!Flashes of life
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agk's diary
20 January 2024 @ 02:40 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
in living room after my family's asleep
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We drove daughter to her Memaw's house and napped
til it was time to drive to the Amtrak train. The
station is beautiful and clean, historic and
elegant. Parking free. Ticket agents helpful.
Our first conductor in his hat and tails, beard and
bowlegged stance was a fairytale of a 19th-century
sea captian. He fixed our ticket, saved us money.
He makes over $60 per hour, twice what I make as a
registered nurse.
Hell yeah. You want people to be helpful, profess-
ional, experienced, one thing you can do: pay well.
Through the back ends of towns, through snow, along
rivers, into dawn, the train rocked while Evy slept
on my lap.
We loved walking the dirty old town, our destina-
tion, in sub-zero C temperatures. First night, just
above zero and raining, we walked, wet, up a mount-
ain for fancy pizza with fig jam and coconut creme
brulee.
Saw old friends. They made us chicken soup,
cappuchinos, Russian and Yiddish folk tales. Their
dog loved to cuddle us.
We got tangled up in rope, watched a movie on a
very old laptop, read many pages of our books,
made up stories about places we walked in the cold.
Back home, daughter and I went to a protest after
dark in -16 C weather. She was scared by aggressive
protesters and chilly. We were out for four hours.
She was confused: was someone killing babies inside
the places we protested outside? No, they watched
snuff films Israeli consulate shows to try to de-
humanize victims of Israel's US/UK- and German-
sponsored genocide.
World outside's blanketed, snow on snow. Ten cm a
few days ago, ten more today. When daughter's
scared she sings In the Bleak Midwinter:
"Frosty wind made moan;
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone."
When she fears the goblin, she asks "the sun in the
heavens" to help. Imagination personalizes fear and
comfort. The world always stares back, chin working,
slit-eyed snotty goat.
