fifty-two: Toad will now walk on a high wire, and he will not fall down
This month’s title from my new favourite Mastodon quotebot, Frog and Toad, which pulls Frog and Toad Are Friends lines out of context enough that you realize Toad is cantankerous, flamingly queer, exceedingly catty, and kind of absolutely my favourite? It’s the kind of fundamental kindness wrapped in just enough upraised middle fingers to hit the spot.
I delayed this issue a week, partially because I had to pick the deadlines out of my breathing holes and the corners of my mouth, and just did not have time to do much else. The social and organizational firehose has kept on blasting, to the point where I, while still being happy and hungry to do all the things and see all the people, found myself on my belly in bed midafternoon in early June, pacing through my calendar to find the closest possible morning I could just sleep in, face half-buried in my pillow, purring lightly at the thought of uninterrupted naps. And then there were three more weeks.
Or, snapshot, mid-June: Spending a Sunday shoveling out one application for a very aspirational contract and one major piece of stressful life paperwork, separated by a Zoom call with one friend and gelato with others, and finally, three in the morning, under a moody half-starred sky, out on the balcony watering the plants in perfect silence, brushing leaves and straightening trellises, to protect them against the heat wave about to roll in. There’s a poetry to this; I do recognize it. It’s a kind of poetry I don’t want to have to recite on my body too much longer, because I will lean into it when it shows up, and it’s elegant, but it takes from you, and it doesn’t give enough back.
So: A four-turned-into-five-week blur of action follows.
"I'm Greg Davies and I am still the Taskmaster, and nothing you can say on Twitter from your horrible little bedroom can change that."
Most of this month’s been devoted to oblique infrastructure: the wholesale life restructuring I’ve mentioned in the past few months. Different machine for different results, and when you’re not entirely sure what results you want out of the situation, building that takes on the tenor of acts of faith. There is some kind of architecture happening, but it’s accretive. I have not been precisely gifted with the plans. This is not unlike writing a novel, except with my actual life, which is probably the only reason I trust what I’m doing in any fashion and am not panicking 24/7 (only late at night, when it’s harder to hold faith): an adult lifetime of understanding that the backbrain knows what it’s doing. Even and especially when I can’t explain myself, and it hasn’t yet entirely explained to me. Trust the process, show up, work and love.
The Food Security course is definitely factoring into that math. In one of June’s acts of getting something ‘cause I asked for it, I received a full bursary for this semester’s tuition, at which point I thought: Oh. Well. Wow. Maybe I should do my homework. >.> (Yes, I was being a dirtbag. It’d been a busy week.)
Although I had to be reminded, doing my homework is coming with its own pleasures. I really enjoy digging my brain into structural food security frameworks and occasionally studding my course notes with Statler and Waldorf-style commentary. I’m actively being confronted with the evidence that I don’t notetake a lecture, I silently heckle it. Which is why I now have course notes about the post-WWII order, whether governments buy into feminized labour frameworks without even realizing it, giving people just a little more credit really, the danger being less right or wrong solutions and more reifying rigidified solutions, and the phrase: Okay, the agronomist Antoine Parmentier is a stone cold motherfucker. (He is. 4D chess, that man’s playing.) Fuck around, find out is a learning style. If I’m not poking, deforming, and talking shit about it, I’m not actually internalizing.
So, um, this is fun. :) I spent a lot of time this month up the back of my head — arguably too much, really — but when the getting’s good, it’s vastly entertaining around here. I lost the ability to make my own fun for a while, in the deep pit of 2021, and I think I was a little afraid that was damaged forever, and there was a fundamental way I would be lost to myself. For someone who’s always fed and thrived on her own fun, it’s been a massive relief to know that limb grows back.
So yeah: What’s she building in there? I dunno, team. It’s a medieval castle and I’m at a mason’s-eye view. I’ll find out when we hit the sky. :)
Toad put his head close to the ground and said loudly, “Now seeds, start growing!”
