We need to break a lot of death grips now

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

All those beautiful black skies yesterday, and we got next to nothing out of it. The storm sat off on all sides all day, and finally only delivered anything at all well after dark. Even that turned out to be only a dusting. I mean, we'll take it, and yes, we're grateful for it, but we need a whole lot more than this to break the death grip of this drought.

We need to break a lot  of death grips now: this pandemic, the poverty that has become so much greater with it, the fascism that is back out in the open again now. Before we can do any of that, we need to break the death grip of colonial white supremacy, and unfortunately, the dominant group has zero interest in that, including everybody's Dem faves. Which reduces us to hacking at it ourselves on the micro level.

Hard to do much hacking, or anything else, when I'm in this kind of agony, though. I knew that would be the case, and I aggravated it by taking care of some other things that had to be done early yesterday morning, to say nothing of everything I was doing the day before. Unfortunately, this kind of pain and fatigue are lethal to my ability to focus, so expect everything to be late and low-quality, probably for the next few weeks, because this flare is pretty clearly settling in for the long haul.

On the plus side, JoanMar met the match 5 days ago, and the matching funds were deposited moments later, putting her halfway to goal. Another mutual friend is setting up a GoFundMe on her behalf, and that will make tracking easier, and hopefully make fundraising easier, too. But thanks to the generous donor with the matching funds, she hit the 50% of goal mark early Tuesday afternoon, and that is a beautiful thing in and of itself. On top of that, Wings is getting the first dose of the vaccine this Thursday (it goes by age, and he just made it, probably in part because he's diabetic; my number won't be up for a few weeks yet). That is a huge load off my mind, too.

As I've said, January is always the hardest month of our year (July runs a close second, but it's not as bad as January). We have a ton of annual or biannual expenses that come due, some insurance but mostly business-related. That fact doesn't make them any less necessary, nor any less urgent, and this year winds up being the most expensive yet. We received some very, very good news a few days ago, and I'll be able to cover all of it before the month is out. Barring catastrophe, I'll be able to cover necessities for a good while. Eve before today, I have been mindful of the fact that we will not freeze or starve, and that puts us in a position far more fortunate than too many folks in families this winter, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic currently raging unchecked here. BUT: I still have to bring in consistent sales (only 4 the entire holiday season, an all-time low courtesy of the pandemic economy), and I still need to boost my Patreon (which is down $300 on this month's payout already), because there's a long, long year ahead of us, and a whole year's worth of direct attempts to harm people using the pandemic as a vehicle will not be corrected by the end of the year, let alone a few months.

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 can cover the bills. We have lost SO much to 2020, so very, very many people, and the gifts and the talents and the knowledge and the wisdom they carried too often lost with them. Because this state has followed the lead of the country and refused to do what was required, we are about to see a very big spike in new cases, probably as early as two weeks from now; the current spike in deaths remains sustained daily. People have needed so much more help than we could give them, but we did as much as we could, even when it put us in a bind, and we will need to do much more of that this year. So:

• Sales here; 
• Testimonials here; 
• Amazon wishlist here;
• Patreon here;
• Ko-fi here.

And if you've been contemplating a purchase? Marking the birth of 2021 would be a very, very good time to do it. There's even new work, here and here, and there will be two more new pieces shortly, so please watch for them and share the links.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.