Eaton Hamilton

the problem with being trans is cis people. The problem with being queer is straight people. The problem with being disabled is abled people. The problem with being Black is white people. In other words, prejudice.

Tag: covid

04/23/2023

Betwixt and Between

Photo by: Eaton Hamilton

ID: Frog in daylily, my yard

What kind of week did you have?

Mine was sort of a wreck. The weather is still wintery and cold here and I feel like I’m hanging on by my thumbs. The garden’s growing anyway, and the daffodils are out, lasting forever because it’s so brisk. The clematis armandii is starting to bloom, its evening scent mesmeric. When I take the dog out at night, the frogs in the pond croak, the crickets saw, and it smells divine. If only it would warm up. I’m still wearing my winter gloves to go for daytime walks. I couldn’t get it up for anything this week. Doesn’t matter how perpetually behind I am with everything. Doesn’t matter that some things are urgent. Doesn’t matter that I have upcoming things that will take me away from my desk. I just … couldn’t.

I cope with isolation by working seven days a week. I’m glad Tamara Taggart called what I and other vulnerable citizens are experiencing eugenics this week. It helps to have a celebrity voice telling it like it is when most are gaslighting themselves, their families and their communities.

Those “Festival Flus,” those “Coachella Colds?” All covid. Covid is raging out there, and in hospitals too, where many covid negative patients catch it, ten percent of them dying because of it without anyone standing accountable. There’s no such thing as hybrid immunity with a virus so rapidly changing. That’s why even with flu we need a vaccine once a year–because it’s not the same flu we had before. Covid does this five times as fast. It’s new every few months and we’re learning about the damage of repeated infections. There’s not one part of your body they don’t harm in perhaps permanent ways.

It still could be a game-changer for humanity if we don’t smarten up and fast. Wear respirators and elastomerics. Buy HEPA filters or make CR boxes at home (instructions on You Tube). Keep windows cracked. The best thing is to never catch this bastard.

It wrecks everything, but one of the everythings is that it wrecks your autoimmune system. This leaves you unprotected against things like pneumonias and strep A, and also to age-old infections we thought we’d never see again.

We know how to stop it. We stop it by cleaning the air.

Nobody wants it here. Nobody longs to put on masks. Nobody wants to spend money on protections.

But we don’t have a choice. The only way out of the humongous mess we’ve made is to stop it infecting us.

Okay? Let’s do that.

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01/29/2023

I try not to

Painting: Eaton Hamilton Couples Counseling, unsure of size, oil sticks and fingerpainting, 2022

The one time I went, for a period of about 6 weeks, I loathed couple’s counseling. I didn’t have an ethical person to attend with. My partner had already told me weeks before we attended that she was leaving me, and then, even despite our long talks about logistics, later claimed I’d fabricated this. On my side, I was desperately trying to get my partner to re-engage, and for that we needed truth on the table, but her agenda was to “win” the therapist so the therapist would find me unreliable. My partner was very calculated, very buttery faux-warm, and it worked, and it then became hard for the therapist to believe anything I said, and for me to respect the therapist. I needed to talk about a series of gaslights, and my ex saying I made up stories, rather than telling the truth, and the therapist chided me because, she said, my ex was obviously sincere.

I’d been feeling, after an increase in violence at home, imperiled, and I left counseling after my ex confided to the therapist that she’d been “waiting and waiting and waiting for [her] to die.”

Hello? I had time with that partner. I knew when she was sincere and when she was manipulating a situation, though I, like many others who knew her less well, tried not to believe she was as Machiavellian as she truly was. I’d had to see, and emphasize, the good side of her to stay. It turned out she was about to manipulate every “helping person” that came our way. The therapist, but later her lawyer, my (!) lawyer, two divorce counselors, all our mutual friends.

You both must form an intent to save the relationship for things to work in couples counseling, or don’t bother. That’s what I learned.

*****

This week the Doomsday Clock moved up to 90 seconds to midnight. I watched bleakly, wondering if we’d be able to pull it back, sad and alarmed for all the children who are having to grow up around such complicated adult destruction.

But I also wondered how parents who take their children to dance, or soccer, or piano hoping they’ll have a leg-up as adults, who plonk helmets on their heads and buckle them into car seats, who feed them 3-square and make sure they get enough sleep, justify letting them sit in toxic air all day in school without the protections of masks and HEPAs. I wondered if they will have intact bodies after many, many covid infections, and if they don’t, as now seems increasingly likely, whether they will be mad. Furious. Livid at the parents who disabled them.

