ignite after burning

a horny and contemplative missive for cancer season, plus the beginnings of a 2024 full assed revision of my 2020 half assed disabled prepper guide and some musings on post internet disability justice

hey tiny people in my computer. how you doing?

it’s hot as fuck and only one of my ACs are working after a lot of water came gushing from my upstairs neighbor’s bath through the bathroom ceiling light- the light works, but some of the circuits in the kitchen outlets seem to be fried. two nights ago I moved all my living room furniture around til 2 AM anyway. I continue to be grateful as fuck that my life is completely different than it was last year when I was grieving and slowly life functions critical from being in an isolation chamber in massachusetts.

this stack is an extra long triple decker like the one my mom grew up in. it’s got little titties and a full butt. enjoy.

fun sidenote fact first: “In its oldest roots, the word care means to call out, to yell. Even, to scream.”- Susan Raffo, “on the evolution of care.” interesting essay, still reading it.

some other notes: that story of M Téllez’s I was a big fan of a few post’s back, you can now buy a sweet print version of here.

crips for e sims for gaza is still going, still going, donations for e sims are still needed. i watch the ones I’ve personally bought in the app on my phone, getting used by heroes trying to survive and go to school, 5 MB here, 10 GB there. I’ll never meet these folks but it feels like watering survival every time I top up the e sims a ton of people might be hotspotting. this comic by @redgoldsparks echoes how it feels for me and is also a helpful explainer that addresses some of the “I bought one and it never got used for a while, what happened?”

however, Mirna El Helbawi of Connecting Gaza/ Connecting Humanity, the place we work with that sends the e Sims to people in Gaza, just posted an urgent update that with the recent drop in donations, they may need to close in 2 weeks which would be heartbreaking. every single image of torture and devastation and real news that got out of Gaza in the last ten months came via an e Sims. please keep boosting and donating.

Staceyfest is next weekend in Oakland, CA, check it out if you’re there. I won’t be physically because I am still banking my energies post COVID.

I will be in Melbourne/ Naarm in October doing a residency at They Swarm, TextaQueen’s disabled QTBIPOC arts residency in progress and doing some finding my biofam stuff. Texta, Leah Manaema Avene and me will also be doing this workshop on how to both create an access rider and an ethical use rider (around land sovereignity, money, anti Zionism, anti fuckery) you can use in negotiating the terms of your labor as an artist. come if you’re a disabled/BIPOC artist in Naarm/ Melbourne or if you’re on the planet via Zoom.

1. prepping for the post internet cripoverse

I’ve been on this for a while but I will repeat: a lot of the modern DJverse came out of disabled people hacking social media to connect and organize with each other. for the past fifteen years I’ve been in crip spaces online and used them heavy. and yes that’s a cliche in every Y2K Bell and AT&T ad about how the internet would bring us all together. but disabled people specifically leaned on social media heavy because of how fucking isolated we are in our beds, the small town with cleaner air we moved to 4000 miles from anyone we know, not knowing any other disabled people locally or all the ones we do are racist.

for the past 15 years so much of what I care about in modern DJ movement happened in those spaces. we - and by that I mean people who had been left out of disability rights culture or did not see much merit in trying to fuck with it, as well as people who didn’t identify as disabled but were- found each other and built a whole lot of shit. ideas, pill shares, access hacks, crowdfunds, actions, conversations, relationships.

nobody I knew trusted the platforms we were on, but for a brief long wild time, we could occupy them. there was always trouble, there was always shit the group got deleted or someone ratted us out to the fb cops. but the spaces still sort of mostly worked. I could post and be part of a 250 comment and person conversation. we got used to organizing happening fast, even when it happened on crip time. other communities of course used this too, much of 2006-2015ish femme online communities that don’t exist anymore were vibrant there.

in 2020 twitter worked. in 2024 it kind of mostly doesn’t. sitting on my porch with my friend on a hot fried pea soup july night, hidden behind the bushes, we talk about the climate crises of the week- did you hear a bridge got stuck open because it was so hot? yeah it was in the bronx, they shot water at it to try and cool it down. did you hear the mississippi flooded? a lot of st. paul is under water. she asks me how I know the things I know, I tell her mostly it’s via friends on discords and friends who live in a place and text me photos, otherwise I wouldn’t. “it’s amazing how I’m not seeing any of that on my timeline, or the news” they say. instagram is full of ads and no one who posts an article on facebook gets any hits. in canada you are legally banned from posting links to news articles on facebook.

so this made us think, how will DJ organize when social media finally gives up the ghost, or, more likely, becomes so much of a law of diminishing returns that we just drop the rope? when this kind of typing from bed connectivity has been such a mainstay of everyone pulled off over the last decade and a half? when we are isolated now more than ever and as FLIRT spreads like wildfire even through masks and distance, as we brace ourselves for a possible H1N1 outbreak amidst a complete videodrome erasure of any public health tracking and policy. no masks no mas.

