• Diaries

    another walk in darkness

    2023-10-25 /

    had a really nice walk this morning before sunrise. it was warmish despite being late-October and very dark, pitch black but maybe 45f with barely a breeze. i could actually feel the knots inside my skull coming undone bit by bit. walking through utter darkness in autumn is a purgative act.

    my head’s been messy lately. nothing is meaningfully wrong. i am struggling with isolation. i’m homeschooling, parenting, crocheting, writing, drawing, programming, gardening, and therefore always busy, but almost never leave the house. it is painful somehow.

    i’m far from idle in this idyll, no wordplay intended, but even when i’m doing a lot of really happy fulfilling stuff, it is psychologically difficult to be confined. i am immune compromised. i’ve been socially distanced a long time. haven’t really traveled. just at home, being domestic/artistic.

    it feels like there should be absolutely nothing to complain about, and yet my head gets twisted up in all the ugliest knots anyway unless i actually physically move my body around, go outside, walk, exchange casual greetings with neighbors. I don’t even need that much! but I get so agoraphobic.

    i like walking in the dark. it eases my agoraphobia. i didn’t even wear my glasses. there wasn’t anything to see except some distant street lights. just kept to the sidewalks/paved trails and moved through space, unseen and unseeing, under blurry starlight

    a couple livestock guardian dogs heard me and came to bark at the fence along one part of the trail. they were VERY BIGUNDO SCARY BARKS. but i used my soothing baby voice to say good morning and praise them for being such good guards and then they got quiet and followed me to the end of the farm lol

    i love dogs!!!! they are so good to their goat friends. those goats have nothing to worry about with such great big scary shaggy protectors.

    it is those small moments that break up my day that my soul absolutely *needs* and yet i often find so hard to get ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  • Diaries,  facebook

    small sources of wisdom

    2023-10-20 /

    Ahhhh I miss having little kids. Tonight I sat outside while kids were playing with my youngest, and a couple of the wee ones came over to check me out. One was so tiny I could cry, with his tiny bicycle. Smaller than our pumpkin.

    Apparently the kids think our house is scary. I think we have a bit of a mystique for a couple reasons… My eldest used to play with kids on the street but no longer does (just not interested anymore, kinda grew out of it) so they’ve ascended to myth. youngest seldom goes outside to play. i keep some halloween stuff up year round. big barky dog. black cats in every window. etcetera.

    the kids don’t even know about most of the creepy shit in my house, but they definitely caught our vibe. i love it. i can’t help being sweet with kids tho, i probs ruined my dreams of being the scary neighborhood witch.

    they were sooooo cute, on their bicycles, just climbing over my porch like it belongs to them. no boundaries!!! boogery and wearing very small shoes. then they ran home and weren’t my problem anymore, which is kind of even better than having little kids of my own honestly

    i also always think it’s so funny how neighborhood kids swarm me every time i go outside. i am not sure if it’s Just a Me Thing or if they do this to all grownups but it’s like, they want to hold entire conversations with me, directly. about random kid things like roblox.

    i’m like, this is adorable, but also you’re all frolicking out here to play with each other. go forth. frolic with humans similar in mass and cognitive development to you. (but of course i cannot stop them when they are giving me all their best prison escape tycoon tips)

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  • Diaries,  facebook

    tabula rasa

    2023-10-18 /

    I think if I ever interviewed for a job again, and they asked me, “What’s your greatest weakness?” It would be, “I get so excited about a particular project that it fills me up and pushes everything out, until suddenly I get excited about another project, and in order to finish the first project I will someday have to collapse sobbing over my work to figure out wtf I was doing, relearn everything, and wrap it up.”

    Just saying, I left the worldbuilding guide to my epic fantasy book unfinished – and I haven’t finished editing the second half of the book, either. I decided to set them aside because I wanted to grow a little before revisiting. But also I got *really* excited about crochet. And then interactive novels.

    I have to fully reread the worldbuilding guide (and realistically the book itself) to finish it off at some point, so I’m going to have to study myself to figure it out, lol. I was just poking around in there again going, “Wow, this is incredible, and incredibly esoteric, I sure Made Some Decisions that I no longer recall.”

