This post is also available in a paid version, which has pictures that are not included in this free version. If you are interested in supporting my work or if you want to see the pretty pictures, please feel free to gimme your money here: (Look at me! Doing a capitalism!)
How’s everyone doing? Would it help y’all if I talked about the projects I’m working on, and the creative process I’m using on the comic book? Maybe put some soothing music on? Sit back…relax…and read on? It’s only good news here right now for the next however long it takes for you to read whatever the hell I’m about to write and by maude it better be good now that I’ve placed the entire fucking weight of the world on my damn shoulders for no good reason. bahahaha.
Anyway…it’s been a beautiful and difficult couple of months for me, and the difficult things are tangentially caused by the beautiful things, because the beautiful things make the difficult things stand out in stark detail. And that contrast is also somehow beautiful. So I guess that means beauty wins? Or something. Yes. I’ll just say that beauty wins, because for however long I’m writing this, I own reality, and that’s what I’m deciding is true.
With that decided, I want to share some details about the beautiful thing I am working on that just fills me with so much glee. It is a collaboration, of sorts, because the sweet dear friend who inspired it also fills me with glee, and that glee has been just churning out a ton of positive, creative energy which also fills me with glee. It’s like a fucking perpetual glee machine over here as long as I have my face stuck in the flow, but sometimes you have to pull away from glee and get back to reality, but no. Not right now. In this post. For these however many minutes I am writing this, perpetual glee prevails, damnit! I decree! I decree perpetual glee!
(the following is where the paid version has a bunch of really great pictures that you totally want to pay to see! hahaha.)
Crow & Oyster is a about an unlikely friendship built on mutual aid, community care, and creative collaboration.
Crow is a traveler, a protector of children, and a bringer of light who suddenly finds himself in the dark.
Oyster is, quite literally, bogged down in the toxic swamp, where she spends her days converting poisonous silt into shiny pearls that serve no real pupose.
Tragic circumstances bring them together, but they form a unique bond that spans time, distance, and differences in lived experience.
This first issue is their “origin story,” and I really hope I can continue to write about these two silly characters. I don’t often write fiction, but I’m getting the picture! I love these two characters so damn much. When I think about all of the shenanigans and hijinx they can get up to, I just get a big old goofy grin on my face.
However, given that I’m not a practiced or disciplined artist, my challenge is time. I think what I’m going to do for this first issue is use images that I draw, and juxtapose them over collaged backgrounds that I scan. The scenes are basically the jungle, the toxic swamp, and the ocean (maybe) and the sky above each. So I can make those backgrounds, and I might experiment with different media along with the images I have drawn.
Y’all, I really love this story so much. It is such a fun puzzle to solve. Our collective ability to invent new worlds is so important. We all really need to flex that muscle and create as much as we can as often as possible.
I also have another collaborative project in the works that I’m crossing crossing crossing my fingers comes to fruition. I don’t want to say anything out loud, because I don’t want to jinx it. A different dear old friend I have been trying to collaborate on a project with for-fucking-ever, but when we were close before, our relationship was filled with a turbulence that, thankfully, neither of us seems interested in generating anymore. Which is nice, you know? It’s good to go to hell and back with someone. Clears the sinuses and whatnot. So, cross your fingers on that one for me.
There are no words for how thankful I am for the creative energy in my life right now. It’s shiny shiny shiny, and I want to turn that shine outward if I can. So if anyone needs a pick-me-up pep talk or anything…please feel free to reach out. I have capacity. I am holding all of the sad things in my heart, and the beauty is still winning out! Yay beauty and glee! But also, I am not averse to collapsing into wracking sobs and yay for that, too. For the contrast, if nothing else. And because it reminds me I am a human being living in this contrived. reality that is designed to make us feel helpless and defeated and alone. Try not to forget that part.
I’ve been thinking a lot about safety, as I watch people get murdered in the street by government agents for the crime of existing, and people thrown in jail for decades for the terrorist act of Trying To Help People. Also, the illusion of safety that comes from ignoring those things, or refusing to stand up and point them out; or the illusion of safety that comes from compliance with a system that harms and murders others.
I have had the privilege of knowing (directly and indirectly) a lot of people I consider to be superheroes. Just average, everyday people who end up doing wonderful things to protect their family, their community, or the world. Some of these people do things like create art that makes the world a better place, grow food to feed their neighbors, or share knowledge and expertise where it is needed. I also know people who have put their entire bodies on the line, or sacrificed their entire life as they knew it for a specific or even general cause.
As for myself, my mind is adventurous and willing to entertain an entire universe of thoughts. I am a thinker, a connector, an observer, an occasional peacemaker, a poet, and an artist. My body, on the other hand, prefers a certain amount of comfort that I have grown used to…and perhaps even more now that I’m growing older and my body expresses its opinions louder. To me, it feels like the “bodies on the line” folks have a kind of bravery that I lack. Or that I missed an opportunity at a critical juncture in my life and ended up in anarchist administration, instead of field work.
That may be true, but the larger reality is that all communities and movements need both kinds of people, and the entire spectrum of kinds of people between and outside of these. We need everyone, in fact, who shares the belief of collective liberation and freedom from oppression for all. And unless you are of the mind that everyone has the exact same capabilities, skills, and desires – which is pretty much antithetical to collective liberation – we need you, too. And that other person who has a skill you don’t value as much (even if that person is you?) We probably need them (you,) too.
We also need to support those who have ended up in prison for putting their bodies on the line, whether they intended to do so, or not.