I don’t love it. I think back to shit I was a part of before modern internet- the psychiatric survivor show on the community radio station on Monday nights. underground newspapers, painstakingly mailed. pen pal networks, the ad I put in the back of maximum rocknroll as a 17 year old depressed slut. all that stuff is important to remember and still vibrant and yet part of me chafes at the idea of going back to full analog.

I think about how the only working online community I am a part of wholeheartedly now is discord, and it’s great but it’s not wide open to someone new and wanting to learn, you have to be invited in.

i wanted everyone in. i wanted masses. i wanted enough of us everything could change.

it did, it didn’t. masses aren’t safe anymore and mass reach is not available the same way.

but still I think on it.

2. the beginnings of a full-assed prepper guide for every kind of pandemic and emergency, revised for 2024, or at least some reflections

lookit this cute little vintage google doc

back in february 2020, my lover at the time was a STEM queer and was scanning science twitter for covid news and said, there’s already community spread, this is going to be really bad. I went out and silently bought bags of rice, lentils and water storage containers. right after beyond survival’s 3 stop initial in person tour which would become the only in person launches Ejeris and I would be able to do, I ignored what I was supposed to be doing that day and wrote the following missive from a snarl of blankets.

half assed disabled prepper guide blew up really fast. it’s kind of a historical document now. scrolling through it feels tender. we had so many more resources before hyperinflation and the systematic starving out of our nervous and immune systems over the last four years. we knew so little. we were so more less worn down. so many people weren’t dead yet. we had no idea how surreal everything would be four years later. look at all that mutual aid. look at all that earnest knowledge sharing. look at that earnest belief that together we could kick covid’s ass. look at that completely not-resigned acceptance that no, there will be collective gaslighting and abandonment and so many of us will get covid 4, 5, 6, 7 times.

the future is disabled and it sucks, y’all.

four years later, two days past an assassination attempt and looking towards the fall and elections, looking at early warnings online about bird flu, in the middle of heat emergencies and floods, i learned a lot. these are my early addendums and things I would add or change if I was writing it now,

screenshot of a google map of “apocalypse south berkeley” a map Stacey Park Milbern I and friends made after Fukushima in 2011

map your scenarios in advance, then evolve. what are the threats you’re most worried about?  if they happen, what’s your plan?

the thing about plans is people think, oh, you make one and you just do it, sounds nice, that doesn’t work for me.

no. not only can you not plan for everything and you will make a plan and then it will be time for something completely different and you will have to scrap or evolve your plan. maybe that’s a specifically disabled planning methodology, I don’t know, probably. I told someone recently, yes I make one and five year plans but every single time things come up and break them, it’s in where the planning meets the record scratch that any ‘success” comes.

if there’s anything 2020 and beyond showed us it’s that we need to be nimble. but any degree of planning still helps, it doesn’t mean you have to keep it in lockstep. gas, water, food, masks, money, relationship and disinfectant and a communications plan and network always help.

what i learned since 2020:

water is primary- people die of thirst before they starve- so I emphasized it in my guide. but my water system didn’t fail, neither did utilities (I lived in a northwestern city with a decent grid, not a rural area and the grid mostly stayed up). the water where I live now does get regularly fucked up, so I have stored water. part of prep is dealing with anxiety, “logical” or not. so I still would have a two week supply in the house even if I lived someplace else. I also have ways to cook and heat water if my power grid goes down (multiple, a way to build fire and a rocket stove.) I love my rocket stove for how little and light she is and how fast she works, but i might get an old fashioned coleman two burner because propane is easier to find.

5-7 gallon storage containers of water are great for long term storage but are heavy as fuck (7 gallons is 58 pounds) and inaccessible for me to lug. it’s fine to buy some gallons you can grab easily too. you need to empty the big containers, scrub them (with a little bleach) and rinse them out at least once per year before you refill or else you have water that will taste gross and make you sick.

shit i needed the most in 2020-21 that could be tough to find: n95s, kn94s, elastomeric masks , rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, bleach. toilet paper, fresh produce, protein (eggs, chicken, cheese.) shit that didn’t exist then that I would try to get: covid tests, either RATs or one of the home PCR readers. friends in the Bay where FLIRT is rampaging report that there’s a RAT shortage at the walgreens.

things I might plan to stock up on now: gloves, water, masks, storeable protein, gas, comfort food, covid tests (rapids or matrix).

i bought a ton of lentils but I ended up eating a lot more pasta and frozen pizza and chips. baking mixes and comfort food were important.

one 50 pound bag of rice lasted two people and friends almost 2 years. be careful about pests in an open bag.

