Friday, December 18, 2020

Hard days.

Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved.

These are hard days.

Yesterday was hard for too many reasons to count, not least of which was what it marked. We set a candle out, one scented with tobacco, lit for the man who called me daughter. [No, not my own father; his.]

The rest of the day was all work, and never enough time to get to it, and today is more of the same. Meanwhile, people continue to leave us at an alarming rate; a new record yesterday of 48 officially-reported deaths state-wide due to COVID-19. But the ski resorts are open and the tourists are here, and the governor continues to talk about reopening the state.

Unfortunately, we are not expecting things to improve over the winter, vaccine or no. Nothing rushed like this is ever reliable, and we already know better than to take something that already has so many reports of serious adverse reactions. There's also the question of whether it actually works over the long term, and people are already behaving as though it's a magic bullet that means no one needs to mask or distance, and we're being flooded both with tourists and with jackass locals who won't do the minimum to keep from killing us. And prices continue to skyrocket, and an artificial scarcity remains the order of the day.

Meanwhile, the need to bring in a bunch more sales this week and the next two to avoid us being thoroughly screwed going into 2021 hasn't changed. There is no economy now. There's nothing. People are literally dying all around us from the government's failures, and I don't know how we keep them, or us, alive unless I bring in a significant number of sales over the next week and a half. Tuesday, we sold my old Hyundai (for a tiny fraction of what we could've gotten for it) to a young Indigenous man who needed one badly; Monday, we raided our freezer and Wings took a bunch of meat from that half-hog share we bought to a fellow Indigenous family who can use it. This is nothing special; it's our way. But we have to have the resources to share and/or make otherwise available in the first place.

And I'm still tired. Tired from this stupid shingles vax reaction. Tired from the stresses of this year. Tired in ways no one will ever understand. "Can't hold your own head up because the physical fatigue is too much" tired. I don't care about any of the rest of it. Yeah, our craven and cowardly governor is willing to let us all die. Nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference, but I still have to keep us alive, and other folks, too. So:

And this will sound selfish, but I've spent the whole year working to help other folks survive in the face of some very ugly [and wholly unnecessary] odds, and three days ago, I hit the fucking wall. I'm going to do my work, I'm going to chase sales to keep us alive, and whatever else we can do to help those we can.  That's it. Because the country, the state, their so-called leadership? They're willing to let us die.


All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

      

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