it’s the little things that make up the big things. this is a disabled way of being and knowing.

I made it out of the house in the feels like minus 20 cold Saturday to pick up my broken now fixed computer and hit the trader joes before I had to scamper back into my enclosure for the night. in the middle place between the two errands I thought, the post office on chestnut has saturday hours and a decent blue spot that’s probably shovelled out, or could be- let me try it. I wanted to try and re-mail my oldest best friend’s solstice/ christmas gift package, to toronto. it had already been returned once because I put two perfume samples in there for her and I missed that perfume is on the banned list. this time I had the form all filled out, the form a lot of USPSs in Philly don’t even carry anymore or say doesn’t exist, the one to mail shit to other countries. the first time that happened, that they said, we don’t have that, I thought: the u.s. state doesn’t want us to be connected to other countries. sure it’s Philly infrastructure breaksdowns/ gaps/ reality but it’s also that.

this time I got the form all filled out and signed in advance, I need a next customer who’s ready, I go to the front of the line and…. what spices are these?

Uh. I don’t know. Cardamon?

Yeah, well you can’t send those. The form on the computer says, no herbs and spices allowed.

Are you sure? Is this new? I know I’ve mailed these before no problem.

I don’t know, I just do what the screen tells me.

OK. Have a nice day.

It’s such a small thing on the big iceberg of sad shit and bullshit. But after I pick my way over the uncleared glacier to my car, and later when I talk to my friend, I’m like, you know diaspora, they’re that bougie high quality diasporic desi spice brand? I just wanted to get my best friend the goddamn Padma Lakshmi gunpowder and the good cardamom. and I went home after and looked on the website and spices AREN’T on the list of things you’re not allowed to mail to Ontario. and then I’m chatting with her and she’s like, yeah, we now have to pre-pay customs through a third party site. if we’re mailing to the States.

and my brain explodes and I told her when Tangled shipped my stuff back from the fall show, not only did one shipper say they wouldn’t send it without a scan of my passport photo, but when the stuff did arrive, I got texts the week after saying I needed to pay US customs fees- but if what she was saying was right, it seemed Tangled might have already paid for the customs fees - so it’s just a cash grab both ways, powered by autotexts and a third party app.

it’s the pettyness of the creep of fascism sometimes, mixed in with all the huge big bads and overwhelms. there’s murders and kidnappings and the buyout of the Big Lots warehouse to become a concentration camp. and then there’s the petty everyday mundane heartbreak of, you want to send your sister bougie spices as a treat and a present, and the petty mechanism of fascism tells you: you aren’t allowed to send those dirty south asian spices in the mail. learning, communication, border crossing- all always policed and restricted and patrolled, but now a steady upswing on the fascism barometer to them closing.

you should write about that, says my friend as we’re sitting in my car with the heater blasting close to midnight on her frozen ice corner before she goes inside.

so I did.

autistic Brown oppression and resistance.

this is the video (with transcript in link) of Aliya Rahman, the Autistic and disabled Bengali person brutalized and violently arrested by ICE in Minneapolis, who got out and has gone on to share what she saw inside the Whipple Building, where scores of Black and brown people are locked up and cannot get out. She testifies about the love and solidarity- how she feels she stayed alive because a Black cellmate took a risk to bang on the bars when Aliya was passing out from head injuries.

ALIYA RAHMAN: I did not receive any medical care while I was conscious. When I arrived at the Whipple center, I was already injured. I cannot lift my arms now normally. I don’t know how long that will be with me. You know, my body will heal, or it won’t.

But it’s important to me to fulfill a duty to folks like Mr. Mondragón, who you just mentioned, right? It is completely consistent with my experience to hear that the story of these folks, that he ran into a wall head first, is not true — of course, it can’t be — because these people do not regard human bodies as attached to humans.”

(embedding not working but here are links:)

<iframe width=”640” height=”360” src=”https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2026/2/9/minneapolis_ice” frameborder=”0” allowfullscreen=”true”></iframe>

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/9/minneapolis_ice

i keep thinking about the disabled stories Alice would be tweeting. Aliya’s story. Wael Tarabishi’s story, everyone who is disabled now because of getting shot by a gun or a impact device or pepper spray or trauma, the public grieving toolkit put together to mourn together. our thoughts in the middle of the night. she can’t write them. we can and are.

deep freeze

deep freeze and a lot of sudden endings. another friend says, there’s so many things that are suddenly over- in a moment, that journalist is murdered, that family member is snatched, that beloved friend/ community leader dies- and we’re all so cattle prodded in the chute and expected to just keep trampling forward. we’re getting used to fast goodbyes.

another friend and I talking, late sunday night warm inside their place with the electric fireplace and we talk about what happens in movements of the marginalized when there is a high moment of visibility, big changes, big moves and then a lot of people die- “leaders” but also a lot of people more everyday, and then a lot of people drop out, out of grief or burnout. and it’s not simple to just fill the gap all of them left. people aren’t interchangeable, the relationships and skills they bring aren’t immediately plug in the gap replaceable.

