I don't have all the details worked out yet but here it is roughly:  I will be creating for myself a website with my name on it.  On that website you will be able to go to any of my projects (blogs) and can subscribe to the ones that interest you and ignore the ones that don't.  Me, but more compartmentalized.  The website will be the hub of all my activities. 

Stitch and Boots will continue to be my urban homesteading notebook and over time I hope it will become a truly useful site for information about growing, cooking, and making things.  I'll have a personal blog which will be like Dustpan Alley in that it will have the voice my blog friends have said they enjoy reading (because I can't help myself anyway) but will hopefully be a better version.  Frocked Weekly will be the place I can catalog all my vintage patterns, make design commentaries, and put up design inspirations.

Lastly there will be a Cricket and Grey blog which won't be particularly active for a while but will eventually be the place to go to find out what's going on with the book.

I am not opening comments back up here.  This doesn't mean I don't want to hear from you if you have something to say.  If you would like to say something, feel free to email me at: angelinawilliamson1 at gmail dot com. 

In four years I have written nearly a million and a half words on Dustpan Alley. In that time I have gone from being a fairly hopeful person to becoming excessively caustic and bitter. I started with a business in a new state, (or rather a new town in a state I loved living in as a kid), thinking I was building a fresh start for myself and my family. It felt like an adventure and I knew in my bones that everything would work out, that the previous year of bad luck we'd had would change, that we'd build ourselves a shiny new life.

The blog became my chronicle and often my lifeline as I developed friendships here that I wasn't developing in my new town. It was my happy place. When I look at the early posts I can feel the optimism informing even the anxious and the depressed posts. My pictures were terrible and my narrative was sketchy. The progression of change and growth is very clear in the chronological archives.

I was wrong, of course. Very little has worked out. My life is still mid train-wreck. Our closest friends, with whom we shared much of this strange Oregon adventure, are going home to California and it feels like a chapter closing. It's becoming more and more probable that we'll have to leave the house we're living in to rent something much cheaper. Which means giving up my garden, my roses, my fruit trees, and my chickens. It's looking like we may never own a home again. It's unclear what our next move is or how our life will unfold from here on out.


I have, for four years, and with one and a half million words, put myself out there with all my mess, my imperfections, and my contradictions for others to see. For others to scrutinize if they wish. For others to share in. Some of that has been empowering. But so many times I've cut myself open and pushed raw muscle onto the page and the silences that echo back are louder than the support and happy noise of friends. It's the silence that has begun to eat away at me.

The silences have become a fresh form of self destruction. I find myself wondering if any of my friends and family would notice, would bother to call me if they opened up my blog and saw that I was thinking of cutting my head off to spite a sandwich. It has become the same kind of self torture I engaged in when I was completely invisibly falling apart after my parents' divorce, experiencing a dangerous bout of disassociation, and I felt so alone and I was in such desperate need of help but my parents were so self absorbed that they actually didn't even notice I was depressed. The slash marks across my arms practically bled out on my dinner plate in front of them and they couldn't see anything but themselves.


I 'm a really angry person. I've been angry since I was a kid but this is the first time in my life I've become openly and hostilely angry. Kung Fu has brought to the surface what no amount of writing alone could do. It has forced me to feel the anger in my own body and admit the deep disappointments I feel in others. It's always been a cinch to feel disappointment in myself, but until recently you could have pulled all my teeth out and I would have worked really hard not to admit to feeling it for others. Working out my anger, frustration, and disappointments on my blog is not only unhealthy for me, it's dangerous.

Writing this blog has made a lot of good things happen as well and I would like, in closing this chapter of my life, to acknowledge that through writing here I have met so many caring impossibly supportive people that filled some of the hurtful silences, I got one of my designs published in a book, and without Dustpan Alley I would never have gotten my job. It was through writing this blog that I eventually unlocked the door to the most pure form of telling the truth:


I've made it easy for people to get just enough of me, to snatch whatever it is they want from me, without having to commit themselves to any kind of real entanglement or inconvenience. Such is the toxic nature of Facebook and all social media for me. To have 130 people get to casually call themselves your "friends" and invite them to take whatever little snippets from you that are convenient without having to give anything in return is a queer form of prostitution of the spirit.

