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| found while tearing the place apart looking for my glasses. then I found em in the bed 1 min later. I dunno what is wanted of me |
Friday, August 21, 2026
books and islands
"Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, originally published by National Geographic in 2003. And the library you're remembering is Ernest Oberholtzer's library on Mallard Island, in Rainy Lake, Minnesota, right on the U.S.–Canada border.
Oberholtzer is the man you're trying to remember. He was an early conservationist, wilderness advocate, canoe traveler, and serious student/friend of Ojibwe people and culture. He accumulated an enormous personal library—rare books, manuscripts, maps, Indigenous-related materials, literature—and kept it in the buildings of his island home. So Erdrich isn't traveling to a conventional institutional library. She travels by water to a man's house on an island that has effectively become a library. Scholarship on the book explicitly describes her destination as Oberholtzer's library on Mallard Island and notes that one object she's particularly interested in seeing there is a first edition of Tristram Shandy.
And you've remembered the architecture of the book correctly. It is essentially two linked pilgrimages. First she travels with her eighteen-month-old daughter, Nenaa'ikiizhikok, to meet the child's father, Tobasonakwut, and visit the Ojibwe pictographs around Lake of the Woods. Then she travels to the other kind of inscribed place: Mallard Island, the island of books. One scholarly account describes the structure almost exactly that way: pictographs/material landscape in one part, then the “special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books” in the other.
Which makes the thing you remembered from the book much more interesting in light of what you've been thinking about for the past two days:
cave wall → book → island → house → library.
They're all places where marks survive their makers.
And Erdrich actually announces the conflation at the beginning: her travels have become so concentrated on “books and islands” that the two have merged for her.
So, yes. Mallard Island. Ernest Oberholtzer's house/library. Rainy Lake. That's the place you were seeing in your head."
Fuckergpt is good for some stuff 👆 as long as you're strict and verify everything. The book itself is upstairs, I coulda just grabbed it, but I don't want to wander too far off topic / read outside following thread Love Medicine trail. And I wanted the library's name, the physical location(s), to map what it might look like to go there, and to see the cave paintings, and then wind up in North Dakota.
All I do is work. But this 👆 isn't that.
My job is a job. I do it well. I get paid.
Writerly reading my way through this material all again, then taking myself to boundary waters and rare libraries is what I'd do regardless. If I could/can.
Nebraska would have been very helpful in planning such a trip and especially in getting access to the libraries. I'm not a Dartmouth alum like him (and like Erdrich and Dorris). I am just applebees on date night. Without a date lol.
But. The problem with letting someone hold a door open for you is that they have the power to let it hit you in the face and land you on your ass, locked out, on a dime. I am not able to live at someone else's discretion like that. (I'd shoot first, I just didn't.)
My employment contract makes me eligible for a paid sabbatical next year. ELIGIBLE. I know damn well they will not let me have it. I am the only fulltime Eng faculty.
The only one.
If I tried to do scholarship, like I did on my first sabbatical (I studied Erdrich's kinship diagrams), my current employers could not even understand my application. That's why it's just a job now. There is nobody left who understands the work. All they know is students wait a year to get into one of my classes and never fail them - how, why, what happens, etc is all a mystery to my employers. They look at the math = I make a ton of money for them. That's it. I look at the math and I make enough money. That's it.
When I asked my boss yesterday about a sabbatical, he looked utterly terrified. He cannot legally hire any Eng adjuncts for two years because of the firings. All of NYS teachers union would sue the shit out of em. I'm all he's got.
In real life, I am sinking about 8-10k into a new patio door and deck, then tacking on 2 window replacements for my mother's room - Craig is doing all that. Then I'm paying E to replaster / repaint around it all. It will all set me back about 12-15k all tolled. Sound investments. This house was long overdue for upgrades, and this burb keeps topping realty rankings. Best to do these things while the paycheck is steady.
In real life, it's Friday night and I need to get laid something fierce, this dry spell must end, but I have no desire to see or talk to anyone.
In real life, I've lost my glasses in here and am helpless until I eventually step on them. All I can see is the book in front of me.
In real life, I am going to keep reading, blogging interesting findings, then filing it away. I will go to bed early. Been a long week, I'm very tired, and next week will be worse. So best to rest while I can.
All sensible and constrained actions.
In my mind's life, though, I am beginning to plan a trip. North Dakota is not somewhere you go in winters, nor is the boundary waters through the Badlands. And I need planning time to do such a thing, since I have no idea how. So while I continue to virgo-plod through this shit and to do my job, the whiteboard of my mind fills with words and plans. Like an elaborate escape route being mapped by the quietest inmate.
Tell me more about Tobasonakwut, and don't make it up! I think he was/is a sun dancer...
"You remembered correctly: Tobasonakwut Kinew was a Sun Dancer. And this time I checked against sources..
Tobasonakwut Kaagagewanakweb Kinew (1936–2012), sometimes called Kelly Kinew, was an Anishinaabe elder, traditional knowledge keeper, political leader, teacher, healer, pipe carrier, Midewiwin member, and longtime Sun Dancer. The University of Winnipeg—where he later taught Indigenous Governance—specifically says he was a Sun Dancer in both Anishinaabe and Lakota traditions. The Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba goes further and identifies him as a Sundance chief.
And his biography makes the man in Books and Islands much more legible.