Another young Black man, this time in Memphis, was lynched by police. Mass shootings in CA targeted Asian Americans.

How can we cope? What can we do? How can we change things?

When I am desolate and there seems no way out, I keep Margaret Mead’s quote in mind:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

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12/11/2022

Swim, much?

Painting: Eaton Hamilton 2022 acrylic on paper 6.5×9″

Hello, folks. I see we are very close to the holidays, while I’m lost (as usual) many months back. The acceleration starts in the spring and keeps going the rest of the year. I can’t quite keep up.

I’m doing a fundraiser to cover housing for Jan, so these little paintings are only $100 USD, incl shipping continental N America. So many folks ask after work but can’t afford my prices, so these little pieces are for them. See Hamilton Art on FB for more.

Meantime, I’m writing. Are you writing this week? If you are, what are you working on? Me, I’m turning from project to project–whichever one I have energy for. Novel rewrite (again? Are you kidding me? This book has had ten years of rewrites) and memoir rewrite (which makes sense because only draft 3 and still looking for the shape). I try to keep more than one project on the go at a time because it helps against blocks.

I hope you’re keeping safe against the new omicron variants in this worsening SARS2 pandemic, and managing to keep away from RSV, influenza and the other viral/bacterial resurges. Here in BC the government behaviour is catacylsmic, and many adults and now children are losing their lives due to gov’t’s “let ‘er rip” policy. It’s heartbreaking. More still are feeling the sequelae to infection because covid presents as respiratory but its damage is deep and long-lasting, from mini-clots, sudden heart attacks, heart damage, brain damage, liver damage, kidney damage, vasculature damage and new study this week noting accelerating osteoporosis. It’s the anti-gift that keeps on giving. It’s worth doing everything in your power to NOT CATCH IT. People are going to have to be a lot more careful, and this means N95 or better masks, building CR boxes (google it; You Tube has instructions; dead simple), HEPA filters in all your spaces.

CLEAN THE AIR YOU BREATHE.

Be well this week. I know how stressful Dec is, especially for parents. Hang in there if you can. The shortest day will soon be upon us, and then every day will be longer again, thank goodness. Loads of my plants are loading up for spring already, in particular lilacs and magnolias. It’s going to be beautiful, and we’re going to need it.

Celebrate love. Celebrate your friends. Celebrate your animals. Find a thing of beauty to remark upon today if you can.

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11/20/2022

Mastodon-morphing–aren’t we all?

painting: Eaton Hamilton, Nov 20 2022, unfinished, oil stick on canvas board, fingerpainted, 8×10″

What’s to say about this week, folks? Life, ever precarious, grows more so by the day. Watching kiddos without updated covid vaccines or flu vaccines navigate schools is daunting because so terribly dangerous. Every day I hear the wait times for BCCH, where one of my grands once spent time in an isolation room, and I wonder how parents are not breaking. I know how frantic one is when kiddos are seriously ill; to then wait with that sick kiddo in a room full of coughing need-to-be-patients for hour after hour only to finally give up after a day in exhaustion and hunger? What the hell are we doing, Canada? What the absolute hell?

We know that covid is a chronic disease now. We know it affects every bodily system–from brain to heart to liver to kidneys to vasculature. We know it stays in the body even after a so-called “mild” acute stage, and we know, now, that it is working to kill people a few months hence. Young people without comorbidities, usually quickly by heart attack or stroke. We now that the “brain fog” people have identified shows up as dementia-like damage in brain scans. We know that the damage caused by reinfections is unsurprisingly much, much worse. We also know that because of the PHO’s “let ‘er rip” DIY pandemic that most people have gotten ill again and again.

But we also know how to slow down (and even perhaps stop) the bastard. We know that N95 masks and elastomerics work a charm–their electrostatic charges attract and trap virus particles (we also know we can’t pick that virus back up from the filters of these masks). We know that easy-to-make CR boxes work brilliantly at cleaning indoor air. All they need is duct tape, a box fan, and 1-4 filters the same dimensions as the fan and about two hours of your time.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy safety.

Here’s one a 6 and 7-year-old made almost alone. I steadied the sides while they applied duct tape to hold them together, then after that all I did was cut a lot of tape, check it when they were through, and cut shapes they asked for to decorate “Georgie.”

