sh1njuk1

 Another day in paradise. 

Me: Yes, I think I felt the most comfortable yet in the office today. I am starting to get my feet under me at the job! :) Which is great, because I'm more than committed at this point, really...

Situation: I realize that my feelings about the situation are coming in waves. Today I had more sadness come upon me this afternoon, but I managed to make sense of it by the evening. I realized that what's happened to me with my father is actually what happened between me and my mother back in 2018, just repeated with my "more rational" parent. 

I have twice now had a parent swear up and down they were ready and willing to do something helpful for me that was their 'traditional' role - childcare for my mother, hosting us in his home by my father (and to his credit my dad has hosted us for over 18 months... nevertheless); they found out quickly that they had overcommitted but did not bother to have a conversation with me about this fact; an excuse popped up that would let them slip out of their vow; they grabbed it like a life-preserver; and while letting me know about this "reason" why they could no longer do what they had promised, they made sure to gratuitously and emotionally blame it all on me as if I had been the real bad guy all along, for ever thinking they would do what they promised me they would do.

My mother claimed, 2 weeks before I was scheduled to return to work with an agreement in place that she would watch my baby, that she needed to keep working at her job instead so that she could afford acupuncture (!), and told me I expected too much of her, that I should have just known she should be caregiving at most half-time (despite this being impossible with my work schedule, and not brought up beforehand). The very moment I got my current job, my father - who had been continually encouraging me to keep slogging through the application the entire previous month, hmm - suddenly "discovered" the threat from the Delta variant like a new religion, put us in an impossible situation with a claim that we were just having a "conversation" about "safety", and then when we let him know we were leaving, patronized me from atop his high horse with how I was "too pregnant to think logically" and how "I hadn't solved the problem" and he "was absolutely not evicting you! You can come back anytime!" But there's been a cautious lightness about him ever since, even as we have been extremely careful about how we talk to each other the few times we've interacted. He's gotten what he wanted. Soon, his house will belong to just him again. 

In short, my entire DNA font-source is comprised of worthless shitheads, who somehow failed over the course of senior-citizen-length lives to  learn the basics of respectful communication. (My brother is ADD, on legal meth for it, married to a horrible vegan childfree bitch, and on the East Coast. I write him postcards now and again but he does not respond. I don't expect to see him again until one of our parents dies.) Well - there had to be SOME shared basis for their awful marriage, I guess!

The hardest thing is that if my dad had just let me know that he was really struggling with having so much family in his home, and that he wanted to make a solid time-table for us to move out, I would have been upset for like a day (OK, a week) and then - accepted it, and made plans. It's his home, after all. He is an introvert pretending furiously to be an extrovert, always has been. He's given us 18 months, and even slept out in a tent last summer when we didn't have enough rooms for all of us. He really has gone above and beyond. Which, in a way, makes this even more painful. I did not see it coming. I still thought, on some level, that he was the reliable one. 

For both my mom and dad, the issue is that they both want to be the type of parent that would, say, provide free childcare for their grandchildren, or let their adult kids in a rough situation crash at their place, no questions asked. But... neither of them are truly capable of what they aspire to. So they've both got a lot of cognitive dissonance about the situation, which finally bursts forth in blaming me for not somehow relieving them from this burden they set themselves up for. Which - yeah nope, I'm trying to raise children in a world implacably hostile to them, and I don't have the time or space to give a shit about Boomer feelings! I can't just pliably adjust myself to them and their whims anymore, as I once did so easily as a non-misbehaving teenager.

Clearly, I'm having a rebellion against my parents at age 35. 0 out of 10, do not recommend! At least when you're a teenager you have all this self-righteousness and energy and inability to understand what a brat you're being. When you're my age, it's more like the grimmest possible slog through a bleak, snow-covered valley. You would never ever choose to do it - unless you have no choice. I went scorched-earth with my mother for a while after she pulled that on me - we only have a relationship nowadays because my mother-in-law and, yes, my father begged me personally to reconcile (and after she completed 100 hours of free babysitting). I suppose I am glad that I gave her a second chance - the babysitting, now that my son is of an age she finds fun, is helpful. And there's no illusions between us as to what she needs to do to maintain our relationship going forward. I don't have the energy or ability to go scorched-earth with my father right now. But... I know what he did. And I think, on some level, he does too. I'm sure he'll spend hours coming up with justifications why he was right. He may even believe them. I guess I hope he does, because that's all he's going to have once this situation wraps up. 

