greetings

oh boy, it’s been a month. my friend loon passed away in the first week of august. i’ve been having a weird one since. spent a lot of my time trudging through molasses, busy managing various chronic illness flares, and now summer is basically over. where does the time go?

“Our dear beloved Loon is dead and we're throwing her a party. She requested not to have a traditional memorial but she always encouraged us to be together. Anyone who knew her knew what it was like to dance and sing and laugh until your face hurt, to have dinner together and read poems aloud and pray and joke at the same time, to happily labor and fight side by side, and now we have to keep doing it…”

loon’s memorial will be early september on the peninsula, there’s a fund for end of life/travel expenses if you wanna share or donate.

upcoming

• monday, september 7th: olympia porch fest.

• sept 12-26th: virtual bay area queer zine fest.

• saturday, october 17th: portland zine symposium.

porch fest stuff

all outdoors; live music all day in the neighborhood, market from 12-7, roosevelt elementary. lots of cool vendors (will i get a 4th shirt from absurditerra and more cyanotypes from mortal coil studio? probably!).

i made a bunch of pins for this (including brand new designs + pressed flower pins).

i’ll also have a handful of shirts, lots of greeting cards, prints, gig photos, zines, stickers, seed packets.

new in the shop

2 years on low dose T gel mini zine is now available in my shop. patrons got it first! i’ll be adding some new buttons to my shop after porch fest. friendly heads up that threadless is having a labor day sale starting august 31st- you can get my art on shirts for as low as $12.50.

garden report

garden highlights from august include: the birds who take all the white baubles out of my bee bath brought me a gift (small mirror fragment), new waterlily dahlia type blooming, first zinnias, pink sweet peas, sungold tomatoes, first of the scarlet runner bean pods harvested, many seeds saved from various spent flowers (will have lots of purple poppy seeds at porch fest).

you can get the garden report zine in the mail if you sign up for my patreon at $5 or above (you can read it digitally as a free or $1 member).

live laugh loon

i hadn’t been close with loon since right before the pandemic hit (i remember going to inhale exhale with her at ofs, i think it was the last time we really hung out), but she was one of the first friends i made after moving to olympia. there was a stretch of time when kyle and i had her over for dinner every week. we excavated decades of garbage and gnarly blackberry bramble at the track house to build a garden together. there’s a framed photo she took in my bedroom of our friends planting the first veggie starts in the fresh dirt. she put an electric guitar in my hands, and believed in me more than i believed in myself when it came to playing it lol. she was hilarious and encouraging and a joy to be around. she cared deeply for her friends, and i feel lucky i got to be one of them.

this is my first big grief i think. it’s been nice to talk about her and look at old photos. i resolve to take more photos of and with friends going forward. i’m glad i have a fair amount from our time together.

some songs

elliott, are you okay? you’ve been listening to nothing but mj lenderman’s self titled album on repeat for weeks. heh.

anyway, i really loved this song from teenage sex and death at camp miasma. i maybe switched to this on repeat instead:

Andy ShaufSatan

i’ve also had long december by the counting crows stuck in my head, which makes me do a sensible little chuckle every time. go see that movie immediately.

tiny victories

• seeing teenage sex and death at camp miasma at my local independent theater with our lil cc movie club was definitely a highlight of my month.

• first garden tomato salad.

• made some art for fun and for work.

• managed to line up the first and last quarry swim of the summer with clover on the last day of august.