Harvesting and No NoKings

These three are here to haunt.

After punking out of the NoKings gathering in one of the nicest (read safest, most liberal, easy access) locations. I came home to stew and funk. 

I drove all the way there, dressed for the chill, my banner and chair tucked in the trunk. Arrived early and snagged a prime parking spot right across from Mellow Mushroom. 

For an hour, I watched people enjoying the sunny day. None of them looked like protesters. Just families with kids playing like all was right in the world. Alone, that's hard to pretend.

At three o'clock, I could see a few people with signs gathering on the far corner of the park. It looked like a field trip for a local nursing home. I know. Some balls for 77. The turnout looked very thin compared to the last one.

My back hurt; my head felt mushy, and I did not know how I was going to lug my shit from the car and tie the banner up to the stanchions. No heart for any of it.

I left. Made a guilty donation to Ossoff when I got home.

I like funk as a verb. Because of some imagined dread, it's a low-grade form of (mostly) mental self-abuse. If I drank, I'd be drunk. God knows there's enough real shit to have dread about. As rage and imagining wreaking violence on evil-doers are my go-to response, funk was as much as I could muster yesterday and I still had hundreds of thread skeins to process.

The dyefest wore me out, and the very sketchy look of the wet threads was like a gang of vultures perched on the fence just waiting for my eyelids to flutter down one last time. (Sounds like a line from Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just wasted my initial freebie from Audible, which I will cancel quickly before I forget.)

Rinsing and washing out the skeins, twenty or so at a time, is both tedious and contemplative. There was an awful lot of dye in the water - a sign that the chemistry was off. 

Rather than dance with the fiber, the dye molecules just flung themselves into the void. In this case, down the drain. Old dye powder? Old soda ash? What felt like 80 degrees to me was not nearly enough for Turquoise to make a statement. 

I also made the mistake of letting Bubble Gum and Cotton Candy out of the box, forgetting that Demon Fuschia is their godmother. 

But I didn't really forget. I just looked the other way and hoped for their best behavior.

"Silly woman." I can still hear Jim's voice chiding me. 

Today, I thought I was going to be flexing the herculean copywriting task of turning a flock of sow's ears into silk purses. But, no.

After a summer of wildly buttery exuberant color, this batch has come back down to earth to comfort and console us.

Speckled and freckled. 

Muted with the smoke of distant fires and the sleepy haze of October. I can almost smell the cider and donuts.

After the last of the threads were set out to dry, 

I saved a little color for myself.