It's time for a complete retreat from the world. It's time to stop giving myself away to everyone. I've known I needed to do this for a long time but I didn't have the guts. Facebook is like heroine to me. When I turn it off I get itchy to read the chatter and hear the social noise and so I say "Just a little more. Just this once!" I use it to fill the empty spaces in my life. It hurts me but I find it irresistible. I have been open, available, present, and loud for four years on this blog and now I need to take it back. I need to shut the access off.

I don't own, nor will I ever own, a cell phone because I don't wish to be available to people all the time. Having an online social life turned into the same thing as having a cell phone. I see everyone out there in the world twitching constantly with their cellphones, checking their messages obsessively, and texting people who aren't with them at the cost of those who are. This is not a world I want to be part of. Yet here I am in my own house with the people I love the most and I can't stop checking for messages from people on Facebook and my blog who aren't here which is robbing my kid and my husband of my full and genuine attention.

I am withdrawing myself from online life. I've made real friendships here and I can't promise to keep up with emails or letters and god knows I won't call anyone, but for those wonderful real friendships I've made: let's find each other in real life. Let's have actual tea together and let me cook for you. When I come your way I just might reach out and demand some good old fashioned hang out time with cell phones off and no computers. There's a little train trip I've been meaning to make to Eugene and I think I might find a way to squeeze that in this summer. Just know that I don't forget the people who have been good to me. I never forget kindness and I am adamantly loyal.

In the meantime I plan to work hard at not getting fired from my paying job, putting all of my best writing energy into writing Cricket and Grey which I hope will get published and someday find it's way into your hands, and to spend quality time with my astonishing kid.

Lastly, and I think most importantly, I intend to master my punches and my 360 kicks. I intend to find what I need in myself which is as it should be and I know that part of what I need is to train hard to bring my body back to a recognizable shape and dependability, and I believe that Kung Fu is a major part of that road back to myself. I want, and I intend to develop, the fluid grace of the black belts in my Kung Fu school. When they perform the most violent actions their energy is calm, focused, and strangely beautiful.

I hope that the next time we meet I'll have so much more to give you than I have today.

Human beings are the worst thing that's ever happened to this planet.  Worse than locusts, earthquakes, ice ages, and plagues.  Why?  Because none of those things have managed to wipe us out.

I'm in a caustic mood today.

I had to see a picture on a blog of the birds that have been coated with oil from the oil spill and it made me wish a thousand harms on myself.  Luckily, my life is already punishing me.  But when I saw those birds I just wanted all humans, every single damn effing one of us to have to wear the oil we use everyday like those birds have to do.


Every time I get on my scooter I'm saying "Yes!" to killing off wildlife.  It isn't just when we spill the oil that I'm being complicit to harm.  I'm complicit to harm because the whole society we've built around having lots of POWER is harmful.  If it isn't oil it's nuclear for which there is no harmless disposal.  Oh yeah, I know, we BURY the toxic waste.  As though that isn't going to bite us in the ass with massive sickness down the road.  As if that isn't going to corrode eventually or fill up the ocean or the desert and begin to seep and sicken.

For any power to be acceptable it has to be not only renewable but belong to a system in which the waste is somehow a benefit to something else, like soil for example.  Horses are a perfect example.  But obviously if everyone used horses instead of cars we'd have more manure than we could safely and productively use in the environment.

Ultimately everything boils down to the fact that there are too many people on the earth and all of them want to live a high tech fast paced lifestyle. 


Don't think I'm passing the buck on to everyone else as though I think I'm doing enough myself.  I'm not.

I realized recently just what a sickening product of my country I am.  This "way of life" that Americans are always waxing proud about isn't anything to be proud of and its arrogance is insidious.  I wouldn't be caught dead defending our WAY OF LIFE yet I have been living, making decisions, and trying to arrange my life in a distinctly American way. 

I kept asking how I could afford the life I wanted to live.

How can I afford this life I think I deserve to live and expect to be able to live?  Apparently I was willing to do almost anything to hold up a model of life that was out of my reach.  I banked on more than I should have banked on.  I took risks.  I made decisions that dug me in deeper until I was standing at the bottom of a big fucking dark hole asking "Why isn't anything I'm doing working?!"

