Dinah – introduction

Here. Now.

I am feeling simultaneously hopeful for the web, as Twitter stumbles and the Fediverse blossoms, and sorrowful, as hate and targeted abuse rise. It makes me want to gather my online skirts closer around me, to give fewer places for ill-meaning others to tug at me.

But also I am a Discardian, and it doesn’t take unpleasantness to make me want to bid farewell to (or honor, package up, and put away in private) something that no longer serves me in the present.

I’m closing up the oldest posts. Pictures of me as a muddy kid, a sandy beach-exploring kid. Turtlenecks and corduroy pants or lightweight denim. Off-brand Keds style shoes with my toes about to grow through the front. Long tangled hair. Bangs chopped to reveal my face. Out in all weather, making up stories, looking at the interesting things in the world.

Happy granddaughter in the above-ground swimming pool in the hot central valley summertime. Using wading pools as pool floats in the bigger pool. With an older girl I vaguely recall, from next door maybe.

Back at home with my cousin holding stiffly still for a photograph, interrupted in our play. Bare knees, tan as I ever get. Sun-lightened hair from playing outdoors. Standing in planter dirt, probably a future planting around the pond fixture my parents built. A big truck toy of which I have no memory, and two playhorses of which I have many. The chair that still is in use at my parents’ dining table brought outside, perhaps for a grown-up to keep an eye on the kids. I love the ordinary kidness of us in this picture.

Camping with Grandma and Grandpa. Again with my cousin, both of us with our long straight hair, but in this my bangs are brushed aside. A shaggy little elfin child, next to my more average sized cousin. She snacks, I read, Grandma gazes at us, affection and tiredness. All of us wear extra layers against the cool day. Grandma has a knit cap and stripey jeans. I can almost smell the dusty ground of a campsite under redwood trees. Ah and that’s not a fur trim on my coat, it’s one of my pet rats. Was this a day trip? or did I actually take a rat camping? Sweet indulgent family. Perhaps Grandma’s expression is about the rat; probably not her favorite pet.

Maybe the same trip, me my mother, my grandmother. The making of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Me watching, drinking from a tin cup. My mother’s hair long and straight, falling in front of her face as she looks down.

A summer month long ago, memories only anchored to that point in time by old photos. Distant, pleasant enough, but slippery and distant.

I wrap them in virtual tissue and pack them away. I live here, now.

Fast forward to the fall of that year. A truly lovely picture of most of the family, only adequate of Grandma, and possibly one of the worst pictures of me. It’s like child Dinah as played by Will Ferrell or something. Perhaps I’d just eaten my weight in pie. I’m not sure a single one of us is wearing something we’d wear today—ah, the 1970s—except perhaps my cousin who looks completely cute and whose sunny personality shines through so clearly in this picture. The picture of a group of ancestors behind my grandparents hangs in my parents’ house today. I can’t speak to those forebears, but I got lucky with my family. Most people in this picture were gathered for Thanksgiving this year too.

The faded yellows of an old photo can’t hide the incredibly bright and busy patterns of the long dresses made for my step-sister and I by my grandmother as Christmas presents. For some reason in this photo of us posing in the dresses, I am wearing galoshes. Perhaps we just pulled these high-collared long-skirted garments on over our run-to-the-park-and-play clothes? Old car behind us, I think a decade older than the era, but I don’t know cars, but the van immediately behind is the 1948 bakery truck my parents got and never quite brought to its full envisioned glory. It made a nice playroom though, even when it was parked on a gravel area in our back lot before they finally sold it years later.

Sometime in the early 70s a family photo of us all with long hair and hippy-ish clothes visiting Golden Gate Park. One of the few with me and my two step-siblings. Not sure if they were living at our place or it was just an outing. Funny to think I live in San Francisco now, have lived here for two decades. Another decade and I’ll have been an SF resident longer than my mother was old in this picture. Time is such a rubberband, so distant often, and then some little thing will contract it right up with vivid proximity.

But the elastic begins to lose its springiness with time. The photographs sometimes bring things back, yet often emphasize the distance. Nothing wrong with the distance. Let it go, let it go.

Here. Now.

Catching up and shifting focus

No posts since November! You can really tell my attention has all been over at Kabalor.com and its associated Patreon. Many many hours of game design and quite a few spent on getting better at terrain and mini painting. Also a lot of personal growth, physical recovery and restoration after my flattening experience of Prednisone for a couple years, and continued Discardia reflecting my changing interests.

