community – Composite

DCC open mic night

November 15, 2025November 15, 2025 Liz Henry

First of all I am vastly sad that Alice has died. Hilarious, witty, insightful, compassionate, she was amazing to talk with. I admired her more than I know how to express for her writing and work making spaces for us all to be heard, and I will miss her and am aching for our community and all the people who were her nearest and dearest ones. My heart feels like it is just flying through space somehow in a spaceship alone as I think about her and about death and mortality.

It sounds like while Alice was living her last, the DCC open mic night that she funded from the Disability Visibility Project was happening. I wish she had not died and that she had been there. I wondered why she wasn’t there but didn’t want to bother her and didn’t know she was critically ill at that moment.

Well, I am going to just do my post and write up my notes from the wonderful community event that was a strong manifestation and celebration of disability culture. It was very clear that sparks were flying around the room and through our screens as people were excited and artistically charged up by everything we were hearing! I think that writing about others’ work from last night is a good way for me to honor Alice.

Our open mic was hosted by local luminary King Lotus Boy. There were about 40 people attending online and 20 or so in person in the space. All three of our founding leaders of the DCC, Emily, Mika, and Dagny, were there to make things go smoothly and they were fabulous hosts as always! A note, when I am not sure if people have a public presence online as a writer or artist, I will just put their first name and not link. (But if it’s you, and you want me to name you and link, let me know.)

an instagram post flyer for the hybrid open mic with a photo of king lotus boy in full drag looking magnificent

First up was Max L. who read a delicately structured piece called “Shine”, a sort of battle of images of light shining out through holes and (abusive) people trying to plug up those holes, about ARFID and neurodivergence, the food forced on them trying to plug the light burning through their mouth. The complex web of these images worked so perfectly as they kept building and circling to convey the complex experiences of being beleagured and suffering, while being so powerful and fierce inside, and coming to be able to live & shine in that power. I am not sure how this poem looks on the page but I was thinking of it as a prose poem – a difficult form to sustain and Max pulled it off.

Leche read a beautiful poem of houses falling apart, houses with no safety net, of longing for complex webs of care and love, passion and comfort, basically, a queer artist polycule. I wish my notes were better on this one, but I was vibing. Hell yeah!

Fern was on the signup, but didn’t make it. I hope to hear from Fern next time!

Avra showed up for us reading two poems that kind of snuck up on me as they started off feeling a bit prosaic, built up momentum steadily, and then hulked up to pack a punch. The first one started off with cornfields and maybe moving cities and I got the impression of a family and then it kind of became about being refugees and it was carefully not delineating exactly what from, but I certainly thought of the trans migrations I am watching my friends go through now. “We need to believe there’s less evil here.” That was a great line that made my nostrils flare.

Avra’s second poem called Walk This Way hit me the same way as it was a description of her walking with her granddaughter and noting her toe-walking and then going back to her own grandmother who I think raised her, and criticized her, then talking about her own experiences of ambulation class (at which I had to give a little beatnik snap of recognition… how many times I have had to do gait training PT over the years!) This wound up to the start of that amazing punch I mentioned — The poem talked about the criticisms she (the narrator of the poem) faced of her own disabled gait as a child. (“These days, grandmas know to keep that shit to themselves”) And we returned to the talking books she listened to at her grandmother’s knee and how those talking books made her a poet. It worked as a story, it worked as musing across generations, and it got across that disability culture exists — that we “do” cultural transmission across generations, that it’s a living thing that we can decide to change, like Avra (or the narrator of the poem if it isn’t plainly autobiographical) decides not to be a bitch to her granddaughter. These were poems that were often plain talking — as you can see in the lines i noted and quote here — in a way that worked well as poetry, and that stick in my mind.

Masha Aleskovski then got up to the mic. She talked a bit about TBI and hemiplegia and then sang two poems – her own songs and her composition. Her ethereal voice echoing through the cultural center and the atrium, about moonlight, trees, spirit – just incredible. I need to go into all caps because THERE WAS ALSO MEOWING IN ONE SONG. The meowing and howls and inchoate calls to the sky worked so well done with her gorgeous voice. (clear to me, classically trained) Everyone was so blown away listening to this spiritual night fairy taking us to the fucking stars!!!

Alex, from online, then sang us a very sweet folk song with ukelele (or was it a guitar? my memory fails) The song was called “If the world was ending” by Julia Michaels. There was a big round of applause for this touching song!

Nicole B. then read a scene from her novel, Creating Love, which is about a woman who is a wheelchair user and creates an embodied AI, maybe a cyborg, I think to be her lover. In the scene we heard, our narrator was about to take Edmund on a flight, and was coming up to the TSA checkpoint deeply worried that they would catch that Edmund’s ID was faked. This might traumatize Edmund badly! The TSA agents start to question Edmund. The narrator realizes she needs a distraction quickly.

At that point I started to laugh hard because it was clear what was about to happen!! The narrator cripped out fully , acting confused and loud about how she could not stand up for the xray and demanding to know what was going to happen and then I think also started dropping things and spasming. (I can’t remember, because I was giggling so hard.) The TSA agents assume that Edmund is the airport attendant wheeling her to her gate (despite him having a boarding pass!) Edmund then gets offended and says “I’m not her attendant, she’s my girlfriend!” While the narrator has a lot of emotions about this since he never called her that before, and the TSA agents die of guilt for assuming things.

It is very hard to pick a scene from a novel and read a short excerpt to a crowd and have it both make sense, and not be boring as fuck, and I know this because I have been to a shit ton of literary readings. This reading was perfect – clear, entertaining, and enticing. Nicole is one to watch here, because this novel is fire. The room burst into applause and everyone started demanding where can they buy this book. We all felt deeply invested in what happens next and what in the world happened before as well. The novel is finished, but not yet published as Nicole is just starting to talk with agents.

TextaQueen then read us two poems and kindly posted their full text in the chat as well. The first poem, return, describes a cameraderie from behind glass. Maybe a hospital stay, maybe a train trip, maybe a space ship, – maybe just commuting to work in a weird metal box hurtling forward at 60 miles an hour — it is left beautifully ambiguous. Though I saw most clearly, being home, with chronic illness and in protection from illness, the extra isolation that came to us with COVID. The glass of screens and the cameraderie of the chat, the longing and loneliness.

group chat alert vibrates
somewhere under blankets pets pills
phone as hard to find as spoons
our connection untied to consistency
we send each other ease we wish to feel
our choirs meet on screens
wormholes to let us warble
there is no path to light
no A to B to Z

This poem worked well aloud and holds up well on the page as well. I love a densely packed poem that fucks with language and structure! And yes — take us to space, please. The loneliness and isolation that is part of a lot of disabled people’s experience, taking us to a deep human longing for space travel, freedom, and the hope alien contact, crops up a LOT.

