-
SC meeting notes
Video Chat 2/1/2024Present: Issa, Sara, Candice, Hairball, Joshua.Not present: Justin, kids Dylan and Quinn Camp name: Spoon Commune (taken from the “spoon theory” idea) Camp roles: Camp focus: Making life easier for people, including all burners through our public offerings, camp members through disability and neurodivergent awareness in how we organize ourselves, and unhoused neighbors in Knoxville/Atlanta by helping burners help us collect useful stuff to distribute Placement: Our placement request will be that we are central to the “main area” and close to the effigy field. We acknowledge that this can be undesirable for people with sensory concerns. This choice is to prioritize people with mobility concerns, allowing them…
-
Snow at The Wallow
-
Deserving Love
Doesn’t everyone deserve love? To be loved? To be accepted? To be cared for? Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched friends go through devastating breakups, and I’ve noticed a recurring sentiment that I’d like to warn you about. I know many empathetic, big-hearted, patient people with lots of love to give. Some of them have been in relationships with terrible people. Scratch that. Let’s say they were in relationships with regular people with inner demons, deep wounds, and insufficient coping mechanisms. Is that you? Now? A patient and caring person in a relationship with someone whose wounds make them relate to you in harmful ways? Even when you…
-
Guess I’m Gonna Talk About It
I was 22 years old as 1999 rounded into the year 2000. I had started my path to a career as a childcare professional, but I still had one year to go as a Blockbuster manager. All 3 of my roommates were Blockbuster employees, too, and we saw ALL the movies. I missed it in theaters, but in the spring of 2000, there was no missing the giant wall of new release DVDs with those two smirking stars on the cover and those giant pink bars of soap. 25 years later, Fight Club is still my favorite movie. I find myself scratching my head in confusion at the increasingly hostile…
-
Single Digit Night
I came to update my long-neglected website and discovered that my last post was about heat deaths and 117 degree heat. Funny. Because it’s falling below 0 in Knoxville tonight. I have the woodstove cranked, and I’m losing ground. Hopefully the power doesn’t go out because my solar array isn’t working due to the snow load. Wild times.
-
Thursday, August 4, 2023
NPR said Phoenix may reach 117 degrees. The graph for heat deaths so far this year looks like the other temperature-related graphs. That uncomfortable rise and then that sudden spike that lets you know we’re in big trouble. I feel good about East Tennessee as a place to be to watch the world end.
-
Today’s Affirmation
I breathe in peace and stillness. I breathe out anything that no longer serves me.
-
I sell things
Or I try to anyway lol. Maybe I should say I design things. Then I put them on a website and enjoy the collection of things that I’ve made. And it would be super exciting if other people bought them, but marketing is a discipline that eludes me. If you want to look at the things I design, you can visit Idylissa.com – if you decide to buy something while you’re there, you’ll be in a VERY elite club. 😉
-
Fat Clothes
I recently traveled to visit a friend and somehow failed to pack enough clothes. Halfway through my trip I found myself in sudden need of a new wardrobe. 20 years ago this would have been a crisis. The stores that carried clothes for fat women could be counted on one hand – half of them an hours drive away and the other half too expensive. On this particular day, I walked into a Target and immediately found exactly what I needed. There were clothes that I LIKED. They fit occasions from dress up to dress down. They were reasonably priced. People who wear “straight sizes” (that’s a fashion industry term)…
-
Red tailed hawk
I clocked a red-tailed hawk today, visually, and I caught its screeches on the Merlin app. Since I started logging birds around The Wallow, I’ve found red tailed Hawks and red shouldered hawks. What I haven’t seen are coopers hawks. I called them coopers for years, but I think I was misidentifying then the whole time. This is a photo (not mine) of a red tailed hawk, and it looks exactly like the ones Joshua and I used to spot on the brush pile on the land behind ours.
-
Brabble & Grubble
Hey it’s a theme camp! What’s a theme camp? Here’s one explanation from the regional burn Transformus. If you asked me “What do you LOVE?” I might think of my children and honeybees and medium rare ribeyes and my truck and myself, but TOP of the list would be the WORDS themselves. I love words – written and spoken and sung and whispered in the night – but especially the written ones. Brabble & Grubble is my theme camp for LoveBurn 2023 for writers, poets, and other lovers of the spoken and written word. We love a good debate, a moving poem, a provacative quote, a subversive zine, and the…
-
Dreaming of Community at The Wallow
The Wallow is what we call the land where I live with my extended family in two log houses plus have a couple of acres to play around with. We have done some gardening and some livestocking and some rewilding. But what I REALLY dream about is building community here by hosting meetups, events, workshops, and gatherings, leading to an interconnected web of friendship and reliance. I imagine us sharing primitive skills like fire-making and current survival skills like dumpster diving. I imagine us learning to make compost and trading eggs and honey. I imagine us having book clubs, debates, and round table discussions about anti-capitalist, anti-civilization topics. I imagine…
