I've been feeling a strange, ghostly feeling in my psyche the past few days. Not like a specter has taken over my body, but more like a specter that once took residence in my brainspace finally moved out. They said, "it's time to move on, my hauntings have stopped working their woes!"

My work ethic has been questioned a lot, and so has my art. Turns out my most adamant critic was The Ghost of Bad Work Ethic's Past, the same one that was kicking around in my brain. Shame and negative self-talk are pretty strong bad habits.

So I made a website. Feels a little strange, honestly. I liked the process, which is NOT something I'm used to when coding. My college Web Authoring course was hell; like, it just didn't make sense to me! But it's even more than that - I just sat down an coded a website over the course of about 30-35 working hours and got it done. At the end, I had something I was proud of, and I feel as though I can keep up this kind of working momentum for the time being.

I'm not exactly sure what the crux of this eureka moment was for me. I think it was a big ol' stew of thought-ingredients I was cooking over the week. I just finished Action Button's six hour epic "Action Button Reviews Boko No Natsuyasumi" earlier that week and I cried. I watched it a second time that same week (with my fiance that time) and cried AGAIN. It stirred up some feelings in me that were silt sitting at the bottom of a still, clear pond.

I realized these things after many hours contemplating in the apartment: One, I need a damn job (unemployment depression is real!), but I have plenty of free time already that I don't want to waste by being a slug in bed; Two, I want to do things that I love doing, and that no one can stop me or tell me otherwise (being the daughter of two artist-adjacent degrees will catch a lot of flak by proxy, trust me); and Three, I am not stupid, and I can do anything I put my mind to.

It sounds like the most generic self-help advice you can give someone in a sense (I should know, I'm also a critic). But I have to keep telling myself these things to really massage it into the folds of my brain. It sounds easy, but I can't say that to myself; it IS hard! I had listened to about twenty-three years of negative self-talk and criticism, of course I would internalize that behavior! And in return, I have a mountain of bad habits to walk back down that might take me another twenty-three year journey. But it really, really helps when I'm not alone.

My wonderful fiance has guided me back to shore during the times my mind was cloudy and dark. I got, admittedly, way too high by accident a day after watching the Action Button video. In a sorry state, I remember holding my head in my hands during dinner and saying "God, I feel so stupid. I am stupid!" I said it a few times out loud, to no one really but myself. My fiance grabbed me by the wrist gently, looked in my eyes with genuine concern and love, and told me, "you're not stupid, you shouldn't say that about yourself."

Him saying that had rushed through me with all the surprise and gusto of a strong wind. I don't even remember why I kept saying "I'm stupid," and I think that's part of what I learned that day. Why am I saying these things to myself? No one else is saying it, so why do I have to self-flagellate like that? Especially when I don't even know why I would ever NEED to say that about myself?

It took a few more days of sitting on the idea to get to know what that really meant to me. In this moment, I'd like to add another item to the list of things I realized: Four, using my CPAP usually helps me think straight. Like, its damn JOB is to put OXYGEN into my BRAIN. It would probably help to wear it at night so I don't stop breathing when I sleep - and help it did! I cleaned my CPAP, set it back up on my side table, and used it. I slept for seven hours with it on (it usually falls off my face after two or three), and woke up having unknowingly digested the mantra that I could, in fact, do anything I wanted to.

Fueled on a few episodes of She-Ra and a 5AM adrenaline rush, I made this nefarious machine of a webpage. No phone or video playing while I worked, just me and my desk for a couple days. I forgot how much I missed it.It's not much, but it suprised and impressed me that I could make that. I'm still working on it as of my writing this, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment and... peace? Like my desire was always there, I just had to stop stuffing it down the toilet by playing Monster Hunter for four hours every day.

I find it sad and funny how my mind works. The chemistry that goes on up there befuddles me a lot. That same chemistry can make me my own worst enemy sometimes. But it can be changed; I can open my code or draw a picture because I find it fun. I can go outside because I like the outdoors. I can exercise because I want to. Sometimes I just need to say it out loud: "I can do hard things, and no one can stop me!"

After a long week of studying, listening, and wandering, I emerge with new thoughts as I always do. This has been a fun week!

I hold a very strange position in life, and I think I've always known that to some degree. I mean my physical position mostly, but also the mental position I stand on in comparison to what I feel is most peoples' perception of place in this day and age. I've lived in salty coastal towns a third of my life, boreal forest cities for about another third, and then deathly dry plains for the rest.

People love the coast, and not just when they grow up on it. There's a whole "P.N.W. lifestyle" that people covet deeply - when I tell people about the places that I grew up in, it's usually "oh, my family visited there on a cruise once!," with a thick layer of envy hidden under the suface of their words. Either that, or they'll just outright say "I'm jealous of you." Strange.

I loved where I grew up. Maybe not in the way a tourist loves it - honest to God, I wouldn't live on the coast now as an adult now for many more reasons than environment (though that is a big one I go back and forth on; I suffer in anything above room temperature). I miss the coast too most days, but I do also love where I live now because I learned to listen and love it for what it is, not what it isn't.

As far as living goes, I assume most people stay in one biome for a lot of their life. Hell, out in the midwest, people are born in one house and die in the hospital down that same street they live on (trust me, I've KNOWN people who have). This is not me passing judgement either; I don't think I "appreciate it better" than anyone else can. I find it fascinating! This weird little continent of Turtle Island has so much to offer, and so close together too. I didn't even need to travel very far to see such a diverese palette.

My partner, in contrast, has lived in the American plains for all his life. Most people commonly refer to it as the "Midwest," but that's up for scrutiny; there's a lot of specific connotations and precognative biases people have in their mind when that term gets brought up. A lot of them are either hopelessly romantic or deeply resentful of that kind of environment and the people who now reside within it. For most, it's cowboys and farmers now; not much else to be seen.

I was one of those people when I moved to the desert praries of the US. I'll be honest: I hated it. I hated it for some other reasons going on in my personal life, but seperately from that, it was difficult to live there at first. If I had a choice on where to move, that wouldn't have been my first choice, or my second, or third, fourth...

I ain't here to be a hater. I'll get to the good part: my partner and I visited Elk Island National Park this weekend, and it was gorgeous. I loved every second of it.

Elk Island is one of many old lakes left behind when the northern icesheet melted. A lot of them disappeared naturally over time, but this one stayed. Not exactly a "glacial" lake, but its stayed around for a few reasons I can't quite remember (I'm not sure if there's a spring here too). Many of the hills on these plains are left behind by glacial sediment buildup; suddenly steep hills that dip back down as soon as they rise up.

Wetlands are fun, and a bit new to me. Marshy puddles surrounded by big cattails. These ponds are turned into moats for the small forts of beavers. The damn beavers! We unfortunately didn't get to SEE a beaver, but we sure knew they were there. The geese knew the beavers were there. They sat on top of their house, honking at them through the roof. And yet, even through binoculars, the beavers hid; damn you, beavers! I'll get you one day.

We did manage to see some muskrats! But only their shadow; the boardwalk that cut through the marsh was turned into a hidden sitting place for them in the mid-day sun. They splashed in and out of the water, dipping back underneath the surface or under the boardwalk before the sun hit their rat-like faces. Funny guys! I love a funny guy. I liked imagining them plotting, scheming in the underground nightclub of the boardwalk support beams.

And Lord, the textures... algal blooms, whispy grasses, groves of aspens standing sharply against the shoreline. Not just visual textures either - the soundscapes were otherworldly in the morning. Quiet, but delicate on the eardrums. My fiance likes bringing his field recorder out, and the quiet orchestra of those rustling leaves in the wind is now on his SD card for whenever we want to travel back there.

The animals are bold too, and even the grasshoppers. Gulls yelled almost with anger, and a squirrel nearly rummaged through our bag as we sat for a snack. And yet, NO BEAVERS. I couldn't believe it! I could see patches of dead tree groves, and freshly cut logs left behind by these industrious fellows (that's just what they do). But they hid their tracks well. I'm sure they were watching us from underwater.

We weren't there for long, only about five hours. I think that was plenty for the day and we got a good fill of walking. I love my fiance too; he knows my limits when it comes to being physically exerted due to my spine, and no one else in this world asks if I need help like he does. Even just the gesture of him carrying my pack for a bit means so much to me.

We ended up having to take a free tour bus to the park since we don't have a car, and that was a whole ordeal. Our bus got cancelled the first time we had booked for it in August, then all the open bus days afterwards were already booked full! We nearly missed the last bus of the season, but we got in. Unfortunately, we were also supposed to have a "free park tour" that morning with the trip, but no one was at the entrance building. We didn't even get to go to the gift shop!

The drive to the park itself (and back) was markedly a common story. Yellowhead Trail is a freeway across Canada, and it (as well as downtown Edmonton during Summer construction) was pretty difficult to look at in a car. It has the same aesthetic impact that freeways have in most North American cities: callously uninteresting. But unlike most, Elk Island isn't even all that far from Edmonton itself - once you pass the last factory, RV park, and the river, it's only about another 20-30 minutes to the front gate. It appears out of nowhere.

I was tired of the freeways. That's why I've moved back to the home that I know in Canada. Elk Island was no different, it felt like the Canada I'd always known, despite Alberta being new to me. And what's more, it was like the plains of the Midwest... but in Canada! Almost silly to say, but I felt like the Venn Diagram of my experience of place came together there. When we passed the first bison on the road, I felt that feeling codify.

I've been reading two books lately: the third Earthsea book, "The Farthest Shore," and a historical compilation "Alberta Formed, Alberta Transformed." It gave me a little important context before going. The carving of the land itself at the will of glacial icesheets, the nature of when the first people inhabited the area now known as Alberta and their traditions, and how the Blackfoot First Nations people lived in tandem with herds of bison.

Seeing a bison was not my "I suddenly understand nature!" moment. I think more about how having these spaces is important, not just as a tourist attraction, but as conservation. Canada does better than most when it comes to conservation, but I feel usually that when people talk about the concept of "conservation," they're talking about places like the BC boreal forest or the California redwoods, not plains biomes for bison. Bison are historically overhunted by colonists in many ways, and forested areas are more important to plains bison than we think. The winter winds are harsh, unrelenting. Bison need somewhere to hide.

Azul wants to write a paper on this, eventually. We ended up talking about the topic at-length the day after we visited the park. About rangeland plains, about the historic grazing patterns of bison, and how often people really consider these spaces. The answer is they kind of don't. It's an aesthetic problem.

One of our favourite national parks is Idaho's "Craters of the Moon National Monument," a historic eruption site where famously the astronauts trained. It's an oven out there in the Summer. The Snake River Basin is dry, and deathly hot because of the black volcanic rock that absorbs all the sun's UV. "Wasteland" is a banned word in our household, but if there was ever a place that looked empty and not fit for life, it's there. And it's beautiful.

"Devil's Orchard" is a sub-section of that park, and it displays an array of plants that have climatized to the deathly environment. They look twisted and violent; neon lichen sits on boulders, and trees like witches' brooms grow in between the same rocks. Salamanders hide in the roots and stones, and bats swarms caves made from cooled lava tubes.

Another hill, "Inferno Cone," sits high above everything else in the park. It's a hike up to the top, but next to a single tree and a patch of grass, you can see the curvature of the earth up there. Dark thunderclouds roil inbetween patches of bright sunshine, and the rain is seen boiling off before it even hits the black ground. It's otherworldly.

Craters of the Moon is having some conservation issues. Tourists are breaking apart the stones and brittle lava rock in the caves, and too much damage has closed some of these caves to the public for good. Even then, they check if you've worn any clothes in a cave within the past DECADE, as to make sure the bats don't contract a fungal disease spreading across the country, carried by the hoodies of travellers. Even though it has existed far longer than America has, the footsteps we take must be careful in these spaces.

Elk Island was conserved starting in the early 20th century as a way to save the remaining elk population. So far, it's been helping. Helps the bison and beavers too. It's actually a bit of a pit-stop for birds traveling north during migration as well. Overall, it's a good thing, even if the way it exists is a bit abnormal in the way of "proper conservation."

Historically, First Nations peoples have known much more about proper fire management for a long time, such as when to burn off dead grasses and trees to reduce fuel buildup (and herd bison at the same time). It's hard to go back to that, but people are finally learning why they have done this for so, so long. Long before modern fire management figures it out (and long before the government knows that allocating money to fire resources is important, actually... goodbye Jasper). In that sense, Elk Island shouldn't exist because its "no fires whatsoever" policy let it grow to this size. But it does. It is important to know that it lives, and who it is for.

Even if it's not "proper," these spaces need to exist. The freeways are much worse (and much more ugly to boot). Even the process of making the harsh Canadian soil arable for crops has done damage to these plains spaces. People think all this open space can only be "used" for this: people, and industry. If it's not a home, it's a factory. The rootin' tootin' cowboy homesteadin' cowboy fantasy is gone too. In my lifetime, living on open land that grows by itself is gone. I take from that many feelings.

Even the forests are occupied. Their "natural beauty" is taken and flattened down into an aesthetic of cedar cabin living. People seem to love hiking a lot more in the woods than the ancient and quiet patience of the plains, where you can see forever. To each their own, but the Salish people have known and lived in the BC forests without the need to carve out of them spaces for cities like Vancouver. And just because the plains are "open and empty" doesn't mean it only has value to cattle and crops. Life everywhere has equal value in the spaces we all share.

The boreal forest needs fires to burn off their fuel load too actually, even as wet as it is. People hate to see a cedar burn, but don't seem to look at it the same way when it comes to rangelands. The grasses are less known than the trees, maybe just because they are prone to living a shorter life, or easier to be stepped on and overlooked (quite literally). That doesn't make them less valuable to have lived.

This meanandering thought, as long as its gone on, doesn't quite yet have an endpoint in my mind. I think generally, you need to know what the beavers are doing. Even as they are little rascals, they don't cut down all the trees and eat all the fish. They know what goes on better than I do. I believe most people in the city forget how big Turtle Island is and who lives here. People need to know. It's not beavers' responsibility to tell us, but it is our responsibility to know the beavers. They live open and free on the range.

I'm tutoring my fiance through his "Wildland Plants of North America" class since he asked for help. We really both hate learning latin scientific names, but of course I'll help him. The university has a place called "The Batcave" that's filled with dried plant samples and old rangeland magazines from the 60's. This room is only seen by about 5-10 people every semester.

These samples go untouched by most. They're delicate. They're beautiful. "Tanglehead" has long, coppery awns that look like sparkling hair. "Timothy" has flowers that look like a beetle's head, and lives in Elk Island. I wouldn't know them if I didn't get to see them, to hold them, to learn to love them.

(P.S. The Blackfoot word, "Miistakis," refers to the Rocky Mountains - the backbone of Turtle Island.)

Excerpt written after listening to Ricky Eat Acid's "am i happy, singing_" at the park.

A raw composition of brain activity. Strings plucked and then crystallized, sparks flying between neurons with no sound made. But the sound is heard. The heart of a cat beats out of tune, out of sync with mine, but it is felt on my own, in my chest. Dancing bells in dappled sunlight are free, unbound - then, in another moment are cut off with a glance across a different way. The brain wipes the moment but the brush remembers, the board remembers underneath new ink, new chalk. Glittering leaves rustle with the sound of piano, but they don't know of the piano. Neither do I. Every moment, every person around me, it is composition. Moments that somehow form together into sometimes awkward, sometimes out-of-tune, oftentimes unknown songs. Songs that are unknown as they are not yet made, and will never be made again. They form a polyrhythm, a performance teetering on the abstract and formless nature of all things under the sun that is life and the sheet of stars that is death. It is not done with performance direction, but it is done with intention. Watch the sunflower blow in time with the reed; their hearts move close together, in the same wind. But even as they are untouching, their gentle murmurations overlap, two instruments with distinct chords and progressions sharing in the same air: music. One will be gone and so will the other, but what I see is heard in the folds of my brain, and what they play is shared to me too. To watch, to listen, to know, if only for a moment. Their voice is loud, and heard. Their fingers play as they feel the heat of the sun through overcast clouds, as both are what they will always know. All at once it is known, it is gone; birds above the eye, grass below the feet. One has flown and the other reaches for that same sky the crow has already touched, navigated, swam in and swims in now. Every time it reaches its arms up high, it must know it will not leap out of ground and join the crow in harmony on the wind. But the crow can come down and sit with the grass instead. Does the grass feel jealousy; does the crow feel pride? Neither feels none; both reach upwards still, and feel the sun upon their backs and the dew of the morning as it comes again, as it always does. They are known, but how often do we listen to the hummed notes of the blades of grass? A thousand-thousand-thousand little ones standing tall, stretching towards the sun, all swaying in unison? Why cut them down in their efforts to become tall and feel warmth, to cherish it? What is a tune if it only becomes noise, layered beneath the sound of all else, not intertwined in the tangle, but below it? Turn your ear to the sound that reverberates through all strings as they are plucked: A tone. A tune. A song. A dance. A passion. A noise. Vibrating, a frequency made and soon gone, only heard if it is listened to. It is an honor to hear it, to be there when the note sounds crisp, cleanly, with the love we all desire play.

If I have to look at another scientific name written in Latin, I might just need to go back in time and kill the dude who standardized it. And guess what? I found out what that dude's name is: Carl Linnaeus. Some Swedish academic in the 18th century just LOVED Latin, and made it my problem about 300 years later. Although to be fair, most academics in the 18th century loved Latin for some reason. I STILL DESPISE IT.

Like, seriously! Why do all these campus fraternaties still use Latin? Why do all these white people love Latin? This is a rabbit hole that I could totally go down if I didn't respect myself.

I once had a funny conversation with a good friend of mine who lives in Boston, the same friend who just told me "Carl Linnaeus" exists. When I visited them, we talked a lot about the differences in our education and the general education systems we grew up with. My education is frankly pretty scuffed; despite that, I am lucky to feel informed and educated. Because of that, I also have some strong opinions about the education systems I'm familiar with (even as they have changed). And my friend is much the same: lucky to be educated, though their knowledge differs much in its consistency and specific expertise over mine. They're a tutor of basically all fields of knowledge the American education system expects a kid to know through high school (algebra/calculus, english literature, social sciences and history, etc.).

Then, one of the only "arguments" (it was more a discussion than anything) I've ever had with them was while driving on a side road from Concord, in the middle of that same conversation, and I'll never forget it. They said something like, "I teach my students the Latin roots of English words to help them understand the word better!" and I went, "excuse me?"

What a bizarre thing, to have to learn another, ancient language in order to learn English. The concept baffled me! We talked on and on about what students need in school, what the "current workforce" needs out of students, and what students need seperately from and interwoven in with their education. Their take was basically that not only would learning Latin help with the literacy of students who need to read and write academic papers at a university level, but that in general, students should be required to do hard things they don't like in order to learn problem-solving skills.

See, I can't say I even disagree with the notion; the current academic environment does greatly require these things, and making sure kids are educated in a multi-disciplined way to help them become well-rounded in their own knowledge is crucial. I just... my gut reaction was so, SO strong to this almost cop-like notion of "just comply to our current system the way it is currently built" that I had to take a breather and listen to their thoughts before deconstructing it in my head. And again: we discussed, and ultimately neither one of us necessarily disagreed with the fundamental facts that our current education system is broken in the ways it forgets about children and underpays teaches (and how this leads to a steep influx of nihilistic pacifism for everyone in it). I simply come back to this conversation from time to time.

My friend is well-meaning, and hell, I'd even say they're a damn good tutor. This same friend is one I bonded with over our love of Patrick Schneeweis' work as a touring anarchist musician. We've both been listening to this guy's music for well over eight years now (them more than I; they love folk punk, I'm just a distant appreciator). I used to own a copy of "Probably Nothing, Possibly Everything" on tape, where in the liner notes Pat wrote that one of the greatest inspirations of his time as an arachist was the novel "The Dispossessed," who I'd later find out to my great surprise was written by Ursula K. Le Guin of the Earthsea novels.

"The Dispossessed" is dense. My partner and I have been listening to the audiobook together, barely on Chapter 3. To say it is greatly impressive in all its aspects would be an understatement. Le Guin does what many others stop short at: truly imagining, picturing a complete anarchist society free from the shackles of capital, but not free from the bonds of fundamental human suffering and emotion.