And then, in a breathtaking moment of clarity I saw what the real problem was.  I saw why nothing has been working out for us.  Maybe it's a little bleak.  Maybe it sounds a little dire. 
And I know it does because people, on hearing me talk this way, try to edge me back to the other camp of trying to have the life I want to have.



We shouldn't be making all of our decisions based on a determination to live the kind of lives we're used to living when there was lots of fossil fuel just lying around.  People.  We've already exhausted an insane amount of power in the century of using oil to fuel everything.  We had billions of babies we shouldn't have had because suddenly we could afford to.  Food got cheaper for a while.  Transportation got easier.  We didn't have to work so hard at first compared to before.  Industrialization exploded which gave jobs to all those billions of people who now needed a way to support themselves.  It was great.  We could have lights on in our houses all night.  We could run amazing power tools and gadgets to make everything easier.  We can drive wherever we want. 

It was a poisonous boon to us.  It has caused us to build all of our expectations, our "way of life", our ideals of what a "good" life consists of around the availability of oil.  Because it seemed endless.  All you have to do is drill and it will spill.  We never stopped to think about long term effects of an exploded population.  We never bothered to ask how we could sustain such momentum.  History demands that we never believe in a permanent growth or a permanent upswing.

Here we are.  Talking about our "rights", our rights as Americans to live a certain quality of life.  To live however the goddamn hell we want to because our forefathers gave us the right to do whatever we wanted. 

NO THEY DIDN'T.

Just like everything else, we interpret everything to underline our own agenda.  To support our own selfish desires.  In case anyone has failed to notice it, our forefathers wrote the outline for this country before the industrialization of our nation.  They were writing rules to govern an agrarian society.  Not of industrial farmers, of family farmers. 

But that's not even the point.

Americans are in love with the idea of having "rights".  No one and nothing has the right to live however they want without considering everyone and everything else around them.  We are all accountable to not only each other but to the tit mouse in the field. 

Rights is a man-made concept.  In nature there are no rights.  It's just the way we rationalize and justify everything we do.

No rights. 

The human race needs to do some dying off. 

I'm tired of hearing people say "I'm so tired of hearing people tell me I shouldn't drive so much." or "God, these environmentalists are so sanctimonious!"  Right.  If someone makes an effort at change there are people behind them saying "Shut up already.  So what?!  Goody for you that you're so CON-CHEE-EN-CHOUS." assuming that if someone is making changes they're automatically looking down on everyone else.  And ahead of them there is always someone doing twice as much saying "You're not doing nearly enough.  You're, like, putting a tiny band-aid on a severed arm."


A lot of people I know and a great many people who read this blog are already people making changes in what ways they feel they can, and most of you are doing a lot more than I am.  So I'm not necessarily trying to shout anyone down who's come here to read this.  I'm just saying the obvious truth here.

I'm angry at human beings as a whole today.

But it doesn't matter because our "way of life" simply isn't sustainable.  When oil truly runs out I predict that in our determination not to substantially change the way we live we'll rely more and more on nuclear power and that will buy us some time until we begin to die off from radiation leakage.  And people are going to demand more CURES for the things that ail us and we'll spend lots of resources trying to fix the symptoms of our excess and our arrogance which is our disease.

Eventually we're going to pay for all of this in a really huge way.  This "way of life" that we have no right to live will be removed from us and replaced with the life that humans can scrabble for themselves on resources that actually exist.

People will starve.  Industries will fall.  People will die off.  Water will be more and more contaminated and not enough of it to satiate the thirst of the people who don't die.  It doesn't matter what we do because we won't do the one thing, the ONE thing we have to do if we want to have a different story for our species:

To ask ourselves what kind of life us humans can live without shitting in our own cage?  We have to ask ourselves NOT what kind of power source we can come up with that will allow us to keep living the way we're used to living once oil is completely gone, but to ask what kind of lives we can live with 75% less power at our disposal.

I think it's funny that I'm writing a book about a post oil existence and I'm writing with such optimism and lightness when I think the reality is going to be a lot more like I've heard Cormac McCarthy's version is in "The Road" and I'm not sure how I can be writing with such optimism I don't actually feel.

When I saw the picture of the birds, black with oil, knowing that so many of them are going to die because we're so greedy to be able to drive where we want and whenever we want, I felt sick to my stomach with a shame of the deepest most viral kind.  I am so ashamed to be human and it isn't that I'm just ashamed of other humans.  I'm ashamed that I'm complicit in that disaster just as much as people driving Hummers are.

