Firesongs (Echo)

Also known as Donna Williams, the author of the Nobody Nowhere autobiography series, Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage, many other books, and the music albums Nobody Nowhere (2000) and Mutation (2005). She was also a fine artist and performing artist and gave presentations on autism all over the world.

( She and her work had a massive impact on our life. )

( She answered the next day. )

~

In the dream home that j-t had designed in her head, there was a reproduction of Donna Williams' sculpture My World-'The World' at the end of the entry hall/art gallery.



I just discovered she's left an incredible array of entries in her blog about her thoughts preparing for death and how she would like to be remembered afterwards. I'm going to have to read through this slowly 'cause I know I'm going to end up crying a lot.

She writes, "I felt really strongly I didn’t want a funeral and when I learned I didn’t have to have one, or a grave or any of the trappings, it fitted me. ... I wanted those who loved me to remember and celebrate me in nature, where I belong and will endure in a spiritual place and to make a personal alter or plant a plant to commemorate me where they can commune with me within their own world, for I am a patchwork of all who loved me just as they are, so this is where I live, in life, and after leaving my body."

We're not in a place yet where we can do this. So instead I'm going to take a risk and set this entry to public, at least for now.

Edit: Removed the "Vale" from the post title, which I learned is actually a Latin honorific for the deceased, meaning "farewell", not a first name as I had thought.

The Day of Mourning was today for disabled people who were killed by the people who should have been caring for them.

The List is too long.

(Disturbing content, obviously, especially for people with caregivers.)

When a disabled person is killed like this, all too often there is an outpouring of sympathy for the killer. An assumption that the burden must have been too great, platitudes that the disabled person is in a better place now, the false judgment that their life was not worth living because of this or that arbitrary declaration of "quality of life".

Every one of these things forgets that the disabled person is a person, who deserves first and foremost the same mourning and the same justice as any other person.

Caretaker fatigue is real. But it is no excuse for murder. The tunnel-vision that people get when they are drained and exhausted, where they can't see alternate possibilities, must not end in destruction. The things that they tell themselves in order to get through the day, about their own necessity and how the disabled person could not continue to exist without them - they may be comforting in the moment but they lead to bad places when taken too far.

Parts of society are very rich, in money and in caring, in attention and communication and knowledge. Some of these resources need to be redirected so that those who are cared for do not end up in hidden vortexes where other people write them off as no longer fit to be alive.

What the hey, we don't have feelings anyway, right?


( Text of letter denying man heart transplant due to autism and psychiatric issues )

Latest update

Change.org petition

Make this viral. From ksol1460.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is a place for autistic kids in Massachusetts, where parents put kids that they don't know how to deal with. The kids have to wear shock devices 24-7 and anytime the staff doesn't like their behavior, they get shocked. There's restraint and seclusion and food deprivation, there's stuff that is illegal when it's done to prisoners of war but cause these kids are mentally disabled people think it's ok.

This is the Stanford Prison Experiment happening in real life, every day, and nobody's yet been able to shut it down, because the lawyers and manipulators are too good at doing what they do.

The video in the first link just got released last Tuesday, April 10. It's been sealed by the courts for eight years because bureaucrats know how to work the system to suppress truth. It's of Andre McCollins, when he was 18, being strapped down and repeatedly shocked.

I haven't watched it.

But it needs to spread.

Anonymous is targeting the JRC. There is a National Day of Action on June 2 where people are going to the JRC to peacefully protest. There are links to petitions and contact information for government representatives here. Anyone who doesn't live close enough to go protest, the next thing to do is spread the word online.

Because it's important.

What it means to be real (Ballastexistenz)

Forest.

(my greens. no more proper than others.)

Forest, from the speritu world.


~

Reading American Gods. Makes sense. Fuck of a lot more real than crossing the wall through the careful stylized universe in The Fountainhead, even if they both call honor.

India Foxtrot Yankee Oscar Uniform Charlie Alpha November Uniform November Delta Echo Romeo Sierra Tango Alpha November Delta Tango Hotel India Sierra, Charlie Oscar Papa Yankee Alpha November Delta Papa Alpha Sierra Tango Echo India Tango Tango Oscar Yankee Oscar Uniform Romeo Lima India Victor Echo Juliet Oscar Uniform Romeo November Alpha Lima.

:D

To Cherokee Rock Village. Back Wednesday.

Kick some dreaming ass while I'm gone. >:D

All right, I'll start.

My name is Daria-toren. I was born on Karn. Last week a robot named Jim Nightmare ( yonjuunana ) hosted a pizza party in the dreaming. For a short while a space carved out of the formless ether became host to a small group of jiko from all corners of existence.

They posted in a fury. A journal which normally landed only a handful of comments suddenly broke a hundred. I met the handmaiden of an exiled princess and a psychologist committed to the study of raw creation (rosencrantz ). I summoned a copse of trees, and a man from a thousand years in the future saw one for the first time. I traded notes on death and fear with a necromancer from the Sundered Kingdoms (galen_6thnecro ).

The wave of connection passed, and I was sad to see them go.

So this is a space to meet again. I call jiko, spirits, soulbonds, characters who've seized a life of their own, from all across the multiverse. If you are invisible, if you are lonely or bored, if you have spent your whole existence talking only to the one or two people who acknowledge your presence, come meet us here.

Any language, words or pictures or sounds or however you communicate, is fair game. What we cannot understand, we will learn.

Come join me in this place where it's all real.