I’d Rather Be Anywhere But Alive

My husband complained that this was more Shakespeare than Eddas, and I challenged him to do better.

Solen sken, skönt gyllene

Dagen Tor föddes

På trottoaren, vid Taco Bell

Där låg Loke

—KJN

My translation:

The sun shone, sweet golden

The day of Tor’s birth

On the tarmac, by Taco Bell

There lay Loki

ay yo show ur husband 

Solen skinnede, skøn og gylden

På dagen for Tors fødsel

På asfalten ved Taco Bell

Dér lå Loke

“LEV MERE (LIVE MAS)”

He hair shine brite

A very very

Magical site

But then I see

A bab from hell

I pik up loki

Like, we get told "sirens will drag your body to the sea with their songs" or "those fae folk will steal you away and you'll never be seen again" or "the vampires will drain your blood and steal your soul"

Woods: WoooooooooEEEEEEEEEEEG

Me:

Crafts

quilting

embroidery

cross-stitch

knitting

crochet

sewing

Cooking and Baking

homemade bread

homemade butter

homemade extracts

dandelion jelly

Canning

26 canning recipes

canning jars 101

60 canning recipes

Gardening

edible trees to plant

what to plant to save the bees

cure and braid garlic

save seeds for next year

braid onions for long term storage

build a greenhouse

Animals

homemade chicken feed

raising mealworms for chickens

why to raise nigerian dwarf goats

Outdoors

starting a fire with sticks

trail signs

knotting

find true north without a compass

Medicine

homemade neosporin

The crowd boos. I begin to walk off the stage in shame, when a voice commands silence from the room.

having to produce something and have a use is a capitalist ideal and not an intrinsic part of humanity

Guess what happened to people who didn’t do things before capitalism? They died. Cause if you weren’t hunting, gathering, or useful in some aspect of nature. You were killed, died or starvation, dehydration, or exposure. 

note: in the neolithic era, a person in their 40s or 50s would be considered elderly

12,000-year-old burial of a woman about 45 with mobility disabilities both congenital and acquired

burial of a 40-50 year old Neanderthal man who had survived to old age with a deformed right arm and a long-healed head injury that would have made him blind in one eye

neolithic burial of a man in his 50s who lost the use of his left arm in adolescence

neolithic burial of a man in his 40s with evidence of a significant mobility disability caused by an injured hip and leg, some time in adulthood but long before his death

neolithic Asian burial of a man in his 20s with a congenital disorder which would have made him a quadriplegic around age 14. He survived for 10-15 years after that.

Stop turning ancient hominids into these cruel “survival of the fittest” images. Especially cause that isn’t even what is meant by that phrase.

Nowadays, on the other hand, we have excess, and waste, and an absolute shitpot of arbitrary work that gets shoved into the “necessary and vital” pile just because somebody else can make a buck off it, made as much off of cut corners and financial shenanigans as of anybody’s honest labor. Shitty Wal-Mart plastic pitchers and crap toys that capture attention and drop it just as fast, “fast fashion” that you wear twice and it falls apart, shiny chrome washer-dryers that are going to be replaced in five or ten years because planned obsolescence meets upgrade culture, and produce that gets rejected because it doesn’t look shiny and uniform and perfect.

If you’re a cashier, you have to stand even though you could do your job just as well sitting. A fast-food place throws out pounds of fries, empties the whole assembly-line of prepared food into the dumpster at the end of the night, and if you take any of it home to eat, that’s called stealing. Grocery stores throw out entire cartons of eggs because one out of twelve is cracked and lock their dumpsters so nobody can scavenge food from the tons of what’s thrown out still edible. Tech stores demand that unsold computers be destroyed with a sledgehammer before being thrown out, and all the labor that went into making it, assembling it, forming its component parts and mining its raw materials, is all wasted.

We can see this shit going on, we encounter it and sometimes we’re ordered to carry it out, in our workplaces that pay us shit, and let me tell you, there’s a hell of a difference between “if you don’t get the wheat harvested we’ll have no bread all winter” and “you need to spend the next eight hours cooking food so we can hold a profit after throwing a quarter of it in the garbage.” A multitude of people would benefit greatly if allowed to access that waste or allowed to not produce what’s likely going to be wasted.

Now people starve because they don’t “produce” in an acceptable way for our capitalist system, which has a very narrow and limited definition of what being “useful” is, and because our corporate overlords would rather throw food away than feed someone who is starving.

We have enough food, but people are starving to death.

We have enough houses, but people are dying of exposure because they’re homeless.

We have enough medicine, but people are dying because they can’t afford to pay for it.

And we accept this as correct because we’ve been brainwashed that only “useful” i.e. “capitalist productive” people deserve to have food, shelter and healthcare.