#It's mostly a matter of finding the time energy and brainspace for it - and taking it in small digestible chunks ugh

[sysig]

I didn't know abt the tumblr detox you're doing until now, but I hugely respect it. I was experiencing similar stuff, and actually wound up deleting my tumblr bc of it, for better or worse. You talking about how tumblr is temporary made me think though, i would be so sad if one day i wasn't able to see all your beautiful art. Your Vargas stuff especially has been a huge and much needed source of joy for me since i found it last year. Do you put all of your art anywhere more permanent online?

I can only guess this is about my blog cleaning? Although I’m not deleting any of the original stuff I’ve posted, so maybe my existentialism? All of them feel far away now lol, sorry I'm not Entirely sure what you're referring to haha

I am glad to have been able to provide some comfort and joy with my art, that makes me happy to hear ♥ I hope it continues to!

For better or worse, as you said, tumblr is my main social media at the moment - even the little bits of Vargas and other art that I’ve uploaded to DA have been cherry-picked out from the main sets, so not everything gets crossposted. Also, I’m sure you’ve noticed but I have a kind of daunting backlog, so every time I try to catch up I just feel like I’ve fallen further and further behind haha

The sad reality is, the internet is impermanent. Putting my faith into any one site is just asking for trouble *cough* because who’s to say it’ll be there tomorrow? And crossposting to other websites to try and diversify my odds feels like an uphill battle that only gets worse the longer I go without it and I just end up spiralling lol

Make no mistake, I don’t plan on leaving this hellsite anytime soon! I have no intentions of deleting any of my blogs, and I keep backups should the worst happen - I’m not going anywhere fast lol

All that said, the most reliable places that I’ve been uploading to/looking into have been my Patreon, where allllll my doodles from the last couple years are hosted, unedited, even the ones I scrapped haha, though without my usual commentary. I’ve made plans to add more to my backlog, should there be an interest for it. I’ve also been looking into neocities which has very much withstood the test of time, although I’m still extremely new to it, so don’t expect anything there for a while. I’m always open to suggestions too!

So yes, I’ve got other sites that I frequent, but none to the level of completeness that I’ve got over here. It’s been on my mind, believe you me, to start making a more comprehensive list of “Also find me here!”, I just get easily distracted and disheartened by how much work it’s going to be haha

[kootenaygoon]

So,

Lyra was giving us a special tour.

Her medical shift ended around dinnertime and she came blazing out of the headquarters, still jazzed from a long shift of dealing with drugged-up idiots. Over the course of a day the medical staff dealt with everything from slivers to dehydration and minor wounds, but mostly they triaged all the different people in mental health distress thanks to what they called poly-substance abuse. There was the naked guy screaming out like a baby tyrannosaurus, the girl having a nervous breakdown, the bearded gentleman terrified by the alien chanting in his headspace. It was amazing to see her work, yammering into her walkie talkie while circling from one bed to the next, corralling patients. She only made it forty feet on to the grounds before a giant dude in a black and white prison uniform tossed himself on the ground in front of us and began howling, berserk and high-pitched.

“The crazy thing is I can tell you right now that he’s on too much ketamine. And believe it or not, the right way to deal with that is to give him more ketamine,” Lyra told me, as she flagged down the on-duty medical staff. They roared over with their ATV and loaded him up. 

“They can actually respond to an emergency anywhere on the ranch in two minutes, any stage or anywhere out in the camping area. Two minutes.”

Lyra was intensely proud to be working for Shambhala, but I wondered if somebody behind the scenes had instructed her to take the local journalist for a ride. She was definitely showing me the festival’s good side. The official types were busy arguing about the forest fire and they wanted to make sure I had other things to occupy my time. In the darkness it wasn’t as obvious that the smoke had only gotten thicker over the course of the day. There weren’t any new updates on Twitter, so I’d texted Chris Armstrong. He hadn’t gotten back to me yet.

“What do you think Jimmy will do?” I asked. “Like if they tell him to shut it down, can he just ignore that?”

We were hiking through the darkness, and Lyra shouted back over her shoulder at me. “I wouldn’t want to be in his position. He’s got $5 million at stake.”

“Have you had people checking in for smoke inhalation or anything like that?”