I believe that human beings are the lowest of all the animals on the planet. 

I believe that human beings are lesser in worth than cockroaches.

I know it's a dire view.  I know that it isn't exactly a helpful view.  But it's the feeling I have in my gut every time I see human filth.  Which is everywhere.  And people have the gall to believe they have a right to do as they please because GOD says we're superior.

Which is one of the main reasons I will never believe in God.  Because if I believed in God I would hate him/her/it more than I hate humans for creating a world that was pretty gorgeous, worked pretty well, had all kinds of built in checks and balances for all the species living on it.  And then "he" creates us?  The worst thing that ever happened to this planet.  What kind of being designs creatures like us?

No, I can never believe any being, celestial or earthly, could intentionally create such a destructive and evil force as humans.

I will continue to move towards my ideal of change.  I will continue to use petrol less and not buy petroleum products and to produce less waste and though nothing I can ever do can be enough, I will do them because I want to be able to look at the wounded, the contaminated, and the innocent animals out there who are suffering because of me and say "I see what horrors I am complicit in and I'm not alright with it and I am making better choices every day because I know your value is greater than mine."

The following accounting is for myself and isn't a self congratulatory inventory nor is it produced here to make anyone else feel lesser.  What you do, the choices you make is less my concern than the ones I make for myself.  It doesn't matter to me if what I do doesn't make a big difference; even if it can't stop us from ruination as a species, I still have to live with myself.

Here are areas we've been working on:

I reuse all ziplock bags at least once, often twice.

Max uses a cloth lunch bag every day (actually made of nylon and plastic lined, so that's not good)

We all wear predominantly natural fibers.

We eat about 65% organic foods

We never ever water our lawn. Damn thing grows anyway.

We grow mostly things in our yard that benefit birds and insects or feed us.

We purchase very little online.

We don't buy very much stuff (mostly buy things we need when we need them.  Books being something of an indulgence.)

We work hard not to support any companies who have a track record of environmental neglect or that support political parties who aren't known for having environmental concerns.

We are constantly investigating what we can buy locally, especially when it is something also made locally.

We don't have air conditioning.
 
We turned our heat down to 58 degrees all winter.  Though not to use less power, just to spend less.  Has the extra benefit of using less power.

When the car is working we only use it once or twice a week.  It's been broken for two months.  We bicycle.  All of us. 

The scooter, which I have used way more than I should, uses a fraction of the gasoline than the car does.

When the scooter was broken I did ALL of my errands on the bicycle, lost ten pounds, and didn't feel like my life was really hard because of having to bicycle everywhere.  And I live in a REALLY rainy area.

We rarely ever use paper towels or paper napkins.  I've bought exactly two rolls in the past 12 months.

We work in the town we live in.  Philip makes 2/3 less income by working here, but it means he has a five minute bicycle ride to work.

We never use any petroleum based pesticides in our garden.  In fact, we haven't used any approved organic measures either for two years.  Much to the detriment to my fruit trees which really needed some dormant oil which is an organic pest control.

I have been successfully remembering to take my own grocery bags with me whenever I leave the house for a year now.  I do forget every now and then but I have no build up of plastic bags like I used to.

I don't buy gossip mags like I used to except on very rare occasions.

All my cleaners, detergents, and bath products are a minimum of 99% natural and preservative free, all of them are non-petroleum based.

We compost most of our food scraps and trimmings. 

We have never bought a brand new car.  (But I did, in contrast, buy my scooter new and looking back now I wouldn't do that again.) 

We try to fix what breaks first before buying new.

I am only buying used laptops.  It has it's downsides but even if I could afford to buy new I'd still buy used.

I wear all my garments twice before washing (EXCEPT FOR UNDERGARMENTS, which I'm adamant about wearing fresh everyday.  I'm sure everyone is relieved to know that.)

We use bottled water only a few times a year in emergency thirst situations and when we travel.  We all have metal water bottles and we fill them with our own filtered water.

Areas in need of bigger improvements:

We need to shut off all power that's not being used such as turning lights off in rooms we're not using.  Turn off my computer every night.

