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[awashsquid]

Do you have any words (yours or by others) on grief/grieving a loved one?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I got it. I know this will sound strange coming from me, someone who writes not-infrequently about grief in the context of fictional characters, but you have to understand this: A frame makes a thing look like art. It’s easier to do things when they’re made to sit on a wall. So I’ve written and erased a dozen things, because I’m not sure how to talk about it when it’s me saying it. Which I guess is sad in its own right. That’s fine. This will have to be what it is. 

Some people have never been touched by death. 

I know it’s true, but it surprises me every time. I think all people of a certain age think they’ve lost someone, but there’s losing, and there’s being touched. If you’re coming to me with this question, you must know what I mean. You know someone who died, and that’s a little sad, you miss them, and you think of them from time to time. Grandparents, great-grandparents, classmates. Celebrities, if you’re weird enough. 

But then there’s being touched. I’m not sure I could have described the difference, before it happened to me. Someone dies, and, the world changes in an immeasurable way. Nothing will ever feel the same again. Now that’s all a very well traveled and quasi-hackneyed set of ideas, but it is true. The world is shifted. Doorknobs turn the other way, and always will. You could have sworn that clock had a robin at six, and not a blue jay, but the jay is singing now. The coffee didn’t taste burnt yesterday, or maybe it did but it was right for it to be burnt. 

The world is too still, and too loud. 

Grief is a shared way in which we are alien to each other. No two people mourn alike, and no deaths are mourned the same. I have been furious in the first flush of grief. I have burned things and made sacred oaths to my eternal anger. My grandmother sold everything he owned the week of my grandfather’s funeral. My friend once sobbed picking up a box of cookies from the supermarket. If at no point in your grief could you be called insane by a reasonable person, you cannot possibly understand what I’m talking about. 

You ever eaten a piece of gristle? I think grief is that piece of gristle. You chew and you chew, and you chew, but it just won’t go. You think, ‘if only I could get this down, everything would be okay’ but you can’t. It just sticks in your mouth, and it makes you gag, turning its oiliness over in your mouth. 

I nearly died once, by accident, mind you, in the grips of grief. It happens. You gag. 

So I think about that a lot, because its true what they say that flowers grow best where there was rot, and that’s true, but the trick of it is, that before the flowers can grow, that rot has to be broken down. It has to be chewed. And that takes time. 

There was a bar we went to. It was a fucking dive with shitty food and badly-poured beer, but PBR was a dollar on Mondays and you got a free basket of bacon. That’s where she told me she was dying, and I told her if she planned on doing this, she might have paid more than 3 bucks for my tab. 

It was a mess of a bar. 

They tore it down, shit, seven years ago now? And I remember thinking, ‘No, they can’t do that. They can’t get rid of that bar. It has to stand.” and I couldn’t have articulated to you why it had to stand, why this place I never thought much of and in which nothing good had ever happened to me had to stand, but I it tugged at me so hard. Because I could still hear her voice echoing there, and I could still hear what she told me. And if that bar didn’t exist anymore, than maybe it was never really real. 

Because that’s the insane part, right? You have individually and personally experienced 9/11, but everyone around you doesn’t realize the massive change the world has gone through. You are screaming at the smoldering pit, the scent of jet fuel in the air, and someone gives you that pitying look and goes, ‘How you holding up?” because the world is not different for them. You are fully prepared to have your knitting needles confiscated for the next twenty years if it would just make you feel safe again, make things feel right again, but this asshole standing in front of you has no idea. 

Because you’re changed. 

Grief changes us, but it’s wrong to think of that change as a ruining. 

The grand canyon is nothing but but a ditch dug by time, and wear, but people travel from all over the world to see it. A silver bowl tarnishes, but in the tarnish there are patterns and plays of light the new silver never dreamed of. Then again, that shitty dive bar is now a gastropub that serves burgers with aioli and has a gluten free menu, so some change is ruin, but that is not settled law. You can be changed and just be different. Different is not always worse. 

I think every person I’ve lost, and there have been more than I’d like, has changed me in some way. I’ve been a drunk, I’ve been destructive, I’ve been religious and reflective, and I’ve been a planner. I’m not any of those on a full-time basis anymore, but I see them all in the mirror, looking back at me. All those Docs, all the ways she has felt, still exist in me. 

 My grandfather, he of blessed memory, used to say that you don’t ever have to get over things, but you do have to get on with them. I think that’s what I’ve tried to carry with me. 

