gaaaaaay

And it's about 5 hours of sleep.

The important thing about wool is that it continues to keep you warm even when it’s soaking wet.

Other natural fibers don’t do this. In fact, quite the opposite. Campers and boaters are usually familiar with the phrase, “cotton kills.” If you’re wet in cotton or linen, your clothes actually sap heat from your body.

If you sink in a lake in late October like I did today, staying warm is important. I was rescued long before I would’ve actually died, but cold makes your muscles seize up, which isn’t good if you have to swim to land.

Which brings me around to life jackets. If the water’s cold enough, you may only have five-ten minutes until your muscles seize (today I probably had 40-60, more than enough time to get to land if I hadn’t been picked up), and you’ll drown.

In a life jacket, even in extremely cold water, you can float semi-conscious for perhaps another 30 minutes or so before you actually freeze to death, which is usually when someone rescues you.

What’s more, you probably know that moving around on land warms you up. Jumping jacks, jogging in place, etc.

In water, moving actually makes you colder. You need to stay still curled up in a ball, which you can only do in a life jacket.

In wool AND life jacket, you’re warm, and your head’s above water, which is pretty much your only and entire goal.

Yep! A really simple “experiment” I learned as a kid and now use in my own courses is sticking your hand in ice water. Compare moving it around in the water to curling it up in a fist. The contrast is stark!

To increase your survival time in on cold water, you want to curl up! If you’re with others, you want to huddle!

Happy May Day all. Solidarity and all that jazz.  For your brain, some history on May Day and how it came to be: 1. The Zinn Education Project:  May 4, 1886: Haymarket Tragedy

2. IWW Historical Archives:  The Brief Origins of May Day

In the past couple decades, I’ve met a couple dozen Black folks who have had a similar story happen to them with white people with varying timing/lengths. Some I’m still in contact with, some have disappeared, some I just ain’t kept ties with. No deed on us naming us their property legally, but thanks to the machinations of capitalism and white supremacy, property and slaves nonetheless—far beyond the average abusive relationship.

For a lot of y’all, slavery is something abolished a couple centuries ago and history is history, why should it affect you now? Why should there be reparations for Black people or countries? For slightly better-taught folks, when we think of modern slavery, we usually think of prison labor, human trafficking, undocumented and exploited labor, the exploitation of the global south, we think of systems. Don’t get me wrong that shit is still there and needs to be addressed, but some of y’all motherfuckers think the only slavery close to home for y’all is the white people calling themselves slaves on fetlife and that’s a problem to me.

When I first named myself Anonsee, it was as a SW mononym the year I got free from my enslaver, in part because of the version of Anansi played by Orlando Jones for American Gods despite never seeing the full show. In particular, there are two monologues I used to be able to recite perfectly from memory.

The first, Coming to America/Story of Black People, is a story Anansi tells to captured Africans on a slave ship who prayed to him for help. So, he tells them a story. He tells them how they don’t even know how fucked they are yet.

How over three centuries later, even after we “got free”, we would still be getting fucked economically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, every damn which way while the professional descendants of slave catchers still enslave us and kill us in the streets, in our homes, our schools, our jobs, anywhere they fucking please.

“You shed tears for Compe Anansi, and here he is, telling you…there isn’t one goddamn reason you shouldn’t go up there right now and slit the throats of every one of these Dutch motherfuckers, and set fire to this ship.”

One hesitant man speaks up, saying that if the ship burns, everyone on it will die.

To which Anansi retorts “You’re already dead, asshole. At least die a sacrifice for something worthwhile. Let. The motherfucker. Burn. Let it all burn.”

The second monologue has him meeting with other African gods in a funeral home, who ask him why he’s so full of rage when they wish to choose peace, to choose complacency, to simply accept how things are.

Anansi says “I am not a god, in the sense that I can tolerate exploitation, oppression, and repression, my worshippers KNOW freedom ain’t free and that the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed; they know slavery is not a condition, slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand like mothafuckin ‘The Alt-Right’ and snatched, another one gone.”

How every 30 seconds, another Black girl fucking disappears, and the new plantation owners built a pipeline to take us from school to prison while we live as a suppressed, oppressed people within the imperial core, living as spectacle, tool, or to be disappeared—no AMBER alert. Snatched, 30 seconds, another one gone.

“The world assumes white people are naturally good, so when something bad happens, it’s a good person doing a bad thing. They assume Black people are naturally bad, so when something good happens, it’s only a matter of time before that animal’s true nature rears its ugly head.”

I run into people regularly who think Abolitionism is too far. Shit, some of them are even Black and think that if we simply reform modes of slavery everything will be ok—that if we just make sure its just the bad ones who experience slavery, surely we can keep the same systems in place. Hell, California even majority voted against abolishing slavery couple years ago. For economic reasons, you understand, right?”

Y’all white-ass, cis-ass, abled-ass motherfuckers have been told the fucking horrors we go through over and over, you watch how much worse it gets for us, and yet always leave it to us to save the fucking day no matter what. Stop being fucking afraid and be the one ripping shit down, the one taking action, the one letting your fucking anger fuel your motion instead of your despair for once. Stop accepting how things are and pretending we’ll be saved by a vote or a phone call or a timid “is there anything I can do?” to give yourself an excuse out.