Constellations

It's equinox today. I went to the grocery store and inside an older man was saying to one of the shelf-stockers "it's the first day of spring today" so I'm not the only one in town that tracks it. I like that.

I sent in a bunch of my disability paperwork today, the parts I needed to write. Next week I go in and the doctor and I together fill out her part, then theoretically the clinic sends that plus all my medical stuff for the last year in to the insurance folks, and also make a copy for me (which 1. lets me know what it says 2. lets me know when they have it assembled and theoretically have sent it and 3. gives me a copy in case they forget to send it and I need to send it myself). Yes of course I'm charged for all of it.

The Canadian Potters facebook group mug exchange is coming to an end for this year. They partner people up, I think kind of randomly, and then we send each other mugs. I sent two, unsurprisingly, because one was a bright fun bigger one and the other was a dark textured slinky shaped one and sending two is only barely more expensive than sending two. Sending the box cost me $50, $7 of which was a fuel surcharge. Small-business-friendly government my ass.

Anyhow, part of the exchange is that when we receive our mugs we post a picture of them on the group. So there have been a ton of really neat mugs posted to the group lately. I enjoy groupings of art on the same theme made by lots of different people more than I enjoy one person's whole art display, generally, though a chronological series of works can be fun too. I both love seeing when a posted mug is something I've done or know how to do, and when it's a choice I've deliberately not made or don't know how to do.

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I've been thinking lately about how, when the ability to clone files basically for no money showed up, such that any show or picture or music could be infinitely-ish reproduced for free-ish, we took on a huge social project to convince everyone that making copies of things was stealing. It crept into home plant propagation fairly soon thereafter. During the first part of covid everyone started doing workshops online, then paywalls went up around those too, so showing someone how to do something for free isn't as much a thing anymore.

I can't help but think we could have engaged in a social project to convince people that folks had rights to food and shelter, or to not being killed by [transmissible viruses, bombs, school shootings, school bombings, food poisoning, lead poisoning, lead poisoning in food, air pollution, mental health issues, not-so-secret police, being put in cages and not fed or whatever, floods, seiges, deliberately withheld medical care, exposure all on its own, etc etc etc take your pick] but instead we spent our social capital quite the other way.

I know food is more invisible to folks than computer files. It also has a little more of a base cost -- more now with oil prices going up and fertilizer markets being used as political leverage, and even more with both Canada and the US shuttering so many ag programs and the Ukraine being somewhat down for the count. Because of that base cost we're more able to accept that we can make a lot of it, but it's ok to not give to people. I guess it was practice for the rest of it.

And yes, I'm leaving land out of that equation for the moment.

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We had those windstorms awhile back. The power didn't go out somehow, but it still got me making candlesticks, and then with the Iran war that stepped into making olive oil lamps. They need to go through the kiln before I can test them, and of course there are no olive trees here (apparently till recently 80% of olive oil was for light and lubrication, back when these lamps were used) so that one project line is turning along slowly until the next kiln fire.

I ordered another 3 cord of wood, which I need to stack somewhere, so I'll be solidly warm next winter.

It's light a lot now. I mean, equinox, theoretically it's light half the time, but when I spend a lot of time sleeping or resting a lot of the day doesn't count. I want to be outside.

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I'm not settling into gardening like I usually do. Illness/PEM from doing too much? PDA from being forced into the disability paperwork etc for months? State of the world? My house being essentially a disgusting heap of whatever since I've been doing survival things and not cleaning it, and also the floor is falling off so it's harder to clean? Not having had a conversation with another human this year? Or meds?

Am I in a bad mood because:

1) I think I haven't had a conversation with another human just for pleasure since before christmas

2) More and more things are becoming monetized and people seem to view this as a triumph since more people can pick up more side hustles, instead of viewing it as an insidious intrusion into normal human activities

3) Ecocide

4) Bombing infrastructure necessary for life

5) I don't want to read the books by other authors about Agatha Christie's characters but they keep being recommended to me

6) I probably can't do an 8 day workshop on soda firing and may never be able to again but I want to

7) New meds are doing bad hormone things

If 7, I should do something about it. Realistically I should do something about all of them, but they all require a different kind of response than 7 and maybe 1. I don't think getting a t-shirt made that says "useless eater" is the way forward on any of them, I guess.

I really do want the luxury of being able to crash out because of doing something for pleasure, though. It's a different feeling than wanting to do something but not being able to because I can't work. I really did live a lot at the edge of my ability.

Yesterday I stacked the last of the wood that isn't embedded in the driveway ice flow, and ordered another 3 cord for later this week or next week. Maybe I should have done pottery. Maybe especially I should have called someone to talk. I'm back to being a morning person again, though, and there's no one to talk to during my little windows of energy. Or something. Maybe that's just my excuse and it's just 7) above.

I've played this "which one" game all my life and I'm tired of it.

Instead of going to the pottery workshop in Medicine Hat, I've decided to contact the soda kiln person in Prince George and instead spend the workshop money on getting my winter 27/28 firewood laid in and freighting in clay for the soda kiln (they fire to cone 10, my clay is cone 5/6, so I need different clay). Fun fact: it costs about as much to ship clay to me as it does to buy it in the first place, since it's just rocks.