He was born in 1936 on his father's trapline at Lake of the Woods, which is crucial given where Erdrich takes us in the book. Elders selected him when he was very young for instruction in Anishinaabe knowledge and traditions; the University of Winnipeg says that before age six an elder took him fasting to seek a vision. He subsequently survived residential school.
He wasn't simply a ceremonial figure, either. He had a formidable political life. He served as Chief of the Ojibways of Onigaming, Grand Chief of Treaty 3, became the first Ontario Regional Chief, participated in the National Indian Brotherhood and Assembly of First Nations, and eventually taught Indigenous governance at the University of Winnipeg. In 2009 he was the elder accompanying the Assembly of First Nations delegation that met Pope Benedict XVI.
So when Erdrich goes to Lake of the Woods with him in Books and Islands, he isn't functioning merely as her lover/baby's father who happens to know the territory. This is his homeland and an intellectual/spiritual tradition in which he has considerable standing.
There's a very useful scholarly description of precisely this. Tobasonakwut was a pipe carrier, traditional healer, Sun Dancer, Midewiwin member, and fluent Anishinaabemowin speaker. The scholar consequently reads the central journey with him as not merely travel but Erdrich's encounter with Anishinaabe language, knowledge, and landscape through someone possessing all of those forms of knowledge.
And here is something I think you're going to find extremely interesting for the project.
His full name matters. In Books and Islands, Erdrich explains Tobasonakwut through place and ancestry rather than giving us a conventional boyfriend biography. One scholarly discussion quotes her account of his people as literally constituted by Lake of the Woods—the fish, animals, plants and water entering human bodies—and recounts something his father told him: “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.”
That's the man accompanying her to the rock paintings.
And there is another connection you may already know but hadn't mentioned: Tobasonakwut was Wab Kinew's father—the writer of The Reason You Walk, and now premier of Manitoba. The Reason You Walk is substantially about Wab's difficult relationship and eventual reconciliation with his father. Its description identifies Tobasonakwut as simultaneously a traditional chief and elected political leader and discusses the complicated coexistence in him of traditional Anishinaabe religion and Catholicism after his abuse in residential school."
I did not know that 👆 part. I remember her describing him is being older for a *first time* father (which he was not, apparebtly) (in his 60s) as she is late in life, at 48, a mother again. That is why her daughter is a "grandmotherly baby." And I remember her describing him as a sun dancer, which is a practice that was made illegal in the United States along with the boarding schools, all laws and practices intended to break the culture of the people, "kill the savage to save the man" was the rationale of both the US and Canada. So he's very secretive, and she is very secretive about him because he'd been an outlaw.
Another interesting personal side note: The Grey Nuns, the ones for whom I worked and built and lived and studied, the order that granted me that sabbatical in the first place, the current president of which I still write to, relatively recently settled a case against them for running such a boarding school. In Montreal, I believe.
Right before Patti died, I told her a story that was true: I had played the radio game, asking for where I should go (wtf do I do next?), and the song that came on seemed utterly impossible. How would I possibly get to and north of WINNIPEG? Why would god/universe tell me to do that? But it's a really good song, so it seemed not impossible to figure out how, nor how to compost a human body (what patti wanted me to help her do). All impossibe things just haven't been made/done yet. "That's why I love you so much." The last thing she said to me.
Thursday, August 20, 2026
"this way"
loving wrong - st. paul & the broken bones
Having pretty much finished the four classes I thought I had (Grit Class is back - but I'm standing my ground on wanting it to be an online class, trying to) this morning, I'm taking a wee break and focusing on my new Louise Erdrich project. There are three editions of Love Medicine where there is changing to the wording and structure of some of the stories - all of the rest of the editions, upon careful inspection, amounted to packaging. There is no significant forward written by any significant author in any of those editions. So the three I physically have are The Three. While my reference library hunts down that magazine version of the cat story, I decided to read the three editions in order.
Straight out of the gate, boom:
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| "written it this way" |
If you don't know who Michael Dorris is, the impact of that sentence and its particular wording wouldn't hit you in the face. But it slaps me hard.
There's an almost obscenely perfect line from Erdrich herself in 1997. Asked about the discrepancy between the celebrated marriage everyone thought they had and the marriage they actually inhabited, she said: “We're in the era when every marriage touted as ideal turns out to resemble a pathology report.”
The only novel of hers I didn't like is the one she wrote about a marriage. It made me nauseous in places, I had to force myself through it, and I swear I could feel her forcing herself through the writing of it.
Consequential is not synonymous with beneficial. Nor does acknowledging somebody's presence inside the made thing (art) (children) retroactively justify the toll they took / you paid.
I know the cats are not here yet in the first edition. So when did cats begin to show up? If you haven't read the story, you don't realize that it's all about mating. So. Put the timeline of the various editions next to the Dorris timeline - that is the kind of chore fuckergpt can do:
1984 — Love Medicine, first edition. No “The Island.” And that dedication explicitly names Dorris's “ideas, experiences, and devoted attention” and says Erdrich could not have written the book “this way” without him.
January–February 1991 — “The Island” appears independently in Ms. magazine. That's now verified bibliographically, not guessed. This is Lulu's first-person story of going to Moses Pillager on the island—the material that later gets folded backward into Love Medicine. And importantly, the Ms. text is not identical to what Erdrich subsequently puts into the novel. Chavkin [scholar] specifically compares the two and finds meaningful revision between the 1991 story and 1993 chapter.
