Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 22

Let’s Call it Nope-Plying

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I tried to teach myself to N-ply yesterday, so I made this beautiful multicolored yarn to practice on and, as I kept fucking up, I kept getting very mad at myself because I was fucking up bad enough to make the beautiful yarn unusable. So, instead, I whooped up this gray yarn and plied the two together.

Third Man

I should have worn sunscreen. I should have even thought to wear sunscreen. But I did not. I think people really enjoyed the reading. Sheree Renee Thomas brought her friend who was such a fantastic audience person at Southern Festival of Books and so I was able to talk to him and thank him for being so awesome.

Every time I get to read with her and Caroline Randall Williams, I just feel so out of my league. I love it, don’t get me wrong, but they’re just so good. It makes me feel so very lucky. Lucky to be with them and lucky to be seeing them.

Caroline, at this point, is like some kind of priest for her Lucy poems. She has them memorized. She knows exactly how to move an audience. She fucking took the mic off the stand and walked around! And her boobs looked so great.

I told Ciona that I tend to wear bras based on emotional comfort, so I was wearing the bra I do my dyeing in, and then I showed her all the spots of color, because it was just the kind of day where you stand outside in the good weather drinking beers and discussing boobs. Ciona and her friend were momentarily confused and worried that I was… I don’t know… sometimes practicing suicide in my bra, but the green spots clarified things.

But Caroline had a whole fortress of undergarments. Which, you know, makes sense, but is not something anyone ever taught me. At some point, I’m just going to have to ask Sara Harvey to append her History of Underwear lecture with notes specifically for me about what does what, how, and why you might want that.

Chet told everyone that Sheree’s next book is coming out from Third Man so that the story she was reading was from the future. And I think she thinks of herself as someone with a kind of Afro-futurist bent, so it felt doubly fitting.

We were sitting together when Jack White came through and it was so much fun to watch her play it cool and then freak out once he was out of sight.

But mostly, Ciona and I grabbed a couch end and talked about making art and weird connections and strange coincidences. And I went home early to feed and medicate the dog and my Lyft driver and I talked about horror movies and The Skeleton Key, and I was just like, how is this my life?

Also, now both of my favorite pictures of myself were taken on Third Man property. This one from when my nephew was very wee.

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And this one from yesterday.

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Also, bonus picture of me with a delightfully wicked look on my face:

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Apparently There’s No Sign-In Sheet?

Yesterday, as I was scrolling on Twitter, I came across a thread where it’s basically like, “See how many of these symptoms of autism you might have” and I was like “Oh, ha ha, fun” thinking I’d have like two or three, because I’m a nerd.

I have all of them.

I have this strong urge to tell you a story about this, to line up all the evidence and lay it out in a neat and convincing order.

Hopefully you can see the humor in that.

The worst part is that all my arguments with myself about it reveal to me that I have some pretty deep-seated ugly believes about people with autism. I can’t be autistic because I’m funny. I can’t be autistic because I have friends. And a social life. Kind of. I don’t make people uncomfortable, except, you know, every conservative in the state. I have a good life. I’m happy. Blah blah blah. On and on.

And then there’s the ugly hollow feeling I feel when I think “Oh, this, me, is what people wish didn’t exist.” Followed up by, “oh, no, because I’m one of the good ones.”

That’s pretty ugly. But it just keeps bubbling up. I guess I’ll see for how long.

So, on the one hand, I don’t feel any different than I felt earlier in the week. I can’t really see how knowing this might make any difference to my life. Like, I don’t think I’m suffering from it in any way. But also, I’m very fortunate to be able to arrange my life to suit me. That may not always be the case.

On the other hand, I have some existential vertigo. Like, oh, is this why x happened that way or why I’ve always felt y? And that’s not fun.

And I do wonder if there’s something I’m supposed to do now? Like, if things seem okay, do I need to try to get an official diagnosis? And this one is really hard for me–can I trust myself to know if things are actually okay?

The whole thing is weird and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Which, yes, also on the checklist.

Which, I guess, I also dislike: finding out that all my charming quirks, which I believed were unique to me and made me special are actually common enough to be boxes to check off.

So… yeah.

I’m going to read at the Third Man 10th Anniversary this afternoon and I need to be my charming and witty self, so I’m going to try not to dwell on this.

But dwelling on things. Or, you know, obsessing over them. It’s my way. It’s also on the list.

I Knew It

Yesterday, I found out a bit of information that made a weird thing that has been bugging me for over fifteen years make sense.

Y’all, the older I get, the more I’ve come to realize that the whole “they’re going to take our spots” anxiety is because a lot of old mediocre white guys have been coasting by on the idea that white guys should give jobs to each other and keep each other employed no matter how crappy one of them is.

The idea that you, who actually try, might be valued for your trying is a threat to them.

Which is not to say that, if you’re a white guy who tries, you have it made. The coasting guys have ways of keeping you down, too. But the coasters. They are fascinating to me.

Delights for the Eyes

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So, I got this cool self-made-batt kit and I made a giant fiber burrito and then stretched it out into roving.

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And I made this ridiculous yarn. And then I ordered more fiber so I could make more ridiculous yarn and put it in my afghan.

And, y’all, I may finally get merino. I still have no idea why anyone would want to spin merino by itself, unless for some reason you think spinning a kitchen sponge is fun. But all the things that make it super annoying when you’re just trying to spin a basic worsted make it perfect for this kind of thing.

It was nm, I believe, who I was telling that the thing I hate most about merino is that it’s like the kindergartener you can depend on to figure out how to hold hands with everyone else in class and bring them along everywhere. But I usually only want a couple of kindergarteners at a time, so to speak. I don’t need merino finding a way to hold a million hands with itself.

