Being a bike commuter means I shred the crotch out of my work pants in a few months. Hope this patch gives me at least another three. :P May use some sashiko to keep the two planes more or less planted against each other, but really needed a machine to do the heavy lifting on this one.

#VisibleMending #repair #mending #StitchItDon'tDitchIt #TrashMammal

I have a 14 year old nephew I spend Christmas with every year, and I have always been terrible at getting him gifts, not least of which is because I've never really had money, but also because he usually gets so much plasticky stuff that he's developed into quite a little consumer, and I just... Don't want to add to that. But I want to give him *something.* Especially if it's something that somehow opens the doors to some of the issues his neo-liberal parents don't like me talking about around the kid: labor, climate change, anti-consumption...

#solarpunk #AntiConsumption #christmas #IWW #ServiceIndustry #labor #TrashMammal #TrashMammalHoliday

I have a 14 year old nephew I spend Christmas with every year, and I have always been terrible at getting him gifts, not least of which is because I've never really had money, but also because he usually gets so much plasticky stuff that he's developed into quite a little consumer, and I just... Don't want to add to that. But I want to give him *something.* Especially if it's something that somehow opens the doors to some of the issues his neo-liberal parents don't like me talking about around the kid: labor, climate change, anti-consumption...

#solarpunk #AntiConsumption #christmas #IWW #ServiceIndustry #labor #TrashMammal #TrashMammalHoliday

@raccoonformality always happy to see more #trashmammal representation!

Your very good and close personal buddy Poor 'Possum is recovering from his first full-time week of work in... Fuck, pal, I don't know... 7 months? I don't know whether to feel proud or ashamed of that. Anyway, point is I'm tired, I'm working a job that is "good" but also "bad" and now I'm gonna write about something because I need to do *something* that feels like it's mine...

After work I got home and meant to hop on chat and toke up with a friend who seems to deeply need some support. They didn't make it, but I'm deeply hoping they will if they need to, and I don't want them to feel pressured. I got high on my own and threw on "Dear Wormwood" by The Oh Hellos, and I just realized how lacking my existence is in poetry. Like, sure, I don't expect life to read how authors and content creators of every stripe create experiences... but I don't live a life where I even *think* such things. I just... keep plodding through the same day over and over again, cast in different shades, with minimal flourishes. There is no arc to my life, no rising action, no rhyme, no reason. I see no archetypes in my day to day, no soldiers, poets, kings. I just see people fucking struggling. I see people getting through their day-to-day slog swiping for any scrap of dopamine their meager paychecks can provide. Just slapping the shit out of the button in the Skinner box of their capitalist lives.

I grew up listening to folk, reading fantasy and adventure and watching Star Trek. All things that highlight how poetic life is, and the joy associated with that, and it just feels such a part of humanity, and so dreadfully inaccessible to me. A life without poetry is, perhaps, in my experience, a joyless one. Sure, I've had moments where I've whooped with elation, joyful in a moment... usually an isolated instance of speed (like barreling just ever-so-slightly too fast down a hill on my bike perhaps), unsustainable and so very brief that it isn't an emotion that I'm able to carry the memory of in my heart. I don't have time to make it rhyme with some other memory or event to make it feel tangible after the event. It becomes lost as ephemera, and I quickly return to my low base mood, and feel very little hope for any further joy in the future.

This makes it very hard to try to plan for a future. It's part of the reason I need community to do ANYTHING. I need to see that other people are able to feel joy, and are willing to plan and work for a future that includes more of it. And helping others brings me joy as well, especially when I can see and talk with them about what we can do for each other. My nuclear circle right now is very small, and we are very lonely, and we've been that way for a long time, isolated before the pandemic by our inability to figure out how to effectively sell ourselves to the market.

This is getting away from me. I'm tired, my attention span is shot, and I don't think I'm capable of putting a bow on this thing. I just... the finer things in life are in such short supply for so many of us right now that it's hard to imagine that life will ever feel capable of transcending subsistence into... poetry. I want more poetry for all of us.

#antiwork #Anthropocene #trashmammal #serviceindustry #solarpunk #depression #adhd #latestagecapitalism

No job pays me enough to replace my pants just to keep up appearances, so I've been #mending most of my clothes. And because I am not good enough to be subtle, I am turning into the skid and going with #visiblemending. Mostly I've been reinforcing with a very clumsy #sashiko, but I just got a #speedweave that I've started using very poorly to make sort of #darned patches. I am not very good at wrapping up a patch, but I'm sure I'll get better. If I can't afford to not dress like a #trashmammal I am gonna make it in your face and everyone's problem.