Behind all this, June has been a bit of a revelation in terms of this garden, and capacity.
I started this garden season with more than a little skin in the game. My regular vegetable box had ceased operation, my CSA didn’t start up until August, grocery prices are (still) through the roof even with my native-Torontonian version of The Knowledge, and I kind of just thought: Okay. We’re doing this.
And: I am eating out of this garden. Not even close to everything, but a whole lot more often than not this month. I had four salads in a row the first week of the month as my leafy greens all tried to bolt and I just snagged ‘em one by one: spinaches and buttercrunch lettuce and arugula, bam bam bam, putting in hot crops in my own wake. The profusion of radish greens made both a lovely pair of noodle bowls and a nice accompaniment to peanut chicken. I sauteed pak choi and blue-podded peas and garden basil with chili shrimp and mangoes and burned my tongue off. The shiso is up. The tomatoes are flowering. I am going to have a delicious amount of beans. My pea plants are seven feet tall and rising. They twine over my head.
I made this. I can’t quite contain my joy over it.
On and off, I’ve been talking about with a few people (notably: Dr. My Former Roommate and her partner) about all the things that got written off as Millennial aesthetic affectations — knitting, drinking from mason jars, thrifting, growing food — and how they weren’t just (the obvious) poverty coping valves, but us reskilling. When I was three, I would pull weeds around my grandmother’s tomatoes in the beds that lined her back yard, under a pear tree that was always, it felt like, buzzing with bees. (I may overstate the bees because I was afraid of the bees.) There was probably some value in my parents’ generation doing the class mobility thing, getting university educations, etc. There was not value in their conviction that since they were the managerial/professional class now, even the knowledge of craft and thrift and DIY was a negative class signifier to be shed: that success was ignorance in the same way some cultures-in-time practiced foot-binding. Gotta think a little more clearly before you throw away tools like that, before you actively choose against passing knowledge on. It’s not so easily summoned back. Yes/and, yes/and, yes/and is the only way to go, I keep thinking.
But: now I’m learning again. I am reskilling. This month, I fed myself these exquisite fresh meals, through seeds and care and attention and time and friend-barter and stewardship, off a strip of concrete balcony in a loud and busy downtown. I am in delighted awe. Whattaworld. :)
outside there’s hectic action
Elsewhere in organizing: The IDHA seminar series came to a somewhat abrupt close this month — they’re cancelling the last two sessions in the wake of some organizational disquiet — and I found myself surprisingly, not entirely sorry. Like I said last month: When it was good, it was good, but overall I found far too much political education in the mix for my taste, and far too little practical upskilling.
There is a noxious, Internetty tendency in certain areas to try to move the world by litigating how people ought to feel, by attempting to control interpretations and reputations, which — my private opinion tends to be good luck with that? It’s setting oneself an extremely hard problem in a field rife with shortcuts, and also it’s kind of bluntly controlling in a way I appreciate less and less with every passing year.
The paranoid mode in American politics felt like it really kicked up beginning of June — I don’t know what you were all doing the last week of May, but oh boy — and part of why I kept so busy throughout the month was that it’s a mindset where I just cannot hang. (Tangentially, I did try to read Rest is Resistance this month, and my whole review is: “Paranoid mode. I cannot hang.” I’m sad, because there’s a good topic in there when someone isn’t constantly preaching at me about who my enemies are without ever including the proverbial Allan Key.)
It did have me thinking about why — I did pay for the course, after all, so you think a minute before you flake off and do something else — and so much of what upsets me about paranoid-mode thinking is the persistent inability to really internalize other people’s humanity: flaws, uncertainties, compromises, and all. No, the person who hurt you wasn’t a commissioned officer of the British Raj following the inexorable orders of Empire! Unstoppable force meets movable object! They were a human being, in an ecology of incomplete skills and information, and they were most likely acting out or fucking up. Even in situations of systemic dysfunction (and we have many) or outsized capacity for personal impact (and we have many), the paranoid reading can’t seem to keep people in their proper size and dimensions. It makes assholes over into monsters and gods. And if one can’t see that second option — even the glimmer of it, the door to it — the space of motion and solution and actions will be so constrained as to be unnavigable.
