air like a torn spiderweb. Where did their creators go?

I am grateful that Pat, the blogger of Weaver of Grass, has written a farewell post, "Final".
Pat has been living with end-of-life care for cancer, and now as her "faculties begin to fail", she is bowing out with an exhortation to "be of good cheer" to readers in her position healthwise, and a thank you, and good-bye.
Graceful and gracious, as ever.

As of this morning, 130 people have left comments on Pat's post, most saying thank-you, that she has been and remains an inspiration. Several people said they'd never commented before. I thought it was nice they came out to say good-bye. (I'd only found Weaver in the past year and had only commented a couple times myself.)

Pat has the strengths of her generation, like my Auntie Vi, that I'd just written about.
"Look for the silver lining; don't grumble;  always find something interesting, even if you are housebound". She didn't tolerate unkindness towards others but was patient with inane opinions.

She wrote about the view from her window--her garden, dogs and their walkers--her enjoyment of a "two-finger Kit Kat", and as she writes in her final post, she "often got ideas for a post from reading my daily paper".
This reminds me of advice I got when I started my first blog in 2003, inspired by a pal, Tim, of the long-gone Primate Brow Flash.
Tim said, "If you can't think of something to write, write about something in the New York Times."

Marz showed some of this grace yesterday, in response to the news:
She looked up from the Internet last night and told me someone had shot at Trump.
I admit my first thought was regret that they'd missed, but her reaction humbled and recalled me.

"I don't want us to live like this," Marz said. "I want to be part of the calm in the craziness."

Part of the calm in the craziness.
Yes.

I am of the generation who grew up during the Vietnam War and Watergate and Civil Rights, spurred to cultivate the strengths of questioning authority, experimentation, righteous outrage, and rebellion.
Yay, us!
Let us rage on!

As I age, I also want to fold in some qualities that I had disdained in the older generation when I was young.
What I condemned as passivity may be grace under fire; what I'd considered repression, wisdom in choosing your words and thoughtfulness toward others...

Learning goes both ways.
Auntie Vi could, in fact, be a little too passive for me--and, maybe for her too.
At the age of 92,  for the first time in her life she made a public political statement. She asked me to order a "March for Our Lives" shirt for her (after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting).
On the day when students across the United States demonstrated for gun control, she wore the shirt around her village center--at the coffee shop, in the library, stopping in all the places where everyone knew her.
"I had to say something for the kids."

Outrage, expressed with care.
Calm in the craziness.
Thank you, that generation.

2023: My Year in Review

* * * Please visit me at my newer blog, Noodletoon, where I post regularly:
noodletoon.blogspot.com

(Double-posting this here and there to wrap up the year of 2023.)

2023: My Year in Review
Note: Not representative of the State of the World

BELOW: Self-portrait in convex mirror at the thrift store; perfect martini twist in Decorah, Iowa, (visit w/ sister)

BELOW: workmates Eric, Jesse, me, Em by the dumpster; bullet hole in store window

BELOW: left: bink & hand petroglyph (top) at Tsankawi, New Mexico, and (bottom) at the Santa Fe Museum of Folk Art;
right: Penny Cooper making her mask (top) and (bottom) wearing it at Tsankawi.

BELOW: visiting L &M in Santa Fe; I turn 62 [party photos at end of post]

 

BELOW: left, start of my collage collab (w Em);
 center: April, Marz turns 32; right: "walk among the stars" card by me. 

BELOW: Easter text message exchange, Sister > me;
Penny Cooper & "Just Do It Badly" bunny in annual Sydney Carton Memorial Tumbrel

BELOW: I expanded this small NYPL t-shirt w/ side panels: "What are you reading now?"; right: Bible that has wintered outside at George Floyd Square

BELOW: Summer Solstice Parade.
L to R: Marz, parade balloon attendant; me on ground; and bink making tiny drums.
Penny Cooper is grand marshall.

BELOW: Assumption of Mary (Aug. 15): bink gives girlettes angel leaf wings; more of my collage collab

BELOW: Julia Happify, mending at Penny's Café downtown; right: dino w/ bunny balloon apotropaic

BELOW: New book nook at work; my musical headdress in honor of Douglas Ewart's art opening

FORWARD into 2024:
Every Damn Day, Lighten the Fuck Up, for heaven's sake!

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R.i.p. Jody Williams, 1956 – 10/17/2023

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Birthday party, and other places
clockwise, L to R: with... Rebecca (bink behind), Allan; with Jill, Mississippi near flood stage; Nancy (Marcia & Maura in background);
center, at Maura's 60th birthday party: Per, Anne, Mark, Joe, Mark;
Annette, Carla, Neal, Karen

Previous Year-End Reviews at l'astronave

I do this, I do that...

