fifty-six: (if this is a game, are we cheating? yup.)
(This month’s title from that XKCD strip I linked last issue: a mood which extended, and never a bad one.)
We kicked off October around these parts by shutting down social media right at the outset. I could sense the barometric pressure system that is The Internet and Its Moods visibly starting to boil — random people lashing out at me and each other on the slightest pretexts, which: let me tell you how much I enjoy that — and I just decided that I don’t actually have to play emotional endurance sports right now. We downplay this stuff, but it’s violence, and I hate it. It’s unnecessary, and it loops in on itself. Nothing comes out.
I fully and firmly agree with everything Erin said at XOXO about the answer to compromised networks being refiguring, rethinking, and repair. (Linked because exceedingly worth watching a la people are good. Whisper it under your breath. I didn’t even know XOXO was a thing until this year and now I’m mad I never went.) But there are things I personally can’t do — or do well — with violence blowing in through the windows.
So it’s been a month of focusing on the local-and-actionable, which is good, because there is no shortage of local, actionable things to do.
co-op
For the first time in ages (first challenge of tabletop: schedule tabletop) I played a game of The Quiet Year with some Mastodon half-strangers on a Thursday night. Literally just someone asked who was interested and four of us were up for it. So we spent an evening sketching out an underwater city and doing a little imaginative yes/and about its life and conflicts.
Without even trying, I kept it fully on-brand: bureaucratic precision and vast swathes of the unknowable in the appropriate proportions. I am the persnickety party who’s making sure the water temperature and pressure conditions were right for that coral reef I wanted (look they mostly grow to depths of 150 feet, the lil’ corals need light and gas exchange), but also the party who pulled an entire guild/mystery cult of ecological diplomats out of my hat, establishing relations with and advocacy for the school of fish over there, the clam colony, the ghost of the skeletal blue whale, and the formless shadow thing in the chasms to the northwest. And put a precursor artifact right in the centre of town. It’s very revelatory, actually, how people tend to set up their starting principles in talk roleplay: I don’t like my Big-M Mysteries to be solved, just contemplated. If you try to solve one, I will hit you with another! The world is unknowable and qualitative! Bosh!
It’s a lovely game as a whole, although I’m not sure we as a group hit the purpose: there’s supposed to be a simulation of the push-pull of being in community together as you play and the initial set pieces iterate into challenges or opportunities, and doing that online, where we couldn’t see each other’s faces, with a GM who leaned more to strong structure might have torched the point. It landed overpolite, in the sense that people seemed reluctant to start playing with others’ narrative creations — which is fundamentally the job. Community involves touching each other’s shit. This may have been a real-time modeling of what does stifle the push-pull of community outside a gaming space as well: I have been thinking about how people refuse interdependence or interaction in the name of respect, and how that’s not respect, not really. The opposite of rough handling isn’t abandonment; it’s care.
I do have a physical copy of this game, and I think I need to bust that out with some people I actually know better, and see how the dynamics change. When we’ve got the body language, a little context for each other, and enough trust to mess with each other’s stuff just a little. To know how to mess with each other’s stuff constructively, gracefully, or just in ways that are too stupid and funny to do anything but laugh and laugh and keep going.
(Which is what I want from community. So: Maybe it succeeded after all.)
research and then praxis
At this point I’m halfway into this semester’s course (food security research, how to both read and generate it!) — aided by three (3) small scholarships that came in beginning of October. Course fees in this program aren’t massive, but it’s nice not to have to worry about them, and a student award or two won’t hurt when I need some of these projects taken seriously. Everything I’m building in these assignments has a destination — that’s one of my rules for this, turn in actionable work — and putting credibility to years of grassroots fuck-around experience is part of my goal.