Some of the most striking concepts that come back to me often upon reflection of this novel are about language and education. The power of non-possessive nouns, the open-discussion format of their classrooms, and most of all, the freedom for students to choose what discipline of knowledge they would like to specialize in of their own volition. To say that Le Guin is a poet and a skilled wordsmith would also be a grand understatement and a disservice to her work. It moves me. It had given me pause for reflection on the bigger question I still often think about: "did the education system fail me?" I can't go back now on my answer, having read what I've read. The answer is "yes."

I fell through the cracks. I changed my school so many times just due to shitty circumstances that my knowledge was left scattered and unfocused. But for all intents and purposes, my new school required I take a level of arithmatic that my old school did not. At the time, I was failing so much in something I was forced to do that it nearly broke me. My already suffering emotional state was compounded by a system that did not care about me as a person, but rather cared about what credits I did and did not fulfill to get me out the door, out of the "care" of a system that was not for me and into the world, to eventually be lost.

I admit, in this moment, I felt the need to be fulfilled internally, spiritually, academically, where the education system had failed to do so for me. Internally, I needed to put in the work to help myself, only after admitting that I needed help, and wanted to work towards a better self. No academic system could make that conclusion for me. But the education system I found myself in nearly beat a love of education out of me, not nursed it into me. That's where it failed me, and that's where it continues to fail a greater population of children. It made me not want to learn, because it tried to get me to be someone who I was not: someone fine with the status quo. Someone who learned math because "I had to" despite not wanting to at the cost of my mental health. It wanted me to be a factory worker while the smoke filled my lungs; it wanted me to love the sensation of fumes in my throat, and not to question it.

"The Dispossessed" does not free the anarchist society of Anarres from criticism either. It often poses the questions of "what can we learn from history, and what should we leave behind?," and, "how can we be free if others, elsewhere, are not?" For those too, I do not have a perfect solution. No education system will ever give you the tools to change it, because that is not what it is there for. It is there to get people to work. In a sense, it will always be to prop up the current system. But in learning, we also discover what we do not want; forming opinions of what we do. That things could always be better. What is joy in leisure, if there is no hope in work? In the education system I grew up in, I learned that Latin is an ancient language historically used by white men in power, men that possessed slaves, and that slaves were forced to work.

I believe some academic papers (don't ask me to cite them; BAD PRAXIS, I KNOW) have said that the language we speak does not necessarily correspond to the ways in which we think. I'm not certain how true that is. The academia determines it to be true, that certain linguistic exceptions and flexibility means that "technically this is correct." But you just need to learn about Aboriginal languages to know that this may need another pass. Some lingustic groups do not even have possessive words, almost untranslatable if not for exceptions and localizations.

I do not want to learn Latin. But at the end of the day, guess who's now sitting her happy ass in the basement of a university building spending countless hours to help tutor my fiance for his plants class. It's me. Of course it just had to be me. I mean, I'll do it because I love my partner of course, because this class is pretty damn difficult. Doesn't mean I'm happy about it. He's not happy about it either, he's the one that needs this credit in order to get his degree, and he's also dyslexic! This shit sucks! At the cost of this modern education, it seems like we had to pay the piper one way or another. These names aren't going to learn themselves.

"It's not art unless you laugh / One of these days I'm gonna laugh / It's a long way down, I know that now" -- lyrics from the song "Pavement" by Teen Suicide.

Sometimes I look back, way back. Sometimes I look back at the person I once was. But an odd thing happened this week. Actually, a lot of odd things happened this week but most of those are private to my bedside journal. The odd thing in question is more of a solemn epiphany, a shaded thicket of trees surrounding me, casting long shadows on the path I walk now.

I still have a hard time understanding the phrase "can't see the forest for the trees." I also don't really understand the metaphor "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" no matter how many times somebody explains it to me. Whatever, I guess. I honestly look down at my feet a lot of the time when I walk, or even hike, or sometimes when I sit too. It's a habit I have. Maybe I feel like if I'm not looking at where I step, where I'm walking right now at the exact moment my feet carry me forward, I'll fall. I worry I'll fall down fast, and hard, and embarrassingly. Or even worse; maybe there'll be a time when I fall and I don't get back up again.

When I looked back at a former version of myself, I saw someone different there. Often, I think about the person who other people saw me as at the time. What form is taken when I am perceived? What ghost takes loose, vague shape in the minds of the people that remember me? I think of that ghost often. But this time, I looked back and I didn't see the ghost. I saw myself through the fog, and I met her.

I sat with her a while. I saw her at a point in my life, a couple points, at all the sad points. These points, they looked similar, overlapping, compounding into and onto itself and back again. It was sad to see her go through that. Hurt, in pain. Distant, alone. Not many people had met her down there.

I played through "Milk Inside A Bag of Milk Inside A Bag of Milk" & "Milk Outside A Bag of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk" this past week. There were so many ways in the dialogue of this visual novel to put the main character down, to insult her, to show no remorse towards her, to be ashamed of her, to hate her. It was a sickening display of internal dialogue so raw to the touch that it hurts to even prod the surface of it. Every moment was drenched, soaked with the sickly slime of self-loathing, of pity, of the space between death and sleep. It was violence.

Without realizing it, after talking with my fiance in a moment now gone, I had thought about all the directions she (my past internal self) could've gone from these points. I thought about all the places I could be at this point, right now today, if I had taken a different path. If she was scooped up by some nefarious body, some malicious thing, some abusive person. If she had given up to the gloom of sadness, the pain of the time, the misery of feeling lost and alone in a world that seemed it could not care about her, the self-loathing of trying to justify abandonment. If I became someone violently searching the world surrounding me, lashing out in fits of unformed emotion, discovering myself through people and action piloted by that malevolent and formless ghoul of someone who could never be at rest. I would not have blamed her; the odds were not in her favor.

Now, she is not alone. I'm not sure how to help her now. All I can do is sit with her in the quiet points. Most of these quiet moments feel the same. Tinged with an aura; the fear of loss. The fear that if I stand in one place too long, trying to pick up all the broken pieces of my history that surround me, I won't move forward. That someone won't stay behind with me, that I can't go on. "Zero-sum game."

Inside, I must be there for my own self. Stay with her; stay with me. Wounds break open if one tries to move to quickly. I should know, I still have the scars from my stitches. I've thought about starting a compliment jar: for every violent thing I say about myself, about her, I write down one nice thing to say about myself, one thing that I like, and put it in the jar for a rainy day. Maybe the younger version of myself will see it too. I hope it will let her know that she is okay.

Is playing off a Pat the Bunny song name two weeks in a row for my blog post title too extra? I think not! I can do what I want and no one can stop me!

I've been putting off writing anything for a proper blog post since it's been one of those weeks where a lot of stuff happens, too much to stuff all into a summary or proper thoughts. I hold a bunch of this week's laundry in my hands and all I could really do is drop it all on the bed in a messy pile. I'm the kind of person who has the bad habit of washing my dirty laundry too late to all fit in the washing machine, and then I also have the even worse habit of not folding and putting away the laundry the same day. What a mess! I often have to put myself into a corner just to do the whole process, front-to-back.

I started using a program called "Obsidian" the other day. This software thing makes me feel like a mad scientist. And what to use it for? Anything! But what do I end up using it for? Bulleted notes I'd otherwise put on sticky notes, mostly. Beats trying to sort through all the garbage on my desk. Oh, and helping my fiance compile all the notes for his plants class. This thing is exactly what we needed for that; cross-referencing data points across several hundred pages of scattered notes with ease. I can look at the same data a hundred different ways, and it's fantastic.

It's funny to listen to my fiance complain about the reference textbook for this plants class. It makes me feel like we really share common interests when he gets to complain about how terrible (and I mean absolutely, bizarrely TERRIBLE) the formatting for this textbook can be. He pours over and brainstorms with me all the ways we could format the data better, to help understand more easily the minute differences in ecology to ID similar plants, to make the knowledge that already exists easier to understand and digest. Turns out Obsidian had us covered (I am not sponsored, don't get it twisted.)

In exchange, we get to talk smack about the curriculum and testing format about this plants class. We hate brute-force education! To make someone forcibly learn the Latin scientific names of over 200 plants in a semester is still wild to me, even if it is still valuable information. I don't think I'll stop complaining about it as we study until the day I die.

And yet, I think on what I could be doing versus what I'm not. I talk big about all the ideas projects I have swirling around in my head right next to the knowledge that I have the skillset to even make these things a reality. First-time videos about graphic design, half-finished illustrations, and essay notations in the margins of books, all flittering in and out of this head of mine. And yet, I burn myself out before I even get on the computer. The passion, an intrinsic motivation, is hard for me to muster most days. It feels strange to be reading old academic papers for fun when no one is making me do it, when the highlighted quotes are for no other reason than my thoughts. My fiance is in school, why aren't I? But it doesn't help when I'm my own worst critic; I often forget how far I've come, for no one but myself.

In the distance from my old self, there is a small sadness that begs a big question: what have I forgotten, and does it matter? Does the richness of memory get a more rounded, robust flavor with age, or does the sweetness of the present moment taste best when tasted only in the moment?

I watched the leaves drift away, saying goodbye in a bittersweet rustling raspy voice: "we will be apart for a while, but I will be back come Spring." I let the goodbye last; I sat with them in hearty joy with a heavy sigh, taking comfort in knowing that even though the wind carries the voice away for a short while, the tree will always be there. There is joy in the leaves, there is sweetness in their presence and sadness when they leave. But there is a new appreciation I have in knowing the tree is always there, growing more solid day by day with me, even as the seasons change with our emotions.

I have come a long way. There is still much to look forward to, feelings I do not know.

I have a lot of thoughts. They're the thing I've had the most of. Yet, my head is heavy. Maybe it's better to offload these all into some computer program for later, when my memory gets weak. Even as I stare at the graph of all my notes start to build up as I transcribe old ideas into digital files, the question of its ultimate value eludes me. Does it matter all that much when I'm having fun?

I don't usually give my blog illustrations a title, but I feel like calling this one "Safety."

Our apartment building is being renovated. It's been "being renovated" for about two months now. We moved in right before some major changes were being made, and now it's been just a lot of errant construction noise and changes I'm not sure anyone really asked for. At least our floor doesn't smell (mostly) like cigarette smoke ever since they ripped out the hallway carpet.

It makes me wary, more than anything. In these times, just having a place to consistently rest your head becomes less and less of a sturdy guarantee. My fiance and I have made it through harder times, and we know how to get by with just a lot of rice and dry beans to cook. It makes me wary though, because I only found out Alberta doesn't have any rent control after we moved here. I'm wary because I know who they're going to foot the bill to once our lease needs renewed.

We make it by. I'm grateful for the books that a library can provide to me, in times where other entertainment is expensive and bland. I'm grateful for our city parks, in times where paid events boot out free community gatherings. I'm grateful for our cats and our ability to feed them. I'm grateful for my fiance, who is my rock and my cinnamon bear. I'm grateful for when we have a little extra to buy a pint of celebratory ice cream. I'm grateful for a pillow to rest my head on, someone to sleep next to safely and lovingly, and lots of Youtube uploads of "How It's Made" full episode compilations.

I forgot I have an extra holiday to celebrate this year. It's been some time since I started HRT, and to put it bluntly, it's got me feeling emotional for a lot of reasons. I suppose, if anything, I am grateful for these emotions. I've given up a lot in order to live truthfully to myself (and not all of it was given up willingly), but I am all the better for it; I have gained much in return and I will forever be thankful for what I have. It's given me a newfound lease on life, and that in combination with the love and support of my partner, I have been able to make it by with as much grace as I can muster.

But I again feel the pessimist in me wonder: what have I lost, and what will I never be able to access because of the choices I've made, or the choices others have made for me? A depressing subject, Lord above! For all the gains and treasures, it's still difficult not to dwell on the losses and blights. The walls, the illusory walls of the things paid for either in cash or emotional labour! What if there was simply only good times, and no bad times?

I find it's easier every day to focus on what I have, rather than what I don't and what I can't. In a certain sense, someone can become a ghost among the living, trying to figure out what their shape is by looking at the negative space between bodies. I would know too, I've been there before. But who am I? Someone who hopes that being thankful for things will make them last a little longer. No one can take my being away from me, I hope.

I try to keep a level head. But it's late, we're tired, let's forget all about it and go to bed. We can think again in the morning.

"what if we could name ourselves and speak about being in this stasis kissing and contagious stop waiting for the sun to rise and finally feel safe at night

i want to suck the gold good & knock on wood open this door and share this bed every bad dream in my head --

i want to spit this road out and build a whole new house"

-- lyrics from "i've been tasting roads my whole life" off the album "the decline of stupid fucking western civilization" by Jordaan Mason

Radio silence. All is quiet on the Web1 front. What is going on over there? Well, as it turns out, that last post about worrying about rent came with incredibly bad timing on my part; my landlord had to do some renovations that required they cut my ethernet line, and the maintenance person in our building didn't repair our internet for nearly a month. So, in retrospect, it looks like I went "I feel like I won't have a place to sleep!" and went and disappeared for a month. Not that I think many people read my posts at this point to worry about my well being, no: I just think it looks hilariously unfortunate!

As well, since we're on the topic of being "in retrospect," not having internet access came with incredibly good timing based on [RECENT EVENT] and the ensuing [RESPECTIVE CONSEQUENCES]. Fill in the blanks as you will. But remember: I won't ever be like "oh, thank you to my incredibly gracious landlord for making me have go to the library just to be able to submit job applications" because I'm not an idiot. Internet is always nice. Just gave me an excuse to log off is all. Log off and play way too much UFO 50, that is... and what a damn great game that is, by the way.

But hell, I'm on Bluesky if you can believe it. I got access all the way back during the private beta days. Did I use it? Nope. Not until this month actually, because that new-world urge to scroll overtook me. I'm only human, and that urge gets stronger the colder it gets outside. What else to do when the first snow of the season hits, and hits hard? And fortunately, Bluesky is a much more positive place... theoretically. I ended up following a lot of new artists I like. I also ended up seeing a lot of old artists I liked who frequented Twitter, followed by a slew of artists I was not as fond of. Then, comes the bait-replies, and the deliberately abrasive posters, and the chronically online discourse... on and on and on. Almost instantly, I felt the same way I did back in the day online, scrolling through Youtube comments I hated reading, on videos I didn't particularly care for, then swapping to a different social media platform full of slurs and the arguments of strangers I shouldn't care about, but did. If you can believe it, all it took was one single poster to say something that I would hear all the way back in a 2016 Twitter thread for me to say, "it never changes here, and I learn nothing; I don't want to be here anymore, I cannot grow." (EDIT: by "here" I mean more specifically "internet-centric artists' circles;" I'm sure I would actually learn something if I followed like, I dunno, community organizations and charities and whatnot. In fact I'd probably have a much better time if I had some kind of professional account I strictly kept clean, but unfortunately for myself I am a silly lady who cannot resist the urge to see cats in bodegas.)

I suggest most others do the same. I managed to convince a good friend to get off Twitter last year: they keep telling me that they feel more enriched from doing crossword puzzles in the same morning timeslot they would've used for Twitter for some morning brainless content mixed with the occasional community-organized event. I think most people see it as a catch: it's where the people are, and where the news is. In a world that requires connection, this feels like the place to get connected. In most cities, it IS the place to connect; Facebook groups replace paper pamphlets, tweets replace flyers for charity drives and punk shows. In a sense, when you log off, you cut the cord to the outer world.

But that's the catch; when you care about connection as much as the algorithm wants to keep you on there, you lose the self. The love and respect held for one's self is supplanted with only the thoughts and arguments of others, no matter how banal. Most people (especially including myself) forget how vast their inner world is, I think. They forget to care for it, tend to it, and let it flourish. Its vastness can be terrifying, even if they do recognize its presence. It can be populated with any measure of thing, any idea or concept, or perhaps even be polluted by it. Even more, volunteering is ALWAYS going to do more good for the world and your own mental wellbeing than liking a post and scrolling on.

My partner made me think a few weeks ago about what my "mind palace" looks like. Not just now, but historically: what does the house inside my brain look like? Do I even have one? Do I actively wander inside my mind, like it is a tangible place? I don't believe most people truly conceptualize it actively, consciously. The "mind palace" concept itself has, in recent times, been more associated with those people who love to go on Ted Talks and ramble on about "good habits for building short term / long-term memory" and "knowledge recollection skills" and the like, just a complete overview on how important it must be to be able to recite the words on a page after having only seen it for half-a-second because they "pictured an elephant next to the paragraph" or whatever. (Note: I'm paraphrasing and I couldn't give you a source since I, rather ironically, don't remember what it is; this weird example is from an assignment in an old Communications class I despised taking.)

But the Mind Palace, as an abstracted concept, has become more and more fascinating to me as I dwell on my partner and I's conversation about it. I'd put it like this: I remember that one episode of Spongebob ("Sleepytime") where he rather abruptly infiltrats the dream of Gary the snail. In that dream, Gary took on the form of a sorcerer-like cloaked figure, wandering the halls of a grand library of thoughts and knowledge. To Spongebob's great surprise, he learned something rather strange and intimate about his animal companion that day: where he feels most comfortable, and that he thinks rather profoundly in these quiet moments, saying, "did you think my shell was full of hot air?" This extends to most of the other characters in that same episode: for Patrick, an open space with nothing but a horsey ride where even in his dreams he is held back by the limitations of money, and for Sandy, thrill-seeking on the edge of death.

This rather silly example makes me remember my most recent lucid dream as well, my first that I can remember in many years. I was on a peninsula of some sort, in a hutch with a family. After we ate dinner, I went outside to the taste of tropical air. I realized then I was dreaming, and what I had decided to do was to just explore this space and see how far it went. I conjured a shabby little hippie van, and drove down the dirt road across many bridges and islands, just to see it for myself.

Listening to Hiroshi Yoshimura's album "Surround" as we talked on and on about our internal worlds into the night, I pondered more on my own mind palace. In days passed and gone now, I felt like I wandered among the wilderness. The world was new to me, and so I walked it freely and openly in my mind. I daydreamed a lot when I was young, never settled into my seat in the present. But the freedom of hiking new horizons reflects an internal and external sadness. I could never settle, even in my mind. There was no mind palace, no home to call my own. I would often wander into the traveller's cabins that dotted the wayside of these hills of my knowledge of the world, sleeping in them for a time, but never growing too comfortable. The presence of others littered the inside, the feeling that it was not somewhere I could stay for too long. And so, as my mind's avatar, I frequently floated from place to place across hills and valleys, much like my mind in daydreaming, and much like my real body in moving homes and houses.

Now, as I grow older, I grow more comfortable being content and in-place in this ramshackle body of mine. I've built a little home in my own mind. A wooden cabana with an open floor plan, sat right by the sea, with a cobblestone path in-between. It's small, but comforting. Imagine the orphanage from Yakuza 3. Something quiet and roomy. The only big difference being that it's only me in there, in that whole big little world in my head.

Oftentimes, it's been only me in here. The one me; the present me. But other times I retreat inside of myself, I find others in there too. Or, to be precise, other versions of me. They are usually occupied by their own worries and routines, or maybe even their curiosities every once in a while. I find myself at age twenty sitting in the den, alone. Or myself a little older than that, trying to make some new dish in the kitchen (and oftentimes failing). Myself, age seven, playing in the yard; or myself, age four, sitting by the beach in the quiet with feet in the waves. The curious ones are rare, but I often find them in that quiet back room, where I keep those files I don't look at often. The old photos, the sad memories, all in a filing cabinet I no longer keep locked. They look in there freely, and I do not stop them. I join, I reminisce. If they cry, I may cry too. It's better to let the emotions flow.

No one else visits this place. I have no qualms with describing it so freely. I lay my heart and mind out bare in trust. But no one can visit, not really. It's only me that can cross that short wall and enter the territory of the mind. I wander its hills too, when I can. New emotions, new thoughts, new wells of knowledge are scattered still in those valleys, often untouched and lost. But no one knows those hills like I do. I seek no ego-boosting when I say this: my mind feels vast, and it is filled with much even as quiet as it is. The trees rustle in the wind even when I am not perceiving them. This space is as comforting as it is challenging, and I will accept it all the same.

Yet I think, much often to my detriment: do the people that surround me on the street, people that I will never talk to or possibly ever see again, dream of anything more than a suburb in a cul-de-sac? An apartment in the city? Are their mind filled with paths and roads, or locked doors and dim rooms? And then, I correct myself: is that my business to judge that dream? How could I ever know, truly?

