556 black friday

Here we are, Black Friday, aka, International Buy Nothing Day. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. 

We started with a trip to The Rock, aka Alcatraz, for the annual indigenous people's sunrise celebration. 

The crowds were a bit much for me, but the message was pretty clear. Get over your propaganda, this country we reside in is survivor's territory. "We're still here," is the reminder.

As we prepare to move north, this complicated, uh, no, this brutal and shameful history, is getting closer and closer to me. I grew up in a town where the colonial history was 400 years old. I've lived in a city where it's a couple hundred years old. Now I'm moving to a region where it's only a hundred years old. There is a reservation not far from our new place.

Art is often inspired by local events, people, and history. The visual art of the PNW is awash in Salmon and Totems. The genocide and environmental desecration of my colonial forebears is very, very new. In fact, one could very well argue that I'm part of it. The third or fourth wave of colonizers.

Also, we sold our combined CD collection, that musical soundtrack to our twenties we spent so long carefully collecting, for twenty five bucks.

This one is by request, my mother and brother wanted to see pictures of Deb's latest garden.

It's over in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland.

What made this garden interesting and challenging was the soil. They're right over a buried creek, and the soil is very clay. In half the yard, it retains water and turns to crazy mud. The other half, it's baked dry and hard as a rock.

It took a fair amount of working, supplementing, double digging, and tilling, to get it to a workable condition.

Sometimes during these projects Deb transforms our garbage area into a wonderland of plants. And then we moved.