what is organizing and community like when we are sitting in that gap, as I believe we are now. and what is organizing and community like within mass normalized, brutal grief perhaps making a lot of us more reactive, in that way that grief upends everything and often makes people not act their “best.”

and I sit with the shock held by my autistic heart, at so much sudden, change, rupture and ending. hand on my stupid heart indeed. I want to believe, in a way that is perhaps cringe, that you mean what you say, in hanging in there, in persisting even with breaks.

in yet another not yet finished project idea, a friend and me want to write about what it really means to sustain community with people you dislike, have disagreement with, just don’t vibe with, under intense conditions of occupation and war where you have to WE KEEP US SAFE. of course this is not new but maybe this iteration is. de escalate all conflict not with the enemy, in real messy time with people who hurt and piss you off and annoy you, how does that work?

tarot year 31. month 2

it’s deep freeze all kinds of ice winter. everyone I know is out of work. there are almost no asks in my inbox for the first time in twenty years. this is true for everyone I know who is an itinerant workshop thrower, talker, organizer, performer, poet, whatever. there is no money and everything is expensive. my friend says, why is cream cheese seven dollars all of a sudden. good question. at least we’re in it together. what happens when we all don’t have rent.

so for the paying the rent reason and the other many reasons, thank you to everyone who has supported my reopened tarot practice. it’s been a good month. glad to be able to offer my skills to people who want/ need them. you can keep booking here. it feels good to offer readings in this moment of so much churn. in the deep freeze, come get a read at the kitchen table. happy to offer 31 years of healing skill as a surviving bytch.

the book is at the printer. the book is out march 24

the book went off to the printer. three rounds of proof review, as tight as I can make it. some of famously abundant long lines wrap around, some I chopped a different way to fit in the boundaries of the paper we have. I’ll probably see things I missed. but it’s done. it’s ready to be in the world. every book is a spell, you watch and see how it unfurls and all the best of what will come of it is the most unexpected and unplanned for.

I’m planning tour and it’s been three years and for this one, I wanted some online but a lot of in person, masked, accessible events. that was what we chatted about in the meeting in november, I was like, I think people need to be together and in october ‘22, there was so much resistance to masked in person events- not that it’s gone but back then it felt like the available options were either online or an unmasked in person free for all. today it feels like there are more venues that will mask require because of three years of beyond complete abandonment into the firey furnace. and I was like, I think we need to be together. my friend said, wow this whole book and tour is one big disabled grief /love spell/ ritual. i said yeah. tour planning is going ok but there’s one or two places including minneapolis that are like, we want you to come but it might not be safe for us to gather. it might not be safe for you to be there.

one more piece of disabled heart/break and life in wartime. and in my head I go, ok, I’ll hold this date for now. ok we know how to pivot and be flexible- we can always do zoom, or jitsi, or whatever piece of tech that doesn’t steal us.

the way disabled people love each other:

the speak/easy tour

I thought about calling it the “Sad sack of shit tour” but tbd ;) maybe this will be the unofficial nickname.

my friend Satchél said, this tour isn’t just a bunch of readings, it’s a queer disabled grief/ love ritual. yup.

dates and details are in progress because booking and event planning is is a one sick sad femme show over here (with a lot of help from my friends) but here’s some confirmed dates and dates in progress, watch this space for more, but 8 confirmed already isn’t too shabby. if you want to make an event happen, hit me up and we’ll get back to you (eventually!)

Friday March 27, Disability Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA, masked in person and hybrid with ASL. Stefani Echeverría-Fenn opening.

Sunday March 29, Third Place Books Seattle, WAm masked in person event, openers and other info TBD.

Thursday, April 2, Wooden Shoe books, Philly/ Lenapehoking, masked in person event, M. Téllez opening.

April 12, Halifax NS/ Mik’maki, Venus Envy, details tbc, masked in person with hybrid
April 15, Toronto/ T’karonto, Another Story/It’s OK* Studios, masked in person event, hybrid details TBD.

April 17, Not a book gig- but will be presenting at CLAGS Queer Class Relations Conference’s “Featured Roundtable: Amber Hollibaugh: Class, Queerness, and Desire”

weekend of April 18th: hopefully, reading in NYC.

April 29, Chicago, Women and Children First, masked in person with hybrid and ASL by Access Living.

either April 30 or May 7, Moon Palace Books, Minneapolis, MN

in the works: LA, Vancouver, online, Baltimore, Durham and Atlanta.

You can pre-order the book here and here. as always, pre orders super super help my press and me. You can always order it “anywhere but amazon”- your local bookstore, Bookshop.org for online, or direct from Arsenal (or at an event.) Ask your library to uy it and tell your friends.

