current events

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in today’s briefings about the new State Of Fuckedness of the various local municipalities, our county executive accidentally misspelled https://twitter.com/markpoloncarz/status/1329221816397803523 the name of our town https://www.tonawanda.ny.us/, and so Dude and I have been sitting across from one another on the couch repeating the name increasingly incorrectly, and the latest iteration of it is that we live in the “TOM A TOMAWAMMA” so we’ve just been repeating that back and forth to each other in shriller and shriller tones.

yes, very incisive commentary, we’re aware.

traveling

is it a mega-spreader event at this point?, probably, fuck i don't want this disease, but i have to live my life, i have to help my family, it cannot be up to me, do // not // reblog

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(don’t reblog, I am not prepared for this to go way out of context on other people’s dashboards)

I know, I know, but I’m traveling for Thanksgiving.

I’m going to the farm where my isolation pod is, where I’ve been working all summer on the line at my sister’s poultry slaughterhouse. We’ve got one last big job– everyone’s turkeys. Two processing dates for two batches– we’re processing for another producer, as is traditional, and if he’s got 40-pounders like last year we’re gonna beat him up.

Yeah, I don’t live locally, yeah I’ve been working at my actual-income job for the last three weeks since we processed the final batch of chickens for the year, because yeah, I need actual money to survive. Yeah, that means I’m traveling from a hotspot (7% testing positive in Erie Co. as of yesterday) to… well, another hotspot, Rensselaer Co is up over 3% as of yesterday as well. (I got the NY Covid app on my phone and monitor it obsessively.)

(I’ve been strictly quarantining for weeks for this, only going, well, to work, in a retail store*, because I have to, because the unemployment ran out, because there’s still work that’s gotta be done, because my employer’s not getting rent relief or any kind of stimulus check, because there’s no money unless you’re already rich. I haven’t been into a restaurant since March. I haven’t been outside my house without a mask on in a couple of weeks now. So, how good a “quarantine” is that? You fucking tell me.)

(*I work in the office in the back. Yeah, I don’t talk to customers. Does that make me at lower risk? It’s all the same building, it’s all the same ventilation system, it’s mostly the same room. IDK; I leave my mask on. Does it help? I don’t actually know.)

I’m on an Amtrak train because I’m tired, because my car is not in great shape at the moment, because I’m going to get a ride back with someone afterward. (Yeah! More traveling. We’re reprehensible.) And this car is crammed (to strict guidelines, a maximum density– they mark the trains sold out at 50% capacity) with college kids who are going home, because it’s terrifying out in the world and they want to see their mothers. And maybe that’s going to kill some of their mothers. And maybe some of their mothers are going to kill them.

The thing about all of this, as I look around at all the people traveling for Thanksgiving, and read all the Spicy Hot Takes on the Internet about how people traveling for Thanksgiving are the downfall of society, is that neither of those two parties are wrong. I am both of those. I think traveling is a terrible idea. And here I am, on a fucking train, watching the sun rise over corn stubble somewhere just outside of Batavia.

Because the thing is, this kind of shit is why humans organize themselves into governments. This is what a government is supposed to be for. A government is supposed to manage a fucking health crisis epidemic. It cannot come down to a college kid standing up to their family and opting to spend Thanksgiving alone (and possibly dying alone in their dorm room because their suitemates didn’t dare defy their parents and went home and brought the virus back). It cannot come down to a frightened parent telling their child to stay away. Humans are humans and we need human things, including and especially other humans. It’s got to be someone’s job to look at the big picture and allocate resources and implement policies to do what is necessary. And not half-assed impossible-to-enforce policies like “don’t have more than ten people in your house, privately”, which, if you’ve ever had an overbearing mother-in-law, you try telling her you’re not coming over and see what happens when she won’t buy Christmas presents for your kids in retaliation, you try dealing with your husband’s feelings about it, you try standing all alone against that like, fucking, Cuchulainn but with a frying pan and crying kids, like, fuck.

No– policies like “we’re paying every restaurant’s employees to stay home and we’re giving paid sick leave to every wage earner whose job has been deemed essential”, kind of shit. Rent relief. Promises of re-hiring bonuses. Shit like that. None of this verbal-shaming-only bullshit that only makes people mad and doesn’t actually fucking stop any of the problem behavior.

I promise you, if there was money in it, the anti-mask rabble rousers would have a whole lot less traction.

It cannot be my individual effort. It can’t.

(I’m wearing an N95 I found in my basement with a three-layer fabric mask over the top and I’m fucking miserable and my face hurts and I have four and a half more hours of this to go. Oh my god does my face hurt. Shit these things suck.)

But I have to do this; it’s essential agricultural work. People have to fucking eat.

(Yeah, I’m going to wind up violating the law by eating Thanksgiving dinner with more than ten people, because that’s how big the farm isolation pod is; my immediate family was six, and now there are husbands and kids, and if we’re all here to process turkeys we’re going to fucking eat dinner together afterward, we’ve all been quarantining for it. Are we supposed to spend the day working together, eat lunch in shifts, and then eat dinner in shifts???)

