Anchorage public works crews use a ‘friendly snowplow’ that prevents the pushing of snow into residents’ driveways during snow-clearing operations.

Right. Coleman and the Livability people obviously never tried walking on non-downtown Anchorage sidewalks in the wintertime. “Friendly snowplows” in Anchorage — whether belonging to the Municipality of Anchorage or the State of Alaska Department of Transportation — plow all the snow after a big snowfall onto the sidewalks, in huge berms often made worse by icy chunks that make things even more unwalkable for people who walk, ride the bus, etc. — especially for people who have any kind of physical disability. Sometimes sidewalks get cleared, but frequently only weeks after major dumps of snow — if ever. Until then, good luck.

Try walking a few blocks in my winter boots, & see just how “friendly” the snowplows of Anchorage are. Here’s a typical scenario facing any Anchorage pedestrian who walks in places other than downtown or from their doorway to their car:

That’s a photo from Monday, December 5 next to the Sockeye Inn on the north side of Fireweed between C & D streets, looking west. Anchorage residents may remember that we were on the second or third day of some unseasonably warm weather & partial thawing. The sidewalk was barely walkable here, so long as you weren’t old or disabled — full of lumpy chunks of ice thrown up from the road by snowplows on whatever day that most recent snowfall before December 5 had been.  And see that hump of snow beyond the light pole? That’s where snow was pushed to clear the Sockeye Inn’s driveway.  There’s no pathway for pedestrians at all there, short of climbing the berm.

Why so bad? Because the State of Alaska and Municipality of Anchorage have placed low low priority on making the streets safe for pedestrians, including those who, like me, ride the bus. The Anchorage Daily News reported, also today, on problems with road conditions after recent major dumps of snow — snowfall which occurred after I took the photo above. ADN reports:

The problem appeared to be worse on roads the state maintains — most of the bigger roads in Anchorage, such as Dimond and Northern Lights boulevards, C and A Street and Minnesota Drive. The state also plows the Seward and Glenn highways….

The city plows a few major roads, including Lake Otis Parkway, 36th Avenue and Bragaw Street, and also cleans all the neighborhood streets. Each agency [Municipality of Anchorage and State of Alaska] clears bus stops and sidewalks, too.

Sure. Once in a blue moon. The photo above from December 5 was taken long after the most recent snowfalls.  So were these, taken that same evening:

That’s on the west side of C Street just north of Northern Lights, next to the Wells Fargo Bank.  This, again, is after the unseaonable warmth & partial thaw earlier in that week — but sidewalks were still a mess because as usual, whoever was responsible had never bothered to plow them. (Along C Street I believe the Alaska Department of Transportation is the (ir)responsible party.) It’s next to impossible to walk on, and definitely impossible if you are old or have a physical disability.

(Julia O’Malley of the Anchorage Daily News wrote an excellent column last January about how lousy the sidewalks are for people in wheelchairs.)

This next one is a few yards further north, by the Wells Fargo parking lot.  Already a dangerous area because the drivers of vehicles coming out of that lot tend to crane their necks to the left to look for oncoming cars, seldom checking to the right for oncoming pedestrians.

And a little further to north, approaching Leroy’s Diner.  The sidewalk is only marginally better here, but still uneven & poorly maintained.  Alaska DOT seems to have decided that it needn’t bother plowing sidewalks if there are parking lots next to them, since parking lots inevitably get plowed by the businesses who own them.  Unseen in this photo is that next to this sidewalk is a large vacant lot full of berms that are even more impassible (if that’s possible) than the typical Anchorage wintertime sidewalk.

Here’s one from a few days later, December 8. This is on the north side of Fireweed Lane west of Arctic Boulevard.  The sidewalk was so bad that I walked on the street, only using the sidewalk when there was oncoming traffic.