“Oh, a couple. But come on, it’s Friday. How close could the fire get by Monday, really? I heard they surveyed the fire and it’s still not even heading in this direction.”

“It’s just so ominous, you know? Trying to enjoy a music festival while the province is on fire. If things get worse I’m going to have to file a story tomorrow.”

“I doubt that will happen.”

Lyra found a side-gate to the Fractal Forest, hugged the guy manning it, then ushered Steph and I through it. Pretty soon I was climbing to the top of a flashing neon temple, looking out over the surging dance floor towards the looming green face of Yoda. In one of my Star stories I’d quoted a raver saying the muppet Jedi was making his “bass face”. My brainspace throbbed from the swampy soundscape, the light show lasers making me squint. I hadn’t really slept the night before, laying in my RAV arguing with Andrew Stevenson, so I’d now been awake for over 30 hours. Lyra put her hand on the base of my bare back, her lips tickling my ear while she narrated the scene in front of me. I loved the smell of her breath.

“Any of these kids could go down at any moment, from an overdose or whatever, and they don’t even stop the music. The medical team just drives right on to the dance floor and collects the person,” she said.

“You should see them do it. They’ve got it down to an art now.”

Eventually we worked our way back to the Pagoda Stage, where silhouetted women hung sultry from hoops and the newly constructed architecture came alive with rainbows of vibrating energy. My body felt heavy but I was trying to have a good time, half-dancing with Steph. I knew this was probably my last chance to enjoy the festival before I put on my journalism hat tomorrow, working on my harm reduction feature with Dr. Brendan Munn. Lyra pulled out her camera and took some blurry pictures in the darkness, as we hugged and posed. I told them I was heading off to find a washroom, then headed back towards the vendors lined up near the entrance.

That’s where I found Kori. I’d first connected with them during the Human Library event three months earlier. It was an event at the Nelson & District Public Library where readers were invited to take out real people for 20-minute interviews. I was covering it for the Star and ended up writing a cover story about Kori, the first non-binary person I’d ever met. As I approached I saw they were wearing a tutu and rocking a fu manchu moustache, their breasts brazenly bared. Kori had recently had a kid who was now potentially going to become the first British Columbian to have a birth certificate without a gender, and appeared on Piers Morgan arguing about the use of the pronoun “they”. From what I understood, Kori planned to utilize the female aspects of their body for the parenting experience before going through a further transition. During our interview at the library I’d been surprised to find myself attracted to them, because they reminded me of my ex Cat. 

I’d never met anyone like them.

“So I was thinking if I did LSD, then it would end up in my breast milk, right? So if I squirted it in your mouth right now, would you get high?” they asked, looming six inches taller than me.

I considered this. It felt strange to be attracted to someone who seemed like they could dominate me physically. “That would make sense. It would be kind of like recycling your drugs.”

“Exactly. Do you want to try?”

Hanging out with Kori was a trip, and always got me thinking about my own relationship with gender. Ever since I was in elementary school, I’d always considered myself to be a female in a male body. For a long time I even wished I could become a girl. I understood girls, gravitated to them, befriended them, while boys were obnoxious and scary and gross. This information never proved to be especially relevant, because I ended up being comfortably cisgender and hetero, but meeting Kori had me reconsidering the complexity of it all. If our sexualities were all in our brain matter, was it really possible to imagine an identity that contradicted your body? Could I imagine being a woman, and everything that came with that? In my fiction I’d created female characters, conjuring everything from lesbian heartbreak to a tragic father-daughter relationship. What if I took it one step further, and imagined childbirth? Could I be like Daenerys on that funeral pyre, giving birth to her dragons? Could I be more than this ordinary dude, hopelessly vanilla? 

Lyra and Steph eventually caught up, and I introduced them to Kori. We danced together in the shadows, throwing our arms around each other like we were in a football huddle. I gazed around at their three beautiful faces, full of love.

“It’s like I’m high on you guys. I’m feeling this incredible energy because I’m here partying with three mothers,” I said, my mouth gaping open happily.

Kori raised their eyebrows at me, and I knew I’d fucked something up. I was so careful with the pronouns!

“Three parents,” they said. “Three parents.”

The Kootenay Goon