Texta’s second poem explored everyday experience (drinking some boba tea, looking at a flower, going to work) but the boba is like, deeply weird as a physical experience and the flower is like, a sort of crawly robot bug and goes on the bus with her to work and crawls inside other people’s brains. Texta is a virtuoso at getting embodiment and emotion and particular vision — a visionary – into the poem.

my clever friend returns to me
sits up on my shoulder
reporting its research
whispers clicks and whistles
slides back inside my shirt

if only i understood its language

Justin Archuleta then read a poem that was structured like a quiz, a multiple choice quiz of him quizzing himself and speculating about in what ways his disfluent speech or stuttering is impairing and how it is or isn’t disabling or being disabled. His exploration was deeply thoughtful, viscerally described, I could almost taste the dry glass and panic, the unpredictability, and appreciated his soul searching. You can read this poem online “Is Your Stuttering a Disability” in Carte Blanche magazine.

Deidre then performed / told an ASL vision-story. She mentioned Adrienne Maree Brown in connection with this story but I didn’t catch how she was involved and I think the story was by Deidre. It describes the year 2050, the smoke and crisis, but then bounces to a 2050 with clear skies, beautiful trees, seeds in the ground, picking a cherry and popping it in her mouth, a child asking her, how did you survive the hottest years on record back in 2025? Graceful and expressive, she painted this future world we could have, so close, almost within our reach, and I felt deep sadness at the state of the world but also hope that we can work and fight for our visions of a better future.

Ayelet sang a song, about the ocean, unmasking, hiding and then “coming out”, the awareness of developing trust, looking deeply into others with understanding and wanting to know more about a person. It was a love song of neurodivergence and queerness!

I’ve lived my whole life
Hiding the signs
Hiding my light
Until my voice takes flight
Then I’m alive
Then I’m alight
But somehow in the silence you and I

I read two poems, one my poem to Mel Chua and all of the community around her in her last year or so, online and in person. I miss Mel very much. She is on my ofrenda with Beth, Eno, Stacey, and so many others. I also read a new poem called Wry Crips (which is a call out to Patti Overland) but isn’t about her, it’s more about that experience when you meet another disabled person’s eyes and share a look or a nod and you feel seen and feel in community.

A bit from my poem to Mel, “To put it in context”

as you move
to a beat
unhooked
from the sun
the lines of juice
& power
trace that
space ship
harness
to your body-pilot
cockpit,

limit
& cradle,
sustained
and fed
the fierce
light in your
hands
that roll out
in manifesto
cadence – as
in the club
a dancer

caught
by other dancers’
arms, flexible
listeners
staunch
as redwoods
check
the screens’
sight lines,

I cannot help but think of Alice reading these lines and I hope she was surrounded by love and had a peaceful exit. As Mel did.

Ash was our last performer with storytelling and comedy, talking about unhinged things they have said. (I actually missed a bunch of this – I had to pee – sorry!)

There were more people on the list but we had to wrap up the event.

Themes running through much of the work I heard last night — lots of embodiment, complexity, longing, love, and compassion — those science fiction themes coming through SO strongly – and centrally, how can we communicate our perspectives and experiences across a distance that can be so alienating. We have stories and novels and fiction to convey inner lives and complex experiences, we have poetry and song to anchor our emotions and thoughts from embodiment to language – And we turn strongly to speculative elements, surreal, fantastic, or science fictiony threads to push out the ways that things do not (have to) make SENSE or the ways we are alienated and alien (or that others are, from us). I think of the ways we experience dehumanization for example in that TSA line or in encountering any institutional setting, and how disconcerting it is, how hard to convey. Putting your cyborg/AI frankenstein lover into the TSA line with you really hammers it home. It means a non disabled reader can catch a glimpse of that experience and ways that we have to cope. Including a dry and bitter humor and sense of the absurd, that I always appreciate seeing in others.

This was a long post but I wanted to honor all the performers and people who showed up last night as I think of Alice and my other friends. Thinking of Alice writng and talking about her own death (https://time.com/6960765/alice-wong-muscular-dystrophy-essay/). I am thinking of Freddie Baer who just died this week and the work we will do to preserve and honor her work as well. I remember going to work on Alice’s very early Wikipedia article in 2016? 2018? and fixing it up with whatever I could find. It is so important for us to document our work and existence. Love you all. Over and out!

A day in the life of Capp St. Noisebridge

January 16, 2022January 16, 2022 Liz

Noisebridge moved into the new space, what, a year ago or so? Something like that. Because of the pandemic, we have been a little slow settling in, and this winter with the rain and Omicron surge, there wasn’t a ton of activity – a solid core of regulars working to get the space organized, the wood shop even more functional, the giant laser cutter in working order, and so on. I spent Friday and Saturday afternoon at the space and thought I’d report on my day today! In case you are worried about my pandemic surge risk taking I will mention everyone at the space is vaccinated and I stayed outside 95% of the time and wore a well fitted n95 mask!

Friday in between work meetings I cleared an enormous load of junk and trash to the front porch, listened to Claus’s vision of what might happen with the space, emailed an electrician for a quote, arranged for trash pickup today and a plumber to come snake the clogged drain. 272 Capp was some sort of auto repair place for a while, with a big concrete driveway and a rollup door you could drive through. The drain in this “front porch” driveway area has been clogged since the move-in, and we’ve gone through a few attempts to lever up its rusty iron grate to no avail.

First off me and TJ chatted with a guy I know I’ve met before, James, who is a science fiction writer, who let me photograph his amazing “battle jacket” covered in patches for punk bands and nerd things, stopped by and talked about his plans for lenticular printing. I gave him some tips on cheap options for rubber rollers (like for printmaking). Wonder if we will see some nifty lenticular print workshops at the space?

james with patch jacket

The trash pickup guys were intrigued and said they might come back another day for a tour and will tell their boss, who would like the idea of a free workshop.

The heroic plumber who showed up today chiselled and hammered the hell out of the grate, got it unstuck, snaked and hosed out the drain several times (absolutely disgusting smelling motor oil storm drain situation! ) The plumber is now a friend of Noisebridge and I think is going to show up to take a welding lesson.