That’s the first step to breaking down the rot. Chop wood, and carry water. You keep it moving. You carry that with you, and you carry them with you. Sometimes thre’s nothing to do but the work.Then one day, you realize you told a story about them, and you laughed. You didn’t even think about crying. So then you cry.  Time comes you spent a whole day not thinking about them, and then you cry again. But slowly, life starts to take shape there. Things grow in around the ruins, and maybe it’s even more beautiful than before. You fly their memory like a kite, bright and bouncing in the wind of your life. People can see it in you, even if they don’t quite know what it is. It’s just a pretty, dancing thing in the clouds. 

And then you realize, you don’t want you knitting needles confiscated anymore. 

I recently laid years of anger to rest over someone’s death. It was the first time I cried about it. As soon as I stopped being mad, I had to let the sorrow in. After you clear the rot, you still need the rain, I guess. 

You get better. There are still trenches dug in the French forest from WWI, but the forest is no less green for them. Tragedy above all others. Covered by the willingness to grow. 

I feel like this fucking ramble makes less sense the more I noodle on it, and in many ways is more about how to move through grief than what it feels like, so, I don’t know, the best I have in the way of a poetic thought is that sometimes grief in the way all the clothes end up in the hamper now, and the way you stop halfway up the stairs with a cup of coffee before you remember, and the way you never walk past that cafe with the little pink cakes. That sharp, cold knife is small, and fits in so many places. 

But it can’t stop the grass from growing.

[awashsquid]

“there is no moral. the wolf eats you one day and until it does, the forest is beautiful.”

[awashsquid]

your discord pfp and your tumblr pfp are locked in a room together. what happens?

[awashsquid]

A particularly nasty side to antisemitism — it’s been part of Ye’s message recently though it is by no means unique to him — is this implication that they’re just the ones saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking. And I just want to say, unequivocally, fuck you. You don’t get to claim me. You don’t get to use me as a bullet against people I care about. It’s not what I think, and I’m confident it’s not what any of my friends think because if I wasn’t confident, they wouldn’t be my friends. I’m not silently agreeing with you — I’m VOCALLY disagreeing with you. Your beliefs are pathetic. Go fuck yourself.

[awashsquid]

Some magnificent bastard tracked down the entire pilot episode of the infamous Toonmakers adaptation of Sailor Moon, known amongst fans as “Saban Moon.” If you’re not aware of the story, before Sailor Moon was dubbed by DiC a company tried to make an Americanized adaptation of the story that was a mix of cartoon and live action. It was decided that it would be easier and cheaper to just dub the original anime (because duh) and so only a pilot episode was ever made.

I’m literally in awe, like most Sailor Moon fans aware of Saban Moon I just assumed the pilot was lost to time. But thanks to one fan’s outstanding resourcefulness and dedication this piece of lost media has been found!! The pilot starts at 1:43:45.

[awashsquid]

[awashsquid]

A little Reinako comic. First time in a really long time I've drawn a comic all traditionally!

[awashsquid]

Choose your fighter. 🤠

Patterns are available in my shop ~

[awashsquid]

Sailor Moon

By Angela Vianello

[awashsquid]

Do you like frogs?

im bisexual

[awashsquid]

toxic masculinity is my stepfather refusing to eat a meal without red meat and beer to the point that he now has ACTUAL FUCKING GOUT

[awashsquid]

🦀 time for crab 🦀

today i summoned 21 crabs and they all fell in love with me. i love them too.

🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙 🦀💙

[awashsquid]

Pretty good short video on how bad the new hp game is

[awashsquid]

anyone else ever see a rabbit hole and go “wow i should not go down this before bedtime” but then you do it anyway and end up thinking about it instead of falling asleep

[awashsquid]

Help a Jewish Community Buy Back Its Own Damn Synagogue!

Firsty, thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ll get through it and give us the honor of a donation, firstly, and a reblog, secondly. Maybe even a note to any friends you have outside of tumblr! 

If you don’t care about the history, skip to the bold at the end! 

This is Temple Emanu-El, in Helena, Montana. At the time it was built, it was the only synagogue between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon. It was built with the hard work of the Jewish community that had come west to seek their fortune and stability, having heard that people were more willing to do business with Jews in the West, a place where social strictures were slightly relaxed. This turned out to be true, and the community thrived. 

This picture resolves small on tumblr, but you can see the love and care they put into it. It’s modeled after the great synagogues of Europe, with heavy stonework, onion domes, and intricate stained glass. The president of the congregation cried at its opening and dedication. 

As the years went on, the West became more settled, and for a series of socio-political reasons of which my History of the American West major ass is well aware but are ultimately unimportant to the issue at hand, Jewish communities left much of the interior west for metropolitan areas. By the 1930s, the Jewish community was so small that they could not justify the large and lavish worship center. 

They sold it to the city for one dollar. 