Michael (of Orange Crate Art) reminded me yesterday that not everyone's "I do this, I do that" is as interesting as Frank O'Hara's.
Ha, no kidding.

From O'Hara's "Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)"

it is dawn
...
I make
myself a bourbon and commence
to write one of my “I do this I do that”
poems in a sketch pad
it is tomorrow
though only six hours have gone by
each day’s light has more significance these days

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"Each day's light has more significance these days."

Yesterday was Winter Solstice and today, the daylight ticks for a tiny bit longer. Or does it? Does it pause for a while?

The timing was incidental, I suppose, but yesterday, Solstice, I announced (with a flounce) that I was ending my blog, l'astronave.
Some bloggers yesterday were complaining about their house cleaners:
well-off, well-meaning people complaining about the help. 
They don't say "the help".

A forty-year-old memory came to me of staying with a friend's parents (the Martyns--the dad was in insurance) in a wealthy suburb in New Jersey. Every morning at eight o'clock, a stream of black women in pastel maid's uniforms came up the hill to the wealthy houses. They had come on a bus from the big inner city. At five o'clock, they streamed back down the hill to the bus stop.
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Solstice is a good time to make a change.
Pause, change partners, and dance.
I wasn't thinking about that, I'd just had enough of people writiting about other people doing their housework (not up to their standards).

My god. What do you say? "You missed some of my dead skin flakes here, and a little of my dog's body fluids there"?

In theory I could have —should have!—ignored those bloggers all along. But I didn't.
And they'd show up in my stats, which, again, in theory I could have not looked at. But I did.

Will this work for me, starting a separate blog?
Why not? FRESH START! Singing a new tune, a noodle toon:

ABOVE: a shelf in my workspace where I've been setting donated books about or by Jimmy Carter, to display when he dies.
He turned ninety-nine in October, and Rosalynn died recently, so I think he may leave any minute now.
Fly away, Mr. President!

[A fun thing I learned from the New Yorker article "The World of Frank O'Hara":
Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey were college roommates. WHO CLEANED THEIR ROOM?]
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I woke up feeling fine this morning, after being wiped out yesterday by the latest Covid vaccine--the fourth, is it, since 2021? 
I'd planned on doing errands yesterday to prepare for Christmas Eve's pot roast dinner (Sunday), but I was too achy all over. I'm glad I got the shot though, since bink had been so sick with Covid for two weeks, not having had the vaccine.

Next up--shingles vaccine. Gold star! to me for attending to medical matters, which I put off (and off).

When it comes to medical and financial things, I don't do this and I don't do that. I've taken a few paid days off over Christmas, and I intend to sit at my desk and clear some papers.
Intentions aren't very effective though...
Penny Cooper is advocating for making an ACTION PLAN!
This is such a good idea.
Here. Step one: I will mail my rent-rebate form.

"Hope is not an action plan", Jeremy Norton writes in his book Trauma Sponges. Norton is chief of the fire station I bike past on my way to work, in between my apartment and George Floyd Square. His truck was called to the scene of the 2020 murder, but Floyd was already dead.

Yesterday I wrote Norton a thank-you card and told him that his line about hope was a favorite. (Looking it up now, I see it's a common saying, but I heard it from him first.)
Also I said that his book helped because I saw myself reflected in it:
yes, this happened; yes, it was this bad.

That's the thing that bothered me about the bloggers I kept reading--perhaps their focus on housework comforts them--I can imagine it does!–– but for me, their "this and that" was not a reflection of or a helpful response to what I see happening in our times.

Fine, then walk away!
I have. And god bless and good luck to them.

Of course, doing little this-and-thats does help in these times. All times are unknown, and this-and-thats mark time like geographic coordinates.
And so does making an effort to celebrate the seasons help...
Below: bink helps Penny Cooper decorate the dolls and bears' Xmas tree.

Hello, I must be going.

UPDATE, 1/24: I am now blogging at Noodletoon:
https://noodletoon.blogspot.com.
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Did  you see that my state, Minnesota, has adopted the blandest whitewash redesign of our old, racist state flag?
It's like the winner in the Race for Inoffensive.

Kinda puts me in mind of... IKEA?

Lt Gov Peggy Flanagan, a Native activist, said,

"Dare I say anything that isn't a Native person being forced off their land is a flag upgrade?!"

How's that for faint praise? "It's better than genocide!"

Yay, us.
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Post #268: Welcome

 . . . One more post than last year!