Many events will include an installation of the Disabled Grief Portal Altar, an installation co-created between me and disabled visual artists to hold and honor the deaths of disabled loved ones.

also this long awaited book is finally out and I have work in it with some true lights:

watch this space for some true good shots and plotting from my cripple crooked left arm, coming up next.

and: happy Black Liberation/ Black Disabled Futures month, all ways. Support and check out the work of some Black Disabled creative political geniuses like Loud’nUnchained, Balm In Gilead, DSM215, Riz’ accessible van fundraiser, Tiezst "Tie" Taylor , Embraced Body, Jen White Johnson, NEVE, to name just a few.

stay warm and true,

L

She’s two months gone today and what the hell is that?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Alice would be doing right now, as World War Fifteen breaks out.

Probably all the right things, making some witty angry snarky posts drawing the connections. Tweeting, urging people to send money and remembering that there’s ways of being in the struggle not in the streets. Curating an incredible selection of articles for DVP, if we were lucky.

Tweeting about the autistic person ICE pulled out of their car screaming I HAVE AUTISM I NEED A MINUTE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT’S HAPPENING on the way to a doctor’s appointment. The Black Deaf man snatched by ICE. The brown baby pepper sprayed. All our friends in the Twin Cities staying inside for days to stay safe. All these disabled experiences.

There’s no way of knowing what someone who is gone would do, but you can imagine.

I wonder if she would also feel like: yes, tell these stories, make these connects. But also feel a little like: What is there even left to say. Not even in a bad way. Just: We’ve said all the things about this time, that it was coming and what it would be. And now we’re in it.

Because I feel a little like, what is there to even say. I committed to writing this substack every month two years ago and right now I don’t know if I have anything particularly original to write in it.

The “but” is, for what it’s worth: Every way I see people coming together in the Twin Cities feels like stuff we’ve been building in disability/ justice for the last five to fifteen years. From that post- Fukushima disaster survival meeting the twelve of us did in the back of the Arizmendi on San Pablo after it was closed for the night, talking bout how we would find each other when the phone lines went down and who had a generator and who had a landline. Everything we been practicing the last five years, the food and mask and water and money drops that are second nature now, were always part of life but are just life now. “It” never ended.

How to “do the work” when you are grieving and terrified and disassociated. And I don’t mean that as rhetoric, I mean the real of limping on the long march when you are feeling all those things and it’s just, you’re there, it’s January 6th and this is what it is and you go out the door or online to the thing or the friend while you are out of your skin, moving anyway.

This time last year, six days til the inaug felt like hunker down and brace for the blow. What’s coming, how bad will it be. I half packed a go bag with a friend, mapped my escape routes.

A year later I still have that go bag in the hall closet and water in my car, but I know what came. I’m not bracing for it anymore. I’m in it. We’re in it.

I feel sometimes like every trick i learned over the past 30 years is in me as we are here. Maestra who taught me to put salt water in a bowl and breathe everything that was way too hard into it and then pour it out, the long winter guide Tina and me made with tips about thrifted furs and propane mr buddy heaters and hot hands in the jacket pocket and the feet to allow you to hang out covid safer outside in the dead of winter when you can’t go inside anywhere safely (which I reread this morning and O it was an awful time but THE INNOCENCE- look at us being like, soon we won’t get 8 free tests a month from the government anymore! agggh, evushield stopped working against the new variant! do you remember those times?) And the most important trick, which is to figure out what you can give and give it, and to know exactly when your body says stop and to stop. Asking people how they’re doing even when there’s no way to answer the question. All of them are in me as I do the things I can.

The other day I told some people, a lot of them younger than me gen Zs, ok anyone heard of somatics? Ok this is some shit we were all getting trained up in fifteen years ago to withstand this utter wave of brutality we knew was coming, this shit is weird but works, let’s all shake our heads really hard! and then move down your whole body! and then brush it off!

Every single thing we’ve been practicing, this is it.

“No one is coming to save us except us” is disabled knowledge.

It’s something Stacey said. It’s something I know. You know.

We’re all we got, we’re all we need.

(Link to the full interview with Hwa Jeong Kim, vice president of the St Paul City Council and member of the Immigrant Defense Network.)

**

I rebooted this substack two years ago as a place to say whatever I wanted to say, a place to give myself a deadline to write for a community of you every month. And also, a commonplace book of memory and record, to track, once a month, what I was observing the accelerated genocides and ongoing pandemocene doing to the people I saw, the world, my souls and ours. A memory book. And then continuing it during Trump 2 year 1, what will Project 2025 actually be like year. A way to nail down memory in a time committed to the memory hole extra than usual, when long COVID and age and grief also threaten to nub down my memories. A place to go off about what I want to go off about. Document the good things done as well. And finally, yes a place to be like you can check me out here and here this month. That’s changing a little because for the first time in maybe twenty years, I have absolutely no asks in my inbox asking to come speak here or perform there, this college or place, come teach someone or tell someone about themselves.

There’s a general strike called in Minneapolis for January 23rd.

Maybe this is the time where we get to do all the things we said we believed in, and were going to do.

Maybe this space will hold different things. But always, memory.

Disabled oracle telling the disabled future present, you aren’t here in the flesh, but you pre-told this story.

