amazon_syren

Yesterday I taught a small workshop on making garden stakes at the pottery studio. In the other room the sculpture-only guy was mass panic-glazing his work (the hospital hasn't renewed his contract so he's leaving town permanently in a bit).

On the main floor the decorated paddle art exhibit was holding its opening, with storytelling and stuffed salmon and bannock. They had more food than people so I got surprise salmon and bannock, and chatted with folks, including someone who told me where some easily accessible clay was if I went at the right time of year (the lake has basically one big yearly tide, it goes way down in late fall/early spring, and way up in late spring/summer as the snow in the surrounding higher areas melts and flows into it).

On the upper floor was a class learning floor looms.

Most of the town was probably at the ski hill doing the everest challenge, which I imagine is some sort of distance ski, or on the lake skating, skiing, biking, dogsledding, skijoring, kicksledding, or walking. It was sunny out with little intense occasional snowbursts, as far as I could tell from the basement studio.

In my haste to get myself out the door in time for the workshop, I forgot to take one of my add-back hormones.

Today, although my body feels as expected and my mind is very slow, I am emotionally bouncy, er, that is, happy in a bouncy lighthearted sort of way.

Is this because:
-social and out of the house
-light returning and sun
-those pills are bad for emotions
-not doing the paperwork I'm supposed to be doing so PDA is less relentless than normal

Another day, another data point. It's a great town, though. We even have a coffee shop at the moment, though the population is generally too small to support one so they don't often stick around.

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"