This from Sanjeev Bhaskar again — the guy really is impeccably levelheaded — on his Blank podcast episode. The whole quote is: “You are always defined by what you do next. Who you are is your next decision, not the last thing that happened to you. The next decision is yours, so that is who you are.”

That particular set of cognitive lockpicks showed up at a useful moment in a month where — I may keep a tally of the crisis-inflected wordcount I sent through the back door of this issue for the third month in a row. (Look: To my knowledge I have never started a shooting war in somebody else’s bedroom, so I’m on decent high ground here.) Gallows humour, disrupted logistics, trickle-down damage from other people’s panic attacks, and sleeplessness, and attempts to keep a cool head without bottling it all up in the face of same, took up far too much space over here and in my schedule. Thousands of words of anger about things already obvious to all of us here which aren’t worth retreading, because the people doing it, well: hundred-word vocabulary.

None of it ages well even two weeks later because I don’t actually want to marinate in any of it. I’m increasingly thinking of The Crisis™ as a place — a contagious self-perpetuating mass of panic, lashing-out, and reactivity that eats redshirts — and it’s a room built only to leave.

It feels a little douchey to be so focused on keeping my own schedule stable right now, but the answer keeps being the same every time, once I’ve thrown all that venting and reexplaining to myself into the verbal pit: not living miserably in a dead-eyed landscape of zero choices, chaos, and perpetual panic isn’t a frill, it’s the whole ballgame. Fear and control don’t make anything or they’d have made better things already. Don’t make anything different — ways, means, or options — and you don’t get nice things. I want nice things. I am working hard toward them. I want sleep and art again. If your two options are intolerable, take Option Five. Widen your moral fantasy / widen your sense of time. Get bigger. tl;dr: To the woods.

Guess I talked big when I said I was going to make this space a site for more proactivity and keep outside that narrow moldy room for good, and whoops, time to deliver. Me and my mouth. 😛

upon the brighter side of the machine

(This is a lyric from a Matthew Good song, but not a real one: one I once dreamed with such vividness I took apart his entire back catalogue to find it before concluding it had actually come direct to me, orchestration and all. Your own! personal! B-side.)

Part and parcel of trying to keep people’s panic from blowing my life out to sea was walking a lot of the infrastructure beat. It’s a coping mechanism to stabilize what you can when other things are failing and shaky, but it creates legit improvements. You keep those good results later.

A prearranged bit of work finally connected — scheduling in a bunch of handyperson work and drywall fixes that I won/filched from GNN’s online auction last year. (I did not actually win it, but the winning bidder never claimed it, so guess who swooped in, ha ha ha.)

This was a good day, partly because there are a ton of nail holes and popped drywall seams that aren’t actually in my walls anymore, and I can look at repair and not brokenness and crap. But also because it came with a really in-depth conversation about infrastructure and organizing with said volunteer handyperson, who is a soil scientist by training and working on medium density zoning as a climate solution. And pointed me toward two (2) important things for the fruit tree situation while helping out with that. He’s working on a Pedestrian Summit scheduled for May; I’m going to go. Community networks: they are great.

So is the progress of the Student Union Food Program™. There are a bunch of things we can’t get done because of budget limitations running up to the annual campus elections, but that just meant pivoting to the ideas we could, and so that seed bank is up and running^*, and the work to establish some student discounts at neighbourhood grocery stores is underway. So is an exam care package kit that’s going to pilot into a Ramadan on-campus support program that’s going to pilot into support for any other culture that’s got fast days involved, and that last one is my bit, can you tell? If you’ve already got the model, use it for all the things; make inclusive spaces a practical reality. Also, when you use the same model for Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and some models of Lent support, as well as anything else that crosses the student population path? You have spent zero extra effort to thwart the Culture War.

