Log Cabin Sundays: Sort of a Soft Launch

This is a weekly blog now, cool

The story so far: Log Cabin Sundays have been something I’ve been doing on Patreon. The whole year’s archive is here and it’s available to all members, free or paid. As always there are no paywalls there and paid memberships are completely voluntary (and appreciated). You can find them here. It all originated with this Threads post.

So here’s where I’ve found myself re: Log Cabin Sundays Logs. First of all, great title, Howie. This thing’s got legs straight away, I think. Second: these posts have had the tendency to either be very samey. My Sundays have become a lovely tradition filled with many of the same activities that I heartily look forward to, or they are just me talking about what I thought about that week in the guise of a accountability.

I’m not sure about you all, but to me the second one is more compelling from a creative standpoint. So here is my proposal: Log Cabin Sundays is now the name of a weekly blog where I talk about the stuff I’m interested in, media I consumed, natural resources news, etc., while also being an accounting of my weekends without social media.

I hope that’s fun and good. It is for me.

Here’s what I spent a lot of time thinking about this weekend, especially on the hike I took Sunday morning. It’s a further dive into what I’ve chatted with you all about this whole year. How do we live in a tumultuous time like this one, aware of the things that are happening and actively doing something about it, but also maintain sanity? How do we still enjoy gardening and birdsong and be a pleasant person to spend time with?

Unplugging on the weekend is a privilege when I’m not yet a member of a marginalized group. People who are worried about being arrested without warrant, shipped off to overseas prisons based on a rumor, then aggressively demonized by the most powerful government on earth don’t get to sit and listen to records so they can recenter and live like a sane person. They don’t get to go surprisingly viral simply by publicly promising to leave their phone on the nightstand for 24 hours. These are all things I find true and have yet to find a way to reckon with.

I will say, though, that our parents and grandparents lived through tumultuous times as well, and they were informed at most three times a day about them. They read about them in the newspaper and watched about 30 minutes of recaps of what the world has done before going to bed. A screen didn’t notify them in the middle of the night, or interrupt their dinners out. Were they privileged simply by living in a time when they weren’t expected to be informed not just of what is occurring today, but what is occurring this second? Incredible social change still happened, perhaps rivaling anything that has happened in a post-social media news cannon world. There may be an argument that in the absence of the ability to post that we are outraged, one instead was more likely to channel that energy to on-the-ground action. I don’t know but I bet someone has studied this.

I worry that today someone who spent an hour with the news in the morning and another 30 minutes in the evening would come across as painfully disconnected from the world today. But we’ve existed as a species for perhaps 200,000 years and have had the internet and cable news for less than 50 of them.

The thought I had was that we not only need to moderate what we allow into our brains, but also that doing so is not a selfish act. In order to be the support members of our community need, we also need to be in a place where we can provide it. The metaphor I’ve used before is that a healthy watershed has lots of places where water can go when there’s too much of it. Intact rivers can distribute that energy across a floodplain, which prevents the banks from being shorn down. Deltas and estuaries dissipate that energy further when the river meets a body of water. But when our streams and canals are constrained, the water can overtop the banks and cause devastation. These floods not only hurt the streams themselves, but the areas surrounding them.

If I’m a river, I can’t take on the flooding from waters upstream if I don’t have the capacity to handle it. And if I try, it can make the situation worse. I have an aquaintance who was in the middle of a mental health crisis, and a close friend visited to help them through it. But the visit was not productive, because the friend was in the midst of their own panic regarding political situations. Instead of listening, they piled additional doom onto a person who was not in the position to receive it. This is not a new story, and many a friend has had to cut off contact with a Fox News-addled parent or relative they disagree with, who see everything as an attack and repeat conspiracies, but it’s also upsetting even if we agree politically.

I like to think that I’m pleasant to be around, and funny, and thoughtful. I would hate to think that instead of living up to that expectation I instead left a friend after a visit in a worse state than when I’d arrived. And that’s when the stakes are low.

This week I was on call as a volunteer victim advocate for our sexual assault hospital response team. Because I knew I was going to potentially need to be a support for someone going through an immediate and painful crisis, I opted out of material that would be upsetting to me. This is a privilege, but it’s also a privilege to be in a position where I can take the time to be a support for rape victims. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to use that privilege for good. Other people were paying attention to the news and responding accordingly, so I knew I could take a day or two off.

On the team we will sometimes get volunteers who aren’t emotionally ready to be team members yet, usually because they have unresolved emotions regarding their own assault. It’s incredibly brave of them to want to turn their pain into healing for someone else, but it can be damaging to have someone who is supposed to be a support instead get triggered into their own trauma. That’s why members of the team can meet with the therapists, too. If joining the team instead turns into finally getting on a path towards healing, that’s a victory. Even if it means they take some time off to get there.

That’s my message to you, if you’re in a position where someone is depending on you to take on some of their troubles. We’ve got this. Do you have small children who need you at your best? Are you the primary caregiver for someone? Maybe you’re an EMT with little sleep but another shift ahead of you and you have no idea what is in store. In those moments it feels irresponsible to check out for your own health, but it’s not for you. It’s for someone who needs you more than “the resistance” does. Take a break.

Hell, maybe it is for you. If you’re overcoming your own personal crisis: take a break. You’re healing from an assault, fleeing domestic violence, barely keeping it together while your child is in the hospital. Friend, take a break. The fight will be here when you’re ready for it and those on the front lines will be happy to have you back when you’re ready.

Here’s the Log Cabin Weekend Report:

Parents visited for a birthday on Saturday, we had a massive meal and a pleasant visit. Sunday was a hike in the morning, a nap in the afternoon, and catching up on all the graphic novels I’d accumulated from the library. These were Book 4 of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ Die; Cullen Bunn and Cat Farris’s The Ghoul Next Door; Tri Vuong’s The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn, and Zach Weinersmith and Boulet’s Bea Wolf. All were good but Bea Wolf was absolutely phenomenal. One of the best things I’ve read in a long time.

I polished off a good half of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn and we had homemade pizza.

It was a light music weekend. I listened to The Who’s Who’s Next; and The Cure, Paris.