People who are having normal days, doing normal things, and people who don’t understand how neurons and protons and atoms are coming together to form anything, anymore. People who are staring at cardboard boxes but thinking about maternal michrochimerism.

People who are at Staples because they’re moving in together with someone they love, like the couple a few feet away from us who were heading to IKEA next, and people who’ve just lost someone they don’t know how to live without, and are standing there because even small decisions feel overwhelming. As if buying the wrong size box will change anything.

I’d spent most of the prior month in the ICU with our mother. The fluorescent lights at Staples were whiter than the fluorescent lights in the ICU, or maybe it’s that the walls at Staples were bright white; the light bouncing off them hurt my eyes. The walls in the ICU were a pale yellow-beige-green mashup and the light cast that same shade onto everyone’s faces. Possibly, that was by design.

I’d said goodbye to my mother a few days prior, sobbing. It had become my habit to fly back to Los Angeles once a week, look at my kids, make sure they were okay, hug them, and fly back to New York City. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t let myself think about the money, I just booked the flights and went. I didn’t let myself worry about anything except trying to stretch myself across three thousand miles. I could feel her dying.

I had planned to return the following day to meet the hospice team at the apartment where I grew up in New York City. I’d filled out 29 pages of paperwork to switch my mother into the hospice network instead of regular insurance. I’d done that when I got to Los Angeles. A man from the hospice team had explained about the paperwork as I walked to Penn Station to take the train to Newark Airport. It doesn’t really matter what coast I was on, what city I was in, she was dying.

I was walking in the door of my house, hugging my little family, and it was like gasping for a huge breath after you’ve been underwater too long, but knowing you’re going back under. Trying to get enough oxygen to fill your lungs. I was ordering furniture to go with the hospital bed that had arrived in New York City, and was now waiting for my mother in my parents’ bedroom. It was supposed to become my mother’s room for her last few weeks. Of life.

I wanted the aides to have a reclining chair and soft throw blanket and reading table and lamp, and I didn’t know what else. What do you order to make sure someone can be comfortable and get some rest, but not sleep through it if your mother, who cannot speak, needs help? Comfortable, but not too comfortable. Maybe I’d just end up sleeping there myself, I knew I wouldn’t sleep through it if she needed me.

Then I got a call from her best friend to get on the next flight; she wasn’t going to make it home the way things were looking. He held the phone up to her ear for me. I said, I love you, Mom, I’m coming. Hang on if you can.

She’d spent two weeks on a ventilator due to a sudden and unexpected worsening of ALS symptoms, after a diagnosis that came out of left field right as we were all processing the first global pandemic of our lifetimes. I know I’m not telling this in a linear way, but it doesn’t need to be linear for you to understand.

She began to have symptoms just after the pandemic started. She blamed it on me, the symptoms I mean, and eventually the ALS. That story is too long for an essay, we’d have to go back to the day my dad left her, or maybe the day she found out he’d been seeing someone else when she was pregnant with me. Too far back is the point. I’m writing a whole book about it.

It hurt like hell, but that isn’t the point, either. Slow progression with ALS is expected, and that happened for months, but then she’d experienced a very rapid decline in a matter of days. I know why, but there isn’t a way to tell you without hurting someone I love, a thing I cannot bring myself to do. What I can say is there will always be charlatans on the internet ready to sell miracles. What I can say is watching YouTube videos and “doing your own research” is not the same as spending eight years getting a medical degree, and it takes a certain kind of blind arrogance to be confused about that.

By November of 2021, when she ended up in the ICU, the entire floor was full of COVID patients on ventilators. I will not describe the things I saw, but I have no tolerance for anyone who says ICUs were empty. I am not a violent person at all, I never have been, but my first thought when I hear someone say something along those lines is I’d like to kick them in their stupid, lying teeth.

ICUs had been full since the beginning of April, 2020, then overflowing, so much that sometimes hospitals in New York City had to call in refrigerated trucks to handle the influx of dead bodies because the morgues were full. I am sorry to write that sentence, but what exactly are we doing?

Why is time being wasted grilling Dr. Fauci now, when the president who was in Office at the beginning of the pandemic is president now, and has started a war in Iran he can’t figure out how to end? Congress doesn’t have time to be looking backwards, and at Dr. Fauci, of all people, and not Jeffrey Epstein?