^{*I’m deeply, viscerally pleased about this. Not even close to carried off alone, and the heavy lifting came from one of the paid Student Union staff members who was really into the idea, but from raising it to pushing for it and the documentation and the sourcing, I feel like I get to say here: I did that. Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. 🙂}

The grocery thing is proving fun. It turns out that when you’re the person doing the lead generation on some of that, you can make sure you’ve got a bunch of different cultural grocery stores covered, and also take the chance to throw some business to small, local-owned places who’ve been really good to you and your friends both for years and years — whether you were broke or stable. So this is turning into a lovely case of taking care of my independents, which is actually good for everybody? Lets new generations of Torontonians discover and sustain my Nice Things. Stewardship isn’t just for plants, yo.

On the proactive side: In talking with Merrie about this particular strain of work, we compared notes and agreed that one of the things that’s frayed over COVID and the years universities went mostly-virtual was — the chain of transmission between older students and newer about where the cheap stuff is. It’s a kind of place-based, geographical knowledge: exploring the neighbourhood of your campus, presuming it’s integrated in a town/city and not one of those suburban airlocked ones. You find out from your older friends, in undergrad, about the $2 banh mi (for example) and the good kitchen supplies store and the happy hours and just the lineaments of survival in your new neighbourhood, and six years on, I can tell that knowledge transmission has been broken by the conversations I have on this working group. And she is backing me up that it’s visible in Michigan too.

It does a small thing, but I think it might be a vital one, what this grocery thing is looking to repair: an outbound mature student in her early forties coming back with Okay. Kids, let us reattach you to the ecology of the cheap stuff because that water cycle can run stably, and I still remember this institutional knowledge.

I know some of the people here are attached to universities. If anyone else sees this pattern happening, and needs a head start? I will happily send you my templates and the basics of how we’re putting together this lil’ intervention. I think all you have to do is seed it in a few places, and the current undergrads will reestablish that knowledge pathway themselves. One more thing up and working.

***

Some time this month has gone into Other People’s Studies (yeah you know me). Pull data out of the ecosystem, put some back, right?

Two of these were fairly standard operations, but this was a chance for some interesting and fun activities: talking about urban agriculture resources on a Sunday afternoon for a study out of one college, where I basically got to (let me be clear, speaking quite honestly and in good faith) put on a straw boater hat and a fake moustache and go “Monorail!” about things I would like done around here for my personal vested solarpunk food systems interests.

I have probably mentioned this before, but: easy route to impact? Show up to studies. If you’re worried about what All Those Other People will say about things that affect you? Well, get in the room and say your things and be those people your own self. This legitimately works.

The second, really interesting one was doing a walking interview around the Gay Village with a Ph.D student writing on the sociology and gentrification of queer neighbourhoods. I lived there for most of my twenties, in one incredibly crappy old beautiful apartment (seriously, 1920s architecture, Murphy bed closets, elevator with one of those metal grille doors, a little maintenance and it’d have been perfect) and one more standard better one which got acquired by a REIT a year or two in, and then began the long effort to not get renovicted.

It turns out I had a lot to say on this topic: the intricacies and community relations of my two (2) Church-Wellesley apartments; how the texture of visible poverty has changed in that time; the only half-subtextual conflict between very community-driven spaces and businesses and queer-tourism storefronts and events and then you threw the condo people into the mix too; living in that community when you were in monogamous relationships and not dating, weren’t a bar/nightclub person, and how that made you differently part of it, and gave you a different eye. And notably, the surprise of realizing that the researcher, who’s 28, had no idea that there used to be affordable! community-owned! grocery stores! in this neighbourhood, and they were a cornerstone of people’s lives and changed the entire way this piece of geography worked. Nothing I mentioned was an official, touted queer-friendly space. Everything I mentioned was really community-level: diner with good breakfasts, hardware store, trans activists who lived a few floors up from me passing down secondhand Ikea bookshelves, Ukrainian deli, local park politics between the dogwalkers/AIDS memorial stewards/unhoused/condo people, defunct art galleries, the Asian family who ran the tiny convenience store ordering things in special if you asked, the regular panhandlers who legitimately looked out for 21-year-old students at three in the morning. The warp and weft of a community, not the shell or performance of it.