    Also I spent a couple days away from my interactive novel because I’ve been going hog over crochet again, PLUS I had to repot/replant a bunch of plants for the shift from summer to winter conditions. Now I’ve come back to code chapter 7, and I’m like, holy crap, what was I doing? Where do I put the autosaves? How do I determine the location of journal entries? Whaaaat monstrous abomination of a logic chain have I crammed into the end of every chapter in order to track character development for a dynamic narrative?

    I spent my twenties furiously writing fiction, and it got hard in the end because it felt too repetitive – like I wasn’t learning anything anymore – like there were no more surprises. Trying to Just Write a Book got to be excruciating because it was understimulating and too easy, as weird as that sounds. I made Mood Management my problem in that case (working even though routine murders me). Now I’ve thrown routine out the window so I can focus on having fun, but oh boy if it doesn’t spawn about a thousand different problems.

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  • poetry

    feminine beauty rituals

    2023-10-10 /

    I made myself pretty today,
    as nice as I can be,
    in your favorite mask, my dear,
    so that you’ll let me leave.
    The skin I stretched is dewy fresh
    The clips all match my dress
    I know you want my back exposed
    and that you’ll be impressed
    I’ve woven this with warp of flesh
    And wefts just like your brother.
    His tendons feel like luxury
    You’ll never want another. 🙂

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  • facebook

    4am walks in the rain

    2023-08-24 /

    I haven’t been sleeping real good. Nerves, I guess. We kept my eldest home for much of last school year to attempt home school, but we’re off to 7th grade today and *so anxious*. We’re dealing with anxiety in our house the way that Los Angeles is dealing with a light drizzle, in terms of scale.

    It doesn’t rain much in Northern Nevada, although you may be surprised to hear that I am near enough SoCal in this spot that our rain is from the tropical storm too.

    On the bright side, not sleeping well during such a rainy time period means that I can take walks in the rain, at night. I took a 4am rainy walk just now. The coyotes were out again. They sound like babies the first time they cry, every time.

    Streetlights are on, but they aren’t real bright, and they don’t go down the trails between houses. It’s pretty black down there. You only get the shape of things from ambient light reflected off the clouds. The geometry of tree copses, overgrown ditches, and split rail fence, but not the colors or textures.

    What I enjoyed most about the rain in the dark was the way it paints an audible landscape. It’s sprinkling just a bit, but it’s been going a while, so the gutters are full and everything is dripping. You can tell from the echoes down a drain how wide and deep it is. The patter against roofs can tell you what your neighbor’s corrugated awning is made out of, exactly. The mix of quiet-hiss to drumming-tap communicates how much sand vs concrete you’re walking around. The bushes don’t rustle with lizards when I pass; they’re already hunkered down. There is no movement but mine and the rain.

    Do you ever think about how your tongue knows how everything will taste when you look at it? Look at the wall, look at the carpet, look at the bush outside. Your tongue can imagine the flavor. Can you imagine the flavor and texture if you don’t see it, but you hear the rain bouncing off of it? How many senses do you need? How different is the world when you perceive it in different ways? Can you taste the corrugated plastic composite on that gazebo? Can you taste the plum tree leaves?

    Almost everyone is asleep at 4am, but it’s quiet enough that you can hear everyone who isn’t. A mile away, I could hear the whisper of a car going to the gym. But otherwise it’s empty. Bustling suburbs turned liminal. Nothing but patter-patter and coyote baby cries.

    Except I’m back home now with all the anxiety, the closed air, the litter boxes that need scooping. My hips hurt from the walk. I’m going back to bed.

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  • facebook,  social media crossposts

    The next few years, the last few years

    2023-08-24 /

    I’ve been talking for years about quitting my job as a writer (as in, no longer making career advancement a primary goal) but it’s a hard weird thing to do when you’re self-published and there’s no real line between “I am doing this” and “I am not doing this.”

    I am still doing all the exact same things, after all. I’m just doing them slowly. And that is how you kill your career as an indie author. Get around to organizing one promo a year? Publish one book a year? You are dead in the water after a few years, even when you have a lot of wonderful readers at your back. Just because the bookstores forget about you, and they stop selling your books at all. And readers can only buy all your books once 😉

    The fact I got away with working soooo slowly for so many years before the faucet reached near the end of its financial drip is a blessing, because I’ve had a lot of time to think about this off-ramp and what it means.

