Monday, February 1, 2021

Some beauty/mostly terrible.

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

You can't tell very well from the photo, but along the left of those switchback clouds was a very clear and obvious sundog, lots of rose and yellow in the light, hints of green and blue and amethyst, too. That was how SunDog got his name, originally: When he was a tiny puppy, his eyes were not merely different colors, but each iris full of different colors, too, from green to amber to purple. With his white coat, it made us think of a sundog. And StormDog is, well, a stormy, stubborn, bullheaded little thing.

It was nice to have some beauty on the last day of the month, but the month itself was mostly terrible on too many fronts. February is not starting auspiciously, either, given all the awful in the news and other, more local awful (and offal) close to home. Government is still failing us at all levels. No stimulus (not even the $600, because everything's been lost in the mail, which probably means that Trump diverted and converted all the checks; that $600 would've covered our propane the other day, but despite allegedly being mailed on January 6th, neither we nor anyone we know has received it). No vaccines. No ACTUAL halt to caged Indigenous children, deportations, or border wall construction. And no end to the suffering. At the state level, no actual effort at accuracy, sending elders out into the cold in a pandemic-riddled public for vaccines that don't even exist at a site that's been told nothing about any of it? I am disgusted beyond words.

The last three weeks have been brutal on a whole bunch of fronts. I have had to justify my humanity repeatedly and be told that it's not enough, and I said I was done: No more; I don't care; I'm done. I'm so tired, in ways people who don't deal with my health issues will never understand anyway, and dealing with another episode of nearly dying last week is going to be with me for a while, physically and mentally both. And I have to get back to my own work, back to making masks for folks, and most of all, back to making sales, which are at record lows now. But I had to do it anyway again the other day. It's hard knowing that you don't matter, that the world would just as soon see you die and be happy about it, knowing that I am already invisible, and if they cannot keep my that way they will actively erase me.

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. 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. We have shelled out close to 2 grand over the last 2 weeks, $600 just the other day to fill the propane tank, which I was not expecting to have to cover right now on top of everything else. At some point, I'm going to have to make it up somewhere, and my Patreon still has nearly $300 in subscriptions for DECEMBER STILL UNPAID, so folks, please check your cards and the expirationsSo:

And if you've been contemplating a purchase? This would be a very, very good time to do it; I've got to make it this staggering outlay somehow. There's even new work, here and here and now here, among other new pieces, 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.

 

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