We need good relations in place to get all our crap out of his house, that will take several weekends. I'm going to be using his compost bin - will dump on Saturday evening, while he is at work - until I find a better alternative. My son will need a transition period from "old house" to "new house", which will be easier if we can visit this place on the weekends for a while (while my dad is at work). But as soon as these kinks are worked out... I no longer intend to call or communicate with him in any way other than the obligatory Christmas call, for the rest of his life. He can get any "family" urges out by visiting his girlfriend's family, which is much more enjoyable because she does all the emotional labor so he doesn't have to. He'll get his house back - his nice empty house, filled with nothing but his Facebook friends and his girlfriend who mostly exists on his phone nowadays. He should enjoy his golden years! In silence. My mother got fire; he's going to get ice. 

We will not return here, once we have left, unless my children cannot eat any other way. 

I struggled, but I finally have a worldview that makes sense about this, and am dealing OK. 

Anyway... enough therapy writing, I gotta get to sleep. 

Outcome: I got a question at the end of the day about "if I had finished all the training videos" from the boss, which means of course, "why are you reading the news during work?" The answer being of course "I do not have more than 4 hour of focused learning capability per day, same as the rest of the human race, yet you have assigned me 8 hours of video." Not that I said that (nor did I spend 4 hours or anything close to it reading the news, for the record). Ugh... but also, oh well. I've gotta find some other task I can break up the videos with and still appear "responsible". This does correlate with my karma, though, because I caused this issue by personally choosing to take breaks, and employers have commented about my apparent lack of focus in the past (it actually helps the quality of my work when I take occasional breaks, but that's hard to tell from the outside). At least it should be (relatively) easy to solve. Just one more day left in this week. 

Divination, and bed!

Me: 8 of Diamonds - Comfort achieved through hard work

Situation: Queen of Clubs - optimism, creativity, little one

Outcome: Queen of Spades - oh no not again

Oof... well, I think the Queen of Spades is a marker that I need to be more serious about clearing my karma tomorrow. I NEED this job; I need to take it with absolute seriousness. Other than that, seems like it could be a pretty good day! Let's work towards that. 

 Might be a bit of a journal post today, we'll see...

Me: I did have freedom today - the freedom to go and get exactly what I wanted to eat, as I worked hard to keep staving off this whatever-it-is. I also freely allowed myself to take a nap in the middle of the day, about 2 hours. It seems to have worked, at least for now... but I also am recognizing this funk is about more than germs in my lymph nodes. 

Situation: Good things happened today... but in kind of crappy ways? We replaced all our tires on the car and found out the rear brake pads needed attention as well - that means our car is much safer to drive, but it did double our expected costs. (We can afford it easily, it was just a bit of an ugh.) I smacked (not literally!) my husband out of what he recognized retroactively was a panic attack, over art of all things. He was in a spiral where he was trying not to burn out on it, but all the worrying about burning out was... burning him out. I put my foot down and told him that there would be NO discussion about art, none PERIOD, for at least two weeks, and that I would enforce that! I think this will be really good for both him and me, and so does he (if we never ever talk again about art it will be too soon, there's some steaming honesty with how I feel about this stupid topic) but it had to hit a pitch of unpleasantness first. Most likely the true root of this is stress overflow from the intra-family battle royale that had been going on, breaking through now that peace has been successfully brokered. He'd been considering joining a climbing gym - I told him to DO IT NOW, because more exercise can only help an anxious mood! So he'll be going tonight, hooray :) Also, the few friends I keep up with on a Discord server were complaining about the suburbs in exactly the way I taught them all to (fuck the suburbs!). At long last, I've convinced them all! This stuff was my passion, no exaggeration, from roughly 2015-2020. Man... I wish it still mattered. 

