How can we continue like this - vaulting over increasingly larger cracks, now too large to merely step around? Will we need to rappel down one side, climb up the other, before more people feel moved to do anything? Or will massive swaths of bodies need to fall through these cracks, will the chasms need to become bottomless? Someone responded to a Mastodon post I wrote about disaster thoughts that thinking like this gets them caught in a loop. Read more...

My mind spills off of rest like oil jumping from a hot pan. When I think about napping or stopping so-called productive tasks in the name of more relaxing activities, I am instinctively re-routed to something I “have” to do. Even if it’s empty or busy, I somehow would rather do it than, say, reading or drawing - even going on a bike ride in my neighborhood. Basically anything I find pleasurable is off the table. Read more...

I’m currently reading Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. What I was prepared to read was a meditation about the connection we have with marine mammals and how that translates to Black feminism. What I was unprepared for was a revelation regarding the functionality of online spaces. Gumbs writes: “How does echolocation…change our understandings of ‘vision’ and visionary action? Is social media already a technology of bounce, of throwing something out there and seeing what comes back? Read more...

I promised myself that this week would be an art week. My goal was to do weekly themes for my hobbies to prevent myself from chaotically starting and not finishing different projects. However, the Vergennes high school in Vermont has decided to host Walt Heyer in their auditorium next week, so writing week is starting a little early. Who is Walt? He gets his claim-to-fame for spending eight years as a trans woman and “regretting it. Read more...

It’s been hard for me to journal lately. I find that my internal narrator is reflecting silently these days, whether due to high stress or because my body chemistry is changing. Whatever the reason, I am attempting to go against that silence and tease out some of my own thoughts without its help. I celebrated the Seder for the first time two weeks ago, tapping into a merriment that I hadn’t experienced in a while. Read more...

A meditation brought on by mushrooms and a veteran Navy diver I recently found myself isolating at an empty apartment in the south end of Burlington. The isolation was both for practical purposes and for that deep, almost-spiritual need I get to be shrouded in silence. In a way, I guess those reasons could be one and the same: after some time, I cease to function like a human being without being given the chance to pray at the altar of solitude. Read more...

It’s hard to put a question mark at the end of that sentence. It feels more like a statement, a permanent form of being. Often, I find myself actively avoiding the news - and the computer in general - in order to distance myself from the slow burn of everything falling apart. However, it has a way of crawling up into every orifice of your existence to remind you that it’s there, that smell of decay we may love in autumn but not when it carries the hint of what’s to come. Read more...

It’s a war that’s already started. People keep talking about it like it is theoretical, but watching a friend get a dog because white nationalists are stalking them for their abortion rights efforts? Citizens dead at the hands of radicalized gunmen? A global pandemic where people in power favored the economy over the health of its constituents - leading to thousands of preventable deaths? How about - something more close to home for the trans community I’m a part of here in the Northeast - a NH man who said he’d shoot the “next drag queen” who “got near his daughter”? Read more...

Living with a roommate who got a graduate degree in computer science means we talk a lot about interfaces. I’m a coder; he’s a researcher. I was recently diagnosed with ADHD after years of struggling with basic adulthood functioning; he is a well-adjusted, organized individual where everything in our apartment has its place and tasks get done in a timely manner. You’d think this wouldn’t work. Oftentimes, I wonder why he hasn’t just run away screaming after watching me let the table - which was missing a screw for almost a month before a friend had mercy on me and fixed it - wiggle uncontrollably whenever someone sat at it. Read more...

Why they are not the same There are a lot of negative opinions of anarchy that I’ve often heard phrased as follows: Anarchists “can’t get anything done.” They don’t organize because “they don’t believe in hierarchy.” They don’t have anyone in charge because everyone is in charge, or there’s no such thing as being in charge, “so there is no direction.” [1] An important takeaway here is the assumption made about organization, about structure: that it is inherently hierarchical. Read more...