Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
take 2 steps to the right and get out of the neighbourhood
grrr – i want so badly to write about the whole ward churchill controversy brewing in the united states over the last couple of days – you know, the one where right-wingers dredge up an article he wrote way back in 2001 and then scream about it? – but everytime i think about it, i falter in my ability to put together something that isn’t loaded with invective.
the part getting me most is not that people disagree with ward – diversity of opinion and all that – but the out and out hypocrisy of the american “free speech” right demanding that ward be silenced (either by being disallowed from speaking in new york, or fired from his teaching post at the university of colorado). it seems to me (from reading many articles and blog posts on this subject) that any semblance of “moderate” thought (and by this i don’t mean left-wing, but just centre) has fled from public life in the united states. from reading through the blogosphere, it also seems there is a growing trend of meanness that has entered into public dialogue in the us that wasn’t there before (or maybe these opinionated americans were always mean, but the internet allows them to share that with the world).
even stranger is that, although the rest of the world has noticed this dramatic shift to the right in the opinions of everyday us citizens and public officials alike – people in the us are completely unself-conscious about the fact that something has changed. (i know, i can hear my good lefty state-side friends reminding me that only half the people voted for bush – but really…… you don’t know how it looks from out here.. on the other side of the glass.)
this is not to say we don’t have right-wing voices here in canada – of course we do (witness the recent anti-gay marriage campaign by stephen harper for proof) – but i do feel that those voices are tempered by both a centre and a left on all the issues that are put out for debate. even when sunera thobani was under attack back in october 2001 for essentially the same reasons ward churchill is right now, there were at least some editorials and articles supporting her right to speak freely of her opinion.
i dunno – i don’t even know how to wrap this up except to say that i am frightened for where things are going, not just because the leaders of the us are up to no good, but because something nasty seems to have infected a big chunk of the population too – they revel in the deaths of people they have never met, and sue their closest friends out of some misguided notion of rights – i often wish we didn’t live right next door.
i'm hiring
yeah – okay – quit giggling.
i am hiring a new webmaster here at the good offices of the federal government – if you know anyone who is both bilingual and web-savvy, please pass this along : http://www.jobs-emplois.gc.ca/jobs/p035852e.htm. as far as supervisors go, i’m pretty hands off…. (in fact, this has been complained about before – not providing enough direction) – and the job pays well and has good benefits.
recap
not much to post today – things are good here (still feeling pretty damned fine in fact)… i’ve been swamped with union work all day (as opposed to my job work), including writing letters, politicking, updating our website, writing meeting recaps, providing member representation and advice, and working on contact lists. now it is almost the end of the day and i still have a full inbox of job work that is not going to get done until some other day in the future.
i forgot to mention earlier – but as of thursday treasury board employees (that would be most federal government workers like myself) have got a new collective agreement. that means retroactive pay, which means being taxed at twice the rate you would normally (if the money was paid out over time as opposed to in a lump sum). someone pointed me to a tax exemption form today which i am going to fill out – we will see if that helps any. i am very glad the whole process is finished as this has dominated my union-brain since sometime last march, and i really didn’t want to go back on strike.
i didn’t manage to get nearly the amount of work completed this weekend that i wanted to – but i did have some downtime which was needed. sometimes, i think i work too much.
48,692 stitches
stayed up past my bedtime tonight to finish the rug (was so close, i had to do the last row….) and post pictures of it…. here is what forty-eight thousand six hundred and ninety-two stitches looks like:
it still needs to be stretched, ironed and then backed to be truly finished – but eight months of stitching means the hard part is done 🙂
a fiction from the granville street bridge (part 4)
here is a photograph:
in this picture is our heroine – she is turning 19 in a haze of MDA (both ingested and smoked) and hard liquor. in two months one of the men in this photo will rape her, within five years the other man in the picture will die of a drug overdose. there is another photo too of another man (same party) – three years down the road he will rape and assault a friend of her so brutally that she is hospitalized. here is the danger she does not see – lurking in leather jackets, waiting for the right alleyway and the right girl.
before the night is out, our girl will come extremely close to having sex on the fire escape of this chinatown apartment, but it being february is too cold. she is not at all self-conscious about sex, she does it for fun and sometimes for drugs, or just to pass the time between parties. 13 years later she will recognize how lucky she was not to have got some incurable disease.
but now at 19, she never thinks of that even though she is officially an adult.
she is in a new house now, with different people – and working part time but still drinking a lot. there has been much illness over the winter, including a brief flirtation with scurvy and a full case of german measles. she is always sick, a typhoid mary of the punk rock set. her immune system has collapsed under the weight of drug and alcohol intake and she is so ill she at one point fears she has HIV because the sick never seems to vacate her body – but she is lucky, for the world does not want to write her out of the script just yet.
in this photograph, she looks like a woman with all the edge drained out of her, pale skin and the half-lidded eyes of the partially present. thin too, not skin and bones, but what you can’t see in the photo is that she lost 20 pounds in a month. also not visible are the bruises on her arms and legs, covered by clothing, mostly self-inflicted.
but this night is fun, she knows she will wake up ill, but the da takes the bitter out of the night wind and there is only a floating, a chemically-triggered inner peace. over the past few months, struggling with suicidal impulses, she has decided she doesn’t want to die just yet – things are just starting to seem better.
Red Cedar 