I’m feeling more myself than I’ve ever been and more connected to favorite parts of my past selves. My child and teen self would approve highly of the central place that games and play have in my life now. 🙂

One big change is having even more focused time to myself; that is, time which I am in charge of and during which I’m focused on what I want and need rather than the expectations of others (or what I think will please them). That’s improving my creative work and making it easier to trim away the old stuff.

With meds that have prevented me from drinking (except very low proof and then only rarely), cocktails have dropped off my list of hobbies and writing interests. I am still deeply Discardian in nature, but realized I don’t want to be a self-help guru and so, for now at least, updating my book Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff has dropped off my projects list.

Becoming a person with a chronic health condition has sharpened my focus. It’s probable that I will not live as long as my grandmother and her father (something which in the past I’d strongly hoped for) and so I’m looking at fewer than 40 more years, possibly substantially less, but maybe not. Suppose it was half that? What would I want to have spent that time doing? Synthesizing my lifetime of learning and play into an original roleplaying game feels like something which is deeply enjoyable, emotionally satisfying, and a gift to the world (or at least my friends). If life is going to be harder and shorter than I expected, then I will choose to spend it on more fun and kindness and laughter and love.

This focus, this commitment to bring myself joy and share it with others, is making it easier to look at past things and say, “Awww, yes. That was nice.” and then put them away, perhaps to look at later again and perhaps not. I continue to sort through my oldest papers and souvenirs and to process them. That usually results in them physically leaving my life, though often I’ll keep photos where they bring up part of my story or just make me laugh.

As my terrain and minis hobby grows, my present bumps up against my stored past and the stored turns to story only, freeing space for me now and my future.

So, too, with my online presence. I am not as precious about my posterity as I once was. For my own offboard memory, I keep old things in digital form, but it doesn’t all need to live on the web in the same way. Archiving my past out of public view keeps it from overwhelming who I am now in the online world.

Here’s a picture of me as a toddler. Hair in a long ponytail with bangs over my forehead. Sitting on a sofa somewhere—not the house I grew up in—wearing a yellow sundress and barefoot. One hand is out across the arm of the couch, against which my back rests, the other has fingers splayed as I inspect it intently. Looking at something on my forearm? Exploring how the muscles work when I stretch my fingers? It is tiny Dinah focusing on herself, discovering herself.

A few months later I received immunization shots: polio, diptheria, tetanus, pertussis. Thankful on behalf of my healthy child self. Thankful in the present for all who are getting vaccinated. We all do better when we each do better.

A picture with badly aged color, from when the house I grew up in was little modified by my parents. Still a plain, light color. No decks, no ponds or streams. And here’s toddler-chubby-cheeked little me in a red turtleneck and white and blue plaid pants. They look like a pattern reserved for pajama bottoms today, but that was a different era. There I am in my childhood domain, that great adventure space of our backyard. I smile now and I turn the page.

My earliest known song/poem, written down by mother as I was singing to myself:

I thought I planned
A magic wand,
A wand, a wand, a magic wand
But what I wanted was a dawn
But they cannot know when
Because they’re not my friends.
The little ones run from side to side
Lie down here, lie down there,
And where, where, where.
Then it is the end.
Then I said I’ll go to bed.

Glad to have this. I tuck it away.

Pictures of a child self on a path I chose not to take, in white tights and a short white dress, modeling for the camera. Posing. Being pleasing. I view her with empathetic concern. “Girl, you don’t have to do that. Be you. Be how you want to be. Be free.” And there the path I chose—and to the credit of many of the adults around me was encouraged to be on—becomes visible as I horse around trying to carry our enormous cat, Bliful. Little me, hauling up the drooping tights, annoying things. Dresses are so impractical for DOING things. I leave the poses in the past.

Next a picture of little me with a book in lap, Curious George perhaps, wearing a practical little dress my mother made in a plaid fabric and with some wild paisley pattern behind me (a giant pillow? a wall hanging? a draping over a sofa?). I have long hair, bangs, bright and intelligent eyes, and a closed-mouth expression encompassing happiness, imagination, and determination. This picture, this, is one of the past Dinah’s still present. This can stay public.