Happy birthday to the kittens!

two teenage kittens curled up on colorful blue blankets

Happy 5 month birthday to Khaaan! and Fizzbin, our adorable kittens! They are sisters from Quizzical Cattery in Seattle. Here they are curled up on fuzzy blankets on a chair this morning.

Fizzbin is more quick, impulsive, and energetic, while Khaaan! is more muscley and bides her time before leaping when they play. They also will both fetch a toy when they feel like it! They sleep together and groom each other very sweetly MOST of the time. And they are very affectionate, following us all over the house, sleeping under the covers, etc. I think Khaaan will enjoy a baby carrying sling based on my experiments with scarves tied across my chest. The only problem is 6am they start walking on my head but we will see if they can be trained out of that!

On a more frivolous note

I have invented a new word useful for all of our political struggles: Snackquity, for equitable access to delicious snacks.

My cats are letting me know about this important concept and asking me to be with them in community and solidarity.

two teenage siamese kittens in liz's lap in manual wheelchair, action shot of one cat leaping

Translating their frantic lunchtime meows:

How about a little mutual aid to OPEN THIS CAN OF CAT FOOD?

While humans get pastries, with their thumbs, we who have paws, just get the crumbs!

What do we want? SNACKQUITY!!! When do we want it? MEOWWWWW!!!

hilarious close up of a cross eyed kitten with its mouth open wide to the camera

Accessible Futures discussions

Earlier this week I went to the Metropolitan Regional Commission’s Accessible Futures conference and had a great time being in community with so many badass disabled folks & talking with people from all over the Bay Area who work in transit. The main track for the conference was on transit, and there were other discussions on housing, employment, and climate. I want to give a high level summary and maybe a few critiques along the way (shocker!)

The MTC was created by the California Legislature in 1970 to plan, finance and coordinate the Bay Area’s transportation systems, and now includes other regional issues, including housing and development. They get funding from many sources, including 700 million/year in bridge tolls, and distribute or help move over 1 billion per year to other agencies. 9 counties! Many cities and towns! I think 27 different transit agencies too!

In short, what they are, who they are, and what they do is super complicated!

I enjoyed hearing the presentation of MTC’s 4 year plan. Here is a PDF of it: https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-12/MTC-Coordinated-Plan-2024.pdf.pdf They sound committed to improving accessibility and are starting with a unified design for signage and wayfinding across all the regions and forms of public transit.

several powerchair users facing the conference speaker Dr victor pineda

Each section of the day’s discussions kicked off with a sort of panel of people with related expertise or experience. Often that was simply a short self-introduction and then the rest of the time was taken up by carrying the mic around to us in the ‘audience’ of other participants.

This worked well enough to get ideas flowing and people talking. But I would have liked to hear more thoughts and discussion from the panelists. Or if we were going to hear from everyone in the room, just do it round robin style and give everyone an opportunity to introduce themselves and their work or experiences, and to speak further. We had the time!

My impression of the most important points raised in the transit track:

1) Defragmentation of services
Reliable, same day scheduling, with single-seat rides, are a big goal.

Moving across “regions” is an expensive, confusing experience for disabled people on public transit. Paratransit users have many inequities in services. That is, rather than scheduling a ride a day or more in advance, then having to transfer to a different paratransit agency/vehicle because you are going from one city to another or one county to another. As an imperfect solution, having subsidized ride-hailing (Uber/Lyft/Waymo) rides can improve things quite a lot for disabled riders’ experiences.

2) Equitable fares.

Everyone should have reasonable costs to get from point A to point B. Paratransit users are still facing unequal costs depending on the region or municipality they are traveling in. We pay more, and we get less, or worse, service in many cases.

3) Respect for our time and agency.

This is somewhat nebulous, but many of the pain points I heard articulated from the crowd hinged on disrespect for our time.
* The timing on paratransit rides often doesn’t work, as drivers arrive early or late. A paratransit ride might be shared with someone else so scheduling is imprecise to start with and we can only book a goal for either pickup, or dropoff, time but not both.
* A blind person trying to get schedule information shouldn’t have to wrestle for 10 minutes with a PDF to find out when the next train is when a sighted person can glance at a display.
* A wheelchair or walker user gets off BART where there are elevators at both ends of the platform (19th St. Oakland I’m looking at you) from the platform to the concourse, but only one side has an elevator to the street, so if you pick the wrong one you have to traverse an entire city block underground, twice.