I took on the top half of a plywood laser-cut obelisk that was in the trash pile (rained on all winter) as my project. It is now spray painted with spare cans of paint & I’m going to add hinges to one panel so it becomes a cabinet, slather it in marine varnish, and put a solar LED light inside.

Justin from Technical Underground spent hours building a giant planter box for the front porch – totally off the cuff out of scrap lumber. It still needs some sealant inside, a bottom shelf, casters so we can wheel it around the patio, paint, a coat of polyurethane, then I’ll fill it with the herbs and succulents that are now in some janky plastic pots.

Have a look at things coming out of our horrible car repair shop storm drain (drains to Mission Creek, I’m afraid)

heroic plumber

Meanwhile people were coming into the space and doing amazing mysterious things. Some 3-D printer stuff was happening, a guy showed up with a box of electronics stuff and god knows what he was up to, someone tried out sewing machines upstairs, a dude showed up with fancy lumber to build himself a desk –

One of the most hilarious interactions went like this, a dude riding by on a bike stopps & yells in, askking if we are open. Yes! Yes we are. “Do you have any electrical engineers here?” Yes probably. Maybe! What’s up. “Can I bring this, well, I have this BOX, I got it at an auction and it’s like, this 80s bullshit device that does something with your Aura, and electricity, and I want to know what it actually *does*.” Ok well how big is this box and can i just say right off, that you cannot leave it here but that does sound … hilarious” “It’s got a little carrying case! I can bring it and show it!” “Bring it a little later like 5 or 6pm when a lot more people will show up!” Hours later dude rolls up on his bike with a sort of thin suitcase and we all cluster round to see the 3-Part Body Charging Molecular Enhancer!!!! Hilarity ensues! It is several glass plates, a palm sized piece of hammered copper soldered to an amp lead, and some laminated instructions. Turns out we are missing the other 2 suitcases with the Transformer thing and the Bulb but the instructions were AMAZING.

diagram of molecular enhancer

I feel that some of the instructions are worth sharing with the world and you will have to imagine my dramatically reading them aloud, lingering suggestively on any mention of rubber or nooses in order to make TJ die inside.

How I Experiment with The 3 Part Body Charger

This is how I start and stop the machine so I don’t feel a zap of current when I start or shut it down.

1. I sit on a plastic chair (plastic does not conduct electricity) or
2. Sometimes I use our sofa. I cover the area I sit on with a kind of rubberized material or thick blanket that does not conduct electric. I remove my wrist watch.
3. I PLUG THE CORD INTO THE 110 WALL POWER SUPPLY I MAKE SURE THE MACHINE IS OFF
4. I place the aluminum & glass part (B) on a clean flat dry floor
5. I position the transformer part (A) as shown in Diagram
6. I place Bulb Part (C) in Foam on floor next to my chair.
7. I insert all 3 plugs in their proper sockets on back panel board as shown on diagram
8. I clean the soles of soles of my bare feet and place only the heels on the aluminum part of the glass plat
9. I tie the string of the Harness on the wire next to the bulb and secure the rubber around my neck this prevents the bulb from breaking if I should drop it.
10. I form a noose from the end of the starting cord and tie it on my right wrist.

Many lines or phrases in BOLD, ITALIC, in RED LETTERS, or ALL THREE with Suspiciously Weird Capitalization and yet a notably correct use of the subjunctive!

As near as I can tell this Molecular Enhancer is the equivalent of slowly licking a 2 volt battery. SADLY, Zach the neighbor on the bicycle only has 1 of the 3 part Body Charger. But we enjoyed this historical tour of someone’s absolutely crazed invention.

Justin Lazerbong brought me a very tasty burrito!

Briefly taught another young person how to use a power drill, left her to drill holes in the Obelisk, and I just kind of enjoyed being like “Here’s a power drill, hold it perpendicular, squeeze gently and get the feel of it , BYE” I think she had fun.

I also sent some innocents who had never done such a thing in their lives before, to a paint store to buy several kinds of paint, which reminded me of a similar good time when I yolo-ed to the e-waste center in my wheelchair trundling an enormous heavy bin on entirely inadequate casters 3 blocks down Capp St. with a fabulous young nerd named Wolf who had (I think) just shown up for the first time that day. Hello youngster we are going on a JOURNEY.

Among the things I gave away at the curb (post trash pickup) were: a pharoah costume in original packaging, cupcake decoration kit, many VHS tapes and DVDs, a bunch of weight lifting gizmos (which sadly, the owner of them showed up several hours later unexpectedly, oops, but noisebridge is not a gym, and they were in the trash pile but I felt bad as he was distressed and explained ot me that when programming, it was important to take breaks and do exercise to keep blood flowing to the brain – sorry dude) Some buckets, some more buckets, gnarly old pieces of lumber that had been in the rain and had nails sticking out, and some sandals. By this time the plumber (still snaking the horrible smelling patio drain out after 2 hours at it) was yelling out in a companionable way to passers by, “HAVE SOME FREE STUFF! YES ! FREE!! FUCK YEAH ITS FREE” unbending a bit from the beginning of the day when he was awkwardly calling me “Miss”.

I tweeted this afternoon to try and remember the fun stuff going on: https://twitter.com/lizhenry/status/1482455008507432963

This post is already too long but SO MANY THINGS HAPPENED and I met like, 20 people and got to hear all about their
projects and beam at them benevolently and share some cookies. And that is what I love about Noisebridge! But most of all I love the feeling of contributing something to society and this city, beyond my own private life, family, home, and job, together with other people.

DWeb Camp Day Zero and One

July 19, 2019 Liz

Day Zero at DWeb Camp. We drove down Highway 1 stopping in Moss Beach to look at a strangely cheap vacant lot to try and figure out what is wrong with it (On the fault line, a weird shape, has a utility pole smack in the center of the tiny property.) Saw a huge hawk in the tree next to the utility pole and then realized I had dropped my car keys somewhere in the tall grass. If we buy this vacant lot and park a derelict trailer on it and build cinderblock library and a tiny house from a kit, I shall name it Keyhawkia. (I never found the keys but Danny had a spare.)

I brought an entirely unnecessary cooler and bag full of food. There is abundant and delicious vegan food 3 times a day! Our glamping tent is comfortable, equipped with a foam mattress, a wooden crate, and a battery powered lantern. I brought a Yeti 150 battery hoping to heat my early morning coffee with it, a solar lantern, a second lantern to charge off the Yeti, my two wheelchair batteries, and about a million different charging cords.

