Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates, Birds in the Cold, Melancholy, AI and Voting Rights

Me at Roq La Rue with two paintings by Dewi Plass at their Spectacle du Petite show

Valentine’s Day and Artist Dates

Hello there my friends. I hope you had a good week. I am smiling in the picture at left but have felt heavy and a little melancholy all week. James Van Der Beek passed away from cancer, and that seemed strange, as he was four years younger than me, with a lot of little kids—didn’t seem fair, though I realize these days “fair” doesn’t go as far as it used to. I felt a little under the weather—MS acting up, sinus problems—and the whole “GOP wants to take away women’s voting rights”—and that the “Save America (from women)” act passed the House already, terrible betrayers of democracy.

So I didn’t have the highest hopes for Valentine’s Day, but we took the arduous trip downtown and back to attend the Spectacle du Petite show at Roq La Rue, which features a ton of wonderful artists including my current art crush, Dewi Plass, whose works Glenn photographed me with. Below are some of the pieces, including the fennec fox piece, for you to enjoy. However, I recommend a visit to the show! Glenn also took me to a downtown bookstore, so I could peruse lit mags and magazines not available to me on the East side. The whole thing wore me out, but I was happy I went. Glenn made duck and strawberry cupcakes, and we had dinner at home, which was lovely. (I also received two rejections—one book, one lit mag—on Valentine’s Day, which seems like a slap in the face. Not cool, places that reject on V-Day. It’s a hard day for a lot of people! Geeze!)

Birds in the Cold, AI, and more on Voting Rights

The depressing new reliance on AI—and how it’s using up water resources and making electricity more expensive for all of us and does very little good and a lot of ill—was perfectly captured in this cartoon.

Glenn was reading Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which I hadn’t read in a long time (though I read the sequels more recently), and I was reminded of how women in that novel became property—first their voting rights revoked, then their access to their own bank accounts and credit cards. The “Save America” act will make it so women who have different names than their birth certificates cannot vote, legally. This includes me. It made me so mad I looked at changing my name back—but it involved a lot of paperwork. I have a passport, but most American women do not. That said, it’s time to get a passport if you don’t already have one, as it is still “acceptable” proof that women aren’t fake voters, apparently. Anyway, if they come for my bank account or credit cards, I’m out. I did find it funny that the Appalachian area was not part of the new fundamentalist, authoritarian government of Gilead, even in that book. Those are my people!

Below are some birds I caught in the brief sunshine when they came out to get a snack, we’re supposed to have four days of cold slushy snow/rain coming up, which is super fun, for both us and the birds. I’m so ready for spring to be here already—I even spent a few minutes gardening in the last week, getting it ready.

So how are you doing, my friends? I am feeling too discouraged to do much writing or submitting. I don’t think I’m processing the “family member with terminal cancer” as well as I think I should, too—feeling the pre-grief and trying to figure out how I’m going to get well enough to visit—Cincinnati is a rough trip, very few handicapped-friendly (and mold-unfriendly) places to stay, and I always get sick when I visit. I feel a little overwhelmed with my own health stuff (at least two biopsies in the near future for me, blech, which I keep putting off until I’m a little well-er, which seems to not be happening fast) to deal with bad news, Olympic controversies, governmental evil, maybe the need to escape the entire country…and a radical feminist and disability-activist book that doesn’t seem to be getting traction with the “right” publishers. If this isn’t the right time for this kind of art, I don’t know when it will be—when this awful government has not only cancelled the NEA but also all art? I don’t know, kids. I am holding on to small beauties—birds out my window, art on the walls and in my mind, books and poetry (mostly other people’s). What are you holding onto?