Samhain. Thank you to all the nasty women in my blood. So many and so necessarily tough as fuck or we wouldn't be here still. Help me, if you will, guide me forward. The world is melting. I am worried not only for our own children but for everyone's. I worry all the time. ALL THE FUCKING TIME, I worry. I worry for our thoughts, our MINDS most of all, collectively shrunk to hostile grasping need of dinner and fear. Who can think let alone read books in the face of that? I worry about our desires, marginalized and made brutal as a result. Who can afford to love on anyone anymore honestly, without shame? I worry about money, so much worry about money always all the time. I was hemmed in by cultural ignorance and poverty. Those were surmountable. Now the generation of my kids and students are hemmed in by education defined by skills that have planned obsolesce built in, and debt debt debt which is poverty prostituted forever. Who can serve anything but their immediate needs, selfish essentially in the face of that desperocity? I am one of the lucky. I got up and out. No one owns me. And I can afford to educate and keep and feed my own. On this Samhain, I invoke and entreat my dead peeps: help me know what best to do with what I have, this privilege in this place and time, for myself and the greatest good. S.M.I.B.