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#2024Goals

Reading Wil Wheaton's memoir last night, I felt my loss of contact with creative thinkers and makers, seekers and healers over the years--partly the normal loss of friends through time; partly because of working a job where a lot of people all around me are undernourished in every way; partly fallout from the isolation of Covid and the stress of social turmoil.

Also, honestly, partly me being cantankerous and complacent--sometimes for reasonable reasons, perhaps, but, eventually, aren't they self-defeating ones?
I think I should take that in hand--not to force myself to be gregarious, ohgodno, but to reach out a little more to people, even, eek, to ask for help.

I not just only "should" do this, I admit I want to. My “reasonable” reasons not to include a heightened irritation with people arising from a kind of social PTSD, like many of us developed in Trumptimes and Life in the Time of Covid. Plus, for those of us up and down Lake St. in Minneapolis, there's a special flavored PTSD from having witnessed (second-hand, but on streets we walk on) state-sanctioned murder in broad daylight, and the explosions of people's anger and frustration afterward, met—not by the powers-that-be with empathy and attempts at reconciliation—but with more state-sanctioned strong-arming.

I remember the day conveys of armed US troops in camouflage rolled past me as I walked home from work--I stopped at the little garage-gym I was going to at the time and wept with the owner.
The next day, Asst Man said, "How do I explain to my kids why there are soldiers with machine guns on the corner?"
At work, I was on my knees cleaning up shards of windows smashed by legitimately angry and frustrated (and sometimes just opportunistic) people.

So, maybe I want to try again to get some help/ to talk about all that with someone who understands the complexities? 

Which, I am remembering, is what blog friend Darwi who lived as a teenage girl through the BOSNIAN WAR urged me to do…

I know there’s plenty better than that clueless therapist I saw once last year. Someone who doesn't gaslight me, brushing off my feelings and thoughts as "overthinking" or telling me that “everyone is doing their best".

No wonder I don't want to socialize when these are literally some of the responses I get from people.

My dear coworkers mostly operate in survival mode--a grin-and-bear-it which can even be jolly and wise, in its way, but not what I'd call... healing? expansive?

This is a TINY door (2 inches high) in the outside wall of Dreamhaven bookstore. An invitation...
Welcome. Well come.

laughter and tenderness

I had a fun day out, though it started with the nursing-home staff informing us that bink's mom has Covid after we'd walked into her room. She seemed well--up and alert. There was a notice posted on her door, but it was one of a couple pale Xeroxes crowded with print--I hadn't even registered it.

We were wearing masks, at least, and I expect/hope the exposure is nothing to worry about. An aide said we could stay and visit if we put on PPE, but we'd had time to say hi and to give her the little Xmas tree, and that was good enough. She clearly had no idea who I was--no flicker of recognition when I introduced myself, which wasn't surprising. She did light up when bink introduced herself though––"I'm your daughter...". (It can be good to remind people with dementia of who you are. Quizzing them, "Do you know who I am?"  may set them up for feeling they've failed.)

Then bink drove me to the grocery store, and I stocked up on everything to make holiday food. So nice to get a ride for heavy and bulky things like that!
The cashier was wearing a headband that dangled a piece of plastic mistletoe in front of her eyes, like those deep sea fishes dangle lanterns off their foreheads...

In the afternoon, I took the bus to the sci-fi bookstore Dreamhaven, where  a bumper sticker at their till made me laugh out loud:
STAR TREK: Woke Since 1966.
They weren't selling them--the owner had gotten it at a con--or I'd have bought one for my bike.

I bought the new Murderbot, another book as a gift, and Wil Wheaton's 2022 memoir Still Just a Geek [see, Wheaton's books website], an update-by-annotation of his 2004 Just a Geek.
I'd been one of "dozens of people" who'd read the original, by Wheaton's comical count and had "seemed to like it".

I'd never gotten into Star Trek: The Next Generation though, so I didn't know Wheaton's character, Wesley Crusher, well enough to have an opinion about him, much less to virulently hate him as many people did. Wheaton has written about how horrible it was for his character to receive so much hate and mockery. So I'd been moved recently to see Wesley appear briefly in the second season of ST: Picard (the season I loved best) in a cool and heroic, kind and wonderfully geeky way.
Yay, Wil, for bringing it home!

I've always admired how Wheaton has long chosen to be incredibly public, vulnerable, honest, and sincere on his blog, Wil Wheaton dot net--talking about his struggles with his "brain goblins" (mental health), his survival of abuse and "emotional smog" from his parents, the doubt and near-despair after leaving TNG, and also, all along, boldly sharing his joys and bravery and gratitude and love. What a geek!

Also, he loves me. He said so in this speech!

"Are there any librarians here today? How about booksellers? I love you."