And look what else is sitting right there in 1991: Dorris and Erdrich's eldest adopted son, Reynold Abel, dies at 23 after being struck by a car. The family subsequently relocates to Montana amid severe trouble involving another adopted son; they return to New Hampshire in 1993.
(side note if anybody's interested, there is a book and movie version of the adoptions - it's an important story because Michael Dorris is the reason we have the phrase "fetal alcohol syndrome" - in the film, he's played by jimmy smitts, and my favorite author, Louise Erdrich, shows up at the end of the movie, she was his student and she says something almost exactly like "I know this is crazy, but let's get married" - that's why I remember it)
1993 — Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. “The Island” gets incorporated into the novel, along with three other new chapters and a new section of “The Beads”; Erdrich also resequences and alters existing material. This isn't a reprint with bonus material: scholarship describes it as a substantial rewriting of the 1984 book.
So the sequence is:
1984: I could not have written it this way without Michael Dorris.
↓
1991: Erdrich writes/publishes Lulu's missing history as “The Island.”
↓
1991–93: catastrophic family period, including Abel's death and major upheaval involving the children.
1993: she opens the already-finished Love Medicine and puts Lulu's story into it—while changing other parts of the old book as well.
↓
1994: Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris appears; publicly/intellectually they're still very much presented as a literary partnership.
↓
1994: Sava [other son] sends the threatening/demanding letter that leads Erdrich and Dorris to take him to court.
↓
1995: Erdrich and Dorris separate.
1996: divorce.
1997: Dorris commits suicide.
So “The Island” does not belong to the post-Dorris Erdrich. That's important. It arrives inside the marriage, four years before the separation, during a period when their literary partnership was still publicly active.
But it's also not the 1984 marriage preserved.
It's written seven years after that dedication, during the beginning of what becomes an extraordinarily difficult family period, and then Erdrich takes that story and changes it again before inserting it into the marriage-produced book in 1993.
<giant fucking pin here>
The character she chooses to write back into Love Medicine is Lulu.
Not simply additional plot. Lulu gets a past she did not have in the 1984 textual object. And that past concerns mother, abandonment, institutional removal, language, sexual/kinship connection, and the attempt to locate where one comes from. The Ms. version is actually more explicit about Lulu believing she had turned her back on her mother and needing forgiveness; Erdrich makes that relationship subtler when she absorbs the story into the 1993 novel.
And that's where the cats enter.
Which means the cat trail has unexpectedly landed exactly where your Dorris trail lands: in material Erdrich wrote in 1991 and then deliberately used to reopen and alter the 1984 book in 1993, while the marriage that was “so much a part” of the original book was still intact but the family's history was accumulating weight far beyond the 1984 book.
And it's LULU (I think she's my favorite literary character ever, if I had to pick one), that slinks her way into that shit and onto the page...
It's funny how life keeps working like that for me these days. I was just like "cats, siiigh" and then decided to follow that thought/feeling to wherever my mind took it. I like this Erdrich project so far. The overhaul of my standing classes I also like very much, I think it makes it possible ( not probable but possible ) that a record incoming class of freshmen survive the fact that only one full time English professor exists there. But no matter what I make now came at a very high cost to me as a human being.
"Andy" is the first man encountered in Love Medicine, the first edition. I knew that although I had forgotten his name. What I remember is that's not his real name, and he's got his own book later. In that book, it turns out that what "really" happened is they got married the night they met, the night the woman (June) commits suicide in every version that same night. I ask fuckergpt to confirm dates in a line with the dorris-erdrich marriage. I've read all of these novels at least twice, but I didn't memorize the dates of their publication obviously. When does a CATASTROPHIC MARRIAGE slink its way in? I know for a fact that no edition of Love Medicine includes that. But it does happen, so in which novel and when does it?
1984 — Love Medicine
June + “Andy.” No marriage. Andy is essentially an anonymous mud engineer.
1991 — “The Island,” Ms.
Erdrich begins supplying Lulu with the history absent from the original novel.
1993 — expanded Love Medicine
“The Island” enters Love Medicine, along with substantial revision elsewhere—but June's encounter with Andy still does not become a marriage.
1995 — Erdrich and Dorris separate.
1996 — Tales of Burning Love
Erdrich goes back to the very first scene of her first novel, reveals that anonymous Andy was Jack Mauser, and gives June and Jack something that had never existed before:
a marriage.
1996 — Erdrich and Dorris divorce.
👁 huh
I am two pages into this project and feel like I am uncovering a writing process of continually folding life in. This is what happened in real life / this is what I made out of it. #witchcraft
card of the day: 8 cups (moving on)
Sometimes we can't see the horizon because the city, fog or windowless room prevents it. Certain circumstances, relationships and responsibilities act in much the same way, blocking our view. Today's lunar aspect urges us never to cease imagining horizons we can hold in our mind's eye and carry wherever we go.
I have very much tried to🙏
I got a call this morning at 8 AM on the dot, he was waiting for it to be a decent hour. T'was of one of the Fireds calling me to tell me that he got a job - thanking me for all I did, he's going to be a program director for a lot more $$ and he gets to move home to florida (where his family is). Since I built those programs from scratch and needed all of their help, and I was careful to give them titles, acknowledgment as program designers etcetc, they're finding it easier to land jobs like that. But what he wanted to thank me for was the candles, allll the candles 🕯🕯🕯🕯
You don't know if witch-hopecraft is gonna do anything, but you don't know that it's not either.
