This person didn't message me, but I want to give a shout-out to @BosmangBeratna & ask everyone else to give our belta all their love.

Unlike in storybooks, the real work of healing never ends. Wherever we are, our full journey-arcs are as well.

Bosmang is a being who crafts care for kith & kin out of every weariness, setback, & strain.

Bosmang is an exemplar in how he carries himself through tough times most of all.

When you see him, let him know - his life-song makes his station strong. 🛰️

CoSo, I am giving you a loving warning. ❤️

I am a happy-emotional inebriated person right now.

If you want positive affirmation, I will 100% give it - always! but also definitely tonight, while writing through my buzz. (Just reply for personal glow-ups!)

This is the best place I've found online to be a full person in, oh, a decade.

Kudos to J for making this all possible.

Kudos to everyone here for living through the messy values of human striving every tricky but important day.

🍻🍷🥃 (or 🍵!)

I'm chatting with someone who has a very specific definition of a word they're trying to "take back" (more power to them!), and now I'm terribly curious...

What's something - a word, a style, an attitude, a food craze, an era, a mannerism - that you're on a mission to take/bring back? Something you'd love to see other people invoke the same way again?

(Answers can and should range from the goofy to the profound!)

🤣

I just had the funniest conversation with an old paisa, who had just learned about "kissing booths" in North America and was truly baffled by the concept of paying for kisses. Other stuff, he could understand, but...

"Don't people just kiss each other on the streets where you come from?"

🤣 Well...

😘

"Intolerance is killing us in Medellín"

I love this local framing of a common problem everywhere. All everyday violence has systemic factors that hurry us to breaking points, but how often do North American papers expressly name the reasons for "petty" violence in our neighbourhoods?

"Las presiones sociales y económicas generadas por la pandemia del covid-19 estarían detrás de esta disminución en la tolerancia social, sumado al incremento de las problemáticas de salud mental."

#Colombia #News

A "funny" aside.

I didn't realize how much I was keeping from a dear person working far away until this week, when something in my update made them worried.

I gave them a sanitized version of how things have been, because there's not a darned thing they can do at a distance - they don't even have time for real chats.

But even then I was dreading having worried them.

That's not ideal.
Sorrows and stresses need outlets.

So thank you again, CoSo, for being such a brilliantly safe part of mine.

Starting the writing day with a reminder that James Joyce made a heap of errors when publishing. Be like Joyce. Choose joy in language and its attendant cultural chaos over pedantry. 💛🍵

#Podcasts #Literature
https://pca.st/episode/55b893d3-f5b3-415b-b876-a14fe263320b

Okay, warm-up sillies over.

This week's Saturday night fiesta has now tapered off in the building commons, so it's just me and the sound of car tires turning along wet highway pavement in the night.

Sleep well, CoSo.

#AmWriting

Oh, and for anyone struggling with image quality and/or the older text - in which a long curly "f" is actually an "s" - here's the text transcribed on the Wikipage:

https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:An_Act_against_Atheism_and_Blasphemy_-_Mass_Bay_Colony_1697.jpg

😂 Okay, I am laughing for all the wrong reasons, but before I dive into a couple hours of novel-writing, please enjoy this document from Massachusetts Bay, 1697 with me.

Yeah, yeah, it's a list of brutal punishments outlined for anyone who denies, curses, or reproaches god/Christianity...

But look at that last part. How can you *not* laugh at the attempt to show restraint?

"We'll do all of these terrible things to atheists, but only two at most for the same offence! What are we, monsters?!" 😂

Heading out for a walk. Then maybe some more writing.

Here's a spot of #poetry that shows what the form can do: not just estrange us from the familiar to make it new again, but also make the strange somehow familiar - so that it needn't frighten us as much.

Shine on, lovely critters.

We are none of us perfect - but we are all still *here*.

That'll have to be enough.

FYI: This is a catfish stan account.

Meaning we don't tolerate those who go around giving these slick-whiskered cutie-patooties a bad name.

If you see a bad operator trying to ruin this critter's reputation, report 'em and send 'em back to the high seas.

(And a high fin to you 🙏 for keeping the local waters groovy!)

#Catfishurday 🐟

Okay, lovelies.

I have finally let go of the Patreon post. It's a tough one. It talks about the death of children, and suicidal ideation, and the complex interplay of poverty mentalities, trauma, and our struggle to be present with each other--wounds and all--long enough to build better communities together.

Thank you again to everyone who helped me try to help a family in need. I treasure your extension of care so very much.

Please be good and gentle with yourselves.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/against-memoir-89010688

I'm thinking on one of my favourite excerpts today. Probably time to revisit an Iris Murdoch novel (this is from The Nice and the Good; a few others are coming to mind a lot as of late).

All our striving, all the mess we bring to interactions... and no good medium to hold back the worst of it all. Our fears. Our all-consuming needs.

We will trip over each other's wounds relentlessly.

The best we can do is notice when we start to err, and find the courage not to let it unravel us all the more.

(That last post brought to you by an interaction on a less-safe place: I'm not sub-tooting about a darned thing here!)