I want to talk about the Prairieland Defendants right now, because they are the most recent example, but they are not by any means the only people who are in prison for supporting a cause. I feel a personal affinity for the Prairieland folks because, even at a time in my life when I was completely risk averse due to having young children to care for, I have attended noise demos. Those activities have never been considered remotely high-risk. Yes, precautions always need to be taken. Especially now. But I would have been very shocked and unprepared to be hauled off to jail for bringing noisemakers and standing outside of the city jailhouse on New Year’s Eve to celebrate with those inside, or to be charged with terrorism for watching an entire punk rock show outside of a detention center in TX – both events that have happened numerous times with zero negative consequences within the last ten years or so,
I cannot even imagine how it must feel for those folks – who did not set out to risk their lives. They were not laying their bodies down in front of bulldozers. They were not chaining themselves to trees. They were merely standing outside of a harsh and brutal building, making sure the beating hearts inside would know they weren’t forgotten by those of us outside of the walls. They were there on my behalf. I’d like to hope they were there on your behalf, as well. On behalf of everyone who has been rendered immobile by the crushing weight of everything that is happening all at the same time right now, and everything that has always been happening. They were there to represent our collective sorrow, our hopeful joy, and our loving solidarity. Because THAT is what anarchism is about. They may have discussed prison and prison solidarity in their reading groups, but they almost certainly weren’t thinking that knowledge would be required for a noise demo.
And yet, from everything I’ve read about the (non-snitch) defendants, they have handled everything with the bravery of any of the people I have ever known who CHOSE to take a stand that they knew would put them in jail. I can only imagine how very scared and lonely they must be right now, but they have been and remain so fucking strong.
I am proud of them, but we must free them. If we can’t free them, the least we can do is offer the same they were offering: reminders that they will never be forgotten. They will never be alone. They will always be loved.
I have been listening to interviews with Eric King, and drawing a great deal of inspiration from his story. He makes it clear the support he received in prison was life-changing.
I don’t know if any of you know Tom Manning, but he’s one of our elders. He’s one of my heroes. A dedicated anti-racist fighter and warrior. He did brutal time. He was also at ADX. He did five years there, and he was someone I looked up to. When he passed away, I thought, I wonder what his life was like like. I wonder not what his ethics are, but what’s your day-to-day like? Did you have friends? Did you ever cry? Did you ever miss your son? And I was desperate to know this because, between me and you, I’m very soft. I am a very emotional person, and this stuff that was happening imprisoned me at these times was crushing. It was hurting me physically. I got the scars, but it was also destroying me emotionally. And I felt really alone. Because when you read about our elders, what you hear is this bombastic, like “We’re fighters. We never back down. We do this, we do this.” But you never get to hear the vulnerability of like, “I cried because I missed my son’s birthday.” Or “My little girl turned 10, and I didn’t get to hug her.” So I wanted to know, am I alone? Am I a *** because I’m crying all the time? But that was really, really important to me to know that I wasn’t the only one feeling this.
When Josh and I formulated the question—Josh made the lot smarter than I could have—and when I read other people’s answers, I saw other people had a bad time. Other people felt things, other people were sad sometimes, and other people made friends. It’s okay to make friends and find happiness because finding happiness is resistance inside. If you can find joy inside of it, you’re beating these mothersf*ckers. When I got to read about different people’s experiences, not only like, “Yes, I’m sad all the time,” but also, “Yes, I’m happy all the time, and I do it despite these punks trying to bury us.” That made me feel… What’s the opposite of alone? It made me feel encompassed. Like what you said, we’re in this together. We’re a unified front of resistance inside of prison, it’s both our joy and our vulnerability that binds us together, and it made me feel so happy.
And this quote by Conroy:
But if I can echo what Eric said, those little bits of support that might feel like a little bit, from someone on the outside, as a huge, huge boost to people on the inside. I always call letters a jailbreak. Every letter was a jailbreak. You get that letter. And I was very lucky. I got a letter literally every single day that the prison would give me my mail, which wasn’t all the time. But on the days that I got mail, I got a letter. Sometimes I got five. Sometimes I got 20. Sometimes I was getting 50 letters a day. Which is incredible, which speaks to the level of support that we all on the outside understand those on the inside need. But every one of those letters I would take up to my cell, and I’d set them out, and I would open that one, and I’d read the front, I’d read the back, and that was a jailbreak. It was a prison escape. I looked at the picture of the cat someone sent. That’s cute. I got so many pictures of cats, which I appreciate, of course. And then I put that letter away, and open the next one. That was my next jailbreak. If I was lucky, I get five or 10 jailbreaks a day. And every letter 5-10 minutes, I get to read it. And I would read it so slow and savor them. I’d hear about your vacations, the food you’re eating, the television show you’re watching, the camping trip you went on, and stuff you might have been thinking was so boring. No one’s going to want to read this letter. That was me escaping from prison, and then I would get to as much as I could write everyone back. And that was a prison escape. And the relationships I formed with people, similar to Eric, are so special to me. I got out in 2010, and I’m still friends with people that I wrote in prison. I still have very special relationships with them, and I still go and visit, and they visit me, and those things wouldn’t have happened without prisoner support. And so I don’t say it lightly when I say that those letters and the support that I received, and I’m sure Eric received, saved my life. I don’t mean that metaphorically, or figuratively, it literally saved my life.