Of course mistakes were made, we’ve never had a global pandemic in our lifetimes, but we were not the only country with masking requirements, vaccination requirements, social distancing, school closures, etc. Do you see other countries’ governments dragging their top epidemiologists in for questioning, shouting expletives at them, insulting them, and holding them in contempt of Parliament or whatever? This really is a banana republic, and wildly embarrassing.

Some of us lived through the pandemic, millions of us did not. By November, ICUs were full of COVID patients, some of whom had not gotten vaccinated, some elderly people who’d been exposed at nursing homes, and others with compromised immune systems. Hospital morgues were no longer overflowing. It’s hard for me to think about the hospital morgue, I try to make myself think of other things, but sometimes I can’t help but think about it, for reasons that have to do with a lack of foresight about what would happen in the hours after my mother died. I feel crushing guilt and sadness when those images come, like I let her down and there’s no way to fix it.

I was there, though, I saw the human beings in every single bed, and the machines breathing for them. The sound of oxygen being forced into a person’s lungs, C02 being sucked out, the rhythm of it, will live inside my head forever. The beeping of the monitors. The alarms going off. The way you never know what time it is because time doesn’t matter in the ICU. Doctors and nurses have more important things on their minds, like saving lives, or comforting family members.

I told my mother it was okay for her to go, but that was a lie. It was not okay for her to go. I was not going to be okay. I just didn’t want her to suffer anymore, and she was suffering so much. My mother, who had always been a force of nature, who never went to the doctor and had never been sick, who was always put together and never left the house without lipstick and jewelry and perfume.

My mother, who got her hair blown out twice a week, and didn’t own sweatpants and only had dressy black jeans, not blue jeans, was reduced to little more than bones in a bed. She didn’t care about her hair anymore, though she thanked the very kind nurse who came with dry shampoo and gave her a “spa treatment” on one of her last good days.

I’d made friends with all the nurses by then, and the social worker on my mother’s medical team. Her lead doctor changed every Monday, a thing they do at Mount Sinai so a new set of eyes can come in and take a look at the care plan. Her neurologist was in constant communication with the team and with me, but there isn’t a cure for ALS, and when they got her off the ventilator, she refused the bipap machine, even though she knew what that meant. Too much C02 build-up. We all know what that means.

The nurses saved me every day. I don’t know what kind of state I was in, but I couldn’t eat and I barely slept. I don’t recall being tired or hungry, though, I just remember being there in the room with her, talking to her, shifting her if she wasn’t comfortable, leaning her forward onto me so I could fix her pillows, and then lifting her gently so I wouldn’t disrupt the feeding tube, or the wires connected to the monitors reading her heart rate and blood pressure. Lifting her gingerly because it felt like she could break.

It was holiday time in New York, the city was dressed up first for Thanksgiving, then for Christmas, and I would walk from the Upper West Side where I grew up, to 16th and 1st Avenue every morning, and back again every night, sometimes at 9pm when visiting hours were officially over, sometimes at 10pm if certain nurses were there who didn’t mind if I stayed late. I needed the walk, it kept me tethered to the world. I could feel gravity pulling me toward the center of the earth as I felt my mother impossibly leaving the planet.

It made no sense. I couldn’t leave with her, I have children here, but how could I keep existing on a floating rock where she would no longer walk? I wanted to throw up a force field, some way to keep her grounded, but I know when I’m beat. I could see it in the doctors’ faces, and the nurses. The social worker’s especially.

It’s not that I blindly accept whatever a doctor says, or that I don’t realize Big Pharma is corrupt, or know our healthcare system is broken. Of course I investigate things for myself, and I advocated for my mother every step of the way, just like I researched every vaccine before I got my kids vaccinated from the time they were babies. You have to use your critical thinking skills with everything these days, and media literacy is also good.

You don’t listen to two ignorant, unserious, unqualified old men without medical degrees or licenses when it comes to vaccines for your children, that ought to be clear to everyone. The president signed an executive order attempting to change the vaccine schedule for children in the United States on August 10th, and talked about how “they pour a soda-bottle-sized vat of liquid vaccines into a child’s body” by the time they’re one, which tells me he never took any of his children to the pediatrician, because no they do not.

During the Q&A portion of the signing, a reporter asked Trump if there was any evidence for his comment that the MMR combination vaccine is “quite lethal.”

“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way,” Trump said. “And I say, well, let’s say there’s a 5% chance of it.”

