throwing some love

Folks, I know I've been quiet, but plenty of folk haven't, and we're all fighting in our communities in the meantime. One person with an online presence whose on-the-ground community activism consistently leaves me in awe is Cripchick, whose work organizing people with disabilities, especially people of color and queer people with disabilities, I have been privileged to see a little of myself. This woman creates community wherever she goes, and her deep care for her communities is obvious within moments. It is no wonder that organizations that do amazing work gravitate toward her. And right now, one of those organizations, the Disabled Young People's Collective, is in need. All you have to do is check out their site to see the influence and impact they have had in bringing people together in solidarity to improve their lives and futures, without apology or rancor. Cripchick details some of the financial difficulties the group is having here.
I cannot think of a worthier cause to support. The Disabled Young People's Collective is making such a difference for so many people marginalized by extreme, often intersectional oppression, and they are doing it with beauty and joy and love. If you can help them out, please do, even if it is just by spreading the word. Go have a look at the work that's happening, the community that's happening, and try not to feel joy, I dare you.

ordering chapbooks

I've already started getting some online orders for "All Of Them With Teeth: Monster Hymns and Sermons," and the most streamlined way to maintain a sliding scale was to create a Paypal button. I am asking for US$10.00-15.00 per chapbook. Please add US$2.00 to your order if you are ordering from overseas, to help offset shipping costs, and send me a mailing address I can send zines to as well as how many you'd like. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, difficulties with the sliding scale, want to order bulk, or don't want to use Paypal, email me at takingsteps *at* gmail *dot* com and I will work something out with you.

greatly exaggerated

Good morning, my darlings. I am not dead.

Let me explain some of where I have been, because it has been a while and I have had some very sweetly worried e-mails. To begin with, well, life exploded. As any of you who've been reading me for a while can imagine, I have been dealing with a lot of trauma--from rape, abuse, police brutality, and more--that I am finally, finally biting the bullet and working through. That takes a lot out of me. Add that to twelve-hour workdays and six-day workweeks, local community work, school applications, and actually showing up for a committed relationship, and it's all I can do to squeeze in time to write or the emotional energy to handle the Internet. I mean, last time I posted, I actually had someone berate me for espousing hope, because nothing is worse than hope. Some time around then, I just decided it was time to take a little break from this world where I get hate mail for statements like "you are lovable" and "hope is okay" and "sometimes things hurt and nothing is wrong with you." So there's that.

So let me tell you some of what I've been up to, given that:

I'm currently applying to attend a social-justice seminary program. It is time, even in these scary economic conditions, to be brave and stop wasting my energy and hope and time on a day job that doesn't let me use what I have in the service of my community. It's time to actually put my money where my mouth is and follow a calling toward greater opportunities for service. (I don't know where the money's coming from, of course. As Zhu Xi said in the Song Dynasty, "If in your learning you don't progress, it's because you're not bold.")
I'm getting married in July, which, as you may imagine, takes up a lot of space in my head. The secret magic bridesmaid roster includes Internet People who you may know. Together, we are resisting the wedding-industrial complex as fiercely as possible, and I have derived a certain amount of comfort from Offbeat Bride.
I have been hustling. I participated in the keynote at this year's AMC and am now busy working to make next year's even better. I did amazing shows in San Francisco, Seattle, and the East Bay alongside truly incredible writers and activists I admire, like Gina de Vries, Elaina Ellis, Julia Serano, Ela Barton, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, Nalo Hopkinson, Miss Cherry Galette, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Nomy Lamm, and many more. I got to learn from some of the best out there and really grow as a writer and performer, and spent a lot of time on planes and trains with my pen out, squeezing in words wherever I could and finding new loved ones everywhere I went.
I made my first chapbook, a compilation of some of my work on monstrousness, resistance, and dangerous love, and it has been selling enough that I may need to do another print. It's called "All Of Them With Teeth: Monster Hymns and Sermons" and if you'd like your own copy, get in touch with me!
I'm also making my magazine debut in February. I will keep you posted, everyone.

So with that laid down, I want to emphasize: it is time, for me. I am available for speaking and teaching engagements, for commission, for publishing, and for showing up and preaching wherever you feel someone needs to hear it. I have heard over and over that my work is being read in classrooms around the country, in conference keynotes and resistance actions, written on skin and taped to mirrors. If you want me and my voice there to do that reading, let me know and I will do my best to show up. It's time for hands in hands and voices raised.

