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: SARS2

01/01/2023

Happy New Year!

Painting: Eaton Hamilton 2022, oil on stretched canvas, 20×20″

ID: Two small kids run barefoot through a green meadow wearing red and white striped shirts and blue shorts

#AutisticArtist #FaceBlindness #AcylicArt #AcrylicPainting #MixedMedia #OilPainting #Drawing #FigurativeArt #Strength #Endurance #OnLineDrawing #LifeDrawing #Visual Art #PortraitsOfWomen #NonBinaryArt #PastelArt #transArt #AuthorsWhoPaint #PatreonHamiltonArt #ArtForSale #DisabledArt

Folks, we made it! For all my isolation, 2022 seemed to zip by with me, as usual, always behind, behind, behind. It helps, I guess to have meaningful work you love (even if more than half the time it is crunchingly hard). I hope you have that, too. It means the world when disabled people have been cast aside, officially by governments (legislated super-poverty, systemic ableism, MAiD, triage out of hospital care, lack of SARS2 mitigations) and unofficially by friends and family, who find vaccinating, wearing a mask and improving their ventilation absolutely a road too far to protect the vulnerable and children. Three years of selfishness is killing the disabled.

I don’t have high hopes for 2023 given we’re getting “Kraken” with the SARS2 omicron variant XBB 1.5, which is virulent, transmissible and a great evader of all the current treatments. It’s what we get when we pretend this thing is gone, instead of dealing with it, and there will be worse ones behind it if we don’t start cleaning the air, just like we once learned to clean the water. Problem is, SARS2 is wrecking our immune systems, more and more with each reinfection, which means all the other nasties are getting better footholds and overwhelming healthcare already stressed by bad right-wing government and SARS2: strep throat, foot and mouth disease, meningitis, measles, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, pertussis, influenza, pneumococcal disease, and gonorrhea. We’re also seeing huge rises not only in long covid (LC) but in SARS2 sequelae like sudden death from bloodclots and heart attacks.

There’s every reason to make the virus pass through multiple filters before it reaches your face. You don’t want to get it. you especially don’t want to get it a second, third, fourth, fifth time. Protect your precious body. In the end, it’s all you have.

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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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