“Let’s split it up,” he continued, adding that when the MMR is given separately, “they” say “there is no impact. In fact, they’ve said how safe it seems to be. But I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive.”

“…some people say.”

He wants to split the vaccine for Measles, Mumps and Rubella into three separate shots by Executive Order, thereby sowing a little more distrust in vaccines, and making it harder for low-income families to get their kids vaccinated. Each shot requires a separate doctor’s appointment that way, a separate co-pay, another trip to the doctor’s office, more gas money and/or time off work.

This is solving another problem that doesn’t exist, like “solving” election fraud. Vaccines do not cause autism. They do prevent disease, though, and this Executive Order will lead to the spread of more disease amongst children, and the wider population. That’s how herd immunity works, or more accurately, this is the pathway to how it erodes.

People will also tell you New York City has changed, and now it’s full of rapists and criminals. They’re the same people who tell you the ICUs were empty and the MMR vaccine should be split into three shots. I am holding back the expletives and it’s taking all my self-restraint, but I don’t need a Venn diagram, they are in the same circle and they watch the same program that has the word “News” in the title, but is entertainment of the Rage Bait variety.

New York City is no more or less “full” of rapists and criminals than it’s ever been, and I was born and raised there, so I know what I’m talking about. I walked back to the apartment where I grew up every night my mom was dying, past Macy’s with all the windows dressed up, past Fifth Avenue with its twinkling lights, past Central Park South, over to Columbus Avenue, and eventually over to Broadway. It was the only time I felt like I was in my body, the cold air biting into my face until I felt alive again, until I felt something.

It’s a big city, so yes, you have to keep your wits about you like any big city, but no, it’s not suddenly a hellscape. Matter of fact, violent crime in the Big Apple is down this year, in record-breaking ways. Hmmm, what’s changed since last year? California isn’t a nightmare, either, sorry to disappoint the same circle of people. I wish more folks would pause and question a headline instead of believing it, or that they’d take two seconds to check the veracity of a story before sharing it, but I wish so many things these days.

Someone sent me an article about the “mass exodus” of millionaires fleeing New York because of Mamdani, and the resultant $11 billion dollars in lost tax revenue, with the comment, “Wow, New York City is really in trouble!” and I thought, huh, that really doesn’t sound right, so I clicked on the article they sent me and read it, a thing they clearly had not done.

I know this, because if they’d read the article, they would have seen the study cited was conducted by the Citizen Budget Commission (CBC) and it covered the time period of 2010-2022, which, if you’re keeping score, you’ll know was prior to Mamdani’s mayoral term. It has nothing to do with him, but you’d never know that from the headline, or more specifically, the subtitle. This isn’t an accident.

“As per the study, New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires fell from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022—the steepest decline of any US state. Although the number of millionaires in New York increased by about 34,000 during that period, states such as Florida, Texas and California recorded much faster growth.”

I feel like it should not be too much to ask that people read the articles they share, and not just look at a headline and say, “Yes, goddammit, that fits the narrative I support! I’m going to pass this on!”

I was thinking about all this because I got a lump in my throat on a plane last week and was trying not to cry. It was one of those times when it really hurt. Sometimes those lumps are not extremely painful, but this one was the kind that isn’t messing around, and then the tears hurt, too. They feel a bit prickly, like tiny knives in your eyes, and if tears escape, they feel hot on your face. Maybe that’s what got me thinking about standing in front of my mother’s closet seven hours after she died, a thing I wasn’t at all ready to do.

I didn’t yet know that I was going to be dealing with PTSD for a year or five, or that I’d have horrible nightmares about the moments right after she died, or that I was going to have the first panic attack of my life in a couple of hours. I just knew my stepdad was having his own reaction to the grief, and he’d said he needed a room where he wasn’t hit in the face with her things every time he turned his head, and if he could have the bedroom, that would be great. I’d gone to Staples with my brother to get boxes in a daze.

The lump in my throat happened because I was on a plane and I started thinking about the decoy plane, the one that’s been in the news. The one that was supposed to be carrying the president and other senior White House officials — along with the press corps — from Ankara, after the NATO Summit, back to the states. Then the Secret Service told the president there was a credible threat on his life, it seemed an Iranian terror cell had snuck into Turkey and knew his movements, and they were concerned Air Force One would be targeted.