I did this mostly because I had the feeling it would be seriously joyful, and it delivered. It is lovely to point out the alleyway murals that used to live outside your window when you were 20 years old — which are still there, but not long for this world because development is coming — and go: When I was a student I looked out my window onto this art on hot days, and next door was a KFC, and my summers smelled like humid fried chicken. I hated it. In fiction, I blew up that KFC. Remembering this is great now. Or pause on the side-stair doorstep of your old apartment building, and go: I am having a visceral body-memory of the third week of January every year, when I would step out this door first thing in the morning, breathe in, and it would be so cold my nostrils would stick. You sit on the edge of the concrete street planter you and the other tenants’ association people gardened in the spring for a few years, never to great effect because nobody was doing enough maintenance or watering, and remember in an incredibly physical way this version of who you used to be: not the abstract story of it, but the living of it. It felt so unsurprisingly, startlingly good.

It was also great for dredging up the kinds of things you know, but have filed so long that you didn’t quite remember them. Like Bulldog Coffee quietly started what is third-wave coffeeshops in Toronto and nobody remembers that. On my way back down Church Street, before stopping at the grocery store, I stopped in there, where the same guy (Stuart) still owns and runs it, picked up a latte, and chatted with him a little about how it’s been ages, and about the deli which younger people now don’t know existed, and which we loved and miss (they got these Polish jars of plums in; I have never found again the Polish plums). It’s been a while. I should get there more often. I am going to make an active effort. I like that dude. And shit don’t thrive if you don’t tend it.

***

Likewise, I spent a bit of time on digital improvements. The doings of Big Tech haven’t generally been my particular battle — I know it’s invasive, exploitative, and bad, but my energy tends to go to other forms of infrastructure first — but I did end up ripping out and replacing a significant chunk of my tech infrastructure this month. Why? My Dropbox renewal got poisonously expensive, the kind of expensive you have to call impunity, and while I was poking around thinking what to do about that, this article from the Guardian about best alternatives to Big Tech products dropped. Service journalism: it still does stuff. And yes, this validates my longstanding and near-crank-grade conviction that people don’t do stuff when you tell them what’s bad, they do stuff when you offer them workable options for what’s better. Theory of change strikes again.

So I set up Proton Vault first thing the next morning (still working out the kinks on syncing it, and would not say no to tech support), and found myself happily divesting from Dropbox in a way that also counted as a 66% discount, freeing up money I could then put into a better per-month rate for my email renewal^*. And since that felt so nice, I moved the Look into LibreOffice item on my calendar forward, and once I’ve polished off some deadlines, Microsoft Office doesn’t get money either; it will be going toward supporting my local businesses. More cash for people like Stuart. It was nice to just actively improve one corner of my life in a way that nobody is actually in a position to obstruct.

I still do not want to hear about anybody’s lord and saviour, Linux. But there’s a great breakdown of available services in that piece, and turns out: most of them are way more affordable. I offer this to you in the spirit of.

science today, and science all your liiife

Fruit tree research is the big focus otherwise, and while it’s running terrifyingly late due to see the above Sturm und Drang, fruit tree research is undiluted greatness. Any day I get to cluster research interviews is automatically improved by ten thousand.

Asking people about their processes and stresses around something like this is amazing. It’s a quick and easy way to find out just how many people are thinking what you’re thinking, and that in fact you are all a team if you can just get the logistics of teamwork down and pull together. Also, this has got to the point where I’m starting to be able to send referrals and introductions around between interviewees: You know that thing you mentioned needing? Here is someone who has it. Want to connect with each other?

Doing that is magnificently satisfying: It’s puzzle-solving, it’s bookseller-nature, social Lego, the right book for the right reader. Synapses connect. 😀

I’m running up to the wire on how long I’ve got to write any of this up, but I’m still sneaking in a few more to fold in past deadline. Even when I’m stumbling with tired, the idea of booking a few more interviews feels good.