Worst of all, the half-assed finger-wagging broke-ass attempts at stopping this are mostly being made by Democrats. Thousands of small business owners being ruined by this are going to blame Andy Cuomo (who is indisputably a piece of shit anyway so they’re not wrong in spirit, even if they are in specifics), and are going to vote straight-ticket Republican the rest of their lives over this. Across the country, lame-duck Republicans are going to trash the place on their way out, and the Democrats who come into office and try to fix it but don’t have any money to spend are going to be blamed for it, and in years to come, everyone will blame the Democrats for this. Just watch! Fuck your facts, fuck your feelings. Shrug. (I mean, to be fair, the Ds probably could get money, but they also only believe in giving money to rich people, which seems to be why our government thinks it exists. So they’re gonna bail out fucking Amazon or something and people will starve and they’ll wag their fingers at the progressives who voted for them to stop the bleeding and say we’re asking for too much. They very much will deserve it, in the end, and then Rs who never gave a shit in the first place will sweep gleefully back into power and strip the carcasses for scrap metal and sell it. I mean, I’ve seen this before, I’m old now.)

I’m tired. Please don’t reblog this, I’m not ready for people to read the first sentence and flame me over it for months. (Nobody ever reads the whole thing before they send anon hate.)

vriskanon:comatose-cristatus:just-shower-thoughts: If Wallace (Wallace and Gromit) died in his...

discourse!, didnt' see that coming

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vriskanon https://vriskanon.tumblr.com/post/634904788429078528/comatose-cristatus-just-shower-thoughts-if :

comatose-cristatus https://comatose-cristatus.tumblr.com/post/634730783023775745/just-shower-thoughts-if-wallace-wallace-and :

just-shower-thoughts https://just-shower-thoughts.com/post/634633201894227968/if-wallace-wallace-and-gromit-died-in-his-sleep :

If Wallace (Wallace and Gromit) died in his sleep, the contraptions that get him out of bed would still deliver his lifeless corpse into the dining room, likely for Gromit to clean up

The only automatic contraptions just fucking wake him up he has to manually trigger the breakfast clothing contraption you edgy cunt. If wallace dies in his sleep gromit just has to peel back the wallpaper, break the glass and press the small, black button labelled simply F

It will take care of alerting neighbours, family, authorities, and dress him in his funeral attire. He is slid peacefully down into a casket that has just finished being created. A pair of gloves on springs, wearing black with a distinguished tie on each wrist, drives Wallace to his final resting place, where an army of suspended gloves comfort each other, pay their respects, and tearfully dab at eyes that are not there. The car carrying Wallace’s casket stops with just enough velocity that it sails gaily through the air before landing in his grave.

palate cleanser: fic snippet

the witcher, witcher 3, meet death sitting

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yeah Geralt’s in this one

This is a ways forward in the Keira/Lambert thing, well after the plot is in motion, but I almost deleted it and am not sure it fits anyway so I’m putting it up here anyway.

Geralt was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read. “You know,” he said, “I expected you to try to win me over with tears, or something. I can smell how hard you’re working not to cry, and it’s really odd.”

Of course that set her off, and she burst into furious tears. “Fuck you,” she howled, and threw the crystal she’d been holding at him. He caught it, and she bit back her outburst and swallowed her tears down as hard as she could, and it was easy because her fury went right back down in the face of her hopelessness. “Shit, I need that back,” she said, and rubbed her face. “I deserved that,” she told herself.

what *is* a government for?

to replies

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galadhir https://galadhir.tumblr.com/ said:

             totally agree with you. You’ve only got to look at New

Zealand to see what happens when the government actually tackles the problem instead of leaving its people in chaos and poverty to try to negotiate all this alone

In the beginning of all this, they put out that stimulus package with the payroll protection thing which reimbursed businesses for paying employees in return for them keeping people on the payroll.

So I could in conscience not rush to my sister’s aid, as she tries to keep her small essential food-producing business afloat; they had money, and could pay local people to help them and could manage the unexpected expenses of These Unprecedented Times, and it was fine. They were fine, I stayed in isolation in my friend’s house keeping her children from going insane, it was cozy, it was scary but reassuring. Someone was looking out for us. We could do what was important.

That ran out in May.

There’s been nothing since.

In June, my doctor friend’s hospital laid a bunch of people off because they couldn’t afford to pay them because hospitals are for-profit and make their money on elective procedures people are too scared to do. He got a pay cut, so he put in his notice at one of his jobs; if he’s earning less anyway, he might as well be home sometimes to help take care of his children, since there’s no school for them anymore. It’s not like there’s a shortage of ICU-qualified doctors with 20 years’ experience at intubating people and managing people’s blood gases, or anything; he’s got some first grade social studies to teach at home, since nobody’s gonna help him do that, and his 6-yo is developing a wicked anxiety disorder from all this shit– he’s got to take care of his own, since nobody else is gonna. Guess y’all can intubate yourselves, since we don’t live in a society, or anything– fend for yourself. Take care of your own.

It’s fucking November and we’re just on our own, and so I’m traveling in the midst of this spike because they need help and nobody’s going to help them and, on an individual scale, all we can do is take care of our own the best we can. I am fundamentally unequipped to make large decisions for the greater good; I am a minimum-wage retail employee who pays bills. I’ve been paying taxes and voting since fucking 1998 and it’s not doing me a damned bit of good.

It is November and not only have the bonuses for unemployed people run out, the regular-ass unemployment has run out; even if I stay home, I can’t claim anything, not even the half-your-pay unemployment usually is, as if you can live on that.

All of the concrete things that could give me some other, safer choices to make are gone, so I have the choices I have, and I have to do what I have to do.

deretbeshelar:hasn’t he been through enough

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deretbeshelar https://deretbeshelar.tumblr.com/post/635250425212387328:

hasn’t he been through enough