A New Year

 I realized this has been the least I've posted on the socials in a very long while. Many thoughts about why this is, including the eternal refrain "it will never be Livejournal", but the preponderance of ads and "growth content" (aka getting you even further addicted), and getting sucked into video after video is part of the problem. FB itself will ignore you when you say "hide this type of content" for the intrusive Reels box, so, today, I used uBlock Origin Lite to create a filter. Reels no longer load, THANK DOG.

Maybe this will help? I don't know.

It has been a very strange year, starting in January with trying to finish the back room, February starting a new job, the horrorshow that is politics right now, and the tripled, interweaving stresses, deadlines, and projects of each. The job feels like it's going well...ish? It's hard to tell with startups, but this feels like incremental progress, while riding another rocketship. Politics has, for better or worse, barely affected me personally. Mostly I see people moving _back_ to California, secretly pleased to be returning not just to office, but to a semblance of human rights.

And while it doesn't feel like it many days, the house stuff is... going. We're like four inspections away from being able to close the curséd foundation permit of 2022, take a breath, and finish the nice downstairs bathroom. Then figure out how to best group and phase the remaining work, and decide how and if we want to the next few projects. (The kitchen needs work, the upstairs bathroom too.) But then I count off the many things we've done since the start of this madness - new roof, the solar, all the knob and tube replaced, a second bathroom, sooo much new plumbing, the seismic upgrade, the new basement space, the more secure garage, and so on and so on. The garden has been cooking along too - although it was barely hot enough all year to set any tomatoes, my passiflora edulis flowered through the entire season and so while everyone else is getting bumper crops of Meyer lemons, we are drowning in purple passionfruit. Oh darn. Oh darn.

It feels like I barely did any travel at all, but I traveled to Santa Cruz and San Diego for work, did my normal Write the Docs Portland trip, visited Booneville (wine! CHEESE!), and then after a really-too-long slog of a summer and skipping Burning Man, visiting the Caribbean on a cruise. (Basically the polar opposite of Burning Man, where someone else cooks, cleans, and drives for you, and you just have to wander around enjoying the stuff and not making yourself sick on too much of anything.)

There's been a lot of grief and loss: Nighty, Tonda, but also my own grandmother, suddenly and unexpectedly Frederick Lighting Leist of Odd Salon, Bryan Chiwito of Rumbustion, Will Wood from Faire (and a number of the Faire folks I remember from the old Tribe.net days), the list goes on.

And then Odd Salon itself; after the grief at Annetta's passing last year, we strode into the new season with hope and determination, planning that this would not be an end to the event that'd become so much a community. We were all ah, misled, shall we say. A furious Signal chat developed into several community meetings which developed into a New Thing. And as the New Thing takes shape and picks up steam, it appears we might... might?? be okay. We might have managed to jump the gap and bridge the transition. Or at least we're selling a good number of tickets, which is a relief. (We, the producers, have committed to taking the financial hit if we're unable to make our ticket minimums. So getting like, a third of the way to that minimum in a few days feels, well, I'm not going to count my chickens etc etc but I think we're all breathing a bit of a sigh of relief.)

This draft has now been sitting for four days, so, off it goes.

Again, and again, and again

The thing about being a precocious child, is that you turn into a precocious teenager. And a precocious teenager doesn't really want to hang out with other teenagers, and makes friends with older and more mature fellows.

This leads to heartbreak and being left behind. 

First memorably, by a group of women I admired and counted myself a friend among for a decade, and who forcibly removed me from their circle - uninvited, explicitly, to my face - because I was "too young" and they didn't want to admit in my hearing what it was like to be aging. (Years later I have not yet recovered from that shock fully, and I don't think I'll ever trust a group of women as unguardedly as I had.)

And now, as I'm at the dreaded "middle age", I am getting my heart broken over and over as the older people who I am still friends with all these years later, go on before me. My final grandmother passed. Friends from high school, and college, and after college. The work colleagues who I hear about passing months- or years-belatedly, of some ailment, of some disaster. The number of live-hard die-hard Burning Man folks who've passed due to illness, accident, or by their own hands. The unending march of the Skyfaire list, of all the Rennies who've passed on to wave banners and eat turkey legs at a perfect-temperature dustless faire in the sky. The Odd Salon fixtures who seemed an unending well of stories, suddenly capped and inaccessible.