Outcome: I think reading JMG's post earlier today about the possibility of ADE breaking out this fall/winter among the vaccinated is, unfortunately, what this card represents for me today. As he also stated clearly, it is just a hypothesis; my feeling is that even if it does kick off, it wouldn't be as bad as the worst-case scenario... but boy, I wish I had more than "a feeling" to back that up. I think the real realization for me wasn't so much that this is possible - it's that if the elites think it might be possible, suddenly a whole bunch of recent weirdness makes far, far too much sense. 

On that note... I'll allow myself to wallow for a moment in the sad end of the pool. I, my mother, and my dad's renter are the only people in my entire social circle over the age of 12 who have any chance of not being vaccinated as of this moment (everyone else has trumpeted their vaccinated status loud and clear). Even if we surmise a very conservative death rate from ADE over the next few years of 5%, that means 5 to 10 funerals of people I know or once knew well. Any higher of a rate than 5%? I'll be conducting at least one of them, probably under great duress :( And that isn't even going into the social, political or supply chain consequences...

Not a single one of the motherfuckers in charge of the country has ever read Nassim Taleb, I can see that much! The fat tail on this one should have been too horrible to risk, but the bastards went ahead and did it anyway, didn't they?!

And my mind, ever helpful, has of course reminded me that it is also possible that the non-sterilizing vaccine will simultaneously lead to the evolution of increasingly virulent variants of COVID, which would hit the unvaccinated harder than the rest. So... there could be piles of both vaccinated and unvaccinated corpses in our future, from slightly different yet not exclusionary causes. It's not like there's a choice on offer that guarantees one's personal safety from all this. Not to mention, either scenario carries with it a good possibility of turning our entire modern health infrastructure into a smoking crater. The folly of our leadership runs so deep and dark... it literally boggles my soul. The more power mankind wields... the greater the fallout from their mistakes becomes in turn. 

And yet... and yet. Deep breaths. There is also a decent chance, out of all this, that COVID simply fades quietly away, and that all we're left with are the political consequences and the vaccine side effects. Not that those are any slouch - but, they are at least more comprehensible. 

I watched a video, first time in a long time (I used to watch him every day in May 2020) by Chris Martenson last night, after my divination. He went into great detail on vaccine side effect reporting from the EU, and highlighted something fascinating that I'd had no idea about. Of course heart issues of all types were widely reported, but the highest single effect reported in the data was neurological and anxiety disorders. This seems to include everything from seizures to onset of severe anxiety. Anxiety, eh? I think back on some of the interactions I've been at the receiving end of over the last month and I have to wonder...

But to get back on topic, the card is... as should not surprise me anymore... excruciatingly correct. It feels like a truth may have been revealed... but has it? Fundamentally, I still don't know. The larger context in my supplementary tarot warns that the reversed High Priestess can represent secrets that seem to have been revealed, but may actually stay a mystery. "Someone is obsessing about finding out all the facts when that is in fact impossible." Guilty, ugh...

And thus, I have decided to avoid checking JMG's site for the next two days, to give my soul a little bit of a break, and some time to recover. If I find that this doesn't help, I may actually stop checking all the news sites - I only go to alternative ones, but even so, COVID is the topic du jour all over every corner of the Internet right now. 

Because... frankly... if these scenarios are going to play out, one or the other, there's no longer anything that can be done to stop them. The vaccinations have been given. The variants are mutating. The economy won't survive another lock-down. I guess I could wear a mask? Ehhh... it would be far more practical to buy myself (and potentially the family) some elderberry syrup. And ivermectin. Time to dig up that site that routes generic meds through Vanuatu! Wheeee! 

Gonna put my kid to bed soon... then, let's divinate for tomorrow. May it be an easier day. I'm thinking that ALL reversed cards, even if ostensibly good readings, can create a bumpy ride...

Me: 6 of Clubs (The Tower) REVERSED - problems, but I can handle them

Situation: 8 of Spades (Justice) - Reason, Fairness "getting what you deserve, for good or ill"

Outcome: 5 of Spades REVERSED - not able to win, hollow victory

Well! This feels like a terrible divination. 

Interestingly, I usually get a "tell" very quickly with these cards, but for the first time I had to sort twice and reshuffle extensively before getting any extrasensory response at all, and it was very slight. I wonder if they didn't want to tell me? Or if I am just burned out... perhaps the spiritual exhaustion continues. 