I am so thankful these folks made it through, and grateful they continue to share their stories and educate people. And I’m grateful for the support people, who worked tirelessly to record all of the court notes, press releases, and community organizing (THE NECESSARY AND IMPORTANT ADMIN WORK) on behalf of the Prairieland Defendants. I’m proud to be part of a larger community that prioritizes not letting people fall through the cracks. And I will say loud and proud in the middle of my room full of thousands of zines to the tiny audience of this blog – I am proud to be an anarchist.
Stay well, y’all. Be as brave as you possibly can. I love you.
Y’all…I gotta be honest. I don’t know what the fuck to even say right now. But it’s been awhile since I last posted – for mostly good, creative, productive reasons, but also…like…what can anyone even say right now? I feel like I keep repeating to myself and anyone who talks to me for longer than fifteen minutes “I’m so thankful I have people in my life who are earnestly doing good work.”
That said, I have been largely focusing on prisoner support. One of the highlights of my entire week this week was getting to talk to a long-time Earth First activist and prisoner support homesteader friend. He is truly a delightful person and though the topic is serious and the week has been heavy, there is such joy in the knowledge that people like him exist and remain. I’m hoping to get that interview published soon, and will link it up here when I do. I’m also hoping to collaborate with him on another project. I will talk about it more when it’s a little less nebulous, but it will be in support of the Prairieland Defendants.
Speaking of the Prairieland Defendants, sentencing was more egregious than anyone could have ever imagined. Between that, and the arrests and indictments in Minnesota of people who were protecting their neighbors, it is clear they are coming after the people who are offering community defense, resistance, and solace to the people they already went after. They think they can convince us that it’s unsafe or unwise to take care of each other, but they can’t. I’m a stubborn fucker, and my plan is to just love y’all even more. Like, I’m walking around falling in love with everyone all the time now just out of spite.
So, yeah…basically that’s why I’m posting here even though I really don’t feel like writing. I’m sad and restless and angry and out of sorts and inarticulate as fuck, but I just want to say that I love all y’all, and I WHOLEHEARTEDLY support the Prairieland Defendants. Those are officially my brothers and sisters now. I will do everything in my power to ensure they are not forgotten, nor the people locked inside the Prairieland concentration camp, who the Prairieland Defendants were standing in solidarity with to make sure THEY weren’t forgotten, either.
That’s about all I got right now. Take care of your neighbors. In the words of Margaret Killjoy “De-escalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.” We are all we have. Always.
(Every full moon (ish) I pull out my old journals and peek at what I was doing around this time at various points of my life. It’s fun and entertaining, and makes me glad I have kept journals and been a total fucking packrat about it my entire life. I hope you enjoy these snippets of my life. I’ve kept the dates, but excluded the years to add to the mystery! Random photos from the same time period in different years also!)
5/1 Mayday Picnic: Listening to music under the cypress trees
5/7 Saw Cibo Matto last night with Carla. It was a night of cute, although I cringe at the thought of saying that, as I imagine the diminutive faction of Cibo Matto are not fond of the term.
The first band consisted of two boys from Dallas. I do mean boys. They looked high school age. They spent thirty minutes or so frantically darting around a bunch of samplers & mixers, producing sounds that wavered from heavy groove dance beat, to scions of noise, to loops, etc. The thing wast it was so disconcerting to watch them hunch over their boards and race around disconnecting and reconnecting wires even if I was un-self-conscious enough to dance, I would have been fretfully unable to do so. I did manage to grab a free record from them after their set.
The second band, Delta ’72, reminded me a lot of a segment on MUPPET ROCK & ROLL in which the muppets do a parody of Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” (“no no no no no COOPERATION!) The lead singer of this band exhibited the same strut and preen and over-the-top but seemingly utterly sincere expressions to go along with the garage soul funk music & constantly yelling out of“DO YOU FEEL ALRIGHT!” Not to mention the endless amounts of energy as he climbed onto speakers, monitors & at one point, the organ that a fellow band member was using as a punching bag. To top it all off were the occasional rock god jumps into splits and back up without missing a beat (is the human body supposed to be capable of these types of manouvers? I don’t know, but between the bottom of the undersized bowling shirt and the edge of the thick white belt decoratively embellishing skin-tight hip-hugger jeans, I caught glimpses of what must be THE most muscular BACK in the world (and, honey, I work out at Future Firm, aka Buff-o-rama, but I couldn’t imagine any of the buff dudes being capable of the gymnastic feats this guy was pulling off without a blink.)) I gotta admit, I was laughing & I’m not sure if it was supposed to be funny. But aside from the sheer entertainment value of the stage presence, the band actually ROCKED & rocked pretty damn hard. I was impressed. Apprently, they’re from PA, or something.
Anyway, they ended their set with a soulful ministry – a series of admonishments to “FEEL ALRIGHT” and to carry that feeling home with us and, hopefully into the bedroom (accompanied by compulsory pelvic thrusts, for emphasis) etc. And the wait for Cibo began.
It occurred to me at this point that A) just about everyone in the room was considerably younger than me; B) There’s an encouraging trend among young women to NOT wear makeup; and C) after all my years going to punk rock shows that attract a primarily white, middle class boy audience, it was nice to see such a wide variety of middle class boys and girls of all races gathered in the same place.
“That’s Sean Lennon” exclaimed a guy in back of us. “Get a picture of his shoes!” Said his companion. Intrigued, I turned to look & was met with sheepish smiles. “We design shoes,” they explained. So, the band set up and strode onstage and began a set of sheerly energetic, soulful, tuneful, danceful, CUTE music.