HEPA filters work a charm, too, and guess what? There are portable ones now! You can take them with you, whirring away on battery charge, to the doctor, the PO, the pharmacy, the grocery. School! You can even loop them around your neck and wear them like a purring pet kitten.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that I’ve had two positive people between a small HEPA and my 20×20″ CR box, and I was masked (they were not) and I did not get sick.

These protective measures work! I can’t tell you how relieving it’s been to be without viruses the past few years. What a feeling to know I’m not going to be plugged up and coughing my lungs out several times a year.

There is oodles of peer-reviewed studies on twitter covid or mastodon to read. We haven’t been getting the straight goods from PHO or govt. This is an on-going pandemic that is worse now than previously (more deaths in 2022) and that is now striking kids hard. At this point, it’s child abuse not to send your kids to school in masks as good as you can possibly provide to them. We don’t fully know what covid’s doing to developing bodies, but what we know without a scintilla of doubt is that it’s nothing good. This virus strikes to harm, long-term.

Please don’t let it.

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10/16/2022

It’s Sunday all over again…

painting: mixed media, Eaton Hamilton, unsure of size, 2020 or 2021

And I’m still way behind. I work a lot, or feel like I do, and feel like everything is reeling regardless. The pupster does require a lot of attention until 4, when she conks out for more than 12 hours, so for sure, she’s part of this pressure that mounts for Sept and Oct without let-up. There are more things. Spending so long watering trees doesn’t help. The poor things. Years of drought and they’re going to topple anyhow from all the stress of being alternately water-logged and too dry to function. Toppling is dangerous to everyone, and a fine reason all of its own that we should address climate change.

And, Bonnie Henry, is BC planning to ignore Ebola just like we have monkeypox (still circulating), polio, and covid? Respectfully, to you and Dix: bite me.

In any case, it’s been a great, if highly stressful, work week. Got a ton done. Got back in the studio, finally, and did a rough draft of an oil stick 24×24″ in the new series, along with several drawings.

How did your creative week go? Wishing you all the best for the upcoming one.

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07/23/2022

These days, while I’m moving…

pastel by Eaton Hamilton

…and have a lot of medical appts to wade through, it never happens that I can clear my schedule for a week. It seems baggy and luxurious, like an emotional space I can fit into for once.

Moving has never really been as bad as now, since if you don’t find a place before you to have leave, there’s literally nowhere to go. Not for the wealthy, I know, but for we serfs.

So, I had a week where I could cancel a couple last things and just feel the space around me. I motored through a partial draft of my memoir having no idea if I was hitting the right direction or losing it even more entirely than I had in the draft where that was allowed. I’d laugh except the daunting task of reading this one-third book has not happened yet. I dread finding out it doesn’t work, again.

What are you writing this week? Are you getting through in a project that’s been giving you pain? Any successes to report?

Have a good week if you can with all the worry.

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01/16/2022

Hello, folks, from the middle of January

Eaton Hamilton 2021

We’ve had a nastiness of snow where I live and rotten temps that finally, in their last hurrah, killed all the hummingbirds. Or they went back to where they came from. Maybe the latter. I like to think the latter, since I only had 4 or 5 when the cold hit, and suddenly there were 20-30, what with my feeders. In any case, there are hummers here again, but not the juveniles. Haven’t seen them again. I am not sad that I don’t have to do the constant thaw and freeze, bring in, hair dryer, take out routine any longer.

January has been a bugger for covid. Governments are now routinely behaving badly–letting their populaces fend for themselves in a pandemic, figuring they’ll only deal with hospitalized patients when they have to (and maybe no one with pre-existing conditions? Yes, I’m outing you, hospital personnel, triaging out a constitutionally-protected group of people.) I rant about government lack on twitter, where you can follow this.

If it’s art you’re after, try @hamiltonart1000 on IG. Posting daily!

I’ve had a dear beloved down with covid the last couple weeks, and kiddos back at school without effective mitigation, and so many friends with covid I can’t count, and friends worried about their little ones. None of us will come through this psychologically unscathed, I don’t believe, even if we manage to miss getting long covid.

My writing is going okay. It’s the first time I’ve written a book without regulating my output (2000 words/day, 1000 words/day, poem a day etc). I thought it would be dangerous. I just write when I want to; what I’m finding is that if I can make myself start, and stick to it for about two hours, the rest will flow pretty easily and I can put in a good six hours or so before I conk out.

I hope you are managing out there in these tough times. I wish you the easing of your burdens.