Need to find a way to get post consumer recycled toilet paper every month.  Trader Joe's has the best most affordable 100% recycled toilet paper (80% post consumer).   The people who are doing family wipes are doing the only truly sustainable toilet wipe situation and if the rest of my life was simplified enough I'd like to make that change.

Need to make my own feminine pads.  The materials in the ones I use are super creepy and it makes me cringe that I'm heaping it onto the environment.  This is an easier change than going cloth toilet wipes.

Smaller house.  We sure didn't seek out a house this big (1900 square feet) and we were happy with a house that was 1260 square feet.  Though we did end up finishing the attic which put us at a little over 1400 square feet.  That is more than enough space for a family of three.  If we don't get to keep this house then I'll be happy to get a much smaller one.

If I ever own again or if we stay in this house a grey water system is a MUST.  It's illegal in the state of Oregon but I don't give a shit.  If I have a right to let whatever chemicals and scary crap I want to go down the drains to the public sewage and water system I should have a right, and indeed a willingness, to use that same water to water my own yard.

Find a better longer lasting non-petroleum based material for putting produce in.  I still use the plastic produce bags because they keep produce in much better shape in the fridge.  It really bothers me.  But I weigh using those against the waste of non-bagged produce that wilts and then is not used.

Stop buying fashion magazines.  I did this for several years and can do it again.  I love them and I've let myself indulge in the past two years again.

My hand lotion.  I use St. Ives as my everyday hand lotion.  It is the only body product I use that is not 99% natural and preservative and paraben free.  I have some other more natural lotions around here that I don't like.  My hands hurt when dry and the consistency and smell of a lotion is intensely important to me.  I use a lot of it.  I will panic when I don't have lotion on hand and if I put any on my hands that make them feel weird.  I don't mean panic in a euphemistic way of saying "I don't like it", I mean I PANIC.  I either need to find a good natural one or I need to find a recipe to make one that I like.


There are other things too.  I would say that my psyche meds are the very last frontier for me because without them everything else falls apart.  Maybe some people can find all the aid they need in natural herbal remedies for mental illness but after 30 years of pursuing only natural herbal remedies for my mental illness I am 100% satisfied that the dangers of life without them are too great, especially now that I have a kid.  So I'll make almost any change before I'll give those up and make myself vulnerable again to persistent and pervasive mental illness whose ultimate risk is suicide.

But before I get to that line, there is a world of possible improvements I can make.

So tonight, as I sign off to go work on my more optimistic look at the future in fiction, I want to say I'm so desperately sorry that our greed and our "way of life" comes at such a devastating cost to creatures much more innocent than a human newborn can ever be.  I don't pray to deities either male or female, I only know that there is this earth that we're on and if I could have nature answer a prayer I'd have her erase us completely from the crust and atmosphere.


But I wanted to leave you with "Snow Goose" by Jean Redpath because it is the natural conclusion.  I couldn't find a link to any version of it.  I listen to the one I found on Rhapsody.  If you can find it, please listen to it.  It's for the birds.

You will come in ships full of coffee and cloth bearing false white flags of surrender only to land and melt into the sharp resinous conifers, shooting the birds up into the fresher higher canopy where none can catch; only watch helplessly as feathers rise, and song is keening like your soul just ripped the mast and tore to ground.  You have become the damp mist across virgin cheek cold from the night and fresh from sleep, roused by butterfly cry and you take nothing here.

This is not where you hunt.  This is not where you take.  This is not your dream, if you can be said to know a dream of your own.  Clouded by salt pork and canned water, any land is like apricots fuming gently in the warm summer sun.  Take that arrow into the dark again, into the woods where the needles grab at your jodhpurs and rip at your arms.  Here you will find cover to watch the unfolding, the story in the clearing, the courage that will rip your tight chest wide open.  No blood, no blood of your own here.  Enough will come.  Enough will follow.  Sit in your shadows and watch fierce eyes burn at the edges and fists break through the curious smoke of an early morning burn pile. 

It will never taste as rangy as this again, like wild cougar on a spit at the beach.  It will never smell like this again, like the acrid after-shock of winter.  Still your beating heart, wear your enemy closer than yourself.  Hold it still, hold it close and never breath- the humus underfoot will suck you in with its rich underground pull.  Set your heart out on the sun-warmed rock because it no longer belongs to you. 