It is so sensitive a thing, people's dreams and minds, and the spaces they aspire to feel most comfortable. Even a dream and the internal world, locked behind the iron door of memory and subconscious thought, can be vastly different if one is not in touch with their own body and propaganda that affects how one thinks.

Even to the people on Bluesky, if I think too often and too hard about it, that online world dissipates like smoke and mirrors. The internet is not real, but the people on it are. It becomes a scary and insurmountable thing to give tangible to the intangible, to try and wrap one's mind around the miasma and poison of social media given life by every user that types thoughts into its gaping maw to be destroyed again by time. "This is not music you hear right now; you hear only your mind." One's soul and will can barely handle one's own thoughts; to enter the mindstream-of-consciousness of a million users at once is to get lost in it, to drown in it, to live and then die in it over and over again every day you log on and log off.

One of my favourite phrases that floats in the front of my mind often is from Eliana Manticore's "THE HOUSE IN THE OCEAN." It goes: "Your brain is suspended in fluid: you are the house in the ocean; you are the only house in the ocean." This phrase contrasts with another thought gained from the description of Jordaan Mason's album, "REWRITE THE WORDS AGAIN," saying, "The body's all there is. It's our only field of contact with the world, the only matrix that can form experience, and we chafe against it so readily." Our bodies are present; they cannot escape the world. Yet it is oftentimes the mind, not the body, that bears the brunt of storms and disaster, and it does so truly alone. Even though my body breaks down over time, even when my spine gets tired from hunching over a library desk, it is my mind that feels the weight. I describe it, I imagine it, I know it so intimately, my mind, and yet the describing of it is not true knowing for others. No one can touch it but myself. To each person, our own little haven, with no one else inside but the self, young and old in all its forms, shapes and versions.

When I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place in trying to choose how to learn of the world - between the stark, open, unending roaming and rolling hills of that intimate internal mindstream, and the egg filled with slime and miasma that is the modern internet and discourse, I find these days that the hills call my name. I will walk them with an open heart, and on the two legs that have carried me around since the day I was born, to discover the things inside that surprise me every day. I have a strong enough self-identity now - a roadmap, sketched crudely but kindly - to know I can always come back home again.

P.S. Man, that new King Gizzard (Phantom Island) feels way too safe. I know, weird to say, especially for King Gizzard! I think their fans really burned them every time they do a long song that's not Head-On Pill, and now their songs don't feel long enough to get really interesting, y'know? Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here, but I really enjoyed IDPLML, and it was really surprising to see people hating on the studio album versions for "being too long and meandering." That's what I like! So the new single doesn't feel like it gets enough room to breathe. Really unfortunate, but I feel less and less interested in new Gizz the more I hear.

Pictured: random attempt at drawing an Agnaktor from memory. Unrelated to post!

Probably the funniest story my mom tells about me when I was a baby (too young to even remember this happening) goes like this: there was a period of a few months where I was crying my head off any time I heard noise in another room, and especially when there was no one else in the room with me while I was in the crib. Pretty normal baby behavior, sure. But I would cry to any number of things, like steps in the hallway (during the day!), the sound of dishes being done downstairs, and the odd car driving by our quiet neighbourhood. It drove my parents absolutely batty. The funny part comes when my mom hatches a plot, deciding to try an unhinged experiment with me while my neurons were still developing.

Basically, she would place my crib in a spot where I could hear the washing machine, but not have it be too audible to where I would start crying. Even if it was just a short nap, she'd make sure I'd fall asleep next to her so I'd feel comfortable with extraneous sound. Then, more and more she would nudge the crib closer and closer to the washing machine, having a bit more sound exposure, and leaving me to sleep alone more when I felt comfortable to do so soundly. She could've probably ended the experiment at a certain point of my comfortability, where I'd be able to sleep okay somewhere like the living room that was just busy enough to prove the experiment was a success.

But for some strange reason, she decided to go all the way. (Advance notice: I personally do not see this as neglectful or dangerous because I do find it genuinely funny, but most parents certainly shouldn't do this with their kids in the future; my role as a scientific guinea pig here stands as just a strange story in my life that resounds with me now as an adult, which I'll get into here soon.)

She would keep me right next to the laundry room, just right outside the door. Next, she would crack open the door, just a hair, then a crack, then enough for a draft, then enough to fit through. I slept like a rock almost every time, my mom tells me. I'm sure that's far enough, right? No! She would then place my swaddled self directly onto the shaking dryer like it was an auto-rocking crib while she switched out the laundry in the machine. And through all of it... it worked! The experiment a resounding success! I could sleep undisturbed, and she could check in on me asleep without waking me up, or carry me around the house while she did chores to keep an eye on me better. I would nap in bliss, zen, quiet like a stone sat at the bottom of a white-water rapids river.

But the scientific hypothesis sometimes cannot predict certain outcomes; that's what the scientific method and experiments are for after all, aren't they? To discover strange, new, unpredicted results! Safe to say the unfortunate unpredicted outcome of the washing machine baby experiment was a worse situation than what she started out with. But one may say, "but now the baby can fall asleep with noise around, so what's the issue?"

Well, the big issue was that now I could ONLY fall asleep with noise around. I would wake up and be deathly terrified and consciously aware of a quiet room, and I hated it! Dusk and dawn was made into the witching hour as my screams pierced the still night, and the activities of the day would be met with hours of peaceful slumber. I can't imagine what being my parent was like, although my mother tried to relate that feeling to me several times: it sucked, like, pretty bad.

Fast-forward a little bit (about twelve years) and I'd be doing some truly unhinged things just to go to sleep. Before I discovered that music can be more than just what was on my iPod that my sister gave me, I was popping in some cheap Walmart quality earbuds right before bed so I could listen to Vampire Weekend to help me sleep. If you can believe it too, it DID help me fall asleep (though I'd often wake up several times at night to tangled cords around my limbs, and typically woke up to my eardrums ringing in pain). I'm not sure my mom even knew I was doing that for a while. It just helped me to have the noise, even if the crackle of peaked audio substituted washing machine rattling and probably permanently damaged my eardrums at the same time.

In my youthful stupor of not knowing that falling asleep without noise aid wasn't normal for a pre-teen, I found two solutions. One, an anti-anxiety sleep pill that kept me asleep through the whole night; turns out I had undiagnosed anxiety disorders, and that usually doesn't help with the whole "getting a full night's rest" thing. But, two, I also discovered ambient music!

I'll link albums couple below that I especially love. The world of Bandcamp ambient really opened my eyes to the kinds of textures audio can have, the meandering melodies stimulating the mind to colourful dreams. It was a wonderful time... unfortunately mired by the fact that I developed a bit of a discoverer's obsession that would have me stay up for hours past a reasonable bedtime trying to find the perfect soundscape to eventually fall asleep to in thirty seconds.

Now, with my fiance and a CPAP machine that treats my recently-discovered sleep apnea (another condition which also hinders my sleep; go figure), I am able to rest easy without many sleep aids. Although sometimes I wonder if our humidifier and the churn of my CPAP also takes up the mantle of sound to help me slumber.

This long-winded anecdote is to say: I have an acute taste for ambient music and audio texture nowadays. Even at work, I play wordless music that should act as a downer for most people, but it keeps me focused somehow. It's easy to get lost in the scrub-brush of overwhelming tape hiss.

But this becomes an issue when the glacier of strange tastes is met with the small, but still undeterred icebreaker that is "so... what kind of music do you like?" And sure, I listen to more than just ambient music. But it feels a bit like waltzing around a central pillar in my life that many people are often weirded out by, or don't understand enough to engage with me about it. Even some close friends and my fiance I got to listen to an ambient album I discovered recently that shot quickly up to the top of my "best-of" list for 2024. My fiance, after listening said: "I like the album cover." Devastation. And my best friend, after seeing the link said: "I like the font." A killing blow!

I see some memes that are like "don't ever hand the ambient music lover the aux, all they'll play is Disintegration Loops." Funny, I do laugh. But it is difficult to talk about regardless. There's never really an occasion to listen to ambient music with friends (even when I get high), nor do people pay attention to it like I try to. And it's no fault of theirs, most ambient music I feel is tailor-made to melt into the background. But surely there is more attention to give it, more grace to treat it with, beyond the seconds between turning off the bedside lamp and floating away to an unconscious sleep? Oh well. If someone is reading this, send me your favourite ambient albums. Here's some of mine, from listener stater-packs to limited-run cassette tape loops.

Cadaujac Sessions - "Transes Chromatiques"
Bubble Keiki - "Ikebana Online"
days of blue - "Days of Blue"
downstate - "Fragile Glass World"
Forest Kelley - "Silt"
Gates of Siam - "Temple"
Jordan Christoff - "Elements"
Joseph Sannicandro & Jordan Christoff - "Surreal Transit"
K Hein - "Hypoxia Expanded"
Kagami Smile - "Lost Reflection"
Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza - "Rainforest Hill (I+II)"
Mount Shrine - "Homeless Rooms"
Ricky Eat Acid - "Three Love Songs"
Sacha Anocibar Lechêne - "Le Passage"
Seán Ronayne - "Wild Silence"
tarotplane - "Improvisations For Echo Guitar"
Zer0 れい - "OST"

So I'm taking this medication, right... it's a little something for, y'know, ADHD? It, uh, helps me not completely self-sabotage myself and ruin my entire day by listening to video game reviews while playing Balatro instead of doing the dishes. Who knew?

Turns out, not me! It's not a rare story: I was raised in a post-internet world, and unrestricted access to Minecraft longplays turned my brain into hot mush without me or my parents knowing the long-term effects of that kind of exposure. Sure, I read books and did my homework sometimes, when I felt like it, maybe. But I didn't even know what "ADHD" as a condition was until I was about sixteen, and even then it took another five years until I found out that I don't have to just rawdog reality without medical help.

So, some time passes and I'm moving to Canada. I need to stockpile some of these pills in advance since I don't know how long it's going to be until I can renew a prescription with a doctor (and if those doctors need to give their official notarized approval after a third-party psychiatric evaluation, whatever and/or whatnot). Unfortunately, my specific flavour of ADHD requires a specific pill, which if I were to attempt to purchase out-of-pocket, would completely obliterate my savings I had kept for moving expenses. I'm glad my doctor let me know that BEFORE I went to the pharmacy.

So we attempt Plan B then: I'll take a new, different kind of pill that doesn't cost a kajillion dollars. No problem, I have no qualms with the concept. I've taken my fair share of medically-perscribed pills over the years and I'm no stranger to trying new ones by now. Except later I'd find out my partner, who's taken this kind of pill before, specifically says "this pill sucks, don't take it."

I didn't NOT believe it. I'm just one who likes to find out myself. "I like to see for myself / I like to touch it without gloves." And boy howdy, have I been "Finding Out" since I moved and started this new medication... it sucks! At most, I'd equate it to drinking a cup of instant coffee after breakfast. So, like, it kind of does something, I guess? It does something in the way of feeling more awake to be less enthusiastic about doing anything productive. Actually, just like coffee, some days it makes me feel like my brain is about to implode!

I had a lot of plans this year. I made the usual list of stuff for 2024 that I'd want to do. Indeed, I did check off some of those things off the list. Such as: "Build a website" (here we are), "Read two books a month" (I think it averages out to that), and- oh, look here! "Move to Canada!" And I'm certainly proud of what I have done. It's a lot for any one person to move to a new country, let alone do anything else on top of that.

But then I think about all the days I knew I had things I wanted to do, wanted to try, wanted to learn, and went, "...nah, I don't really FEEL like it today..." - knowing how often I did that, how many days I planned to keep on-track, and just... didn't! (Minus rest days. The rest days are sacred, and should be treated as such. I'm not hard on myself about those; more so when I take too many days off.) I'm looking at the list of stuff I didn't check off for this year, like: 1. "Publish a zine" (I'm kind of working on that, sort of), 2. "Journal every day" (I got tired, okay?), and 3. "Work out a minimum of twice a week" (walking everywhere is exercise, surely). I look at this list of stuff and say to myself, "I totally could've done more of this, right?"

And sure, I could have. But all things considered again, I did do a lot this year. I've done a lot of work to not be so pessimistic about my progress. The problem is more so that I need some better habits for work, and maybe my original type of medication again, because I look at how much I was able to do nearly every single day before I moved and I feel envious of that version of me. Not a hustler, just a do-er. Whatever I wanted to do, I just did it a lot of the time. Whatever needed to get done, I got it done without hesitation. Now I have to wrestle myself to remember to move the air purifier out of the bedroom and into the living room in the morning.

I could go further back, but I don't think it's necessary. I don't really mind the fact that I started having better habits late in my life. My younger self was going through it for more reasons than my ADHD. In fact, what would my younger self even do if I was medicated? Play Monster Hunter even later than 1 a.m.? I genuinely do not think I had any concepts, any artists' unique perspective, anything worthwhile to contribute to a portfolio until my twenties (and not because of the pills).

It's more like this: I am back on my old (new?) medication this week, and I am equally grateful and frustrated that I didn't have access to it for this long (nearly six months)! I am frustrated that I felt like I had good life habits that are now dashed on the rocks and in dire need of repair, but grateful that I can rebuild my habits with more fervor than before. Turns out life kind of sucks when I'm not participating in a healthy mindset supported by good habits that help me come closer to the person I want to be!

It's now time for me to put something on digital paper then, etched and officially notarized into internet stone, a promise I make to myself to do something I've always wanted to do, but didn't have a good idea for until now: I'm making a damn comic. For real, no going back. I have characters, I have a concept, I have a theme. A preview can be seen in this very page, and on my portfolio page (note: all things subject to change, this contract is non-binding). It's been so long since I've had a fresh idea that I started to feel like I didn't have an imagination!

So, now I appreciate with a fullness how much progress I've made since I was young and unmedicated, and now know for a fact that I absolutely have ADHD. Now I'm working on the rest of my career as a creative, starting with... blogging, I guess. More illustrations to come I hope. I'm no Moebius (only found out about this guy recently - great stuff!), but I'm not going to come close to skilled artistry until I sit down and do it knowing I love it.

(P.S. Am I repeating myself and a similar sentiment from other blog posts? Probably. What can I say? I have consistent and predictable themes in my life.)

When I was eighteen, one of the things I wanted to do most was to go to an underground gig, just to say I have. I didn't even mind who I would see play, because I was living in Victoria at the time and I knew no band from America (or probably even Canada) would even consider taking a tour detour to an island. So, I was willing to settle for a show - no more, no less.

That's what I told my coworker at the time, because I knew he was In-The-Know for whatever scene was around, because there's always a scene around. He humoured me for whatever reason that I'd rather not contemplate, and told me to bring some extra clothes to wear after our shift one night the following week. It seemed like he was already going to a show, and didn't mind bringing some anxious teenager with him. So I got ready.

I brought a jean jacket to wear over my work shirt, and that was it. We swung by his apartment, where he threw on a leather vest he'd studded by-hand himself, and after he had some bizarre tiff about rent with his partner, we were on our way.

Before we got there, two random guys also on their way who I did not recognize had recognized me: "Hey... you're Liz, right? From █████████ High School? Sick... you're old enough to buy beer, right? Can you run in and buy us some drinks? We're not old enough."

I said no. I immediately knew that this was going to be a shitty night.

The venue wasn't too far from downtown - near the harbor and behind the liquor store in some old, unmarked warehouse. My coworker said "The show hasn't started yet, come with me though; I'm gonna say hi to some friends of mine." He lead me back to the warehouse behind the venue warehouse, where he waltzed in, argued with another guy, handed me a pair of earplugs saying "You'll need these," then sat me on a couch where a metal band was practicing and left me alone.

The band stank, like, literally. They actually played pretty good, or what I assume was good based on the 110+ dB noise rattling my brain while I was sitting right next to them. The green room was covered in stickers and 18+ objects, and the couch was falling apart. I sat there for thirty minutes. I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. I tried to alleviate the awkwardness of being some random kid in the greenroom by saying to the band, after a song I actually liked a lot, "That was a sick song." The lead responded to me, only saying "That song isn't ours." I felt like I was going to implode.

My coworker picked me up after what I could only assume was an eternity in my punk purgatory. He said, "Okay, show's starting." We went to the front where I saw those guys from high school again. I did not say hi to them. We went into the venue. Earlier that night, after repeated anxious questions about who's paying when we got there, my coworker said, "Don't worry, you won't have to bring your wallet, I got you." He then argued with the doorguy saying neither one of us had money, which was a complete lie. I wasn't going to call him out on it unfortunately because I had no spine or wallet. The doorguy, rather irritated, miraculously let us in. I felt awful.

The first set was a harsh noise set. I laughed and cried without anyone hearing me over the volume and stepped out early. Out of some now-alien obligation to not seem rude, I waited outside until the set was over. My coworker was chatting with two other random people, found me over by the dumpster, and the four of us talked while waiting for the next set. One person, what I assume was also out of some obligation to not seem rude, offered me a hit of a crackpipe she pulled out of her jacket pocket. I said no, to which she shrugged it off and took a hit. All my years of listening to "Just Say No" campaigns had all paid off in that moment, which probably says something about the nature of peer pressure campaigns versus reality. Either way, it wasn't funny in the moment, but getting offered actual hard drugs out of the blue like that added some bizarre and dark comedic timing to the already awful night. But I know the offer itself and that woman who offered me a hit were not jokes. What was even less funny was when my coworker's drunken friend in line for the next set, in some bizarre attempt to make me angry, insulted my jacket and limply shoved my shoulder.

I'd never tell my old coworker this if I ever saw him again, but despite how awful that night was overall, I was glad I stayed for the second set, because I walked away from that experience on a positive note. A drummer and guitarist got set up on stage: two women in loose tank-tops who introduced themselves as "Spike Girls from Vancouver." The lead had a curiously soft and kind voice, the only one I'd heard that night. They then played the most killer twenty minute set I will always remember as being one of my favourite experiences of all time, where the lead erupted out with entire lungfuls of screams from somewhere deep in the soul, and my soul felt them in return. I cheered and cried from the back, as every two- to three- minute song came and went, and as the pit circled violently in front of me. It was amazing, and I will always regret not bringing my wallet so I could buy a tape.

Until last Saturday, I never saw another show again. Until last Saturday, I probably never wanted to go to another show again. Until last Saturday, I had no reason to go to another gig. That was, until last Saturday, when my favourite band of all time was playing their very first show in Edmonton.

I can't really tell people "My favourite band of all time is Teen Suicide" for reasons that I feel are self-explanatory, and reasons that are more personal. When asked that infamous question, "What kind of music do you listen to," I usually respond with, "Uhh... electronic?" since saying the words "My favourite band of all time is Teen Suicide" would, assuming, to say the least, leave anyone above twenty-four with some shocked notions of my person and create a rift between any personal or professional relationship we could share. So I don't say that because I hate answering bad reactionary questions, and I can't say something like "I like Sonic Youth" instead because that would be a lie.

There is no one artist on earth who's music I've listened to more than Sam Ray. And though I have less familiarity with her music, I'm now a fan of Kitty as well ever since she joined the band. Even if someone asked me a good, thoughtful question like "Why do you like the band Teen Suicide so much," I realize I would probably come to a dead halt and not know how to respond, because I have a hard time explaining out loud just what this music means to me. Sam Ray has made up a significant portion of my musical diet via many monikers over the past ten years, which feels crazy to say - I've been listening to one guy's music for ten years as of this year - yet I still can't quite put my finger on the magic that captures my attention in each song he's touched.

It almost makes no sense to me that I haven't seen much casual conversation about Sam & Kitty outside of the passing "Have you heard their band name?" because I feel they are some of the greatest musical minds of the times (which is totally not an entirely biased opinion). Yet their names and projects come up in the weirdest places. My fiance, completely unbeknownst and separately from me, also came to find and love Sam Ray's "Ricky Eat Acid" electronica project, which was one of the strange happenings that we bonded over and keep us together now. My best friend from Boston randomly said to me one time that they envy Sam Ray for an extremely funny reason that I won't mention. Hell, I remember that time Sam Ray randomly decided to drop a completely unserious diss track about Will Toledo of the band "Car Seat Headrest," to which Will dropped a completely unserious diss track in kind (and these two tracks were completely bombarded with replies asking "Is this real? Do they actually have beef?" to which I will say: no, probably not, because from what I remember, it was a joke).

