"Random Passion"

✦ ✦ ✦ The Kiss

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

Frederick Carter (1883–1967), “The Dragon of the Alchemists”

engraved on wood by W.M. Quick, 1936

🪕 Banjo did a big stretchy on me, then put his feet on my arm, and when I still did not get the point and give him uppies, he lay his forequarters on my arm and turned his body and pressed his side against me like he had been picked up and was being held.

When I got pregnant again, Simon would lie on my belly and purr for hours. I had read somewhere that there's a theory that cats purr at a frequency that can promote bone growth and healing. So we joked that he was helping the baby grow bones.

When the kids were little we told them that Simon's love was soaked into their bones. When died we reminded them that he would always be with them because his love is soaked into their bones. He was such a good boy.

Pretty early on, they decide the crew will need to do most of the traveling in a coma, and it turns out a group had been studying prolonged comas and found that most people can't survive the length of time needed. They've found a specific gene though that seems to determine a likelihood to survive. This is like, an early phase of working on the mission. Stratt immediately takes the test herself before ordering everyone else to also do it. I think she even says at this time that she doesn't want to ask anybody to do anything she wouldn't be willing to do herself and is part of the argument for making everyone (including Grace who questions it) take it. (This is also the real reason Grace ends up needing to go. Not some sort of time crunch.) Theoretically, if she'd had the gene, she might have gone herself.

There's a scene where a scientist unrelated to PHM pulls strings to meet Stratt because while she was following the progress of the mission, she figured out a science thing that they needed to sort. Stratt ends up being like 'great observation/point. You're now on the team.' And the lady is like 'no way. I'm going home.' And Grace is like, 'oof sorry. this is now your home' so she's forced to stay (because he knows when Stratt says that it's done)

Stratt arranges for the crew to pretty much have access to any and all information that can be crunched into their systems. A huge Library of Alexandria, as they have no idea what the team will need while they're away (this is how Grace ends up being able to make a translator program/software whatever with Rocky), and multiple organizations put together a suit. She shows up to court to be like, 'I'm here as a courtesy. I don't need to defend myself. It is within my power to do whatever I want. Now I'm out.' Immaculate

When Grace is refusing to go, he says he'll sabotage the mission if she makes him go. She tells him she doesn't believe him, but she doesn't take chances, so fine, his drug cocktail for his coma will include an amnesia drug so he won't remember right away that he wasn't a willing participant, and by the time he does remember, he'll be too invested in his research.

But my favorite has to be after Grace has refused to go on the mission, she has him put in a cell while they get closer to the launch date/start him in on his coma. She visits him in his cell and has a sort of monologue moment where she says once the mission is launched, she believes she is going to be sent to jail probably for life. (Not just for the above but also authorizing plans to nuke Antarctica and pave over a whole African desert in the process of making the project work/warming up the planet to save them time as the sun cools.) She's very much like 'there's no happy ending for me here. You will die out there doing research. I will die in a jail cell.

We do not in fact ever learn what becomes of her after the launch.

"In Gentle Light"