The more interesting people I meet in my many lives and many travels, the more it seems I am just going to eventually lose. 

Tonda, Teflon, my amazing goth friend, old school St Maxian, Burning Man Cafe shift lead, historical costume stitch-counter, Georgian romance writer, mastiff enthusiast, historian spitfire Juno of a woman, is dying. The brain cancer we thought was in remission is no longer, and they've reached point where nothing they can do for her will extend her life more than a month or so at most. And so, on reflection, she has decided she's done. I haven't heard her voice in ages, but I can hear it in my head - loud, firm, brash. She is DONE. I immediately got a mental image of her in her Germans, tellerbarret cocked at a jaunty angle, kirtling up her skirts and kicking Charon off the boat and into the Styx, poling herself across the river on her own time thankyouverymuch. 

But it's hard to remember her howling with laughter with a cocktail in her hand, watching Duel at Blood Creek at 1am at Costume College, when confronted with her dozing unconscious form, the hovering hospice care workers, the resigned quiet of the room. Her hands are still soft, but cool, and held them while I told her about all the people who were shocked to hear about her going, and how much she is adored, how much she will be missed. There will never be another like her. And we all know that and are bracing ourselves for impact. 

There is a sickening symmetry with last October, leaving with a few hours notice to visit another friend, insensible and dying in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones. This is too soon. Too much death. Too SOON.  

There's a comfort in the fact, once again, that my friend has made a choice, and is leaving with dignity and agency intact. And in this case at least, comfort in the fact that she's not in any pain. (I only recently learned that brain cancer apparently doesn't hurt because your brain doesn't have pain receptors. I can't tell if I'm relieved or horrified.)

I love you Tonda. May you pass gently into the next world, your work here being so well discharged. May we meet again in joy and light, far far from this earthly plane. 

The things you leave behind

 I don't like to talk about where I'm from much. There are a lot of reasons and it's hard to put a finger on why I shy away - I'll tell you I'm from the blue end of the BART line. I'll tell you that it was a great place to grow up, but terrible after you turned 18. I'll tell you that you can categorize my graduating class into two groups: those who got out, and those who didn't. Most of those who didn't, didn't because they already live incredibly privileged lives, and they had nothing to seek. I was obviously not one of those people.

I looked further afield for happiness, for love. I had to because home held little for me. I ended up at an internet cafe in Livermore, where all the other weird kids (and former kids) hung out. Several social circles converged, and I took joyful part in most of them. While there was a great deal of friendship and camaraderie, there was also a great deal of immaturity, abuse, casual sexual assault, and a certain amount of what I have to admit now was grooming. But there were safe parties and dancing and dressing up, hanging out and singing and playing games. But then again there were also the darker moments like waking at 3am at a sleepover LAN party because one of the hosts threatened their spouse that they'd commit suicide, and were being taken away in an ambulance. 

I don't like to talk about where I've been. I've lived so many lives, left so many people and things behind when they hurt me. I think many of us do.

My first "boyfriend" was a boy I kissed at 4H summer camp. My second was a boy from the cafe who also went to my same high school. The third one died on Wednesday. Her name was Chayna.

It's hard to look back at a picture from January 12, 2001 and think about where I was and what I was doing. The world was completely different - you could meet your loved ones at the airport arrival gate. Gas was a buck something a gallon. I was waiting to see what college(s) might accept me. I had a free FortuneCity webpage where I put my pictures from 4H camp (laboriously scanned, cropped, and converted). Webvan still delivered, and the Dot Bomb was two months away. I carried The Leash, my name for the navy blue Nokia candybar phone I was obliged to carry (in the first stages of what I realize now was a troubling crackdown on my burgeoning independence). The iPhone would not be released for another five years. And we went, of course, like the nerd kids we were, to MacWorld.

It was a group of us from the Hotline server where we'd built a weird sort of outsider hackerish aesthetic community. We all cut school that Friday - they were giving out free tickets for the last day - and took BART into the City, walked to Moscone Center unsupervised, and were juuust mature enough to not be a nuisance worth the effort of kicking out. And most of what I remember was seeing the Mac G4 Cube for the first time, and that I was in the end stages of a debate about if we could be polyamorous with another boy from the server we all shared. (Spoilers: we could not.) I don't even remember the other guy's last name anymore, but it's weird to see that one detail with a twinge of guilt, still, a quarter of a century later.