We have your archive, your love that continues, to read and contemplate and listen to, as we move into these battles, as your love stays in us.

xo

L

PS: Crips for eSims for Gaza, which Alice co-founded with Jane Shi and me, is currently a little (10k CAD) in the red again. If you want to support our ongoing work, you can donate here.

by Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Two years ago today, the three of us began Crips for eSims for Gaza. Alice, are you reading this? (We know you are.) It’s the 3rd xmas Leah has had a “Free Palestine In Our Lifetime” sign up w/ their holiday decorations. It’s the third xmas Jane has been sending & topping up eSIMs, now w/ many others. Two years ago, we launched Crips on Christmas, just two months & two weeks or so into the accelerated g-side, as a crip effort of hope, solidarity & radical love.

Today, on the two-year anniversary of our project, we continue crip-steadfast. We’re launching something special we’ve been working on, something we’re grateful Alice was able to see before her passing & was excited for too: our official logo!

The phenomenal @fleshknife designed these collaboratively w/ fellow eSimmers, beginning w/ doodles on a big sheet of paper. We thought of Toni Cade Bambara’s words: “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” We thought of how the eSIM chip sits tall w/ dignity like the land & the people of the land.

This logo was inspired by the oranges of Palestine, the routes, fishing nets, & olive leaves of kufiyas fuelling resistance & connection, & the brilliant logo of our friends @gazaonline_. Sunny also channeled the art of Barabones, who designed many of our posters, & the colours in @ndn_bebop’s posters.

Despite a “ceasefire,” our work is far from done. Daily we see evidence of continued violence – over 400 Palestinians killed by the IOF since Oct 10th, including 157 children. Send us a gift via our Chuffed/tell a friend to keep us out the red!

Alice taught us a lot about crip steadfastness & adaptation in the face of uncertainty & oppression. In so many ways we never thought we’d be here, still doing this two years later, weathering the storm of grief from losing Alice from this earthly plane. In other ways, maybe this logo is part of the good in that steadfastness–that we are continuing as part of building alternative systems that, god willing, will lead to a thriving, free & autonomous Palestine.

Til freedom. In love & disabled Asian persistence,

Alice, Jane & Leah <3

Alice Wong was Crips for eSims for Gaza, and Everything to Us

Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

ID a collage digital portrait by Jennifer White-Johnson, featuring Alice Wong, an Asian American woman in a wheelchair with a tracheostomy at her neck connected to a ventilator. She’s wearing a pink plaid shirt, pink pants, and a magenta lip color. She is surrounded with red-orange, yellow, and white flowers and behind it a grainy lavender shaded background

When we wrote last month “How long can we keep this up? Are we going to be doing this forever?” we never thought it might mean we, Jane and Leah, would be asked to keep Crips for eSims for Gaza going without our cherished friend, older sister, auntie. Alice Wong.

Jane texted Leah at midnight EST asking, TW for news of a death in the community; can I share?, hidden by the spoiler function on Signal. Leah was about to go to sleep on day 11 of healing from a hip replacement surgery, but said, yes, but please tell me it’s not Alice. It was.

We are heartbroken, in shock, and devastated. Coming on the heels of so many disabled deaths this past year or more (because what is time)—Patty Berne, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, jes sasche, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Peta Pottinger, Lilac Vylette Maldonado, Leslie Lee III, and more, it’s as Imani Barbarin says in her tribute to Alice on TikTok: “It’s really profoundly hard watching disabled people die over and over and over again who mattered to the disability community. Alice Wong wasn’t just a disability advocate, she was someone that took other disabled people along for the ride. . . .she’s one of the very few people I could say I know what my future could look like as a disabled person.” Jane is feeling confused because didn’t Alice email her thirteen days ago?! Leah is feeling brain fucked because back in June Alice and them were texting about Patty Berne’s death and talking about how they needed a group of surviving disability justice organizers and artists over fifty. And now here we are.

We are also autistic “OK WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” about it all.

It is so important that Alice is honored and remembered. And we believe Alice would also want us to have time to fall apart, to grieve, to keen and wail.

Alice was the crip aunt and big sister of our triad. She loved us. She sent us gifts of fancy Korean tea and handwritten postcards and books and zines and stickers of bears, spoons, cats, and mushrooms. She texted us about how our cats were doing, asked Jane for advice about getting her first tattoo, and texted Leah a photo of Alice holding a koala named Stacey and telling Leah their surgery would go well on hip replacement day, a week and change before Alice died. She was the framework, the bulwark—the person with big dreams and a big life who built a big framework for disabled ideas and organizing. Leah thinks of her as the person in the movement with the most executive function. Jane thinks of her as a fellow foodie and fellow “graphic design in my passion” meme-schemer, shitposter extraordinaire who introduced her to the coolest, most badass disabled QTIBIPOC cuties across the world. Leah didn’t want to write for anyone but Alice for the last eight years. Jane feels the same way.