Here’s a couple photos from last February 28, on Northern Lights Boulevard just west of Spenard. Again, snowplows at the last snowfall had thrown a snow berm up onto the sidewalk, and the responsible agency never bothered to clear the sidewalks. Even after the berms began to melt off, pedestrians were left with only a narrow aisle barely wide enough for one person — if she walked partly sideways. Looking east:

Same place, looking west:

None of this is new.  Whether it’s the State of the Municipality at fault, Anchorage has had a dismal record of giving a crap for Anchorage pedestrians for years. Here’s the first “lousy winter sidewalks of Anchorage” photo I took on November 20, 2005, on Denali Street next to Sears Mall Carrs. I’m pretty sure this is a Municipality-”maintained” sidewalk.

When it comes to people who walk in the winter, it’s clear: Fairbanks cares more.

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In any case, Jesse made a tough call, & had her put to sleep this afternoon. His girlfriend Gina was with him, of which I’m glad. He was pretty torn up about it.

Sweetheart was a mutt with a preponderance of Rottie who we adopted on Jesse’s behalf from Animal Control in August 2009. I don’t have any pics of her when she was a puppy, but I spent lots of time tonight going through other photos & adding to the set I already had on Flickr, & showing them to Jesse & Gina, & all of us sharing memories of a dog who lived up to her name — in spite of the name my cat Vai gave to her: Evil Dog from Hell.

I lost Vai on October 13.  Now Sweetheart’s gone too.

We’ll miss you, Sweetheart. Rest in peace.

Some of my favorite photos of her (captions below photos):

On Homer Spit, Homer, AK, summer 2003.

This young moose, perhaps two or three years old, wandered around our back yard all morning (see other piks in my Anchorage moose set), then came up alongside the house through the carport, & finally to the front of the house, where Sweetheart finally got to see it. Amazingly, she didn’t bark once, just stared fascinated with her nose to the window, until the moose moved onto our front porch, and Sweetheart went to the other side of the door — unable to see the moose, but still fascinated. This was the supreme “Gotcha” moment, with her head cocked to the side, listening intently for whatever that moose might be up to. 18 Jan 2004.

Jesse & Sweetheart resting up after a hike up Powerline Pass, Chugach State Park, Alaska. 13 Jun 2004.

Jesse & Sweetheart, Homer Spit, Homer, Alaska. 3 Jul 2005.

In our backyard, March 2006.

With Ptery (then Rozz) in the Ft. Richardson woods, April 2006.

With our friend Chris on a hike on the Kenai Peninsula, May 2006.

Point Woronzof, Anchorage, August 2006.

“It’s, y’know, a little crowded back here with this bike.” August 2006.

Snowplow! December 2006.

Getting a bath. August 2007.

Holding paws with Jesse, November 2007.  She used to love getting up on her haunches and having her paws held like this — she could sit there for long minutes, just blissing out.

Holding paws with our friend Marcia, January 2008.

Playing dress-up, February 2008.

In the back of my car, September 2009.

Rolling in the snow, March 2010.

Here’s the full slideshow:

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Since becoming a Goodreads member (see my last post), I spent awhile last night adding books to my bookshelves there & in general being a book geek. Along the way, I ended up reviewing a book I’m still reading because it’s already proven valuable to my writing.  I figured I’d share the review here — actually expanded from what I wrote on Goodreads.  And because my blog automatically updates my Goodreads author profile (that unfortunately is still not with my reader profile), it’ll show up there too.

I started reading The Hazards of Space Travel: A Tourist’s Guide by Neil F. Comins off my Kindle for iPhone as relaxing lunchtime reading at the Bear Tooth the day before Thanksgiving — excellent accompaniment for Yucatan lime soup, chicken Ceasar salad, & that dark smooth Moose’s Tooth Pipeline Stout!

Really, I chose it because I was in the midst of NaNoWriMo, working on a story called “Cycler” & thinking about what my character Esti Gusev, born & bred on Mars, will experience when she takes a mag launcher into space for her trip to Earth. “Martian” is synonymous with “has lived her whole life at 1/3 of Earth’s gravity” — she’s had to work her hiney off to get strong enough to withstand Earth gravity, much more so to take a launcher into space instead of riding the space elevator.  So, what will it be for her to be pressed back into her seat at 2 or 3 times Earth g as she rises to orbit?