That is: "lately" has been frigging exhausting. But moving forward, and moving up, and moving through. For those of you still out there, I've missed you, and I hope this time has been one of growth for you, too.

I'll be back when I can. I am, as always, available at takingsteps *at* gmail *dot* com.

street medics, update

I have a few updates on the street medic situation.
Word is that all of the Portland street medics have been released, though other medics, as well as journalists and many others, are still incarcerated. They're nominally okay, but facing the theft of their equipment and possessions, including medical supplies, plus a mound of legal and travel expenses.
It isn't pretty over there. Report is they actually have mercenaries on the streets--even making raids. That's Blackwater--the same mercenary company under fire for their war crimes and murder of unarmed civilians in Iraq, the same mercenary company deployed after Hurricane Katrina and caught playing target practice with civilians.
Add Blackwater to the National Guard deployed in Minneapolis-St. Paul this week, and what you have is a government deploying military personnel--including mercenaries with little to no legal oversight and a history of brutal, trigger-happy tactics--against their own citizens.
If you've been accepting this as normal, as a status quo you weren't thinking about, please sit back and drink that up for a moment. Think of the more than 300 citizens dragged off by these soldiers on their own streets, for participating in a largely peaceful, nonviolent political protest. And if you're an American, think about how you feel when you read stories of that sort of thing happening somewhere else, and what you're willing to say about those countries, those governments, those people.
Now let's add more into the mix. They're by all accounts specifically targeting journalists--even journalists with high-level credentials--people who are paying attention to what they're doing and reporting on it. They're targeting medics--nonviolent volunteers out there to deliver medical aid to people and keep the crowds safe. They're raiding community centers, community kitchens, homes. They're pressuring independent media to shut down. They are kicking the legs out from under people's ability to know what's going on, stay safe, and protect themselves.
Are you seeing it on the news? Are you seeing it in your local paper? My paper ran a story on the dangerous, destructive protesters, with a picture of a beleaguered lone policeman firing pepper spray at frightening masked anarchists. That was their coverage. And then they went back to stories about a baby elephant at the zoo.
Military personnel performing police actions on US soil and arresting nonviolent protesters. No, not just that--preemptively arresting people they think might be protesters in a few days. And going directly after nonviolent people providing food, medicine, and information.
It looks like this. And this. And this.
Pay attention.

Street medics are trying to keep everyone safe in all this, trying to make sure as many as possible make it out in one piece. Many of them have traveled hundreds of miles on their own dime to do so, and are putting themselves in direct physical danger to serve others.
They're being thanked for it with violence, brutal arrests, incarceration, theft of equipment, felony charges, homophobic and transphobic abuse, and massive expenses both for legal support, new first aid gear to get back out there and keep helping, and to cover their travel.
Please, if you can, donate.
They're out there doing first aid for democracy, and now they're bleeding for it. Return the favor.

help me get to the allied media conference

I wasn't going to do this, but then I went to try and buy a plane ticket and went a little green.
(Laugh if you must, but I've never bought a plane ticket by myself before, and only flown alone for one round trip, ever. I've never even gotten myself a cab.)

I'm going to the Allied Media Conference in June. And I may empty out my savings getting there. Any donations to my travel fund would be appreciated overwhelmingly. I know most of y'all don't have any more than I do; every little tiny bit will help. And I can promise you that every cent of it will go to travel expenses, and I don't mean knickknacks at the conference or fancy dinners or cocktails on the plane or nothin'. One hundred percent.

I'm terrible at this PayPal stuff--I've never even used eBay, believe it or not--but I had a friend set me up a button for this occasion. My name is not on it, but I promise you the money will go straight to me. I can send a personal confirmation e-mail to anyone who chooses to help me out.

If I get even one way covered for the trip, I will do a posting marathon this summer, where I post as often as a normal, non-slacker blogger, like, every day.

Here it is, the amazing thanks-to-my-friends-who-know-how-to-work-computers Donate to Little Light Attending the AMC This Year Button:




Thanks so much to anyone who considers helping me out.

good housekeeping

So, it's come to my attention that there are at least three college professors teaching my work in classrooms. Now, this is extraordinarily flattering, but it also means that I have to say a few things here, for my own sake:

First, all of my work is under a Creative Commons license. So far everyone has been gracious enough to link back to here, that I know of. My writing is free to distribute so long as it is attributed to me and to this site, nd so long as it's not published elsewhere without my consent.