I made a lot of fucking immune boosting stew and i got sick of it but i leaned into routine. I made a rotation of the same nine meals for long periods of time.

you can have human contact by parking in your friend’s yard and talking to her on your phone while you look at each other when you really can’t risk any contact.

you get bored and you get weird. your ability to concentrate will go in the toilet. you maybe can’t read hard shit right now.

routine is helpful because it’s about morale and almost paramilitary discipline to get through your days. and, you also need to do things other than it sometimes.

be cautious on your reliance on tv or other substances to disassociate. use it as a tool. know when you need to walk away from it.

you may be spending a lot of time in your car. have water, toilet paper, sanitation supplies / wipes and snacks in there.

lessening my need to go out of the house/ lessening contacts helped. a siege mentality helps.

eventually the siege is forever and forever evolving and you have to figure out a different way.

**

one of the best things about the past four years is seeing how much more disabled prepper guides are out there and shared science. I’d still love a functioning infrastructure but it’s mindblowing to see all the prep the last four years have wrought. this and this and this and this, five million guides to survival. disabled Black and brown poor people have always been prepping outside of “prep” communities, the past four years just cemented it.

3. ignite after burning

image of Kali idol from Kalighat temple, Kolkuta.

(tw for discussion of kink and also brief mention of a past abusive relationship w sexual assault and attempted murder in it, in the fifth para.)

***

talking with a friend the other week about kink communities and the places of care she’s found within them, I said, even though I have been kinky since I was seven, grew up into a 90s AIDS culture babe in new york not cosplaying 90s leather culture but in it, official “leather culture” has at best been semi accessible to me and sometimes never and often my reaction to it has been, meh.

I’m happy for friends who tell me stories about the mentorship and learning they got easy within leather, the peers, the kinship. but for me, it kind of never came through. not formally, anyway. I didn’t go to unholy harvest or cons. the shit I learned and got was more in doorways and futons on the floor and alleyways and corners of nightclubs and my sleigh bed in my backshack coming and going with other BIPOC ND cripple freaks, or alone in bed with my fine mind and whoever wanted to take a chance and ride the tilt a whirl.

at first shit was just so white. then it was like, you assume I’m the vision in your head you jack off to of a mean (cis) femme top without ever asking if I agree or if it’s what I want. then I was sick to death and walking through the memory tunnels waist deep in spasming water and doing landscaping off the books and lying down after I walked home dragging my granny cart from my gigs in Drake’s mom’s neighborhood.

then and always it was like I don’t know who these people are, why the fuck would I give them my devotion or let them top me, either both. then it was access, I can’t start the party at 11 and there’s so many fucking stairs at the palace. access like, I can’t small talk, I just want to take your pants off lol, because sometimes knowledge and communication through touch memory and sensation is easier than talking, ie ND. of course i went into semi accessible spaces anyway, of course I went to the palace when it existed. but i’m talking about the limits of some proposed sexual utopias, and the sex utopias we make in our minds out of other minded desire that don’t make it into the gospel of mainstream kink.

at least one of my exes first hated and then got obsessed with old guard. I do love and believe in protocol, but I also believe in breaking it when it breaks me, when my body and mind never fit into it in the first place. i like the compression of a corset showing me where my skywalker body is and pushing those titties up and also down, and I like protocol as do-right, but only when i can bring my fist down on the jenga when it doesn’t hold me or you up the way we actually need.

and there’s the notation that my second top raped me as a 20 year old and tried to kill me. i got away on a greyhound and then the people united put him on a greyhound out of town after he stole the money from the cashbox to buy his drug of choice, after doing nothing when he called me 54 times from the infoshop landline alternating honeysweetie with I’m going to kill you bitch. that was private, a man’s business, nothing for them to do anything about. I tucked that away in a memory box out of town for years, only opened in the last decade. did put the frost on the pumpkin of a supposed kink utopic. there’s a echoing canyon chasm between the desires of a young bulletproof femme disassociated and hot thighs in the street, and homesafe.

***

care is not soft. I would get devotion as a neck tattoo except that there would be too many assumptions that I give my devotion easy. I give my devotion generous but oh so selective. I get on my knees for my people, for myself. I fight for what’s mine and by that I do not mean a possession of ownership of a dead object. I am a dedicated lover to the writing, to the dead that crowd my altar, to the lovers and friends I choose. I love them on crip time and in secret language messages. my devotion is crip. it comes from how I am earning secure attachment to myselves, to my autistic selves. it’s about time.