Much to my surprise, as I read the chapter in this book about gravity, I discovered that I’d had Esti work so hard that she was well-equipped to deal with the high g-force for that brief duration. What really messes her up?  Microgravity. From low Mars orbit to rendezvous with the cycler in which she’ll travel to the Earth/Moon system, she gets sick as a… well, not as sick as a dog, but rather as sick as more than one-half of all astronauts & cosmonauts who’ve ever been to space. What sickens them is a condition called space adaptation syndrome (SAS), which is caused by physiological changes due to the lack of the force of gravity that the species of Earth evolved under:

While all the causes of this illness have not yet been identified, changes in the gravitational force, redistribution of the fluids in the body, and changes in the digestive system all contribute to the disorder. The symptoms include uneasiness and discomfort, as though you are coming down with a cold, drowsiness, disorientation, sweating, headaches, loss of appetite, irritability, loss of motivation for tasks, a knot in your stomach, and sudden vomiting.

Space adaptation syndrome acclimation (NASA). This isn't what Esti looks like, but this is kinda like how she feels looks like. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In this enclosed environment, the vomitus has nowhere to go, which adds to your nausea and can eventually case you to breathe in the material you are expelling or have already expelled….

Ewwww.

…. caus[ing] you to asphyxiate.  To avoid these dangers, astronauts today are forbidden to carry out any activities that require space suits until three days after they have arrived in space.

My channeling-Esti pseudo-SAS was not, I must hasten to add, because of Thanksgiving dinner the day before: nobody else with whom I enjoyed Thanksgiving got sick.

I got better, Esti got better, & the book has already proven invaluable as a research tool for my ongoing writing in my Cold/Long Dark story universe. I’m reading it all out of order, though.  Right now I’m reading the stuff about radiation hazards in space. The radiation dangers are so extreme for long-term travel in space, that if I were to retain complete fidelity to science, I’d have to give up this story universe altogether. Therefore I will follow that tried & true method of all science fiction writers: I’ll fudge a bit.

Some of the “Mack’s Log” stories used to illustrate the science verge a little on the cheesy side — Neil Comins is, after all, an astronomer & science writer, not a storyteller.   But all else is good.  This book is immensely readable, interestingly written, & is comprehensible to the intelligent non-scientist reader. I particularly recommend it to writers like me who might want to know a few things before they have their astronauts do something really stupid.

This is my review from partway through the book — perhaps I’ll write more later, after I’ve finished it. Or as additional facts in it affect my writing of my characters & my story world.

Related posts:

1. Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space
2. Terraforming notes
3. Taking life support for granted

And what is Goodreads?  It’s “the largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world” — a “social cataloging” site that allows readers to share what they’re reading, make recommendations to each other, review books, join book clubs, and even talk with authors. Right now it has over 6.5 million members with more than 220 million books in its catalog — which members are adding to every day.

And Goodreads recognizes me as an author. Cool.

Cyd went on to tell me that she could add to my author profile because

I’m a librarian, a lofty status I was awarded by asking, “Can I be a librarian?”, which means I can add your blog, a bio, a photo…

Very cool.  So she added my blog to my author profile, & I went on over there myself to check things out.  Next think you know, I had become myself a Goodreads user, so now I have two profiles, one for me as a reader, and one for me as an author. It turns out that it takes just a bit longer to be recognized as the author associated with an author profile than it does to be approved as a librarian (which I got myself appointed as too, in order to address some issues with a couple of books that stuff of mine appears in), but that should happen soon enough, at which point my author and reader profiles will become as one.  And then I’ll be able to do some additional cool stuff, as author, that I can’t do now.  But you can already, if you want to, become my fan.  (How strange! Me? Fans?)

This will be good for me, as I prepare to finish out my last non-”my stuff” writing obligation other than my editorship of Bent Alaska, and change gears to really focus on my writing.  The possibility of engaging as a writer with friends and potential friends who might like to read my stuff is a big motivator to do more writing, and actually getting it into shape that I can share with other people.

