Summer pandemic fatigue 2022

[numb3r_5ev3n]

I'm finding myself missing stuff like going to barbecues and walking on hiking paths around the lake when it's like 100 degrees Fahrenheit out. I know it will basically just take a few moments outside to dispel these feels, but yeah. Last year I was at least able to go cruising in my car, but the current gas prices have made that impossible.

I have seen all sorts of "remember that six weeks or so last summer when we thought the vaccine meant we could go do our normal activities, and then Delta and Omicron happened?" Yeah.

I'm getting the 4th jab though anyway. Because of reasons.

At least I'm getting a lot of crafts and reading done. Along with Spiral Dance by Starhawk, another book that I highly recommend is "Masteting Witchcraft" by Paul Huson.

Current Mood.

Comments

[dewline]

I want my fourth dose too. Not getting it yet, because I don't currently "qualify" for it. All these subvariants of Omicron, as well as the ongoing threat of long COVID, worry me.

[sabotabby]

Can you get across the border to Quebec? You can get your fourth dose there and they don't care what province you're from.

I still can't get mine. :(

[dewline]

Because of the cross-border transit networks connecting Ottawa and Gatineau, probably.

I'm sorry about your situation. :-(

[sabotabby]

I don't really like the outdoors. The odd hike or barbecue, sure, but it's not my favourite thing. Concerts and travel and pubs are. And they've just made all of those even less safe for me than they were before.

[dewline]

*insult-words aimed at various specific politicians and fascist-network people in several languages*

[flamingsword]

If you are doing the medication thing, please be aware that a lot of meds mess with your heat tolerance and make you more likely to get heatstroke. Please web search that shit.

I need to get Brian and I signed up for the 4th jab and myself for the shingles vaccine for immune compromised adults. Good luck to all of us.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

I talked my therapist into getting me off of Cymbalta and I'm weaning myself off of it right now. I get my new prescription on Wednesday.

[flamingsword]

Good luck with the meds adjustment period! May it be smooth and handle-able.

[lb_lee]

Please tell us more about Paul Huson's book? Curious!

[numb3r_5ev3n]

This is going to be kind of long and get kind of weird and rambly, and I apologize in advance.

"Mastering Witchcraft" *seems* to be along the same lines as the Reclaiming Tradition ala Starhawk, and like Starhawk proposes that the first Witches were the indigenous Goddess-worshipping peoples of "Old Europe" before the Proto Indo European migrations and the spread of the PIE language starting around 2900 BC.

The thing is, it was written in the 1970s before historians knew much about the spread of the Neolithic Farmer peoples into Europe from Anatolia (Marija Gimbutas's first book The Goddesses And Gods Of Old Europe came out around the same time, so maybe it was an influence?)

According to legend, when the Tuatha De Danan got to Ireland, they had cattle and horses but didn't know how to farm. The "monstrous and deformed" Fomorians had to teach them.

But the Alt right Youtube Radicalizers have jumped on the train of the Proto Indo Europeans being ALPHA MEGA CHADS who genocided the DEGENERATE SOYBOY CUCK EARLY EUROPEAN FARMERS (except for the Basques and the Sardinians) and took their lands and their women - but they survived in their mythology as boogeymen and witches, to the point that even in the early 20th century, horror authors with racist/fascist leanings like like Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft characterized them as "Swarthy, Stunted, and Degenerate" Witch People.

It falls neatly into the tenet of Umberto Eco's Ur-Facism that the Foe is always "too strong but too weak," "Genetically deficient" but capable of "cheating" somehow to "undermine" the "wholesome" folk of "Aryan" stock.

You know, like how they've characterized Jewish people since forever.

Mastering Witchcraft doesn't really go into the history of the "Old Europeans" as maybe the original Witches (as we think of the term) for more than a section of the first chapter. But this and a few of the other books I've read recently, combined with the flood of alt-right fake history chuds on youtube, are enough to launch me on a full "REVENGE OF OLD EUROPE, MOTHERFUCKERS," as a backlash against the Alt Right Fascist Fuckwits. Old Europe built the Megaliths and figured out how to feed whole communities of people. Maybe they didn't discover bronze, but they discovered the metalworking skills that eventually made bronze smelting possible. Their Goddess is coming back, and She is PISSED. But also Down To Party if you're cool.

This technically falls into the "Pygmy theory of the Fairies" and while I don't think the Early European Farmers were "the" Fae, they definitely seem to have been conflated with them by later "Indo-European" Peoples. Judging from Basque lore, they definitely seem to have been aligned with them. The image of Black Phillip from VVitch descends directly from the actual history of Akerbeltz the Basque Black Goat God frolicking with medieval Basque Witch covens as they went to go playerhate on their Catholic colonizers.

I saw a Youtube video that rejected this theory on the grounds that the idea of a dark-skinned indigenous people being wiped out by more technologically-advanced fair-skinned blonde haired invaders was too problematic to be contemplated, to which I must respond...hello, this is pretty much the entire history of much of the world at least?

(I hope this is coherent and that I don't sound like I'm off my rocker, LOL. Even if I am a little bit.)