Year: 2025

Coma therapy wishlist

At a chronic pain seminar tonight, the OT said, “one thing we often hear is, ‘oh i wish you could just put me in a coma until my current neurons would die and be replaced with new ones that aren’t so highly reactive’, but unfortunately that isn’t how the nervous system works.”

Firstly, lol at “unfortunately”. Love this ally who wants to make coma therapy wishes come true.

Secondly, wanting a temporary coma really is a common fantasy across quite a few chronic conditions. I have personally heard it from people with pain, anxiety, depression, ME/CFS, and also just sleep-deprivation (parents).

I mean

Promo photo of the book My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, with pink block letters over a classical oil portrait of a woman looking bored or resigned

I am thinking about how often patients are correct in a general or metaphorical way– folks with ME who say they feel like their batteries don’t work and then research turns up mitochondrial dysfunction.

Makes me wonder what version of coma therapy will turn out to work for us all.

Seasonal ambition re: slug draft stopper

We had one cool day and I am having my traditional seasonal ambition to make a draft-stopper for the one drafty door.

I have already made unprecedented progress by choosing a design and even buying a pattern, because how could I resist this perfect soft sculpture of a slug by Clare James?

Photo of a large greige corduroy slug perched on the back of a couch against an off-white wall. The slug has a realistic shape, with a mantle and four eye stalks. The couch is covered in a green patchwork quilt and cushions with earth-toned prints. There is an abstract blue and orange artwork on the wall above.

Inspired as always by my friends’ projects, in this case a pal who made this sardine as a draft-stopper for her mom who loves tinned fish.

Now I am torn between using generally sluggy fabric I already have, or buying something to make a perfect banana slug 🍌

Background info for today’s small pleasure: a friend and I recently started a soup swap, which just means we drop off soup for each other whenever we feel like it.

So today’s small pleasure was texting my friend “HOT SOUPS IN YOUR AREA” to find out whether she was home

Red Nation on trusting white people

Loved this take on how to organize across differences in privilege:

“One of my favourite organizers in history is a guy named Witold Pilecki, who organized a resistance cell inside Auschwitz… He said that the people he chose for that cell were the ones that he saw do an action that helped another person and harmed them. Help another person, and gain nothing.

You wanna know if you can trust the white people you organize with? Put them in that position. Do it over and over and over again.”

From this episode of The Red Nation Podcast.

Reminds me of the classic Real Ally Shit zine— finding the difference between pretty words and dependable people:

Making pink ink from radishes

You would think by now I would have one moment of hesitation before I started boiling 3 bunches of radishes that had been in the back of the fridge too long. It makes #WeirdSmells but will it make ink?

Photo of a small stainless steel pot full of chopped radishes and water. On the surface there are bubbles and foam. The radishes are pale pink, having released some of their colour into the liquid.

Surprisingly solid pink ink once it gets concentrated enough! Seems more stable than things like raspberry or red cabbage.

Photo of a stainless steel pot with about 2 cm of dark pink liquid in the bottom -- radish tea

Photo of four strips of paper that have been labelled and dipped in ink at different stages. radish: very pale pink radish + 10 min: still very pale pink radish + 15 min + salt + alum: noticeably darker but still pale pink radish + 20 min + salt + alum: even darker but still light pink that could possibly be legible for writing

Can’t decide whether to add gum arabic for a drawing/dipping ink, or filter it better and add a bit of glycerin to try with a cheap fountain pen 🤔

Art is when everyone else makes money

I have been watching documentaries about art forgeries, and I keep being struck by what an unstoppable economic force art is.

You fund a fringe festival and the entire city or even region makes money even if all the plays are bad– restaurants, taxis, hotels, venues, bartenders, poster designers, print shops, and then later maybe youtubers and critics and fan conventions…

This is probably the wrong take-away from art forgery stories, but even criminals are making millions of dollars in secondary activities because of the original art, which then means these filmmakers are making money talking about the forgery, which means cinemas and festivals can make money showing the films… Unstoppable.

This is the worst test for whether art is “real” but the way AI-generated content leaves a bunch of economic destruction in its wake is probably telling.

They invented a type of content that has zero cultural capital lol

Related/unrelated I would like to visit a museum of famous forgeries. Probably cheap to set up.

The Colour of Ink

Today’s little pleasure was this ink documentary and a heating pad. Recommended if you like artists at work, foraging, history of pigments and dyes, diy, or ink in particular. It features several inkmakers, cartoonists, calligraphers, artists, tattooists, and even a paleontologist.

Streaming free on CBC: The Colour of Ink

I yelped out loud when the film cut to Thomas Little in a pawn shop. He is a gentle soul who makes truly haunted iron-gall ink by dissolving guns in sulfuric acid. Very cool to see part of his process.