Revisiting his memoir after almost twenty years, Wheaton said, was "uncomfortable, embarrassing, awkward, but ultimately healing and surprisingly cathartic", which I think is true of a lot of the personal writing he has shared online for years. Of updating it, he said:

“Many times during the process, I wanted to quit. I kept coming across material that was embarrassing, poorly-written, immature, and worst of all, privileged and myopic.

“. . . I physically recoiled from my own book. Those moments [of] privilege and [the] ignorance that fueled them filled me with shame and regret. They still do.”

I never did clean the apartment, but I'm not going to now--I'm going to read this book. Even as I'm thinking/writing lately more about Big Picture stuff on Earth, I never forget, I hope I never deny, that we each have our own tender selves to care for, and it matters that we do that. Otherwise, what's the point of being here?

So, yeah, just glancing at Wil's book was a good reminder. Everything connects, it's not always obvious how, it's not all going to resolve when you want it to (or, maybe, ever), but your life matters, you're a piece of the whole.
Keep 'er moving!

Fresh-Ginger Cake recipe

The fresh ginger makes this cake amazing. My tip: don't grate your knuckles when you're grating the ginger like I did last year...

Christmas Break

Some cheering seasonal stuff.
I rewatched "Philomena Cunk on Christmas, 2016", last night––she makes me laugh out loud.

Yesterday was my work's pot luck lunch. It was scattered and disjointed, but nice--just like us.

This morning, bink and I are taking a little Xmas tree I got at the store to her mom, who lives in a nearby nursing home. Her mom's dementia is pretty well progressed. I haven't seen her since before Covid--I wonder if she'll recognize me.

The tree is a bit squashed but we can straighten its wire branches.

After that, we're going shopping for Christmas supplies. I'm making pot roast as usual for Xmas Eve, and, this weekend, ginger cake. (Oh--I'll post that separately, as Kirsten requested.)

And then I'm taking the day to finish putting my apartment back in order--still half-pulled apart from when I moved my bookshelf a couple weeks ago. This afternoon I'll take a break and go to Dreamhaven books to treat myself to System Collapse, the new Murderbot!

I think I'll also buy a replacement copy for the first in the series, All Systems Red, to replace the one I lent to mattdamon, who has vamoosed. I could get both books far cheaper online, but I love Dreamhaven and want to support my local sci-fi bookstore.

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The Comfort of Confirmation

Also last night, weirdly cheering/calming to me, I read most of a donated book, published this fall, 2023--it's rare to get such a new book:
  “Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response,”
by Minneapolis fire captain Jeremy Norton [MPR interview].

I bike past the author' firehouse on my way to work!
In his work as fire captain, Norton tends to the same people I see at the store. For me, having someone creative, smart, angry, and in the know say, Yes, this is happening, I see it every day too, is so, so helpful, its a balm to my scarred heart.

The book is not only about this event, but Norton's unit was called to the scene of George Floyd's murder––too late.

The book centered/calmed me because the way Norton talks about what happened on 38th & Chicago is exactly how I see it too, but closer up, plus he fills in gaps in my knowledge.  Sadly he confirms my suspicions about what's happened since to improve the city's policing:
pretty much nothing.

"Hope is not an action plan" he says. Yes! It's not!
I think I'll write him a thank-you note.

But now I need to write a shopping list.
Have a lovely day, everyone!

First plant the sapling

I. Like a Turner Sunset

Isn't this photo beautiful, like a Turner painting?
"The finest sky, to my mind, ever put on canvas," written of a Turner sunset at the Tate.

You can see the movement of colors––dripping, blowing, bubbling–– some emerging, some obliterating...

 
I took the photo as I was biking down the Greenway path this spring.
It's the remains of a fire under a highway overpass, where people living outside were cooking or keeping warm.

There can be beauty in the breakdown, as it reveals new realities.  There's for sure discomfort in it.

II. Dissonance Reduction

I finished reading Collinson's Reformation last night.
When reality doesn't match people's beliefs and expectations,
writes the author, historian Patrick Collinson,
people don't usually change their minds, they (we) change how they see the reality.

What's the name for that? It's a reaction to cognitive dissonance...

*quick google*
Oh, here--it's called dissonance reduction.
Neat! It's the name for how we seek to reduce the unpleasant feelings when belief and reality clash––naturally, but probably not logically...

Even if we change our beliefs, do we change our actions?

Most of us will choose to keep doing what we're doing––
I had a hamburger last night––and, who ordered Christmas presents from Amazon?

III. First plant the Sapling

There's a saying in the Talmud,
"If you have a sapling in your hand and they tell you 'The Messiah is coming' first plant the sapling, then go to see him."