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01/09/2022

Scary times

oil stick painting by Eaton Hamilton 2018-2022

Omicron is raging and where I live, kids are going back to K-12 tomorrow without the proper mitigations to keep them safe. No HEPA filters, no CO2 monitors in every class, no N95 masks. It’s terrifying. At most, only partial vaccination status. Teachers too without N95s. I wish every one of them well.

Did I say I turfed my essay collection in Dec and decided to re-jig and re-write as a typical linear memoir? I’ve had a month with it now, and while I’ve had major health problems during this time, I manage to sit with the ms, now about 20K words, most days for at least a little while. That’s one of the benefits of being on perpetual lockdown, I guess, and it’s important to find satisfaction in that ugly situation where you can. So that’s me. Always a dollar short and a day late, but struggling along, doing my best.

I continue to be passionate about advocacy work and educating others about ableism, homophobia, transphobia, fat phobia and violence against women/enbies and children. I put a lot of time into twitter these days trying to undo some of the damage of government covid policies. BC is off the rails. I can’t get BC back on, but I can link to some of the people whose work very well could.

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11/21/2021

This week

Painting: Eaton Hamilton 2021 (appeared at Guernica)

This week BC had catastrophic rains following just on the heels of another catastrophic fire season and heat dome. Things are in a bad way, with thousands upon thousands of animals dead, a state of emergency declared, and many roadways and highways washed out amidst flooding and washouts. Wishing everyone the very best with this new challenge. I’m sorry for your losses and your sorrows. Help victims here:

Times Colonist info

This week, too, of course, was the XX acquittal in the US. I can’t say the murderer’s name, but you know who I mean. I ached for the families in the courtroom as the verdicts were delivered and just as much for what this means for the safety of social justice workers and racial minorities protesting on US streets. As always, you can donate to the ACLU, who work to keep you safe.

The good news is that we now have vaccines for 5-11 year olds in Canada. This is a relief. Despite my own vax status (x2), I have medical problems that mean I need to avoid the people I most want in my life, but when they’re flu and covid vaxxed, I’ll be able to resume our relationships.

On the creative side of things, I continue to show visual art daily on Instagram at hamiltonart1000! I hope you’ll visit and drop me a line; if you fall in love with a painting, do inquire about its availability! You can also support me on Patreon at Hamilton Art.

In the writing world, it’s award-season and I’d like to congratulate all the long-listed and short-listed authors, and the winners (!), and urge readers to remember those who weren’t on the lists–their books are still terrific! Me, I’m working on difficult essays and those remain difficult to find forms to fit them. Still, I work on them every day. I’m working, in particular, on an essay about homelessness and another about autism.

I hope you are doing okay. I find it harder to be doing okay the longer the pandemic lasts. Many gov’ts, including BCs, seem to have decided not to battle hard against covid any longer, declaring it as a preventable illness (say what now?) and endemic. Good luck to you navigating through your week. I wish you all the best.

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09/20/2020

New Painting.

‘Tops. Yes They Call it Tops’–painting by Jane Eaton Hamilton 20″x24″ mixed-media on stretched canvas
We are all full of sorrow, grief and fear. I wish you all the strength to bear what comes our way/your way with grace.
I’m not having any luck painting at night because writing is just a wily beast and it claws all the time from any day. Keeping up with errands and housework, too, is proving a chore.
 
The weekends are for art. Today I rearranged my home studio because it’s in a small bedroom and I’m really at the stage I need one of the big studio spaces available in Vancouver, so I can go large. In this studio I can’t paint against the wall, have a ladder to get to the high parts, have multiple works going at once, or even store extant pieces. So it’s all a hellish jumble without adequate storage systems. I reworked the layout of the rickety old tables I have to give me some mostly empty table space for flat work and hope that will help to make it manageable.
 
Meantime, this painting is what I’ve been working on.

Part of the studio jumble is dozens of old paintings where my reach exceeded my grasp. Things I couldn’t figure out and abandoned as under paintings or just flubbed. What a delight to repurpose them! I’ve had several “go-fix-this” days in the last couple months, and with a few exceptions I’ve been successful. There’s still more to do to this one, but it will have to wait as for some reason, tomorrow’s Monday.

Meantime, two major rewrites this week on old/newish short stories, which was hella hard but gratifying. This week fun things like submitting and accounting, along with trying to finish first draft of a new story.

To purchase a print (mug, shower curtain, set of cards) please see Fine Art America under my name or Hamilton Art. To inquire about purchasing originals, please contact me at hamiltonjaneeaton at gmail dot com.

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