I can't wait to visit him once he's settled / one fewer to mourn 👍
song tbd - still a long day ahead and I'm crying already, but at least they're happy tears (for a change) atm
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
grit class reading (cats)
"The Island" - Louise Erdrich
Tracking down this story and getting it into readable form took several hours. In the process of doing so, I didn't just make a reading for students, which I did, but I also discovered a scholarship project. One that has absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence, thank fucking god.
The classes are done. I said after that I could write fuckingstuff if I wanted to, but I really did not feel like it. I did this instead.
This author is known for shapeshifting (authorial witchcraft). Characters have multiple versions of themselves and multiple different permutations of family relationships over time. In the case of this story, in particular, there's an added layer of difficulty. It is a chapter included in her signature book, Love Medicine (*medicine* being the operative theoretical term). However, it was not included in the original publication of that book in the 80s. It didn't get included until the second edition, 1993. And subsequent editions have subtle changes, so that you would have to read them all to follow the shapeshifting. Add to that is the difficulty that even the most recent edition of Love Medicine (6 editions by my count), has no e-version of any kind. Not kindle, etc, NOWHERE can you find the book in any electronic form. Not even behind a google books firewall, nada. You must hold a physical book in your hands if you want to read Love Medicine. Add to that (!!), this particular story was also published separately as a standalone in Ms Magazine - so there is yet another version floating around out there that my reference librarian is now tracking down for me (shockingly, Ted still works here).
I have gone down this rabbit hole of dogs once before with this author. Dogs do a lot of work, including talk sometimes, which was the inspiration for my own dog's narration in one little "chapter" of Grit.
Now I'm on the trail of her cats...
To get this story into a version I could post, I had to scan each page of it (earliest novel version) to make it into one artifact. Then, I had to download an app that would make jpegs out of artifact pages. Blogger doesn't support pdf format. Nothing really does online because everybody's just posting pictures of their fucking dinner or their ass. Mass Sheepletude. Nothing supports anything except taking a picture of your ass (or cat). Then, I had to extract those pics using an obscure function inside this new expensive fucking phone. Then upload them here in order.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only "electronic version" of this story anywhere.
(What are you making?)
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| how human consciousness accumulates a world, how everything touches everything else, how people fail one another without becoming disposable, how animals exceed the stories humans tell, how eras erase while individuals remember, how sex and knowing and kinship and rage and jokes and death occupy the same life—and how attention itself might be an act of making rather than repair |
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| "suicide note" needless to say, chatgpt didn't get the joke 🙄 - what I really need to keep working with AI is a sidechat survival feature - stupidfuckingidiot predictableaf |
status update: 3 of 4 classes done / as good as they're getting given the constraints of 1 the #grit-concept that no one understood and I am the only one left standing in it 2 AI (dumbfuck hallucinating liar [and that's only the sins I've discovered so far]) "in everything" (like someone farted?) 3 enrollment of 140 students to start next week (40 more will be added added in Nov)
Despite allllll that, I'm going to guess that the students are going to fucking lovvvve the classes - I am the magic that turns that pile of utter shit into something safe to consume. So there.
Not every friendship is forever, Virgo, and today gives you permission to step back from the ones running on fumes.
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| "solitary witch from the gecko" |
lots of people are just dead, pics of which I can summon but not them. and among the living it's the same diff a lot #realitycheck
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
What does it actually mean to be a witch? How do you know if you are one? I think everyone is one, at least nascently. Not everyone would agree. And it is true that skills are earned. They don't just come out of the fucking ground up your asshole out the top of your head like fucking glitter. You have to have a Way, first of all - probably several. A Way is a thing that you do faithfully, a practice, a focus, of control and self-reflection that can be sustained and returned to, not for comfort but to "screw your courage to the sticking-place" - and it must entail your body, your whole body, and not just consume it like burning fuel. You have things in common with both a living tree and a log but you are neither. These and distinctions like it must be front of mind much of every day. It is your job to figure out how they stay front of mind for you. (Otherwise, you may do some very damaging things to keep your body doing what it is, burning itself right out.)
You have to have a moral code that constrains your behavior and guides it. It has to be chosen and clearly articulatable. It can't be some vague bullshit about how you were raised Catholic or whatever - you don't get to inherit a vague moral compass, even if that is your inheritance. In that case, it's on you to correct that fact. Personally, I live by the threefold law and the transformative humanities golden rule. Respectively, 1 what you give, you'll get 3x back 2 (much more crucially) if someone else can do a thing, then you should help them do it / don't do it yourself, and if something needs done in the world and you are the only person who can do it, then you must do it.
The first part of rule two - if someone else can do a thing, then you should stop doing it and help them do instead - acts as a countermeasure for the tendency towards martyrdom that the second half of that rule leans toward.
You share qualities with the God of your understanding, but you are not Jesus. You should always remember that. Even if you think he's a good guy. And not everyone would agree on that.. I never asked him to climb up on that cross and would not have asked that of his mother. As a syndrome that can metastasize out of the perfectly good, fundamentally good, impulse to be measured by what you provide, martyrdom as a syndrome is deadly droll. Do you enjoy it when someone martyrs themselves for you? I mean as kinkplay sure 🥰 but.... Otherwise probably not so much.
A witch spends a lot of time aligning your body with energy and want and swerve and persistence, the fundamental states of what's around you, and tries to love every one of them, yet use discernment about what feels in accordance.
