016: I've Never Been Sued by a Door

First, COMPILATION.
Usually, this is where I post a whole bunch of my social media posts in a neat copy-paste format so it seems like I have more to say than I actually do. Not so this time. This is a compilation of one post, because it is important and near and dear to my heart. You may have seen this on Facebook, but in case you do not haunt Zuckerland, here it is again:

You know what would make Pride great? Helping a talented af queer gal make it through the month (and more.)

Dex is my favorite comics babe with a heart of blackened gold and more loving venom than you can shake a stick at. She's also been dealt a shit hand of late and our lil support network needs help. None of us are happy about how much mental health, physical health, or transportation cost, but those costs still need to be paid. If you can chip in, we'd very much appreciate it, and her gay heart gets to stay with us longer.

Second, A SHORTish RANT ABOUT HEALTHCARE.
All of my partners and most of my friends struggle in some way with disability. I've documented my own issues here a number of times. What is most appalling about all of it is how those with the fewest resources are forced to pay the most, in time or money or both, in order to simply function or exist. And since that time and money expenditure is so large, it perpetuates the cycle of diminishing resources.

Now, I could go on a big rant about the excesses of capitalism and the classist state of healthcare, but that isn't this rant, not actually.

This is about the inability of people to imagine themselves in a situation where they suddenly didn't have an arm, or couldn't see, or needed an insulin pump, or had a joint that is literally bone grinding against bone, or any number of mental or neurological health issues that are wholly invisible, or organs that fail, or a digestive tract that cannot absorb necessary nutrients. I'm not talking at all about the sort of misguided "survival of the fittest" people, either. I mean your average healthy person cannot imagine how many people in their lives deal with some kind of actual debilitating illness or infirmary, and who cannot imagine themselves in that position.

We have normalized pain, disease, and a kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare to the point that society simply disallows those things from existing in "real life." We have hundreds of medical dramas that revolve around emergency rooms or acute shit you get over, but no shows about living day-to-day with the literal inability to get out of bed because of fibromyalgia, or the cyclical loss of general health after a major accident (breaking a bone leading to lessened exercise leading to cardiovascular disease leading to further and further complications,) or even truly living with cancer and its lifelong struggle.

We take enormous, dramatically interesting ideas about health and erase the banality of the chronic. It's like Dom Irarra's bit about his mother, explaining every horrifying thing she deals with on a normal day, and then she finishes with "...but you know me, I can't complain." And we laugh at that. (I mean, it is funny. It's a well-crafted joke. But it's also horrifying.) We make it an exception; we distance ourselves from the fact that we all have friends (or are those friends) that make statements like that.

We need to stop treating disability like some alien other, and accept that human beings have bodies, and every body eventually breaks down, and addressing that breaking down is honestly trivial for us as a species for most things.

And still we create imaginary or constructed barriers to that trivial care simply because of a lack of imagination.

Looking at the subscriber list for this, I know I'm largely speaking to the choir here. We know these things. But I encourage you to speak up about it. Tell people about your struggles. Tell people how much it costs to keep your failing body running. Start those conversations. You might end up being that stick in the mud friend that people label as a complainer, or too sensitive, or plain Too Much, but you know what? They will likely end up with some chronic condition at some point in their lives, too, and when they do, they'll be dumbfounded that it could have happened to them. And they'll come to you. And you, being the kind, sharing soul that you are, will help them on their journey. And you'll have the option to say "I told you so" but you won't, because you're better than that.

I'm not, but that isn't the point here.

The point is, the more people are able to see, literally, and imagine, literally and figuratively, that our whole world is full of people that need help, and that they themselves might need (or already receive!) that same help, the more people will GET help.

This is why we still have things like Migraine Awareness Month. By the way, it's Migraine Awareness Month. Hi. I've had migraine since I was in elementary school, but I never, ever received treatment for it because my mom just thought it was a stomach bug when I would get them so bad I vomited. So then I just stopped bringing it up after the time in my teens I mentioned the phenomenon that was actually migraine aura and she took me to the optometrist instead. Well over 30 years of my life has been impacted by a mostly unpredictable vascular and neurological condition that looks to the outside world like nothing at all.

It is estimated that a billion people worldwide struggle with episodic or chronic migraine. And we just... let people suffer with it. We make medications that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and act like it's normal to withhold them from the people that need them. And as much of that is, indeed, the fault of capitalist greed, it's also on us as fellow human beings to help the people who need it. The irony is that "the people who need" it is literally all of us at some point.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- the new Florence + the Machine album, Dance Fever, came out two weeks ago and it's challenging Ceremonials as my favorite F+tM album. There's something about the atmosphere of this one that just speaks to me. The instrumentation is fairly minimal in most places, but the production is very interested in keeping the minimalism of the arrangements full. This is a really clumsy simile, but it's like taking a full power trio recording like Green Day's Insomniac and then transferring it to a totally different set of instruments and genres and timbres. There's so much being done with (comparatively, for Florence) so little. "Girls Against God" and "Dream Girl Evil" are probably my favorites, but like with Ceremonials, it's hard to figure out which I like "best."
- finished The Complex PTSD Workbook to help with, y'know, the complex PTSD. I'm not sure how much I actually took from it, but it's a good reminder that a fair amount of my discomfort might, in fact, still be stemming from trauma I haven't quite gotten over.
- read Philip K. Dick's UBIK in a single sitting. I very rarely do that; I think the last time I did it was with The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I loved it, though, particularly the atomization of tolls for every service. I've always felt that the actual plots to Dick's work are less interesting than the worlds he's created for them. Which is ironic considering how much of his reality questioning goes into my own work.
- read DIE Vol. 1 by Gillen/Hans/Cowles, and just loved it. Gillen's writing is always delightful, and Hans' art gives a beautiful impressionist feel to the concepts and worlds related to those words. If pressed for a description of the book, I would say "Reverse Jumanji" but also with JRR Tolkien as a cameo.
- purchased and began reading The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay. My theoretical knowledge in feminism, and specifically Black queer feminism, is lacking, and I decided Pride is as good a time as any to finally get some in.

Fourth, PROMOTION.
This is the part where I talk about my book, A Void and Cloudless Sky. The book is up for sale on Amazon and BN.com, as well as Bookshop.org! The best deal is with Mr. Bezos, but Bookshop actually lets you support your friendly local bookstore if you want. In addition to those online locations, you can ask your local indie retailer to order a copy for you if they are serviced by Ingram. (Most retailers of new books are.) Ask your bookseller!

Do you want a FREE Advanced Reader Copy? All I ask is that you review it on the aforementioned sites and/or Goodreads. Let me know!

And as usual, if you'd like to support this whole endeavor more directly, you can check out my Patreon, where I post poetry, notes to poems, the occasional essay, and whatnot. At upper tiers I even write poems FOR YOU!

If you like what I do here and don't have the scratch or the inclination to do the above, please share this newsletter with you friends. I like making words wiggle people's brainjuices.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
I'm back up in the northern Great Plains for the foreseeable future (by which I mean til August.) It's already been blindingly hot, humid, cold, and rainy. Every time I come up here, I'm reminded why I left, but at the same time, I love my time here. I saw my best friend on his birthday for the first time since 2008, I have my dog, I get to blast down country highways listening to synthpop at high volume, and general enjoy having a night sky to look at. There's always brighter sides, even if the darker side seems so much more prevalent.