So when my fiance and I were standing outside in the cold while waiting for The Starlite Room to open its doors to the public on Friday, January 24th, 2025, and we overheard some teenagers in front of us saying "Like, have you even heard of Teen Suicide before?" I think my fiance and I both felt a certain kind of old. This was an all-ages show of course, and I'd never scoff at a teenager for existing as a teenager. It's more this overwhelming feeling of age came with a sense of growth; seeing a new generation of people love their music at the same age I loved their music. Although, it was jarring seeing parents come with their kids to the show, because I desperately want to know how THAT conversation went. I certainly never could've asked my dad something like "Can you take me (a teenager) to see this emo punk band called Teen Suicide?"

My fiance and I got a good spot on the back balcony because we were pretty early in line. Our expectations were high and so were we. But seeing them play live was fantastic. They played their damn hearts out. I won't try to describe the moment the world melted away, but for fifty minutes, I was in a room with my favourite band of all time playing songs that I listened to for all my life, and it was perfect. They had this self-spoken confidence in playing that oozed off the stage; they were there to have a good time and bring a good time to others, and I received it graciously with hands open. It made sense to me, to be in there in that moment, like there was no other place I could be. They played a lot of old songs, songs about taking pills and feeling lost in a scary world that seems like its against you, songs that I've personally grown out of in the time since I've found them. But they were there, being played and sung, and I was happy to hear them. I was blown away when Kitty sang and yelled with a tongue of fire on a new song, a song she declared was "about a bitch that I hate." These emotions, old and new, flowed through me in a cascade, but the one that I stood there holding tightly to, the one that I walked away with, the one that I touch now when I look at the photos and videos of that night, was joy.

If I had to say what this music means to me, it'd be about the fact that this music from both Sam & Kitty, have been beside me through all my growing pains. An escape from pain some days, a reminder of healing on others. When I was fifteen, I listened to "the same things happening to me all the time, even in my dreams" through dollar-store earbuds in the dark of many late and sleepless nights after my parents' divorce. When I was sixteen, I was listening to "The Body Descends" when I █████████████████████████████. When I was seventeen, I listened to "It's the Big Joyous Celebration, Let's Stir the Honeypot" religiously after I left home to live with friends and away from the pain of a religious household that wasn't my home. When I was eighteen, I listened to all of "i blew on a dandelion and the whole world disappeared" after moving away from Victoria, and away from those now ex-friends, to live abruptly alone in an empty house. When I was twenty, I listened to "am i happy, singing_" on many walks I took to help me realign and meditate after work. When I was twenty-two, I left an unhealthy relationship not knowing if I could ever be happy, and after many visits to the therapists' office, I listened to "honeybee table at the butterfly feast" and still didn't know the answer... but I knew then that I could leave all my baggage behind.

I'm twenty-four now, and I'm doing good. I'm in a good relationship, and I'm building a healthy relationship with my emotions and my work. I feel like I have to write that a lot to reinforce the concept to myself, and it seems to be working. Yet at twenty-four, I went to a Teen Suicide gig. Why? I needed to say thank you to Sam Ray. Not for sharing in my pain, and not for telling me that it was going to be okay - far from it! For all of this music throughout the years, it's made me feel known in a way that has kept me alive, oftentimes in an ephemeral way that I never quite got. Sam Ray has said the band name started out as a bad joke; I never laughed. Teen Suicide so unabashedly, for better or worse, stared the hard, dark, and somber mirror of self-loathing in the face and did not flinch. That act of that lyrical boldness so unafraid to cry and yell and laugh and be laughed at, said to me, "If your life sucks, don't pretend like it doesn't; embrace the pain, because it's part of you now, and you can't run from yourself."

I do not share in the specific experiences of pain that Sam or Kitty have, nor do I desire to; my life is my own, and theirs separate from mine. But what strikes me so much is that these paths and point of pain and experience, so distant and separate from mine, affect me and change me continually throughout my life. The pain and emotions take on new textures, new perspectives, as they pass through foreign hills and valleys. Sometimes the lyrics feel so distant, and other times, it feels like they are being sung somewhere nearby. I don't listen to much pre-2016 Teen Suicide now, if at all, because it is records filled with such drowning depths of illness that it's hard to listen to. Despite this, some distant part of me felt lost down in a similar swamp; a black and muddy hole where I'd listen to Sam sing, behind noise and fog, "Death does not come graceful / What if faith can not save me?" and I'd swallow those bitter words as easily as cough syrup. But I listen to the new album fairly regularly, and a chill passes through me as Kitty sings "On a good day / I do the laundry / I forget my phone for hours but no one calls me;" blunt desperation becoming wistful and vacant.

I have new problems now as an adult, new pains to work with. "I have the mind of a housecat these days I feel / I can barely crawl my way through until six / Taking on new frustrations like tired unsellable homes / Paranoid and ghost-dense / And all the time endlessly dreaming." But I'm not going to be too cynical about them, because I have to be brave and face them head-on. My back hurts all the time, I feel barely employable based on the state of the job market, and I'm trying out new medications at the recommendation of my doctor. But I can't very well run away from those facts, even if the new meds give me headaches. I find this makes me a more content person overall.

On Saturday, I saw my favourite band of all time play some songs about pain, and I faced it head-on (and I got to wear that same jean jacket that I wore six years ago, newly equipped with patches). When all was said and done, and the edibles were wearing off, my fiance and I stepped outside. I saw the band outside too, and my fiance helped hype me up to go say hi because he knew I wanted to. There I was suddenly, that anxious and awkward person I've always been, looking at the exhausted face of a person I have utmost respect for as he and the bandmates awkwardly stared back at me. I managed to stifle out words in the brief silence of interrupted small-talk, and said to Sam, "You played a killer set, and thank you for playing here; you mean the world to me. Can I ask you to sign something for me?"

Maybe I wish I could've said more, or said hi to Kitty after she was done talking to someone else, or recommended them our favourite poutine place that we'd go to after the show, but I couldn't handle being next to their overwhelming presence for very long without coming to anxious tears, and I'd said all I needed to say. Hopefully they can come to Edmonton again; they'd certainly have at least one huge fan buying tickets.

THE SETLIST:

1. [???]
2. Living Proof
3. God
4. everything is fine
5. cop graveyard
6. suicide
7. Spiders [Unreleased]
8. Euphoria
9. dead bird skeleton
10. the same things happening to me all the time, even in my dreams
11. skate witches
12. See the Clown [Unreleased]

My own Bandcamp review of "honeybee table at the butterfly feast":

There is no fantasy in this life. There are no characters on a screen. There are no panes of glass between us. There is no solace in an epilogue to a story. Life marches on and it stomps down hard with its bootheel with every step it takes. It has taken away from me and it will do so again. I don't believe anymore that it'll spare me the time to say my goodbyes before it crushes me flat. I wouldn't have it any other way - I couldn't have it a different way, even if I wanted to.

When I first moved to Edmonton, I was told by many, many locals how cold it was going to be come January. A couple of them exaggerated - "Be ready for when it gets down to -40°C... it's so cold that it froze my doorknob!" A few more told me that it probably wasn't going to be that cold, realistically - "-40°C? Who told you that? Hasn't been that cold since the '90's!" Well, it's February now, and it's the supposed last day of a three-week long cold snap. Every night, it's gotten down to -32°C, and boy, am I hearing about it from all our neighbours who still have old windows..

My fiancé is mostly not a fan, but he survives. He's used to being out on the range during those 110°F Idaho summers, spending the whole day surveying junipers and sage grouse by hiking up and down those dusty dry hills. I, for one, never got used to those Idaho summers; I'd melt like a snow-person when I'd sweat every day sitting next to our busted AC in the bedroom after work. Even those balmy summers on Vancouver Island, where you could never hide under the shade of a tree from the hot humidity in the air, never got terribly hot to the point I'd take refuge by the fan. Yet my fiancé somehow would always come home with a smile on his face under a big hat, and a tan on his arms under thick layers of sunscreen. I still don't know how he does it!.

But these winters up here are unlike what both of us can handle, admittedly. I'd surely thrive in a cooler, wet climate, where I could throw on a light jacket under a stormy drizzle, like by Stanley Park in Vancouver... those days never got too cold, even if my teeth would chatter. But it's not like here. Here in Edmonton, the cold... it surrounds, it suppresses, it probes, it interrogates, it chokes; a claustrophobic cold that will explore every inch of the sacred self trying to find a way in and steal the warmth of one's soul. On our anniversary, when we decided to visit a skating rink during the day, we left the apartment sorely underprepared. A thin scarf couldn't stop a small breeze from stinging my eyes, where tears I'd cry would then stick to my rosy cheeks and freeze to my already fogged-up glasses. When looked at my fiancé not a minute after exiting the building, his beard was already white with frost. Yet somehow he was still smiling through frozen teeth!.

I don't mind this cold too much, at least on the days without wind. For the occasional sunny day we go on the occasional sunny walk around and across the North Saskatchewan river, frozen solid as it is. The sun hangs low over that endless white trail, casting sharp shadows of bridges overhead, while whatever isn't obscured is prone to potholes in the ice where the river peeks out to remind us that it is still there underneath the tarp of packed snow. Besides the trickle of water and the sounds of birds, I'm always delightfully surprised at how quiet this city is. The romantic scene brings a smile to my face that feels good when my cheeks are hot and red..

Even after finishing the zine last month, I'm still thinking about how people manage to live here. Not just the people freezing at the LRT station next to me in ripped jeans, or my friend who bikes to work in a heavy jacket, or even those crazy guys in shorts who run outside instead of on a treadmill; I also look farther north, to indigenous people and inuit tribes who are honest-to-God just straight truckin' it out in the Arctic circle right now. I even look farther back, to the Voyaguers who (often aided by indigenous people, don't get it twisted) were sitting in a canoe straight truckin' it across all of Canada on a river - these same rivers! - to make a living. How have people been here for thousands of years?.

My question is rhetorical, and hopefully doesn't sound like some unknowledgeable and misguided mysticism. I'm learning what I can about the people who have lived here and are still living here, in Edmonton, in Alberta, in Canada, in general, on Turtle Island. It boggles my mind to stand in the snow freezing my butt off and knowing this is somehow someone's element. I'm privileged to have jackets that I just bought from a store, and food that is bought from a store, and a little box that I live in with an electric heater. Sure, I've sewn clothes before, I've been camping before, I've been hunting before, but not in this unyielding cold! How does anyone get anything done? How is there a whole damn city here? Even caribou can handle this better than me, because they're made for this! Who am I to pretend I can do what a caribou can do better, and for so much longer than me?.

A grumpier and more tired part of me rambles on this woeful way every time I come inside with dripping nose and frozen toes. I tear off a thousand layers of cloth to reveal sore muscles and cold bones aching for the relief of a wool blanket. I now realize with acute awareness I did not make that blanket myself. I do not complain.

We met a neighbour in our apartment building a few months ago who, by chance, needed someone to take care of her cat for a few days while she was out of town. The usual list of stuff: "feed the cat twice a day, give her some treats and wet food with dinner, play with her if you can, and pick up whatever she knocked over."

I'd only met her once, my fiance twice. I thought it funny how quickly she trusted us to give us the key and let us nose around in her apartment without supervision. To take care of a precious pet cat in the time she was gone, her angel. Bibi, the black cat with a smoker's voice, greeted us warmly and somehow knew we were there for catering. A big cat; not the biggest cat, but enough to know she was well-fed.

The first day we accidentally fed her dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner as the instructions were penned in the opposite way by accident... which we would've noticed if we paid attention to the big arrows next to the words "DINNER" and "BREAKFAST" on the card our neighbour left on the counter. We let her eat at her own pace, and she let us pet her while she snacked. Refilling the water, then staying for a moment, we eventually said goodbye.

We brought over a string one night to play with her on the carpet. She scrambled around trying to catch this red string of yarn joyfully, as a cat does when on the prowl. Still a good age, about six. Another night, she had puked while we were gone on the part of the entryway carpet runner that's hardest to clean off (of course), the little strings on the short ends. We cleaned up and sat with her to make sure she was okay, and she purred contentedly.

Our neighbour may have miscommunicated about what days we'd be feeding her, or maybe she just spent an extra day out of town. I think one of us misplaced her phone number too, so we just hoped it was fine or that she'd leave a message on her home phone. Either way, she didn't come and pick up the key on the agreed-upon time, so we just made sure to go down and keep Bibi fed until she came back. She happily ate every morning and every night. A soft, yet professional demeanor; what more can be said about a black cat, so intense in her presence, yet so kind in her whole being?

Since then, we've been exchanging baked goods and smiles every week, saying hello to Bibi when we drop off treats to her, and her saying hello to our cats when she brings treats to us. It's a strange kindness... she's elderly and retired, and we're twenty-somethings, a whole river of experience between us. Yet she's a friend to us now, some way, somehow.

I saw her in the lobby one day during the cold snap this last month. She was bundled up and looking outside for her ride to show up, and Bibi was in a nice kennel and meowing with the solemn "mew!" of a cat that doesn't know exactly where they're going to go in this box, but might assume it'll probably be a long ride to a vet clinic. I said hello, and asked if everything was okay. She said "it's Bibi, she's been having some issues lately... I'm worried she's gettin' too fat!" I waved to Bibi and told her not to worry, then stood back up to talk some more to the neighbour. Then she saw her taxi and said goodbye, and probably didn't hear me ask if she needed a hand carrying anything, or just needed someone to come with.

My fiance came home to me a couple days ago, and he said to me with a frown, "I have bad news... if you'd like to hear. Bibi has passed away. Our neighbour said it was something to do with her body filling up with too much excess fluid. There wasn't much to be done." Turns out that time I saw her down in the lobby was the last time I would ever see her.

We stopped by later that night because she had offered to give us the cat toys and the cat tree right away, as well as all the other bits and bobs one needs to take care of a cat. She'd already gathered up all of Bibi's spare things, quickly letting go and passing it on to someone who needed it, to our cats who would love to sit on the wobbly tree and play with the scrunchy butterfly toy.

When we talk to her, our conversations are short, but certainly not curt; they're sweet little chats. Even then, she was quick to chat. But she said to both of us, "give me a hug," and we both gave her a separate embrace. Beyond that, it was private and brief grieving between us. I've had to say goodbye to a cat, a sweetheart, an angel, before. I didn't go into it because I didn't need to, and I think she understood just as well.

Goodbye, Bibi. Rest easy.

Bibi is good
Bibi is loved
Her voice quiet and strong
Her tone firm but loving
With the drawl of the countryside
With the roughness of gravel
Has the tone of a calm night
Has the voice of an angel
Just like her caretaker
Just like her home
And our paths crossed briefly
And our paths split apart
But Bibi was good
But Bibi is gone

Hymn for Anyone.

I have a really bad habit. I've had this really bad habit for at least eight years now, and I'm dealing with the consequences of that bad habit in action eight years after the fact.

There's a Calvin & Hobbes comic I remember reading when I was a kid. Calvin says something like, "what's the point of showering if I'm just going to get dirty again?" I think I might've accidentally taken that sentiment to heart. Well... uh, not the showering part - I swear I shower regularly!

My ex frequently got irritated at me because I'd constantly leave the cabinets open after I grabbed something out of it, and I never noticed I consistently did that until she brought it up to me in a (justifiably) fed-up manner where she asked for an explanation. I paused, thought about it for a minute, then responded, "...I'll probably need something out of the cabinet later anyways, right?" That was my actual response, the response of a complete buffoon.

So, I go to therapy for a while for the sake of bettering my mental health, and identify that I've got some bad habits. Sure, big whoop, most people do. The difficult part is untangling the mess I've made of them now trapped in my neurological centers. I knew I had some bad habits I dislike having, but what exactly are they, and how do I start to change?

My now-fiance said early on in our relationship, after noticing something similar when it came to organizing my things half-assedly, said to me "how come you don't just do it right the first time?" I repositioned, lazily chewing on the idea and spitting out an unfinished thought like, "I dunno, I know where my things are in the mess and it's easier to just throw them somewhere than have a place for everything." I positioned myself perfectly for a rhetorical punisher move on my button-masher's argument, and had my lights subsequently knocked out by his response of "it'd be even easier if there wasn't a mess in the first place!"

In being humbled (and deciding that yeah, having a mess to look at and wallow in every day was probably also terrible for my mental health), I tried to stay on top of things. Forcing myself to have neat little places for everything was torture for my scattered artist's brain. My whole family was the same way too; for example, my mother's art studio was a hurricane of half-finished projects, drafts, paint tubes, palettes, documents, calendars, mailing supplies, framing tools, and so many pencils, yet she always knew where the exact tube of Prussian Blue she needed was. That's an explanation for my bad behavior, sure, I could blame it on my family, but that won't fix anything. I'm the one doing it now and I have to take responsibility for my (and my fiance's) dissatisfaction with this thing I have and do.

I'm no disciple of Marie Kondo, but I am boggled at how much stuff can accumulate if it's not given constant and immediate attention. No number of storage units I've helped clean, no amount of rooms I've decluttered for others, could prepare me for my own crap. The weird thing is that I don't mind cleaning and tidying up for other people, but I have to drag myself kicking and screaming into the kitchen just to wash the wooden utensils in the sink. Right now, as I'm writing this, my eyes occasionally drift down at a little storage organizer with clear drawers staring back at me, and I quickly refocus on the paragraph I'm writing like it's a better thing to do than spending five minutes digging through old cables.

I've got so many of these half-finished and mind-numbing organizational tasks on the backburner. I need to finish making pages for my portfolio on this very website, I need to reorganizing my legal documents, I need to clean out my purse. So many things I know wouldn't really take that long and would be even less effort, and yet I put them off again and again. Every time I throw another document lazily into the back of a binder can be considered a failure of my person.

I'm certain the many people in my life who tell me that I'm overcritical of myself is wholly unrelated to the topic of this post (author's note: this is a joke that's only funny to me). But how could I not be critical of my own behavior when I now look at my old portable hard drive and see "BP\Old_Files\Junk\scans-2015609T232321Z-001-20180129YU904516Z-001-20170317T074631Z-001.zip?"

The crucible of today's blog post was me remembering yesterday that I had some old MP3's I could salvage off of an old hard drive that should've had every file from the past two laptops on it. I was not ready to witness horrors as soon as I delved a single folder down. I'll never post shock content like that anywhere on the internet. A warzone scattered with a mix of corrupted JPGs, unlabeled PDFs, and piles upon piles of AVIFs strew about without thought or care. Lost art projects from high school were hidden behind homework I never finished and Powerpoint slides I never looked at. It was all hazy memory and garbage data. What monster could have done this? The mirror looked back at me and did not answer. I began to clean and re-label as penance for my crime.

I'm going to start a new habit: every time I go on a trip, instead of recounting every excruciating detail in chronological order, I'm going to stake with certainty firstly which vacation detail I found to be the worst, and secondly, which vacation detail I found to be the best.

So, first on the agenda is thus follows - I did NOT get to hold a tarantula. I will now initiate discussion on my lack of tarantula-holding, after which there will NOT be Q&A segment of this presentation.

Oh, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I went on a vacation to Victoria this last week to get some sun and hopefully burn off some clouds of depression in the process. It seems to have worked! It was... surprisingly healing.

When I tell people "oh, yeah, I'm from BC," it's usually followed by, "y'know, Vancouver?" This statement also purposefully neglects much baggage and many complications that surround the pressing question of where I am from, exactly. Technically I'm a New Englander but I don't remember any of it; when I visited my old house out there last Summer, I didn't remember or feel a damn thing - it was all newness (including the cannoli).

Moreover, Vancouver being next in the weighted order of years-lived, makes the statement "I'm from Vancouver" teeter precariously on the border between technicality and lying. What's more is I don't even know if many people would consider the part of town where I lived Vancouver-proper, as I lived in one of the rare districts nearby to the city that did not require a hedge-fund's worth of liquid capital in order to pay rent and be able to eat any amount of food. So, to say my knowledge of Vancouver's food scene boils down to our neighbour who'd sell us home-made smoked salmon may disqualify me for even more reasons based on the standards of the theoretical average Vancouverite.

Next, I hate telling people in Edmonton that "I moved here from Idaho," which is a fairly contentious statement for many reasons, both personal or otherwise. I lost eight years of my life there and I'll be the first to tell you that it's a tarpit where compassion goes to die. My therapist already hears enough of it from me. And no, I will not be hearing any "but Craters of the Moon is beautiful!" lowballs (despite my agreeing), and certainly not any "but grocery and housing prices are better!" rhetoric thrown my way (which is just plainly untrue, by the way, unless you'd want to live in a cardboard box with black mold in it).