You know those riddles people ask at parties sometimes, or kids ask if you’re babysitting, or happen to be someone’s parent or aunt? “If you had to choose between saving a train full of 350 people, or saving yourself, what would you do?” There’s only one right answer, all grownups know this, but also, we never expect to be in a position to be tested.

One would hope if you decide to run for president, though, it’s because you’re ready for real-life riddles like these. That is the job. When is it worthwhile to risk actual human lives, and for what? The human lives you’re risking are not your own, they’re all individual people. Each life is precious to that person’s mother, father, partner, kids, best friend. Just one life is a whole universe to someone, and you know this if you’ve ever lost someone you love.

They’re the lives of other people’s children, in your own country, or in other countries. If you decide there is something valuable enough to risk sacrificing human life, any decent citizen would hope the weight of that decision would not be made without deep and serious soul-searching. You don’t give that responsibility to a man who posts AI images of himself for hours on end. He lacks the capacity and the depth to care.

The lump in my throat formed because I suddenly thought of all those journalists on that plane, and all their families. All the staff, the pilots. All the innocent people sitting there, having no idea they were in danger, and the casual way in which the president decided his “consequential” life was worth risking all of theirs.

Of course riding with the president is always a risk, but I imagine they assume if there is an imminent threat, the plane won’t take off. The president had options, he didn’t have to take the catering truck to a different plane and send those people up into the air when he knew they might be at risk. He chose to do that, and apparently “he loved” the subterfuge. He was having a good time.

That’s the part that made the lump in my throat form. The fact that so many people decided to put this man in charge, a man who doesn’t care about human lives, who doesn’t think about each of the 5,000 active duty sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln who’ve been deployed for over 260 days. Sometimes there have been food shortages, no ability to do laundry or make calls home, no port calls.

Family members have been worried about the mental health of their loved ones, and reports of self-harm; one sailor did go overboard last week, and others have been stopped from trying to throw themselves overboard. Today, when pressed, the president and Pete Hegseth said this wasn’t true. The families are not concerned, the sailors are fine.

The president said they had not been deployed too long, in fact, “not nearly long enough.” My heart hurts. The “support our troops” people are deathly silent.

I know what it feels like to lose someone in a horrible way, and to be unable to make their suffering stop. A person making decisions about people’s lives should have some sense of the sanctity of life, but the man in the Oval Office does not. He does not.

He will never know what it’s like to be at home and see Fedex arrive with cardboard boxes the week after your mother has died. He’ll never know what it’s like to open those boxes filled with her clothes, but also photographs and letters, things that make you sit on the floor of your living room and weep, grateful your kids are at school, and there’s only your dog there to see you falling apart while he nudges you with his nose.

I don’t know why it isn’t obvious to everyone you’d want a man who cares — or even more, that a woman who cares will always trump a man who doesn’t.

I’ll never know why that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world.

Want to meet me in person for a writing retreat?

I was born and raised in New York City, and I admit, when people describe Santa Monica — the place where I’ve lived for the last twenty-five years — as a city, there’s a peanut gallery in my mind that titters away. They’re obnoxious little asshats.

“Did someone say ‘city’? In an actual city you can get Szechuan dumplings at 3 AM. There’s public transportation and it goes everywhere, all the time, even to the airports. Santa Monica is a beach town!”

(It is a beach town, though).

The further north you drive, the more the coastline changes, and soon the beaches don’t look like SoCal beaches anymore. There aren’t any piers or ferris wheels, and you might see hawks instead of seagulls, like we did. The beaches are marked by jagged black rocks, and look untouched by humans.

If you’re Gen X, you would not be surprised to see Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins come out from behind one of these rocks, with their now-grown, platinum-blonde, adult children in tow. It’s not a deserted island, or an island at all, so it would be weird, but I’m just saying. The beaches are unblemished by people or signs of tourism, and stunning.

If you pull your car over in awe to stare at the ocean, you might see a pod of whales, made known by their spouting blowholes. That peanut gallery gets pretty quiet; this is why people call Santa Monica a city in comparison. My daughter was so overwhelmed by the views at one point, she slowed the car to a stop along a windy stretch of road at the apex of a cliff that reminded me of the moment in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief when Cary Grant wonders if he’s going to survive the ride with Grace Kelly.