Met a ton of people, passed out some copies of my zine, and helped wash and sanitize some loads of thrift store dishes. Went to bed and as soon as I laid down realized my body was screaming in pain – oh fuck! Vowed to lie down and rest more during the day the rest of the time here.

I was saying to some of the mushroom farm people that, everyone coming here is used to being the person who just does stuff directly and feels super confident and capable of being in charge of whatever, and so we are about to have a physical manifestation of decentralized activity and it will surely be a bit hilarious. (So far, from day 2, definitely true).

Day One. Woke up at 6am, made lukewarm coffee using my Yeti and a car charger travel mug. Sat in zero gravity chair before it was fully open, falling slowly and gently backwards, and actually set the coffee mug down without spilling it AND no one saw me fall over.

Over the afternoon a couple of hundred people arrived. It started to feel festive. The “Mesh Hall” now looks like Noisebridge complete with “sans flaschentaschen”. Lots of discussions of Scuttlebutt and also of Kazakhstan. I love seeing everything take shape.

I pedantically corrected the sign for Shiitake Camp with a sharpie, adding the second “i”. The kerning may bother someone but it wasn’t a bad job of insertion given the spontaneous nature of the action! Danny laughed at me…Guys sitting by the sign somewhat bemused…

Set up my tarp outside the tent so that my wheelchair has shelter from the dew – within 5 minutes I found some pointy iron rods which Bill, who is amazing, told me were foundation rods. People passing by had sledgehammers, extra tent spikes, a hatchet which broke while being dramatically used in exactly the way you should not, so that the sharp end is about to embed itself in your forehead – All was well and my wheelchair is protected from the elements in the night. While I took a short nap, someone (probably James) left me a little roll of cord to tie up the tarp! Miraculous!

I washed more dishes and spent the day mostly loafing. (Under my tarp lean-to.)
Did some crosswords in Portuguese with Seth (I don’t know Portuguese but faked it from knowing Spanish) – relaxing and fun.

Could not hear or see most of the opening circle stuff but some of the talks made it to the outer fringes. At one point I gathered that people were sticking a branch into a fire pit and then saying a word in their language and maybe explaining the word’s significance (to them? to the moment? to their culture?) and I had a saucy suggestion to Danny as to what his special representative British word should be. 10 points if you guess it!

Day Two – The showers are amazing in this upper camp. Huge compared to my bathroom, a handy bench to change on, everything rather beautiful in that people-who-have-spent-years-living-on-communes wood shop way with shelves constructed of sections of tree trunk and attractive large pebbles as decor – Lots of Dr. Bronners soap to share. We had a nice camaraderie in the shower this morning as I complimented someone’s tshirt which said in scrolly print, “Brats push to master” and she then explained it to the people in the bathroom with us (Christie the biologist and her daughter) who were not familiar with version control software or its jokes. (“Good bois push to branches” I guess would be the alternate version.) “I’m blogging this” – my sudden declaration from behind the shower curtain after like 5 solid minutes of explanation of the joke.

My yeti battery heated the travel mug of instant coffee beautifully today. It takes a while. The trick is falling back asleep after plugging it in so that you aren’t waiting tediously for the water to hot up.

Plans for today: set up a little zine making workshop. Get set up with scuttlebutt. go to some discussions or talks. Work on my small text adventure game of this event and then put it up somewhere in the hackitorium room if anyone has a spare computer to display it on.

Sustainable activism

January 22, 2019January 22, 2019 Liz

My friend Zach was out today with a pretty cool setup. Just out on the local streetcorner with a giant homemade amp (made from parts from Noisebridge) and a record player, powered from his mobility scooter battery. The album is titled WE SHALL OVERCOME! Documentary of the March on Washington and has speeches and songs from the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. Anyway, he was playing MLK’s speech just hanging out there on the sidewalk at the bus stop. He had a photo of MLK in a frame with flowers around it. People were honking as they went by and stopping to listen and chat. It was really nice.

mlk-album

The thing is it is too hard for him to get to any of the actual events in town right now because of mobility, health & so on. I admire him making his own event at his own pace right on our block and what he could sustain doing, bringing all his skills in making electronics stuff, special power supplies and power converters, and scavenging, along with a super awesome sensibility that you can celebrate the life and ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. by making this beautiful bit of culture out on the sidewalk on an ordinary street corner. As a result anyone else who couldn’t get to a special thing downtown, or wherever, but had to go about their ordinary day, got this piece of community added to their day.

Enjoying all the paths

January 1, 2019January 1, 2019 Liz

Took a bus and BART to my sister’s in Oakland last night, then went to a party, then BART home before midnight. Once again I was struck by how easy it was for me, when it was clear it would be 20 minutes before the next late-night bus, to just wheel on home from BART without even noticing the ride, because my new powerchair is so awesome and comfy. Though, an extra mile or two per hour of speed would be so perfect for times like that.

Then this morning I did the journey again. I saw the guy who lives on the street a couple of blocks from my house and we had a chat and then he followed me to the bus, getting on through the back door to flip the seat up for me very sweetly. An older lady on the bus got off at the same stop and told me how she was once stuck in the 24th St. elevator for 5 hours and now is too afraid to use the elevator.

At the 24th St. station (and I think the 16th too) I always marvel at the strangely inconvenient path for (wheeled) elevator users. The elevator lets you off a few steps from a ticket entry point, the midpoint of the concourse. But the only wide ticket entry point suitable for wheelchairs is at the very far end of the station. Then, you have to go all the way to the extreme other end of the concourse to the 2nd elevator to get to the train platform. If they would put a wider entrance at one of the entry points in the middle of the station it would cut 5 minutes out of my navigation of that station. No one cares and I don’t really care since I am motorized but if I were in a manual chair, it would matter since it is a long extra distance to push yourself! Still, seeing it be so non-optimal bugs me every time I’m in there!

On BART I noticed an ad for some bed sheets that promised the sheets are good for more than just sleeping. The picture in the ad showed three people’s feet, with socks on, friskily entwined as if they were having a fabulous, but dorky (naked except for their socks) threesome. Why you would want to be under a sheet in that situation is beyond me but maybe it helps them forget they’re wearing their socks during their strange orgy apparently happening on an ugly beige 70s shag rug. The socks were somewhat masculine coded for one pair, more polka-hearts femmy and with smaller feet in another, and then the 3rd pair of socks seemed more ambiguously gendered (yellow, medium size, non-hairy) so I guess that is a win for bisexual threesomes everywhere, even on a giant ad on the BART. (P.S. to the ad author: no one says “throuple” in real life.)

frisky advertisement

A man sitting under the amazing ad for kink-positive sheets reacted with miming exaggerated shock when I moved my right leg to wiggle my foot and ankle around as if he had just caught me in my extreme naughtiness of faking the need for a wheelchair. Dude! You caught me! I can move my legs! I’m totally not paralyzed! He stared at me, grinned, stuck out his leg, and waggled his foot around while raising his eyebrows. It being 9am after New Years Eve I didn’t really have the energy to engage so I played Threes on my phone and didn’t look up any more till he got off the train at Oakland West.