The promise made to them was that it would be used for the public good. The state readied the former temple for its new function as offices for Social and Rehabilitation Services, sandblasting of the Hebrew inscription, “Gate to the Eternal,” above the entry and removing the star-studded, painted domes.. The copper was stripped from the building and likely reused to re-clad the State Capitol’s dome at about the same time. 

That lasted all of 40 years, when the State of Montana decided to let it sit idle and decay, so they could justify the sale of the building, sold for a pittance to the public good, to the Helena Catholic Diocese for $83,000  (this is an opinion of mine, though it is not an uneducated one, and I do firmly believe it. I do not, however, represent that they allowed it to fall into disrepair to justify the sale as objective fact.) 

This is the building now

In a twist of fate, the diocese can no longer afford to maintain the building. They are selling it, and the Jewish community of Helena is trying to buy it. 

The Montana Jewish Project is being far far far nicer and more politic about this than I would be, but in fairness, they actually how to get Nice Goyim to donate, and I don’t, so. The Diocese is spinning this as selling the building for much less than its worth, which may be true, but if you bought it for $83,000, that would be $280,000 now. 

They are selling it for $925,000. And we have to have 70% of the purchase price by February 28th. Easy terms, right? 

Here’s where you come in! If the idea of Montana’s Jews getting back the building that was sold to the Diocese in spite of the original agreement appeals to you, you can and should donate to their capital campaign. They even have an option for your donation where if we don’t get Emanu-El back, your money will be returned to you instead of being used for other MJP protects and repairs. 

This place won’t just be used for the Jewish community, though I think that would be enough. They want it to be used as a museum and center for the community as well, to teach about Jewish life in Montana, with Jewish cooking classes, and social programs, and teaching non-Jews about Jewish customs and culture. 

I just want to get the cross off the top.

Donate here

[awashsquid]

Help a Jewish Community Buy Back Its Own Damn Synagogue!

Firsty, thank you for reading this, and I hope you’ll get through it and give us the honor of a donation, firstly, and a reblog, secondly. Maybe even a note to any friends you have outside of tumblr! 

If you don’t care about the history, skip to the bold at the end! 

This is Temple Emanu-El, in Helena, Montana. At the time it was built, it was the only synagogue between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portland, Oregon. It was built with the hard work of the Jewish community that had come west to seek their fortune and stability, having heard that people were more willing to do business with Jews in the West, a place where social strictures were slightly relaxed. This turned out to be true, and the community thrived. 

This picture resolves small on tumblr, but you can see the love and care they put into it. It’s modeled after the great synagogues of Europe, with heavy stonework, onion domes, and intricate stained glass. The president of the congregation cried at its opening and dedication. 

As the years went on, the West became more settled, and for a series of socio-political reasons of which my History of the American West major ass is well aware but are ultimately unimportant to the issue at hand, Jewish communities left much of the interior west for metropolitan areas. By the 1930s, the Jewish community was so small that they could not justify the large and lavish worship center. 

They sold it to the city for one dollar. 

The promise made to them was that it would be used for the public good. The state readied the former temple for its new function as offices for Social and Rehabilitation Services, sandblasting of the Hebrew inscription, “Gate to the Eternal,” above the entry and removing the star-studded, painted domes.. The copper was stripped from the building and likely reused to re-clad the State Capitol’s dome at about the same time. 

That lasted all of 40 years, when the State of Montana decided to let it sit idle and decay, so they could justify the sale of the building, sold for a pittance to the public good, to the Helena Catholic Diocese for $83,000  (this is an opinion of mine, though it is not an uneducated one, and I do firmly believe it. I do not, however, represent that they allowed it to fall into disrepair to justify the sale as objective fact.) 

This is the building now

In a twist of fate, the diocese can no longer afford to maintain the building. They are selling it, and the Jewish community of Helena is trying to buy it. 

The Montana Jewish Project is being far far far nicer and more politic about this than I would be, but in fairness, they actually how to get Nice Goyim to donate, and I don’t, so. The Diocese is spinning this as selling the building for much less than its worth, which may be true, but if you bought it for $83,000, that would be $280,000 now. 

They are selling it for $925,000. And we have to have 70% of the purchase price by February 28th. Easy terms, right? 

Here’s where you come in! If the idea of Montana’s Jews getting back the building that was sold to the Diocese in spite of the original agreement appeals to you, you can and should donate to their capital campaign. They even have an option for your donation where if we don’t get Emanu-El back, your money will be returned to you instead of being used for other MJP protects and repairs. 

This place won’t just be used for the Jewish community, though I think that would be enough. They want it to be used as a museum and center for the community as well, to teach about Jewish life in Montana, with Jewish cooking classes, and social programs, and teaching non-Jews about Jewish customs and culture. 

I just want to get the cross off the top.

Donate here