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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
Dangerous cold also brings unexpected gifts. Okay, maybe not exactly "unexpected." Just not necessarily expecting it right at that moment.
I had gotten up briefly about 3:20 this morning, then went back to bed. I had apparently already fallen asleep again by the time Wings got up 20 minutes or so later. He shook me awake, telling me that the elk were here, and he went downstairs and got my camera. yes, it's fuzzy; it's taken through the window, at night. But click on it, and it'll enlarge. We had the whole small herd down from the mountains. I counted forty, if I managed to get them all. They came trotting from our south boundary through a place where the neighbors cattle had trampled the fence last year and then their own herd had finished it off. Wings has been putting old hay out for them down that way, but apparently it was all gone, because they came right up to the big bales stacked behind the studio and in front of the pen, looking for food. The two in the center left? Young bucks rising up on the hind legs to compete for dominance. Not violence; this was play among two not fully grown into bull elk yet.
We let the elk eat here because the drought has decimated their habitat, too, and we have old hay that's no longer suitable for horses to eat, but is perfectly good for ruminants. Wings hauled all of it down to the south field this morning, because like the wild birds, they'll starve without help. That is, as it happens, what they think killed all those thousands of wild birds here in that massive die-off a couple of months ago: starvation, because climate change has so thoroughly fucked up the food supply on their migratory routes, Which undoubtedly explains why we have whole clans of spring and summer birds here now.
Which reminds me again just how brutal next month is going to be financially for us, and how badly I need to bring in sales to cover everything.
And again, I'll get to us in a minute. First, thank you to everyone who's shared the fundraiser post I put up here on Saturday for a woman very dear to both of us (and frankly, to a lot of y'all), one who has been struggling, alone and in silence, these last six months as the pandemic has made everything worse for her by the day, and even as people come to her routinely for help. Such is the lot of Black and Indigenous women; we keep everyone else alive and safe and well, while no one notices as we slide ever closer to the outer edge of survival. Special thanks to all of you who've already donated or are going to donate.
My work for this weekend and the week to come is to help her get the resources she needs to come back from that dangerous edge. This will be the site for the fundraiser; she doesn't have a GoFundMe, but I'll post her PayPal and CashApp info; she'll update me as she can, and I'll bump the post to the top of the page when I do (as in a few minutes from now). Look, I know everybody's feeling stretched really thin, especially with Christmas over and a new calendar year just around the corner. But it's winter (serious winter where she lives), and it's the middle of a deadly pandemic, and she has been fighting this battle alone for half a year now. No one should do this alone, and no one should have to fight just to live. So we have juggled some things, and with a lot of prayers and not a little faith, we gave $100. I'm going to ask y'all at least to match it. Some of you won't be able to, and we get that; but if you can spare $20, $10, $5, it all adds up, so please toss it in the pot. If you're completely tapped out, you can share the post and her cash links. And for a few of my friends on here who I know read this site who I also know have more resources, I'm hoping you will step up for this woman who does so much for so many.
Now, back to our regularly-scheduled programming:
This has been one of our leanest, lowest holiday seasons ever. Only four sales total, and not a single sale this week or last. Not one, and no visible results for the work, even though I've been putting in 18-hour days and doing mostly without sleep, STILL. I'm still running the Twitter hashtag trying to help folks who are at risk of losing everything now get what they need. I'm grateful to everyone who's helped, because we are still losing people unnecessarily to all of this ::gestures around at a world in flames::. I have no patience with colonial standards of "charity" and "giving" and the respectability politics inherent in them, nor do I have any patience with the colonizing and colonized mentalities of those who continue to perpetuate them, leaving folks to die.
And all the other stresses, of course, are all still here. This has been such a ghastly year, and this winter's going to be very, very bad for our peoples. It's bad enough for us, with only four sales total this holiday season, and given that Christmas is over, I'm guessing that's it for the year. But it's been a lot worse for a lot of other folks in our community here. And so on top of the donations we've been making at least weekly, whether to our community health center's matching funds campaign last month or direct donations to individuals, we've been giving out of every sale we make, quite literally. We bought and had delivered the firewood yesterday; we sold my old jalopy at a fabulous loss to a young man who desperately needs a vehicle (it was a jalopy, but a really well-maintained and well-running one, with new tires, battery, and front end, including axle, rods, and joints, and we sold it for a third of what we could've gotten, because he could afford that); we gave away a substantial number of items from our half-hog share; and a few days ago, we gave [what we thought was] the last of our cash donations to an elder who needed help. Those are just the ones that come immediately to mind; there are others. None of this is to make us out to be saints of any sort, because we're about as far from it as it gets, and unlike some folks, we have never pretended otherwise. We're both impatient, don't suffer willful fools, and are fucking profane. None of that makes a damn bit of difference to what we see as the work. My point is that, in this world? With circumstances as bad as they are? People die if we don't help. So, yeah, only four sales, and we're down to our last dollars, so to speak, but we have food, shelter, warmth, and now I'm going to be able to do my work properly. So there really isn't a choice. No, we don't get a tax deduction for any of it. I'd rather give directly to people who need than ever get a deduction for charitable giving ever again in my life. Because if you had any doubt? It's BAD here. We're the lucky ones. And with that kind of good fortune comes responsibility.
The rest is no longer entirely cut-and-paste, and if you take one thing from it? Please share our links. January is always the worst moth of you (followed closely by July), because it contains a bunch of one-off annual or biannual expenses, none of them cheap, and they all have to be paid. I'm staring down the need to pay out easily a couple of grand ver the course of the month, starting on the literal first, and we have made almost no sales all season. So if you're in the market for gifts, consider Wings's work. It's what keeps us alive, byes, but we also always make sure that whatever we bring in, we send out to help others beyond ourselves. I've posted one new work already, just below this; I'll have three simple cuffs a little later today.
And people continue to leave us at an alarming rate; a new record two Thursdays ago 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 even as she's running an official state TV ad campaign four tourism, urging people to come and spend Christmas in New Mexico (and worst of all, I'm positive she's using a Native voice actor to do the voice-over, even as our peoples die disproportionately from this folly). 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. 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 we've spent the whole year working to help other folks survive in the face of some very ugly [and wholly unnecessary] odds, and . . . you know what, we're just done. Not done helping others, but we gave away the last of what we could a few days ago. There's nothing coming in. No sales. I have to come up with a way to get us through this winter, and it's looking grim indeed. So while we will continue to do what we can to help other folks less well-situated? Do not ask me for political support for any of the people whose cowardice and venality put us here. And if you want to help? Please share our links, because we are staring down the barrel of 2021 up very close now, and after this holiday season and with outsized one-off expenses looming for January? I don't know how we make it if I don't start bringing in more sales.
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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