I was a great designer of studies I had no intention of carrying out in undergrad — just an absolute filth of an Idea Guy slavering to split the profits — so I am having fun with this. There was a startlingly happy moment early October, turning in a stone-cold killer of a study framework design — urbanism, food security lit, sociolinguistic elicitation practices, housing turnover and Competition Bureau data, a heap of experiential practice and inference, and top it all off with subtractive design ooh la la — 20 minutes before the deadline cutoff on a Friday night, and then dancing my way across the apartment to “Boys Don’t Cry” near-midnight to celebrate, wrapped in a cardigan because my building fucked up the heat switchover and we spent all of Thanksgiving weekend in the cold, because this is still the fallen world.
There are plenty of problems in this picture, but in the moment? The moment was awesome. The first time I did this sort of thing, in undergrad, I was far too anxious and unsettled in myself to fully enjoy the victories. It’s so nice to wallow in feeling so fucking good at something I like so much.
Right now, the beat is a small and semi-participatory community study for the major assignment: some impact assessment on community and balcony gardening skill programs, since there were only about a million of them sprouting up this spring as people panicked about food prices, and — on one hand, good? The balcony and I had a great time and I fucked myself over with tomatoes. On the other, it is rather the trickle-down economics, Internet-advice way of thinking about the problem: all self-reliance and information-not-infrastructure, with the same rotten, lonely structural assumptions at its heart. And that is, inherently, the approach that created the problem in the first place, so I want to measure the follow-through and actively pin down what people are missing. Punch through the board.
It’s a good time to be doing something like this. I’m not really directly impacted by this hurricane season, but it’s stirred up some basis for comparison.
When Hurricane Katrina hit — and I remember that being, at the time, shocking — I had a sustained, steady instinct that writing fantasy novels was not really the best use of my talents and my time, and started voicing around the corners that maybe I should find ways to get my hands in. Not quite join the Peace Corps, which is what I was flippantly calling it, but: hands-on community development. A piece of the work. (Nothing about what I’m doing now is surprising if you knew me then.) I remember being argued with about this quite emphatically by members of my extended writing group, about how this was a false urge or a wrong one, that I should resist it — to a degree that at the time truly startled me.
This month’s whole hurricane light switch rave has possibly gone down easier for me, happening as it did alongside designing that community study, a deescalation training, and getting sideways tapped into a truly ambitious project one of the community garden folks wants to pilot. Keeping your hands on the matter of the problem is something of a moral prophylactic. I can choose to think okay, someone else has that piece, because I have my corner, and we’ll all work our corners and there we be. It’s in the state of being purely a passenger where the moral injury, I think, lies.
I’ve been mildly obsessing since about this notion that passivity was not just desirable but moral? There’s something in that, if anyone wants to take it on. The only way I’ll be chasing that one further is in fiction.
As above: this weekend also saw into existence one of the small projects I’ve been helping out with this autumn: a deescalation training and collective meal for the community garden. One of the other regulars there does encampment support work, and has wanted to meet some of the stress community gardeners have around the park encampment with a lil’ upskilling. I offered to run support on it, and we’ve been sticking it together for about two months.
Throwing this out for when people think organizing/activism/whatever is hard and requires growing a whole different personality or something. I thought it was a good idea, offered to help, and threw in some sounding board time, graphic designer leads, gluten-free food options, setup/teardown, and perspectives on content (which just means I was around for a few conversations she hadn’t been, so I could say: hey, there’s this ongoing drama with one of the neighbours that told me where people’s heads are at and then we could tailor material with that in mind).
I will not say there weren’t hiccups. Doing this kind of thing in a space that’s having conflict means conflict habits are going to come up. There are a few reliable people-in-stress tendencies that send me out of my skin, and we definitely hit one. But I got a rather fabulous two-hour deescalation training skillset out of the deal, met some of the other people organizing along different vectors in the neighbourhood, and got to hang out with cool people who care about art and community and harm reduction too. We might build on the concept and do another event in the spring. It was a worthwhile afternoon.
from profound to quotidian
The weather’s been changing — Changing on a grand scale and day to day, not changing enough — and this month, canning is a clock. I know what I was putting up last year, and the year before, and I should not be trying to figure out what to do with seven pounds of tomatoes in the third week of October. Time is out of joint, she keeps thinking, as she preps yet more half-litre jars for this:
The trouble is: too much of some things — so on paper, more than enough food — but not quite enough of other things to complete them. And thus the rather peculiar feeling of having a too-full fridge and needing groceries, because otherwise the components just fall apart in one’s hands. A surprising deal of meal prep stress vanished just by buying the right four things.
