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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
These are difficult days, and deadly dangerous ones, too. The governor is focused on being able to reopen even as she's allowing hospitals to refuse to treat COVID-19 patients they deem less likely to survive, which means, disproportionately, our peoples. She's completed cowed by the restaurant lobby, but not afraid to have the world know she's willing to let us die?
Oh.
Same as always.
It's hard finding beauty in the shadows now.
Still, it's there. it's there in the folks following and sharing my hashtag on Twitter, giving to keep folks going just one more month, to fund food and rent and meds and heat and lights and a holiday party for low-income schoolkids who have to go to school in this pandemic but are continually underserved. It's there in the possiblity of snow for tomorrow. It's there in Wings's newest work, linked below. It's there in the fact that we are still, in spite of everything, in the face of governments that would rather see us dead, persistently, defiantly here.
But it doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come without the work. And I have to work to do now. I will have to run two sets of numbers today, because the state blamed a network outage (while everything else was up) for not providing them yesterday, promised them for this morning, and STILL has not produced them, probably because they're likely god-awful. I have housework and business work. I have to keep us alive. I have to help keep as many other people alive, locally and elsewhere, via mutual aid and support. Sales accomplish both. Wings new masterwork, completed yesterday, has dropped: It's the fourth and final entry in his limited signature series, The Four Seasons. This one is fall's, and you can find it here; it's extraordinary. I also posted his latest informal collection of bead jewelry here three nights ago; all three are available for purchase. There will be more in the same vein, too, as well as new silverwork coming in the next week or so.
I, on the other hand, am still in full-blown shingles-vax reaction and way, way behind now (if you want to know what it feels like, think mono and flu simultaneously, with all the autoimmune joint and nerve pain besides). I have so much work yet to do, so the rest is cut-and-paste, but the only thing that really matters is that we're running out of time to make holiday sales to get us (and others) through the next spring, so please share the links.
We were very blessed a few weeks ago to be able to cover November's expenses and get hay for the horses and firewood for the winter. But it's December now, and my Patreon payout yesterday was down by some $400+ (now it's down only $300+). I'm pretty sure a couple of them are folks whose credit cards expired and they just need to update their accounts, so if that's you, please check your subscriptions; this is BIG hit for us. But most of them, I suspect, are folks who simply can't swing it this month, because four years of a Nazi gutting everything and now a raging pandemic have destroyed people's safety nets. If that's you, don't worry about it. Unsubscribe immediately if you need to; things are hard enough without folks worrying about something like this, too.
Of course, what that means is that I have to make up the difference with sales. As grateful as we are for our current blessings, we also know that real winter hasn't even arrived yet, and it will be a long one. Cases continue to spike state-wide and locally both, and deaths locally, too. If they allow ski season to open on December first and allow tourists in, unquarantined, our local numbers are going to be deadly indeed. Meanwhile, the economy is wrecked already, the number of people who need help climbs by the day, and after refusing to do the minimum by locking down (she couldn't even last two weeks this time without weakening her own rules, and now people locally are paying for it), the governor has announced she'll soon be shifting to so-called "crisis standards" for hospitals, which means that if you're disabled or otherwise less likely to survive COVID-19, doctors can abandon your treatment entirely, let you die, and focus on those they think will make it. Which means, by very definition, wealthy and white, and Indigenous peoples will be left to die disproportionately, even though we already know that such appearances are NO predictor of who survives and who doesn't, and that this "underlying conditions" crap she's let her people flog for the last 10+ months is just another Trumpian lie. Our communities are dying, and it's about to get a lot worse, and we have to be able to help where we can.
This is all by way of saying that, blessings or no, I have still got to make consistent sales somehow, through the end of the year and beyond. In more ordinary years (long since gone now), our holiday sales alone carried us through the winter, the late winter/spring closure, and on toward summer. Those days are gone, and the closure is already here (and if not permanent, it's the next thing to it). We will still need to sell Wings's work regularly to make it. So please share the links, and if/when you're in the market for gorgeous, authentic, Spirit-infused Indigenous wearable art, Wings will have something perfect for you. There will be a brand-new masterwork coming today (featured tomorrow). The links are here:
Oh, and there are some additions to the wishlist: The towels folks took off it last month are the absolute best I've ever used in my life, so I put a few more sets on there; it will mean I don't have to keep running these two through the laundry all the time. Also, there's a hideously expensive chiropractic gun on there, but even at that price, it's only a couple of appointments and it's already paid for itself. It's for both of us, but mostly for Wings, and this is the model that was recommended to him. Thanks.
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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