I lost all of the emails and conversation logs from this period of my life to Hotmail wiping my account for inactivity, some time in the spring of 2002. Thankfully I had at least saved some of the oh so gothy photos we took together. They're very very small files, in retrospect.

The person I dated was not great. Quick witted, playful, passionately caring about friendships and community, a giver of thoughtful gifts and care, I could even say loving (such as it was at that age); but also mercurial, temperamental, simmering with sarcastic anger that sometimes boiled up into rage, inflexible to downright bullying when opposed, and unwilling to admit when they were wrong. And damningly, pushy about wanting to make certain um, sexual milestones, together. We were young and we were exploring, but I knew that was happening on my terms or not at all.

In the lee of the breakup my old alias was banned from the server, so I made a fake one unbeknownst to her, so I could keep talking to the rest of my friends. When staring at the blank "new handle" field my mind went blank as well and my attempt to make my handle `ConcretePretext` (as a nod to my excuse for being there) became `ConcreteContext`. I do think in retrospect I would've been found out and booted the second time a lot faster without the error.

Later, when I decided in my second year at Burning Man that "Hestia" was giving the wrong idea as a playa name, I fell back to Context, and thus has it been ever since. When I had to give up my old alias that had become inextricably linked to naked pictures of me, I added a second syllable, making it a bad three-part pun on Comic Sans, the Japanese honorific, and honestly at 1 in the morning with a glass of whisky I can't remember the third.

So she's been a subtle part of the history of my online identity - nearly from the start of having an online identity - as well as of my individuated identity from so many other things.

I got into UCSC. I did ren faire as much as humanly possible as an undergrad, and still hung out with the crowd from the internet cafe, so I saw glimmers around the edges of the social media sphere. She was frequently at the costumed events I went to, honing her already formidable photography skills. At some point I think she made a point to tell me she wasn't mad anymore, but we didn't really hang out at all until the cocktail hours at Bandersnatch. And even then not that much because of work and the long drive. 

We reconnected at a funeral. The one I went to because I needed, in that dark moment, to remember what suicide does to your friends. She was, weirdly, there for me, and I later spent some fun time haunting thrift stores for aesthetic components for her home. Our text messages were mostly about Edwardian silverplate and gold-rimmed cocktail glasses from the 50s, all going cheap at the Menlo Park Goodwill. But I was living in the South Bay and having My Own Shit Going On™️, and mostly we traded notes about the silly-valley from afar.

...

The goth scene is not without drama. Some of it I am ashamed to say, goes beyond mere "drama" and into more serious problems, and I admit some of my distance was intentional. I was busy trying to make a living, and having been badly burnt in both love and friendship at ren faire, distancing myself from that whole world as much as possible while I plunged into hashtag startuplife. It was easy to stay uninvolved and remote. 

At some point she went to Asia and came back with beautifully tailored gentlemen's suits. Then she disappeared again as if into a cocoon. And she reemerged as Chayna. 

My impression, which I will never get to ask her about now, is that transitioning was as much about finding peace within her being, as bundling up and putting behind her all the toxic traits associated with her fragile masculinity. A repudiation of what had been. I didn't speak much to her post-transition because I'm not part of that scene anymore - definitely not cool enough to hang with these folks, and certainly not putting out any art at all, much less of the quality that would attract notice. I'd been more distant recently because there were some parts of her I didn't want or need to see, and boy howdy were they on display. Forced intimacy is still a hard line for me.

On my first date with Martin we went to Wicked Grounds, who were for some odd reason having a cookie-painting event. I painted (a very bad from-memory version of) Chayna's iconic picture from her trek in Namibia on the cookie. Partly because it was fresh in my mind, partly because it was easy shapes to paint, and partly because they happened to have (mosst of) the right colors. It now pops up on the anniversary of our first date each year.

My first thought on hearing the news this morning was thank god it was an accident, and that she hadn't picked a fight with someone. Then anger that she had been working in the vehicle alone. Then grief, because it was so senseless, and so early. 