What impresses me about Cibo is the sheer ease with which they pull it off. The keyboardist danced, the bass player strummed, and the melodies issued forth effortlessly from the throat of Yuka Honda, whose movements also seemed natural and effortless, even when she was pogoing about the stage. The only people on stage who appeared to be getting a workout were the drummer and the bongo player who were both, by the way, awesome athletes as well as musicians (the drummer of the previous band, too, struck me as praiseworthy, in spite of the fact that the only knowledge of drums I possess is the long past crush I once had on the drummer from Friends of Betty (Chicago) and my memoir of my unrequited love – two ends of a shattered drumstick. What can I say, I like my men to beat it hard…er…)
At any rate, Cibo put on a fantastic show, performing songs off of a forthcoming release, as well as many from Viva Lo Woman. They also did an incredible version of Moon River, which everyone chuckled about at first, but were quickly enraptured by the dynamic diva. A great show. A great night (even though I ended it by telling a really (intentionally) dumb joke to a stranger and getting totally dissed for it) A great band.
5/8 Glazed, Dazed…and annoyed. Sitting in the dorm room and D’s composing. I haven’t been writing lately – don’t know why. Next week, I’m supposed to go to California and I just don’t want to go for work. Whatever. Will do my job happily, but why should I do any more?
Made chili yesterday and had guests. D and I got stoned before working out, and when I came home, Harold and Angela and Mr…? (Angela’s boyfriend) were sitting in my living room with John. It was kind of weird. I didn’t think I was really stoned, but apparently I was being really loud and even singing out loud at the gym. And we stopped at Alberton’s on the way home, where D proudly announced that he’d been really horny the night before & I hadn’t done anything about it. Quite loudly. While in line to pay for our items. I didn’t really think much of it until D pointed out that he said it.
And home. I guess I was cracking really bad jokes all day while they watched Body Bag and Baywatch. And John fell asleep on the couch and exposed his belly to us all. D went home to get his allowance and his trombone. Then he came back and we smoked some more before taking John back to the dorm. I did a little too much and started freaking out a bit – saw a fire truck flashing on the way back and instantly became paranoid that I had left the stove on and D took me home after purposely losing a round of Mortal Kombat II. Sweet boy.
Then back to the dorm to watch some Talk Soup and then to Jeremy’s house for a bit of a fine movie called RHINESTONE in which Dolly Parton teaches Sylvester Stallone how to be a country and western singer. This after a nice little dinner at Magnolia.
D and I both fell asleep during RHINESTONE, but he stayed at my house. The night before, we watched BOXING HELENA at D’s dad’s house.
May 7 12:56 AM I think I have given up on getting to sleep at a decent hour & have therefore also decided to call out SICK one more day. I’m feigning a stomach bug that I sort of almost have. And plain exhaustion, honestly.
I have been able to get SO MUCH done these past few days. Today, specifically, I got all of my fitness goals met & seeded the remainder of rows 2 & 3 and ALSO the salad bar. I ordered a TON of stuff I need, more masks and a face shield.
At some point, I may do a run out to BJ’s for a cart’s worth of supplies, but I’m going to hold out until it’s evident I need to – like if we run out of something in the cart. The goal is to not shop at the grocery again this month & use other resources, but I’m still being very VERY spendy.
I’ve been thinking, too, about how the garden will evolve. I’m not sure I’m a straight row person. Once I’m done seeding this bed, I want to experiment & play with different gardens. I think the perennial asparagus bed will be next. I want to try broad forking it, but if it ends up being TOO difficult, I’ll buy a little mantis or something. I want to look up pics of asparagus patches to see how creative I can get with it. Can I plant asparagus & strawberry TOGETHER? & when do I plant elderberry? Is it too late for all of this? Perhaps I may need to prep & cover the beds & just wait. But I have no time to plan that now. I need to make time for planning.
5/7 9:30 PM It’s all about control. And just because I’m trying to not be controlling doesn’t mean that there won’t be a controlling element. And I DON’T want to control things…but that doesn’t mean I want someone else to control me. And I DON’T want to play fucking mind games, but that doesn’t stop anyone else. All I want is someone to be friends with.
He tells me he wants me to go to this Irish folk music thing, but tells me I need to ride my bicycle. But I don’t have a lock – so he tells me he will meet me outside the place and will lock me up with his bike. I tell him that I don’t trust him – that I feel like he’s telling me to go somewhere that doesn’t exist. But I go anyway. He shows up late, with the friends who drove him. He has no bicycle, and therefore no lock. He greets me with a peck on the nose & I tell him I have to go. Hop on my bike and leave feeling cut out hollow empty inside. He tells me he might try to stop by later, and I really don’t want to be here when he does, so I go to Harold’s and hang out with the boys. Whatever.
So it goes. I guess I was just wrong about his sincerity. God damn. I BELIEVE words. He’s telling me not to believe. Well, it’s a good excuse for saying what you don’t really mean, but that’s about it. It’s a fucking farce. I just wanted a friend to treat and be treated accordingly. Now (the past two times I’ve hung out with him) I just walk away feeling like shit.
In a way, I’m still excited and wondering what comes next. He tells me he doesn’t trust anyone, and I say I trust everyone and no one and he asks me what yoga book I got that out of. As if saying that you trust no one is DEEPLY original. Fuck that shit.
Anyway, that’s my angst-ridden tale for now. I am having much fun basking in Harold and Bryan’s presence. They are making life livable throughout good and bad times. Thank goodness for that shit.
5/8 2:30 AM (in big bed) PROP 1 WAS DEFEATED!! Now folks need to gear up for the state lege.