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Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, ed. Bart Lieb. Cover art: "New Generation of Leaders" © 2011 by Brittany Jackson http://liol.deviantart.com

Way back in February, I wrote “Whatever in hell I’ve been doing… it hasn’t been writing many posts on Henkimaa.” And lo, here in December, it’s still the case.

In February, I’d just become  co-editor of Bent Alaska, Alaska’s LGBTQA blog, which means lots of my blogging energy went over thataway. Since October, I’ve been Bent’s sole editor — still trying, with limited success, to get other contributors consistently involved with the blog so it’s not only on my shoulders — and there’ve been a few big stories this year that I’ve written, even aside from the normal day-to-day of basic posts about upcoming events and news. I’m also principal investigator for the Anchorage LGBT Discrimination Survey, which has taken up huge swaths of my time over the summer and fall.  I completed the preliminary report on the survey in early November, and will be finishing the final report this month.

That’ll free up some time for what I really want to be doing with this life: writing my own stuff.  But it isn’t as if I haven’t been doing at least some of that.  I just spent the last month doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again — that headlong hurry of the writing month I now call NaNovember, wherein a lot of nutty people around the world attempt, and very often succeed, in writing 50,000 words in 30 days.

Out of which has proceeded — well, let me put it this way.  As I wrote in February, in a parenthetical:

(Meantime, a story finished in the wee hours of November 1 featuring Esti Gusev, born in a really yucky Martian religious community, has been accepted for publication, but I’m constrained to be pretty mysterious about it otherwise.)

No need to be mysterious now. My story “Pushaway” has now been published, as one of a number of very excellent (if I do say so myself) stories in the Crossed Genres anthology Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, edited by Bart Leib.

Bart Leib is one of the founders of Crossed Genres, and selected my story “Cold” for publication in its 12th issue — the LGBT issue — in December 2009.  “Cold” was later selected to represent the LGBT issue in the Crossed Genres Year One Anthology, published in February 2010.

Not bad for a story that came out of my very first day of NaNoWriMo writing ever on November 1, 2007, which also marks the baby steps in my creation of a story universe that I’ve been writing about every NaNovember since — and in between as well.  “Cold” is about two young women, Bai Wang and Boleyn Maheshwari, who live on a planet in another solar system in the late stages of terraformation (that is, being engineered to have an Earth-like biosphere). My NaNo writings in both 2007 and 2008 were mainly about those characters and that world.  But in 2009, I decided to jump back three or four centuries in my timeline to learn more about the people from whom Bai and Boleyn and their contemporaries descended — the inhabitants of the asteroid belt and gas giant moons of our own solar system, who built the ships that traveled the Long Dark between stars that brought Bai’s and Boleyn’s people to their planet.

And thus was Esti Gusev born — early enough, in fact, to have shown up in a brief mention as an important historical figure in “Cold”.  Here’s Bai in “Cold” reflecting on the progress of the terraformation project:

In her own lifetime, they said, they’d be able to walk outside without breathers, something no one had done since Esti Gusev departed Earth to join the Project so many lifetimes ago.

That’s Esti: the last person of the Project to have freely breathed the open air of a planet-sized biosphere: everyone in between, through centuries of time, has lived only in the small human-created artificial biospheres of space stations, ships, rovers, or habitats built on moon or planetary surfaces.  Martian by birth, Esti becomes a citizen of  Consensus — the association of inhabitants of the outer solar system (asteroid belt and outwards) — spends some time on Earth on Consensus’ behalf, and ultimately takes one of the ships crossing the Long Dark… and she’s become an important carrier for me of a lot of how I feel and think about things.

The first words I wrote that went into “Pushaway” came out of my NaNoWriMo writing on November 3, 2009, including the words which now open the story:

Esti Gusev wasn’t the name she was given at birth. It was the name she’d taken. She’d damn well earned it.

Gusev Crater on Mars. This is where Spirit Rover landed, and some many years later (as in, many decades, even a coupla centuries), where Esti Gusev grew up. This is seen roughly from the north, with Ma'adim Vallis in the south.