People are complicated. I am having complicated feelings.

Catching up

On December 2nd, I logged in to work as usual, did about half an hour of my usual Monday catch up routine, and then got a message from my then-new-manager, asking me to join a conference call. I held out hope until about 15 seconds into the meeting that this was about the project that I'd been trying to get resources to get off the ground, but instead I was laid off.

Backing up a bit to catch everyone up...

And the other thing...

A friend passed away, suddenly (or at least it appeared suddenly to those of us who she'd kept in the dark about the cancer coming back), and tragically.

She was a person I greatly admired, envied even, but whose open-heartedness and open-handedness with her resources made it impossible to do anything other than love her back. It's strange to think it, but I only knew her twelve years (ONLY??!? my brain is going... ONLY?!?) which is far fewer than most of her friends.

The message came on a normal Tuesday mid-October while I was boiling pasta for lunch. I thought at first it was some sort of tasteless joke - no, no, she'd been in remission. I would've known if she was sick, much less dying. She was at the event last week wasn't sh... no she hadn't been. Oh shit. This was real. Hours or days. Come say your goodbyes.

I messaged Martin and choked down my lunch, weeping in shock. I messaged my team I was taking the rest of the day off, I messaged my lead that my friend was dying and I was going to say goodbye.

Walking into the ICU was so surreal - familiar from my December 2020 adventure, but also no longer crammed full due to COVID crowding. But so unfamiliar on foot (rather than gurney), and with tears in my eyes. 

How were we supposed to know where to find her? Somehow we managed to tailgate someone in, and the nurse just.. pointed. It occurs to me now that they must be somewhat familiar with the gathering cloud of pre-grievers, and know not to make it any harder than it has to be.

We walked in. There she was, swollen and sedated, looking nothing like the bold, vibrant, excitable person I knew - my friend - and I could see that death was nearby. I don't know how. I hate seeing it. It scares and unnerves me and I become instinctive and irrational. 

I took her hand, warm and alive, and spoke my truths to her through my tears. And we stood there and then sat there for awhile, holding her hand and trying to let it seep in that this was her, this was how she was doing, this was ending.

After awhile her family came back in, and we gave up our spots to them. 

I was told there was a waiting room, but I had no idea how I was supposed to find it. 

I shouldn't have worried.

A few short steps down the hall I looked in to the first waiting room, to find it full of people with colorful hair and tattoos and rock/metal aesthetics, and I knew Her People Had Gathered. And among the awe of an all-call being answered across the country, that Her People Must Attend, I felt the familiar pangs of being an outsider. 

I was so honored to have been called at all, to have been let into the knowledge before it was too late, to get to say goodbye. But I still felt myself on the outside of twenty- and thirty-year friendships, felt awkward and unsure. As more people arrived and the room filled up, I felt I had no right to be there, taking up space that those thirty-year friends might need, and so we departed. 

That night I tossed and turned, thinking of her partner's quiet calm and strength as he gently shuffled people in and out of her room. If she didn't wake up, would he have to make the call for her? I could only imagine in the three years since her diagnosis, they'd had time to discuss it. I hope they had. I tried not to think about it too much.

I finally got off my ass and got my trust and will printed, so we can notarize it.

The call came the next evening. The only bright spot was the nexus of love and support that coalesced around her, and that she'd been conscious enough to make her wishes known. Her partner did not have to make the call. She passed peacefully in the arms of her community.

We were asked not to vaguebook about it until an official announcement could be made. We tried - but for those of us who know the Odd Salon crew, the signs were there plain as day. We had a wake. The announcement went out. But I've felt emotionally constipated for weeks now, like I need to hide how I feel about it. Like I don't have the right to my own grief. Like writing this down is going to get me in trouble somehow.

But I'm grieving so much these last 24 hours, it feels like this just sort of... fell out... along with everything else.

Numb

 I am still immensely grateful for the antidepressants. I am holding it together really well, like even to the point where I look at myself from afar and go "huh, she's doing pretty well" even while there's an endless churn of fear and pattern-finding and worry going on inside.

I went to our favorite adventure-themed bar on election night because they had an all-night happy hour. It helped to be with people, even though I felt somewhat pathetic being a decade older than all of them (at least a decade, possibly two RIP). I got to talk theatrical effects with the designer which was SO incredibly pleasant after wondering for all this time.

