Cleveland Handart

Long time no scree. I know I’ve used that pune before but a good pune is like a good wine – the same as an okay one but way more costly.

I intentionally scaled these down while I was on vacation. I did intend to go again last week though. But my brain is puffy and doing these seemed hard even though I was doing okay with other life tasks ¹I did take lots of pictures this past week so I’ve included a bunch of those (with no context) to help fill the gap. I’m gonna try to take pictures while I work on believing a different thing about what they mean. And while it try to make Shanda remember that she likes photography. And while I practice the art of group chat.. I started several times with something about how I resent the way parental privilege is assigned by patriarcal role, entirely distinct from parental responsibility. I still have a thing to say but clearly it’s not baked yet. Something about the way young people doing parenting to their siblings are ignored or even punished, and never granted even the power they need to succeed, let alone any of the privileges. Or about how parenting your assigned old person as young person leaves you with all the hard work while they use their privileged patriarchal position to directly fight you ²A form of a abuse I’ve been feeling at my company. They’re recently started pushing slogans like “We are all owners” and claiming those are important principles. But they actually mean: You are all individually responsible, because we – the owners – don’t want to share control or profit, but do want you to be attached like owners. … Continue reading. And something about the way I resent having to give up my whole life and the Kids to flee and save myself.

I’ve got a whole list of other things to write about too. More big picture changes that feel out of the drug day, conversations with @BPS, M feels, the art of group chat, my first crayon drawing, and a series of interactions with J that included both months of careful work, lucky happenstance meeting low inhibitions, and a thing that came real close to being amazing but failed ³Hopefully just failed to be amazing in a heist movie sort of way. I am still trying to make it amazing in a human spirit sort of way. when time gave anxiety a chance to overpower love.

And then I was leaving for Cleveland. Which is real good, but full of its own complications (and definitely related to the mess in my head about parenting). It is often hard for me to write when I’m prepping for travel (and particularly for Ohio). I’m there right now in fact, after transporting a 10-year-old I hardly know across the country with literally no questions or papework from anyone in the process ⁴Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for a world where young people can travel freely. But the fact that nationalist authoritarian paternalism steps back to avoid conflicts with patriarchal paternalism is sort of disheartening. I’m not sure there will ever be a day when I can travel without showing my papers and making my quim squirm in the right … Continue reading.

Travel was pretty good. Having someone along who didn’t get triggered by my presence was a great way to keep me from being entirely lost. I was also able to pack normal clothes and not survival clothes, which is pretty new for me. I’m still a little uncomfortable about it but I’m happy it’s happening. I packed colors for myself too. And left home with provisions instead of procuring them in-situ ⁵Which you might think fits with my emergency preparedness but that is usually overwhelmed by procedures for fleeing and for minimizing attention from authorities.. Plus I ate eggs on the plane without any obvious ill effect, and usually my brain only lets me eat eggs in very dangerous situations. So lots of good things, but still a hard day.

And now I’m staying up late pounding out some writing because time zones and air travel both make my brain wibbly.

So of course I put this off again and did my HA4H prompt [fig 1], which follows:

I’ve been working on childhood rememberings, as a general concept, because I don’t have easy access to them. So I’ve sort of been doing it the other way around – imagining a childhood that fits the facts I can actually observe. I think it turns out rather the se for this exercise though. Here are some facts I know about my early life – that I had lots of maps, that I was safest when I went unnoticed, and that I carried the same knife without losing it from like without losing it or having it confiscated for almost a decade. And here’s what I imagine I imagined from those facts – that I could learn to be prepared to survive anywhere, that I didn’t think I could do it without a knife, that people liked me best when the things I made changed their life without being seen, and that wear, decay and eventual loss were inevitable.

And that’s definitely how I art today. I’ve been making my art invisible to everyone (including myself) for a long time. But it’s been happening anyway. I built light and glass installation in my home and programmed a computer to make it work seamlessly with human activity in the room to be helpful, and when that wasn’t too demanding, to also do art. I turned it off the other day – not just reduced it functionality or brightness but unplugged it – and it made my room sad even though I didn’t need the lighting. The life I programmed into the thing, where it watches what you do and adds art that won’t be distracting – where it cares for you without your notice – was obvious in its one day absence even though I ignored its presence for a decade. In fact that part that’s most visible now is the decay; I engineered it to fail in a way that is pleasant but increasingly less subtle over time. So it will run without me a for a long time, and will slowly bloom after I’m gone and it’s safe to be seen.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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