So, here is my confession: I am from Victoria. I have finally decided that, after visiting there again after six years, those ten years I spent living there on three separate occasions did mean something to me, if not largely defined who I am and what direction I wish to pursue in life. I also really, desperately, violently, wholeheartedly, miss the taste of fresh west-coast seafood. I'm an islander at heart.

But where I'd lived in Idaho was where my fiance grew up too; he'd stumbled back there to family because of the tarpit of that state, but there's not much to see. The sightseeing and pointing out of his ol' stomping grounds was mostly places like corner stores that somehow never went out of business. or schools where traumatic events happened. So it was a funny thing, being back there in Victoria, to show him the parts that I'd loved and forgotten about for so long until teary eyes saw the familiar colours of alleyway corners, aching fingers felt the rusted and barnacle-encrusted handrails, and weary feet felt the sand, the clay, and the salt-spray of the Pacific Ocean once again. I didn't think much about the Great Basin then, other than dispelling the lie of "hey, it ain't so bad down in the desert" that I told myself to keep sane. Instead, I tended to think about all the good times I had there on the island.

Admittedly though (and this is partially admitting to myself as much as it is a confession to the world), I don't think I'd ever want to live there again, and this last trip really did confirm that feeling. This is what I'd have to tell all the old people in Idaho who'd I mention living in Victoria to, and they'd go "isn't Butchart Gardens just beautiful, and what a beautiful city it is!"

I tell people "Victoria is where Canadians go to die." Like, there's a lot of retirement homes in Oak Bay, and it's kind of weird when you grow up near those retirement homes. People seem happy there; blissfully, ignorantly so. It's so easy to keep quiet near the coast when the waves fill the space with their gentle noise. But I loved them, and I still do. I got to touch the ocean, feel it in-between my toes after so long, right in the place where I first touched the Pacific Ocean. I cried when I did; I'd been waiting six long years.

So, secondly on the docket, wouldn't it be fitting that, for what I do declare to be the best moment of the trip, that my now-fiance would propose to me there by the tidepools? I think so. What a fitting circle to match the one on my finger.

I found peace in those waves gently lapping against stone, the same quiet peace I felt back when I was a child, when I was just an animal. I thought I lost it forever there, but I found it again right where I left it.

When I get home,
I try to think all those happy thoughts.
But when I do,
I just wanna call and tell them to you.

-- lyrics from the song "Take Good Care" by Soft Fangs.

For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Title is a play on lyric from "HOT BURNING STONE" by Jordaan Mason and Their Orchestra.

Art by my wonderful friend and fantastic artist Linen Burrows of The Goblin Burrows (@thegoblinburrows.gay)

A private moment. A quiet full of uncertainty; completely unsure of the nature of the words I write, sharing them openly, publicly, but really to no one soul in particular. No names come to mind and no faces appear in my peripheral vision as I write today. I am empty but not hollow - like a stream appearing out of nowhere, trickling in-between dry rocks, strange words emerge as the temperature rises, unexpectedly, unknown but refreshing, returned; not as if they were lost or gone or in drought, but instead a pleasant surprise of their coming without expectation of when they'd come flowing again. The glacier melts and new feelings - new responsibilities - arise with the changing of the seasons and exchanging of the keys between them. A clock turns but no numbers are borne on its face; just weathered marks where the implications of touch, of hands, may have once been.

I have to remind myself many days that, though patterns arise as the cosmic clock shifts alongside the internal, historical one, that they move at different paces wholly separate from one another. They may appear as though one may affect the other and vice-versa, that opposite is not quite true. There is no concise pattern to my life in the cosmic sense - not one that can be measured out with needles and compasses and barometers and weather-vanes, but one that is constantly defined only by the words I know and cling to so dearly, always so readily and excitedly waiting for the next moment I am able to stick them cleanly onto the things I see. That utterly human folly of wanting to define with shape and labels what is messy, unknowable, unbound, untethered to any singular definable experience, real, alive.

I try not to cage my thoughts with too many definitions and names nowadays. I feel it clogs the heart to do so; it bears it down from flying free and reaching new heights of fleeting feeling with its grievous weight and confused corridors of semantics. And though I love to play openly with semantics (especially with others), I've lost my taste for them when I am alone. Semantics I feel are most useful when trying to understand the unknowable life of another, bridging the gap with language what cannot be felt with warm breath, laughter, tears, and song. But language does so alone, being a last resort, even as it is used so liberally.

The infinite resource of words and its plethora of the implications of knowledge still cannot completely describe the space between bodies. The sharp and distinct moments, the existential times when there is no time, only experience. The moments where, for a brief but infinitely long period, where someone's eyes glint with nature, with the distilled essence of their being. It's my folly, then, that when I know those moments come to me so briefly, that sometimes instead of cherishing these moments for revealing this individuality that I always try to find, so desperately clawing at it like a starved animal, in all things and all doings, for its oneness comparative to anything and everything, gratified that I was able to glance at that holy light so bright for but a moment that it could blind me, that I instead all at once resort to the hubris of trying to define myself within or contrast myself against that individuality when I come so close to it, like I am afraid and unsure of my own. Or maybe, that I cherish the individuality of the momentary nature of the reveal itself more than the individual nature of the people and things and life so singular and unknowable in depth and emotion that is found within the moment itself.

I ramble. I ramble on and on with words about what I know surrounds me, surrounds all of us, and is the constant state of the world itself to be filled with life yet I fill it with words instead. Then I think I may attempt to use words to define words too. Do I treat them like dead things, things that have passed, things that stand like tall dark graves on top of experiences that would have returned to the earth naturally had not that heavy slab been placed over them, saying "here lies a life that once was, but now stands unchanging?" Or should they also be treated like living things, running free from us as they escape our mouths, beautiful that they were said and returned from our minds and into the air once more? Do the words lay dead when they reach the page, when they are read by others? And do the experiences we share lay dead when they are painted with the language so unable to reach the exact point we are trying to make with them, making ghosts that wander the halls in circular thought, trapped, unresolved, unable to change? Or are they free in tandem with one another, in their changing, in their meaning?

Maybe I ask myself these questions because I am so unsure of myself. If there's one thing I now know, in contrasting myself and in being told directly by many people whose opinions of me and my doings are so valuable to me, is that I am unsure of myself. I question myself and my internal world more than I question the world around me. I suppose that's the result of formative years spent not having a self or sense of self thereof, is much ado about nothing (at least nothing worthwhile and nothing real in the literal sense, though maybe more or less so in the metaphorical and philosophical sense). Call it dysmorphia, call it stunted growth, call it trauma, call it whatever one wants. I'm tired of calling it anything at all. I'm tired of calling it and recalling it, trying to paint pictures of scenes from a movie I saw only once and couldn't let go of. The picture degrades and I forget it freely. But maybe it's not enough; I needed new things to feel, to cherish them and forget them all the same. "Dead memories and the colour of grief / won't you help us to make it real?"

I was warned of all this. And I didn't listen.
Didn't listen.
I caught a glimpse of myself. And I fell right in.
I fell right in.
The earth fell out from under me.

A wildfire - a single spark grows into something bright and catastrophic at the same time. It consumes everything in the landscape, coming quietly, then all at once, changing the nature of the land at all once. It roars with fury, it strikes fear, it is all-encompassing, often inescapable before its too late. It never comes expectedly. And it never ends expectedly either; sometimes the sparks and smoke catch currents on the wind and travel to far horizons to burn even brighter, clearing out the built-up fuels and dead brush that needed to go, destined to be forgotten, to be given back to time, to the earth, to the air, in flame. Other times it fizzles out as quickly as it comes with torrential rain, or maybe it stays just a little longer, burning underneath the black ash and remains. But always, it is singular. There's no room for anything but the one fire, in its awe-inspiring heat and power, only to be seen once when spark and fuel meet together in harmful harmony with one another.

And then when it's gone, there is nothing. Nothing left of what was old remains in definable shape, or can be salvaged. But all is not lost. What remains is fertile soil to regrow another, stronger, new forest, new prairie, new range, grown gratefully though slowly from the old growth which is now gone. And maybe, when everything is regrown, when the flowers bloom and the trees gnarl with age, when the grasses grow long and dry and reaches towards the sky maybe out of some desire to touch the burning sun and feel its infinite warmth and kindness and gift of life, a new fire will come and do it all over again. This terrifying nature. Uncontrollable. Necessary. Beautiful. Free.

This is my first pride month being "out" in any public fashion, both outdoors and online, even as little as I do try not to draw too much attention to this fact. Even as factual as the origins of capital-P "Pride" are as a queer protest and resistance movement, I'm still learning what pride means to me. Like, I'm suppose I'm demisexual (only recently decided on that label), and I'm trans. Even on this personal web domain though, I'm pretty hesitant to declare these things as facts out loud. Really, I'm just not one who feels the need to declare it to the world. It's a fact that I exist and people will either take it or leave it, but that doesn't change the fact that I do exist and exist in this manner of being regardless of if I say this truth to others or not. To me, truths can exist inside of us as much as they can exist in the space between us when we communicate them to each other.

I'm fairly content with the labels, though I try not to sweat the specifics too much as identities and preferences can be exceptionally fluid as people (myself included) are ever-changing, and that's a beautiful thing. I've been on HRT for nearly two years now, which I'm incredibly lucky to have been able to start and continue to do. Having started has made a part of me feel contentedness, and my ability to see myself in the mirror has been returned to me as I picture myself in this feminine body that I have now, and have always had in an internal sense. I have always been a femme nonbinary in some manner or another, and I know that because I remember back to every time I would pick to play as the robot character in a video game because they were genderless, and I identified with that lack of strict identity. I wish everyone in the world to be able to have this option, this choice, available to them - to express and change, with love, with support without bonds, without social stigma.

I recently read a poignant thought-piece by John Paul Brammer titled "Low-Risk Flier (On bureaucracy, and confronting my inner fascist)." The parts below I've been chewing on it for the past week:

I am in a state of constant, vigilant self-surveillance, an instinct I developed early in life while attending a Catholic elementary school and then while being a latent homosexual in a rural middle school [...] my hostile environment taught me the virtues of stealth, and to adapt I became a human tuning fork capable of detecting threats that most people wouldn't register. This paranoia over my every little action kept me from slipping up, and thus, from the hammer coming down on me as it had in the past. A similar defense mechanism can be found in incredibly skittish prey animals, such as rabbits and deer, and in recently abused dogs. [...]

One might imagine such negative experiences with authority would engender nothing but antagonism toward it, that the lesson learned would be to say, Fuck what other people think, I'm going to be myself! / rainbow flag emoji. I don't want to discount my multitudes. I do sometimes feel this way, and my political views trend in that direction. But whenever I find myself in situations like “getting Global Entry,” my deep programming kicks in and I find myself firmly on the side of the machine [...] After many years of obsessive self-censorship, there's a significant part of me that loathes people who don't share my extreme sensitivity to the space around me...

I find that I'm not nearly on the same level of internal, unexpressed loathing as described by Brammer, but there still remains two facts: I did once feel this way too, and my conformist programming remains despite the emotional violence being largely dispelled in my active mind. This takes, at best, the form of emotional and conversational reservation; at worst, a complete unspoken distrust of my fellow person.

The long and short of it was I ended up stuck in rural, Christian, bigoted America for a long time (starting in late 2015 - terrible timing), much longer than I wanted or could bear, and I frequently am baffled that I somehow made it back to Canada after all that time (which I could not do without my partner who was more than willing to leave for those same adjectives). Pretty early on living there, at age sixteen, I had a secret fling with a guy I loved so very much. The first guy who took me and my homosexual flirtations seriously - he did not hide behind crassness, cheap jokes or slurs when I wanted to bond in those delicate ways that I needed so badly - yet, with punch and drive for love in the late-night summer heat, he matched my desires equally. He freed me, untying the first of many knots my brain had gotten tangled and tied into at the hands of those who I later found out did not have my best interests in mind. We had kissed and held hands in private yards at night, in alleyways in the day, in the quiet places where maybe we believed that no one could see the beautiful sprout we were growing together. He didn't feel the secrecy necessary; we often argued that he wanted to show my love off publicly, to the world, to show off and tell 'em all to fuck off because were making merry in spite of their miserable selves and violent projections. But I had my reasons to be paranoid, so I looked over his shoulder every time we kissed. I'm not sure he looked over mine.

This guy was so unabashedly and openly gay, that by mere proxy of being around him so damn much and loving the shit out of him, I eventually felt confident enough to come out to my Christian family after having dated him nearly all summer. But this was not before going to the hospital sick with stress and wracked with a self-flagellent concept in my mind that if I punished myself before they could punish me (and I fully expected the hammer to come down), that maybe they'd soften the blow out of pity that I'd already done half the job for them. But this only made it worse when I finally said 'fuck it' and decided the hammer would hurt less than not living truthfully and publicly.

Telling them right after a two-week hospital trip was probably bad timing on my part, but to be fair, I did wait until dinner that night when I was feeling happy and confident. That was dashed on the rocks. I nearly didn't make it home that night, and I fully expected to not have a home to go back to by the morning. Right before things entered the "throwing shit at my head" portion of the meltdown, I snuck out a window and called my very queer best friend at the time whom I trusted plenty and was also previously informed that this guy and I were dating. This best friend later became my now-partner, but this would only happen after one very long night, and many terrible nights over many terrible years filled with many terrible breakdowns.

I had already been (technically) homeless before this for about a year in Canada, surfing on couches and whatnot with only really a backpack to my name until I managed to get some of my stuff out of a storage locker and got temporary housing with my mother. (Trust me, I know it sounds confusing.) But now, after having lived in a semi-permanant place for about a year, my mother was now threatening to kick me out which would make me homeless again, except this time it wasn't someone else's fault - it was made to feel like it was my fault. Like being gay is just a phase, like crying was just lying, and like cutting was just begging for attention, and all this pain and punishment could've been avoided if I simply shut the fuck up about what I wanted out of life and made things easier for people who were apparently burdened with my being their child and their being my caretaker. These actions of mine - actions of trust, unashamed of my realistic desire for love - were interpreted and flipped back onto my head as acting out, a reflex of my manipulative muscle I enacted in order to hurt those who told me they "just wanted what was best for me" and in doing so, attempted to make it seem as though they were saints who could do no wrong and I was the devil defying their holy word. This was the lie: "just conform, and it'll make things hurt a lot less for everyone." I'd only find out this was a fucked-up fascist lie and how fucked-up this fascist lie is, made to crush my spirit and offload the blame on the victim, much later after years of adult therapy (and not with any help from the Mormon conversion therapist I was sent off to). But I wouldn't find this out until after being so desperate to avoid so many more almost-guaranteed years of homelessness that rather than let myself be crushed under the boot, I did what they wanted and conformed. I shut the fuck up and I conformed. I broke up with this guy and conformed. I ghosted my best friend and conformed. I went back in the closet and lied out my ass about whether or not I still liked men (including to myself), and conformed. The threat worked because I was vulnerable, and they knew it. I was afraid of what could be done to me. I just wish I'd been able to take my best friend's offer to stay with him at his place a little more seriously instead of going back in the closet... but I'm not going to pretend like I was in my right-mind to make a good decision like that with such weight behind it - I was sixteen and had nothing else. And as much as I wanted to say "our love will get us through no matter what," it was the three of us versus a town of ten-thousand bigots who watched my every move, open-carried at the Walmart, and knew my name and could find any address I stayed at if they sent enough missionaries to prowl the neighbourhood.

I've never had the chance to not be seen, even since I was young, even long before I officially came out. Where I was once a lanky six-foot-seven-inch tall teenager, I am now a six-foot-seven-inch tall trans woman with small boobs and broad shoulders who doesn't put on makeup because I'm too lazy. I'm hard to miss. It's difficult for me not to be perceived in some capacity, one way or another. It's a double-edged sword: where I do like to be noticed (and have even learned to take a compliment), I've been subjected to countless questioning and explaining myself my whole life on the other end, albeit stupid questions like "do you play basketball" or "what do you drink to get that tall?" But for all these banal lines of questioning, I often do not feel seen as a person. I am a novelty, even more so maybe as a trans woman. I mean, hell, I'll take being called a "tall, young lady" by a man old enough to be my father over a "tall, handsome ███" by my actual father any damn day of the week, even if both are ostensibly disturbing to me if I think about it too hard. But this is rarely about the compliment itself: enough of these quick comments from strangers is enough to feel like I am clumsy prey for anyone watching. Often I feel the prompt of my height bounces the more uncomfortable questions off this armor in favour of a "how's the weather up there;" regardless, sometimes I feel like I not only expose myself, but others who go out with me to become subject to some rather different uncomfortable comments on top of the usual ones women who go outside receive unprompted and unwarranted from men exercising power in their general direction. My being tall can only go so far to protect me with my projection.

Lily Alexandre has a lot of great videos. All of them are deeply uncomfortable to me in how much her writing so solemnly but unreservedly prods at these unconscious and unexplored fears and anxieties - subconscious beliefs and remnants of fascist frameworks - that I believe even the most determined and well-meaning of queer people may have, but are unsure of how to approach the topic so keep them tucked quietly under the rainbow flag so as not to spoil the fun. (This is me calling myself out, mostly.) Her video "Transition Regret & the Fascism of Endings" came shortly to me after I started HRT, and I think back on how it helped me confront why I'd been made to feel like it was such a big deal and ordeal, when it's really not, despite the most difficult pill that I may never "pass" simply because I am tall. But more particularly lately, I've been constantly thinking on her latest video, "Trans Day of Vanishing" (originally titled "Notes on Vanishing"). This video is, I feel, a very necessary watch for the times. One sitting, all the way through, no 2x speed, completely sober. Take it to heart, let yourself hear the painful words with the joyous ones. You may not agree with them all, and I don't, but Alexandre feels like she is addressing a crowd of individuals who need to hear it. I certainly did. Even in Canada, there is tension in the air; like acceptance is a state of just barely floating above the edge of complete collapse at a twitch reaction.

I don't think it's a failure of public messaging, either - activists being "too extreme" or "confrontational." Actually, I think trans people expend a ton of effort trying to explain ourselves to the public. So many of us spend time forging connections with people who don't get it, debunking myths, getting really personal about the details of our lives. [...] So, I really can't stand for this claim that we were "too harsh." Most of us are actually exceptionally patient. If anything, the limiting factor is that we aren't being heard. [...]

My point is that the odds are stacked against us. That's not new information, is it? If anything, it just makes it more tempting to go underground in some way.

This year is one where I'm sure many individuals have had a comforting illusion of generalized acceptance come crashing down into a million shattered rainbow-iridescent pieces at the hands of fascists in positions of power. These fascists who, having graciously been given the red-carpet treatment to the tune of millions of disillusioned people who, are either simply apathetic to the infinite value of any other life that is not their own, or are more than willing to throw any and all merrymakers into the human sausage-grinder of State power in hopes that the economic gods will bestow them with their promised land of sterile white gold.

For a long time for me, conformity equaled safety. But I understand something better now, for the six years I was back in the closet, considering trying to move out of town but not quite having enough money to commit completely to the notion: the surveillance doesn't stop whether you conform or not, and the need for freedom certainly doesn't stop either. By the time I finally realized in 2022 that, after kicking the idea down the road for nearly three years, I not only still loved men but needed to transition as well, I had to really sit down and accept to myself whether it was an option for me weighed against the potential risk of my safety. The scale tipped more and more in the way of coming out of the closet again with every breakdown, with every argument with my (now ex-) girlfriend, with my family, with myself. At a certain point, I couldn't bear myself; I'd rather be miserable and gay than just miserable. I looked in the mirror and saw it clearly: a life that was not mine, a person I did not make, draped over where my soul should be standing. Then, I realized a gigantic lie of what my life should look like - be a patriarch, have a family, work with people you hate until you die - was built up around me in the shape of a person who the fascists stuffed over me like a cheap bodysuit, and was not for me, but for a fascist framework of ideals built like a massive decaying playset that our humanity gets caught inside of, bumping and scraping knees on rusty pipes and nails where they get infected and rot away. Hear this truth spoken out loud: conformity equals slavery equals death.