But the display in the corner kept ticking up for Trump, and the nausea that had plagued me all day didn't play super well with lots of cocktails, so eventually I walked myself home. Bereft of a food plan, and still feeling nauseated, I made popcorn. And as I sat down to eat it at the table, I opened my phone and saw that they'd called it.

I sobbed. I grieve. I feel that I've seen the death of a nation. I feel that I've seen this before.

In January 2017 I wrote, in the other place

And then it's Yeats chasing Niemöller, ["First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist...", and the world is] turning and turning in a widening gyre.

Looking back at the things that terrified me then, I realize how much we've lost. The US's unchecked capital greed has weakened it to the point that it's been completely captured and encircled by a hostile outside entity. 

I do not know what will happen next, but I do know that any last lingering promises of the "normal" life my parents were given have now been made effectively null and void.  Between climate change and the total breakdown of democracy, with a sham Supreme Court and regressive insanity in the executive and senate, even if the House evens out it's going to mean nothing. We on this coast are a popular topic for sneering and fearing among the right, regardless of how much, if any, of it is deserved. We'd just been crawling our way out of the "liberal hellscape" lies toward the recovery that'd been withheld from us. 

The country (appears to have*) voted for war and famine and inflation and death. 

We now have until January to brace ourselves for impact.

Goodbye sweet Luna

The most recent message in my inbox is an invitation from Martin to Luna's vet appointment on Thursday afternoon. How things change, how quickly they change.

 It's been over a year since I posted, and I feel like I owe updates, but this comes first.

In September of 2022, we came home from Burning Man to a message from the cat sitter "haha, I guess she's on hunger strike" and Luna not eating. We rushed to the vet, who looked at her moving and noted how much pain she was in. We'd later figure out that the cat sitter had put the lids on the garbage cans in our rental, making a perfect staircase for a bored, lonely kitty in a big apartment all alone. But the vet also said "leukemia" and named some eye watering prices for diagnostic tests. I should remind folks that I had gotten laid off two weeks prior, and that the contractor working on our home had also raised his rates retroactively by close to $200k. We adopted a "wait and see" stance because there simply wasn't money, and with new pain meds she bounced back. An x-ray six months later showed no change in the suspicious lump, and we thought, okay, maybe it wasn't that. 

But she'd started sneezing, and coughing, and her nose had been running... 

This is too painful to recount in this much detail, so let me just say that each time we went in for the sneezing, we got her antibiotic treatment as palliative care, to make her "comfortable for what time she had left". Each time, she also bounced back to her hold self, though she never completely stopped sneezing, not even when I figured out how to mix her antibiotics with churu so she actually got them down. Her eyesight declined. Sometimes she would make alarming noises like crunching cartilage while she ate, and she splattered her food around. She changed what foods she'd accept every few weeks. We adapted. 

Something changed right after New Years. She was having trouble getting into the litterbox. We put a chunk of wood in front of it as a step. Her sneezing increased again, and now it was red tinged. She started to lose weight faster. I left for my first team work offsite into the bitterest week of cold in Toronto in some time, and barely slept the few days I was gone because I had nightmares she'd passed while I was far from home, wondering where I was. I started looking for someone who could paint her portrait.

When I got back, we went back to the vet. Another round of antibiotics, and she bounced back again. We had our January Salon, and she came to say hello to everyone. February came and went. In early March she became withdrawn, her fur spiky, and she started missing the litterbox when she went, or going outside, or in other random places. We went through several different litterboxes to no effect. Back we went.

The vet noted that she was so dehydrated that it was hard to tell what was going on, and we learned how to give subcutaneous fluids. Again, she bounced back nearly to her old self but slower, and her meows creakier. She came upstairs to wake us at 7:15 every morning, she demanded her milk, demanded tap water, followed us around and napped nearby. But she was slowing, and at some point we noticed that while the fluids were definitely perking her up, her belly was swelling. At some point she lost her balance and fell, and from then on stopped getting up on things she could fall off of, and jumping down from anything high up. We put her cat heating blanket on the floor. 