ID: Graphic with a black background with a photo of Ernie, an orange cat peering out of a white litter box with a haunting expression. Large text in white reads, I POOP ON COLONIZERS. Below are hashtags: #FreePalestine #FreeGaza #AltTextPalestine #CatsForGaza

Alice was also one of the first disabled people with a big platform who came out unquestioningly as pro-Palestinian liberation and against the escalated genocide in Gaza in 2023. She did not give a fuck who had something to say about it—and plenty of people did; she faced enormous pushback. Even/and because of, being in the middle of adapting and surviving her life-changing medical crisis in 2022, she put it all on the line for Gaza.

Alice cared about us as writers, as organizers, as people who have dreams for a better world just like she did. She wanted us to thrive. She saw us as we wanted ourselves seen: as people who did things, as people who had things to say, and as people with a world to change, and new worlds to create. She gave us space to be mad writers and mad organizers in long stretches of time, deadline- and pressure-free, when life gets hard, and ample space to come back when we get up again. We were always invited back on the ride. We were never disposable to her. We all could make mistakes and grow and blossom, together.

We were part of a constellation of disabled writers and organizers building and creating together, learning about each other across disability, neurodivergent, mad experiences, and so on. A constellation of disabled oracles, cyborgs, shapeshifters, and troublemakers that watched over each other just as we stuck it to the ableist world beyond.

This “connective tissue” of care is how Crips for eSims for Gaza came about in the first place: we launched our project exactly when we did, and not a moment sooner, on Christmas Day 2023, because of the space and care that she gave to each of us.

Alice’s friend Sandy Ho, Steven Thrasher, and many others point out how funny Alice was and we firmly agree. We are so sad that she couldn’t read this hilarious parody obit from NYT pitchbot, created upon the request of Steven (because Alice also loved the account):

ID: A circular display pic of the New York Times Office

“NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.socal

To Alice Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything

You were a hero to Asian Americans, drag queens and people with disabilities around the world. May you do what you wanna do as your chariot carries you over the rainbow.

by Maureen Dowd

November 16, 2025 at 9:06 AM Everybody can reply”

We wish Alice were here editing this Google doc with us, the way we wrote everything we wrote for Crips together in late night crip google docs over multiple time zones, telling Jane which of her title ideas are her favourite, adding in her own paragraphs and one-liners, approving Leah using the f word, linking a definition so everyone knows where to find more information on a person or an unfamiliar concept. We wish her cats, Bert and Ernie, could spend decades more with their beloved mum, as the most spoiled feline anti-monarchy princes in all the animal kingdom. We wish we all had more days, and late nights, with Alice.

To know Alice over the decade+ of DVP was to watch someone brilliant and progressive become steadily more radical. Leah remembers when Alice would say “I don’t know if I’m radical enough to be a part of disability justice” in the early days of knowing each other, but it became clear that Alice was pretty goddamn disability justice. The stances she took against successive U.S. federal governments as they consistently abandoned disabled/high-risk people were clear. So was her opposition to U.S. militarism. She spread the word about the expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying in so-called Canada as a threat of eugenics legislating poor disabled people to death. She pursued strategies of both building and sustaining her own disabled media empire through DVP and self-publishing, and through publishing in mainstream media—aiming for maximum distribution and access while refusing to sacrifice or water down her politics or voice.

Her radicalism was nowhere more apparent than in her commitment to a free Palestine and her understanding of Palestinian liberation and the liberation of all people struggling to survive war, occupation, colonization and genocide as at the heart of disability justice. She published disabled Palestinian writers, created the Palestine x Disability Justice syllabus and used her creative shitposting skills to make memes like the one above. With her #DisabledRage project with Finnegan Shannon, she didn’t hesitate to include “ISRAEL IS KILLING AND DISABLING PALESTINIANS EVERY DAY #DISABLED RAGE” in her posters.

Some people may have sometimes initially viewed Alice as a nice Asian disabled lady, a respectable figure of inspiration porn. Alice was nothing of the sort. She was clear—and became more and more brave and vulnerable about sharing — how she was a true weirdo freak who loved pleasure unapologetically, an Asian disabled radical and someone who was not there to make people feel better or go along with the okie doke. Alice was also keenly interested in what younger disabled people have to say, making us her teachers just as we learned from her. She knew, as she wrote in her speculative obituary, “Future Notice,” at the end of Year of the Tiger, that the work long-term was for “the next generation of disabled cyborgs” and oracles, and many more, to come along to bring change to the world as she has.

One of the things that meant the most to us was viewing Gaza Funds tweet after her passing:

“We are reading al fati7a on the soul of our dear Alice, who will be written into the history of our liberation for her work in keeping our people connected over the last 2 years of genocide. It was an honor to experience your time on earth, ya Alice.”