But in a batt preparation like this, where you have sparklies and silk and I swear maybe some cotton and a few different kinds of wool, you need someone who knows how to hold hands with everyone, even the folks–like the sparklies–that don’t normally hold hands. So, you just make sure you have some merino touching everything and everything sticks together. You can tug it into a nice thin (well, not thin in my case, but someone with better skills!) line for spinning. You can get this amazing thing.

So, merino. If you just need a wool fiber to move from point a (your hand) to point b (the spinning wheel), I’m still not sold on merino. But if you need something that you can card on a drum with a bunch of other stuff and roll up and stretch out and twist around other bits and bobs before going to the spinning wheel, merino’s the fiber for the job.

I also spun some shetland this weekend which I really liked. It was mixed with silk, so it had an interesting shine.

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But it’s a little scratchy. It was really fun to spin, though. If I didn’t have to consider its end use, I might be a bigger fan. What I liked about it was it has a nice, long staple length, the fibers, even in the combed top, slid next to each other pretty easily, and it feels sturdy. The only other thing I didn’t like about it was that, even though the colors in the braid looked super, super saturated and vivid, everything became a little more muted in the spun yarn. I honestly think that’s part of what the silk is supposed to be doing–making sure the colors stay somewhat vivid.

I’m going to be curious to see how it blooms, because it compacted a lot more than I expected. Like even in the thing spots, there’s a lot more fiber than you’d think. It feels like that must eventually boing back.

Laundry Day

My plans for today fell through so, instead, I am doing just a butt-ton of laundry and fiber crap. I took the dog for a long, long walk and now he’s happily asleep.

I readded in the stuff about the Atlanta Child Murders, in the conclusion, as suggested.

And now I’m going to try to have a day where I do nothing important and think nothing important. We’ll see how it goes.

I Have the Browns

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This is that motherfucking afghan I’m still working on. That I set aside and did easier afghans, but am now back to because I’m so embarrassed by the prospect of it still sitting here waiting to be done.

The diamond shapes are so hard. For me, anyway. I can, if I’m lucky, get two done a night. And the thing that pisses me off is that they just don’t look that hard. No one’s going to look at this blanket and think “Oh, I bet this part took you the better part of an hour a piece.”

Plus, I haven’t been able to memorize the pattern for the diamonds. After this many! Which also kills my ability to speed through it. I keep trying to tell myself that the diamonds are the vast majority of the blanket, so, once they’re done, the blanket’s mostly done, but it’s a struggle.

Conspiracies

I put a whole big long section in the book about the Atlanta Child Murders and then, last night, I took it out. It’s not that I don’t think there might be meat on that bone, so to speak. It’s that I can’t bear to look.

There is a conspiracy at the heart of my book. But then there is conspiratorial thinking, where there’s a boogeyman in the basement of a pizza joint, which we know because someone ordered broccoli on their slice.

I’m trying very hard to make sure that the story of my conspiracy stays as grounded in as much solid evidence as I can find. I’ve now spent years on these Nashville bombings. I learned about the Sanders family and their potential ties to the Atlanta Child Murders last week.

But if I put them in my book, I’m granting them as much weight as the stuff I’ve been mulling over for years, and that’s just not true. I haven’t vetted that information carefully. I read an article and spent some time on Reddit.

So, I think, if I include it without doing a buttload of research, I risk undermining the information I have that is backed up by research. I also risk giving it the weight of researched speculation, when really, it’s not. And, if I’m wrong about the likelihood of Klan involvement (which could come out as they’re relooking into these murders), then I risk undermining the rest of the claims in my book.

And, frankly, I don’t want to do the research. It’s too heartbreaking and fucked up.

But it is also really fucked up that there are so many families and family networks all connected by their involvement in the National States Rights Party and their friendships with Stoner who keep popping up whenever bad shit happens to black people.

Still Thinking

They’re relooking into the Atlanta Child Murders. I spent some time on Reddit yesterday trying to understand how people felt about the possible Klan ties. (Long story short: many people believe that the guy convicted of two of the murders was not responsible for all of them and that the task force that was developing leads on the Sanders family was on to something.)

The main arguments against it seem to be that the Klan didn’t kill children, that they wouldn’t either have the guts to go into black neighborhoods in broad daylight or, if they had, of course they would have been spotted, that the killings stopped after dude was convicted, and that the idea that the Atlanta police would have taken the idea of a race war seriously enough to take action to keep such a plot from coming to light is ridiculous.

But Klans with ties to Stoner did kill children–four of them in a church. I think we can give a million examples of the Klan going into black neighborhoods whenever. I don’t know enough to say if the killings stopped or if child murders just stopped being attributed to the one guy. But members of the Sanders family did start dying off in 1985, so it’s not like we’d be looking at a pattern that extended another twenty years or something. We’d just be looking at a few years of potentially related but unattributed murders. Unless, of course, the pattern simply moved. Either they moved on to women, like they said they wanted to do or they stopped hunting in Atlanta

I don’t want to get bogged down in this for the book, obviously, but I don’t think–based on the patterns I’m looking at–that it’s really so unreasonable to put some weight on the KKK theory.

Tying Up Loose Ends

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I’m back to working on this afghan because I’m so pissed it’s still in my house. It’s also super hard for me. And I need to just admit that to myself and make my peace with it. I swear, if I weren’t this far into it, I’d switch the pattern to something else.

I also need to be deciding on what pictures are going in my book. But I haven’t really gotten around to it.

But I think the dog’s anti-inflammatory is working. Yesterday he was running everywhere. Not the zoomies, but genuinely like “Woo this is fun and fast.”