She'll save half a peach for you.  That is all.  Restless like the pulling of the ocean, like a great tidal reef she'll draw you like a leaf into gutter.  She has no idea of the power she has and it's best this way, her fumbling forward into light, carrying you with her, unaware of the full weight of you.  Her force is rapid like waterfalls and you can't retreat.  Not now.  Not again.  She'll not see the shimmering past, the dark tapestry of fear and loathing that once shadowed your skin.  She's too fast, too complete to feel the small nicks; the small divots taken from your faith by lesser beings.

The great field of blue camass lilies calls like water to a sailor but you must wait for her hand.  She'll take you across true like her father might have bade her do if he weren't already dead.  Don't speak yet.  Don't break the ferry's spell.  Cross the water and taste the electric air.  She's wild with it, in her hair, her skin, and it's you. 

It's you.

As it happens, the outline I've created with my semi-clumsy photo-shop paintbrush has illustrated the nose I wish I actually had.  But I'll take what I can get.


One of the most beautiful women in the world is my friend Tara who has the most exquisite nose and I'd show you a picture if I could find one.  She has the best example of an aquiline nose I've ever seen, not an "almost aquiline" like mine.  

I cherish the small bump on my nose though I wish it was more pronounced.  I hope that as I get older it grows.  You know they say noses never stop growing?  Here's my fingers crossed on that...

My cousin Carrie also has a gorgeous nose.  It gives her face a keen intelligence, a regality, and it just plain adds a layer of beauty that it gives me much pleasure to see.  You can't take a person with a tiny "ski jump" nose seriously, but no one can argue with an aquiline.  It gives a strength to a face, a chiseled sculptural impression.

Ever notice how the best most revered sculptures in the world don't have Hollywood noses?  Rodin may not have been sculpting Romans and Greeks, but even he didn't memorialize insipid small noses.**

Why's everyone so in love with snub or button or little noses?  What have they got to offer anyone?  Barbie would have never let anyone dress her in crap bubble-gum pink if she'd had a Greek or an aquiline nose.

I gave Grey a Greek nose because I gave Cricket an aquiline one.  Why not?  Why not give each of them one of my favorite noses? 


I'm going to end this silly post with an observation that may seem simplistic and will obviously not be addressing exceptions which do surely exist...here it is:

I think people are best looking with the bodies, skin, and faces they're born with.  I really do.  I think brown skin is beautiful, but not on people who were born pale.  I don't think tans make people look better unless it's a gentle incidental one they got from a little sunshine NOT the kind you get from baking yourself under the sun.  I think tanning salon tans are creepy shit.  I think big boobs can be an amazing asset to a woman's body, but not if she didn't naturally have them.

I believe in making the best of what we've been given to work with.  I believe in wearing clothes that make what shape we have stand out in the best possible way.  I believe in wearing some makeup for fun, for drama, and to enhance things we might actually like about our faces.  I believe in taking care of a body to be healthy, to let it shine, but I don't believe in obsessing about five pounds of weight or letting your life's goal be to have washboard abs you can play bass with.

Because I am obese I spend an inordinate amount of time feeling unhappy and depressed about how I look.  I take many self portraits of my head to ameliorate the self loathing I feel for the rest of me.  However, when I'm not obese I really don't obsess about my body or my looks at all.

Oh, and on that front, this week I hit a personal best: I rode a total of 12.5 miles on my bicycle in ONE day AND also went to Kung Fu the same day. 

AND I lost 2 more pounds this week. 


Anyway, I love my almost aquiline nose.  I hope that anyone else out there who has an actual bona fide aquiline nose will understand what a gift they have and know that their profile is a thing of beauty.


*Like all styles of noses, there are extremes of an aquiline.  Mine doesn't even truly qualify as one, it only hints at aquiline.  What aquiline literally means is to curve like an eagle's beak.  So aquiline can mean something very like a "hawk nose" or it can merely imply a bump, or lack of straightness.  I tried to link to Wikipedia's example and am having trouble, hopefully it will appear.  My favorite in the aquiline range is the style of nose my red pen created which is the kind of aquiline my friend Tara and my cousin Carrie have.  My preference isn't for eagle-noses as much as for ones with a distinct bump in the line.

**I've got a feeling some smart ass art major is going to discredit me on that one.