So I was probably not benefiting from people expounding their probably very hard-won, terror-driven, nightmare-stuffed power analyses (to my eyes: elaborate social murderboards) while I sit in the corner, increasingly frustrated, going so why not just get up and go do some shit? Look, I’m doing the shit right now. Behold my mild sunburn, short sleep, and ongoing results. We did not have a common theory of change, to use the jargon, and nobody’s really enriched by that. So: It’s done. I don’t mind. I did get some useful thinking from it.
Outside those frameworks, though, multiple projects advancing swimmingly. The results from the Chili Project Feedback Survey (consultation is a social good) are in, and it is delicious to know you’ve been collectively running your project considerately, to have your instincts about what needs improving confirmed, and to pick up a few potential core volunteers in the process. I can be confident in my backend upgrades plan for this summer. If anyone’s good at Google Forms, call me?
We did our first team gathering/garden party week before last, in one co-organizer’s backyard, and despite getting rained on three (3) times and having to run back into the kitchen three (3) times, it was delightful: a double handful of people lining a west end kitchen, talking about the mechanics of the 33,000+ meals they’ve delivered over the past three years, without even really exerting themselves all that much.
I’m also tapping back into the City’s Poverty Reduction Strategy consultations, which have been delayed because of reportage timeline SNAFU on their part, and am hopefully going to alley-oop what we’ve learned doing chili into that official policy framework. Anil Dash posted something today about how the ultra-wealthy think about money — as a flow you aim at problems, not a bucket you draw upon — and that’s pretty much how I’m approaching organizing experience right now. If it’s not moving somewhere, if it’s still, it’s basically stagnant. Always keep it flowing into something or other.
And that in and of itself is proving very nourishing. When I dwell in the land of mutual generosity — doing an informal seed exchange on the back patio of a coffeeshop, thanking the health food store in the market that just put out its expiring dry goods for free and gifted me three precious meals, kicking job postings around in the community garden group chat, half-napping on a friend’s couch instead of work-dating that day, nosing into the local weird stuff reading room/fun people bookstore for iced oolong and reading each other’s Tarot — we still live in the eye of the emergency, but everything is well. Nothing stagnant; keep that water clean.
a notable lack of word-making
I have a mode for writing while in school, and it has never been good: Either don’t write much, stay up late to write, or hold in the pressure of the words until they burst, and skip reams of class to stay home writing. I am frequently very serious when people ask about my process and I go: No, don’t do those things. This month has been something of an attempt to change that, see last issue about the proper ergonomic flow of everything I love without burning myself like a little firecracker in the process. (See: The seductive danger of wirewalking yourself to burnout, entranced by the elegance of your own gait.)
Nutrition for wordcount this month has included: So, so much Taskmaster; the smell of blue-podded pea blossoms every morning at watering time; so much horchata, so many pupusas; a concentrated six-day binge of Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast, which is also delightful if you’re even casually into British comedy; and, occasionally, the contents of my course readings. More than one thought has hopped the fence from the assigned journal responses to a work-in-progress. A wall is a technology started in the space between wandering and settled agriculture, but it entirely belongs with the thing about the egg. (The thing about the egg remains beautiful.)
What’s coming through isn’t plentiful, but it’s wild, rich, and strange. I find myself digging through Old English vocabulary lists at two in the morning, running my tongue along those words, to find the right synonym for a poetic line. I’m strangely pleased I haven’t forgotten how to pronounce them, though I barely remember paying attention in that class at all. There’s music in that version of the language, much deeper than what we’ve got. One night I spent all evening talking art with friends not seen in four years, stumbled home, looked at a poem again, went: oh, and moved one line. It was coming in too early. It felt like slipping a knotted thread.