I varied my trip it a little by going to 19th Street Oakland and taking an AC Transit bus. My sister was saying that downtown would not be “exciting” on New Year’s Day, but it was just because it was so empty, fresh, and sparkly, and also because I am not often there and I like to explore all the pathways to get to a place at my leisure when there’s no time pressure, which comes in handy sometimes in the future when I will appreciate knowing exactly where the elevator and bus are at 19th St.

Downtown Oakland looked so pretty, clean from the rain, everything looking green as well, art deco buildings all shining in the morning light. I was at the bus stop near the Oscar Grant mural, across from a building with coppery green panels, amazing windows with sort of pointy arrow motif, and these black tiled and scuplted columns at either end. It was just gorgeous! I could hug that whole building!

Oakstop Building

I just had a look to see if I could find info about it online. LocalWiki to the rescue! It is the Bowles Building at 1715 Broadway. As always when I come across LocalWiki I think of when I just randomly met one of its creators, Philip Neustrom, in Ritual Roasters in like 2005. I was sitting across from him on some couches near the window, noticed his excellent laptop stickers & asked what localwiki was. From our conversation I ended up inviting him and Arlen to speak at Wiki Wednesday and I think later on in some similar wiki-ish context I met Britta Gustafson and Marina Kusko who both love wikis and hackerspaces and are awesome.

At my sister’s I kibbitzed on a game of Settlers of Cataan, ate steak and some gingerbread with apple butter, showed some details of nethack to my nephew, and demoed Inform7 for my sister who immediately started messing with it. It was fun to see them both jump in. When I left, my nephew was gleefully falling through trapdoors in the Gnomish Mines and I’m about to play some more nethack with him today. At the party at Susie’s house nearby I ran into a lot of people I knew. Polythene Pam was playing when I arrived & people were singing along to a song that was incredibly familiar but that I don’t know the words to. I had one of those pre-crone moments where you see someone dressed in YOUR EXACT OUTFIT FROM 25 YEARS AGO and freak out a little in a happy way because they are SO ADORABLE and ‘my’ cultural aesthetic has not died. Seriously this girl was in my same outfit and even in my haircut and middle-of-the-nose-ring and it made me want to cry and also want to hug her but that would have been weird. Sat with Katherine and Nabil, we petted Nabil’s reversible sequin pants (!!!!) talked with Emily a bit about how strange chronic pain or health issues can be, I met some people who were super nice, then I ended up talking with Asheesh in the kitchen, Yoz showed up, Gina showed up just as I was leaving early for my middle of the night journey home.

On BART a guy started yelling a lot but the woman with him (wife? sister?) was composed and philosophical. She rolled her eyes a little once in a while or patted his knee calmingly and acceptingly. I moved up to be right across from him because I thought he was not dangerous, just agitated, and I figured I could apply my de-escalating presence usefully (or deflect his attention from the teenagers he was yelling at) He had a few themes and varied them from Jesus, the bible, cops who kill people and their families which is tragic, homosexuals (could not tell if positive or negative) and how he loves us all (even if he sounds angry) and wants the best for us. I listened and actually so did a drunk guy nearby though he was more laughing at the yelling man, but he kindly called him brother and agreed with him I think doing the same de-escalation technique as I was. The woman next to him in an elegant headwrap carrying a cane then sort of cajoled him off the train. Mostly I felt worried about him and not the people around him (you could easily see someone taking him the wrong way and calling cops on him) So I wish them luck and hope they got home safe.

Home with quite a lot of motoring around, at 30% battery, wishing for just a bit more hefty of a powerchair battery or even an entire spare battery as insurance. Instead I am going to get an extra charger cord and carry it on the chair at all times in a little pouch. Though I don’t usually name cars and wheelchairs or my own body parts, I have decided to call the chair ‘Mr. Beep’ (borrowed from Ahmet the Blind Captain‘s kayak navigational system, because it’s just such a great name and makes me happy to say it).

Celebrating The Winter Sewerstice

December 20, 2018 Liz

Yes! It’s that time of year, the rainy season in San Francisco, when you should run out and Adopt a Drain! Pick a convenient drain near your home from the map, and commit to clear the leaves from it every once in a while so that no one will get flooded on that corner or have to wade through a gross, trashy, leafy pond at the curb during a rainstorm.

I had no real reason to do this but went downtown anyway out of curiosity to the parking garage of the SF Public Utilities Commission where I was given nice leather work gloves, a sturdy dustpan, my choice of brooms (I took the small one which I could strap onto the back of my wheelchair), and a yellow utility vest.

Inspired by the cameraman asking me questions about the Mighty Civic Feelings that led me to adopt a drain, I decided to name my drain at Mission and Cortland “Drainy McDrainface”. I also mentioned liking open data projects and reporting problems with sidewalks, streets, and intersections through 311.

Every time it’s about to rain significantly, the city sends me an email reminding me to check my adopted corner! I go out and give it a poke! From my friends’ feedback on Facebook it sounds like Oakland, Belmont, and Redwood City, and likely other towns in the Bay Area have similar programs.

I was sort of hoping they would let me drive a street sweeper, or give us all an informative tour of the SFPUC building and a certificate of Drain Adoption with a gold seal on it but…. alas, no. Maybe next time!

So what should the holiday name be for this event? Drainukkah? Sewermas? Winter Sewerstice?

Today's small political actions

November 9, 2016 Liz

Today I am reaching out to my friends through chat and email, both hackerspaces I’m connected with (Noisebridge and Double Union), our various women in tech organizations, and in person. I woke up this morning (from my grief and disassociation last night) with staunch, fierce determination full of energy and fire and ideas.

I read through the President-Elect’s 100 day plan. Have a look. It’s quite scary. For instance how many people do you know who have health care through the Affordable Care Act, or who have it through their marriages to same sex partners — here we have a direct threat to their family health. Also deeply on my mind – what will happen with Sanctuary cities?

