Betsy Phillips's Blog, page 30

The Chattanooga Boy(s)

The guy working on the Mattie Green case down in Chattanooga sent me the one mention of the case in FBI files. It’s Dixie Knights leader, Jack Brown, bragging about the killing. In the file, they mention the names of a few Dixie Knights.

I spent some time looking the ones I didn’t know up. Stoner had a guy in Chattanooga he liked to use for bombings. Sometimes the FBI files mention two Chattanooga guys. But what we know, as well as we can know it, is that this Chattanooga guy was young and his uncle was in the Klan and he may have been in the military.

But the other thing we know is that the terror cell inside the Chattanooga division of the Dixie Knights was small. There might have been 100 members of the Dixie Knights but only maybe a dozen who knew about and plotted activities where folks might die.

And these folks, as far as I can tell, never squealed on each other.

Part of the reason is that the Dixie Knights in Chattanooga were a family affair. There were two Brown brothers and a son running the show. But there were also other family members.

Thanks to the FBI file, I learned of a family member also deeply involved, who had two sons–one of whom was a chemistry honor student at UTC and the other of whom was in the military.

If anyone was going to be entrusted with bombings and who would have the know-how and who would be protected… it’s one of them.

Merry Little Christmas

I woke up this morning feeling blue. I then spent a while interrogating what I was so bummed about. And there’s nothing. Nothing’s wrong.

So, then, this idea popped into my head that maybe I just needed to feel sad, for reasons I couldn’t articulate and that it wasn’t hurting anyone if I wanted to mope around.

And, you know, I almost instantly felt better.

I spent yesterday with the Butcher’s family. The Butcher made roast beef for lunch and we exchanged presents–I got a Turkish spindle!–and watched both Crank movies. They remain delightfully terrible.

Then I spent the evening with friends. And there was a history adventure!

And today I’m going to take the dog for a walk and feel my feelings.

I remain, as ever, very grateful for you guys. Your support throughout the years has meant the world to me. It’s literally changed my life. And you folks, who read or have read or will read this are some of the best things in it.

Copper Coming Along

[image error]

I’ve started putting the afghan together. I’m loving the green seam so much. It’s just a fun piece to look at. There’s always something fun going on in the yarn or in the construction of the piece.

And it feels really good to take an idea from thought–whoa, that pattern is beautiful. I wonder how it would look if it were copper?–to trying to come up with yarns that looked to me like copper weathering–to seeing it all come together.

It just pleases me so much.

When a God Spins

[image error]

One of the reasons I took up spinning was that I felt a religious imperative to do so after this year’s nine nights. Spinning and weaving gods are all over, in so many cultures. And yet, I haven’t ever read a good consideration of why it’s so important that we know who the fiber artists in any pantheon are or what it might say about people’s theology and understanding of how the sacred works and how fate works for fate to be something that’s spun and then woven.

I have been thinking about it, though. I’m not claiming my thoughts are coherent or right, but here are some of them.

First, yarn is an energy storage system. I hadn’t ever realized what I was looking at before, because my yarns have always, before now, been factory-made and stabilized before I got them, so I wasn’t ever forced to think about it. But yarn is an energy storage system. You take fibers and you twist them and, in the twisting, you put energy into the yarn that you can later access (even if “later” is just the two second in the future in which the twist will climb up the freshly-drafted fiber).

But you can also see this by tying a weight of any sort to the end of any string and setting that weight to spinning. At some point, enough energy builds up in the twisted yarn that the yarn can set the weight spinning in the other direction.

So, when you’re spinning yarn, you’re putting energy into fiber by twisting it and then transforming it into something new.

What, then, are we being told when we’re told that the Norns spin the fates of people? Are we, then, the medium the energy/fate is being twisted into?

I tend to dwell a lot on what happens after we die. But, if we look at it this way, nothing happens. We just untwist and go back to our component parts. Without the energy of the twist, there’s no yarn. There’s just fiber. Without the energy of fate, there’s just this pile of carbon.

Except that spinners are constantly reusing old fiber. And, if not spinners, birds pluck fiber up and put it in nests.

I don’t know. I think it suggests a varied and impossible to guess at afterlife.

I keep thinking how male gods, especially God, have these rich philosophical lives. They compose and recite poetry. They argue theology with prophets. They write books.

And we’re accustomed to viewing female gods only through the stories of those male gods.

What do female gods think about the nature of the universe? How do they understand how things work? What does their sacred text we should set our minds to contemplating look like?

[image error]

I Hate Spinning

[image error]The wrap I dyed and spun and crocheted.

I can’t tell if I have it like “am done with it” hate it or “it’s hard and I suck at it but I will persevere” hate it, but after last night’s fiasco, spinning and I are on a break.

[image error]

But I’m still chugging along on the copper afghan. All my octagons are done and now I’m working on squares and trapezoids. I’m really pleased with this. Each motif, on its own is not exactly pretty, but when I lay them out and I look at a handful of pennies, it’s so fucking satisfying.