So it’s basically sporadic, fine, and picky at the moment; brain is off on other priorities. One of my July goals is to get enough of the foundational heavy life lifting out of my face long enough to get some good stretches of drafting in.
things read
It’s not also been a great month for reading (right, yup, I need to make myself less busy, this is not fun or sexy), but I did finish Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart, which is a fun book to read in a profusion of places as partial performance art: on the subway back and forth from Tree School, at the bar in a rather upscale barbeque restaurant with a salad and a glass of Riesling, in the park behind the art gallery between the kids and dogs. Just this little spectre of nonchalant radical socialism, enacting a tiny Society of the Spectacle around downtown Toronto. I confess I liked the double-takes.
It’s largely a history of precarity — actual and perceived, which makes it more interesting and different than the usual run — and how the concept of the commons feeds into feeling like there isn’t enough. It does fall into a bit of the slightly Marxist tendency to re-explain the world to you as if you’ve never done your own thinking in the first half (seriously, someone please take the concept of political education out behind the woodshed and maybe we can respect each other a touch in future), but pulls out wonderfully in the second, which is thoughtful, personal, humane, and well-considered.
Taylor spends a lot of time extending the concept of the commons (always a social good) into different socio-emotional spheres, which had me spending a few weeks idly thinking about Things Which Are Just The Enclosure Act Again (political education, condo amenities, Omelas). As a lens, this isn’t always generative, but it can be funny: Polkaroo! I missed him again?
I’m being a bit flippant about the whole experience, but it’s quite sincere in many ways, and quite worth reading.
things to read
I’m informed that the summer issue of Prairie Fire is going to loose two of my poems upon the world, should be orderable within the week, and shipping two weeks after that.
“February Wool” is about the physicality of memory and the lil’ lint balls on your sweater (juxtaposition, it’s fun). The second piece, “Rewilding,” is one of those poems I still think is hands down some of my best shit, and is one of those pieces I do occasionally that sound like a fat sputtering trumpet that abruptly goes very, very quiet. It has both bears and logging trucks, filling the Infernokrusher brief of days long past.
I’m really proud of that second one, can you tell? Worth keeping an eye out, she said.
things to see (upcoming)
So I have done A Thing™ and formally thrown in my lot with the Mapping Future Imaginaries Network, a hub for academics, artists, industry professionals, and more putting in work to map future utopias. This struck me as cool. Good Toronto is a praxis that can dwell in many localities. So there will be a brief highlight of Stuff I Am Up To on their website in future, as with all New Guys involved.
And then I did an even bigger Thing™, and — so yeah, I’ll be giving an artist/activist-stream talk at the Communicating Climate Hope Conference, a joint production between the University of British Columbia and Tilburg University, mid-August. I’ve mentioned that sometimes I sort of just do things, right? I saw it, I liked it, I sort of just did that with utter callous disregard for whether I ought to honestly be taken seriously here (Spoiler: probably should, I’m the only person who doesn’t take myself all that seriously because I live full-time in this head).
The talk is going to be about the lineaments of connecting theory, science, climate fiction, and on-the-ground, hands-in-dirt praxis. It’s mostly, at this stage, about ways of listening and how people actually model information, as funnelled through narrative theory and stuff you pick up trying to generate and communicate paracosms to others. This is going to be a delightful massive braindump of all my gutter sociology, theory of reading, theory of change, weird little bodymind cognition, and thoughts that make my eyes go wide halfway through writing them down. I am cheerfully blowing my own mind a little and cackling in the margins.
It will be recorded. Save the date. Adventure, motherfuckers. 🥳
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So yeaahhhh, it’s been busy? Enough to warp my subjective conception of time? (Why aren’t people getting back to me about things! Wait, it’s only been a week.)
Next month: Hopefully a return to literary stuff and things; jam, and jam reportage; I am guessing one more review hitting print; and a drop out of warp speed into normal time. May nothing but happiness come to your door.