Finally settled on the “voice” of the zine In conquest of discovery. With the idea in mind that it is easier to focus on voice when a particular (known) audience is imagined. I’ve been thinking about this as regards the zine. What voice? Who am I writing for? Because writing it for myself is trite & writing to a general audience doesn’t move me. So I decided to write it for my kids. Everything I write, really. In the voice of my relationship with them. Even if they never read it. I want them to know what my life was like, without getting overly muddled in weird relationship dynamics.
For the kids, then. To my kids.
I wonder if this warrants ANOTHER Intro.
May 7 10:15 AM I’m at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center – hiking around & looking at flowers while my car is serviced. Wishing this place wasn’t crawling with Jesus school kids. I’m determined to get my steps in before I head back to the service center.
Beyond how beautiful this place is – it smells amazing. Not overly cloying, but fresh and earthy. I just wish it wasn’t so humid out. I will not miss the Austin humidity.
On my walk through the trails, I saw a little baby bunny. He seemed to feel safe with me, and followed-in-font-of-me a ways before hopping out through the grass.
Though it is humid, it’s also overcast, so there’s that. A relief from the sun that seems to make every visit I’ve ever made here miserable. Plus, it’s a perfect time of year to be here – everything is in bloom & I can witness what I will miss when I move.
5/9 11:30 PM I should be asleep b/c I start work at 7 AM tomorrow, but it’s been an exciting/fun day & I ended it by playing the Sims all night, which was difficult to drag myself away from
Got my hair done today, which felt great. Took Ride Austin there & then to 888 to meet up with Kit. And then my ride home was with an older man named Deepak & we had the best conversation about life and plans & real estate. I was, perhaps, providing him with more personal information than necessary. He did not shy away and offered advice and kinship.
My plan is starting to gel! I’m feeling more and more like Maine is where I need to be & unless I find some sort of DREAM house situation somewhere else, I’m finding myself magnetically pulled in that direction.
The Chicago zine is done!!! I am going to do one final proofread, but it’s overkill at this point and I’ve already posted it on Etsy for whatever that is worth.
I don’t mean to seem like I’m not excited about it, because I totally am, but also I am a little terrified. It’s really personal, y’all. But also I think it’s kind of good? And interesting? My friend Sam said it was “captivataing.” (!!!) What a nice compliment. I really had so much fun putting it all together in the end, in spite of multiple self-invented obstacles and chaotic shenanigans.
For example(s), for a lot of the zine, I hand-pasted collaged backgrounds, and then printed the text in various sizes, then cut and pasted it in strips, like a cut up…editing out parts I didn’t like…And then scanned them into the computer, only to find that when I printed them, the background kept bleeding through. So instead of, like, using an image editor to fix that issue, I just casually decided to digitally copy and paste those same strips of randomly-sized blocks of text that I had printed and hand-cut and pasted…being careful to digitally skew the sections of text directly over top of the scanned collaged text, and adjust the opacity to let some, but not all of the background seep through.
And then…when Acrobat (the app my workflow RELIES on for the bookletizer feature) randomly decided a single page of the pdf was invisible (even thought it was visible LITERALLY everywhere else) I doubled down in my stubborn dedication to NOT troubleshoot, and instead find the longest workaround possible. I created an entirely new document, and dragged and dropped each individual PDF page into the appropriate place in the landscaped document in booklet format.
Of course, when I discovered typos on THOSE pages, I had to then layer over MORE text blocks to cover those errors, because I can’t edit the PDF images I pasted into the document.
I’m declaring an end to the futzing as of now and offering it to the world. Take it or leave it. But if you take it, I really hope you enjoy it.
Paid Patreon subscribers will be getting a copy in the next zine grab bag. Others, if interested, can order through my etsy page or contact me directly for bulk orders, trades, or if you are broke and curious about my silly little tales.
“All Of Our Heroes Are Bastards” collage art with leftovers from the zine
Lately, I’ve been listening to music a lot more and with more intention. I have grown frustrated with the stupid algorithm and I’ve started making my own damn playlists again…sometimes on the fly, often with prompting from someone who casually mentions something I might enjoy listening to. Occasionally, I will dip my toe into music podcasts to figure out what everyone else is swimming in these days. Every once in a while, I’ll latch onto a random algorithmic miracle and go off on a tangent. But every spring, I revisit “Key Lime Pie.”
Since it’s been approximately 40 springs that this has been my ritual, certain memories and patterns emerge from this practice. I remember even the first spring. I believe I had either just turned 19 or 20, and I was experiencing the crashing and burning of what had been a (temporary) utopia. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of catastrophe, combined with needing to shake the winter blues. It was unseasonably warm in Chicago, and a sunny day walk was exactly what I needed. The things I saw on that walk are still visually implanted in my brain, as is the way the air smelled, and the particular quality of the sunlight. I can even feel the temperature of the still-cool air as I walked under the El tracks on Belmont, emerging, squinting, to be embraced by the warming sun.
I even remember the spring 10 years later, when I related this story to a depressed lover. I described the feeling of emerging into sunshine after the somber grey of winter and gasping at the stark beauty of it all. As we listened to Key Lime Pie together, he steepled my smaller fingers in his hand and told me I was his key lime pie. I loved him, but was secretly terrified of that responsibility, having lost a depressed friend to suicide 9 key lime pies ago.