My friend hazelbroom and I met for coffee and discussed our lives, what we do to support others, what support we need, what we can change, what structurally we might be able to affect. A lot of my ideas are around mutual aid networks. How can we create them and make them sustainable? But here is a brief outline: better self care, mutual support for activists, support for others in our communities and beyond, political engagement with whatever politicians represent us. We try to move beyond a charity model and it is often not greatly successful.

For me, I have good mutual support with several friends for example I am around to help out if a friend is down on their luck and needs help with a medical bill, or getting a ride, or groceries during an illness, or wrapping your mind around a complicated legal or bureaucratic situation — and many friends have helped and visited me when I’ve been in difficulties. In those situations, boundaries are hard to negotiate and maintain – hard to even articulate. Learning to have that kind of conversation is likely part of the work we need to do. Hazelbroom pointed out that as queer folks we have more practice than many others with that kind of “chosen family” bond. Those bonds are something more like quasi-cousins, loose partnerships for emotional and economic support. I have many ideas here, and will be writing about them over the coming days and weeks.

Our first practical action was to leave the cafe and go a few blocks down the street to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center. We signed up as volunteers and got some information from them and talked to Executive Director Gina Dacus, who super nicely took the time to give us an outline of what the BHNC does. I knew already they provide a lot of the low income housing support of our neighborhood and there is some sort of senior center. I found to my happy surprise that the senior services and classes are “senior and disabled” which means : Free senior/arthritis tai chi classes for me just a few blocks away, JUST what I need and have been wishing for!

We described some of our skills for Gina (Hazelbroom: she is an RN, so can give flu shots and that sort of thing! Me: some thoughts on helping with informational discussions of wheelchairs and scooters.) I am donating to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center right now, online. Our next step is to pull in our local friends and neighbors (including all our energetic, healthy teenage children) to show up to the community engagement meeting, and listen to see if we get any immediate ideas where we might be needed and we can be helpful.

Another next step, I am donating immediately to CARECEN SF, picked a bit randomly out of a list of community organizations in my neighborhood of Bernal Heights-Mission.

colorful mural at 26th and mission

The Superfest Dissie Awards

October 13, 2013 Liz

I had a great time last night at the Dissie Awards, part of Superfest, a very long running disability community film festival! Lawrence Carter-Long MCed and presented 3 or 4 short clips for each category like Worst Portrayal of a Disabled Person by Non-Disabled Actor and The Worst Disabled Villain. It was nice to see a bunch of local community leaders get on stage to accept the awards — some of the fake acceptance speeches were hilarious! Audio Eyes did an outstanding job of funny, sarcastic description that felt like watching Rifftrax or Mystery Science Theater 3000 rather than a boring documentary narration. Would listen again. It was great.

My favorite was definitely the “So Sweet” which was about cute little white girls sweetly helping disabled people so I got to give several hearty rounds of booing to Heidi and Pollyanna (who along with Katy from What Katy Did, take up way too much of my brain with their angel in the house internalized ableism).

The event started off with a cocktail hour which I missed and then Lawrence opened up with a charismatic speech about how we would discern, disrupt, display, and discover as we Dissed.

I can’t remember all the nominations but I did tweet most of the award winners for posterity. The Worst Performance of Disability by a Non-disabled Actor Dissie went to the guy playing the blind old man in Young Frankenstein. Prof. Georgiana Kleege accepted the award. In the world of Young Frankenstein, apparently blind people cannot get anyone at all to come over and share their soup. So sad! It was lovely to feel the audience reaction all around me as we cheered and booed how bad all the performances were as they played off stereotypes and made disabled people the butt of humor. It was often a hard call which movie to boo the loudest for as the judges watched and listened to the crowd, because the spectrum of Hollywood badness was so vast!

Shirley Temple in Heidi as she teaches Klara how to walk and then ends up being more important to Klara’s family than she is, won out over Pollyanna. It was a very hard call for me. Was it worse for Heidi to be telling Klara she could walk if she just tried hard enough? Or worse that Pollyanna told her sick neighbor lady, the one disabled person in town, that she wouldn’t die if she wanted enough to live, and then stormed out in a huge ragequit? The deciding factor for me was that it was extra, extra horrible for Klara’s dad not to love her until she could walk! Christina Mills from the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers accepted the award pointedly remarking that ther are great organizations like California Youth Leadership Forum where Klara could hang out instead of being with that poisonous little brat Heidi.

Joshua Miele then took the stage to accept the award for Worst Miracle for the actor playing the paralyzed guy in Monkey Shines. I think it was voted up because the movie’s badness outshone the actor’s bad portrayal! Personally I was rooting for Forrest Gump and the moment where his leg braces exploded off his legs as he ran like a world class athlete. But hey, we’re taking this super seriously, can you tell? Josh invited his alterego, or friend, Manny Zannasshole, to give a speech about his sensitive directing and producing of this miracle moment inspired by his knowledge of “the differently crippled, or whatever you people are called these days, people with crippledness” provoking a giant laugh from many of us in the audience.

Most Tragic was a painfully stupid display as we saw Clint Eastwood feel the terrible pain of the actor in Million Dollar Baby asking him to put her down like her family’s old dog because she could never be on TV again. Wow! It had to win for being most actually horrible and harmful to people’s lives. For me it is a matter of people telling me to my face that they think it is better to be dead than like me, that they would kill themselves, etc. But for many of us it is directly a life and death matter that threatens our survival as nurses caretakers or even family members decide to express their mercy or support a person’s suicidal thoughts instead of getting them help or fighting to change their situation and society at large. So Million Dollar Baby just had to win. Victor Pineda took the stage for the award and was super badass and funny as he told Clint Eastwood he might be better off dead than that ignorant and Hilary Swank’s character in the movie could totally have better friends if he would get out of her life. I’m paraphrasing but that was the gist of it.

Dr. Strangelove then beat out Mr. Glass from Unbreakable for Worst Villian. There are SO MANY. Strangelove has to win for popularity and for the thing that most people want to joke about when they want to joke about your wheelchair. But Mr. Glass was more truly the winner for his villainy being based on his internal bitterness over being disabled! Reverend Scott (?) went up on stage to take the award with his one black glove! You would almost think he had expected Dr. Strangelove to win. . . do I smell a fixed contest here?