“It looks like we’re at the edge of the world,” she said, and it did. The ocean looked like it went on forever. I explained that stopping the car along a windy road with no visibility for the person who might be speeding along behind us, could be a way to experience the edge of the world, and I didn’t think we were ready to do that. Nonetheless.

We went on a hike Saturday, the day of the wedding, that looked from the trailhead like it would be a relatively easy “nature walk” down to a rocky beach. This was good, because I only had old Stan Smith tennis shoes that had no treads. The sneaker companies call treads “outsoles” now. So my outsoles were smooth like butter, which is not what you want in a hiking shoe, but Stan Smiths are not for hiking. We all know this.

Anyway, we started hiking down this path and it became clear quickly, this was no nature walk. It was a steep switchback situation, the path was mostly dry, loose dirt with the occasional rock jutting out, and there was nothing to hold onto but flowers full of happy bees, weeds, and plants I hoped were not Poison Ivy or Poison Oak.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned I’m stubborn? Anyway, I was with my daughter, and I figured if I had to ride down on my ass, that would be fine. A kid from Phoenix arrived behind us at some point, he was holding an expensive camera and said he and his buddies had driven all day to get out of the 114-degree heat.

I offered to let him pass, but he was happy to go slowly because he didn’t want to break his camera or his head. Either that, or he wanted to talk to my daughter. The three of us had a fun conversation, it was nice not to be in a rush. When we got to the beach, my daughter and I climbed over some wet, jutting rocks and made our way to a flat one with room for both of us.

We sat and watched the waves, and as I often do when I find myself in a majestic place where I don’t feel the need to say anything, I found my mom. That makes it sound like a rare thing, but it is a constant thing. I don’t only find her in majestic places, I find her in the kitchen when I’m doing the dishes, or when I’m driving. She’s with me all the time, and if I pause and get quiet I can sense her.

I’ve been having a bit of a tough time lately, in a way I think she’d understand, and last week when I was in the kitchen making coffee, two mourning doves landed on the shelves right outside the window. They sat there in the sun, looking at me, tilting their heads one way, then another, and I froze for a minute and stared back at them. We were just a couple of feet from each other, a window screen between us.

I wondered if they were the same mourning doves that visited me after my mom died, but that’s a story for another time, a story that feels more like a dream. Last week in the kitchen, I laughed, and then I cried a little, and then I laughed again, and shook my head. They flew away. I don’t know if my mom was trying to tell me it would all be okay, any more than I know what happens after this, but it feels good to think that’s what was going on.

I sat there on the rocks with my daughter and tried to send her all the love in my heart, wishing for the eleventy billionth time I could shield her from harm if only I could alchemize my love into some kind of force field. There are specific dangers I worry about for her in this environment, things I’ve always worried about, but never more than I do now.

Namely, there’s a certain kind of man who isn’t humbled by a view like this:

I don’t understand it and I never will, because when I sit by the ocean, some things are so clear to me. So obvious, it seems ridiculous to write them.

Things like: None of this belongs to any of us.

Things like: We’re just visitors here.

I cannot fathom the mindset of destruction. The mindset of blowing things up that don’t belong to you, as in countries. As in, parts of the planet. As in, other people’s children. I don’t even believe in other people’s children. Isn’t it wildly evident we belong to each other? If you saw a child in trouble, wouldn’t you help?

I don’t understand the mindset of taking something that isn’t freely given. As in, someone else’s body. Someone else’s innocence. Someone else’s right to decide what happens to them. I don’t understand the turn-on of overpowering another person. The thought of it makes me ill, but maybe it’s because I know how it feels when someone overpowers you.

I can’t imagine sitting in a place like that and thinking, you know what would make this more wondrous? My name in big gold letters on the top of that cliff, or my face carved into the side of it. I want to walk gently on this earth. I want to leave good memories. I want to love my people so much, that love runs through their veins, and beats inside their hearts.

After a while, we made the crazy switchback hike in reverse, which was strenuous, but easier due to physics and gravity. I was overheated when we got to the room, in a way that felt good. My cheeks were flushed because I’d done something a little harder than usual.

The ceremony was outside under two huge trees. I’m not going to say a lot because it wasn’t my wedding, but I will say when the groom walked down the aisle, he was holding both his parents’ hands, and I flashed to him as a kid, and could almost see them, swinging him high in the air between them. When they crushed him in hugs I was already crying.