In some ways it's very easy to be a witch. You've always known. You take a deep breath and very often run in the other direction, for as long as you can remember, away from distraction and noise. Or you might do the opposite, follow the surge of the energy around you, like surfing - human energy, animal energy, tree energy, all of it. Ideally, you could do both at any one time. And you've always thought about these things, you've always FELT these things.
And then all other ways it's mostly frustrating to feel like a witch. Whatever is already exists, and you can't hate on it because it exists. Even a plastic bottle harming the ocean, even if you want no more of those plastic bottles to be made, you can't just look at the plastic bottle and think "fuck you" - it didn't ask to be here any more than you did. But here you both are.
That's you and the whole fucking world. And for me personally, I can't feel it ALL anymore. It's too expensive as the world is presented currently. It doesn't exist in real life mostly, it exists on devices, and that's not real. Even if it depicts factual things that's not the same thing as being lived reality. If you spend that physical actual lived reality looking at the simulations of reality on a tiny device, that's on you. If you are a witch, you can explain to me how, by doing that, you're surfing lifepower in a morally compassed way to any end that you can articulate.
If you cannot do any of those things, I strongly suggest you just live out your days in peace and don't think too much about being someone who wields witchpower. Because mostly you do not wield it at all, even if you know all about it. You just feel it. And sometimes with great focus and control and effort, you can shift a stream of power and make reality change course right in front of you. For the better 🤏 If you can do that, people will admire your ability to do so, and/but you're probably lonely. It's not necessarily a lot of fun being singular.
And this extends to holding perfectly still. You don't need to perform an action to be held to the moral codes and the energy all around you. If you are lying in your bed alone or with your pets, and you are thinking about all that you hate, you are throwing up into LIFE. So you better knock it off or not be a fucking witch at least. As I said, I believe everyone is to some degree or another a contributor to Life in this way. But you're a witch if you spend a fuckton of time thinking about what you're "putting out there" from the center of your being radiating out at all times. You are doing that to other people, whatever that is.
I don't know how to perform a thrombectomy. Different longstudied skillset. Both hard earned. Often both thankless and pointless and doesn't change the outcome. There's no recompense for lighting a fucking candle at all. It keeps you up all night, you don't get paid, and you have no idea whether it has any effect at all (probably not). Practice creates an obligation to practice well, not a right to results. For whatever reason, however you got there, you are in a pull, a current, and you're trying to shift and survive it usually because you're trying to grab onto someone else, which might even make it worse. "If in doubt, let go" has not been a rule that I've been great at observing.
Do you think about the relationship of your corporeality to the universe? And the way you might land intentionally or unintentionally, even for a moment on the corporeality of someone else in that huge ocean of Life? Is that front of mind? Are you alone in that deep blue current, both submerged and floating?
Are you making anything?
Leanore's aria - Fidelio Beethoven's only opera, he didn't know the ranges/sounds of a human voice, he had to imagine all of it.
"The cats made me one of them—sleek and without mercy." ~ Lulu
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| a coworker death per August - actual not metaphysical or figurative or whatever other kinds of Dying we're all doing - and they want to make promo out of it ... |
status update: 👆 shit + one more class in the bag, on schedule
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Maybe it's effective in dating apps [👀 hell no], but in real life, people who want to make new friends don't typically lead with a list of requirements. You learn more in a 10-second face-to-face interaction than in hours of digital interaction.
like Mary Likes Hornet Figging Guy ("Junior")? - that impression landed in 10 seconds 🤣
it's weekly oracle day, let's check those out..
VIRGO -
I am nursing a hopeful dream that you will give yourself a fun surprise or two in the coming days—maybe even more than two. Not necessarily the most expensive delights, but those that would inspire your nervous system to relax and your spirit to celebrate. Possible options: a few hours of free time with no obligations, a hike where you adore and praise the sky, a conversation you’ve been craving, a daring yes, or a long-overdue no. Or how about finally starting a fun project you keep postponing, or setting down a burden you’ve been carrying for too long? You might ask yourself: “If someone who loved me dearly were in charge of my rhythm, what would they arrange for me?”
uncanny, the "nervous system" language of that. let's crowdsource ideas?? (ask my mom [?] - dicey af lol). what would you arrange for me if the magic wand were yours? all healers, adventurers, ghosts, friends, dogs, even Eggs the cat I've been saving since I met him -DM me yo. I'd love to hear it. I picture like an oldschool coumpouding med cabibet, and every time I pull open a drawer, a different 'arrangement idea' wafts out...
Meanwhile, I have classes to finish, one more cup of coffee before I jump back on on it - anyone who's been following along if you would like to offer which has been your favorite assignment that might be useful to me, if you care to share!
And I gotta help get vehicles bought - one per each of the kids who drives. The eldest just got a modest donation of $ - I've learned less is more w that one. Ears, on the other hand, at his request, I am bossing the absolute shit out of him even though it makes him snappy. He is gonna be requiring some cosigning, I believe, now that we know how far short the schmitzes fell of the goal.
We are getting shit DONE NOW. Enough already.
song tbd
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| card if day, yupyup |
Monday, August 17, 2026
status update: one class is a wrap.
goal: one per day / done by Thursday
on thursday I re-up the class I co-teach w my boss - so that will require almost no thought / no change, unless he's making any changes.
In my own 3 classes, I am systematically going through every assignment, and adding an AI step to it, and then constraining them to use no other AI, then, make 'em run it through AI for analysis/revision before I see it besides etcetc.
