"I can't remember why I don't have a parrot."

I. Rocks Can't Vote Though

I signed up to be an Election Day greeter for the first time. I love the buzz of democracy.
My neighborhood association is too Damn Perky™ for me to join, but I want to join them in giving free coffee and home-baked treats at my polling place:

I signed up for the early morning shift on Tuesday, Nov. 5. Voting starts at 7 a.m.
I'm invited to a neighborhood gathering that Saturday--hopefully it will be a celebration... Fingers crossed!

I wrote earlier this morning that I'd had a wave of feeling that WE ARE GOING TO BE ALRIGHT... in the long run.
The long run can be a huge, long time though.
For Panic Management I even like to think in geological time. Heck, the rocks will be okay!

II. "I can't remember why I don't have a parrot."

Another new thing:
I visited the home of a artist & doll friend, MT, whom I've known off-and-on for decades, but never well.
Her apartment was like a dream of being up in the trees with Swiss Family Robinson and down the rabbit hole with Alice!
I wanted to stay there for days and look at every one of her treasures, which tend toward tiny and tidy:
sewing notions in glass bottles, old photos in antique frames, and her own artwork...

And dolls, which she makes or hand-sews outfits for. She made some play clothes for the girlettes a couple years ago!
These are Ruth Gibbs Dolls from the 1940s-50s that MT is making clothes for.

Hm, not much about Ruth Gibbs online--she was an antique doll collector and a design stylist for Dennison’s Department Store in NYC.

MT also lives with a parrot--an African Gray!
I was telling Marz that on the phone, and she said, "You love birds, you should have a bird."

I said, "Yes! I can't remember why I don't have a parrot."*

She laughed and said that was a perfect INFP statement. That's the Myers Briggs personality type I am. (Marz too.) That is to say, Not Very Practically Minded (NBPM).

Also I'm a Pisces, the most watery (feel-y) of the astrological signs.
The sort of person who quits their job because they FEEL BAD there.
And who still hasn't launched a job hunt...

*Really, I don't want a parrot because it'd be like getting married! They are like humans, with full emotional and intellectual needs.

III. Art Group?

Another longtime casual friend, MW, invited me to an art-making get together this evening. It's the first meeting of some women makers who want to start meeting once a month, maybe. (The friend is a poet, not a visual artist---it's great to mix it up like that.)

I'd like being in an art group, I think. Would like to know more people who make stuff.
I'd invited my printmaking class over, but got no takers. bink & I are taking a community ed. class, Printing at Home--it starts next week.

Printmaking means I have prints to share, and I'm not sure about doing that. It's not a big deal at this point, but if I keep printmaking, I'm going to have a backlog... To give away. Possibly sell.

I want to discover more channels where I could release prints I make, like baby salmon. Swim, little fishies!
But I don't want to get heavy into marketing, because that makes me cranky. (Pisces don't feel like it.)
I can keep putting my prints out and about in public too--like, in Little Free Libraries. I like that!

Eh, some channels will open up, make themselves known, as they always do. (Well, usually.)
The main thing is, I want to keep printing––because I like it.
It is far less demanding than a parrot.

"I think we're going to be alright" (Take a Walk with Me)

Walking every day this week--and forever--I've snapped some signs in the neighborhoods near the lake.
No sign on this house--I just loved the red maple against the pink stucco. It's condos. I would like to live here:

It's all walking distance to busy streets with buses, but the closer you get to prime lake property, the bigger and snazzier the houses are, until you get proper mansions across the street from the lakes.

The 'Chain of Lakes' themselves (Harriet, Bde Maka Ska, Cedar, and Lake of the Isles) are ringed in public parkland:
you can walk/wheel around all four, and if you follow the connecting path along Minnehaha Creek, you'll reach the Mississippi River and can continue along that too.
It's genius public planning--thank you to city ancestors like Theodore Wirth who worked hard to make it happen! 

Here are some signs...

When I saw this sign--there are many such, and none for Trump--I had a rush of feeling:
I THINK WE'RE GOING TO BE ALRIGHT (in the long run).
Pleasegod they win, but history is long, and it's unprecedented that it's the WOMAN of color who is the US presidential candidate of a main party, and the white guy is her support person...

BELOW: Squirrel Camp!

Yay for bicycle supporters!
I bet there's a car (or two) in their garage, but still...
This city continues to build safe bike lanes--more great city planning! Met with some strong disapproval, though.
Change IS hard---and inconvenient to some--but what're the options?
Let's start!

BELOW: I stopped for lunch at Brasa, which serves Creole/Southern US food, like greens and cornbread. The sign says,
"You don't have to be great to start
but you have to start to be great
--Zig Ziglar".

BELOW: Pippi Longstocking lifts a Dala horse (from Dalarna, Sweden ) on a Little Free Library.  Lots of Scandinavians settled here 100+ years ago, and Germans, English...
Then Black Americans in the Great Migration from the South--lots of my thrift store coworkers have roots in states like Mississippi.
The original settlers are Ojibwe/Chippewa/Anishinabe (three names, same people) and Dakota, et al. (www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/native-americans)
In more recent times, lots of people from Vietnam and Laos (Hmong), East Africa (esp. Somalia), Latin America. Now Afghanistan, Ukraine...
Many good restaurants!

Not everyone supports Harris/Walz.
(You know, the quote is from the movie The Big Lebowski.)

At Lake of the Isles: More good planning!
It took a LONG time to get these trash-catchers installed where street drains empty into the lake.

Halloween approaches! You can see how dry we are. Boo. After a nice long, wet summer, we're back in drought conditions.

What about the “o”?

 Can you read the “o” in LOVE? (Or does it look too much like an “e”?)