Second, I would appreciate an e-mail or a comment from anyone planning to assign one of my pieces or sending students my way, just so I can keep track of who's where. There's nothing legal here, of course; I'd just take it as a courtesy.

Third, I like having this exposure, and I think it's an honor to be included in the educational process. If you were to contact me and want to attribute what I've written for the ease of students and for academic rigor's sake, it's very likely that I'd be inclined to help you with that process by giving you my actual name.

Fourth, this makes it pretty clear that I should be seeking a publisher. Is there anyone in the audience who would be able or willing to help me with that? I imagine my being published would be an improvement both for me, the writer, and you, the teacher forced to deal with the awkwardness of citing internet sources. Trust me, I've been there.

Fifth, uh, hi, everyone. Welcome. Hope you find something here that does you some good. Drop me a line, if you like, and let me know what you think, yeah?

adventures in alternate economies

So, now that people are actually paying attention to what I do here, I think it's time I work on making it more pleasant to look at. I like this look, but it looks like fifty hojillion other blogs out there, and the fact is, I don't have the tech savvy to do much else with it, nor the money to properly pay someone else to.
So here's my proposition: I have a lot of strange and wonderful stuff kicking around in my basement from when I did salvage work. If anyone's willing to give me a hand with site design and redecorating, I will be happy to send them stuff they might want, shipping paid--there's a DVD player, a dentist's overhead lamp, a two-foot-tall statue of Doctor Doom, an ornate Go board, all sorts of stuff. Anyone who sends me an email, to the address listed in my profile, with a genuine offer of help, I'd love to chat with about interesting barters. I cannot really be certain of the monetary value of a bunch of this stuff, there's a huge variety, and it's getting garage-saled or pawned anyway, since I'm also not savvy enough to work eBay.
Let me know.

UPDATE: Frigging Blogger.
Okay, so I've been doing some fiddling, trying to make things a little smoother, experimenting with tags on posts, that sort of thing. What this has resulted in is every single one of them being reposted a couple of times on Taking Steps' livejournal feed, including some incomplete, drafted posts and notes on posts that won't go away even though they're not posted here. This is kind of a pain. For those of you reading my feed, I apologize for the mess. Please extend the courtesy of not judging unfinished work till it's finished, as well; it'll be posted in due time and be much more interesting then. I'll figure this-all out eventually.

fixes and fast talk

Well, goddamn.
You know those ads before the movies about random acts of kindness and helping out strangers--or the billboards about compassion and overcoming adversity and integrity? We have 'em all over, here. They're done by the Foundation for a Better Life, in cooperation with the Ad Council.
Honestly, I'm enough of a sap to like most of them. I think people need more reminders in their daily lives of their connections to each other and their moral potential. Call me an old-fashioned preacher that way, I guess.

Well, the Foundation for a Better Life has a very shiny website. They showcase all their billboards and such, and they talk about their core values, and they leave a contact email if you want to donate. What they don't do is tell you where all the money comes from, who they are, who founded them, or what their greater goals are. I dug for months, trying to figure out who the hell was funding all these expensive ads apparently in the name of nothing but altruistic fellowship. They made themselves hard to find.
Someone else did the necessary digging where I couldn't, though, and any ideas I had of maybe working for them at some point are gone now.

This may not be news to you-all, but the Foundation is funded by billionaire Philip Anschutz, and he's bad news. Really bad news. As in, his other campaigns to change society are, well--frankly, they read like a rapsheet of the current American poisons, from corporate predation to institutionalized homophobia to fundamentalist anti-intellectualism to environmental destruction to neoconservative politics. His contributions are huge.
Read that article I linked if you're in any way on the fence about it.