So far, I have done the easiest class. Tomorrow, a writing class.
Upside: by doing this now, I am constraining the amount of attention anyone could get from me for the rest of the semester; and I am making it possible for every student to get an A simply by following the directions very strictly. It's got a dominatrix vibe to it for sure. I'm taking all those grit(ty) assignments and adding them structurally into specific course material.Which means wherever I've been reading chatgpt anyway already, I'm just letting them do what they were already doing, and not calling it cheating, calling it prep work. Then one SHORT actual thing that I read. If they cheat on THAT THING, they fail. Period.
It takes a surprising amount of time to design an assignment that actually works, that a student cannot get around and just hand in bullshit. If you think that by asking them what they feel, or whatever, is gonna get you around that it doesn't - they ask chat g p t to have their feelings for them, and it's getting better and better at faking those. It used to be that you could catch it because somewhere in it, it would say 'of course, I don't really have any feelings' and the student would be too stupid to even proofread the fucking thing before they turned it in. But that was in the days when I could actually read these things and I can't anymore, first of all, and second of all, it confabulates better now, so it wouldn't make that mistake in the first place. I have to plug in the original assignments and make it cheat digest it, right in front of me, so I can reverse engineer what to tell the students to do, which is what they were already doing. And they still can do that. Strangely, that makes them feel as if they're doing homework lol - that's how's how much they use it! I'm just not going to fucking read any of that shit any more. They get to ask chatgpt what they think and then they get to ask chat g p t to write drafts for em and then they have to ask chat g p t what it is they would ask a real human being at that point and then they have to answer whatever fucking question that is in two hundred motherfucking words typa deal.
And let's see what happens.
I certainly don't want to read any more chatgpt fucking essays. THAT IS PASSING BUTTER. No. So. One class per day. Nothing changes except every assignment. Every one of them is A/F so do it exactly the way I tell you. Including be funny when I tell you (amuse me). This is very tedious work, assignment design, but it's long overdue, really, it's been a couple of years now that I've had my eye on the ball of aliving desperately. One should update one's assignments continually, ideally. But now several very hard years have gone by since I last did that.
So. There's something satisfying now about going through each one of these classes, and the update is that every single week I crack a leather whip over the heads of two hundred people. I can almost hear it. They are gonna do it my way, or they are gonna fail. And when it comes to the writing classes, I'm going to make sure they fail by week 4, if they're gonna, so that they won't even be there as part of my statistics, they'll have dropped. Self-analyzing to see if they should persist (harder) or swerve is one of the assignments at week 4, when I am mandated to report them for being likely to fail. Or not. They're going to decide. But they're gonna use AI to come to a feeling-less conclusion on the subject based on the evidence. There will be zero late assignments accepted until MIDTERM - after midterm, if you've been on it, then you've earned some leeway. I am dogfooding all of that here because I can't bear to sit in front of that laptop for one more fucking second at ten p. m. But I did get one done.
Tomorrow the writing intensive version (WIP means writing intensive program, and yes, I did come up with it, intentionally sound like whip 🤭, a good fifteen years ago. It used to be writing across the curriculum (WAC) which was a whack lolol but that got dated, so I thought it would be funny to change it - omg the shit that nuns used to let me get away with was awesome - that's an actual program, WIP, and every single student at the college is subject to taking two whip classes lolol very very often misspelled just like that - we had a middle states commendation for it! - and stillll cracking myself up about it 🤭) of the same course, the worst offender re students turning in total bullshit.
Wed - Narrative Medicine 201, with an eye towards a Week 4 guillotine of some kind, right before that conference presentation. Oct 2. Handy timing. What will we want to be able to say by then in that particular one 🤔 - but all of my classes count as narrative medicine, they're all taught to healthcare provider students, and they're all about stories.
Maybe I could get both those classes done tomorrow - yes, let's GRIT THAT OUT. setting that intention 🙏. then yoga Wed.
Thurs - Graphic Medicine class, the reading list for which ChatGPT hallucinated a book by Ken Dahl and started this whole thing about hallucination and verisimilitude confabulation - but that class won't be changing because that will be up to my boss, the BIO part of the course runs that show. I will tell my boss all about the presentation on Oct 2 and see if he wants to get in on that which he might, we have done many presentations like that together before. Totally up to him. I booked 1-2 hours that morning for us to catch up and get the class out the door. Nobody but he and I have a class that big. It breaks the enrollment rules for a freshman class by one hundred percent - and that's why he and I both still have a job. And I understand that. We are both very pragmatic people (he's a capricorn).
Then all there is to do, if nothing else bad happens and classes actually begin on the 31st, all I have to do is go to the union funeral picnic on the 28th to confirm that yup we are still alive, then I press the "ON" button on the classes. That's it. Half of my job happens when I'm not doing my job. It happens in summers and in spaces betweens. It happens when I look back, and I look forward and I make these decisions. Otherwise, I'm free to be anywhere, doing anything, while everyone else is going to physical classrooms and I am not. And everyone else is wondering what they're doing next week, and I am not. My students know every single thing that's going to be occurring and that they'll be responsible for - they can see the entire class laid out in front of them on day one, and then they get to decide what to do from there on out. I'll be going to Wisconsin for sure. I wanna get to the high peaks for sure. If I get accepted to that conference, which is almost for sure, I'll be going to kalamazoo michigan. All that is in Oct. in the meantime, I'm going to head out to my cottage. I think the cottage is mostly where I'll be for lotsa Sept, 'cept labor day ( fucking fireworks ) until I gotta close it up for the year.