I’m so aware of weather right now, as seen through the lens of The Crops. The middle of October held a series of bright blue days, perfectly cool, perfectly cloudless: a community centre harvest festival under trees that are still green way out of season.
I should be on apples and cranberries right now, and local apples are a dead letter this year; something about the persistent warm temperatures and quantities of rain. My body reads the light and wants hot soup and greasy noodles, but it’s too warm for it, really. There’s still lettuce producing. We should be past salad weather. What on earth.
writing, shading into things read
Writing this month has been a punctuated beat: some slow noodling on some of the more agglutinative projects. Not enough critical mass to chase in dedicated ways yet; every so often something strikes me right, and I go in and add a few syllables, and they’re the best work I did all week.
One of these is going to, I’m starting to think, whistle and wander its way through the entire drafting process: Forgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way home. And my head’s busy enough with enough traffic that I’m just: cool, live your life. I can’t pick fights with any of them right now.
I spent mid-month writing book reviews. Someone pitched a whole chunk of them this summer, turns out. >.> It was, though, a rather perfect week for settling in with a heap of climate memoirs and poetry, and the flow from one to the next made a nice playlist.
It also created the realization that, in my eighth attempt to get through the first page of a book, that man, I’ve been an editor far too long. It is downright scary how much I can tell about a book — and already have to say about it — from that page alone. To be fair, that’s when all the starting signals fire — tone, voice, angle of approach, scansion, alliteration, characterization, juxtaposition with the title craft, elision — so it might be the page with the most to say for itself in any piece of writing. Everything else in a piece has some element of foundation and expectation to lever off; the action you choose now flows from previous kinesis and momentum. What you do in the first page, when only the blurb and title are hanging in the reader’s head, is everything. But it’s still spooky, when I read three paragraphs, go: Yup, okay, that’s how this’ll be — and it actually bears out. Makes you really think about that first page, cognitive load, and communication.
things to read
One review hit print (web) this month: a review of Ken Sparling’s Not Anywhere, Just Not in The Ampersand Review. It likely comes across in the review itself, but if you want to be well and fully sent behind the sofa by a very quiet, small domestic novel, you have a friend in this book. I was late on this deadline by an embarrassing amount because it was so unhealthily precise in the dynamic it’s describing and it was like touching an eyeball. This writer is very good at his job.
Likewise (it was a coincidence) I’ll have a poem in the next print issue of The Ampersand Review, too. It is called “my mother asks why i do everything the hard way” and 1) yes, this happened and it was definitely one of those worldview-revealing moments; and 2) it is a joke in the style of my good bro Jean-Pierre Jeunet, perfector of the emotional arc that goes ha ha ha — fuck. To be fair and balanced, there are also sled dogs, so it’s not all disaster? It’s for the winter issue, so should be out within the next few months.
places to be read at
The official invite isn’t yet assembled, but there’s going to be a group reading and digital event for old-school zine Mythic Delirium’s 26th anniversary on November 23, 6pm Eastern. The roster is a heap of people who are doing bigger things now and Knew Each Other When, and just generally a good crew. I’ll update on other channels when the link’s ready.
so it’s something of internalities around here
The most local place is between your own ribs, right?
Have a good month, and back end of November with definitely some book review stuff, very likely some food security stuff, circular grassroots economics if that thing next week is any good, and hopefully, depending on the whims of the projects, verse.