No wonder they keep it so well concealed. Whatever president Gary Dixon's intentions, the Better Life they want isn't for me.

to be heard

Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is, and made a membership pledge to my local NPR affiliate.
I'm in the red--not horrifically, but not so's I have money to throw around. When I do charity, it's mostly with my hands and feet and throat, because it's just not been long since I was living on $35 a month for groceries and begging for loans from friends, but here it is:

Public media is vital for a democracy like ours to function. Public, non-corporate-owned, non-advertising-dominated, non-government-censored media. Media that's free to investigate what it can and say what it wants and do things I disagree with and people much bigger than me disagree with, too. "This American Life" could never exist on a corporate station--where's the ad revenue? Where's the hook? Where's the guarantee that the single male 18-34 demographic will tune in? If it's not profitable, it's not worth funding, not viable as an investment--this is what happens with media-as-business-for-profit. Why is Howard Stern the free-speech radio icon, and not Garrison Keillor? Well, what's good for business?
It goes further: if one large company owns both the radio station and the grocery store, you probably won't hear favorable stories about the farm-labor strike, for instance. It's bad for business. Leaving entirely aside the political-party loyalties of the owners of these conglomerates for the moment, biting stories and investigation are just as impossible as meandering, idealistic storytelling in this format. Corporate media outlets can't stomach it because it cuts their revenue. For the sort of animal they are, this is a rational decision. Lots of things are bad for profit margins--political upheaval, too. Competition. So on.

So there's that. Then there's advertisements dressed up as news stories, already a problem, right under our noses. Advertisements for medicines, for politicians, for neighborhoods, for movies, whatever. It's all one branch of the conglomerate feeding another. It's natural for the nature of the beast. And it will never, ever give us cultural nutrition the way we need it, never furnish us the ideas and stories we need to live on and to act as informed members of society and so on. Corporate media profits best by dividing people, making them lonelier, and then selling them things. If public media doesn't build communities, it dies in the crib.

And what are our other options? Indymedia sites? They have their advantages, but they're also flooded with conspiracy theories, bad research, calls to take out "the pigs," every crackpot with a keyboard and no filters. That has its place. I use Indymedia, too. It's just not, in its current form, up to the task.
The rest of the Internet? Great, sure, but sure as hell not free. All you need's a broken clock-radio to get at NPR. No monthly fees. No costly equipment. No variation on download speed based on class or income, and far fewer regional limits to access. Anyone can get at public radio, with very little upfront investment and no subsequent costs.

The US doesn't even have the BBC. We don't have the Beeb--and look what that's meant for quality. With no budget worth speaking of, the BBC has turned out some of the best TV any conoisseur can name. Comedy that actually pushes limits. Science fiction that people still watch, allowed to go on for multiple seasons. And their reporting, while veering now and then into the ridiculous, is much more reliably nonpartisan, these days, than anything you can get out of the Americas.

The US has PBS and NPR. And it's no coincidence that the Bush Administration has tried desperately to cut all funding for those. Educational shows for children that don't prime them as nationalists and consumers? Ballet? Political commentary that's not pre-vetted by stooges? It's either a waste of money, in an industry that these people understand as profit-driven (is there anything they don't understand as profit-driven?) or seditious. And they don't get to control it. So they tried to stomp instead.

Public media is the beginning of what will save us. No other movement, in this day and age, can survive without media coverage. The religious Left, most people I meet have never heard of. And they tell me so. Why? Not an exciting for-ad-revenue news story, and it doesn't make for good cable, either. Not sexy, nothing blowing up, and bad for business. Lot of socialists anyway, right? Any number of movements worth knowing about and fighting for labor in silence. Hell, I'll never forget March of 2003, standing in a sea of tens of thousands of people shutting down my city in protest of the incipient invasion of Iraq, and hearing a man with a cell phone bellow, for the crowd, "The news says there's only eight hundred of us!" The roar was deafening. The folks at home never heard it. More public media would have given us a chance. More public media might also have prevented the police brutality later that night.

I don't have much money, but I sent my donation in, and proudly, and it made me feel like a real adult.

A half hour later, listening to "This American Life," I heard a story so real and human and cutting and true that I had to pull my car over and cry. And I knew, right there, I'd made the right decision.

I hope you will, too.


edit: It's come to my attention that I have a number of non-American readers coming through, which is amazing and exciting, but may call for some clarification of acronyms. NPR is National Public Radio, and I've linked their website below. OPB is Oregon Public Broadcasting, my state's affiliate. You probably know the BBC, I imagine. And while it might not be appropriate for me to pressure you to support American public radio, I urge you to support your local equivalent. Also, drop a comment and say hi, especially if you're a returning reader. I'd love to know who you are.