We have jobs, appointments, school, picking up our kids, and so on to get to. Wasting our time is huge inequity that makes it hard for us to be integrated into the life of the society around us.

4) Respect and communication in general

Many people described bad experiences that could improve through better and consistent training for all transit staff. This should also mean an accessible and usable complaint process that provides information and feedback to the person filing the complaint.

5. Removing barriers
– or continuing to remove them. For example increasing level boarding opportunities and ramps. Ramps don’t break (or at least, not as fast as lifts and elevators do.) Designing new infrastructure so that it doesn’t have obvious weak points. Multimodal points of communication for things like schedules, stops, and navigation for blind, Deaf, hard of hearing, Deaf-blind, IDD folks, and others.

6) Disaster planning

I got the sense that the conference runners felt that disaster planning was out of scope for our discussions about transit, while many participants had strong feelings it WAS a transit planning issue. We see over and over that when a disaster strikes, able bodied people evacuate while disabled and elderly people are left to die. And the responsibility for planning for these situations is left to us individually, who may have the fewest resources to turn to. Is this regional transit’s problem? Not them alone but it would be helpful of course if transit had more capacity to transport disabled people as seamlessly as it can everyone else.

Given those points we raised, how can our convening help or influence the decisions that city government, transit agencies, and others make in the future?

As the organizers or more precisely the various consultants they hired to facilitate the conference repeatedly asked, But what about NEXT STEPS? Look, obviously the next steps are complicated and to start making them we would need to understand the giant web of funding, regulations, paratransit agency procurement policies, and local politics of every governmental body in the Bay Area.

When you bring together a lot of disabled people to talk about things like transit and housing, you are going to get complaints and demands that may not slot into what is possible from the political landscape so this process needs to be heavily 2 way.

The wayfinding and signage consolidation plan actually sounded reasonably good to me, like, an obvious improvement for a huge number of people.

The most positive stories I heard from people were about paratransit moving to ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Feelings are very mixed as we are aware of the bad labor practices of these companies and the climate effects of continuing to commit to “car first culture”. AND YET. Everyone speaking up who mentioned these programs said that they were LIFE CHANGING. For the first time in someone’s life having access to on demand transportation that comes with some (even if inadequate) structure. We can assert that, I think, and also help to fight for the rights of the drivers to decent treatment and a living wage.

Some cities like Richmond and I think Hayward have programs where if you qualify for paratransit you can use it to take Uber (or Lyft?) which in THEORY includes a wheelchair accessible vehicle or WAV. You pay a small cost like $3 per ride, then the local govt. picks up some amount over that, and anything extra over a cap (say, $19) the rider pays out of pocket.

I shared many positive examples during the discussions and in personal conversations – here’s two I can remember:

1) For years I reported a particular very terrible and unsafe curb cut, in a busy part of downtown, via the SF 311 app. Finally, someone from SFMTA contacted me via email and I think we may have even had a call, and they shared a very fascinating spreadsheet with me, that listed all the curb cut complaints they have gathered, with details like cost estimates to fix, travel in that intersection, and the availability of alternate routes of travel. That act of sharing data — that should or couse be, I think, public data! — turned my frustration and anger to a feeling of wanting to collaborate and help, as well as understanding how the agency was making decisions about priorities.

2) Over the last several years (maybe 5 or 10, honestly I can’t be more precise) SF MUNI bus drivers have gotten better and better at handling wheelchair using and other disabled riders. I mean me, but also my observations of their interactions with other riding with me in the front of the bus. It used to be, out of a 4 bus journey across town, ie going somewhere and back with 1 transfer, one out of those 4 rides would try my very soul and I would end up sad and enraged at how I was treated (or how others were treated too of course). That has VASTLY improved and I’d put it more like 1 out of 30 rides being super enraging and maybe a few more having some point of normal frustration. It’s so, so much better. I don’t feel the drivers are angry and hostile, they don’t seem to be worrying too much about the time it takes to deploy the ramp, they don’t pass me up as often, and so on. Notably, they are way more proactive to get other riders to cram in or move if the front of the bus is crowded. And they have stopped (mostly) scolding and yelling at me about what they think I am supposed to be doing. (Like, where I wait to board the bus, or even, whether I SHOULD be riding the bus at a busy time of day.)