After two weeks I couldn't stand it, and I called the vet on Wednesday and had a long talk where he talked about possibly draining the fluids to make her more comfortable. We went back to the vet on Thursday.

But we didn't go back to the same vet, we went back to Luna's favorite old vet, who'd just come back from maternity leave. After more than a year away, she was shocked at Luna's condition, and made it clear that draining Luna's belly wasn't an option, and that the humane thing was to think about letting her go. She was worried Luna would "hit a wall" soon. She offered euthanasia that day, in office, or any other day as we chose. 

We declined, we wept, we went home with the HHHHHM checklist - which we ran and decided she was fine. Mostly fine. Okay, she was pretty fine, right? That evening Luna lost control of her bowels entirely, twice, and was croaky and withdrawn. We realized she couldn't get upstairs to go to the litterbox, and had been exclusively using the downstairs pee pads. So we started taking her upstairs with us when we went to the bathroom. She was devouring whole cans of food in one sitting, and wandering aimlessly between her favorite blanket, her secret water bowl, and her food dish. When we brought her up on our laps, she'd sit for awhile, then twitch her hind end, and jump down to sit nearby. But she still purred at us and demanded pets and food and love, and we thought - she's not ready. Not ready yet. Maybe she could last out the week I was about to be gone - more work travel - and we'd decide when I got back.

But her belly continued to swell, even though we'd stopped giving fluids, and she'd started to slow down and withdraw again. The vet's words came back to us, that this wasn't going to get better, it was only going to get worse rang in our ears as we watched her waddle painfully back and forth, panting. We fretted about how she'd take me leaving for the week, since she was prone to missing me and withdrawing more. And then I realized that when the vet said "hit a wall" she was not speaking metaphorically, but euphemistically. Because the end-state of the fluid build up was not dozing off and not waking up, but rupture and collapse and pain and terror. We both agreed we would want to spare her that pain.

On Friday evening we filled out a form to request a home euthanasia vet visit at noon.

The last 24 hours have been painful and surreal. We ate pizza, unable to focus enough to cook for ourselves. We thought of all the good times, and all the things we'd miss. And we thought of all of the things we were already missing - her demanding to play with her feather toy, her chasing greenies down the stairs, asking for tap water (the counter was too high for her to comfortably jump down from now), following us upstairs. We even missed the 7am wake up calls.

Neither of us slept well. At 6am I woke to the last lashings of the rain. Tried to get back to sleep, but couldn't stop thinking about "we only have six more hours". We got up, we tried to have a normal weekday breakfast - giving Luna her portion of the steamed milk, giving her my overnight oats bowl. A sunbeam appeared and I took her outside to have a drink of the rainwater from one of her favorite plant saucers. The rain started again, stopped again, and the sun came out. We pulled her up on the couch and rolled her over on her favorite blanket, belly to the sun, and she napped quietly between us as she read. I lit some candles. I opened my altar. At noon on the dot, the vet arrived with a black bag and a basket with a pretty floral lining.

The vet was very kind, and professional, and was everything we needed. She went over Luna's history, her tentative diagnosis, saw her condition and said that we'd clearly done a whole lot for her (gesturing to the rubber-backed bathmats I'd scattered around when I realized she was having trouble walking on the hardwood floors), and we clearly loved her very much. She said we were giving her a great gift, letting her go before she was completely worn down and miserable. She explained what was going to happen, and left us some time with Luna sitting quietly on her blanket, so we could say goodbye while she was still with us, but no longer in pain. She put a rose quartz heart on her as she transitioned, which she gave to us. She helped us take a paw print, carefully moved Luna into the basket and arranged her so she looked like she was comfortably sleeping, and left a booklet on pet grief and a whole box of tissues.

Entirely relaxed and at peace I could see the sweet, sassy little cat I'd first met when Martin and I started dating. She was so beautiful and soft, even at rest. 

I still cannot fully believe that she's gone. 

We stumbled out to feed ourselves and walk in the break in the rain. When we opened the front door on our return I had a heart wrenching moment realizing that she'd never meow to greet us and demand to be picked up and snuggled by her returning family. The grief is coming in fits and starts.

As I sat writing this the skies opened up, and the sun came out, and a huge double rainbow arced across the sky. They say that pets that pass go across the rainbow bridge. 

I think she made it.