In any case, I will stick to my guns, and see if it doesn't bring about some healing tomorrow. It's possible that if I treat these cards as a warning, the outcome may not be as terrible. We'll see. 

 Can I just write that my prediction yesterday was 100% accurate? It was 100% accurate. King of Diamonds could even have been the Druid home circle leader who showed up at the party, who I didn't expect to come and spent most of my energy talking to so he wouldn't feel too out of place. Fingers crossed that my preparations (wore mask while cooking, wore mask while talking to anyone, had everyone sit outside a ways apart) was good enough to keep others from catching the crud. My kid is already feeling better and after sleeping the entire afternoon, I too am on the mend, so hopefully tomorrow I'll feel closer to normal...

Divination, here goes. 

Me: 7 of Clubs REVERSED - not beavering away, "the questioner has decided not to bring things to a head right now". 

Situation: 3 of Hearts REVERSED - not having a party, "try to avoid getting sucked into pointless small talk"

Outcome: 3 of Spades REVERSED - better medical outcome. "This card shows recovery and healing." 

Looks clear enough - I'm going to continue not getting much done tomorrow, I will be hanging out with one of the party attendees from yesterday as she waits for her train and I should probably keep doing disease transmission prevention, and we should try to keep to serious topics (I'm pretty much sure it won't be a party atmosphere), and this stupid cold will be pretty much wrapped up by the evening. Sounds GREAT, I'm IN. 

I have a cherry cider and a husband waiting for me, so this will be quick :)

First - our cat passed from this world at 1:45 PM this afternoon. It was utterly peaceful, a true blessing, we should all be so fortunate. She wanted to be in the middle of everything - she dragged herself into the middle of the hallway - so we went about our lives per usual, petting her every time we went by. The last time I pet her, I thought "Go play with [your best friend who passed before you by coyote] - go play!" It felt like the right way to send her off into a happy afterlife. My father is burying her in the backyard right now. 

It has been a very good day. 

The divination was 100% accurate. I had no sudden realizations that would deter me from my path - instead, all was confirmed. We broke bread and did a ritual together at the Solstice event. I got several emails to invite back to my house next month for the other event that is being planned. It went... so well. I am still glowing. 

Tomorrow is another day, though, so let's divinate! 

Me: Ace of Cups - Spiritual/Emotional/Creative flow

Situation: 8 of Clubs - Repetitive actions to build up stability

Outcome 5 of Clubs (The Devil) - Temptation, Attachment, Control

Hmm! I certainly don't love seeing The Devil pop up. Nevertheless, it's part of life. It looks like I might be rather productive tomorrow, but end it on a sour note. We will see... and I will consider myself warned.

Quick review!

I think I was "solid foundations" *enough* today - I felt like I'd made a lot of progress this week, I completed my shopping at the farmer's market even though it was difficult, I cooked a yummy meal for us and our friend, and overall I did everything I needed to do :)

"The Lovers" - Mike and I had a delightful conversation in which we confirmed that we are aligned on our future path, united as partners... even though we both aren't sure exactly where our life will go, we are searching for the answer together. I love and treasure him so much <3

9 of Hearts - probably happening now, I'm tired but I'm going to try to do another round after I put the kid to bed. Social time! Social!! I hope I don't aggravate my cold... lol. Slightly ironic lol.

And - what of tomorrow?

Me: 3 of Diamonds - Craftsmanship, Successful Collaboration, Admiration

Situation: 2 of Diamonds (The High Priestess) - Juggling, Multi-Tasking

Outcome: Ace of Diamonds (The World) - Peace, Travel, Open-Mindedness

What a delightful reading! I think I might just have a nice, productive day tomorrow! :) It looks like I will be working with Mike (?) on our family business, or perhaps drafting the candidacy statement, or moving the Portland meet-up forward toward happening, or likely doing them all at once (multi-tasking), but at the end of the day... there will be a sense of peace and possibility. I hope that is exactly what happens!

Well... I dunno if the divination actually had anything to say to me last night. I guess I'm still too early in the process. Maybe I'll pick through this later and see if there are any connection, who knows.