When the bride appeared and started walking down the aisle with her dad, she looked ethereal. I turned and saw the groom’s face when he saw her, and I got that video. He looked at her with the most profound love as she walked toward him, so I didn’t move. The pure hope of it all went right through me. I figured that was a video the bride would want.

I danced to all the wedding classics. We Are Family, Celebrate, Uptown Funk, Crazy In Love. I’m sure Who Let the Dogs Out came on at some point, long after I left the dance floor. I can’t remember the last time I danced to silly songs. I went to bed late. My daughter left from there to head north for a camping trip for a few days, and I hugged her harder and longer and more times than necessary, but what’s necessary when it comes to hugging someone you love with your whole heart? I got up to have breakfast with the wedding guests before everyone took off to head back home.

I am an introvert by nature, but I’ve learned how to live in an extroverted world. There was a time when walking into a weekend where I didn’t know anyone but my daughter and the bride and groom would have been exhausting or depleting. I’ve learned how to manage my energy and take care of myself, so I was feeling pretty good. I don’t do small talk, and for the most part, I don’t think people want to do small talk, anyway.

I ended up at a table with one of the groom’s friends from middle school in New York City, and one of his family members, an American who’s been living in Southeast Asia for years. We were in a dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows jutting out over a view that looked like a painting. It’s hard to find anything other than spectacular views in Big Sur, but this was next-level. The ocean, the rocks, trees that have been there 2,000 years.

The groom’s relative was talking about being in America after having been away for so many years. He said the first time he turned on the news, he thought he was watching a spoof, SNL or something. I looked at him, our eyes locked. I could tell he was waiting to see, the way we do these days. Making sure he was in likeminded company before he said too much. I shook my head. “It’s unfathomable,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to bring down the wedding vibes. I’d been trying to take the weekend off, but I supposed the weekend was over.

He was not worried about wedding vibes, he started talking about the Russian Revolution, and how Moscow and Petrograd were cut off from coal and gasoline. Locomotive conductors and railway workers staged massive strikes and would not deliver food supplies. Everyone was starving. Today, he said, there was no way to cut off the tentacles of the beast. Clearly, I’d picked the right table.

I said it seemed to me the Project 2025 coup officially kicked off the day Musk and his DOGE dudes walked into the U.S. Treasury with their flash drives, and our representatives told us about it over Instagram lives from their living room couches. No one said, “Take to the streets, this is the moment.” No one said, “Meet us at the Treasury Building, this is not normal.”

Maybe we should have gone, anyway.

It wasn’t bloody, it was digital. It didn’t look like the history books told us it would. There was no cohesive opposition leadership, there was no cohesion at all. I think many of us believed the guardrails would hold a lot longer, and more people would put country over party. Instead, it’s been a free fall in slow motion, and we keep reaching for things to grab onto.

Really, though, the portal opened a decade ago. That’s the part that hurts so much, the toll this has taken on everyone. It’s like those moments in life you look back on, those forks in the road where you can only pick one way. Sliding Doors. Golden Escalators.

You don’t get to know how things would look if you’d walked in the other direction. You never see the life that would have unfolded if you’d chosen the other school, a different job, another person. You don’t see the results if you’d said the scary thing, taken the chance, or broken someone’s heart because you knew in your own, it was the lesser hurt in the long run.

We can safely say we wouldn’t have ended up here, though. That much we know. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, that’s Newton’s Third Law of physics. When a hawk flies through the air, the force of its wings pushes the air downward, but force is proportional.

The air is also pushing the hawk upward. The size of the force on the air is equal to the size of the force on the hawk. The direction of the force on the air (downward) is opposite to the direction of the force on the hawk (upward).

When more than half the voting public doesn’t disqualify a man who says he grabs women by the pussy, the force of that collective misogyny pushes women and girls down. It crushes the air out of their lungs, even the women who voted for it, the ones who smile at you and say it’s just “locker room talk” with a roll of their eyes and a flounce of their hair. They won’t realize they can’t breathe until it’s too late.

There are a lot of people who hate women in this country, and they’ve proven it by the numbers, twice. They keep proving it. They’d vote for a swamp creature with no morals or desire to read a book for the pleasure of it — a racist, nasty Jabba the Gut — before they’d vote for a woman.