Spring is that time of possibilities after the limitations and restrictions of winter have been removed. Camper Van Beethoven perfectly captures that feeling on this album. Particularly in one of my favorite stanzas of all time, from “June”:
And I wrote you this letter ’cause the clothes were hung on the line And the crows flew out of the field and up into the sky I’m lying here in the station Stretching out on the tracks Are all the possible places that I might arrive
Springtime reminds us that we can rebuild an entire world, even in the exhaustion of the aftermath of apocalypse. Even when, in the depths of the cold and the darkness, it felt like it would be forever before the sun would break through the clouds. Even if at times it felt like it never would.
I think of all of the other springtimes in my life, and all of the various (physical and metaphysical and existential and hypothetical) places I have arrived in every season of my life so far, and I can’t help but feel like a big old clumsy but faithful puppy, tongue-lollingly drunk on hope, tripping after butterflies and falling in love with tree trunks like all of the springtimes of my past in one endlessly looping filmstrip clacking through my brain like an old-timey projector.
Who needs heroes, when we have each other…and springtime.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the secret agent yet. I highly recommend. It’s a long fucking movie, but it is truly beautiful. And there’s that scene where Armando is driving with Fernando and talking about Fernando’s mother. Wagner somehow is able to convey that tightness of face, and the subtlety of false optimism and positivity that is so frequently required of parents who are experiencing adversity. You can see the almost-tears and feel the subtle catch in his voice. It’s quite lovely. It’s very artful acting.
Link
Only one link this week, as I’ve been busy herding turkeys around, listening to music, living in the past, and not reading so much news.
Oh yay. Yet another opportunity for politicians and their enablers to grift!
“The money flows well beyond large state agencies, to small and obscure agencies most people (including myself) have never heard of. The Point Comfort Police Department in Texas — a town of fewer than 700 people — has a base agreement of $167,525 to supply nine task force officers, plus an additional $5,000 salary modification. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida is getting $119,000 for a single officer once you add its $107,500 base award to an $11,500 salary supplement. The Coward Police Department in South Carolina, also serving a town of roughly 700, has a base award of $107,520 for one officer, with another $15,000 modification layered on top.” – https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-ices-bounty-hunters?publication_id=7677&post_id=192048723
Three Spanish black turkeys: Ursula (hen), Octavia (hen), and Gerald (tom)
It’s the equinox-ish. And what better way to celebrate balance than by throwing my entire life completely off balance?
My mother had a saying: no more pets or kids. In my adult life, post children, fully in charge of the number of pets and/or children I am allowed to acquire, I am refusing to learn this lesson. Instead, in the midst of a potential world war, on top of the teetering tower of the rest of the current spate of atrocities, I choose chaos. In the form of turkeys.
It started with the roosters. Oh sure! I told my housemate, when she inquired about helping my broody hen hatch out some chicks. Who am I to deprive a caring human the experience of midwifing a clutch? Of course, it’s all fun and games until 3/4 of the baby chicks end up being roosters. As a result, after three years of maintaining and/or slowly decreasing the size of the flock by attrition, I have been thrown fully back into chicken math over here, folks. Plotting to hatch more (hopeful) hens to balance the rooster ratio, my housemate has loaded up the incubator with a variety of DEFINITELY fully fertilized eggs. We all know how this story ends, but, again, what kind of ghoul would I be to deprive a human of this particular kind of joy?
Her enthusiasm gave me a mild fever that spiked when she mentioned a friend had a trio of Black Spanish turkeys she was looking to sell. Two hens, and a tom, about seven months old. Y’all? Y’ALL?!?! I have been looking for a lady friend for Tom, unsuccessfully, for YEARS. I figured maybe I could take all three in and rehome the tom, or maybe the tom and one of the hens, if they didn’t mesh with the flock, or with Tom.
Well, they seem to be meshing pretty well with the flock of chickens, but Tom and the new tom (who is called Gerald. AKA Jerry the tom, just to make it even more confusing) are only interested in fisticuffs.
So, I have basically been coming up with different solutions every day to keep the toms apart. At first, we had a dog crate in the middle of the yard that we covered with a blanket. Gerald the Tom lived there at night and for part of the day, while Tommy strutted around and around, taunting him. Completely ignoring the hens, but strutting and preening and taunting the tom. Sigh.
It didn’t take long for the toms to start tangling with each other through the bars of the crate, so I let Tom out of the yard to strut around the driveway. However, the minute he wasn’t being supervised, he strutted back over near the yard and got tangled up in the fence. I found him wrapped in poultry netting, taking a pummeling from Jerry. Poor Tommy. This, of course, would not do.
To tell you the truth, Tom doesn’t even seem the slightest bit interested in any of those turkeys. However, by this time, Ursula has already endeared herself to us by quickly figuring out how to escape the pen through a hole in the fence, following us up on the porch and sitting next to us, chirping happily, waiting to be petted like a dog. And, though not quite as sociable, Octavia is inquisitive, intelligent, and sweet; and Gerald is completely non-aggressive – even in the midst of his Tom-pummeling, he relented to being picked up and carried away with no argument. All three of them figured out how to put themselves up in the coop with the chickens within three days of living here. In other words, I am smitten with the lot of them, and will simply have to find a solution.
Before the snow returned, I was herding Tommy into the back yard with Ursula (who followed like a dog, singing me her happy little chirpy song the whole way) for the day, then herding them back to the coop at night, after putting Gerald back into his crate. Which is a lot, and not sustainable when I’m working until 9 PM.
