My mother taught me not to have loyalty to institutions or systems. There was no specifiic one moment that she taught me that--no curriculum to advise me against institutions or systems. I don't recall her ever using those words or making such an assertion. But it was certainly there in the beliefs she shared.

Institutions and systems have the same flaws people do. Like people, they do intentional or unintentional harm; they have unexamined biases. Beyond that, institutions do not have a vested, emotional interest in you as a singular individual. Systems can't give and take. Ultimately, they can't or won't adapt easily.

None of that is groundbreaking thinking. But it's interesting personal context I never thought of. I don't have a sports team I always root for. I've never joined an alumnus or affiliate group. I guess I've had some brand loyalties over the years, but those have always ended badly. 

Now, as a middle-aged professional, it's my job to show institutions and systems where they are doing unintended harm, what their unexamined biases might be, what sort of adaptations are overdue. I find that my basic distrust of loyalty to specific institutions--rather than sympathy with their goals or valuing their role--is useful. 

A theme of all my work right now--professional, politcal and volunteer--is how the pandemic is laying bare all the failures of our systems; all the biases and harms built into our institutions. This is such an opportunity to fix things. I wish I had hope we would.

Some of you may be familiar with Inktober - where there's a list of art prompts for the month of October and the challenge is to create art every day from those prompts in ink. I've done it a few times and 'won' (succeeded) once.

Now I'm doing Smaugust. It appears to be far less popular, but given that I'm the owner of dragonbones.net, I figured I would give it a go. Of course, I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate, and shouldn't really be spending my limited time on a meme, but what the hell. I have an idea that might make it worthwhile (beyond the pleasure of doing it / the experience of 'stretching' a bit).

Anyway, I may a post thread over on Twitter where I'll be posting them every day. I'll probably do actual posts with info on how I made the different illustrations etc on my Patreon page and/or dragonbones.net. That said, I figured I would put the first few up here for you to get a feel for the challenge and what I'm currently doing with it.

Day 1 - the Aquatic Dragon

Day 2 - the Tribal Dragon

I may re-do this one later. I'm thinking about creating an ebook after the month is completed with a write up for each of the dragons to be used in TTRPGs, but this wouldn't make for a good creature as is. Of course, maybe it will be a magic tattoo or something... I guess time will tell.

Day 3 - the Subterranean Dragon

Day 4 - the Wolf Dragon

I went a little 'on the nose' with this one, but I just kinda wanted to.

I used the guy all the way on the right for reference from this pic. Obviously, I stretched him out and didn't stick with it very much. Perhaps it's better to say I used him as a starting point.

I think--no matter the rules, the metrics, the outcomes--it will take men with guns to remove the fucker from the White House. I fundamentally do not trust men with guns. I do not favor solutions which rely on me with guns. I believe that is where we are.

Among the things that frighten me about this are the people who think there won't be disorder following the election and the people who say "well, the military hates him, so there's nothing to worry about."

In a more generalised sense, it's harder and harder to be okay because of the whiplash. In one minute, you're casually chatting (online) with someone about whether they have a plant stand you can have and in the next you're having a conversation with your friend the bartender who hasn't paid the mortgage since March. You are considering talking a walk in the park with a friend who just paid $250 out of pocket for a COVID test while another friend is removing his brother in law from the ventilator. You haven't seen your parents in 178 days and they're in their late 70s but your neighborhood is full of 30-somethings sitting outside restaurants drinking beer. You get angry at the people planning weekends in lake cabins or posting pictures of their shopping trips with friends they don't live with, but then you invite someone over for a cocktail six feet away in your back yard.

You get up, get dressed, log into work and are supposed to care about long term policy changes while everything around you is smoldering.

Then you find yourself marveling about how lovely the weather is today. And enjoying a cookie. Then you hate yourself for letting go of the despair. 

I missed writing yesterday. I had started thinking what I was going to write and then never sat down to do it.

I think talking about dreams is boring. I think listening to people recount their dreams is intolerable. Dreams are not interesting, portentious or noteworthy to me. I rarely even think about my own dreams when I remember them. 

I often have bad dreams--always a variation on the same haunted house dream. I've been prone to sleep paralysis ever since I was a teenager and when I have the haunted house dream, it often moves into sleep paralysis as I try to wake myself from it. The other night, I had a terribly unpleasant dream completely unlike my haunted house dream, with no sleep paralysis of any sort, which I did not wake from (rather I slept through until morning, not knowing I'd had a bad dream until hours later when I suddenly remembered it in vivid detail).

That's novel. 

I'm not a good sleeper. I rarely have difficulty falling asleep, or rather, when I do have difficulty falling asleep, if I just stop trying for a short while, I'll have no trouble when I try again. But I have difficulty staying asleep. If I wake in the middle of the night, I'm lucky if I spend the next few hours drifting in and out of sleep. I spend a lot of time tired. I took Ambien for years but I stopped. 

I did not have any issues with it--no fugues, no sleepwalking, no real difficulty waking, but I just stopped taking it. It was just easier.

Took a long walk on the Lake this weekend. The Lake is full.

This base weighs 80 pounds. I moved it three times today, each time by myself. Once out of the home of the elderly couple that was selling it and into my truck. The second time out of my truck and into my living room. The third time up a flight of stairs into my office/workshop/den of geekery. 

I have died. Or I think I want to die.

I did survive long enough to mount my period-correct 127 into the treadle base. I have a belt on the way from Amazon. Sometime Monday evening I'll give it a live test run.