The only other thing I did today was get that bees nest, which is hornets actually, offa Mary. The guy comes to the door, he's got a yellow shirt with a big bee on it and something stuck in his teeth (like a little bit of a hamburger bun from lunch). He introduces himself as so and so junior, I'm pretty sure this dude is some kind of drunk or high. He's really really happy to see me. And all I've said is hello. So I bring him around the side of the house to where Mary is. The hornet's nest is in the foundation of the house right behind the base of Mary. So it does look like they're flying in and out her ass, to be fair. But this dude actually says that out loud and adds "virgin birth, ya right!? didn't think she'd be KINKY though!!" and cracks himself up completely so then I'm also laughing because it just feels so absurd. All of it. All the time. And he's not alone, he's got a driver too - my guess would be this is the company owner's kid, middle aged guy who probably does not have a driver's license anymore. So Beeguy Jr calls to the other guy, "come see MARY dude, she's got fucking hornets in her ass!" Like, I have little old people for neighbors across the street 🤭🤦🏻♀️. Not to mention that I didn't get dressed today because why would I (?) so I'm standing out there in bare feet and this little stupid black dress I sleep in 🤭🤦🏻♀️🤣 Janis sitting there, swagging her tail at the whole scene... he wanted the check made out to him personally, no tax, or cash? (no), a check I wrote out fast, thanking christ for the driver dude standing there or Junior woulda hit on me it was feelin like 😵💫🤦🏻♀️. He told me to write my email on the check so that he could send me a receipt that never came 👀 (sigh range)
grit to self: "you can't have or do anything you want until you get your classes done on Canvas"
no fuckwriting or streaming cowboy shows, etc. now that the laptop is open it stays on WORK until that's done. I'm waiting on a couple answers (are you sure these dates are right?), and ANY question is bad, as the answer will be MEAN and call attention to the fact that I still exist for now. But I'm co-teaching a class with my boss (he's out of options but HIMSELF, as all chairs eventually discover). so I need to ask him how we're doing that...
I click the announcements, killing time waiting for answers, while joking with Janis, "let's see if they've closed any other departments!"
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| so weird |
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| hey Janis, do you think that other button leads to a Phish show? 🤷🏽♀️ |
Sunday, August 16, 2026
Saturday, August 15, 2026
Friday, August 14, 2026
grit novel swerve + class assignment (smerge)
What if I go back to the sobriety games and I just keep writing those for a while...
At the end of the modern chair thing, I sent him to where the real-life person said he had to go, ie Blackops Disneyland. And thus ended the sobriety games / I hit a wall.
At that point, he does not have a name, no one would know who "he" is except for his wife and mother.
I couldn't go any farther with that "him" and I still couldn't.
However, when Craig came back to measure for the door, my sink plumbing had fallen apart and started leaking all over the floor so he helpfully got wrenches out and got under my kitchen sink for about an hour. He didn't charge me for that, even though he has an official handyman business now that I make my checks out to - he was just being good to me. And he stunk up the whole kitchen like a handyman. It made me a little woozy for a minute.
After he left I uhmmm "meditated" (wheeeeew 🚬)
So what if to go forward, I make a mash-up? My mother already made a horrible one, A-bone, which fills me with despair. I'll leave that one on the cutting room floor.
I'd make a mash-up of a "he" and start to flip it - it's herself she's keeping sober. he's being nice to her. that's how I phrased what happens at the end of the sex chair story, that he's trying to be nice to her. he has intention towards her for the first and last time. he has intention at all for the first and last time, as it stands, and with that intention, he does two things: he's nice to her once and he renditions himself to Blackops Disneyland.
But this is fiction, I can just take out that last sentence. No disneyland to go to, boom, I shot it.
He then continues whatever intention(s) that the Mashup Man would have. It's not him anymore, it's a Hucklejeffcraigleunionberry Guy.
I don't want to fall in love with Craig in real life in any amount of sentences. But I sure have the material for a sobriety game chapter.
I joked with him about not smoking a joint because he was here, and the walldoor prevents good air circulation so I had to "be a good girl" re substances and lying around depressed in my underwear all day, which is what I would have been doing if he hadn't been here, and I said it just like that.
The drag show vid that he showed me. In it the performer is singing around him as he sits on a restaurant chair. And then she kicks open his legs and points at his dick just as she's singing "have you ever let your heart decide? lala" disneyprincess shit, then sits in his lap with him spread eagle like that and almost knocks them both onto the floor. he showed it to me twice, being submitted and nearly thrown to the floor by a drag queen, delighted. he wasn't flirting. he really just thought it was really fucking funny and it was, but give it a slight nudge and it can get to weird flirting.
Then he changed out of his painting pants in the other room, and he laid on my kitchen floor for about an hour.
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| fuck |
I'd crosspollinate, every man I know brings each their own qualities, skills, jokes, musk. keep some huck, stir in a couple of big scoops of jeff, (🤔 and some E maybe too, actually, always a simmer there) (and Craig is a hell of a lot like Puckhead, smells like him, I could stir some of that retro material in maybe, surely I fucked him in an Ikea on here somewhere rt? I def did fuck him over fixing my sink, I remember it, he laughed at all my hair in it and called it a "dead squirrel"), move the trip to new orleans into the near future and move it geographically to the bourbon festival in Kentucky in September (happening in real life, which I have discussed going to with Ears and Sunnie both MAYBE). If I move the new orleans trip to kentucky, that stirs in a dollop of Union by association, he's a self proclaimed hillbilly from exactly there. Maybe "he" follows her there, so she doesn't drink. Which at the end of the day (2 days), is exactly what he did do in new orleans in real life.
