To Hell in a Handbasket (of Deplorables)

Some stream of consciousness-like meanderings...

Last year during a retreat with my creativity cohort, I made this decorated sketchbook and declared 2024 as The Year of Intention.

Big thanks to Karen Lewis who let us run amok in her studio!

Like all good intentions, mine went straight to Hell in a hand basket, and my carefully laid plans and the calendar/journal only made it to January. And now here we are, a year later, with a mostly empty notebook and it is almost March.

Everyone says the whole resolution thing is just a way to torture ourselves with our inadequacies and instead we should make goals with intentions, which is pretty much the same thing, except with more rationalizing of the opportunities to weasel out of them.

A member of this writing/illustrating/art-ing group, a group of smart, strong women, was pondering the difficulty of having her studio within a multi person household, and the possibility inevitability of interruption while she is at work. I took it upon myself to make this sign for her door:

Feel free to print one for your own studio door.

About a month ago (or who knows…time has no meaning any more…) someone on Mastodon (social media space on the nerdy end of the continuum) reported their child said that fog and mist were dead people visiting you. We have a LOT of mist and fog here in the Pacific North West and I have way too many friends who had the bad manners to die and leave me here without their sage advice (not that I always took it, but, ya know…I miss them)

But I love the idea that they are still here, looking in the window, seeing what I’m doing in my studio. They swirl around the trees I planted in their memory, sometimes asking, “Are you sure you didn’t plant this too close to that one over there? Did you water it in? And what about this branch? I’d prune that if it were me…”

And the idea of sentient mist makes me think about that part in The Lord of the Rings books (don’t ask me which one. Definitely not the first, but life is too short to re-read that again, maybe too short to sit through the movies too) where an army of the dead rise up and vanquish the forces of evil, so as to distract those forces of evil from what Sam and Frodo are doing on the other side of the valley: Hey! Look over there! These are not the Hobbits you’re looking for! Tolkien isn’t the only one that can write run-on sentences or make Star Wars references!

It makes me wish for a vast army of my departed friends, ALL our departed friends, to defeat the forces that are trying to crush all that is good and wonderful in this country, in the world.

I’m old enough to have marched against the Viet Nam War, driven across the country (in a 1961 VW bus) during the Iran hostage fiasco, watched Saint Ronnie wreck the middle class with supply side economics, along with the war on regulations in the 80’s that spawned the Savings and Loans debacle which drove home mortgage rates well into double digits. I saw the World Trade Center Towers crumble on 9/11. I saw Newt Gingrich take out a contract on Americans and a hatchet to the idea of bipartisan cooperation. I (barely) lived through George the Younger’s bungling of the economy thanks to that republican compulsion to not have any rules apply to banks and people with lots of money. We survived (again, barely) Felon 45’s first Reign of Terror and the mishandling of the pandemic when it came barking at the door, and a violent coup attempt to stay in power.

There is no army of the dead coming to save us, in the real world. We are going to have to defeat them the old fashioned way: one orc at a time.

My only weapons are the support of friends, the drive to create, the ability to find joy in nature, and a firm grasp on the ridiculous. It will have to be enough.

Please remember, it’s good to be friendly to bears.

Many thanks to all reading this far. There are many events, many words to grab our attention, so I’m grateful to all who read my words, and like them enough to subscribe or even just to stick around to here. The bears keep track of these things, you know.

I love to hear from you!