Part of the thing is that, when you’re working on an individual piece, you focus on the part that has the most color, because that’s what you spend the longest working on. But your eye is always going to go to the smallest bits and the larger bits become the background. So, as much as this is a pink/brown afghan, your eye is drawn to the blues.

I hope I’ll be able to start putting this together this weekend, but that may be optimistic, considering the state of my kitchen and bathroom.

Superstitions

I don’t take a daily multivitamin because I’m convinced they make me sick. As irrational as I know this is, I believe it. I can read articles. I can talk to my doctor. It doesn’t matter. I believe that the multivitamin sends some signal to my immune system that it doesn’t have to try as hard as usual and then, bam, I’m sick.

The doctor told me I need to start taking a multivitamin with iron, because I’m slightly anemic. So, I went to the store, read labels until I found one that listed iron. I started taking it.

And…

Yep. I’m sick.

The thing that irritates me about how my mind works, though, is that my co-worker was sick and her son had an ear infection. My other co-worker was sick. My nephew has a double ear infection. My mom and dad are just getting over being sick. And I’ve seen everyone this week.

Obviously… OBVIOUSLY… it’s just the season of people being sick.

But this morning, as I reached for the vitamin, my brain was like “No, don’t take it. You don’t want to be sick.” I pulled my hand away before I realized what I was doing. Then I was like “What the fuck? Take your vitamin.” And I did, but still!

I swear, if I have to go back to the therapist for the intrusive thought of “don’t take vitamins; they’re making you sick,” I’m going to be so fucking pissed.

Only Tuesday

Somehow this week already seems a million years long. And yet, it’s only Tuesday.

Ed Fields will probably get his letter from me today.

I’m going to wear my new wrap today, even though I don’t really understand how wraps work. Or how this one will work.

What’cha Gonna Do When the Well Runs Dry?

[image error]

So, it turns out that walking while holding onto someone is super awesome, because you can go a lot faster than you can by yourself, because of all the pesky balancing you have to do alone. This is my nephew on his way to climb some stairs!!! He just learned how to walk, like, four seconds ago and he’s already stepping up steps when he has someone’s hand to hold.

He’s like the Henry Rollins of babies, too. Shuts his own fingers in a drawer? Just a grunt of pain. Gets his feelings hurt because he can’t ride in the car with his momma holding him? Tears. Such crying and tears. If he’s not shirtless and fronting a Black Flag cover band by St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll be shocked. He’s at least going to be writing cringingly sincere poetry about his struggles by then. And beating up anyone who tries to make babies feel self-conscious about crying.

Ed Fields

Ed Fields, J.B. Stoner’s BFF, is still alive.

Can you imagine the balls of the FBI saying it’s going to take another look at the Mattie Greene case, discovering that they destroyed the file on it–not decades ago, but merely years–,having to borrow a copy from the SPLC, and then closing the case because there’s no one left to talk to, when motherfucking Ed Fields lives just down the road?

I’m going to write to him. He’s not going to respond, I don’t think. But he’s alive, so I have to try.

This is Why People Vote for Trump

I think that the hardest ways of thinking to change are the most basic. Like, if it gets in there early that your body sucks, you can be a forty-four year old woman trying to live a happy life whose brain still shouts “you’re so ugly” in moments of anxiety.

And I think there’s a very fundamental belief we all have that some people need to be appeased and other people’s jobs are to appease.

I think this belief is at the core of racism and sexism. It’s not the only thing going on with racism and sexism, of course. Both brambles have grown large and tangled and prickly in their own ways. And I’m not sure, at this point, that removing this taproot would kill either plant. But it’s there, in the dirt, nourishing the hatred.

I do whatever I want, but black people need to be perfect or they deserve what they get.

I do what I want, and I’m fucking pissed that the world hasn’t handed me a beautiful woman whose only goal is to please me and increase my status among my male peers.

The most insidious part of it, to me, is how often I fall into the role of appeaser. How logical and rational it seems that, if only I would devote myself to doing what some person wanted, then he or she would not hurt me or stop hurting me.

The other day, someone on Twitter said that my joking about Kid Rock’s publicist was going to cause people to continue to vote for Trump. As if me having a laugh and a moment of happiness was the cause of people making a continued choice to hurt me and people like me.

As if I was failing in some way to be a good person because I was not constantly monitoring myself to make sure that I wasn’t provoking anyone, but only appeasing.

There’s a difference between kindness and manners and making sure people are comfortable AND appeasing. One is about exerting yourself as a person with power on equal standing with a peer you want to make or maintain good relationships with. The other is about some kind of expectation of grovelling.

It’s a fucked up thing that, in a country of supposedly free and equal citizens, we have this unspoken assumption of some people’s duty to appease others.