And, I also told stories one on one about my experiences actually trying to hail and use an Uber, Lyft, and Waymo WAV (wheelchair accessible vehicle). When it works, it works. When it doesn’t you have no recourse. I can take a (free, currently) Waymo WAV within the boundaries of San Francisco, despite the almost non-functional “app” – which lacks info about who is coming and where they are and their ETA — usually, they arrive in 20-25 minutes as for some reason they are always parked in Marina Green, a place I never go on the far side of town across maximum traffic. I can get a costly (price gouging disabled people) Uber, FROM San Francisco, in maybe 10-15 minutes pickup time, to go across the Bay to Richmond to visit my parents, but then I won’t be able to get back because their coverage just doesn’t exist (it will promise it’s connecting you with a WAV, then it doesn’t.) And, their rear loading vans put a wheelchair user in a very weird position, basically at a steep angle lying on my back since I roll up the ramp and then stay … on a steeply tilted ramp. It is unacceptably uncomfortable to me. (No staff of the transit agencies had ever heard these complaints?!) Lyft sometimes has an OK experience but mostly lacks coverage and availability. (Wild that these stories were news to anyone…)

This leads me to my next point which is that when you get a lot of us in the room to talk about this stuff you are asking us to talk about stuff that is actually traumatic. So the direction the discussion goes is often “freaked out trauma dump”. It is unavoidable.

We have to navigate that up front. It is a fairly intense request to ask people to process traumatic experiences (this comes up a lot with health care for example) and then to immediately come up with systemic solutions. They don’t really go well together, you need to acknowledge that dredging it up is painful (even harmful) and make some point of transition to talking about things in a different way. Not just like, some able bodied consultant facilitators going, “OK well enough with the list of grievances, how about the next steps?!” Dude. No.

Disabled, or let’s say, disability justice informed, organizers would not have been so unfeeling and would have held space for our intense feelings, our rage, our fear, our sadness, and hold out hope for solidarity and healing.

My final point, I think, is about the end of the conference which was framed as taking some of the “notes” or points from the 2 days of discussion, and using them to write a group “Resolution”. Like a political statement beginning, Resolved, we the undersigned, affirm our fundamental right and demand blah blah.”

There were so many problems with how this was approached.

First, I am sorry to be harsh, but the document given to us as the draft of the Resolution was like someone, or some AI, took an assortment of bullet points and made them into sentences with no logical relationship of one point to another, nothing given emphasis or weighted, and barely readable. I love a semi-colon, but Christ! It was a giant list in “prose” that as an English composition college professor I would have given a D or maybe a C-.

Then, this document was handed out to us as 24 pages of large print text , or a qr code where we could get a PDF. Then someone tried reading it out loud line by line asking for “edits” or commentary after each sentence.

That is not a viable way to edit or write a document collaboratively!!!

And I am not sure what anyone thinks would then happen to that document. No government official is going to wade through all that. At best some mayor’s office intern is going to pipe the PDF into an AI to summarize it in bullet points.

We could have each written (with assistance if needed) maybe 3-5 points we wanted included, put them on actual post it notes and shove it up on a white board. Not ideal access but better collaborative construction of ideas. And then giving us time to both contribute those points (after the conference!) and to have space to read and comment on any document created from them. For accessibility, it isn’t gonna happen in real time.

Then when Melissa sitting next to me (from TheARC) asked about plain language translation, the facilitators didn’t have a clue what that even meant.

I had serious, serious doubts about, well, what to me looked like LLM generated sections of the document. If I’m right about that, I think it was both unnecessary and inappropriate.

It was unclear what was going on, overall. A discussion, yes. A group construction of an advocacy platform? Feedback to the MTC on their plan? Suggestions for the next 4 year plan? In what way did this actually result in some sort of engagement in a democratic government process? (Unclear to me but I am a noob in this space so bear with me.)