I got the lovely present this afternoon of THE JMG telling me I was a liar for reporting on the level of danger antifa post to the average Portlander nowadays (i.e., none). I think I was prepared for it from every other source... Lord knows I've gotten it from almost every other source... but that one cut deep. I wasted 4 hours - dinner is cooking crazy late as a result - trying to compose a reasonable response to that allegation, leaning heavily on my personal experience from actually being in Portland, but... I think it's a coin-flip whether he'll even publish it. Fair enough, it's his blog.

But this is MY blog. So...

JESUS H. CHRIST. I'm SO tired of being gaslit on the Internet about what I can see with my own damn two eyes. Are the antifa innocent purity-pure victims of the big meany cops who do nothing but "protect protestors against fascists"? Obviously fucking not. They're blithering, coddled idiots who achieved nothing but a hollow victory for their Feelings (tm) and ended up killing a guy. The better-connected ones totally got a visit this winter in the family living room from a very nice gentleman in a suit who came to have a "conversation" about stuff 'n things. The less-connected ones are rotting in a prison cell which they'll never get to leave. Did they deserve it? Simply through the level of personal stupid, yep, they sure did. JMG is right that as they yelled their heads off about being "anti-fascist" they ended up precisely aping the fascists in dress and actions, in a hilariously chilling way. The establishment has handled them, though, restoring neoliberalism to its proper throne, and it would be a surprise to ever see their leaders in public again. The general public is in NO danger from them--not now, not then, and not ever again. And I'd just about come down on JMG's side, that however it was achieved, that's it's a good thing...

...and yet. A guy I briefly dated in college is possibly in that jail cell right now. Can I be happy about that? I can't - he was just a dumb kid. A stupid, stupid, reckless, underemployed little kid. It's so easy to try to be a hero. Not everyone got the memo that this age won't actually have any.

More to the point, this marks a new and menacing phase in the relationship between the idealistic Portland citizens and the police force which is tasked to protect them from themselves. Authoritarianism is on the march from all angles, bearing down on our society like a freight train. Last summer in Portland was a beautiful moment in a way - a brief moment of hope and solidarity, that maybe this inexorable process could be stopped or halted for a while, that we could go to the streets of our city and fight back against it, somehow... And then a guy died, and the whole world caught on fire, and all of the city's ideals choked and died in the smoke, too.

And - because it's my own goddamn blog - I'd like to specifically point out, here, that the guy who died? Was part of a group that DELIBERATELY ENTERED Portland, a city which was NOT their home, ARMED and BRANDISHING, to "face antifa," and "take back the city" - and didn't even utilize the element of surprise. He ended up being in the moral right, as do all who don't fire the first shot. But he absolutely played stupid games and won stupid prizes.

I'm not going to wave a flag that says "Boo antifa!" and pretend that Civilization Has Triumphed (tm) because the police chased down the antifa who DID shoot first, and executed him in a hail of 40 bullets in his front yard. Not even if he deserved it (he did). Because no matter what shallow take you have on what happened last summer (Antifa bad! Police bad! Trump bad!) the core problem of the age hasn't even been touched upon. And no, it's not fucking global warming, it's that NO ONE IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING CITY IS INTERESTED IN EVEN STARTING TO FIX ANY OF ITS ACTUAL PROBLEMS.

Bully for them, that they almost certainly yanked the antifa leaders off the street in white vans and took them to secret prisons. That was exactly the efficient solution I did NOT want our society to utilize, thanks! Whereas - reforming the police force's approach to minorities and the poor? Or figuring out soaring housing prices? Or adjusting our local economy away from its over-reliance on services? Or, maybe, something as potentially bipartisan as managing our forests correctly so fewer people die horrible deaths during our now-yearly fire season? Nope, nope, nope, nope, and FUCK YOU for CARING! That's the only message our local leadership has to deliver, though it is softened, I suppose, by all the layers of BIPOC differently-abled rainbow-colored rhetoric they can possibly pull over the top of it. And the people of Portland re-elected them all, despite the year's events, like good little sheep. As the children say nowadays... I can't even.