"From this moment despair ends and tactics begin"

Above: Banksy mural at the Marble Arch, London, April 2019, in support of Extinction Rebellion actions

I was thinking about that--how we choose our old beliefs & habits over new realities-- as I hear people complain about actions by the climate crisis group Just Stop Oil (an outgrowth of Extinction Rebellion).

I haven't seen such actions here in MN (yet?), but they involve people blocking gas stations, throwing paint on famous works of art, etc.
Their idea is to draw attention through nonviolent protest to the need to take drastic & immediate action to stop environmental destruction and social breakdown.

I see and support their point; I admire their guts;
but I'm not sure the tactics of these eco-activists will be very effective, given how we practice dissonance reduction.

Still, what the hell? What have you got to lose by doing something?
At least you can say you tried.

Here in the future, Let’s build a yurt!

I have to go to work soon, but I want to blog briefly first. I'm aiming to blog every day for the rest of December for the silly? reason that I want my year-end count to be a bit higher than last year's--and it almost is. I feel sad when I see declining numbers of yearly posts on blog sidebars.

For my last three years, my number of posts goes:

379 [Covid/George Floyd year, 2020]

277
267

This year (2023) I've published 262 posts, so I can certainly bump it past 267!

"And, Fresca, tell us, will it be all heavy stuff you blog about?"

Maybe, kinda, sorta? But I always want to focus on What Helps, though. That's kinda cheering, isn't it?

And really--I am not resigned to an apocalypse or anything like that!
Star Trek always held (holds) that some smart science is going to rescue us from ourselves, and that is certainly not inconceivable.
As a good Trekkie, I am going to choose to hope for that!

I was just emailing a friend about how I feel like I live in different worlds in my one life.

I was comforted to read the quote,
"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed"
––from William Gibson, whom the New Yorker called "the great prophet of the digital age."
(Author of Neuromancer, Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981.)

From where I stand, I could even say,
"The end [of empire] is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

And that's why I feel like I straddle different worlds, only a few miles apart---
from where people are living in tents to where people are living in luxury--because I literally am.
And it can make me feel a little crazy.

But really, I'm not crazy at all:
There ARE NO MAPS for this.
Of course there never are maps for the future, but in certain times you feel like you can see clearly ahead, even if that's an illusion, and other times, you're aware that every step is a step into the unknown.

Ya just gotta light out for the territory.

Mostly it helps if I focus on WHAT HELPS? here, wherever I am.

And, WHO HELPS?

Like Mr Rogers's mother said, "Look for the helpers".
Or rather, as grown ups, we should look to BE the helpers.
It helps to see others being that.

I was cheered to run into Abe at the store the other day--a young man who used to work at the store, he now works with a local Harm Reduction (HR) group.

Harm Reduction folks  are among my heroes---along with sanitation workers! Shit is happening, they acknowledge. Drugs, homelessness, mental illness, mass incarceration, climate crisis--the whole rodeo!
Let's keep it from killing us too much.
Like, Abe's group is our source for the store's free Narcan (for opioid overdoses).

[Harm Reduction Principles] "Your Life Matters"

Logo ^ from Texas HR Alliance.

I asked Abe what he's up to, and he showed me a photo of HR's project BUILDING YURTS on empty land, to shelter people who are forced to live outside this winter.

Yes, we here in the future are back to nomadic practices. They worked  for thousands of years, of course.
These yurts are heated with a barrel stove in the center.
"One of my Lefty kombucha-drinking coworkers got the barrels donated," Abe told me.

"You could make a lotta kombucha in one of those barrels," I said.
A throwaway comment, but he laughed, and that made me happy because this guy is always so sad.

He went on to say, "People are mammals--we should know how to handle ourselves out of doors." And he added, rather sweetly, to be inclusive of me I guess, "Even white people."

It was my turn to laugh.
Abe is mixed, and I think the default image of "people" in his work/world is not-white people--like on a film negative, the reverse image from the world I've always lived in, until this job.

People should know how to handle themselves out of doors. Yes.
I'd said to Em that the people on the street are getting a head jump on surviving without fossil fuels, should it come to that (say, that we run out or lose access, and can't produce the massive amounts of electricity we're used to--which is not inconceivable).

"They will all die," she said, "because they're addicts."

"Well, yeah, they're dying now," I said. "True. But people like Abe who are building yurts are getting a head start on the apocalypse."

She agreed.

But really, the cool thing about Harm Reduction practices is, if you don't need them--great! They won't hurt you.

Yurts, Not Hurt.

Meanwhile, here's a PDF: Build Your Own Yurt. Print it out, in case the power goes out.