So how did she take that name?  That’s what “Pushaway” is about: her growing up on Mars, in a pretty toxic religious community, where she comes to believe in that fundamental lesson taught by Jesus that “the Kingdom of God is within you” — only to suffer her community’s efforts to beat that belief out of her.

But I didn’t write “Pushaway” as a completed story during NaNoWriMo 2009.  It became the story it is as a result of Bart Leib’s invitation in May 2010 for me to submit to

an anthology of stories about striking back at the status quo – whatever that might be. The Authority can be real or perceived; the act of subversion subtle or overt; and the consequences minute yet significant, or immense and world-shaking.

I immediately thought of the Esti’s childhood: because what is more subversive to the status quo, just about anywhere or any time, than those people who believe in, and insist upon, being who they are instead of shaping themselves to fit some other person’s, or some other ideology’s, abitrary rules about who they should be.

This story is not an LGBTQ story per se — it’s mostly about Esti’s childhood and doesn’t delve into her sexual orientation or gender identity to speak of (but for the record, she’s a cis-female lesbian).  But look at the last sentence of my previous paragraph: this story is informed bigtime by the encounter that I and most other LGBTQ people have (though we’re not the onlies, of course) of having to fight for our very identities — to live as who we are, instead of forcing ourselves, or being forced into, living as who we are not. In particular, this story is informed by what we in Anchorage lived through during the so-called Summer of Hate in 2009, when demonstrators against an ordinance which would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Municipality of Anchorage’s nondiscrimination code repeatedly insisted upon the lie that the sexual orientations and gender identities of LGBTQ people were a “choice” — a lie that continues to be repeated today, not only in Anchorage but all over the world.  On a “here’s how my local community influences me” level, too, there’s also a particular scene in “Pushaway” that grew directly out of learning about the child discipline methods espoused by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and by the clerical and teaching staff of Anchorage Baptist Temple and the associated Anchorage Christian Schools — about which you can read in my September 2009 post “James Dobson’s God is a child abuser, & so is Jerry Prevo’s.”

So… in 2010, I took the germs of what I wrote during November 2009 and shaped it into the story it became, and in the wee hours of November 1, 2010 — as I embarked upoin another NaNovember — I completed it.

I must have done something right, because a few days later, Bart wrote back to tell me he’d like to publish it.  Cool!

So there you have it.

And it’s good to be in storymind again.  And to write this post, right here on Henkimaa.  You’ll be seeing more here too.

Until then —

Buy Subversion!

You can still read “Cold” at the Crossed Genres website for free. But to read “Pushaway,” you’ll need to buy Subversion:

• In print from Amazon.com ($11.95)
• Ebook on the Kindle ($4.95) (Amazon.com)
• Ebook on the Nook ($4.95) (Barnes & Noble)

Here’s the company my story keeps — the full table of contents:

• “Foreword” by Jennifer Brozek
• “A Thousand Wings of Luck” by Jessica Reisman
• “And All Its Truths” by Camille Alexa
• “Pushaway” by Melissa S. Green
• “Phantom Overload” by Daniel José Older
• “Cold Against the Bone” by Kelly Jennings
• “The Red Dybbuk” by Barbara Krasnoff
• “Pushing Paper in Hartleigh” by Natania Barron
• “Parent Hack” by Kay T. Holt
• “The Hero Industry” by Jean Johnson
• “Flicka” by Cat Rambo
• “Seed” by Shanna Germain
• “Scrapheap Angel” by RJ Astruc & Deirdre M. Murphy
• “The Dragon’s Bargain” by C.A. Young
• “A Tiny Grayness in the Dark” by Wendy N. Wagner\
• “Received Without Content” by Timothy T. Murphy
• “To Sleep With Pachamama” by Caleb Jordan Schulz

More about Subversion

(I’ll add stuff to this list as I find it.)