And... to make it worse... I actually tried to engage, online, with both "sides" at the peak of the event last year. Because I still believed that it mattered. Every antifa I ended up messaging with was both unbelievably stupid and frothingly anti-American. I mean, so am *I* most days, but I also recognize the reality of our current political arrangement! And there are worse things that remaining one of the more-favored territories of the empire... far, far worse things. Not that those idiots could recognize that. I backed away from those attempts pretty quick. The regular people protesting by their side, though, who were horrified that Trump had poured gasoline on the fire by sending federal troops either to perform an fascist military take-over of of our city, or haplessly blunder into a situation they could only inflame - I DEFINITELY identified with them. Honestly, I still do.

I also took on the right-wing - all those people, spurred on by that opportunistic weasel Andy Ngo, that crafted the narrative that what was happening in Portland was somehow The Beginning Of The Breakdown Of All National Order (tm), instead of a local group burning off long-standing tensions by busting up windows, spraying graffiti everywhere, and taunting the police with mostly non-violent but flashy actions... all of which was made super easy for them to do by the rest of the citizenry dropping their own city's public life like a hot rock, like it was always a luxury option for them. I guess it was. All the cute little restaurants and boutiques were replaced in a heartbeat with Etsy and DoorDash - shows you how much local pride Portlanders *really* have. People who would never dream of setting foot in a WalMart replaced every last household purchases with Amazon Prime one-day shipping, and virtue-signaled about it on social media, to show off what Good People they were - so CAREFUL not to spread COVID!! They still went to all those ridiculous marches across the bridges, though. Can't pass up the chance to virtue-signal, not in this town! All those people with the BLM signs in their window were happy to ruthlessly torture the local working-class people of color by forcing them to mask up in their own vehicles and do 24-hour delivery runs... but I doubt we'll ever have a city-wide conversation about THAT one, lol!

But, I tried my best, with what little platform I had access to back then, to tell anyone who would listen what I was actually seeing on the ground - i.e., the vast majority of Portland not actually burning, the problem really being the COVID closures keeping the adults home and leaving the punk kids alone to play - to help keep the narrative from being distilled into 24-hour looping videos of black-shirted kids setting fires in dumpsters. Not least because I was pretty sure that national public opinion was the only thing keeping Trump's federal troops from putting every last protestor in vans and "disappearing" them. If he'd been the Nazi most Portlanders were convinced he was, that absolutely would have happened. (Ironically--or is it?--I'm sure Biden wrapped up that particular job.) I couldn't march or protest with them - and in July, I desperately wanted to - because I had an actual family to support, I was the only one who'd kept their job, real shit like that. So I posted and posted and posted instead.

I don't know if I convinced anyone. I don't know if it mattered whether or not I did. I just know that I was never, ever, **ever** once in any actual danger from anyone or anything in the summer of 2020. And that KILLED me on the inside. Knowing that it's not possible to actually stand up for your own values - that you have to let them go, let them disappear from your own society possibly forever, because your responsibility to others outweighs them in the end - it felt something like the early Christians must have, when the emperors forced them to trample an image of their God. But I "ate bitterness" as the Chinese say and trampled on anyway.

And then two total fucking idiots got each other spectacularly killed, all that was potentially positive about the "movement" ended, the skies turned sepia as the forest mismanagement bill came due... and all these Portlanders I'd been putting my online reputation on the line for were just SO WORRIED THAT THEY MIGHT GET CANCER!!! To which all I could think was "Bitch... I've been to Beijing on a regular Tuesday... are you serious?" Fortunately the rural Oregonians know how to take care of themselves and they self-organized (while the state government did almost nothing, couldn't even keep us up to date on whether parts of Portland were currently in danger from a WALL OF FLAME or not) and mostly kept themselves and their animals alive. And my anger during that time was so black and so full of hatred that I stopped posting, because I was basically ready to skin alive everyone who DARED to post about anything, ANYTHING, that wasn't "How can we realistically and immediately change our forest management system to prevent this recurring living nightmare from destroying our beautiful home?" FUCK. GLOBAL. WARMING. AND. THE. THOUGHT-STOPPING. WAY. THAT. IT. KILLS. ALL. POSSIBLE. SOLUTIONS. IN. THIS. TOWN. I had to back off of my posting. I wasn't sure, any more, that people like this even deserved to be defended.