ID: Image of screenshot of Gaza Funds tweet reading “We are reading al fati7a on the soul of our dear Alice, who will be written into the history of our liberation for her work in keeping our people connected over the last 2 years of genocide. It was an honor to experience your time on earth, ya Alice.” and then the dua in Arabic: “ان لله وان اليه راجعون” (inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon; “to Allah we belong and to Allah we shall return”)

Alice was so proud of our project. Every time Jane sent her new milestones and gratitude pouring in from Palestinians on the ground and in diaspora, she would respond with a jubilant, “AWESOME!” Just two weeks ago, Alice beamed her appreciation at how Crips for eSims for Gaza utilized our respective skills and gifts so beautifully and has been able to keep things going so smoothly for this long, despite it all. How we did any of it at all was because of Alice, because Alice believed in us and our work, because she believed in the power of collective action and disabled mutual aid.

It was an honor and a gift to be able to be her friends, her loved ones, her comrades, to dream this big dream together. There is a huge hole in our hearts where she was. We want another universe where she got to live to die at 96 as she wrote in her memoir—living on the moon and being in an all-Asian disabled punk band. With the “abolition of carceral institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons.” With a free Palestine where Wifi runs on Palestinian-made technology.

Well, we’re all going to have to make that happen still, with Alice looking over us—set list direction and al—always and forever. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” We won’t.

From Alice Wong’s “Future Notice” in Year of the Tiger: “Instead of flowers, donations can be made to your local animal shelter, food bank, library, or mutual-aid collective”:

1. Donate to Alice’s family to keep her legacy going

2. Donate to Crips for eSims for Gaza in honor of Alice

Just in the last few weeks, the three of us were exchanging texts on our group Signal chat about how we had to document how we made Crips for eSims over the last two years—the internal moments, realizations, big challenges and learnings we had along the way and how we managed to work together for two years with zero internal drama and a lot of amazing blooming of our work and our connections to Palestine. Alice was enthusiastic about this idea. In her honour, we vow to make this happen to the best of our abilities. Stay tuned.

ID a screenshot of a message from Alice Wong with a pink profile pic with “AW” in it, with her name “Alice Wong” in green and the background being black, and the bubble text being dark grey. The text was sent at 5:44pm, October 28th, 2025 and received two red heart reactions.

In grief and solidarity,

Jane and Leah

P.S. Please image-describe your photos of Alice when you share them! Do not misattribute quotes that someone else wrote to Alice! Actually mask up like she wanted us to, the pandemic is ongoing. Take care of yourselves. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo and your block!

i’m a travelling man

hey friends,

welcome back. it’s an october monday and the winds are swirling out there. my cat is staring out the window dirty from where the AC got yanked out a couple weeks ago to where the leaves are finally turning yellow and falling. it’s diwali and I’m a little melancholy, from a variety of factors but also maybe from remembering in my body what new year’s was like last year, gearing up for trump 2.0, and being like, soon it will be a year of this shit. mrrph.

I guess technically I don’t “have to” write another post this month due to metrics I set myself because I posted the crips for e sims 2 year post, but i wanted to.

show is up for another two weeks closing on halloween. you can see in person in toronto or you can go here and here to book a times to see it virtually. there’s only 3-4 more days of those open, so please do book one if you want to see it. also please write about it if you feel so inclined, you don’t have to be a fancy art reviewer, I’d love to see disabled and otherwise folks recording their encounters and impressions of the show. the show is not just me being like look how cool I am, it’s an attempt at one reflective archive of DJ artwork through time. please be archive4archive. the audience is half of the show, makes the show.

I’m getting a hip replacement in two weeks so after a year of much activity and a fair amount recent travel. I’m heading into chrysalis time right now. doing lots of pre-surgery prep, both the buying a walker and getting my scrips kind and also spiritually preparing for this huge bodily transition. so you might see less of me for a minute, but also likelihood is I’ll be home healing and receiving this ceramic replacement for where my stage five avascular necrosis melted the top of my femur for some weeks, so may be bored and fucking around on the internet. we’ll see.

bone magic. i asked my surgeon if I could get my bone after they cut what’s left of it out, and he laughed and then said no, really, he’d get really sued by penn. I can maybe get a photograph, maybe I’ll be really lucky and can stick it in my pocket quick. what a thing, to choose to alter tissue that has always been yours and not get to keep it.

somatic shit. sometimes bones just die and no one knows why. on the other hand, I always associated my hip trauma with my CSA. my sliding scale naturopath said, yeah, maybe all you carried for all these years, maybe you worked a lot of it out, maybe your hip carried that trauma really, really hardbody and worked real hard and is now done, and now the surgeon gets to go in and clean what died out and scaffold you back out stronger. ( one thing- the thing about getting to get older while disabled and not die is that there really is debility. )

it’s wild to be trying to trust the medical industrial complex when it kills people, and when I have a long history of evading and avoiding it for most of my life, and was raised by my mother especially to lie to and evade doctors at every opportunity. walking into the beast, who we have to interact with to get things we need. someone asked why I was afraid of dying when this surgery has such a high success rate and I said: because friends have died after surgery, because I don’t trust the system in general not to do an oops. I don’t trust the system in general not to kill or wreck us when it says it’s saving us.