***

And an update: the thing I mentioned re: productive and reproductive labour last month! We can talk about that now!

I got a deeply unexpected and impromptu chance, first week of March, to do a 30-minute talk on maintenance as a political act for a working group session out of the University of the Andes.

This was one of those situations that gives you flowering imposter syndrome: I legitimately just filled out this participation form because I wanted to play along with their discussion too. I didn’t think they’d say: cool, be the speaker. Straight up, my first reaction was a full freeze. I am not always easy in academic spaces. I do not have an MA, I’m always in them through the side door, and while I’m quite aware I’m more than capable there, I’m always in a bit of a second or third procedural language re: how those spaces run.

However, this set a land speed record for getting from oh no, sitcom-grade misunderstanding to a full-fledged fun fiesta. (See: Fear is sometimes insufficient engagement with a question; to dispel it, shove your face against it and chew.) Fifteen minutes in, I had the lineaments of enough ideas that I lost track of time and was mildly late for physio. It is actually quite a gift, when someone puts you on to an interesting question and you just have to riff.

So I ended up doing 25 minutes on the political dimensions of infrastructure maintenance practices with an emphasis on thinking in terms of scale, on a very cultural-structural level, and with a focus on all that community organizing tinkery shit I’ve been up to for, oh, the past fourteen years? How projects scale up, when and why they scale up, what some of the barriers to that are, what models might be smarter in terms of how we think about those interventions. With some thoughts on how societies gender work, how long-term maintenance projects weird that gendering (reproductive but male-coded, we don’t deal well with that in this current historical moment), deskilling, and how learning to actually do even two things confidently makes you a very different kind of political actor. You know, stuff.

This was a bit of a riff on the talk I did in Vancouver two years back: play as a very real tool for climate emergency. And the idea that fun is interesting and durable, but fear is brittle and temporary did come up, and that widening people’s menu of choices and options helps support crisis action every single time did too. Apparently repeating that around the place is a major part of my organizing practice too. But it’s a significant enough riff that I think it qualifies as an iteration in its own right. And it was a really good time, with good questions from a good room. I got to send them to Shorefast for praxis models (having met some Shorefast people at State of Cities in December and confirmed that they’re deeply cool indeed) and that’s time well spent.^*

^{*. . . oh, yeah, wow, I am always going to inherently be a bookseller.}

So, it turns out when I think about it, because someone dangled enough fun in front of my face to make me? I would posit that maintenance is an incredibly political act on basically every scale you can conceive of. You have to break the frame of crisis thinking in order to do it; you silently develop agency and relationship to place when you create a skilled mode for your own hands; your body has to rethink a whole lot about the value of labour, how systems interface, just the whole shebang. Realistically, the reply to the Good Bones poem is that you took good care of the thing in the fucking first place.

Or as I’ve been saying irritatedly in various venues for a number of years: stop panicking and do some fucking work about it / doing some work about it alters the panic and the world without having to form perfect unified theories first. Enough attentive action generates its own theory. You can try stuff and fail, as long as you can adjust.

I mean, it’s not fine out there? _{Holy god, how did everyone manage this.} But if you just get your hands in and establish what’s actually a constant, and what’s a variable—

Soooo yeah, I think I’m on to something?

So: this was a gift. Always say yes when someone throws too-big boots at you. They’re giving you the chance to fill ‘em. Never waste a good crisis miscommunication bout of imposter syndrome.

things watched

I started this month rather strung out and badly in need of a weekend — one where I didn’t actually have to put out crisis-fires, manage other people, or work overtime (if you found last issue salty, there are reasons). And this 1989 series on the Victorian Kitchen, tucked away free on the Internet Archive, was a really nice pace keeper for that. It’s the speed I wanted for myself: a kind of steady progress centred in chill.