And then there was the election.

And then housing prices spiked to absolutely unheard of levels and the whole reason our family had made an incredibly expensive and difficult move to return here dissolved into smoke.

So... I moved on from that, more or less. I solved some problems closer at hand. I made a bid to move to Canada, which also failed, but I was OK with that. I've laid the groundwork for moving back to Seattle, which for all its (many) faults, has an actual economy and our more helpful relatives nearby. And I've come to terms with our permanent fall in class status. It's certainly not all bad! I've worked hard on reducing expenses and bulking up our savings and acquiring new habits and skills that will keep us in good shape as we face a different future than we originally planned. It's going well, I've generally processed the worst of it, and I'm just trying to enjoy one last summer in Portland - regularly visiting to patronize the local businesses that managed to survive their own city doing just about everything it could to destroy them. Trying to remember this moment, because this place will have too many painful memories for me to casually visit much after I've left the area. And... I'm not sure how much longer un-vaxxed poors like me will be granted this much freedom of movement, before we become the scapegoat for all the Good People's troubles. So I'm trying to enjoy the moment.

And then... an authority figure who I deeply respect--one of the very, very few--who hasn't set foot here in a decade, told me I was "lying" about the antifa, and that Portland isn't safe to be in.

I wouldn't dream of telling JMG that he was wrong about anything whatsoever which I hadn't SEEN WITH MY OWN GODDAMN EYES. I was here. He was not. I am here now. He is not. The antifa were idiots who posed no threat to anyone except the local and federal police who were required by contract to keep them from setting trash fires on the steps of the Justice Center, a few of whom ended up blinded by lasers (which the antifa SHOULD have been put on trial for, if the world was sane, and discredited *that* way) and the morons who publicly announced they would be showing up from out of town at the protests with guns to "take back Portland". Everyone who suffered due to anything antifa cared about *volunteered* to suffer - and it was damned easy to choose NOT to suffer (unless you had a police pension). The janitors, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, utility guys, street sweepers, and small business owners went into this city every day over the past 18 months and the worst that ever happened to them from antifa was some broken windows (buildings only). Nobody just doing their regular damn job needed to bring a gun to it - or if they did anyway out of an abundance of caution, they've never had to use it. I went on the train into the downtown every weekday morning and evening, walked several blocks to get to and from my office, walked around in various directions for an half-hour every single lunch break, and tried to report what I was seeing in forums every damn day, countering idiots from all parts of the political spectrum. I patronized Powell's books online when it was closed, and walked past their building to get tea at least once a week. Now it is open for customers again, and I have enjoyed browsing there several times, even with a mask on. "Too dangerous to visit" my out-of-shape ass. There's usually a line around the block from the door!! I have casually taken FOUR HOUR WALKS as of LAST MONTH right across the very middle of downtown, with garbage blowing every which way and the homeless restlessly wandering about the boundaries of the parks. It was fine. IT, IS, FUCKING, FINE, HERE. Especially compared to what it's GOING to be like - this is the motherfucking golden age!! See it now, see it quick, before the river of time sweeps it all away! That's all I wanted to say. But instead... even in a forum overwhelmingly populated by the last remnants of the sane... I got gaslit. Even **JMG** took the narrative he liked best from the national news, and just blindly assumed it was true.

I defended the city to him - one last time, I went to the ramparts for Portland - but I'm just... so, so, so... tired of it all.

Such is the Year of Our Lord 2021! Wheeeee!!!

I'll stay off the forums for at least a week, I think. I'm not going to throw a fit and permanently waltz off because one guy was rude to me - that would be dumb. But... if it wasn't JMG... at this point in my life, I'll be honest, I probably would do that. Because... this is just too hard to deal with any more.