I’ve also had friends who died out of delayed or denied surgery, and friends who lived due to surgery. so there’s that. I have medicaid for now, let’s get it while we can.

it’s also about the intimate geography of your body. i know and love my limp, know the feel of my femoral head moving around in my pelvis and how i can shove it back into place by clenching my ass. so much total hip replacement media is about, let’s get you back to normal! no cane after a week! “gait retraining” what the fuck. i love my cane and don’t plan on breaking up with her. I don’t want to be fixed into non disability which, good news isn’t possible. still.

I have two pieces in this book. one co-written with Jane Shi to newer/other disability justice organizers about when everything is falling apart. one solo that’s about what happens when people you love and/or maybe were angry at in movement die by suicide. that one’s extra risky and tender, handle with care. check it out if you so inclined.

I got to go see The Next TiMes on closing night of the NYC premier- I was texting Alice like, good luck with the show, and she was like um the last one is tonight. see it if you can when it tours and goes virtual. two decades of getting to see disabled artwork and the art is the thing, but it’s also equally getting to do a sociological survey every time of- what’s the crowd like, the vibe? what are the new developements in the culture of crip nightclubbing this time?

this one was the kiss of intergen. there’s crip queers in their 20s who came up right into DJ and crips in their 60s or 70s who predated it and sometimes look askance and begrudging at it. whites but a panapoly of Black and brown disability too. snazzy dressers. rollerators everywhere. everyone lined up for the access elevator. running into folks you only see IRL every few years. acccess signage saying this is an aisle seat, if you need it for an easier transfer it’s yours! a double sensory room with- finally! I have wanted this for years- one room where you could view the show on a screen with headphones in and captions, but not surrounded by a hundred plus people while you did it. nonalc apricot toasting champagne. a venmo with the next tips written on it by the bartender. everyone masked, hot masks with good colors for free. sensory kits with stim toys passed around. people looking tired as hell like they’d been fighting five wars and people jubilant with good news. sometimes people were both.

embroidered touchable mel baggs quote pillow on the sensory room altar, by Alex Salerno (full text and image description of work here.)

this was the first time I got to experience the poetic audio description I and others have done for KL shows live in Audimance, and while the bluetooth glitched a bit on my headphones lending a delay, it was really something to get to spatially play with the tracks. you can make your own mix!!

Rachel started the show by saying, I come to you from a lineage of disability, my mother helped me through my chasm, she wasn’t able to be here but… and I got choked up feeling lineage, in these next times.

from the KL website:

“Access & Experience

This work is designed to be experienced in any version or combination of sound, sight, and vibration. Access is both intrinsic to the performed work and flexibly provided according to audience member choice.

Performances will include ASL interpretation pre- and post-performance; there is no spoken text. Artistic music and sound captions will be available via CART, streamtext, and your own personal device. A dedicated haptic experience will be available at some seats. We work with all venues to create expanded accessible seating. Audio Description will be available through Audimance, with multiple content and experience options. Orientation and assistance with the app will be available pre-show at the venue, along with a tactile experience of set, prop, and costumes.

There are no strobe lighting effects. There are moving lights and animated projections. Some sections include mirrored props and scenic elements which can create a sparkling or reflective effect.

Audience members are welcome to exit and reenter the space at any time during performances. Quiet space and sensory kits will be available before, during, and after all performances.

Installation elements, if present, will include visual, auditory, tactile, and haptic interactivity.”

a reportback from getting to leave the imperial core

I didn’t leave the u.s. since trump got elected again. I almost went in July when I was in Detroit, but had a really bad feeling and realized after some card pulls and talks with friends that, right- I needed to tighten up my digital and personal security before i did a trip that involved crossing back into the state(s). that was partially it, partially I had other things going on, including being committed to here, but partially mostly also, it was about a below the surface knowing of, if I get a break from this bullshit. even a little bit, it’s going to be hard to come back to it. the united statesian mega doom cloud. nowhere is utopia, least of all canada, but almost every place is abetter than here. I feel like I, we, have got by in the 10 months we’ve been in this recent iteration by…. head down, head up, enduring it, discipline, disassociation. joy yes but also a certain endurance shut down. i knew it would feel like a cleaned wound sharp to be someplace where the ambient doom cloud pierced with shrieks wasn’t.

but I had the show in Toronto so I oiled up the car (the jiffy lube and the protective oil way both) and set forth.

crossing into canada was fine because I have the priv of dual citizenship. my early 20s self was very smart when they looked around and read the signs. the border guard was a punjabi femme in her 30s with ironed straight hair and matte brick red lipstick, what’s all that stuff in the back? a medical kit, water, emergency car supplies- i live in the u.s. I don’t trust anything. well, that’s smart, given what’s going on. welcome back! my friend texted, how does it feel after i texted the got through safety text, i was like, there’s no lights on most canadian highways and people drive the speed limit, which is fiftyfive. my allostatic load unclenched 30 percent.

there’s a grief broken bone ache when what you’ve had to get used to living with gets to thaw. there’s also a storm everywhere, the weather patterns are just different.