It was kind of sad to see this fizzling end to the day, pulling out all the joy, momentum, and sense of connection I had felt compared to the rest of the conference which was very nice and conducive to good conversations. I have a slightly better idea of what kinds of advocacy and oversight and planning agencies and committees are out there, that I might join if I have the time (or pay) to work on these issues directly.

Overall, I’m so glad that I went and participated. The goal was to dream big and make connections, and I think we all succeeded in that even if it didn’t translate to a “political document” about what we “want”. I put “want” in quotes because, We don’t need a new manifesto to assert the rights we as disabled people already have in law.

powerchair user with BART totebag on the back of her chair, and her seated partner, looking at conference speaker victor pineda

Magical boarding school but not horrible this time

I enjoyed reading The Incandescent — for once, a magical boarding school book that isn’t about horribly creating child soldiers, with the accompanying abuse, neglect, and so on, but shows us adults who are caring for, protecting, nurturing, and centering the children. A great story & fun to also read this story from an adult point of view.

I am still in the middle of an interesting book called Traveling in the Third Reich, about tourism and visitors to Germany between 1919 and 1945. It is full of gossipy quotes from diaries and letters of artists, journalists, writers, diplomats, and plain old tourists. The Mitfords make an appearance – always fun. Anyway, it seemed relevant to get a sense of the different ways that different people perceived the country and its politics.

It is not exactly a restful book so to fall asleep I have been reading Baroness Orczy’s detective stories and another early series with a “middle class detective” Martin Hewitt. I am trying to like Hewitt and can appreciate why he was an answer to Sherlock Holmes but his stories are awfully boring.

No Kings protests today

So many great photos and videos coming out today from the No Kings protests around the U.S.! I want to save them here to remember part of the firehose of amazing images. It is not being really covered well by news media (yet). So also in case it is downplayed tomorrow I’d like to convey the impression I got today that this was huge all over the country. I also get pretty disgusted with things like seeing (right now) CNN have a headline like “Americans not sure what to think about Trump’s deportations”. Today is a very clear indication what Americans think!!!! Damn!!!

I also was very impressed seeing this wasn’t just a few big cities. It was smaller cities and small towns and in some of those I’m seeing reports that something like 1/5 of the town turned out to rally. That’s so powerful! And in the SF Bay Area I can see that while we had an enormous 100K+ gathering here (reports of up to 150K) that was simultaneous with all the towns around us haveing their own rallies and marches, 30K in San Jose, thousands more in Vallejo, Concord, Santa Cruz, and so on. It isn’t like everyone had to come to the nearest big city. It is just happening everywhere.

A selection from my casual feed on Bluesky, in no particular order,

Ann Arbor https://bsky.app/profile/marcofoster.bsky.social/post/3lrludtfhok2u

screenshot of a bsky post showing an overhead video of a huge crowd

Oakland, time lapse video, “Time lapse of Oakland no kings march eventually taking over both sides of Broadway from
@oaklandside.org. Many thousands of people.”

https://bsky.app/profile/brandon.insertcredit.com/post/3lrlyk4tlr22b

San Francisco (the beach gathering that spells out No Kings in people)
Video: https://bsky.app/profile/imanor.bsky.social/post/3lrlt2nrcqs25
Still image: https://bsky.app/profile/brucehinze.bsky.social/post/3lrlohrocbc2l

aerial photo of no kings spelled out with the letters formed by the bodies of a huge crowd of people

San Francisco, view down Dolores towards downtown: https://bsky.app/profile/leojos.bsky.social/post/3lrlttaf2ts2x

a large crowd streaming down palm tree lined Dolores St. in San Francisco, view over several city blocks

Chicago, earlier today estimated 80K, but I have seen higher numbers: https://bsky.app/profile/markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lrlppmtqok2e

https://bsky.app/profile/xplicitpolitix.bsky.social/post/3lrlsejv5mc2m

aerial shot of an enormous public square jam packed with people, this was the rally but there were 10 full city blocks of people marching behind this

And this video from Chicago showing along the lakefront, wow! https://bsky.app/profile/jimbrown.bsky.social/post/3lrlqjbkxjs2n

(here is a screenshot of a bit of that video)

screenshot of truly fucking enormous crowd along a huge length of chicago lakeshore drive

