Tuesday Catch Up?!

Hello friends.

It sure has been a while. My inherited, half mine, mostly not mine, elderly, ancient husky German shepherd mix is growing a brain tumour. He began having seizures back on Thanksgiving weekend, he was fine-ish for a month, then Remembrance day he had another seizure, and that’s when it was more solidified that your 15-ish year old dog has a brain tumour. We’ve been trying to keep him comfortable and deal with meds (he’s very good at being pilled, which has been a plus) until we can contact the home vet for one last day. It has been a whole lot of things I dealt with my Dad’s/Grandpa’s/Grandma’s/Gir’s march toward the end. It has not been fun.

It’s a lot.

I keep telling myself that one day I will be fun again. That even though things are hard now, it'll be fun again.

I always wish that other people didn’t have this same kind of experience because frankly it’s a shitty shared kinship. It just keeps on getting shittier the old I become, and maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. Maybe if I let down some of my walls or tried hard to convey to some friends how I’m feeling, it wouldn’t fester. It also doesn’t help I have been sick for a while. And in my head since the last time we shared words.

So I’ll make you a deal.

I will try harder to get out of my head.
I’ll be more okay with sharing imperfection with you all.
I’ll show up a little more than I have been frequently.
If you also try to shake off the seasonal doldrums.

I’m rooting for all of us, gentle readers.

What I’ve Been Watching

I haven’t really been watching a whole lot. Mostly documentaries and some other ‘brainrot’ shows because I haven’t really been feeling up to it. If I did a two-parter on Christmas movies I’ve been consuming, would you all be okay with that?

Death Tour

I heard about this documentary either on Twitter back in the day or on Insta and I feel like I’ve been waiting so long to watch it. The wait was worth it. This is such a transcendent documentary about hope, about community, and about reciprocal relationships in being seen (both seeing someone like you and being viewed if that makes sense). It’s also heart wrenching, or it was for me.

I wish when the directors were doing a cross Canada tour for this documentary, I was feeling up to see it at the indie theatre in town. I can’t imagine the energy from the crowd, the other people sharing this experience. I know I’ve shared a lot this year about wrestling (with Jess’s Wrestling is drag on Dropout’s Smarty Pants and some what I’ve been reading links) but wrestling from an outside perspective is fascinating. If you’re in Canada, this doc is on CBC Gem, I don’t know where you can watch elsewhere. Give it a chance.

Nobody Wants This

This wasn’t a bad ten episode series. Adam Brody (the one guy from the OC that didn’t grow up to become Gordon Keen in Gotham) apparently returned to acting and he seemed pretty decent at it. Overall, the cast was mostly likeable, the story progressed in a pleasing way, and the musical choices didn’t suck. It’s nice to have on in the background. The younger sister in Nobody Wants This is reminiscent of Brianna from Grace and Frankie, which isn’t a bad thing and Sasha is a much more personable Coyote.

It’s probably better than I’m describing it.

Glitter and Greed

I don’t know what I expected from a Lisa Frank docuseries, but it sure wasn’t this. Huge props to whoever decided to film people in specific colours, I loved that. I remember Tassle Fairy and when that went down with them, I didn’t know about Glamour Dolls until this series, or how bad the work environment was until now. This was such a wild documentary, and yet it fits the aesthetic of Lisa Frank perfectly.

What I’ve Been Reading

I haven’t really been reading either. I got a new stack of books, and figured out which books from my previous stack I still need to finish

The Liminality of Community Loss

Suddenly, I recognized the exact same feeling I had when I was walking through the empty building at my day job. And though I had never been to this particular theme park, I grew up with Sesame Street. It is as familiar as the back of my hand. The dissonance between the nostalgic memories of the show and the emptiness in front of me was jarring.

Those memories held one thing in common with my day job’s empty building: the lack of a laughing, vibrant community.

Over at Uncanny Magazine, LaShawn M. Wanak’s beautiful elegiac ‘The Liminality of Community Loss’ has become something I’ve read and come back to. I love how carefully she establishes what a liminal space is, then brings in books to uncurl liminal space ghosts, communities, and loss. I really like how the books/stories are read through each other/with each other to expand on what Wanak is writing. I really liked this. I hope you check it too.

It's A Really Good Time to Get Loud About Books

But I am going to say that books, or the stories within them, are art; that we need art, and we need stories, and it’s cool if some of those stories are about better ways for the world to be and for us to live in it. It’s also cool if they’re about horny unicorns and magically good coffee and mythological figures who just won’t go away, or impossible odds and daring capers and even those tired old chosen ones. Escape one day and find inspiration the next. But keep going. And help others keep going when you can.

At Reactor, Molly Templeton reminds us ‘It’s a Really Good Time to Get Loud About the Books You Love”. I love yelling about books. And recommending books. It’s a bit cliche, I appreciate how Templeton clearly states find your lane. That no one person can change everything. Writing is lonely. Reading can be lonely. Let’s take a cue from birds, and never stop yapping about either of those two things (well we can. We probably should).

Ancestor Code Error

You are a corpse of their existence, a vessel of their religion, a carcass of their rise and fall, a skeleton of their history, and what you expect to see once the Ancestor Code populates your system are the wars, the battles, the deaths, the destruction, the scars with which they had left the earth with as a species.

At Lightspeed Magazine Ai Jiang wrote a neat flash fiction “Ancestor Code Error”. It’s punchy in all the right places, and a quick read.

Whither Queer?: The Genre At Midlife and a Rec-List

If you’re much younger than a geriatric millennial, you can have no true understanding of how huge the world used to be—how inaccessible most information was—before the internet. I ought to take a moment to try and evoke that bygone era for you. But it will have to suffice to say that my piece of loose leaf disintegrated before Amazon dot com, in all its glory and depredations, appeared on the scene—before I ever found every title I’d written down.

At Strange Horizon’s Kai Ashante Wilson’s Whither Queer?: The Genre at Midlife and a Rec-List, is pretty snazzy. He recommends coming back and looking at it rather than trying to down it in one go. His recommendations are pretty neat. I love it when someone has a recommendation in context of other books, read through a midlife time, and yeah. This is pretty neat.

Small Mammal Update

Yaga has discovered how to climb on top of this one bookshelf. Normally I’m fine with her verticality because its what cats do. This time, however, she’s coming close to knocking my Dad’s and Gir’s ashes off. So now, I need to find a different way to basically region lock her from that book shelf.

What I’ve Been Working On

I’ve been chipping away at stuff. Slowly, so much slower than I wanted or intended. I might have some surprises in the future but I don’t want to promise anything.

Until next time, friends.