• Goodreads listing
• 12/4/2011. “A subversion of stories” by Sabrina Vourvoulias (Following the lede [blog]). Reviews several of the stories (though not mine) — but my! there’s some good stuff in this anthology!
• 12/5/2011. “Anthologies, birthdays, and other frightening things” by Bart Leib (Subvert the Space [blog]). Bart’s account of how Subversion came to be, and where he hopes Crossed Genres Publications can go from here.
• 12/5/11. “Read, Subversive! Read!” by Kay Holt (Kay Holt’s blog). Kay Holt is author of the story “Parent Hack.”
• 12/6/11. “REVIEW: Subversion edited by Bart R. Leib” by Peter Damien (SF Signal). 4-star (out of 5) review of anthology, with individual reviews of each story. “Pushaway” got 4 stars —” Told in scenes which move back and forth through a young girl’s life, this is the story of a religious cult who forms an unsustainable settlement on the site of the Spirit Mars Rover. What the story is mostly about is breaking free, over and over throughout the girl’s life, from whatever’s holding her down. The story also comes complete with books, philosophies, other colonies and other places with the same old human problems, and because of this, feels like a remarkably well-rounded future.. This feels very much like humanity among the stars: technologically advanced, but still busy being violent, oppressed, questioning and struggling to break out.”

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Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You

by Melissa S. Green | crossposted at Bent Alaska

does anyone beat your heart for you —
oh yes I know there are some who
will quicken it
or slow it at their leaving —
but when you are alone at night
and sleeping, dreamless . . .
it is there . . . beating —
it will be there . . . beating —
till you die

does anyone beat your heart for you
does anyone live your life for you
do you cast a vote — plea for
intercession
do you hasten your death by forgetting

do you close your eyes and believe
what others say you see

[January 9, 1982]

About this poem

I spoke this poem today at the Community Building for Alaska workshop sponsored by the Alaska Community Foundation & Alaska Pacific University, after a morning’s discussion.  It’s not possible to walk together in community as anyone other than who we are, carrying our own minds, hearts, souls.

I wrote this poem many many years ago, mostly in my head, one day walking across my home town of Columbia Falls, Montana, & thinking about people who seem to need to have other people tell them what to think, what to believe — or even to know who they are. But how can you know who you are, unless you discover it for yourself?  How can others know you unless you are yourself?  How can any other person have the arrogance or violence of spirit to claim better knowledge of you than you have of yourself?  To do so is a violation of your very integrity.

This is the second time I’ve posted this poem on my blog. The first time was in the summer of 2009, during the height of the public hearings on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64. You can read here about the occasion of my posting it then.

Related posts:

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2. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me
3. Buddha in the coffee shop

He’s gone now.

Pretty sudden… a heart attack…?… he was perched on top of me this morning, as he often did, and visited me in the bathroom, bumping up against me this morning as I was getting ready for work… and then went into my room, & I heard a weird miaow, like he makes sometimes when he’s being silly, & I looked in & he was lying on the bed in a silly cat-drama way, or so I thought, and I went to give him some love, and he was just twitching a bit… possibly aware I was there… & then his life left him. I loved him so much.

The rest of this post is a reprise of one I wrote about him in early 2010.  There’s more about his namesake, the Finnish epic hero Väinämöinen, here.

Rest in peace, my sweet fuzzy-wuzz.

I’m too tired to write much, so I’ll make this a cat post instead.

Väinämöinen, or Vai for short, was named after the Väinämöinen of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, who was a creator figure & a tietäjä, or man of knowledge — the Finnish word for what in Siberian cultures would be called a shaman.

This painting is called “The Defense of the Sampo” by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Väinämöinen is the whitebearded guy on the left.

Vaistache

Adamastache

This Väinämöinen is a really cool cat. He also has the power to occasionally & temporarily give me a really fat porno mustache so that I bear an uncanny resemblance to Admiral Adama at the beginning of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Don’tcha think?

Like all cats, he likes hanging out in weird places that he doesn’t consider weird at all, like my laundry basket.

He also enjoys the back of my couch. Here, he was watching me sitting at my computer desk.

He finds it irritating when the dog looks at him. Sweetheart continually fails to understand that it is blasphemy for a mere Evil Dog from Hell to gaze upon the countenance, or even just the back fur, of His Lordship. That’s what was happening in this shot.

Here’s a slideshow of all the photos of him I’ve uploaded to my Flickr photostream.

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