The Book

 Bloodtide is new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs.

It started as a play about a transqueer skeleton’s efforts to unsettle their marrow and learn to hear the moon. Then it became became a plan for a pageant exploring inter-species kinship, adaptation, and the threat of extinction. It morphed into a clown act probing modern human life and our current biomedical industry’s dependence on horseshoe crab blood. And became a way to use flag dancing to celebrate the Rufa Red Knots, a threatened shore bird that relies on horseshoe crab eggs to fuel one of the longest migrations of any bird on Earth. Bloodtide was finding form just as the pandemic hit. Loosing the opportunity to find it in the room with human collaborators, and gaining the opportunity to write a book (thanks 3rd Thing Press!), Bloodtide now propels us, through 450 million of years of lunar impulses, to grapple with interlocking provocations around racial and climate justice, as a holiday proposal and manual for enactment in a multitude of forms! (The book contains lots of cartoons, diagrams, and a velveteen fringe sleeve!)

Bloodtide is a new holiday to gather us* around an homage practice dedicated to 450 million years of horseshoe crab fortitude. It’s a holiday drawn from my own need for new cultural practices, using the tools I have available, with hopes of contributing to the collective liberation of all of us. I extend it as an offering for anybody to use, to either disrupt existing holidays** that reinscribe colonization and celebrate harm or by initiating a new holiday in your family or town.  

Bloodtide attempts queer futurity, without mythologies of settler innocence, and with sustained recognition that time extends through our ancestors: recent ones, bog bodies, slithering fern dwellers and primordial beasts with telsons ruddering behind. It’s a collective marking of our relation and thus the necessity of making reparations and contributing to land return projects, emphasizing that remembrance and debt isn’t ended by Sorry, or Meanwhile or Next. Our blood is tied. Bloodtide promotes horizontalist structure building practices through pageantry, karaoke (altered lyrics), naturedrag, cardboard sculpting, feasting and other hands-on locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. Bloodtide posits that shared homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual healing/ transformation.

*The “us”, “we” and “our” I’m speaking to shift throughout my proposal. Some parts of this holiday and its considerations are directed to fellow white folks, some to other transpeople and queers, other pieces to fellow parents and child caregivers, most of the time to anybody suffering from/in modern “North America” who is alienated by its "holidays" and want to celebrate something remarkable and necessary together.

**Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Columbus Day, President’s Day, V-J Day…