I make iron-gall ink too, using rusty bits of junk, vinegar, and the beautiful native oak trees in my neighbourhood. Amazing how different the vibes can be for similar recipes. I have some of Thomas’ gun ink and I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it, it just sits on my desk and whispers

Anyway I do think the documentary conveys the profound pleasure of making tiny batches of ink out of weird things you find out in the world

At one point Jason Logan from Toronto Ink Company makes black ink for a tattooist out of charcoal from a recent forest fire in the area. Part of what is so moving to me about this kind of poetic or haunted ink is the scale– you can make a bottle of ink out of a couple of grams of carbon dust, which leaves whole mountainsides of charcoal behind. Something about reasserting human scale is such a relief

Mulder and Scully and the Unacknowledged Magic Hospital

I am used to spotting docaganda on medical dramas, but it has been awhile since I watched a show where the propaganda comes from the patient perspective. I’m comfort-watching old X-Files and the Hollywood Healing is so shameless and funny. Gunshots, housefires, novel virus, hit by cars, left for dead in the desert, dehydrated by magic salt? Just get to a hospital for a health reset 😂

Fake-yet-real makeovers of my heart

Aww man. Shout out to local beauty salon for kids Lizzie Lee and Me for having a receptionist who says things like “makeovers have no gender” and “anybody can love sparkles”, and who will book any hair, makeup, or spa service for any kid (and any grown-up, if they want to get side-by-side mini manicures).

I appreciate them also just for taking kids desires seriously. It’s so fun to have a kid salon where it’s halfway pretend play. You can wear a pink robe and get a “facial” that is just face mist and cucumber slices on your eyes. You can get a pedicure with no sharp tools, but you get to soak your feet in bubbles and read a kids magazine. The “makeovers” are sparkly face paint with rainbow or flower themes. I dunno, it’s all just very sweet.

Extensive abstract physical evidence

There’s a moment in Kidd Pivot’s Revisor where someone exposes an atrocity by presenting “extensive abstract physical evidence” in the form of a dance solo, and it works. When I watch someone move their body, I can sense in my body how that would feel. We can communicate abstract things that way, and we can have a shared understanding without language.

I knew this before, but the phrase “abstract physical evidence” comes in handy surprisingly often.

(Revisor is streaming on Marquee if you need some dance theatre about corruption, comedy, and the relationship between language and the body.)

Anyway I think about “extensive abstract physical evidence” in relation to ME/CFS a lot.

A disease that doesn’t even have a satisfying name so we put two flawed names together with a slash, a disease where it’s not defined by specific symptoms so much as the meta pattern of how symptoms come and go, a disease where nobody knows the root problem or how to explain how all the symptoms and patterns fit together. A disease where we have fatigue “but different from normal fatigue”, where “malaise” can be life-threatening and “exertion” can mean something as small as perceiving light.

Just a trainwreck of inadequate language, and yet, people with ME manage to know so much about the situation in, like, an abstract physical way.

Zine brain

Zine-making problems– determining which way to flip the paper to print on the other side when manually double-siding. I feel like if I can get this right my brain will never age.

Apologies to everyone, but the mnemonic for orienting the paper in my new (second-hand) laser printer is “feet first, face up… that’s the way we like to fuck?”

Crip tips for planet earth

Getting weepy about Violet Affleck pointing out that Planet Earth experiences post-exertion malaise, and people with ME/CFS know the hard truths about how to deal with that.

Because pwME know that a crash is unpredictable and impossible to reverse, the goal of pacing is to not encounter the symptoms at all. Success is measured not by a fast and furious response at the moment of crisis but by the absence of a need for intervention. But US society, like a new pwME still unfamiliar with the costs of PEM, is staring down a cycle of “crashes” from which we won’t be able to easily return

Quirks and Quarks for Long Covid Awareness Day

Huge shout out to Bob McDonald for asking David Putrino all the good naive questions about covid on mainstream public radio. Starts at 19:30 or scroll down to that section.

Quirks & Quarks Mar 15: The silent, long-term effects of COVID, and more…

“Wow is that nervous system damage permanent?”

“What is special about covid that allows it to spread through the body, when we think of it infecting the lungs?”

“If covid has the ability to suppress the immune system, how does that affect our ability to fight off other pathogens?”

“What about people who think since they are living a healthy lifestyle, covid isn’t really a worry for them?”

“How far do you think this might go towards explaining the huge spike in excess deaths?”

And the biggie:

“What should we do with all this information, now that most people think the threat of covid is gone?”

I’m pretty into this framing of “new information about silent health damage from every covid infection”, even though it is not new or very silent. I hope it helps some covid deniers rejoin the evidence-based world. Nice one, Quirks and Quarks.