Gaslight Ghetto

I’ve had the strange experience a few times in recent years of mentioning my childhood poverty to another person and their response making me feel gaslit, like what am I remembering wrong?  For example, mentioning I have lived in a few housing projects and homeless shelters, and them asking which ones, and then…  I don’t remember the names, barely remember the locations.  I wasn’t living in them for long enough to identify with them, to see that as my “hood,” get to know the other kids there.  We’d be kicked out or otherwise shuffled along to our next flophouse before that could happen.  My father helped me fill in a few of these details, but he didn’t remember all of it either.

So to gird myself for this situation in the future, I’m trying to remember everything about my childhood that wouldn’t be too creepy to tell.  Maybe some of those things too, with appropriate content warnings?  Here we go…

Content Warnings:  Violence Against Animals, Animal Death, Description of Poverty, Mention of Parasites and Pests, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Child Injury, Children in the Context of Sexual Things (but no CSA mentioned in this one), Racial Tension, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Marital Infidelity, Teen Pregnancy, Vomiting, Terminal Illness, A Man Dying Young, Mental Illness, Generational Abuse.

This will take more than one post and include details that don’t have to do with the poverty itself, just me trying to remember what I can before it slips any further into the void.  For this post, I’ll lay out what I can recall of the chain of places I’ve lived. [Read more…]

Where I Be

This is a picture of a corner of my living room.

The sun is shining.  Being in the southern half of the sky, it’s not as hot as it could be.

I took the day off sick because of course I did.  I’m considering what sort of things I can do for the good people of the world who need stuff to put in their heads.  Might prepare some content for the queue if I can.  Much love, y’all.

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Climb Every Mountain

Had a lil honeymoonesque thing recently, went to a rental cabin in Port Angeles and drove to some sights in the area over a few days.  First day we went to a little waterfall which was pretty cool, tho the nearest terlet was on some Silent Hill shit.  The second waterfall was an unexpectedly long hike, which wore us out something fierce, but it was cool to be in the middle of some natural nature.

Second day we went to see a mountain view, where all you had to do is pull over, get out, and look.  Simple enough.  But then we were like, since we’re on this road, maybe let’s go all the way, and ended up a mile above sea level, walking up another steep path with need of frequent breaks.

I guess the environment would still be considered subalpine because trees could grow, though they were weirdly-shaped in order to survive. Lot of short branches. The grasses and shrubs were weirder too. My home boy who had come along to do the driving noticed strawberry plants and lupines that were not the sort of thing we expected. Saw some canada jays which wikipedia suggests would be the “obscurus” subspecies, vamping for treats but receiving none. We’d left the trail mix in the car.

The trail had no handrails, and a few feet and a slip could easily lead to death.  The area is renowned for unpredictable weather and high winds, but wasn’t too bad.  I mean, I’m here, so I must not have been blown off a mountaintop.  Surprised my husband was willing to climb that high, given that he has a low key fear of heights that can even hit him looking at google satellite view.

Point is, it was very beautiful.  I’d post photos but it’s slightly less easy than posting words, and they don’t do the thing justice anyway.  They’re so flattening.  When you’re up there and you can see how far down it all is, when fast-moving clouds are sliding along the mountainside below you, random shafts of sun hitting snow-flocked jagged peaks, and those beautiful golden shrubs and grasses, the long feathery moss on the trees, I dunno.

I’m not in favor of mountain climbing generally.  That’s what got Julian Sands.  But if you can drive most of the way and then just hike up a few hundred feet of steep path, well, go ahead.  Less than an hour later, we went from having random snow sprayed in our face to having warm sun, down at a little park on the shore.  Good times.
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Dreamposting – Gun Culture

Had a dream that I was a security guard again.  Some kind of mayhem had transpired in Seattle in the night, wherein a gun had been discharged in public.  We were all under suspicion, but one specific guy had done it, and copped to it before we got into real trouble.  Even so, there was so much going on that I wasn’t aware of his confession until it had already transpired, and was running around trying to sort out defense evidence along with my home boy Clark.  Some seagulls had been killed, and during the course of events I found their bodies floating in water, gelatinized and translucent…

[Read more…]

Here Also Be Dragons

St. George can fuck right off.  St. Patrick with him.  In this house we dig the subjects of herpetology, reptile and amphibian.  Sadly, in their season we can barely hear the frogs from our cul-de-sac, most of the time my boyfriend can’t hear them above his tinnitus.  Also, though I know garter snakes are common in the area, I haven’t seen any since we moved in a year ago.  Certainly, I never expected to see a lizard.  I haven’t seen one since I was last in Kansas, half a continent away.

Now, like Charly on the other side of the planet, I’ve seen a drab brown lizard in my yard.  People further south could surely not give a shit.  Even in this state, east of the mountains in the plains, they would not be impressed.  Floridians whose houses are low key infested with invasive wall-crawlers would tell me to take my happiness to hell.  But no, this is cool and special.

There is an invasive creeping wood sorrel of the purple-leaved variety growing from a crack in the sidewalk between ours and our neighbors’ doors, which are right next to each other.  My boyfriend was stepping out to check on the sunflowers he’s growing, when he noticed a movement in the sorrel.  As the surprised beasty moved, his mind ran through possible identities – slug? snake? – before realizing it was a lizard.  He called me outside in time to see it, though if I’d gone for a camera, I would have missed it.

We did not have an amazingly good look at it, but enough to be confident it was a brown lizard about seven inches in length (18 cm) with no obvious markings. Based on the area where we saw it, range maps, comparisons of different boring brown lizards, we are moderately sure it’s a northern alligator lizard, northwestern subspecies.  I don’t know shit about lizards and presumed, wrongly, that I’d never see one on this side of the state, at least not here in the very developed suburbs.

It eats crickets, and I’ve noticed the crickets are less noisy this year.  Lizard population increasing?  Or did I just see lizard on the move because insect decline got them being more bold in searching for prey?  They also eat slugs, and I hope they do.

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humorzzz

i’ve been occasionally percolating on a ttrpg of my own design and, being a very appearance-oriented character designer, i’ve been thinking of ways to formalize / systematize one’s relationship with subcultures that could influence a character’s clothing style – gothery, metalness, alternateeve…

this sorta stuff gets mixed up with occultism, alchemy, pseudoscience, so all that is to say, i’m figuring out which of the four humors punk rock would express.

i think on this, laying back in my bed, and catch myself snoring.  this is a preview of my life at the nursing home.  could be worse.

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Waiting in the Car Again

I have the degenerative disc disease.  Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much.  Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points.  Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines.  I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.

So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals.  At the last stop I decided to stay in the car.  Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some.  But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.

I finished slowly nursing a cold drink.  I almost fell asleep and woke up again.  I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone.  Jumped in the river, what did I see?  Black-eyed angels swam with me.  I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms.  This just felt like spinning plates.  I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.

I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup.  When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty.  I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside.  Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.

As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun.  But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory.  My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs.  Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone.  Would it jump on my junk?  Would the story get worse?

No.  I left in peace.  There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away.  Somebody else’s problem.

After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life.  Good timing all around.

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The Size of the Matter

I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically.  Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma.  Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground.  We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households.  We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.

But it’s cool.  Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups.  Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities.  When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances.  I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me.  I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.

Fast food workers are characters.  Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors.  Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes.  I guess a few of those could have described me.

So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window.  It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.

Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him.  His dick isn’t big enough.”  “What do you mean?,” asked family woman.  “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.”  Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter.  She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety.  Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.

I don’t think I was offended at the time.  Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do.  But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled.  Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct.  And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.

So funny.

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