October.
monthly wrap-up. Happy Halloween!
October is MY month. MINE! My birthday’s this month, and my favorite holiday is at the end. October is my excuse to wear my witch hat to work.
This month marks one year of me working in a cannabis dispensary! The best job I’ve had so far, no contest, but not because it’s easy. It’s because most of the people in this industry are lovely, I have all the accommodations I need, and I have way more access to a medicine that I find helpful.
My bosses and the customers say I always know the right strain for the vibe they’re looking for. They think I choose them intuitively, but they don’t see me sifting through the genetics and terpene information in my brain. I’m afraid I’ve gotten good at this - legal drug dealing. Now that I have a cannabis encyclopedia in my head, I make it look easy.
I’d like to write a post one of these days - something like “What I Learned from One Year of Budtending.” But I keep learning more every week, so I might wait a while longer.
I think my perspective is still limited due to the demographics of Vermont. I want to learn more about the national fight for legalization, and resistance to the drug war. I want to learn about the healthcare workers who became activists for cannabis during the AIDS epidemic. I want to learn more about prison reform. Cannabis is wound up in a lot of American history, and there’s a lot to learn about in this subculture.
I want to share some joy over my health. This month I intensified physical therapy, and I feel that my tendon injury has almost fully recovered. I feel so much stronger than I used to. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I see the exit.
Here’s a couple videos I liked this month - one about how more people need glasses now because our eyeballs stretch differently in response to living mostly indoors as children. The other is about the policies Finland has been using to eliminate homelessness, that were actually first tried in America but not continued on a systemic level in spite of how successful the policies are.
Books I Read This Month
Last month it was hard to read. I planned on reading more horror in October, but I needed a memoir to get me out of my block, and I ended up starting a dive into the nonfiction political work of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
Powerful blend of memoir, magic, and poetry. Deeply spiritual and strong. And a timely gift from a friend <3
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Weeks later, I am still reeling with answers to questions I didn’t know I had. I underlined the fuck out of this book. I’ll reach for it when I need inspiration to write, because it’s a reminder of why it’s important.
Toward Eternity by Anton Hur
An emotional and brilliant imagining of the future. A story told through a journal passed between people over the course of hundreds of years. Adventurous, apocalyptic, and it has a lot of deep questions about artificial intelligence, technological evolution, and what makes us human.
Here’s an interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates by Amanpour & Company.
17:19: “I think there is great, great danger in thinking that because you lack power in a particular moment, you don’t have the ability to hurt and damage other people. I am not in that case making a narrow critique of Israel or of Zionism, this is I think a very human impulse, to think that because you went through some horrific experience, you therefore have a kind of moral authority and are therefore not capable of inflicting horrors on other people.”
I only heard about Coates recently and I was immediately drawn in by his voice and his perspective in interviews. I find power and intention in his work, and I find affinity in the fact that he also didn’t finish college and took classes at the same school I went to. A friend of mine called this an “academia crush” and I think that fits! Here’s another interview by Democracy Now.
17:13: “This kind of abstracting events outside of their historical context is really necessary to the political order, because it allows us to justify ourselves and not have to think harder and ask much deeper questions.”
Vote November 5th
I want abortion access to return to what it was before Trump elected 3 justices to the Supreme Court. I do not want people to keep dying because politicians think they know better than doctors. I want body autonomy returned to every state.
I want to slow down climate change, rather than accelerate it. I want the Chevron decision reversed so federal agencies can continue to regulate food, water, and air properly.
I want hate crimes to go down, rather than up.
I want the immigration process to be sped up. I want it to be easier for undocumented immigrants to become legal residents, rather than have them suffer mass deportation.
I want housing, healthcare, and groceries to be more affordable, by attacking the root cause that is greed.
I want the country to have a larger safety net to provide the equal opportunity that the American Dream espouses.
I want wealth inequality to go down, and I want tax rates on the wealthy to get closer to what it was before Reagan took office and fucked everything up.
These are some reasons why I early voted for Harris. Will she fix all these things? Hell no! But there is certainty that the alternative will take us backwards, dismantle our economic + environmental progress, and make more people’s lives miserable and less free. We must disempower Republicans and create a larger Democratic coalition, to move away from regressive policies, and get on track to imagining a better future.
Here’s an interview of Tim Walz, by WeRateDogs, that I found wholesome. And another video by The Lincoln Project, about the dangers of limiting abortion access. The women interviewed in this video are alive because they could afford to travel for out-of-state healthcare.
Here’s another video by CODEPINK, an anti-war activist organization doing great work at pressuring politicians and lobbyists in Washington D.C.
This will be my last monthly wrap-up. This was one way to practice staying consistent with writing, and I feel satisfied with how far I’ve come.
Posts going forward will be a lot more focused. I’m excited to keep sharing with y’all my poetry, essays, stories, and the books I enjoy. I’ll also be posting videos soon! I’m branching out and finding more artists whose work I connect with, and I’m getting a little more involved with political education - starting out with book clubs and writing workshops. I want to share what I’m learning with y’all more, and with a lot more attention and depth. More to come!