***

it’s been 15 years this year since I said I wouldn’t fuck or love anyone who wasn’t disabled anymore (well, mostly) and the experiment is going well and well, interesting. most of what I come to is esp in the heady crush blush early days of rapture you’re just like me, finally- i found bliss but I also, we also assumed so much. i leaned on my psychic. my mars in pisces made everything dissolve. care became osmosis, assumed, soft. at first it was a steady beat appreciated, then sometimes it became waterlogged delirium where mold grew. I grabbed the queen of swords to get me the fuck out. we prize interdependence but codependence can grow easy at the stem if you don’t fertilize and keep it dry right, especially in a care starvation austerity dry landscape. especially when we hole2hole, the underending unfed need opens up like mimosa plant pussy at the slightest possible touch.

I’m a high priestess straight 2 in numerology, virgin godx for virgin godx always. it’s kind of post automatic access intimacy to something more baklava layered and unassumed but with a complex vocabulary of gaze, touch, question, statement and intent. not merging and nothing automatic.

if I grab on I want to grab onto you hard and hold your chest hard so we both can know where we are. hard not like hard femme that I still am and that also I laid down walls that were protective but got brittle behind, i thought i could never let anyone see or feel the snail soft without collapse or disgust at the slime. hard like a hard edge, a well kept knife, a variety of tools in a roll. the texture of hands that know work and can trace one finger down a spine to know you.

**

I’m in a long term project of wrestling with the real and what is the real and what is the fake. wrestled with myself in my sheets about is my sex and my love unreal, am I cheating myself not to feed myself the meal most seem to want to prix fixe get fed. but I’m not starving just because I give myself the luxury of being selective. in fact, what a luxury to believe we have the right to be choosy, not just the right to grovel grateful for any scrap of offal or crumb.

survivor bodies are both hyper real, the realest, and everything that happened to us and everything we did to come back to it is said to be unreal. the tunnel of colonization is one big trip to gaslight manor. our journey back and forward as we move through time is to not just claim, but be able to have the luxury of exploration. of what is our real.

**

service is a loaded word for crips. goddamn we need it and it’s also the most dangerous place in our lives. where the violence comes. not just one way. i want a world beyond capitalist service and underpaid care indentured service. i want to give it up very badly. i exist in the interstitial.

i started writing from the dark room subasement of my underbody. missives sent out in the dark as prayer missile. ritual before and after writing.. so much possibility in the obscurity, no fame and everything riding on getting it right. in the hot light of climate crisis summer manic sun exposure it’s harder to get there. but there is where I want to get. in my writing and my sex.

**

patrick califia ( a writer who gave me a lot as a young freak and emerging writer and beyond, a person known to have done problematic shit) once wrote the only way he was able to write macho sluts by telling himself he would set it on fire after he wrote it so no one would see it.

sometimes these things that are the most true, or one kind of the hardest kind of true, we have to get them out of us by telling ourselves we’ll destroy them after. they exist in the moment between the flame inside and the curl of flame that burns them.

sometimes writing crip or nd body/ mind/ sex/ desire stories are like that.

**

last week my shoulder caught fire as I was receiving cupping from a massage therapist I trust and adore. we were going over time because she liked me and wanted to, we were using the cbd oil, the cups were sucking, she said just four more, everything was feeling great, then all of a sudden time was slow, i smelled burning, i heard her voice screaming oh my god, I heard mine yelling what is happening, am I on fire right now and then water was being thrown on me. she apologized a million times. got me a cool cloth, juice and wound cared it up. said i could sue her. i said no no. sometime shit just happens.

I got a whole wound care crew together of friends to help me clean and rebandage it. a week later I have thick paper new healing skin like the crust of a beehive. I rub her daily to help her be the best kind of sensitive.

there’s always risk in receiving and sometimes even with those we trust the risk there can be a stupid accident.

“we live in continual risk, and tonight we come home.” said patty berne in the opening act of the first ever sins show I went to.

I don’t know about home anymore in the palmy new outbreath way of shit I’m gonna find other disabled people I felt in back in 2008 when I first experienced those words.

but where’s home but these bodylands. where is home but the place where I write these blazing arrows and send them off to you, whoever you are. what’s home but a place of continual discovery.

notes: no public events for a minute, working and writing on my books and enjoying the “rest now before the shit hits the fan later this year” of this astro season but stay tuned for some super exciting annoucements.

stay in it, stay alive, stay true,

xx

Leah