I could try to leave the turkeys in the back yard, but the problem with this plan, long-term, is Wilbur. While Wilbur is not aggressive, he has chased and pounced on chickens who have flown back into the yard before. I’m not sure how much of that was caused by Lulu’s insane prey drive, or his own. When I have Wilbur out on a leash in the yard, he pays no attention to the birds, but I fear if they startle him, it may trigger something. If he were to chase down Tommy, I can’t be certain who would win that fight. Have you ever seen a turkey talon? And did you know they also fight with their wings? Those wing feathers are like daggers!
When the storm hit, I just set up a crate on the porch for Tommy and he’s our temporary porch turkey now. My brain is still churning a myriad of other solutions, but it’s back to work for me tomorrow, so Tommy might remain a porch turkey for the forseeable future. It’s a pretty big porch, and he’s a fairly sedentary bird, so he should be ok. In the meantime, I’m bringing Wilbur out on the porch, leashed, to get everyone acquainted and used to each other while I scheme various living arrangements.
As of now, my plan is to build some sort of aviary back there for Tom and maybe Ursula, as well as a few of my older hens who really don’t deserve to have to live with a bunch of roosters. For crying out loud, I was out in the yard the other day, and a harried Little Nellie literally flew a hundred yards and landed on my forearm like a falcon just to get away from one of the horny offspring THAT SHE RAISED!
It will be really nice if I can train the chase/pounce tendencies out of Wilbur so I can give him a job as poultry protector instead of my 24/7 shadow. So, that’s what I’ll probably be doing all spring/summer when I should be gardening.
Anyway, maybe my mom wasn’t right about EVERYTHING, and what good is balance in a perpetually imbalanced world. I choose tur-chaos!
A tom Royal Palm turkey named Tom
Links:
(minimal links because I’ve been herding turkeys all week)
For the past few months…but the past week more intensely, I have been immersed in my own personal history. I have been working on a zine that has been in progress for TWELVE YEARS. A love story to my favorite city, Chicago. The place where I grew up, and where a lot of fond memories reside. Some not-so-fond, as well, but I have been thankful to discover that none of the pain that resides there is sharp. I fear it may make a dull narrative, but the process is delightful for me. It’s like visiting with old friends; some of whom still exist in my present life, but many I have lost along the way.
The zine in its current state is about 72 pages digest-sized, and divided into four distinct sections, representing eras of my life when I have moved/returned to Chicago. There were many more returns in between those recorded here, and the eras chosen for the zine were largely random. They represent a pretty good sample of my life. First – my move into my first apartment with a gaggle of punks; Second – my return to Chicago after fleeing to Lubbock to escape the misery of the city; Third – I return to Chicago a parent of two young children after my mom is diagnosed with breast cancer, and we visit all of the museums and eat a lot of pizza; Fourth – I return alone for my mother’s memorial, and lessons learned bringing me up to the present time.
I have given the draft to some trusted friends to review and make sure I don’t say anything that would embarrass me or any of the (totally fictional) people (fictionally) represented in the pages. I’m nervous, because I talk about my sexuality in a way I’ve never publicly discussed. I also just really love that city and all of the folks I knew & still know, and I don’t ever want to say anything that would make them feel like they were anything other than deeply cherished in my memory. I will probably be writing stories about it and them for the rest of my life. I am kind of excited to share them with you when it’s all ready to go.
But now it is time to be in the present, such as it is, and make plans to keep our neighbors and loved ones safe. I can’t talk about making a zine without mentioning the Prairieland Defendants, so I guess we’ll move on to…
Links:
The creative and highly theoretical claims by the state around Prairieland risk producing precedents. The theory that the whole demo was bait — for which the indictments themselves give no supporting evidence — is but one. The mere use of Signal is recast as evidence of criminal enterprise, while deleting someone from a group chat has become “material support for terrorism.” Fireworks are “explosives.” A home where friends congregate is a “staging area.” Dressing in black with a face covering is “designed . . . to aid and abet those members engaged in illegal acts.” The defendants are accused of possessing “insurrectionary materials called ‘zines,’” and defendant Daniel “Des” Rolando is charged with “corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents” for transporting a box of them. –https://jacobin.com/2026/02/prairieland-trump-domestic-terrorism-ice
“Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot,” -Jack Kerouac
The waning light and spent goldenrod
I waited until too late in the day to have my first porch-sit of the year, but I didn’t let that stop me. Jones was like “Where you been? I’ve been out here all winter holding this whole shitshow down!”
Critical porch-sitting supplies
And he really has. If there is one thing I have learned since moving here, it’s the importance of a good barn cat.
My demanding companion
In answer to his question, I’m having Tune Church all day with this Flux album. While I liked the other Flux of Pink Indians records in theory. In practice, there are only so many times one can endure the heavy feedback and painful moaning in The Fucking Pricks Treat us Like Cunts, or the straight-ahead britanarchopunk aesthetic of Neu Smell or Strive To Survive, Causing The Least Suffering Possible. While they all have their merits, they just aren’t heavy rotation material to me. On the other hand, I have literally been listening to Uncarved Block all damn day today.
Lyrically, the album wavers between cynicism and resolve. The songs wrestle with the concepts of facing and overcoming our individual insignificance in the struggle, and are often (intentionally?) disjointed and contradictory. Like free verse. Heavily influenced by Taoism, no concrete answers are provided.
And like free verse AND Taoism, meanings proliferate and dynamically rearrange themselves depending on your mood on any given listen. Even the song order is unclear, as the album version does not have a clear “Side 1” and “Side 2” label. The lyrics on the back of the LP appear in random order.