It's doubly hard because I've blocked so much of the Internet already. Facebook, YouTube video essays, Netflix, the news sites I once read, the video game forums, most of reddit - all gone, for the sake of my mental health. And I know that everything online isn't real, and I'd be more than happy to block out even more. But... I have so few friends here, and so few options for real social contact. I can't just go off to a gardening group and chat about plants with other human beings, or whatever, like some plebe that has the right to enjoy their own damn life in a balanced and healthy way. Everything is being done over Zoom right now - EVERYTHING. Church, political meetings, gardening groups (!!), everything. (I fucking hate Zoom, I'd rather cut my own flesh.) Most Portlanders aren't even doing as well as me (such as that is) in psychologically integrating everything that happened last year. Everyone in this city is fucking traumatized, mostly by our garbage-fire media which screams FEAR FEAR FEAR about things that aren't dangerous, and provides less than zero solutions to what's ACTUALLY going to take us out, creating a constant background buzz of cognitive dissonance that gets covered over by every more FEAR FEAR FEAR. And as long as they all live in fear, I have to live alone. At least until I can get the hell out of this region. But... that's going to take a very, very, very long time.

I wonder, how many ways can a city betray someone who loves it? I'm hard-pressed to think of an aspect in which Portland hasn't fundamentally disappointed me by this point, but - the citizens here seem creative in that way, at least. They might yet think of something.

And I won't lie - when the pied piper finally comes to Portland, and the people on the edge of the city the Good People have constantly antagonized and overtaxed finally decide to gin up that Proud Boys caravan once more, smash in the Good People's windows, grab all their fancy slave-made electronics, and drive right out of town while it *actually* burns down behind them - part of me will be vindictively glad. But I will also weep and weep for this city. The news will break my heart. Portland was - is - *so* beautiful. Even if every new building they've thrown up in town over the past decade is hot steaming diarrhea from an architectural standpoint. Even if all ideas that might threaten the neoliberal Establishment's power in any way are fended off with a claim that the idea isn't "inclusive" enough, ruthlessly using the sacrosanct LGBT BIPOC etc. to make sure that that nothing ever meaningfully changes at all. Even if the people who are still allowed to live here are all wretched hypocrites, talking BLM out of one side of their mouths while they count their rise in home values out of the other. There was a dream that was possible in Portland for a long, long time - a deeper and more meaningful one than what Portlandia mocked. There was a community here that believed in their right to stay in this beautiful place, and their freedom - even if they couldn't define that term to save their lives besides ORANGE MAN BAD - and was willing to fight for it. But... they lost. They lost so completely that everyone here who didn't move in yesterday from California is still trying to work through how much and how fast everything has changed. And they're clutching as tightly to whatever they can still control as possible... and destroying the last of what made Portland great in the process.

And I'm working so hard to change my own way of life, and to leave behind past strategies and worldviews - no matter how I once cherished them - that aren't going to get me and my family through the coming age, and I was relying on JMG to guide me there, at least a little. And this just feels like such a low blow. Never meet (or exchange messages with) your heroes. Sigh.

You know... after all that... perhaps this is why the Me card for today was The Devil. I have too much attachment to Portland, a city that has betrayed me over and over again. I want people to see Portland the way *I* see it - the deep flaws, but also the heart-rending beauty. But I don't have that power, and never did. And Portland has all but kicked me out on my ass for all my troubles, being the worthless non-virtue-signaling poor that I am. I covet being truly a part of Portland, and have since I was a child - its why I moved here! - but Fate has already answered that desire with a very, very hard NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. I'm trying to let it go and move on... but it's hard. It's so, so hard.

Stability, from the Clubs card... actually, I see the connection to this one too. This morning we took a walk and had a delightful chat with a local volunteer who is sweeping our tiny downtown business districts, on her own time. She was making stability happen herself <3 She doesn't have time to roll the shopping carts that got left there all the way back to Fred Meyer though - but I do, and I'll take them there tomorrow myself.

After this mess blasted the majority of my afternoon... I did force myself to go shopping (late), and cook the meal I had planned anyway, even though it was finished an hour behind schedule. And... the family loved it <3 Perhaps that's connected to the Hanged Man - I was finally able to find some peace through self-discipline - I didn't just collapse with sadness, but met my obligations, even though I was barely able to focus. So the day, thankfully, wasn't a complete wash.

Hmm. Can it be, that I have some sort of talent for this after all?