The treadle base also came with a gorgeous Singer model 66. Unchipped  base, fuly intact decals, 1925 build date. It's missing a few parts, but those are all easily obtainable. It's gummed up from sitting. So, a few hours of cleaning will be invested in solving that problem. Then, I don't know? Get rid of it? It's really nice. But I can't keep them all.

As a bonus I was given a Singer 237. A nice, all metal, electric. It's going to get cleaned and probably recycled to market.

Tenant hit a glitch with her move-out but I don't think it'll be a problem. Well, it's not a problem for me. She has no real option but to get the big stuff out today (the building won't let her use the freight elevators for moves on the weekend) and I've tried to make it clear that I won't penalize her for finishing up the small stuff over the weekend. But the painters will be there Monday; the cleaning crew on Wednesday, when I'll hand the keys over to the sales agent.

I am really very sad, even as I'm not second-guessing the decision to sell it. It's time. Change is always hard, but buying that place was the first change it my life I did right and did not regret. Also, it had always been my goal in life to own a vintage flat on Lake Shore Drive and there, I did!

I'll miss its haunted hotel hallways. Its 70's horror-movie architectural details. Its single girl in the city cachet. The remains of the Murphy bed making up a wall in the kitchen.The floors, the windows, the tile. The kitchen I redid. The colors I picked for its walls. The Lake peeking through the trees across the way.

I'll always regret the work I never got around to. And I'm sad we won't always have it, to come home to for the weekend. But that's a lifestyle we're not likely to have.

When it sells, I'll have a picnic on the floor. If it's soon, it'll just be me and the Spouse. If it takes forever, well, it may be a whole cocktail house-cooling party.

I managed to do very little thinking today. Which means I was not productive at work. Which is a guilt I feel. Except for Pandemic and the coming housing apocalypse and the historic 32.9% second quarter plunge in the GNP.

I watched Clemency tonight because Alfre Woodard. Then Aldis Hodge was in it. If you can take painful right now, I recommend it.

I hope to get a good night's sleep. 

Don't believe everything you think. Much easier said than done.

In a lecture today, I heard a woman refer to this as the Third Reconstruction--which I've not yet heard anyone say but feels true. Especially when you begin to consider how much reparations is moving into conversations, across all systemic reform (de-carceration, drug policy, financial policy, budgeting, court fines, fees & costs, tax systems, housing policy, medicare for all). Another woman discussed a case outcome that declared a right to literacy to re-interate the point that infrastructure deficiencies created and maintained along racial lines are the violence in our communities.

I am glad there are smart and capable people doing this work and I am especially glad I realised years ago I am no leader, no revolutionary, no-one dynamic. I'm barely a capable follower, but I try very hard to find and listen to the right voices and share them with others. 

A few weeks ago, my remaining mental block to total decarceration was incidentally dismantled when I realised a small thing. My resistance remained because of evidence that rehabilitation for men who commit family violence is most successful when it's residential. And I was considering "residential rehabilitation" as requiring prison. That's a very limited view of the world.

Even if you believe there are acts which when committed against a community necessitate removal (temporary or permanent) from that community, that does not mean "prison". I was easily able to reject punitive models in favor of rehabilitative/restorative/developmental models, but I was unable to separate that from confinement. Unable to see the inherent punitive philosophy there. 

I had to dig deep into the logical positivism (empiricism) I studied in grad school to get around it. I have twisted myself into some knots, but I think I made some progress.

I recognize the critique here: if by de-carceration, you just mean a different way to lock people up, you're not solving the problem; you're not supporting abolition. But where "abolition" requires investment in people and communities, de-carceration will provide those interventions and that care to those who need it, including those who act in ways that harm their communities. I hadn't seen my own contradiction there, and I'm still working through it, but I see it now.

I don't know whether or not people can be trusted not to harm, if their needs are met, if their humanity and dignity is prioritized, if they are valued. Many smart people say that yes, they can, yet I do have trouble trusting this belief. But I am beginning to understand how we can intervene when they do without incarceration of any kind. Perhaps that's the first step.

In other thoughts, I managed to knock a few things off the personal to-do list in the first half of this week. 

I wonder how much imposter syndrome is just women, internalizing cultural misogyny. We're not mediocre white men; we must be imposters.

I am still cranky and tired but today I'm more disatisfied with small, personal things than with large systemic cruel and hateful failures. I suppose I have only so much capacity for the latter but since joy is impossible, I shift to the former.

I'm also being very ineffective at work. Which may be why my first thought in the morning is about imposter syndrome.

I am trying to get back into American yoga. We've canceled our gym membership--not feeling comfortable going any time soon, among other reasons. So I've been using the DownDog app which is the best at-home yoga I've yet run across. 

The pandemic thing I've been thinking about this week is how sedentary I've become. It's not several half-mile walks to bus stops, or 4 mile bike rides to and from the office, or 1 to 2 mile walks from the house to the bar or store every day. It's not standing around talking in those bars or walking between buildings for meetings. 

It's getting out of bed to move 10 feet to the desk. Maybe walking the 85 feet from the sunroom to the kitchen. Going up and down the stairs to the basement twice a week. Every night, playing the video games, sitting still. 

I am stiff. I am aching. I lose my balance reaching for things. I spent a few hours crawling around on the floor, trying to lay out and cut 5 yards of fabric and I thought I'd die. 

Another backgruond disruption, another way I'm caught on my back foot constantly, the way I'm not using my body at all. I'm never moving through space anymore. I miss the very safe surrounding aloneness of walking along a city street, riding seven miles on a non-express bus route, sitting in a hotel bar.