Links...

Free Ben And Jerry's! 

Irritate A Moderate, Support Abdul Al-Sayed and Win MI Senate 

Write a Letter,

Tell Congress We Can Party With The Haiti-ans 

(link opens to a letter you can fill in and add to. Please do--it's very easy)

I believe in immigration and human rights and Ayanna Pressley's petition would extend protections to people with nothing to go back to.

Also, if you care about restaurants or the caregiving crisis, as I do, you want these people to stay here whether you know it or not.

"It does not say RSVP on the Statue Of Liberty...Thank you." 

Poem-- If Attitude Counts...

 

If Attitude Counts

Maybe I can imagine, since there’s no definite place I belong.

I could pull up sideways to any table, and get exotic crumbs on floors that aren’t mine.

Maybe I can make the space inside my heart

That sometimes feels like a void

Into some death-defying canyon

That the nouveau put on their bucket lists,

And say there is a beauty there, call it “spare” or “harsh”

Does “It’s all in how you look at things?” have that kind of magic?

If it did, maybe it could change a blank page into my

Own personal tundra that’s just mine to explore.

Trying to think that doesn’t quite make it real

But I work better with big goals.

We've Done Worse, Obvs,

 and this is not why I wouldn't especially want him to be President, but Mark Kelly'sremarks defending his wife make me uncomfortable somehow. I don't think disability should be a "Touche" ever. Also, doesn't speaking about his wife while using latter-day Trump as an example...kind of make the opposite point about Giffords' skills? He's not doing a very good job.

Also, could we stop picking a leader like we're picking a stepdad? I mean, it's great that  the Kelly/Giffords bond is so unshakable and that he has been at her side so much, but they can afford it in a way a lot of people can't(So wish Kelly would get behind universal health care and stop voting for stuff  like the Laken Riley Act .)

And there seems like there is kind of subtext amid the Giffords/Kelly "Their love is so pure," that says he's a real hero for staying in a way that Gabby wouldn't get if she were the one that was uninjured. Society expect women to rise to the "sickness and health challenge" so much more than men, even though a study showing truly jaw-dropping gaps between the genders was recently retracted, I still think the expectation is vastly different. (I'm definitely not sure that AU!CaretakerGabby would be able to see that period of  faithfulness as, you know, good for her career, except in the sense that hanging out at home would look better than looking up old boyfriends-- not really like " I took care of him, let me take care of *you*, America!"

I Should Have Written About Community

 

Maybe I should have written about community.  Because, as obsessed as I have personally been with the question of what a public and adult disabled female voice sounds like—probably more of a thing if you have a voice that’s not always clear in your own head, as well as one people are not used to hearing. Maybe it’s not a thought enticing to publishing pros, who, in turn, are trying to decide what engages the book-buying public, to whom, despite everything I’ve been dreaming forever(and that sometimes makes me feel I’ve been at this a long time,) my flashes of activity might look like signs of sunstroke. If I take my eagerness for a hugely validating capital-M Moment out of the equation, it makes every bit of sense for the people with novels that aren’t hope on a hard drive to get the blog posts first. 

 Fifty-something or not, I’m still a rookie, and one who was lying to herself when she thought that getting into the magazine without the aid of First Stories would put to rest a lot of her questions about her overall gifts.  It helps.  But maybe not as much as I imagined it might when I was sending out the six, or eight, unpolished or possibly unfinished stories that the magazine, rightly, as it turned out, failed to pay attention to.  (Maybe I’ll finish one of them, though there are a few that I will chalk up to experience as the moment for police procedurals, at least from my outsider’s desk, seems to have passed. Not that I nailed anything with them but a passable-for-a-chick-from-the desert Richard Price impression anyway. )

“I am Queens Boulevard!” except for all the ways I am so clearly not. Maybe Phoenix doesn’t have much of an identity, either. Maybe thinking of us as working it out together might help me feel better about the other reasons I have to stay. I generally love a project..

I couldn’t have written a more traditional PI story, though.  Not without cribbing so violently from other writers that it would make “Murder By Death” look like a documentary. I don’t really know what “lone wolf” feels like. Maybe not that great, since the bottle of scotch in the desk(or in the case of the women, a punishing-sounding exercise regimen) comes pretty standard, much like the office with the dead plants. 

I have never run five miles, much less felt depleted because I skipped a day or a thousand. I have only rarely solved a problem due to some individual effort of mine—and if you add in my need for personal care—don’t ask, if you think identity struggles don’t go easily with blog posts, you have seen nothing compared to all that stuff—my Individualism count plummets to about one, depending on how fast I can get this post out.

Part of me still wanted to lie, or at least research my way into hiding all that—I’ve done it before.   So the form I halfway love, and my form, that I halfway don’t, had to adapt(pun not intended) and make “Wedded Twist” possible as a PI story where the hero gets help when she needs it.

The Masthead For The New EQ

 I'm an Author in theLatest Issue

As usual, feeling a bit like I don't belong, especially since they didn't use my blog post.(Yet? Who knows?) 

Lots of Conflicting Feels, No Takes...

 but the Platner story would feel different for me if our government didn't feel so damn illegitimate. The Senate *should* be an august body that you should have to be good enough for, but is that what really happens?not really.(If we need it to be, how do we do that? When I was eighteen, I would have said "Women!" and I wish I could still do that, but I've met more of us.)

People can change a lot, but some acts really are things you can't take back, I suppose. War is hell, also. I liked what he said, but anyone could have a scary side and I could see that his could be scary. Even though I like his ballsy attitude. 

still hate Susan Collins, who has found many means to screw millions of Americans against their will all the time. But she didn't touch them and she used her inside voice, so, moral. 
Brett Fucking Kavanaugh.(But yes, always want better candidates than that! Obviously...) But he gets to decide very important things constantly and Collins backed him up.  (And if you say he's illegitimate now, people act like you just found out about Santa.)

Standards don't work if they're this one-sided./ But doesn't that make us the good guys?(does it, though?)