Despite all these revelations, I still have this sense of "be a little more quiet about being queer and you'll survive unscathed." I believe I must have picked up this notion when my sibling came out as bisexual to my mother long before I even considered kissing boys as an option for myself, and what shocked and confused me was the vitriol with which my mother refused to understand. She was actively choosing to make my sibling's life worse by way of toxic ramblings behind closed doors and refusal to help with bills, for having been admitted a truth by my sibling to a parent in good trust and faith that could not be kept secret any longer. So I kept quiet when I had similar considerations, well through into adulthood. Like if I rattle the bars of my cage, it'll just serve to tire me out more, and give the prison warden more excuses to work with should they choose to end my sentence prematurely with a swift kick in the head. But at a certain point, is this not something that defeats the point of Pride completely? Being quiet and taking the abuse in hopes that one day better will come eventually is a notion for the privileged people who don't have to deal with the whippings. Stonewall (and many other queer liberation movements throughout history) happened because they were sick of all that shit, these idea you should just be happy with the cage you were given, and sick notions that it's matter-of-fact that the queers should get the boot for the crime of existing.

There is nothing to lose but your chains down there in the cage. Stonewall and Pride is a monument to this truth. I truly believe in these fascist-colonial states we find ourselves in that individual people are afraid to lose what little they have because they are given just enough of a taste of wealth, a hint and vague gesture at the nectar of plenty, that they could lose something more than their bonds and possibly their lives for resisting. The promise of heaven is so sickeningly sweet that I'm sure I could still find its faint stains on the shirt collars of the most well-meaning of people whom I know personally; I have before, and I will do so again. They take just a taste as a "just-in-case," or to be able to show the others that they know the taste, like there is a future to be hoped for beyond the four walls of this man-made prison. An "oh, well it's not so bad attitude" that says the warden will bestow to those who drink the swill and listen closely to the directions that we can all be free, someday. But I won't buy it. I realize I don't need the keys to the kingdom when I could shake the gates of hell until we're free. I'm just not at the point in my life where I've truly worked up the courage to shake the gate myself. I've been burned, but biding my time until I've healed only feels right up to a point, up until I feel I should be ready to yell at protests and get pushed around by cops... but I'm not. Instead I sit and think privately and quietly to myself how nice the thought is.

Maybe I just envy those who were able to cling onto a comforting illusion, no matter how small. But I take no joy in watching it break either. Just because I never had this illusion does not mean I am so quick to rejoice in the pain of others; all it means is that there is work to be done. I vehemently do not like to apply the popular internet term "egg" in relation to my trans experience, and I am especially reactive and resistant to those who try and apply it retroactively in my stead. For those who like the term: great, I'm glad, genuinely glad. It's not for me though. I'd describe my trans experience more with another small anecdote - when I was young, like three or four years old, I used to so freely play flash games on Barbie websites (this is serious). Maybe my parents didn't really notice or didn't really care, but I would play as interchangeably with my sibling's dolls and on the Barbie website as with my toy trains and dinosaurs. But the more and more time went by, no matter how many Hot Wheels race cars with flames on them my parents bought me, I was more interested in Webkins and dressing up on Club Penguin. Then they wanted me to join the baseball team, but I only liked going to baseball because Jeremy was also on the baseball team and it'd mean we'd get to hang out on the hill by the baseball diamond, to talk about Rocky and Bullwinkle together while chewing Dubble-Bubble and reading the comics on the wrappers. I truly stopped enjoying going to baseball games when they expected me to play seriously and stop puttering around - man up and get serious - which meant I got to hang out with Jeremy less and less. I'm glad I was able to stop going to practices.

I'm not sure if there was an exact moment where my escapades into the lighthearted and carefree were expected to end - maybe when my dad tried putting me on the football team and cussing me out in the car that I was quite literally picking flowers by myself instead of ramming into other sweaty boys (where I'm sure there was no sexual tension whatsoever to be expected or had), or maybe when I wanted to sit and drink hot chocolate in the quiet snow with the other boy scouts at those winter church camps rather than help compete with the other dads and their sons by putting up our tent the fastest - but I had come to find out that, when the moment came when I wanted to express young homosexual love and joy freely, moving a step beyond fleeting fun into wanting something more serious with touch and kisses, that a chain had been draped around my neck in secret that could be made taut at any moment I misbehaved. I was never an egg that needed cracked - I was a bird who once looked to the open sky, now stuffed in a cage without my knowing just when I was ready to spread my wings.

Maybe I fall into these exact same trappings again and again when I try to "play it down" in front of people in positions of power who get to decide passively how much my life sucks. This has happened before, and it's a song-and-dance I'd become all too familiar with while in the closet. Don't express too much allyship, don't be too adamant with my morals, don't express too much discontentedness with my abuse, because word will get around if I make too much noise. The margin of life-suckage is based on what kind of employment, housing, or social benefits I can get (if any) comparative to how much they see me as some sort of aberration, a problem by default, a radical and a risk to let slide. But the truth is that individuals under the allure of State power only let me keep on living because they are doing that cost-benefit analysis on my head any and every time they see these aberrant adjectives tied to my identity on the side - I already have "tall" tacked onto that list by default, so that applies an abnormalcy multiplier to every subsequent adjective; "Straight-passing" brings down the heat, but "trans" is going to cost more than "cis." I have to think to myself, in all my distrust knowing I am so visible, every time I see the moment I get the oh, you're one of them transes look at a job interview, if I lept into their mind palace right now, are they trying to weigh my life with all its potential HR issues against those diversity brownie points they could get for hiring me, one of them transes - weighing, will "simply killing 'em all and being done with it already" cost more than my HRT?

So what even is my point with all this? I'm weaving this rich tapestry to understand, that if the word "pride" does not mean simply "being seen," then what does it mean to me? It means being heard, it means being listened to, it means being understood and believed when I say "I am vulnerable, I am a real person whose identity is real, and I need help." It's telling others they're not alone, it's loving ourselves unabashedly and unashamedly, it's standing up for life, it's boosting the ego at least a little bit because what's a person without it really? It's being proud that I'm alive, and I am alive without having to ask for permission to do so, because all of us are not alive at the hands of any State - we are alive regardless, and will continue to be no matter how much the fascists see us as weeds sticking it out in the cracked concrete, because we are not; we are flesh and blood and real individuals with a desire for love to give and receive. It's for every gay couple struggling to pay rent for their shared studio apartment in the city, it's for every homeless trans person who won't ever crawl back to a family that doesn't love them when the going gets tough, it's for everyone who is two-spirit trying to even be fucking heard in the noise of it all. Pride is not a privilege bestowed upon us, it is a showcase of clawing back our inherent humanity from those who seek to deprive us from it. Because all of us are here, with a voice, and it can be a loud voice if we let it be.

I have a cynical pessimist in me that I try to ignore, but I need to feed it sometimes, and it needs to vomit back onto the webpage other times. I want to feed the starved optimist in me, though. The one that still believes in the power of community and inherent good-nature in most individuals who do genuinely want the best for me. All this writing above makes it seem like my dating a man and transitioning were all public displays of woe, but frankly, when I moved back to Canada I was fairly certain that it would be so much less of a big deal. I've gotten misgendered a couple times, sure, and I've gotten a couple awkward and stilted but well-meaning "she's" in my time, but largely my feminine identity presents as fact to many and so does my love for men. It's just a fact of who I am, like my being tall.

So I have only ever remembered two comments I've gotten about being tall. The first was a few years back, where an old woman looked at me up-and-down at work, long and hard with a sharp eye, until breaking the silence prominently declaring "you look like you could hunt geese with a rake." I laughed my fucking ass off at that one, it was genuinely great. The other was more recently, a handful of months ago, where I was about to exit my apartment building. I'll just put in a large portion of my diary entry from that day here below:

I am not my mother's ███. But God, do I wish I were her daughter. I wish she could accept me. But despite this, I can move on and heal knowing that there are mothers who do treat their daughters with love. The sanity, the respect, the love I feel from passing strangers is more than I've ever felt in Idaho. It feels good, and I don't want to sour that feeling too much.

Some woman, ████, flagged me down in the lobby this afternoon. She said she loves how tall I am. Not a new comment, but what came after was the new part. She said something after I said "thank you" along the lines of "no, really, I do love it - you're tall, just like my daughter; you remind me of my daughter."

It switched something on in my brain. I felt feminine. I immediately felt like I could respond, truly and honestly, femininely. Like I didn't have to pretend, consciously or subconsciously. She treated me not just like a person, but as a woman, and a real woman with feelings and thoughts. She complained to me about not feeling like she could find good places to shop for her daughter, to support her in her needs as a tall person. I came off with an admittedly bougie answer of "I'm not sure where to shop either, you gotta get stuff from a local tailor when you're like me!" We talked a short while more, and we said our names, said "have a nice day," and waved goodbye.

Sometimes I do feel bad that I forget to say "genuinely, thank you so much" more than I do. I don't even try to play it off cool, like I'm "sane" and bottle up feelings even, I really just don't even think about how impactful these moments are until the conversation is ended and I begin to ponder in my mind as I walk down the street. I am so grateful for her, for that experience. It was wonderful. I know it was genuine; she seriously stopped having a conversation with three other people just to talk to me, to see me. She talked about her daughter as someone she really loves as a parent, and because of her experience in life, she was able to see me too and know me in some way. I felt seen. I didn't feel invisible. I felt human. I felt loved by others, in some reflective way at least. I've seen her a couple times talking to others around the building. I wonder if it'd be weird to say "thank you" again; I hope it wouldn't be.

I walked to the grocery store and felt like crying joyful tears, albeit small ones. Just enough to recognize, just enough to solidify the feeling that I can hold my head a little higher, to be treated as an equal by people that surround me every day. To be treated with kindness, even in brevity. That's all I want.

In my inability to know when best to wrap it up and send it off, I will leave my optimist with one more word of determination to keep hold of. Unma Azoua, lesbian activist originally from Nigeria, is quoted below also from "Trans Day of Vanishing" with more poignant and succinct words than I could produce about all this dismay that feels so difficult to cut through:

In fact, despite the constant attacks that we get, we try as much as possible to stay out of the public eye considering that our lives are criminalized. Nevertheless, some of us are visible as a way to humanize our lives and the lives of our kindreds. Visibility also helps us let those of us who are in the closet know that they are not alone. [...]

Who would have thought it would come to this? However, I don't think the trans community should go underground. I'm not saying that they should not be cautious and safe - they need to be more careful, especially now. But disappearing should never be the answer. They should be themselves, be protective of themselves, be more vigilant about the spaces they navigate. But they need to stay fighting. [...]

There were times the queer community in Nigeria had to go underground due to constant attacks and threats and we had to go underground to let the storm pass, so to say. But in the case of North America, the trans community have always had the space and the presence, so they should not give it away. Caution, however, should be the key word; disappearing, vanishing, should not be an option to consider.

I hold onto this in truth. Keep safe. Keep sane.
When the storm passes,
When the tides lower,
When the stars shine,
I will see you again.

And to all my fellow queer people, know this: one day I may join you in posting very explicitly horny thirst traps online for strangers to see and gawk at. But that day is not today. Maybe next pride month, when I get another year in therapy, make a couple more friends, and feel like I can boast a little more about myself. This year though, know that I fully support you from the sidelines. I appreciate your being there nonetheless. Happy Pride Month.

P.S. As I write this, I'm not sure if I'm going to post it anywhere online. I write this end-piece in the middle, where at the start I set out to write a blog post on the subject of my feelings towards pride as a matter of my internal set of values, I now realize the thing I am currently writing is a lot to stomach all at once. In an attempt to make this all more digestible, I originally wanted to make all these complicated notions of personal optics into my first short-form comic. So, uh, spoilers, I guess. I realized CRUSADE is ballooning into a much larger concept than I could account for a graphic novel at first, and though aiming high is great and all, I feel I should start with something much more emotionally prevalent with a much smaller scope first. So instead, I'll be working on DOLLHOUSE, which will be out sometime later this year, in some form, I hope. If I can just keep spinning these plates- ...oh, shit! Oh god, they're falling!

Some good friends of mine have suggested getting a book club up and running. My partner suggested something similar in the previous months - admittedly less a book "club" and more just both of us listening to the same audiobook while his work season separated us physically - so we could talk about something perhaps more intellectually stimulating than his terrible emotional dilemmas about work and my terrible physical dilemmas about moving while he was gone. This wouldn't ever come to fruition just due to how our schedules and emotional capacities panned out terribly, but it was something I still wanted to pursue - reading for fun, discussing for stimulation, and finding common ground in new perspective other than my own. So I've been quick to cling to this concept of a new book club, hopefully with some more people I don't see as often.

I'm still working on branching out here. Fuck, it is difficult though. I think I finally fell in love with this city, looking out from the bedroom window of the new place, seeing the lights of little cars scuttle across the one-way bridge and into the city like the beetles I always imagine them as from this high up. It's a nice view - a surprisingly nice one for the deal we got on the lease. On a slight hill, high up, facing the valley so as to draw the eye rolling down to the river. I used to only be able to see the valley at the old place if I stuck my head out from the balcony, looking beyond the main artery downtown into a sliver of the bend. I suppose I miss that balcony now. It was protected, at least - not from the smells of the bistro or the smells of the smokers, but at least from the elements. The only thing I don't like about the new place is that its balcony is unprotected and the wind frequently whips through it, wreaking havoc upon any and all potted plants that have the misfortune of being left out during a rolling thunderstorm. Can't have everything I guess. That's fine - the new place finally feels like home. Helps to have a management that doesn't terrorize its tenants with every possible injunction imaginable.

But even if I have the posters up now, I don't have many people to share the space with. It seems many of the tenants of this new building are college-aged, sure, but a lot of them on our floor seem to be... well, well-established. Comes with having things to do, places to be - at the very least I imagine some of them have been "local" for a while longer than I have. I suppose we're not yet ready as a society to have co-op housing and living quarters as a commonality, so for now, we must knock on doors bearing gifts in hopes of gaining entry to each others' private quarters just to see another face and grab a coffee with them some time. Reluctant or not, such is the nature of the beast - our selves are locked behind doors, normalcy of the other near us to be damned. The agoraphobic's mantra.

I traded one for the other. Unappreciative of what I had while I was healing early on in my current relationship led me to believe that the visual public of the cityscape would lend itself to a more social self. In a sense it has been nicer to gain my "being fine with being perceived" muscle back (after all, everyone else does it - it came free with my existence). But I surprisingly have begun to miss my old rickety Idaho home - not the should-have-been-temporary lean-to with no insulation, but the one I learned to love in with my fiance. Admittedly there was hardly much insulation in that one either, but it was home. It was probably the most "home" I've been in.

Yet I subjected myself to moving again, even if yes, I needed to. I willingly walked away from it all. I needed to live otherwise, taking steps towards... something grander. Something "other than this" back then. I knew I'd have to try and fall in love with a new city all over again, as I've been doing time and time again my whole life, even if the repeated act still does not lend to it being any less of a tumultuous task. Though it is not passionless, it can be droll. Walking through unrecognizable streets and wading through crowds of unrecognizable people to find whatever chair is somehow unoccupied. I find that typically, those empty spots are found between groups - a single chair between a line of old pals sharing popcorn and spilling beers. It ain't the best spot, but it's been where I find myself most often. I think when I was younger I would often flip-flop between loving the isolational comforts of self, to loathing the feeling (or maybe loathing the facsimile of fact) that I would become relegated to the cracks of the social body out of sheer neglect. But it comes with challenges regardless, whether I decide to get comfortable in my single-seat knowing that I could leave at any moment without obligation, or try and loosen up to resisting those formalities, instead tethering myself to the society that surrounds us all in some capacity by becoming a local too.

I needed to become more involved with people this year. I'd seriously would go crazy otherwise, and that's not an exaggeration by any stretch. I sincerely mean it - in January, I was baking black-bottom cupcakes like crazy just throwing them at apartment building neighbours in hopes they'd return the favour. The baking itself kept me going even if I fucked 'em up a few times, and I'd always get a treat out of it at least. Spending time hand-writing corny jokes on post-it notes with the allergens included to let people know I put in the damn work and gave them some damn consideration. It meant something to me and in doing so, I hoped it meant something to them. And it worked, kind of. I got a couple hits. A pretty lucky one, too. Life has been unkind to me but not so much as to keep things continually cruel - karma throws me enough of a bite every so often to keep me hooked on that line of punishment I frequent.

I think some would call me picky in my taste of peers. I say I am simply trying not to waste each others' time. But I don't know what switched in me - being back on social media certainly doesn't help my approach to consideration of others. In my January doldrums, I tried to put my best foot forward for people to consider me in that form first and foremost. But now I believe, in treating my little Bluesky page more akin to a Satyriconian vomitorium, I have put my worst foot forward in bouts of aggression and woe in order to ward off would-be wastes of time before I waste any of theirs. Declaring, "take me at my worst or not at all, for I frequently feel at my worst." A pestilent cycle begins, churning the toxic bile in circles when I see no interaction with my late-night worry-weaving and early morning manic episodes of catastrophizing, and it causes me to think I am better left alone.

I stick to my guns, my little pleasures and expensive hobbies. Frequently both involve music and the listening of it. I always found it a little funny that I like music the way I do when I have had no precedent for it. I never learned an instrument when I was young, though I did go to choir (which I loathed even as a young Mormon child). I never had many people in my life with good enough taste to spark a passion for the medium (my parents were "whatever's on the radio" fans, though my sibling did give me an iPod with some Gorillaz and Vampire Weekend on it when I was about ten years old). I also was never surrounded by peers who made music or knew about shows... though I never had very many peers to begin with, admittedly. Not ones that would be good enough conversation for me, anyways. I love to talk about music but I realize it's strange and often obtuse to talk about music itself. To me it is often solitary - reading the lyric sheet quietly as the band marches forward to their own tune. I think I thought I was learning about someone. Through their art, I found solace; knowing someone could make something of their worries and tell other people about them through a medium I could barely wrap my head around gave me something to invest my emotions into. In the few times I've smoked a joint and put on a record with someone else around, it becomes the emotional touchstone for the evening's improvisations, but I am unable to follow along with the distinct words, only feeling the vague shapes of emotions each stanza carries with it. So frequently unsocial as I am, I turn to my unsocial hobby - the cycle continues. With some shame I admit that I turn to my vices often.

My boredom has not been trained to the frequency of a creative like it used to be - instead of bleeding the bladder of misery onto a canvas, I tune myself to pain like a worn-out tune drowned under warm radio hiss. As I read from someone on the internet, "I'd probably drink more if there wasn't a recession" - cheap THC doesn't get me the same way booze does, doesn't give me a wonderful headache like booze does. But escapism rarely has the positive notes that it used to. It's all barrel in this bitter bourbon. The sharp and bitter has always had more appeal to me than the lasting warmths. This same philosophy I crave in my art too, though I know it hurts me. Terrible people with terrible opinions sometimes interest me more with their terrible art than the well-meaning ones.

"Fuck the world, it's Christmas / I'll survive / I was born to search my loneliness for any signs of life"
-- lyrics from the song "Cartoons (Bridges Burning Forever)" by The Goin' Nowheres.

I suppose when I went into Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home," I was expecting something visceral, for some reason, or maybe I desired a visceral thing in its place. I'd known just about nothing of Bechdel's body of work going in other than the topic of the book noted above, and the first page. It was about familial trauma, in a sense, or I should say in retrospect more of a exploration into trying to understand better the world our parents were raised in and making sense of sympathy for them as family regardless of their actions. So, I suppose in that sense it was ultimately not for me. I hold no sympathy for my family. I have no longing to know their lives, no desire to garner understanding for them, nor do I have any interest in my blood at large. My blood runs rancid. "Fun Home" shows the world of her parents through the lens of her eyes - I feel she has a love for them in those eyes that I no longer have. I would feel ashamed to relate to children, mine or otherwise, what world beget them and what their heritage has taken pride in. I have scant desire to relate those violences in blog post, so I will not. Such has been my approach to these pains - run far, and forget. No warmth lasts, no home holds; the river runs and so must I.