How dare she think she could be president? That cold bitch in a pantsuit? I’ll take the narcissistic, arrogant man, stalking her around the stage, thanks. The one who cheats on all his wives and says disgusting things about his daughters? The one who hangs out with Jeffrey Epstein, and goes backstage at the beauty pageants he owns to look at undressed teenagers? Yes, him. Anything other than that shrill, overly-competent, brilliant woman who is so unlikable. I’ll believe whatever insane conspiracy theories you feed me, no matter how preposterous, before I’ll vote for her.

Well, we’d still be in the Paris Agreement. We’d still be able to count on Social Security. She was the one fighting for Universal Healthcare, so we’d very likely have that, or some expanded version of the ACA. We’d have the ERA ratified by now, no doubt, we wouldn’t have a gender pay gap, I feel sure we’d have affordable childcare and PTO, and I bet we’d have sane gun control legislation. I feel certain she would not have shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Instead we have the GOP, the party that offers thoughts and prayers when children die at school, and then tells us “today is not the day to make it political” even though it’s never the day, and decades have gone by since Columbine. What could be more political than calling yourself pro-life, but deciding your precious rights to AR-15s and AR-47s are more important than the heartbeats of living, breathing, children, and the rights of those children to leave for school and come home at the end of the day, with their little hearts still beating?

We would not have had so many millions of people die during the pandemic, because Hillary believes in science and doctors, and I can promise there wouldn’t have been any ivermectin insanity, or talk of injecting bleach. We’d still have Roe v Wade, and a Supreme Court we could trust. We’d still have the Voting Rights Act, and no bs talk of election fraud.

We wouldn’t have had an insurrection.

Without the insurrection, we wouldn’t have “J6ers” or the unthinkable pardoning of people who attacked the Capitol and tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power at the behest of the now-sitting president. We wouldn’t have the creation of this truly unbelievable “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, money available to pardoned insurrectionists, while 4.5 million people — 1.5 million of them children — are removed from SNAP benefits.

We wouldn’t have the most corrupt AG in the history of our nation, about to get the rubber stamp after promising to cancel the Anti-Weaponization Fund and limit a deal with the IRS to get his clients (the president, all his kids, and all his associates) exempted from being audited ever again. A deal he never should have penned in the first place, because “acting Attorney General” still means he works for We, the People, not Them, the president, his kids, and all his cronies. A distinction no one in this administration understands, and — even more bizarrely — none of the president’s supporters seem to mind.

Sadly, his promise to amend or undo that IRS deal is worth as much as a piece of toilet paper that sticks to someone’s shoe when they leave an airport bathroom, so I have no doubt they’ll reintroduce it by a different name, or not even bother changing the name. Almost as soon as the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed him, audio of Todd Blanche on a call to “faith leaders” hosted by the “White House Faith Office” was leaked.

In a Sliding Escalators timeline we would not have a White House Faith Office.

During the call, Blanche assured faith leaders from “Intercessors of America” (I looked them up because I’m curious like that, and “intercessors” are people who pray on behalf of other people, and the CEO of this organization is a guy named Dave Kubal). They’re the folks who “pray over” the president when you see those very discordant photos of people laying hands on a man who couldn’t recite a Bible passage for a billion dollars, and who breaks the most important Commandments as a way of life.

Praise be, blessed be the fruit. If you go to the Intercessors of America site, you’ll see a video of Dave Kubal on the homepage “praying against the witches and diabolical power operating in AOC’s district.” Sorry, come again? I could have sworn you said witches! I just looked at my calendar, and no matter what timeline we’re on, it’s 2026. They’re still looking for witches to burn.

During the call, Todd Blanche assured them that although it was taking longer than they’d hoped (19 months and counting) they were going to get that Dobbs decision in every state in the country. To be clear, he was referring to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v Wade, and left decisions about reproductive rights, women’s and girls’ bodily autonomy, and their ability to receive lifesaving healthcare “to the states.”

He said the White House was working with the Department of Justice and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he referenced policies they were advancing to end the mailing of abortion drugs from pro-choice states, to states with abortion bans — making it virtually impossible for women in states with restrictive bans to access abortions under any circumstances.

Please take a look at the stats for maternal and infant mortality rates in states with restrictive abortion bans, and ask yourself why any pro-life person would be in favor of this. Women die. Infants die. Doctors and medical students in these states leave, making it harder for pregnant women to receive adequate pre and postnatal care, and to find OB/GYNs in their area at all. No doctor wants to lose their medical license for trying to save the life of a woman who is miscarrying, or end up in jail, accused of murder.

