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Don't Look!

This morning on my way to work, I was part of a traffic stop/diversion by city police doing a sweep for lapsed licenses/registrations. It went smoothly and I was in and out in about five minutes. The officers who were checking my deets noted my phone mounted to my windscreen/dash (the phone was turned off; I only use it for listening to books/music and sometimes navigation, and I don’t need to…

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#cellphone #driving #law #legal #legislation

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The People Upstairs

The house was old; the house was big – bigger in fact than it had ever been. Not much happened upstairs, in the attic, because the attic was full of dust and discarded building supplies, crumbling plaster and lath, and so many spiders. It wasn’t that the upstairs had never been used, but rather it hadn’t been used in decades. From time to time you’d pop your head up there to make sure the noises…

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#attic #bigger on the inside #old houses #Perchance to Dream #stories

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The Kids Are Alright

This is what it is to have children: When The Captain was just only three, we took him to see Monsters, Inc.. His da was concerned it would be Too Scary for him, but I was confident it’d be okay. A little bit scary is good for you, I always say. The Captain was always a ridiculously happy kid. I think the first tantrum he ever threw was when he was eight. We never had the “terrible twos” (we…

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#family #Kids #Life with Me #stories #The Captain #True stories

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This Blessed Thing

This is a Very Long Post. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about identity. About how it may change as we age, as we emerge into our society, as we redefine ourselves, as we learn more about who we are or about who we were meant to be. This will be a very self-indulgent post, because it’s entirely about me. In this post I’m going to talk about my own sexual identity; if this isn’t your jam, that’s…

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#gender identity #LGBTQ2S+ #Thinkery #VLP

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Karaoke and Grief

Here’s the thing: I don’t remember how it came about but we were at a football game and in one end zone there was a stage. Supposedly for the half time show, because it would be irresponsible to just leave a whole stage in the end zone during play. //Irresponsible//. It was a lovely summer day, with the sun shining and just enough of a breeze to keep the wasps at bay under the shade…

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#dreams #Life with Me #stories #When there&039;s weather

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Bring Out Yer Band! *clang* Bring Out Yer Band! *clang*

It’s no secret (and possibly no surprise) that the public education system in Saskatchewan (and other parts of the country) is under attack. While governments have been claiming to increase funding to the sector, the truth is that education (and I’m mostly talking about primary and secondary education, because post-secondary is a whole different kettle of worms) has been underfunded for at least…

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#arts and culture #arts education #band #breaks my heart #education #Government #music #Saskatchewan Politics

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Small Kindnesses

When my mom died, we asked people to bring rocks (she liked this Jewish tradition of remembrance) to put in a basket in her memory. Some folk painted rocks, some folks brought little ceramic knickknacks and gewgaws, others brought rocks from their gardens or farms, or maybe just from out in the parking lot. I don’t really like boneyards and columbariums; these places are soulless and strangely…

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#breaks my heart #family #Heavy Thoughts #missing you #Remembery

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Displacement

When I was in high school, I had a friend whose family home was just a few blocks from mine. Three generations of their family had lived there, which, to me, was wild. Nobody in my family had lived in the same house (or even on the same land) as their parents. I remember meeting my friend’s mum and dad, and thinking it must have been very cool for them to have lived in the mum’s childhood home,…

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#Home #stories #True stories #Weird feelings #You can&039;t go back

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School's Out

School’s Out

I was going to make this big ranty post about the SK provincial government’s attitude toward education, citing the absolute farce of our premier scolding school divisions for instituting or increasing school fees for parents while at the same time his government has been underfunding primary and secondary education (and likely post-secondary as well) for the past decade, but then it occurred to…

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#Government #Just Wrong #poop in my cornflakes #Saskatchewan Politics

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Burnt Out

I woke yesterday, or maybe the day before, and heard the Radio Doctor (as in, the physician who is often interviewed on radio, and not the person who repairs ailing radios. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter; radio repair is a noble profession. It’s just that in this instance, it was the physician who…oh look what you’ve done. You’ve got me stream-of-consciousness rambling again.…

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#Allergies #Life with Me #nasal lavage #searing pain #True stories

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Iskocēs Tipiskak: A Spark in the Dark - Book Review

Iskocēs Tipiskak: A Spark in the Dark – Book Review

Have you ever had one of those experiences where something comes at you out of the dark and ends up being a pleasant surprise? A time where you weren’t expecting anything but something happened anyway? Or when a complete stranger found you and you ended up kind of grokking each other? I think of the story of the woman who called her friend or her kids or something and was asking them what their…

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#Book Review #Books #Indigenous Peoples #John Langan #Memoir #Saskatchewan Book #writers

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Who puts the 'D' in...."Dystopia"?

Who puts the ‘D’ in….”Dystopia”?

Okay first, right off the hop, let me just say that yes, like a twelve-year-old, I have been snickering at the question “who puts the ‘D’ in ‘Dystopia'”. Dystopian fiction used to be among my favourite genres …styles… of fiction. I still do love me a well-crafted dystopian tale, but lately I’ve been approaching this genre the way one might approach a wolf caught in a leg trap. I’ve found myself…

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#Books #equal rights #Heavy Thoughts #piss in your eye #poop in my cornflakes

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Separate and Distinct?

The Premier of this province has been bumbling around, talking about how his party wants to create a distinct “nation within a nation” in Saskatchewan, and that they want to somehow create a more autonomous province. There’s media out there today about how a good chunk of folks who live in Saskatchewan think that’s a weird idea. Primarily, this is because it’s a weird idea. First, let’s take a…

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#Canadian Politics #everyone is the same #Saskatchewan Politics

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The Kids are Alright

The Kids are Alright

It started out fairly inocuously; Kid the Younger and their paramour, a few friends we haven’t seen in a while, and a few of KtY & P’s friends just hanging out and watching movies, playing games. Some of us were upstairs in my childhood home and some of us were downstairs. There was a bit of strangeness when some of us went to bed in my mother’s bedroom, which had the Big Bed (that apparently…

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#dreams #Kids #Life with Me #stories

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Foot Fish and Fetishes

Foot Fish and Fetishes

The beach sand had been hot; it felt good on the bottom of my feet. Felt like it was scouring off layers of thick, dead heel flesh; the heat in it permeated my skin and warmed and released the striated muscles and tendons. Phalanges, metatarsals, cuneiforms and cuboid, calcaneus et al., all in perfect alignment, ready to walk the world. It became suddenly too hot, as if the skin the sand had…

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#dreams #stories

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Feast

Photo by Roberto Nickson from Pexels I dreamed a dream of a place I’ve dreamed before. A small house on the riverbank, the street-facing portion obscured by what once was a barn and now looked to be a shop. In the Before-dream this then-barn was a labyrinth of pipes and steam and ruddy, greasy water puddles. Angle iron stairs and painted-over windows. This time, though, the barn was a workshop…

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#dreams

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Caymanaymans

I had just returned from some kind of an RPG convention where we’d been camping and doing LARP outdoors when it was nice and playing tabletop games indoors when it wasn’t. The Convention was way down Stateside somewhere but not Indianapolis. Like, we’re talking Louisiana or Georgia or something. I had managed to leave one of my bags on one of the buses, and not the bus that took us from the…

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#childhood home #dreams #junk #stories