I can't remember what I've written about and what I haven't, so let's just dive in.

This morning is sunny. We've been having very high winds (wind warning has said gusts of 70-90kph) fairly frequently, heralding our bouncy transitions from warm (5-10C) to cold (-10ish or something) every week or so. It's been a strong enough wind to tear the overhanging sheet metal off the roof of the pigpen, though not the part of the sheet metal that is actually on the roof. Luckily I strapped that down with wood, which impedes snow slide off but does hold it better. I need to finish snipping that metal off before it tears all the way through, it's holding by a couple shreds right now and when it flies off it will undoubtedly either hit an animal which I'll need to then do emergency euthanasia on (I have not had to do that for awhile and I would like to not do it again for awhile) or go through the greenhouse plastic and slice it open.

Even with the wind the sun is welcome. Our most recent bout was warm, so the warm wind has eroded ice sheets into ice patches. At the end of the day, with the sun hitting the ice, water would flow down and pool in the door to the carport. Every night, with no sun, it would sink into the ground before the carport could flood. Given that rain on snow events -- which we've had a couple dozen times this winter -- can be the biggest flood events possible, I'm feeling lucky. We still have not been below -30 and I've switched the heat to electric for the most recent warm patch.

The fashion for saying that talking about weather is mundane and trivial highlights just how divorced folks are from their environment and life support structures. I think that idea is fading with global warming and energy being injected into these systems so we get more weird and more catastrophe.

This is going to get a bit dark, if you're not in the mood maybe skip it.

While we're on "people" I guess the innoculations of school shootings and gaza etc -- even with images, or maybe especially because of them -- and the relegitimizing of racism, along with the full collapse of due process and presumption of innocence have all worked together to remove the idea of certain things being verboten, like war crimes, from both US and Canadian society. People might feel bad about it but we go as far as "strongly worded letters", and our theoretically Liberal PM has already committed to smiling up and kicking down with his "middle powers" stuff-- bottom powers don't count anymore. Or rather, power is what counts.

For my own soul I need to recover enough energy to work through this, but the disability paperwork business has dropped my baseline because of the constant grinding. On the other hand my art has got better, when I go it? But I can do it less because my body has been playing with pain lately to see if that can slow me down, where just exhaustion and fuzzy-headedness maybe didn't.

I'm giving serious thought to signing up for an 8-day ceramics thing in medicine hat, that's a 13 hour drive, then the thing, then the drive back, just because if I'm going to do something ill-advised I'd rather do it in service of hope rather than nihilism. Ont he other hand, gas has gone up 30 cents a liter in the last 3 days and everything else is sure to follow, but I guess that's part of "ill advised". It'll be eating out of the garden season anyhow, in July.

The ceramics thing is a cone 1 soda fire, which I would bring back and do here after the experience of it.

I had wanted to write about how one thing autism teaches us is how rules are weaponized -- they're enforced hard against some folks and softened against others, which leads to deniability on the part of enforcers: they can say they're only following the rules, but the hardening and softening of enforcement leads to very different outcomes. A lot of autistic folks take this onboard by wanting to enforce rules hard on everyone, to make it "fair". Then, because they believe the rules will be enforced evenly, they want to fix the rules -- even though having a set of rules that is unbearable if fully enforced is often part of how society sorts its power and suffering hierarchies, which is the system operating functionally to keep itself going.

But there really aren't rules anymore. Internationally they've descended to a "haha, made you look, you're so gullible" level with no pretense of anything else at least as led by Israel and the US, and definitely internally in the US too. I haven't been looking too hard at Canada in the last few months because disability paperwork and my crumbling faith in sources of any kind -- still cannot believe everyone is upset about AI in art and not a peep about what it does to the credibility of video, maybe everyone has accepted post-facts and I'm left behind without getting the memo? -- but yeah.

I always knew that if it came down to it I wouldn't grow food in service of a group of people who chose to withhold it from other people. It's one of the reasons I rejected urban farming and high-end farmers markets (the other being I don't have a parent who will die and give me an inheritance to retire on, which is pretty much necessary for that as a viable career). Now I can't grow enough food to make a difference. I do distribute seeds -- probably only a thousand packets this year all told -- and maybe that makes a difference either way? But it may not. How do I support what matters from here, from this body, from this town, from this illness level? And how do I know when my body existing is support vs a liability?

In a complete aside, autism has taken up the rainbow infinity sign as its logo. Infinity sign has been poly for as long as I've known it, and the rainbow sign LGBTetc, which means I can't always tell what someone's shirt is in support of-- but also it often doesn't matter.

In counseling the other day I determined that not being scared into a corner is important. I just don't know what to do to dig myself out, especially while it feels like someone's backhoeing dirt on top of me while I dig.

This post brought to you by "after setting up for seedy saturday I was too unwell to go, and I'm too unwell to go to the pottery studio today two days after to, but at least I have a laptop and keyboard in bed"