She’s two months gone today and what the hell is that?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what Alice would be doing right now, as World War Fifteen breaks out.
Probably all the right things, making some witty angry snarky posts drawing the connections. Tweeting, urging people to send money and remembering that there’s ways of being in the struggle not in the streets. Curating an incredible selection of articles for DVP, if we were lucky.
Tweeting about the autistic person ICE pulled out of their car screaming I HAVE AUTISM I NEED A MINUTE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT’S HAPPENING on the way to a doctor’s appointment. The Black Deaf man snatched by ICE. The brown baby pepper sprayed. All our friends in the Twin Cities staying inside for days to stay safe. All these disabled experiences.
There’s no way of knowing what someone who is gone would do, but you can imagine.
I wonder if she would also feel like: yes, tell these stories, make these connects. But also feel a little like: What is there even left to say. Not even in a bad way. Just: We’ve said all the things about this time, that it was coming and what it would be. And now we’re in it.
Because I feel a little like, what is there to even say. I committed to writing this substack every month two years ago and right now I don’t know if I have anything particularly original to write in it.
The “but” is, for what it’s worth: Every way I see people coming together in the Twin Cities feels like stuff we’ve been building in disability/ justice for the last five to fifteen years. From that post- Fukushima disaster survival meeting the twelve of us did in the back of the Arizmendi on San Pablo after it was closed for the night, talking bout how we would find each other when the phone lines went down and who had a generator and who had a landline. Everything we been practicing the last five years, the food and mask and water and money drops that are second nature now, were always part of life but are just life now. “It” never ended.
How to “do the work” when you are grieving and terrified and disassociated. And I don’t mean that as rhetoric, I mean the real of limping on the long march when you are feeling all those things and it’s just, you’re there, it’s January 6th and this is what it is and you go out the door or online to the thing or the friend while you are out of your skin, moving anyway.
This time last year, six days til the inaug felt like hunker down and brace for the blow. What’s coming, how bad will it be. I half packed a go bag with a friend, mapped my escape routes.
A year later I still have that go bag in the hall closet and water in my car, but I know what came. I’m not bracing for it anymore. I’m in it. We’re in it.
I feel sometimes like every trick i learned over the past 30 years is in me as we are here. Maestra who taught me to put salt water in a bowl and breathe everything that was way too hard into it and then pour it out, the long winter guide Tina and me made with tips about thrifted furs and propane mr buddy heaters and hot hands in the jacket pocket and the feet to allow you to hang out covid safer outside in the dead of winter when you can’t go inside anywhere safely (which I reread this morning and O it was an awful time but THE INNOCENCE- look at us being like, soon we won’t get 8 free tests a month from the government anymore! agggh, evushield stopped working against the new variant! do you remember those times?) And the most important trick, which is to figure out what you can give and give it, and to know exactly when your body says stop and to stop. Asking people how they’re doing even when there’s no way to answer the question. All of them are in me as I do the things I can.
The other day I told some people, a lot of them younger than me gen Zs, ok anyone heard of somatics? Ok this is some shit we were all getting trained up in fifteen years ago to withstand this utter wave of brutality we knew was coming, this shit is weird but works, let’s all shake our heads really hard! and then move down your whole body! and then brush it off!
Every single thing we’ve been practicing, this is it.
“No one is coming to save us except us” is disabled knowledge.
It’s something Stacey said. It’s something I know. You know.
We’re all we got, we’re all we need.
(Link to the full interview with Hwa Jeong Kim, vice president of the St Paul City Council and member of the Immigrant Defense Network.)
**
I rebooted this substack two years ago as a place to say whatever I wanted to say, a place to give myself a deadline to write for a community of you every month. And also, a commonplace book of memory and record, to track, once a month, what I was observing the accelerated genocides and ongoing pandemocene doing to the people I saw, the world, my souls and ours. A memory book. And then continuing it during Trump 2 year 1, what will Project 2025 actually be like year. A way to nail down memory in a time committed to the memory hole extra than usual, when long COVID and age and grief also threaten to nub down my memories. A place to go off about what I want to go off about. Document the good things done as well. And finally, yes a place to be like you can check me out here and here this month. That’s changing a little because for the first time in maybe twenty years, I have absolutely no asks in my inbox asking to come speak here or perform there, this college or place, come teach someone or tell someone about themselves.
There’s a general strike called in Minneapolis for January 23rd.
Maybe this is the time where we get to do all the things we said we believed in, and were going to do.
Maybe this space will hold different things. But always, memory.
Disabled oracle telling the disabled future present, you aren’t here in the flesh, but you pre-told this story.
We have your archive, your love that continues, to read and contemplate and listen to, as we move into these battles, as your love stays in us.
xo
L
PS: Crips for eSims for Gaza, which Alice co-founded with Jane Shi and me, is currently a little (10k CAD) in the red again. If you want to support our ongoing work, you can donate here.
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