Philly, PA 80K-100K (from different reports) https://bsky.app/profile/rweingarten.bsky.social/post/3lrlsyq2ig22p

https://bsky.app/profile/krassenstein.bsky.social/post/3lrlsejjgmc2a

screenshot of a bit of aerial video of huge crowds filling several streets and plazas

a large crowd in front of speakers in a public square in philadelphia

Houston, TX

https://bsky.app/profile/aft.org/post/3lrlaa2jtis2r

photo from within a crowd of  baseball hatted houstonians with signs, likely everyone is covered in sweat

Pittsburgh, PA
https://bsky.app/profile/engelr412.bsky.social/post/3lrlkwfym3c2f

big crowd somewhere in pittsburgh

and more pittsburgh, (a fun thread! i like the “what a jagoff” sign)

https://bsky.app/profile/engelr412.bsky.social/post/3lrlkwfym3c2f

https://bsky.app/profile/kemek.bsky.social/post/3lrlnbju7qk2m

a more clear aerial shot of the crowd in front of an official looking building in pittsburgh

Lancaster, PA
https://bsky.app/profile/got-yarn.bsky.social/post/3lrlgjeybss2g

a moderately sized crowd filling a public plaza in a town in pennsylvania that i have never heard of

Salt Lake City Utah,
https://bsky.app/profile/luckytran.com/post/3lrlmjvzpxs2x

aerial view of a moderately large crowd

Charleston, SC

https://bsky.app/profile/chsindivisible.bsky.social/post/3lrlbdajbec2b

shot of people in a crowd on a hot day's no kings rally in south carolina

Olympia, WA

https://bsky.app/profile/ranaman004.bsky.social/post/3lrlmziphgk2r

another big crowd in front of a government building, in olympia

Dallas, TX. Police reports were of 10K protestors. These videos seem to me to show more than that.

https://bsky.app/profile/therickydavila.bsky.social/post/3lrlvgumz6s2u

https://bsky.app/profile/victinibcn.bsky.social/post/3lrltqe6czc2a

https://bsky.app/profile/lorennacleary.bsky.social/post/3lrlo2krekk24

https://bsky.app/profile/dallasnews.com/post/3lrljrilmvg2x

Fort Worth, “No kings, si vaqueros in Fort Worth” :

https://bsky.app/profile/moye.bsky.social/post/3lrlnz5xyfc22

men on horseback in a no kings parade in texas, us and mexican flags flying

Nashville, TN

https://bsky.app/profile/johnhaubenreich.bsky.social/post/3lrlcmrcc7k2e

a moderately large crowd in nashville tennessee

Kingston, NY, a town I have never heard of but which was one of the many “a huge percentage of the population of the town turned out” reports I saw today. “Sheriff said 5,000 attended! City has 24k people total”

https://bsky.app/profile/ariberman.bsky.social/post/3lrlr6bs3y22q

Bastrop, TX, “small town, large turnout of 700 10 am CDT”
https://bsky.app/profile/shelleytango.bsky.social/post/3lrlozrsjas2v

Austin TX: “Austin proceeds despite the evacuation of the TX Capitol at 1 pm in response to what TX DPS called a “credible threat” against lawmakers attending today’s rally, one of more than 1,800 across the country.”

https://bsky.app/profile/somewhereinatx.bsky.social/post/3lo5ethncdc2x

https://bsky.app/profile/candicebernd.bsky.social/post/3lrlwrbkcn224

https://bsky.app/profile/dianejohnson13.bsky.social/post/3lrlxymqwek2x

view of crowd in front of the capitol building from inside the crowd
view down austin's main downtown street, congress ave, of a big crowd marching with signs

San Diego, along the waterfront,

https://bsky.app/profile/dworkin.bsky.social/post/3lrljwvlomc2t

multiple city blocks of a very wide crowd along a waterfront street in san diego

Portland Oregon: “Thousands showed up today in Portland, Oregon along the waterfront”

https://bsky.app/profile/blondiebombshell.bsky.social/post/3lrlsd5brtc2r

jam packed street in portland, marchers with signs

Seattle, WA

https://bsky.app/profile/pnwgoodboy.bsky.social/post/3lrlok2qhkk2x

giant crowd in a huge public square and surrounding streets in seattle

Sacramento, CA

https://bsky.app/profile/dworkin.bsky.social/post/3lrljnyrics2t

another aerial shot of a big ass crowd this one in front of the california state capitol building

Minneapolis, this is so impressive and amazing since this march was actually called off because of the political assassination of State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and shooting of State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife (who are expected to survive).

