Bad Advice

Prez 45 seems to specialize in giving bad advice and acting on bad advice he has received. Or maybe falling in line with bad advice is a prerequisite toward getting his prized Moscow Trump Tower. Or maybe there are bounties on our lives, who knows....

People should have a certain freedom, he says, and not have to wear a mask during a pandemic with tens of thousands dead. How about, freedom not to wear a hairnet when fluffy folk are bending over the fryer at your favorite restaurant, Donnie? Have a few hairs with your fries. They should be free right?

Or free from seat-belts or car insurance or the need to get a drivers license, pilots license, etc etc. Let people be free to decide to shoot each other. Isn't that what some gun owners think the second amendment is really about in this modern era?

 I think 45 is losing the sparse marble collection he once had. Lucky for us  the grifter and bigoted lawyer Roy Cohn ia no longer alive to be his mentor. You know the guy that flamed McCarthyism into a debacle. Yes he was 45's mentor when he was just a creepy wannabe slumlord. Of course might still have the anarchist Steve Burn-it-all-down Bannon through his puppet Steven Miller or quasi-Nazi Seb Gorka.  I have nothing else today. I might be in a bad mood. 

George Floyd, the last straw?

George Floyd didn't get the benefit of the doubt. He didn't get to say he didn't know the bill was counterfeit. (Would you know a bill you'd gotten in change was counterfeit? ) But if you are white, you'd have gotten that benefit. What George Floyd got was a jury of one who ground him under a knee for nine damn minutes until his oxygen ran out.

Watching that video is deeply shocking. Minute after minute, nine in all, I cant breathe, I cant breathe. There are protests around the world, in all major American cities and most minor cities too, even my own.

I don't know what's going to happen, what the outcome will be for the black community or the white community or for the gestalt of America or for the culture of policing in America.   Also shocking are so many videos of police beating protesters AND members of the press with batons, gassing them, knifing water bottles,  shooting gas canisters and rubber bullets at their fellow human beings at point blank range, like they were easy targets in some horrible video game.

I am very worried about all those beautiful soulful folks of many colors, who are out there marching.  All this sincerity and fury is spinning down the middle of a global pandemic and all these activities spew virus-laden droplets. Though at least they are outdoors.

In Connecticut things were mostly peaceful. I hope this is the wind of change. But we don't know yet.

May, May, go away

May has a worrisome cruelty underneath, and I cant seem to let it go.  My father died in May. My mother too.

May arrives, the azaleas bloom, the lilacs too now. But the beauty is not enough.

Today, this year with the pandemic, I didn't visit my parents' grave. I stayed home again. And tomorrow too. I'm not dead as yet and hope to remain in this state for the foreseeable future. Hope to live to vote in November, live to get my shots: flu and someday, for the novel coronavirus. 

I've always been something of a stay at home, but I balanced this tendency with small scale excursions: lunch, coffee, an exercise class, an art workshop, some local live music, a lecture. Little, short, nearby diversions for mental health,.

Now its just scary grocery store trips. And I struggle with everyone else to figure out how to get stuff delivered. It's tricky. 

And though the world is opening tomorrow - I am not fooled. The virus is still here. And I am still securing against it. I don't care what opens. Each time I think of going out from sheer restlessness, I think  - is it worth dying for?  

I proceed with caution only. 

Praying Mantis in the Fleabane!

In August I planted a dwarf butterfly bush, a sterile cultivar called Pugster Blue Fragrant. While not a native plant, it cannot be invasive like its larger relatives. I got it locally at Halas Nursery and even there it was swarmed with pollinators: butterflies, moths and bees. It was pungent and had filled my car with its heavy sweetish smell on the ride home.

After all the digging and watering, I went in the house for some coffee. I looked back out the window and there was a black swallowtale on my new butterfly bush already!  For the next few days, there were always one or two butterflies enjoying the flowers.  But after a week I didn't see any. I figured they were enjoying a change of diet over in my neighbors cone flowers. I kept peeking about but no butterflies.

All summer I have been nurturing a few stands of wildflower weeds as a garden project. The weeds in question are four-foot tall forests of Daisy Fleabane and Queen Anne's Lace. While I was looking for the missing butterflies, I found three praying mantis

- mostly hanging from the stems of Fleabane by their back legs - looking a lot like dead leaves. They have a reputation as voracious indiscriminate predators, even cannibalistic. Mantises eat a lot of annoying insects. But I think they may have eaten the butterflies as well.

Nature is capricious and pragmatic. Next year I think I will let the Fleabane grow elsewhere in my yard - somewhere not in a direct line between the butterfly bush and the cone flowers down the road....

Conversation Styles Differ

Hot Air

Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:

You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.

American Management Styles:

This old pencil sketch is from a series I made years ago, called American Management Styles. Wish I could find the rest of them.....

Bad boss. pic.twitter.com/hvvzK3oFYa

— Phoebe, Greyhawk & Crow (@MyShyCats) May 24, 2019

My three cats: the morning meeting

My three rescue cats from DAWS decided they want to hold a daily meeting. By feline decree, this meeting, sort of a greeting ceremony, should occur at the corner of the couch in the center of the living room every morning right after the human starts walking around. I don't know what happens if I move the couch. The world will probably end.

The two boys, Crow and GreyHawk scurry over, wind around my legs and each other, tails up, making funny little sounds, giving head butts and cheek rubs. At the commotion, our little cat-colony queen Fiji Phoebe, decides she really should participate and strolls over. She tries hard to make sure one of the boys is strategically positioned between her and the huge horrible human. She speaks to me, but usually only gets close enough to sniff my hand. Yesterday for the first time she allowed me to pet her during the ceremony. Progress!