scene report southern ontario: canadian flags everywhere including in every aisle of the grocery store, but also on every other house. about not wanting to be invaded by the u.s. but also a visibility resurgence of the same old white settler canadian racism. I got screamed at by racist white people twice in my old neighborhood in toronto, something that hadn’t happened in decades of living there and wouldn’t have for all the decades this was a nice regular Black and brown working neighborhood. a certain unhinged white uptight incel rage ready to pop at any moment vibe not dissimilar to the united statesian version but with its own upper canada anglican passive aggressive flare. I told friends, I felt safer in the states because it feels like the lines are clearer even if they’re more horrible. i felt safer in canada because the risk of getting shot is less. everyone i know in toronto looked harried, hassled. i work so much it’s sad, a friend said. everything is expensive and the vibes are tight.

there were also stars and vegetables that taste like food in the grocery store. smaller cities felt better? the everyday chll of my family’s local rec center where we took ther kid for five dollar karate lessons.

and there was being there to help make a disabled art show that was different than most I’ve seen the u.s.. not the completely self funded DIY outside kins, or the shmancy funded from foundations/ universities in some way kind , out of necessity because access costs money.

this was something different: not total crusty and not funded by academia or the ford foundation either, but a nice community art space gallery that wasn’t High Art World (but in the 401 richmond building so nice enough) with enough federal arts grant money to pay for the ASL video vlog translation of the exhibition statement, to get snacks from the palestinian bakery, to pay people not-rolling-in-it money, but something, to be on panels to talk about working class crip art then and now and for me to come. some place staffed by mostly disabled Asian and Indigenous folks, who wanted to create a welcoming home for the disabled work, who wanted to honor the work not in a, you made it into institutionality congrats yr real way. but in a something completely different way.

a different, working cultural worker disabled way of holding the work.

here’s the videos of the two panels, the first is me and Zavisha sharing tall tales of when we met in the 90s and 2001, the second is me, Annanda DeSilva, Wy Joung Kou, and Gem Hall talking disabled art now, and flashing back to when they all met me because I was the teaching artist in various youth art programs and was generous with the tokens and the snacks.

there’s a through line in both , about disabled and mad and ND art then (and now) happening and flourishing outside of any space that would’ve said, This Is A Disabled Youth Art Program- because we were evading capture and diagnosis and being under a microscope- and instead happening with us just being fucked up and big feelings at a table.

cripple road dog

it’s also a privilege, a thing not taken for granted, to be disabled and get to move around.

a lot of the time the process of getting all my shit into the bags, down the stairs and into the car is harder than the actual drive. in fact this was the hardest part of this one and I ended up sitting defeated looking at the bags and then texting my friend for help with both the physical and the mental load of dragging all this shit down the stairs and out of my home the safe place.

Sometimes the drive feels like razor blades into raw meat into lot of little hot pieces of gravel in my hip, or an overall bodily moaning and well fuck, I guess we just have to, grit our teeth and do it. But a lot of the time in this current body, my car really is a big trak chair with storage and a battery that only runs out every five or six hours of highway drving or so (gas.) driving is great. five hundred miles is not nothing but goes swiftly.

cripple road dogging also involves things like screaming voice memos into my phone one handed while driving 90 MPH with the other (only on straightaway, smaller roads where no one is on the highway, I promise. Maybe) and allowing myself to stop and take breathers. Shoving hippie slim jims and rice cakes in my mouth. I have way stations and crash spots, hideaways and land I need to visit. my childhood dream came through come true.

on one of the voice memo exchanges to my friend s, bemoaning my first three days in west end toronto which finally, I have to admit, has bitten the bullet of not just coffee shop gentro but giant development 34 story condo no parking death star, she says, you’ve always been diasporic. People envy that. You have homes where you can be roommates with people all over. You weave network back and forth. bring the news.

indeed. Though there’s been stretches of time where I have been grounded I have also done that service- gotten on planes, trains, megabusses and my car and gone places to talk and meet. I’ve had the opportunity that kind of life gives you, of getting to see your friends and maintaining family all over. There’s also a Rom proverb my friend keeps reminding me of that says, a rabbit with only one hole gets shot. That part. I

I know I’ve gone off here and elsewhere about leaning into a monastic life, about being home rooted, about privacy and turning inward as pandemic fascist time strategies. that’s all real. and i also don’t want to give up the improbably cripple universal, the highwire act that gets you to get to be everywhere you can get to, all the ways you hustle and finagle your way down the stairs and out the window to get there. I don’t want to give up the right to mobility, the bliss of the road and the wind in my hair through the window. the getting to be a web weaver, to get the fuck out of dodge, to see what people and our people are doing different places, to carry the news there and the news home.

our people travelled disabled just like I have been living with chronic pain all my adult life but been a sick slow walker, a crip dancer who closed down the club.

as the clampdown continues, let us find a way to not cede any of our territories and remember the old ways of doing so.

there’s more, but that’s it for now. see you on the flip and in the whirlwind.

til next,

L

ps: missing and mourning D’Angelo, this is my friend DuiJi Mshinda‘s digital altar for him. find one of my favorite recent recordings of his here.