“The day started with tragedy with political violence in MN and instead of being scared, neighbors SHOWED UP to stand together at No Kings Twin Cities. We packed the Capitol Mall all the way to the Cathedral. Estimate 80,000+ right now. So proud of our state.”

https://bsky.app/profile/indivistwincities.bsky.social/post/3lrlwe6decs2h

enormous, enormous crowd, aerial photo, in front of capitol building

Somewhere in Idaho, “Do you know how badly you have to screw up as a Republican to get this kind of turnout in IDAHO? ”

https://bsky.app/profile/heathersdesk.bsky.social/post/3lrlpmxykws2a

a large crowd in some public square in an unknown idaho town

I could just keep going, I didn’t even try to look up particular cities or look up the hash tag. This is just what came into the main Blue Sky feed that isn’t even people I follow or particularly tailored for me. Please feel free to add more in comments!!!!!

Blood on the Fog

This morning spent with the kittens, in bed, with coffee, doing the Sunday NYT crossword (though the quality has fallen off lately), tidying up until I find my notebook, my other notebook, my favorite pens, which takes a while since I have to tidy up everything I see along the way; then sitting in my reading chair again with kittens and writing and reading some old drafts and funny snippets of half-poems. Tried to work on “Generation ship” but instead worked on “Wry crips”, which feels close to done.

two siamese kittens asleep in my armchair  half on my lap, alongside laptop, books, and  open notebooks with a pen

As I look over my drafts and “finished” poems I have to keep repeating to myself: Not every poem is as good as my best poems. That’s ok! They can be finished and still count. It is always comforting to think that even my favorite poets have books where I only like 1 or 2 things or even just a few lines that stand out. But it is a horrible struggle and I feel faintly ill whenever I look at a poem that doesn’t go somewhere really or that feels Not Finished or like maybe I just went down the wrong path and should have thrown it all out. The perfect is the enemy of the finished. Maybe “good” or even “acceptable” or “I can see that I was trying something” can equal “DONE”.

Speaking of excellence tho my morning book after that is something spectacular. It’s Blood on the Fog by Tongo Eisen-Martin and I will be reading this book for a while / repeatedly with attention (which means it being a Pocket Poets edition is convenient). And I would really like to hear this guy read.

Did I know he was the current poet laureate of San Francisco? I did not! I just picked this up a while back as I riffled through many small books in a store somewhere in town and hit on this as instantly awesome from page 1 & then throughout. How is that assessment so fast? Like I can tell if something is gonna bore me or i’ve read something like it a hundred times.

* not prose
* not boring
* says something
* explodes in my mind a little
* language muscles flexing
* holographic
* riding a fucking tiger
* vivid images embraced
* conversational moments
* crams in a lot of thought

There is a thing I love that I don’t get to do enough which is when you get some poets talking, we all sound fucking insane-o in the best way and you can say oblique shit, heavy nonsense that is way up your own ass or your poem’s ass, and everyone understands. Oh yeah!!!!! Give me that sweet juice!!!!! that is how this book feels.

Some of these longer poems remind me of the best of Judy Grahn (Like A Woman is Talking to Death, the long poem about the mother dressing the bride as if sending to war, etc. ) in that they talk direct, they are in the world and current, not wearing some kind of weird hat, have a political awareness that is developed and centered and has compressed rage into language and action and yet also is free to range and roam.

“Will I be tied face to face with the country I murder”


Hand over my friends, Lord

Lord, I think that I am going to die in a war

That hit me hard. this whole poem is fucking great.

waiting for the cornfield to shrug
we are forgetful
but your ancestors nevertheless

slowing down the poem to the speed of sweet light

This is just little bits to tempt you to read more by the way.

and yes,

It's a simple matter
this revolution thing
To really lie to no one
To keep nothing godlike

(yes please. fuck, i’m so tired. )