    Financially the off-ramp hasn’t been great. I do have a spouse that pays our bills, but we must run a lean ship without additional income from me, and y’all know how precarious reliance on one income is. So we aren’t in a scary place or anything. I have time to reconsider myself, and my life, which y’all have already seen me doing. (remember how i did college last year? lol)

    What “quitting” *actually* means is putting my body’s needs and my family before my job. That is what I wasn’t doing when I was making it a career. Production went first. Everything else went after that. And I think this is the right choice – I haven’t been hospitalized since 2020, and I was running so hard, I kept landing myself in a hospital bed every few months (no exaggeration, long story). I have also gotten addictions under control. So I think this is right.

    But I ask myself, does it make any sense to regard myself as a working writer now? When “work” becomes something I do if it fits conveniently around my meltdowns, my children’s meltdowns, taking care of a chaotic household, recovering my broken body…? Where if all of that happens, I can still just say, “I’m going to think zero thoughts about publishing this week because I feel poopy.” Can I REALLY call that a job?

    I think I kinda can, kinda can’t, but I also think I’ve reached a place where I’m comfortable with it if I’m just like…a stay at home mom. I took a lotta pride in being a Working Writer Supporting My Family and deciding i’m actually a sahm mom (for another decade) with strong art hobbies is weird.

    I actually really like how loose the boundaries are around this. I like how undefinable it is, in a way, because I feel like so much sickness in the world comes from this expectation that humans must be able to fit into various systemic structures, and punishment if you don’t do it. Somehow I am currently in a place where I can evade categorization even by myself and don’t need to be participating in most systems. How did I do that? I barely have to account for myself if I just putter around drawing all the time. lol. God, I judge myself so hard for wanting that as a life. I want to be a cat. I want to just exist and have no idea that schools or jobs are a thing.

    My point wandered a bit. Did I have a point?

    I guess I wanna tell you guys that, all of this aside, I am actually writing a lot right now, and I’m even publishing a story on Kindle Vella under a pseudonym. The only reason I’m not sharing the name yet is because then it might feel like work. If it’s anonymous, and if nobody reads it (nobody is reading it), it’s not work? But I’m not withholding stories, lol, just kind of being all up in my head and weird about it.

    And of course Lincoln 5 is coming (even if it’s getting written in sparse moments of sanity) and I have “Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains” coming as this sort of last grand hurrah of a gigundo project that will stand as a monument to the crater of my early 30s.

    But OTHER THAN THAT, I have so totally quit.

    um

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  • movie reviews

    “Oppenheimer” shouldn’t exist.

    2023-08-24 /

    So here is the reason that I am an incredible killjoy about Oppenheimer and think it should never have been made, no matter how good the movie is, and that everyone involved is kinda total bullshit.

    My stance is that there is zero reason to humanize the few people behind producing and benefiting from the bomb. In fact, it perpetuates white American attitudes about noble sacrifice, makes one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed sexy with sexy actors and sexy cinematography, and generally gives ample room for reinforcing the lies of imperialism among a populace with low literacy for even identifying that kind of propaganda.

    I believe there is no artistry good enough to make up for centering people like Oppenheimer instead of the communities actually impacted.

    Congolese miners were exploited to get the uranium to build the atom bomb.

    New Mexico Hispanics were bodily removed from their lands to make a testing site for the atom bomb.

    More than 200,000 innocent Japanese were killed when the atom bombs were dropped. Cancers and related illnesses have continued en masse in the decades since.

    Cutesy bomb advertising became common, particularly in conjunction with Barbie. You cannot have a movie of this scale and budget without marketing that is wholly inappropriate for the crimes committed.

    The movie and its creators had zero interest in engaging with the above, or seeking ways to remedy the crimes committed against those communities. They considered themselves to have no real responsibility to make real gestures of healing toward the communities, but without that responsibility, I argue they then have no right to any story surrounding it.

    I am aware the story “grapples with the ethics” in its centralized white imperialist characters, but they frankly just aren’t members of the impacted community. Whatever they felt about the crimes they committed doesn’t deserve to be aired (to the profit of few) when moviemakers were so disinterested in all of the above.

    Oppenheimer was made because a white guy who thinks he’s a genius wanted to dwell on a white guy tortured genius who he related to. That’s the only reason. We don’t need more such vanity projects. And I don’t think it’s historically significant to keep telling stories about war crimes from the perspective of the criminal.

    “Oppenheimer” shouldn’t exist.

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