It’s a really soothing example of that older-school style of documentary series: not a lot of flash, interested in technical things, unafraid of the long shot. And as well as really hardcore low-tech cooking, it’s a nice supply of quality permaculture vegetable gardening — the kind Friend of this Household Jse-Che calls the 100-metre diet. It was a very reassuring way to resituate in a certain pace, and the reminder that deskilling’s a relatively recent situation. The skills are usually still out there. It’s just a matter of finding them.

On the comedy side: Oh, hey, Armstrong and Miller were and are really funny. I know them mostly as panel show host + more traditional actor, so this was a treat. It’s the obvious choice for a favourite sketch, but the RAF pilots absolutely sent me, and I have enough context to find the Blue Peter apology sketches awesome, too. Hats off to Ben Miller particularly: gotta love an EBD physicist who can write a joke and then play it absolutely straight-faced.

things played

I play video games when I’m stressed. So, um, some recommendations from this month. >.>

Say No! More is — one of the most hilarious things I’ve spent time with in a while. I was saving it for when I had some anger to work out (yo), but it was a great surprise in that it also has a lot of nuance and heart, and bridges an emotional arc between them in a really deft way?

The basic gameplay is really, really good for a bad week: You have one button, the button lets you yell “No!” at people, and what you’re choosing is the tone (angry, cold, silly) of that nope and a few little embellishments, like a laugh or nod or really sarcastic clap. This feels mean in a good mood. It’s great in a bad one. And it, well — kind of helps pull you out of that bad one with the shape of it’s arc, if you’re in that bad mood?

There really is only so much time you can spend running around and shouting at people (but I assure you, there is time I can spend doing that), and this brought a considerable amount of narrative substance at the right moment, without being too didactic. It’s got things to say about being too rigid about anything, and about nuance itself, and it’s one of those stories where the social commentary goes down much better because it’s got a truly epic sense of humour. It’s a few bucks on Steam, and well worth much more than that.

Lacuna was also fun, in that it’s a detective pattern-matching game that actually makes you do some detective work, and gives you the tools to do it. The setting is very classic Blade Runner-esque science fiction noir — a three-planet system with some resource-driven colonial politics shaping those planets’ relationships, where you play a FBI-agent analogue investigating the assassination of an independence movement politician.

You investigate scenes, talk to people, fill out sheets on what you think happened, and the situation changes depending on whether you got it wrong or right — and how much you’ve been spending time on the case or putting a little more into your family.

It’s not exactly expansive or immersive, but it’s well-written, and makes you think just enough for an evening’s downtime?

things to read

Half the review deadlines are getting knocked downstream by everyone involved as we put out all the crisis-fires (FFS), but two that I can officially announce now:

I’ve got a review upcoming in Plenitude of Jeff Miller’s debut novel Temporary Palaces. It’s early 2000s-era, Ottawa-set Activist Problem Fiction™ — the kind of thing you’d like if you’re me and that’s what you like — but also a read that surprised me in a few directions. This goes live, I think, in May.

A second review, of Garry Thomas Morse’s Retcon, will be in an upcoming issue of Prairie Fire. One of the real upsides of the review commissions situation is that it’s introducing me to authors I’ve never crossed paths with before, and I am happy to spoil this piece mildly by saying this book is wildly funny — especially if you’re into the history of films and like a good structural magic trick. Likewise, I think pub date on the piece is this summer.

can’t run around in circles if you want to have a life

Really too worn out about all this to put a pat bow on the thing — it’d only be incomplete or dishonest in some direction — but ideally next month I’ll have figured out a bit more workable detente here.

Definitely more review announcements upcoming, definitely some positive progress as a few things officialize and ripen, and I think one of the things I’ve been sitting back on is probably good to talk about by now?

I am quite serious about the resource distribution/knowledge networks, and if you have something good you’re working on that you don’t mind propagating out to this particular restricted audience, seriously, let me know? It’s top of mind right now, the act of comparing notes. Nothing gets done but for getting it done together.

Cheers, team. See you in April.