Song list and lyrics on the back of the LP
The opening, “The Value of Nothing,” is a percussive instrumental with some soundscaping that fades into a saxophone sample and slightly less percussive beats. It’s all basically foreplay before “Youthful Immortal” bursts onto the scene like spring after a long Maine winter. “Emerging from a long dark tunnel / to be blinded by the bright light / love can be so easily distorted / when for survival forced to fight.“
“Just Us” creates another percussive bridge with dubs and effects and echoes…
“Children Who Know,” juxtaposes the “same bigotry breaking into war” with the “same people nurtur[ing] bud into bloom.” and the “Same Children playing revolution in the park” while “artistry just collects the fragments into manageable chaos.” and culmiinates in the anthemic “I cling desperately to my last two beliefs: Firstly – I believe nothing and in nothing. Secondly – I believe everything and in everything.” And “Martyrdom offers nothing. I love this world and my life upon it. I grasp the hand of happiness whenever it is offered.”
I can’t express enough how much it has meant to me throughout my life to be exposed to artists and people who fully understand the joy of the world AND the pain of the world. It brings to mind this poster from the band’s previous labelmate (and 15-year old Bjork’s first band) KUKL
“Footprints in the Snow” refers to transience of life, as well as of the way we show up while we are alive. Like the rest of the album, the song presents contradictory thoughts and weaves them together in a collage of repeating words and rhythms. It is a song that is sadly appropriate for our time, as spring approaches and we are still sending soldiers off to war.
The entire album is sonically recapped in “Nothing is not done,” which then leads into the monotone chant of “The Stonecutter,” which acts as an footnote to the entire album. Warning “I slept with God but discovered, you cannot rescue whom you follow.” And closing with “Looking into mirrors, denying my reflection / while the ripples in the pond radiate further // Refusals or demands, there is a difference. So many words we did not say.”
Ain’t that the truth.
The inner album sleeve.
Anyway. That album felt important to listen to today. So I pretty much didn’t do anything other than that.
And then the sun came out and melted most of the snow and I sat out on my porch and watched the chickens put themselves to bed, and then I went out there in the gross muck and shut them all up.
As part of my normal seasonal solipsism, I am thinking about how I want to spend my time as the days lengthen and the weather begins to warm. I read back over this blog, trying to sort out what the heck I’m even doing here and whether it’s worthwhile to me to keep doing it. I enjoyed going back in time and spelunking through old blog posts. Criminy, I’m old. And also, I have done some cool stuff that I’m pretty proud of.
In general lately, I find myself sifting through personal data to figure out what to get rid of and what to keep. Recordings, photos, writing, art…Not that I’m planning on going anywhere anytime soon, but when I do go, I don’t want anyone to have to deal with like a jump scare of a random erotic journal entry or me saying something regrettable about someone in a moment of venting frustration. In an attempt to prevent this from happening, I have a project I am slowly working on for the rest of my life of transcribing what I think may be of interest to the kids or whoever, and then tearing up that journal and making it into a collage.
So far, I have completed one journal. I have like 89 thousand journals, so I better start getting on that immortal life thingy.
A journey (journal?) of 1000 miles begins with one step?
And while we’re talking in aphorisms, isn’t it all just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, anyway?
Wilbur can hear me…he’s just not listening.
I guess when it comes down to it, I just want the historical record to be clear that I was a human being who was on the right motherfucking side of history. And also, I had pretty good taste in music, and some really nice friends. Oh, and my kiddos are pretty neato, too. And I raised up a very good dog.
What am I even going on about anymore? I think I’ve been Daylight Savingsed. Yeah. That’s what I’ll blame it on.
February in summary
Oh, so also I’ve decided since we’re all going to be forced to live through historical fucking times forever, I might as well make record of notable events here in the blog again. You’ll have to give me a moment to re-develop my witty political banter and my link sources so I can actually find useful information.The good news is I’ll always put it at the end of my post so if you are all newsed out, you can just skip it.
Listening to the news
I am really really really REALLY going to try to maintain a weekly post schedule. But I don’t want to say that out loud, because saying it out loud is the kiss of death!
Linky Links
Before we get to the wretched present, please allow me to indulge in some memory lane stuff:
This interview with one of the guys from Flux of Pink Indians was nice, though this particular guy didn’t have a lot to do with the Uncarved Block LP.
I was recently reminded of this interview of Marc Ruvolo on Jughead’s basement, and enjoyed hearing them talk about the Chicago scene from the 80’s.
Last week, I watched Belfast, and will probably watch it again. The child’s POV was intriguing, and the sparse dialog. I might write more about it later. I’m trying to spend more time with the media I consume, rather than devouring one movie after another and not taking any time to think about or process what I’ve seen.
Anyway – on to the present. Such as it is…
“For all the fretting about AI, an autonomous machine is already in charge.”
“A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the FBI.”
“The other thing I’m thinking about is relational credibility. The people who’ve taken me seriously over the years when I’ve challenged them are people who know from my actions that I’m invested in their well-being and survival. Even if they think I’m completely wrong about prisons or policing or whatever else, they know I want them safe, I want them alive, I want them to be okay.
If what’s established between us is only that I’m the person telling you you’re wrong, that’s a thin foundation. But if there’s some trust there, if I’ve demonstrated care, then there’s more room for someone to sit with discomfort instead of immediately defending against it. And I’ve gotten more mindful over time about how I’m positioned in those conversations.
Have I given this person a reason to trust me? Am I actually in relationship with them in a way that allows for some vulnerability? Because not everyone is, and not every confrontation is mine to initiate or see through.”
UnrulyMom.Com 