The only occasion which I remember having a good time with my family - with no Mormon bullshit and no white-people family tension sprinkled with non-drama - was when we went on a hike together to a particular cave and monument. My grandmother suggested the trip - "a trip I'd like to make before I die" - and so her children obliged and set up an outing for all the siblings and cousins. We set out to a particular wind cave in Idaho, whereby sits a little stone monument with a little brass plaque, stating a dedication to all my grandmother's friends that were killed near that same cave. It was a long hike, and we all told stories and asked my grandmother for tales too - lots of stories about her girls' camps through church and all the fun she had with her friends, camp leaders, and the like. My grandmother was a trooper too - in her old age at that time, it basically being the last moment before her hips would give out leaving her unable to walk completely even with a cane, she hiked the whole way up herself. When we got to the monument, we stopped for a while. My grandmother told us again what had happened from her perspective: a storm rolled in, so her, her four friends, and a scout leader ran under a tree to protect themselves from the rain. Maybe this was before we knew a whole lot about lightning, or maybe the lightning hit before the sound made them think, or maybe it doesn't matter. All of them were killed except for my grandmother, who only lived because she was standing instead of sitting. Now she has a distinct trauma response to those rolling Idaho thunderstorms. And I think back, remembering my favourite musician Sam Ray saying something about his music long ago on Twitter - paraphrased, "I don't doubt that the drugs I did made me a better artist, but if I could go back and tell myself to never start doing that shit, I would throw away all my records in an instant."

I found some visceral meaning in Travis Alexander's "The Snake Continued to Eat Itself" in that sense, then. The one I was looking for. Despite some harsh subject matter, I found the writing to be refreshingly blunt compared to many of my readings lately. Lots of revolutionary rhetoric and oral histories sprinkled in with poetic fantasies by Le Guin. I suppose it was a bit strange then to turn to this book based only on a whim and the fact that the title was eerily similar to some manic mantra my good friends repeated to me. I'd been sitting on a copy since 2017, attempting a start only to peck at the first few pages then put it down. But I finally chewed through it over a month, in a few sittings, and found an odd solace in the diary-esque descriptions of what it's like to be in a New England hardcore band (spoilers: it's being a piece of shit mostly). Moving between ramshackle apartments, single rooms, and dealing with acquaintances that barely skirt the line between best friend and deathly enemy and never being able to tell which people erred on the side of. Made a lot of sense to me, especially when I consider my now ex-friend who lives in Allston who just stopped texting me back one day after eight years. I think I just needed someone to tell me about their shitty life to know that it's kind of okay that my life has been pretty shitty too, regardless of anyone I know or will know. Just how it goes, with beers or otherwise. Manic dreams fueled on a couple bucks a day - if he can do it, why can't I? Yet it seemed like his family still loved him and he found love in the end... kind of, I think, maybe, I don't really know how it panned out mostly but it seems like it's going pretty fine for the guy now. I wonder what my life would have been like if I stayed in New England longer than just being born, but I'm not sure I care enough to wonder beyond a fleeting "what-if.".

I still don't know how I feel about terms like "found family." I think, for better or worse, the concept of biological ties runs deep roots in my mind. I have made many attempts at weeding, but digging up any more than I already have I fear will leave an unconscionable hole in my brain where a parasite one called home. But weeds have a tendency to come back, tying choking knots around otherwise healthy plants. So I think to myself, ah yes, friends, peers, new faces and new perspectives, perhaps even a few that like me! What a wonderful idea! I think this, then weeds take root in healthy soil again. "Family" is a word of pain; no relief, no boundaries, no love - favours and niceties dangled overhead with transactional expectations tied to invisible line and cage trap. They choke the thoughtfulness out of a gift and replace it with suspicion instead. They starve the soil and yet they beg always for more. It's just what weeds do. They struggle for survival, though their method is frequently to choke out their competition for their ultimate gain and eventual ultimate decline. A horticultural community dominated only by individual guerilla warfare and domination of the monoculture; a terrible thing that should not last, will not last. But the weeds don't know this: they know violence. They were groomed over years to bear the single seed, to survive only by their ilk. White dandelions flying on the wind, choking the earth, knowing no love and having no need for it either. No wonder they're an allergen.

I suppose these things remind me at least again and again that I love my fiance very dearly, and I am thoroughly convinced that I would never find him in another person again if I tried. There's not another anarchist from the moon - I somehow got hitched to the only one. I got very lucky, or maybe my Christian suffering paid off grandly somehow, or maybe his karmic gains paid out their dues too (not to toot my own horn, but he seems to like me a lot likewise). Regardless, he is a gardener. His whole family has green thumbs; my family has continually tended to kill plants. Somehow, his green thumb overpowers my toxic soil often - he has cultivated love in our household and is patient with me as he teaches me to do the same. I frequently forget though, in my worst moments, but I get better at listening to the needs of the greenery, meeting them with love and care, and water too.

When I say I love my fiance, I suppose it's also a phrase I deliver with the knowledge of mutual understanding. We did go through trauma where we lived, but I think we each worked through our individual challenges in younger years on our own dimes, and we'd only convened again as partners near the tail-end of the worst of it. But we understand each other. We know how the other ticks. Conversation comes easy, even when difficult. Some lubricant made the process of knowing one another a natural dance, beyond what I could have ever thought possible. I don't need everyone to like me, nor to be like me, but it helps to have just one person on this earth whose values are near overlapping mine completely, and vice-versa, despite the differences in our persons, day-to-day routines, and neuroses. He knows I am still untraining myself to only speak when spoken to, to speak my mind without permission from surrounding authorities like I am subjecting them to my unreasonable social demands. He is helping me weed my garden; it takes time, but I value my partner for being patient as he helps me revitalize the soil, tweaking these projects with me. I don't want to walk away from this hole like it can't be saved - it will be filled in, and we'll pour the soil together.

I wish I could lean on him less than I do. He puts in the damn work, but not for lack of my trying. He's just a workaholic. In my fatigued body though, I wish to run on my own sometimes. I just don't have many places to run, nor many people to run with. I find myself running to people to lean on when I get tired. I don't have the privilege anymore of pretending like I can sustain myself. I'm getting old ,and this extrovert-in-denial would rot away unnoticed between the tall grass if I fell all alone in the forest without a sound. I've been a loner, willingly at first, now unwillingly. I am left keeping close to people I know, and I feel guilty for it. I don't know many people and everyone is having a hard enough time standing on their own as is. They don't need a dandelion on their heels too. But I can only carry myself far enough to the next person over, the closest one nearby. Making connections does not come easy to me; I tend to think most other people would buy weedkiller instead of letting me grow with them. I tend to think that would be a reasonable response to my being.

So when it comes to meeting new peers, making friends, meeting at book clubs, what's left? What's different? A pragmatic approach begins to feel lacking. Doing things for some abstract gain, meeting people for some missing piece that I don't even know the shape of, even thinking that I can meet people "for the connections" and leave it at that. Well, I know myself well enough by now to know well enough that that's some bullshit and I know it. I thought to myself if I forced people at the book club to read "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" like it were a revolutionaries' masturbatory circle, we'd all never convene for the next gathering. I couldn't stomach purely economic deconstructionism around peers if I tried; It's hard enough as-is doing it in my own time. I suppose I just want to talk, to hear from people I love. I want to see their faces and hear their voices, to appreciate them using their voices. I would like to facilitate and encourage that behavior of creating with words, dissecting with discussion to build something we can share that is beautiful because of our selves, and for ourselves. I do not want to talk at people. I despise when people talk at me. I need to talk with people; I want to understand a little better, to know a little more. Not for me, but I hope they would know I listen, because the people I surround myself with I feel worth listening to. I do take the words to heart. I use those words in my own experiments and recipes. Every one I have ever met is a co-author to my writings, even my comics I continue to put off writing. Maybe I'll actually tell people about them some day, if they'd let me.

And when people swap their daily playlist tunes, I send songs with consideration for their listener, but not without some vulnerability from myself. I tell myself, "I should go see a damn movie more often," in hopes that something new comes of it. I forget that I can just go see a damn movie just to have a good evening.

The chariot swung too low
Last night i met the antichrist's publicist
He told me that "a manger was for feeding pigs"
and someday my songs would make me famous

The chariot swung too low
Crying out in a final breath
I saw the angel turning wild on death
It must have not accepted Jesus yet

-- "chariot" by elvis depressedly.

Every good anecdote an ex-Christian has in their repertoire, giving further context to that decision leading to the "ex" in the aforementioned title, must be about masturbation. Though it may not be a rule, I feel it surely must have some truth to it; after all, why should we feel ashamed of the act of spilling seed if it just feels so damn good? Let's discuss this over some beers... later.

My blog is not a confessional. The concept of a "confessional," or more specifically the dark box in which you talk through a screen to a pastor and to God through the pastor is not something that the Mormon religion has. I'm not even one-hundred percent sure how it exactly works. Though for some reason, I feel most Mormons will swear up and down that "confessional" in that sense of having to confess to God through his appointed disciples doesn't really exist in their religion, despite having to do this for the sake of entry to basic temple ritual and within personal prayer. I don't care if a person lies to a bishop, just don't lie to me and expect me to run with it.

Talking more specifically about these ex-Christian experiences is not something I've really dwelled on very hard since having left the south and no longer being surrounded by dogma. Even not since I've left my cult of Latter-Day Saints have I thought much about the parts of my mental wellbeing that feel burned by the experience; not in the ways that I still grapple with religious delusions and holdovers of rhetoric and hate in that sense, but more what feels more difficult to repair. I've just been thinking lately and often about how much of my burnout does come from this experience.

I hold a lot of days now that the world at large, nor any deity, owes me or holds in store any grandness of life. I'm not sure I fully believed that before but I certainly know I don't assume as much now, and no hymn will convince me otherwise. But to many people I've known in my life, not even in my denomination, so many of life's challenges are to them trials and tribulations through which suffering is noble and will be rewarded in some sense for good behavior and their show of great faith; that it means something to be faced with things like loss and grief, and that we can power through these things individually if we hold on to the notion that we all receive some goodness eventually.

I think it hurts me most to feel after having left my religious past, and even after all the good it has done me to be able to divorce myself from the delusion of the institution and feel the goodness of people more truthfully, even after being able to know that the actions I take towards whatever goal I desire are truly my actions and my pursuits, is that is all crashes up against this nihilism of experience that the literal world offers to me and to the people I love and care about most. I've tried to brand myself a positive nihilist in days past, but thinking in how awful and unkind the experiences I have faced in pursuing my goals, as well as seeing similar yet personalized misfortune for people I've known in pursuing theirs, I feel a deep dread of feeling and knowing in my heart that there is no rhyme or reason to it all. That in the end, there is no "getting off on good behavior," and that some of the most passionate people I know, full of will and love of the world as they are, will sometimes get an unlucky streak of bad days. That unlucky streak at other times becomes unsalvageable, and despite the positivity of outlook any of us may have, there is no guarantee the bad days will end nor that the good days will be given out of pity or even love.

The nihilism of being is to my detriment in those ways. It's hurt my person most especially in combination with a probable BPD I have to feel like I can't help people in a way. It's easy to beat myself up when I'm by myself and to walk away from it. It's even easier to act as though I am subject to my trauma and not object within the world.

But I kid myself when I pretend as though I am detachable thing from the world and the people in it. To withdraw into myself, into the rolling hills of the mind, and act as though I have removed my soul and its gravity from the draw of all other people, animals, plants, and things that are tossed around on the fabric of being. I may be small when compared against the grand canvas of the whole of the universe, but I'll be damned to act as though I am nothing, not on the canvas at all. It's a greater injustice then, to see my being on the picture I stand before and attempt to take in the wholeness of, and subsequently take my thumbnail to the flecks of paints in my stupor, feeling as though it would be easy to scratch out my form from the whole of the composition and declare selfishly, "the picture looks better this way; I'm sure critics would agree!"

Who am I compared to God? Not God, of course, and it's selfish to play as such. Me, a silly woman so bad at roleplay, playing at the notion that I am something other than myself, or acting as though I am only and consistently subject to that which is not myself, but can solve like I am God. Acting like I can change, or could have been different, or should have been different, or should be treated differently, or should have been treated differently. But what of now?

For now, I have probable cause to feel I have a medical condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder. For now, I am unashamed to talk on this for as long as I feel I want to. Which will not be long, but not out of a need to appeal to polite society.

I've thus far read as far as the third chapter into "Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder" by Shari Y. Manning, PhD. I'd picked up this book on a whim off the suggestion of a person posting on Bluesky about it, in a reply to their own post which caught my attention.

I read this post and thought to myself, "...excuse me? That's a thing?" So I went to the replies. Yes, it's a thing. I'd been thinking for a while before that, and while having problems with my medications after (what I now believe to be a mis-) diagnosis, that I may have something closer to BPD in manifestation (potential evidence and culprit #1 being that my father had it). The poster then responded with the relevant materials. So I bit. I thought at first it'd be best for my partner, who I know for a fact was having difficulties in our relationship due to a lot of mental health related issues I was having. (Yes, he still loves me, and no, I don't feel as though he is villainizing me for them.) But I needed an understanding of the topic too, even if the book was marketed more at the partner that the person with BPD. I figured this book would be more helpful than nothing in the meantime while I waited for my government-assigned free-of-charge psychiatrist to reach out to me in six-to-eight weeks.

Well, safe to say as far as I've gotten into it, the book made me absolutely fucking miserable. At first it was miserable because she was right on every count. I listened to the audiobook version read to me out loud all the symptoms of which I'd been tacked with my whole life, like they were the terms of my sentence and I was being charged on multiple counts: "acute sensitivity to emotional stimuli, inability to maintain meaningful relationships, personal lack of a sense of self and inability to find a direction in life, and uncontrollable suicidal ideation." What say I to this determination of the court of psychiatry? Guilty on all counts, your honour.

But then came a following restlessness. A week in dark water, especially punctuated by my decision to try and ween off my meds during that same such week (a decision made with a fool's unwavering hope in personal ability). I had to have been high for at least 80% of my waking hours, and 100% of my sleeping ones. I hardly remember the specifics of the last time I'd turned so desperately to substance like that, but I know I have. I was miserable for this second reason: why, God? Why me? Why did it have to be me?

It was the familiar questions that I grappled with again, and I felt like a child again, and I felt ashamed again. I felt dumb for feeling like a child, I felt wrathful for being bestowed a difference in ability over my fellow person, I felt solemn that maybe I could have and should have corrected this error in my being earlier. I kept circling the drain in my mind, but in my pride and my ego, kept my suffering private in feeling like I should still have enough power to fish myself out of the tub before it was too late. I can still turn back, I can still make it out, I can have it be different, and I can do it all alone.

I've been doing it alone for a long time. Not recently. Recently, I've understood more that I am better surrounded by people. At least I understand and feel that notion in my lucid moments, but as previously alluded, not all my moments are lucid. So in my delusion I say to myself: I am my own. I am the one power, the one ability, the one who will get me out of this mess. And I should be the only one to make the attempt.

I imagine a lot of things when my attempt at "getting out of this mess" ultimately fails and I sink deeper in the mire where there is no foothold. In this particular instance, I picture an accident in the shower. I hear a squeak of misstep, a slip, the hand gripping shower curtains in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation in a snap-decision, and a crash. An embarrassing silence cut only by the white noise of shower sprinkling water onto a crumpled mess of inert meat under plastic Ikea-curtain tomb. And red, red swirling down the drain again.

When I slip, I think: what a traumatic thing to put someone through that grief. When I fall, I think: who should have to deal with my corpse? The coroner? My lover? All those friends I've made, and what little family I still have? When I am at my lowest, I answer in delusion: no one should, and no one will.

But in my delusion, my body is still warm and my nerves still firing with electricity. And in my delusion, I listened to the audiobook and heard what I manifested: I am the problem. According to what I heard filtered through my then-tenuous mind as it entered my ears: people will leave me, justifiably, because I am a problem, I am a timebomb, I am tiresome, and I am unable to take care of myself because I am fundamentally different than others and will attempt to solve this by throwing my woes in every-which-way without care for who they hurt and what damage they do because I don't care because I have BPD. Because, because, because. Everything signalling to me, "I am not welcome." I sat on the couch in a room full of people I laughed and cheered with in shared joy for each others' company, and I walked home thinking to myself, "there in no room for me anywhere, and I am not welcome." All I heard, all I said to myself, was how much pain I can cause others. Hadn't I done that enough already?

My blog is not a confessional. I have no need to confess here, for I feel I've already confessed and done my time for the grief I have caused people in the past, especially people I have loved and sometimes continue in doing so. But for quite a while, I felt like a sinnerwoman. I felt like I walked through the world with scarlet letter, and didn't quite know why, but that I had to continue doing so. I felt like what I did, all I did, was hurt people who got close. And that people would hurt me for it. I felt like people would be justified in hurting me for it. That all the hurt in the world that could be inflicted upon me, should be inflicted upon me, for the crime of my inability of being nothing other than myself.

I believe myself to have a one-apple. Perfect visualization and photographic memory. I've known multiple people now who have had the opposite: no mental visualization ability beyond words. I'd recently talked with my good friends who have this condition about it, saying some people would consider aphantasia to be a "mental disability" (this being untrue, of course, which I'm not going to go over here). But I'd been thinking through that line of thought to the opposite end since our conversation.

In my case, I consider my hyperphantasia a hinderance at best, and a paralyzing disability at worst, at least in conjunction with personal values, goals, and other burgeoning mental realities that I grapple with daily. On my day-to-day, as someone attempting to pen a comic, I become so easily frustrated with the gap between my inner visual concept and my tangible skills in art (the latter being unable to replicate the fancies of the mind at their perfect fidelity, let alone catch up to the frequency at which I can conjure them), that I frequently throw in the towel and admit burnout before I even begin. This is something I feel that I can work through, though. I'm learning to set aside expectation and that making bad art is okay.

So what of it then during the episodes where control feels wrested from my body, and the reality of the eyes and words of others have to compete with the tornado spun by the subconscious weaving alternate truths?

I lay in bed and the white-pockmarked ceiling is the projector screen. The mind would like to show me what it has made for me, yet I have no choice: I am watching a slideshow, whether I like it or not. Comfortably under bedsheets is where I am shown film after film depicting a new and exciting end to my life. A thousand times I am snuffed out like a candle. A thousand times is not enough to show me every possible way I could lose my existence to accident, sickness, self-intention, or murder. Grace, would you like to see another image of your best friends smiling faces as they pin you down and crush your head under cinder block? I think you would; after all, you're only being shown the truth of the matter. All these things could happen. Maybe all of them should happen. Maybe some of your loved ones would feel better if this did happen. Maybe some of them would love nothing more the honour of making this happen.

The fire alarm is going off, the sprinklers have failed, the house is burning down, and I feel I am trapped inside and there is no way out for me. All that's left to do is accept my fate. All that's left to do is accept reality, lay down, and die. I won't call for help; it's already too late for me. I've locked the front door. I don't want help because I should be able to help myself and I can't. So I won't. Maybe I'll speed up the process. Cut my wrists on exposed rusty nails and burn my thighs with the embers of burning support beams.

What is the wedge to open the door? Where is the doorstop to hold it open?

Would it be silly of me to say that after reading a good book, I am now the closest I've ever come to declaring myself "a trans born-again Christian?" It's probably silly, but not entirely untrue.

I've had "Embracing the Exile: Healing Journey of Gay Christians" by John E. Fortunato sitting idly on my shelf for almost exactly two years now. I picked it up on sale at a book store when I first visited Edmonton. I was looking for a nice read for the trip home, as I was just visiting at the time and it was going to be a long plane ride back to Idaho. I read the first chapter and cried in the airport. That was two years ago. The book, sitting on the desktop to my right, still has the orange "SALE PRICE: $3.00" sticker on the front and I'm reading it again, hopefully all the way through this time. It's helping. I needed it now more than then, I think.

I kept having quandaries and gripes I couldn't quite pin down in all my many years of therapy and occasional dips into psychological literature. Things my partner would pose to me, attempts to mirror the reality of my situational being back at me, did not make sense to me. All the logic lined up, and I felt wrong. I realized the logic lined up and that I was feeling wrong, so I tried to delve deeper. I attempted more rigid structure; in failing rigid structure collapsing, I attempted what I believed to be emotional awareness; in failing to attain release from emotional awareness, I attempted to get a job I wanted again; in collapsing art industry, I attempted to get any fucking job at all; in failing economy, I gave up; and in giving up... I gave in to complete inward collapse. I had no place in the world and it seemed like every attempt I made to fit myself with in the framework of modern civilization failed. I barely had enough therapy hours to go around, so maybe in my mind I was treating it more like rehab.