I don't want to change the structure. I like swerve-kill-swerve.
But taking the one sentence out of the end of the sex chair chapter opens up that section of the novel to an infinity of scenarios that eventually leave her house (the setting changes), moving west, even if they resume on the kitchen floor in the next game.
He is increasingly trying to reach her. She is increasingly becoming unreachable in a way neither of them understands. You could flip the he/she of that on a dime. One of them could become a dangerous alchoholic. One could kill somebody. Either of them could do either or both of those things.
I can make that frequently funny. it's the Knife in me.
And writing fucking is fun. I mean...here, try it!
Grit Assignment - write a page of "therapy" porn: fuck somebody to life (reverse blink, no matter how badly you need to get laid, you do not want to be "fucked to death" now do ya?). So the intention is reaching someone who is drowning, with your body, without drowning yourself.
AI step, CHOICE (meet yourself where you are):
1 if you have no idea how to begin such a thing, then set up a series of conditions, including you are trying to use an erotic form of argumentation to talk your lover into living, setting is X, scenario type is Y, etc, all your choice, and ask chatgpt to write your first draft. then, add a lot of swear words to it, repeat until you are happy with a version.
or you can skip that
2 write it all yourself, any way you want to. if it's in your head already, just write it. (btw you can USE A PEN for this, if you want to, in a journal / on a napkin whatever, and then take a pic w your phone and chatgpt can read that / it could read my handwriting)
3 submit your erotic scenario to your AI for a "fucking asshole check" - use the same one as before - ask it for an analysis of how you helped or harmed the nervous system of the other person and/or your own nervous system in the fuck-process.
Final submission = short final reflection on that analysis.
Learning Outcome: imagine → make → interrogate consequences → decide whether to persist/swerve
That final reflection can be pretty damn short. As in "you blew his/your circuit box" in which case you wouldn't want to keep writing those scenarios / persist. Even IN THOUGHT, your brain would simply stop doing it, you certainly didn't mean to hurt that other person (or yourself), that is the opposite of what you were going for, which is why the games stopped writing themselves, and I got so quiet on that and all related subjects to the point of I don't feel my body that way at all for anyone (until today for about 5 lovely minutes, plop ft pop-oft).
But if I go FULL FICTION on it and make every man into ONE, and she is the one in a driving-her-to-drink fucked up situation she doesn't know what to do with - fuck it ? shoot it ? flee it into the arms of a cave ? - that does 2 things:
I write more fucking for a while, it's a compelling form of writing that kind of goes where it goes once you start, just like sex does, and so I would open my laptop for it, where classes that I do not want to teach and an inbox I am avoiding to death await me right now ☠️ - maybe I can get to September that way....
And "she" is already coming apart in Sobriety Games, upping the stakes and crying and stepping onto suicidal ledges with "him" - that is the "she" who shot Nebraska eventually, so she'll be moving towards murder as if by undertow, but not taking Huck-for-Whoever with her, as I did not take him with me by blogging almost nothing about Nebraska until I shot him / posted a photo of the bed I could have killed him on.
grit novel Vegas notes
if books could kill - Grit hilarious and bang on
I was aware that the original book is total shit, of course. in CLASS, I was as much undermining it as I was playing along with it. at every turn, the assignments SLOW DOWN THINKING long enough to look at it. then if persistence is actually applicable, apply it! mos def. but if not, pause. it's the same concept applied in the kinds of yoga I do - in order to get anywhere, you have to know *where you are* (duh), and to do that you have to look yourself in the face. and I've been a teacher a longass time, teaching versions of opt out / opt in - more often out than in, deciding that persisting can become "the hobgoblin of little minds" (Emerson) I wasn't planning any assignment that included reading that stupidass Duckworth book, or watching her Ted Talk (unless to critique it, but meh, I'd be too bored to read that). the grit concept is old news, which is why my employer thought it was innovative. (wouldn't surprise me if next they stick me with The Secret. [which I'd also be great at lol])
I've run away with the whole idea and the novel has been dogfooding grit. from HERE, I can see that grit is half of what is killing everyone. including me, hence dragging my feet to go back - something can be survivable and even worthwhile and still become intolerable because nothing new can happen anymore (the meeting will go according to the fucking agenda, which might kill me, like if it drove me to drink — if that happens I will go on disability permanently [quit]). everyone is told "open sesame" at walls will work if only they keep it up. only once is "kill that" on the board in the novel, and I took the shot.
aliving->murder->aliving
(over->dead->dying)
(swerve->kill it->swerve)
the middle is the rupture, but the outside terms aren't “before/after" they're two forms of continuing (trying to imagine how to / making shit up as I go).
the only absolute thing in that structure has been dead / kill it / murder in the center (no) - from here, now, it looks like 3 intentionalities, the outside 2 of which were/are winging it. I'm (she is) trying to keep us all alive, unless I/she can/gotta shoot the fucking problem.
clear intention / improvised means
clear intention / available means
clear intention / improvised means
persisting is difficult. and persisting in sameness is boring besides. so it better be 1 worth it and 2 not gonna kill ya (or what was the fucking point?)
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