The Crips Gone Wild category for buffoonish portrayals of disabled people causing havoc (AS WE DO) gave us clips from Other Sister, Radio, and Blind Dating. They were all horrible. Blind Dating with a very extended scene of the guy trying to fake that he wasn’t blind on a date in a restaurant. Comedy gold!??? Aaaaagh! Then the last category was “Hey, Only We Can Laugh At That” for truly bad comedy that is “Satirization without representation”. They were all awful and I have forgotten which one won because by that time it was quite late and I was tired.

My teenage son came with me to the Dissies. He enjoyed it a lot. He laughed his head off and I was happy to share some good political awareness and humor with him. He gets enough of it from me day to day just doing things like riding the bus. How nice that he knows it isn’t just me making my usual sarcastic muttering comments. He will grow up knowing quite a lot and being a good ally for others, as well as having gotten all the awesome wheelchair and scooter rides possible.

I hope this event happens again! Thanks to the Longmore Institute and the SF Lighthouse for sponsoring Superfest! I hope I can come out to more events and meet people — I often feel totally disconnected from whatever Bay Area disability activist communities are out there as I flounce around in my own little world. I have the community feeling and solidarity online but not in person and hope to connect more in the future. Anyway, if this happens next year I will wear a sparkley tuxedo and do it up in real movie award style !!

Mozilla Summit 2013: bugs, crafts, and fun

October 10, 2013 Liz

The Mozilla Summit in Toronto was a lot of fun. I met so many intense, idealistic, motivated open source contributors, it made me feel renewed energy for my own contribution.

On the first day I heard some of the keynotes but missed Mitchell Baker’s keynote on the Nature of Mozilla, which I’m going to watch today. People were talking about it through the rest of the conference, so I’m curious.

The talk I did was called Awesome Bugzilla Tricks and was a fairly short presentation of some tips for using Bugzilla.

Awesome bugzilla-tricks-slides2 from Liz Henry

As we went through these tips, the talk turned often into a good discussion of how people use these features of Bugzilla. We thought of a new way to implement Bugzilla tags to look more like browser bookmarks.

People talked about their own workflow as we went around the room describing what we do with bugzilla.mozilla.org! That is usually my favorite part of a workshop level technical discussion. It is like a series of sharing mini-demonstrations about actual working process, what we use and what we do and why. That is very illuminating. I realized in our discussion that I was talking with Kohei who made bzdeck, a tool that makes reading Bugzilla.mozilla.org bug reports more like an email inbox. I had particularly wanted to meet him so was very happy he came to the talk and the discussion! 😀

Durng the talk I said something a little weird and abstract that was not in my slides, inspired by the discussion. Here it is…

As a literary critic I find it fascinating that it is a huge collection of textual information which we engage with as authors and readers. It is like the ultimate “difficult work”, like reading James Joyce except 900,000 times better and with a more interesting result. There is no way to make it easy to understand, even if you can make little pieces of it easier to use and learn, the underlying information and tasks are beautifully complex and demanding for anyone who engages with it, which means you can’t fail to learn something if you try.

Then, luckily, we went back to talking about practical things, features, dashboards, and workflow.

The other main activity I did at the Summit was to set up a big table with craft supplies. Based on an idea of Lukas Blakk’s, I set up beads, string, and charms shaped like ladybugs, dragonflies, bees, and beetles so that people could make necklaces, bracelets, and other wearable souvenirs. The beads had numbers and letters so that you could spell out the number of your favorite bug.

People did just that!

I loved seeing people think about what bug was their favorite or most important to them personally. Sometimes a first bug, or one that people were proud of fixing, or one with an important, complicated discussion. Several people told me that during the Summit, they looked up other people’s favorite bugs from the bug bracelets, and learned something interesting.

Bug 356038 was represented by number and by its Bugzilla alias, BCP47:

Rust and Github bug #5677, ‘Rustpkg “ready for use” metabug’ got some love:

Vu gave a shout out to bug 780076,

And here is another bracelet featuring bug 808964,

For my own favorites I made three objects, one a wire necklace for bug 923590, “Pledge never to implement HTML5 DRM”, and a bracelet and a barette with my first patch because I was proud of submitting a patch. The EME or DRM issue was discussed very intensely on Sunday by many engineers. Feelings definitely ran high and people were determined to continue discussion. I was glad it got an official slot in the schedule for discussion and that there was widespread interest.

Bug 298619 was put onto a cell phone charm along with a blue and orange glass bead shaped like a beetle!

Many other people made Mozilla or MozReps necklaces, spelled out their names or their loved one’s names, with bug charms, or with wire, like this beautiful and creative copper wire creation:

And this Maker Party necklace!

This resulted in “conference swag” was personal and made on the spot, worn and also given as presents! Many people commented that they felt soothed and comforted by hands-on activity in the middle of intense social interaction. I observed that people discussed what bugs or words to spell, how to design their objects, and what techniques to use, very collaboratively, so it was a nice physical representation of work and process.

After the first day, I left the craft station open 24 hours in the lounge, replenishing it with beads from West Queen Street on day 2 becasue we ran out of the letters Z and A, popular in spelling out “Bugzilla” and “Mozilla”. Of course this was because we were in Canada, where they use a lot of “eh”!

I would do this again at a conference, and now I know from experience what supplies are needed and which things are likely to be popular.

The other silly and fun part of the conference for me was wearing (and lending to people) the brainwave controlled robot fox ears! The looks on people’s faces, so priceless, as they realized the ears were really moving. Everyone who tried it laughed very hard!

Thanks for a great and inspiring Summit, everybody!

Hurricane relief: Do something!

November 1, 2012 Liz

Aleja and I met online through GimpGirl years ago. I got to know Nick as well; we chat often about space exploration, writing, and comics. We have mutual friends like Jen Cole and Ron Sidell. We met in person in New York finally! Both at the BlogHer conference and then over Thanksgiving while I was in town for the Committee to Protect Journalists fundraiser.

On Monday I was asking Aleja and Nick if they had anyone with them. Akemi had come over to stay with them through the hurricane but they did not expect at all to lose power and water. I was on vacation in Mexico. My electric mobility scooter had broken, so I had limited ability to go places and was spending a lot of time online following the news and writing to friends.

From my work during and after Hurricane Katrina I know how fast situations can deteriorate and how important logistics are. Simply having people on the spot is amazingly useful. Once they are there, they can see what needs doing. I offered to reach out on my social networks to see if anyone near them might be able to come over and help out. At that point I began to realize the complexity of what support they might need, as well as many of the pressures against asking for help.