So, like, what do you call it when you're one way - an inherit way of being that is unchangeable and ultimately not a wrong method of existence within the world - and instead of accepting your inherit difference as an individual existing within the world with their own truths and gifts of talent to give, an external power muscles its way in to impose a new regime for which there is no other choice for people to "get with the program or die?" Hm, it seems like there's a few words for this. Imperialism, fascism, colonization... for this particular case of wording, I feel like going with the term "colonization."

I let my heart become colonized. I am not naive and separate from the world to believe that I would have an "equal shot" at re-entering the workforce as an openly nonbinary trans woman early on in my HRT, but I truly felt qualified at least. I am not dead to the world enough to only be able to entertain my biggest dreams as white-collar desk jobs, but I felt that was what I had to do to get by. I am anarchist enough to know that I desire to be free of those impositions of capitalism via state-enforced violence, but I am susceptible to enjoying my creature comforts where I can and I need the cash before I die out in the cold. Yet, despite all this, all the logic in the world could not fix the contradictions of the heart. I felt the "necessary evils" take precedent over my body, mind, and soul, but I was not willing to give up. If I was going to give up on fitting into the colonist's framework, in my mind, it was defeat.

Bullshit. I am a queer person. Of course I'm not going to fit into the world of the colonizer, but under that regime, it's easy to feel blown around, my ego completely at the whims of the ego of others imposed onto my body being "right" or "wrong" or "correct" or "stable." I do not need to "make sense." My body is a part of the world and I have a fucking right to exist within it, and my mind knows it.

Who are these people compared to God? Bullshit. God didn't make cops to impose Sharia Law onto the people (despite there being two pigs on the Ark). The only power is God... which I say, still believing in God as less of a literal power and more of a usefully conceptual framework based on my being raised in that environment. Whatever.

Fortunato's writings on 80's psychology is the missing piece of what I needed to hear someone say. Cut the bullshit: where is the spiritual in the therapist's office? My mind is not wrong, not in need of correction. Well, okay, I say that knowing that I am back on a lower dose of my anti-psychotic and should probably not have gone off of it despite my feeling like I need a different prescription. But not in the sense that I need to change my behavior to make myself more palatable to my peers, to polite society, and easier to understand via the framework of the DSM-5. I will talk, not out of feeling the need to explain myself or exacerbate my shame, but because I speak from my soul, and maybe people will listen.

I know what I know in my heart. As I child, I was born naked, and maybe I was afraid, but I didn't know the word "afraid" until it was taught to me. I didn't know what "shame" meant until it was taught to me. Shame especially is not a human characteristic inherit to our beings I feel, and I certainly didn't feel shame until I was beat over the head with it by other people. Who are other people? If I am not God, they're certainly not God either, yet they treated me like such Godliness of their being and my lacking of it was the dynamic at play. But guess what? I'm alive, I'm here, and I'm queer. Those are the facts.

In theory, shame stems from sin. Sin should be followed with repentance. Repentance comes with absolution. Absolution is freedom from the pain of sin. Is inflicting grief onto others sin? Not exactly, but sometimes language is weird in this way where when we recycle it, we unknowingly reinforce old concepts.

What I learned: when we do wrong, we are punished. When I do wrong, I should and will be punished. When you live in a society of Christians that all believe they can enact the will of God on behalf of God, everyone that surrounds each other is a prison warden. These man-made Christian institutions are prisons. Punishment, vitriol, loathing, retribution, violence, the vindictive and the sadistic: it's hard not to believe these things, whether adjective or verb, are the natural motions of the universe and the people in it when those images of harm continue to slam and splatter themselves on the psyche. The mental equivalent of a car crash, twisted metal and all. Or maybe more like those instances of an exploded steam locomotive, where it looks as though the machine coughed up all its vascular veins and organs out of its mouth and onto the oncoming train tracks. What is true? Only the soul.

I was not born knowing violence. I was born whole, and I continue to be such. The desires of the mind and the desires of the soul are the same: they are one, in spirit. We are our minds and bodies and hearts and words. Even the words that are untrue in a sense. But I feel now that the violent imagery is that which I feel when I cannot impose the untrue words onto the truth of the desires of the heart when they contrasted by the framework I cannot find my soul into. So then, why should I try? Why spin my mind in circles with words that are not mine? I will not colonize my soul. I will not be ashamed. I am different. I probably have BPD in a sense, but I am not any less a "person" than anyone else. And if I hear that my loved ones are not people too, implications that they are abberations of the mind, I won't take it from now on. If they don't like my needs, if they can't or don't want to listen to me, if they wish to spit the ego of psychology to invalidate the truth I know in my soul, so be it; I will surround myself by people who will heed my word. Or at the very least I'll try and make my disagreements known. I am a lamp and I will shine my gifts and love how I will to those who are willing to accept it, and even those who are not.

What of my place in the universe? What of my place in the world? What of my apartments I keep moving every two years? We are all meant to be where we are, in a sense. Earlier this year, in my grief of realizing I had truly lost someone I had loved near and dear to me years ago, I met someone who reminded me very much of that person. I felt like I was the butt of some cosmic joke. I have no grave to leave flowers at, and God, you show me new flowers and expect me to be grateful? You expect time and experience to heal my wounds? These wounds, where time has weathered them from their untreated, rancid, festering state, all the way down to bone? You want this new person to crack them open too, suck down the marrow, and leave them dry on the sand where archeologists will find those markings on what remains of my evidence of being, showing where I was cannibalized and how?

Give up. Cry it out, hang it out to dry, and move on. I figured out shame, more than previous sin, was what was hurting myself and others. It drove a wedge between my mind and my soul. Shame was the sin, and in sinning I felt shame. To hurt another is sin. To sin is to hurt another. Let go of shame, and grief - powerlessness is not always a bad thing. In accepting this, I feel I may have a better shot at getting to know myself and the new people in my life whom I can love for who they are, and not who they are not, nor who I am not, or who I was not, or what I was not able to do. I have to stand up for myself before I can let my ego go.

The body is a well. All experience fills up inside; all that trickles in slowly through the fundamental watertable, all that melts from the gentle snow, all that pours down in torrential force from sudden storms. Ultimately, a well remains the same. Sometimes the basins dries up, the watertable lowers, and left thirsting is the empty bowl. But the well remains the same. Poison and disease are quick to spill in still water, yet a tumultuous thing to purify, taking time to go down and some elbow grease to clean it all out. Yet the well remains the same. Richness of mineral the water hides inside it, and it depends on what surrounds the well. But the well is a hole. "A glass can only spill what it contains." Well, a hole is harder to fill, but a well is harder to spill as well. Without a well, a village is deserted. A community lost. When the water dries, the same is true. But until the well is emptied, people will drink. It's harder to dig a new well.

I wonder to myself sometimes: why is it that some of us are born to the richness of natural gifts of the forested places, and others to the dryness of the desert where the days are fights to survive? If this is the case, what is justice?

Justice is wanting. Justice is unachievable truly, but found only in the striving for it. What is a gift if not shared? What is equity if not the sharing in it? We are powerless to what we are faced with, but it is easier when we share our cups as we share our loads.

There is no answer to the question;
If there's no quest then it suggests no treasure.
Well, what have I been doing all this digging for?
Satisfaction.
Classic distraction.
Just some observable action.
Something to bury the past in.

But if you dig too deep you’re standing in a well.
You were questioning the police and landed in a cell.

How can one thing have no true purpose,
but at the same time feel far from worthless?
What have I been doing all this living for?
It's my proof of concept:
I’m measuring deaths onset.
At least my soul's not gone yet.
Yeah, I put my word on that.

-- "September Digging" by Spencer Radcliffe.

I've just sat down to stamp out a blog post about an idea I have that I wanted to have archived somewhere via jabbing my keyboard over and over, and just now as I have turned on my monitor to begin writing I am met with the title of this very-difficult-to-execute idea that I have. I'd call it ThinkVision.

Even now as I write, of course, I am editorializing. Some writers are able to and/or prefer to have their "stream of consciousness" straight from brain to mouth to hand to words-on-page as a first draft, then go over everything with a comb after the fact. This blog post is authored with a mind that criticizes, scrapes away, fills in the cracks, and editorializes as it goes. Every word written and unwritten is simultaneous as the mind is best able to recollect the written and the yet-to-be-written. In this sense I am filtered. Here will not be written some dogmatic droll about what "authenticity" is (and if asked, there will not be an answer provided you). What is typically written in the blog posts on this website are flashes and lightning strikes with the moment passed and only smouldering cinders in its place. The infinite time of the moment it comes has passed on through the mind and is imperceptible.

Maybe to have Robin Williams star in ThinkVision would be the right call if ThinkVision were to be posed as some statement, or art film kibble cast to the dogs of producers and executives before its time. ThinkVision would be cast from the mould of nothing to make the shape of nothing in particular. It would leak out the sides of the sand-cast into scalding-hot vapour-liquid pooling onto the cutting room floor below. All of it would be slag and it would serve no purpose if you think of purpose as to produce something that makes one consider or think about their stand and row in life. It would be purposeful in its desire to see waste produced to see what the end result of the process of intentional waste would look like in one particular sectional case-study scenario. Not anyone but the producing mind would even see the flash and pops of the hot pan.

ThinkVision would require setup. Very thorough, proper, yet not entirely intricate setup. Three to four microphones has already been deduced to be what would be needed. Many battery packs as well. What is yet to be considered is external stimuli. The microphones would be able to record every word and consideration and thought and passing comment and judgement and sadness and woe and cry out to the silent world made by the mind into the recorded format where it could then be transcribed into words of a "book."

Old friends has postulated streaming as "externally thinking," so we could theoretically train ourselves to think only through our mouth. It'd take prep but once this is done and as prepared as possible, the microphones would record everything. They would know everything. The page would become merely every word ever thought by this mind with as little filter as possible and no shame. Some individuals across time have done the work we title fit for the anthropologist and historian, which is cataloguing, recording, jotting down and interpreting every word written and every rattling cough made by the passed-on figures. There is a finite amount of words we know they (the people written about, not the ones doing the work of documentation) have been intentional about. Letters, calls, speeches. Will every Discord message, Facetime call, and passing glance in a 24/7 doorbell video camera be catalogued and scrutinised over again and again in the same ways? Would it be with rigorous tribute to form, or more of a layman's platitude towards the whole endeavour of a life partially spoken-now-written?

This is where the question of external stimuli comes in: does the words of a stranger, or a lover, or anyone or no one in particular at all, shaking with their waveforms the boat of the mind, make ThinkVision a "compromised operation?" No. There is no goal other than to record. Its goal is not even to have others read though it would be open to them because they would find no value in the words or in the whole of the thing itself.

Delving within will do nothing. The psych could not help when needed. Today is the first day off of much of the medication that has been prescribed us. There could be a lie written here - "the Lamotrigine and Lexapro prescription has run dry" - but why lie? The choice has been made to not pursue those tactics for the time being. Now going to see where it goes because it leads us not but we pursue it regardless of its unintention. There is merely nothing else to be done.

Dedicated to my friend, Dakota. Rest easy and rest well.

A design that IS a book cover. Wow, I printed and published an entire book! An autobiography! It's a one-copy edition - you will NEVER see the full version, and it will be gone with time even after I die.

One of my final projects as a part of my Associate's Degree was to publish an entire book. From front to back, cover to cover, all the words had to be original and all the designs had to be crafted by the hands of the author (and then the type had to be set, proofed for errors, sent to print, and so on and so forth). It was a great learning experience, using all my accumulated knowledge over the past year and a half to bring a whole book into the world, from nothing! And so, in spirit of the subject matter, I wanted to push the Adobe products I was using to their breaking point.

Many of the images included are scattered fragments of my past and memories from what few mementos I have left and have decided to keep around. Just due to how I've grown and my personal worldviews, I'm not one to clutch onto the physical representations of my memories via memorabilia. Some images are from gifts and notes given to me by my friends and peers, others are magazine pages torn out from their context and given to me by such labels as Disposable America, and even more are original designs crafted on top of oddities I'm sure anyone else would have thrown away by this point if it had not somehow stowed away in U-Haul boxes taken across states. I figured all of them are important to who I am, somehow. So many have been scanned and reflected into the book, though few are left unscathed. Just due to the legal suggestion from my professor to change the material using some artistic liberty so as to avoid "potential legal issues when sent to the printer," I took the opportunity to chop-and-screw many of these trinkets as a kind of reflection of how I view my old memories through the lens of pain in my mind. I don't mean it in a "man... aren't I so cool and messed up" way, more just a way to show that I really do feel distant, scattered, and sad when I remember stuff from too long ago.

I'm certain my professor didn't intend for students to force open a slew of old wounds when creating this project. The only conditions for the book were the technical specs and that it had to be an autobiography. For many college-age kids, that's certainly no big deal; how exciting could one's life really be by age twenty? Well, mine. My life has previously been exciting in all the wrong ways. So, for my book, I simply reflected on where I've lived throughout the years, and how the culture has shaped me into this person I am. It was a surprising opportunity for me to reflect on these moments I've ignored, make amends from them, and even more shockingly (at the time), move on from them. I found that,as much as I now appreciate Idaho, I missed and longed to be back in Canada again. Now that I've moved away, I don't think I'll be making another book like this again.

P.S. - The title is an apt quote from Disco Elysium... but it's actually slightly incorrect! Oh well.

You know it, you love it, or you may hate it; it's the donut everyone makes when they first learn how to use Blender. I first wanted to try my hand at making 3-D models and digital animation to see what the process was like, and if I'd like to implement that tool into my workflow. The answer: it was a lot of work for what seems like very little, and involved a lot of troubleshooting for my tastes (although not TOO much that I'd never consider doing it again). I tried to make a loaf of bread as my second project in Blender, but ended up struggling with it so much that I put it down. Searching for a solution to problems such as proper vector faces requires that I know what terminology to use beyond "how do I make the triangles not break." Overall, I put it down, but would be willing to pick it back up in the future, maybe even to try and figure out Grease Pencil.

Made in Blender 3.6 - fun story, I actually tried to follow the classic donut tutorial all the way back in 2019, but ended up getting a face-plane vector stuck to the middle of my donut and it just wouldn't disappear from the model! I hit Undo a lot, I tried deleting the object, and I even loaded an earlier version of the file, and the grey floor stuck to my grey torus was still adamant on sticking around. I ended up trying again a whole five years later, sucking down my shame and powering through it.

While my fiance was out workin' on the range, he would always come home afterwards and show me pictures of these wonderful geological formations he'd found, littered around the whole state. Random old boulders and river stones from after the water dried up. We both have a fond appreciation for the weathering of these old stones, but frankly, neither one of us are geologists. Just distant appreciators... maybe even poseurs!

I had recently wanted to futz around with some of Photoshop's bitmap image capabilities as well, just to see what I could do when I had to minimize my palette to just true black and true white; when my only tools are form and texture. So, inspiration struck with a love of those rugged Idaho textures (and some dungeon synth music to stir the pot), and, cobbled together from a couple of his photos and a couple of mine, a series was chiseled away from raw form.

I made a lot of these designs while bored to tears at my old job, just by myself in a dim office with nothing to do and nothing interesting to look at. I have postcard versions of these designs somewhere on my computer that I give out at events and as gifts, just for free. I think of it as my parting gift and thank you to the parts of Idaho that I did love, for as much hardship as I had experienced living there. Stones are hardy, formidable, patient, and stoic; some may see their immovable nature as unkind, but I leave Idaho with a newfound appreciation for the strength of the unchanging landscape, the quiet lessons it taught me and all. I call the series "Bright Stones" because I find looking at their dark, volcanic, alien textures still somehow brighten my day and fill it with joy.

I'd say "play a game and try to guess where these photos were taken," but I'm not even sure I remember myself!

Nothin' better than a poster, even if it's not good for much of anythin' beyond lookin' at. Sometimes you just make things to sit there and be pretty, y'know?

This was my first design I'd made after I'd moved to Edmonton, and my first design I finished making using the Affinity software suite. I actually hadn't had access to Adobe software since April, so maybe this is my "act of rebellion" against a company that majorly sucks (don't sell your data to A.I. algorithms, folks; no company is your friend).

I realize as well that I make my best art especially well, perhaps a little TOO well, when I'm sorting through strange new emotions. Whether the emotions are colorful and bright, or dim and depressing, they charge what I make. I have a hard time coming up with completely unprompted designs otherwise. This one in particular came from a slowly growing pit of anxiety in my stomach I'd gained over a terrible toothache I'd had over the course of a couple months, and that anxiety had mixed with all the coping mechanisms I'd used during the many times I'd moved homes throughout my life. Sore gums paired with sore emotions.

This may be T.M.I., but this was made in an evening while my mouth felt like it was going to explode, and when it was finished, the pain and swelling went down. But alas, after even many months of proper dental care, I wasn't able to get in to see a dentist before I broke that tooth, rather embarrassingly, on a rice noodle. Miraculously my tooth broke clean and I'm now toothache-free. Take care of yourself and your teeth, y'all.

Unlike my previous two entries in my "Dreams of Home" series (One & Two), this one, rather strangely and fittingly, appeared to me in a dream. This dream that I would've nearly forgotten had I not drawn a terrible note on my phone, featured this exact design in the form of a 2x3" gold-backed pin, which I eagerly purchased to put on the back of my backpack. In the depths of my (still current) art block, I spent an afternoon polishing off this design to feature its playful structure and dimension. Maybe one day I'll produce this abstract design into a glossy merchandisable format.

What was a bit of an admittedly thoughtless exercise of a series suddenly had new, complex ideas leap out of the ether and into my head. I have some rather strong opinions on the whole Fruitiger Aero aesthetic revival as of late; it seems to follow behind that same old wave of kistchy surface-level vaporwave Instagram-popular nostalgia bait that has now left a hole where the most generic synthwave track you've ever heard once occupied. You know the ones. I suppose "playing things on Cool Math Games in a 240p Windows XP setup while listening to Linkin Park off Limewire" is the "new 80's pop anime VHS-filter pink-and-yellow vibes." Despite that, this odd design has me pondering: why is it that my brain managed to conjure up search bars in my subconcious thoughts? Are these symbols of the modern internet, things so easily written off as "the standard of life," - a search bar! - now engrained into my neurological pattern so as to become essential to my unconcious reality, even in a grotesque pattern such as this? A bit pretentious, maybe, especially for a simple design. If anything, I guess this is my recommendation to play Hypnospace Outlaw.

I contributed to this wonderful zine with my fiance! He and I both wrote some words, and I got to contribute some of my designer-ly chops to this thing. How much we contributed... that's for you to decide. But most of the words are not ours to claim.

The zine is free to download down below in both a digital and printer-friendly version that should be able to print on any standard-Letter-size 8.5x11" sheet of paper. Please, share it around; also please, don't link back to me! The information is not mine - I don't own it and it has exited my hands. We plan to make more... maybe not for a while, but eventually. Keep in touch.

ONE VISION Vol. 1 - Digital Ver. [1.58 MB] ⤓
ONE VISION Vol. 1 - Print Ver. [11.4 MB] ⤓

A couple months ago, a decision was struck to make an anti-racism zine from some materials found in the back of the library. We'd found stacks of bindings and loose newspapers from Canadian Native and Inuit tribes, bands, communities, and individuals, all stacked up in dust-collecting piles. They were - they are! - so dense with emotion and turmoil, with voice and soul, with knowledge and value, that we just wanted these words to be read. So, many hours of curating later, we come away with only a miniscule vertical slice of the power that the voices of the Native peoples of Turtle Island have held, do hold, should hold, and continue to fight for. As such, many of the designs and words highlight the relevance of the old voices and their aged (but still pertinent and poigniant) wisdom. Hopefully that classic photocopied zine style comes across well while still, most importantly, highlighting the ideas housed inside.

If I had to say what the "target audience" would be, it'd be your average left-leaning individual residing in the states known as "Canada" and "the United States of America" who has a desire to become more knowledgable of the struggles and liberty of Native peoples across the continent, but is caught on some colonial and liberal ideals that conflict with that desire. The hope is to get people listening to Native voices and hearing their issues from their mouth, and not just from some second-hand news source that has become so unreliable in our desolate information dark age. The first step is to just read the darn thing, because you should, because you should care, because you should get involved... but start at reading it!

A heavy recommendation for donations to be given to Black Mesa Indigenous Support! - https://supportblackmesa.org/donate/