I’ve been wanting to do this design ever since I painted “Faith Hope love” on the boarded-up thrift store windows after George Floyd’s murder – – when the store was broken – – and my painted words lined up with the word in the sign above it saying THRIFT.

Here, me, May 2020 (that’s Asst Man, left):

My Current Workplace …

…though I don’t spend as much time in my department as I’d like to/should.

Linoleum prints (5” X 7” text)

The Museum of Solitude 

Dept. of Do Your Damn Work

My new utube, “Out of Shape”

I was truly horrified, as I blogged  about, to experience my body as so leaden, sodden, heavy as it was last week when I tried to run a few yards up a trail at a state park. It was not horror arising from vanity but from fear of my future. I always said I want to die with my toes on! I’d never felt gravity so forcefully before, and it was clearly a matter of my age + mass + inactivity. 

Plus, a couple people have told me that they or their partner “became old” at sixty-four, almost suddenly—and at sixty-three, that now makes sense to me. (It had seemed ridiculously early to me before.)

I’m glad I hadn’t deleted the YouTube channel about aging that I’d started a few weeks ago but hadn’t maintained. It gives me a way, a place, to talk to myself. And while it doesn’t (and may never) get many views, I want to put it out there, to represent my people—fellow (or potential?) aging puddings. 😆❤️ In an honest, unadorned, uncool way—no “chic ‘n’ silver”vibes!

So I stopped on my walk today and recorded “Out of Shape at 63…Taking a walk”. Link here: 

youtu.be/rHfjRV2naXM?si=pqK_9tj54tJgdxq_

Screenshot:

Three Docs, in Oct.

Hello to you, darlings, here in October.
I'm drinking my half–pumpkin spice coffee at the kitchen table this Sunday morning. It's still pitch black out at 6:30, but I can see trees blowing in the light of the streetlamps.
Let's see... The sun will rise in an hour, at 7:26; sunset is 6:30 p.m.

People in the northern hemisphere sleep more in October than any other month (per). I feel that. Not that it's the darkest and coldest month, but it's the change-over month.

I haven't been sleeping more (I sleep a lot anyway), but I've been watching lots more movies. (DVDs from the library.I don't have streaming because without internet, my computer connection (phone hot spot) is too slow.)
Mostly documentaries, or that sort of thing.

I. The Lost King (2022, dir. Stephen Frears, UK), which I watched last night looked promising, based on the true story of amateur historian,  Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins, below), searching for  the long-lost remains of King Richard III--and finding them under a parking lot.
But the story is poorly served.
Was slandered Richard really a mopey, dopey-eyed love puppy, as the Hawkins character envisions him? (Just because someone is poorly done by history (or society or family) doesn't mean they are a sweet innocent.)

Feels untrustworthy--which would be okay, but it's also kind of boring. I wouldn't recommend this.

II. Much better---All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras, USA), a documentary about photographer Nan Goldin taking on the Sackler family and their philanthropy paid for with billion-dollar profits from OxyContin.
Released on Criterion.

What struck me:
the power of age and of drawing on your own history.
In taking on the Sadler family, Nan Goldin (b. 1953, only 8 years before me), drew on her activist experiences during the 1980s-90s HIV/AIDS epidemic––the political theater/direct action of ACT UP's die-ins, etc.––and also on her understanding of her teenage sister Barbara's suicide when Nan was eleven.

III. Best thing I've watched so far:
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy (2023, dir. Nancy Buirski, USA)--a doc about Midnight Cowboy--not just about the movie, but the bigger picture of American culture at the moment--drawing parallels with Vietnam War reporting-- and the place, New York City.

As Bob Balaban says in the doc, it was "a picture of New York that really looked like New York, not like Easter Parade with Judy Garland going to come down singing".

Balaban played the young man who picks up Joe Buck (Jon Voight) outside a movie theater. It was Balaban's first movie.

(Reminds me, have you seen the 10-second video of a little kid saying, "I'm just a baby!"?)

Director Nancy Buirski interviewed online at Westdoc.

IV. Funny to realize just now, Balaban also features in Eva Hesse (2016, dir. Marcie Begleiter), another doc about an artist. He reads the letters of Hesse's father.
Eva Hesse was "one of the few women to make work taken seriously" in the largely male downtown New York City art scene.

Main message: DO YOUR WORK. This is the message I take from every creator's life: CREATE YOURSELF.

Below, Hesse who died at thirty-four, creating her first breakthrough unsettling organic sculptures. --Via "Portrait of the artist as a young woman: inside the mind of Eva Hesse"

Perambulating in the Park

Heaven help me, it is the truth, it is no lie that I have become positively LUMBROUS in my decrepitude.

I attempted to run up a slight––slight!–– incline to catch up with Marz gamboling ahead at Gooseberry Falls State Park, and I felt like a suet pudding. (We don't have those here, but they sound like how I felt.)

Now I'm back home, I am committed--committed!--to standing up every day, stepping outside, and locomoting myself from there.
I have no excuse not to. I'm just genuinely physically lazy. (I say this with affection. It's the plain truth.)
I have time: I'm unemployed!
All my body parts function, if reluctantly.

I live a pleasant walk from a lake with a walking path.
Today I walked those 5 miles (8 km) to the lake, around, and back.
It rained the tiniest bit, which intensified the colors and thinned the crowds. (Weekends, the paths can be mobbed. Luckily there's a separate path for people on wheels.)

The lake commissary closes tomorrow for winter, and I got my last grilled cheese of the season, with the extra treat of a local beer--a "dry-hopped and citrus-forward IPA with a smooth, malty finish".

This may seem counterproductive, but believe me, I'd eat this sort of thing whether I'd taken a walk or not.
It made for a perfect Saturday in the park.