Personally, I have a ton of support and resources, yet it only takes a little change in my circumstances to unbalance the whole house of cards. When my needs change, or become more visible, other people sometimes then begin to treat me like I’ve crossed a line into complete loss of control of what happens. I didn’t want that to happen to Nick, as it so often does, and for him with life threatening consequences. And for Aleja who I love dearly I could picture how outsiders would not be able to see the level of work she does and how necessary it is. We value our independence, including our ability to plan and ask for help. But for me personally that comes with a confusing mix of pride and shame, fear and anger, for the times things don’t go as I had planned and predicted. I struggle with this. People are very, very disrespectful and I don’t like to be dehumanized. But to get along and survive, sometimes we have to just eat disrespect. For Nick and Aleja, crossing that line could mean someone would try to force Nick to evacuate without real infrastructure in place to support them and his health care, and his breathing. (And in fact, that just happened. TWICE.) Being evac-ed could kill him, but even if it didn’t, would it result in some bureaucrat or social worker deciding he should be incarcerated — forced into an institution? Would it disrupt their lives to the point where Nick and Aleja wouldn’t be able to come home together? (They already can’t get married.) When I’m casually dehumanized I lose a little dignity and I get mad. When Nick is, his life is on the line. William Peace describes the dangers of the medical model of disability very well in his blog Bad Cripple, which I recommend highly.

In this photo Aleja and I express our feelings about oppression and ableism by flipping them off with a smile:

Anyway, I worried that I was pressuring Aleja to consent to my sending in some stranger (though a friend of a friend) into their home whether to help with personal care or just to bring them food and water or try and find a way to get power to Nick’s breathing equipment. As soon as they said it was okay, I put out a call. It propagated quickly. Suddenly thousands of people were twittering to me or messaging me on Facebook. I was frantically trying to apologize to Aleja over IM for embarrassing them since my twittered request for help went way out of control. Over the next few hours it became apparent that a support network would have to mobilize. And it did! Three out of the thousands were able to offer practical help rather than just saying “Call 911! Call FEMA” (yeah right!!!), and they joined what was quickly organizing to be a team effort from people who hadn’t known each other before. I was glued to my computer talking with people, gathering information from many sources and redistributing it to others, trying to spare Alejandra’s and others’ limited cell phone batteries. Len Burns became my point of contact with Aleja. They needed sterile water, rides for their nursing/PCA staff because the subway was not running, cash for all sorts of things, drinking water, batteries for flashlights, and many more things that had to be brought up and down 12 flights of stairs. Leslie Freeman was the first to get there, I think, other than Akemi. They are both beyond awesome! My friend Lauren who is a journalist and feminist activist also made it there.

Then I began following Crystal and Sandi Yu’s epic road trip in the middle of the night driving from Boston to New York City, stopping at every Walmart, AutoZone, and truck stop on the way to get supplies. When I realized Crystal is also a wheelchair user and that she and Sandi had barely met, I was cheering them on so hard and felt a deep happiness to find these kindred spirits doing something I could at least support from a distance. I donated quickly over PayPal and Crystal was able to use the money right away with a PayPal debit card. Meanwhile, Amalle was coordinating an ever growing Google Doc of information about how to help and exactly what to do. There was a schedule of people volunteering for shifts and to drive Nick’s nurses back and forth from home to work.

Crystal and others also began, at some point, getting money from Portlight — where I am also now donating! Carrie Ann Lucas connected the group to Portlight. I really like getting cash directly to people in a crisis and to “unofficial first responders”, as I will never forget the amazingness of handing wads of 20 dollar bills (given to me by strangers who read my blog) directly into the hands of evacuees in the Houston Astrodome so they could get to their families, buy diapers and gas, and get the heck out of that refugee camp. Aside from the help…. they were fueled by trust. No fuss, no forms, no proving things to people behind desks, just direct practical help.

I love Crystal’s quick and detailed writeup of the history of how she became involved and what she and Sandi did, from Crystal’s blog LittleFreeRadical: UnconVENTional Aid: Helping Nick Dupree, Social Networking Style. I would love to hear the stories of others like Leslie and Amalle and Akemi who are doing so much as well as what this has been like for Aleja and Nick. It is important not to lose our history.

On Wednesday I started doing research on legal issues for Len Burns, to see what options existed for protecting Nick against other people’s non-helpful 911 calls on him, and discussed battery tech and power inverters with other people active in the efforts. At some point Tuesday or Wednesday I Facebook-friended and began talking with Leslie and then Crystal and others working to help; I could see their comments on Aleja and Nick’s and Len’s posts. Now I’m happy to know them and can tell we have a lot in common — our willingness to jump into a situation and improvise, for one! And I understood Bethany Stephens‘ use of the word “cripfam” a bit more deeply because I felt that recognition of friends who will go all out, who know what “solidarity” means…

Meanwhile this happened: Invalid New Yorker’s Pals Keep Life Saving Gear Running. While I can see the effort this reporter made to be helpful, the disrespectful language and the way the story frames Nick and Aleja both made me furious and sick to my stomach. The reporter couldn’t even be bothered to get a quote from Nick but described his very act of speaking as “burbling” etc, in ways that are classically dehumanizing… as non-speech, as non-human, as alien other. I can see reporters will think this an interesting story — and it is, but not like this, not this easy win at Disability Reporting Bingo. Most of the people helping here are also people with disabilities, for example. There are stories to tell about technology, the Internet, hardware, proprietary medical tech, the connections to OccupyWallStreet and activism, and many other complexities. I wrote to the reporter and his editor, and commented (mildly, for me, and without swearing) on the story.

My main usefulness has been to bring attention to the situation and get others involved. People pay attention to my thoughts on this because of my history of public speaking, and blogging; my involvement with hackerspaces, DIY technology, and activism; and because I did some useful on-the-spot work for Hurricane Katrina relief. I also was able to donate money directly to Crystal and to Portlight. Please pitch in if you can, to share resources and skills, because the situation over the East Coast and NYC in general is still deteriorating as gasoline and supplies run out across the area.

Here’s how to help right now: Lending a Hand

Big organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross do useful work, but usually not at this stage of chaos on this individual level. A week and a half from now they’ll be in charge whether they’re effective or not, but right now it’s anarchy, so we have a chance to be the most useful with direct action. Just go…right now while it’s crucial… go to wherever the problem is, LISTEN TO PEOPLE… and pitch in. Don’t just donate some old clothes or cans of food as if you can dump your trash on other people and it will magically make them middle class and give them all the infrastructure of your massive privilege! Go to gather information, find out what is needed, improvise, and DO SOME WORK.