Speaking of ending up in jail, over 400 women have been arrested for “pregnancy-related crimes” since Roe was overturned — many turned in by boyfriends or relatives who suspected them of taking abortion drugs, one of whom was surveilled using Flock cameras. In some cases, women were having miscarriages or stillbirths, experiences that are traumatic enough without being imprisoned.

Meanwhile, zero people have been arrested who are in the Epstein files here in the states. When men rape girls and women, the survivors of assault are attacked again, in the court of public opinion, like the woman raped by her Uber driver, who was asked to describe the dress she was wearing the night of the assault.

She was asked by one of Uber’s attorneys, a woman, who certainly voted for the Golden Escalator. The sentences for rapists are often seen through the lens of their “promise and potential” with judges bending over backwards to try to make sure these young men’s lives are not ruined because of “one bad decision.”

Unless they are Black, in which case, it’s off to prison for them.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. My heart aches for where we find ourselves, especially those of us who saw it coming and begged people to pick a different escalator, or take the stairs. So many of those people are still smugly holding onto the decision like it was a good one, no matter how many AI data centers get built, no matter how many children go hungry, no matter how many laws are broken, or what fresh news story comes out each day.

For example, the Capitol One case. Money-laundering ought to be a big deal for a sitting president, but this story has not had the impact it should.

The case centers on roughly 385 accounts tied to the Trump Organization, Eric Trump and a collection of affiliated businesses — including a winery, a bottled-water company and a golf course developer — that banked with Capital One for more than a decade before the accounts were shut down in mid-2021.

The president’s legal team is suing Capitol One, saying they caused him, his companies and his family “reputational damage” and they debanked him out of “wokeness” because it was politically correct to distance themselves from him after January 6th, 2021. But attorneys for Capitol One point out they never publicized the closures of his accounts, or ending of their business relationship, a thing they would have done if they were looking for “woke points.”

Anyway, if you accrue 10,000 Woke Points, you get the Antifa-sponsored George Soros luxury vacation, and who among us doesn’t want that?

The bank’s lawyers also noted that it kept its reasoning for the closures confidential at the time: it “never publicized the termination decision nor its confidential internal process giving rise to the closure,” and gave the Trump companies months — plus several extensions — to move their money elsewhere, which they did.

The wild arrogance of suing banks for de-banking you (he’s suing JP Morgan, too), pretending it’s politically motivated, and not because you notoriously do illegal things all the time — the very week you announce a new insider trading scheme — is really something. Long, weak, golf clap.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” Kevin McGurn, interim chief executive officer of TMTG, said in a press release. “Truth API delivers a direct, licensed, real-time feed of the platform’s most market-moving Truths while advancing our strategy to monetize proprietary assets through a high-margin, recurring revenue stream.”

So, just totally open about the insider trading now, not even hiding it.

The groom’s relative was saying it’s easy to leave America. He leads a simple life now, he really doesn’t need much. The groom’s friend was saying he loves the way that sounds, but feels like he isn’t ready for the slower, simpler lifestyle yet. He’s so used to living in New York City, where you can get anything at any time. I smiled, but I was looking out the huge windows at the view.

I was having an odd thought, or it felt odd to me. I was thinking, this is the kind of dining room, the kind of view, the kind of setting a film director would choose if they were going to shoot the opening scene of a movie about people who didn’t realize everything was about to change. The conveniences they’d taken for granted for so long were about to become unavailable. The glass windows were about to shatter. Some people in the dining room would figure it out — how to survive, how to think on their feet, how to adapt and plan, while others would not.

I looked at the guy from my hometown. I said, “I know what you mean, but do you ever think that maybe…” and then I stopped, because there’s a difference between not liking small talk, and saying the most depressing thing imaginable to a stranger. But he said, “Do I ever think that maybe we’re looking at End of Days?” Just like that, I realized maybe we’re all having the same thoughts. The same fears and sadness. The same hope that maybe somehow we’ll be okay.

“Hold on,” he said, and left the table. A minute later, he came back holding a baby I’d been seeing all weekend from afar. A tiny baby, with a full head of thick, black hair. A very snuggly baby, the parents’ third according to the groom’s friend. He stood by the table, rocking the baby back and forth.

He told me his mother used to go up to strangers at restaurants and offer to hold their babies so the mothers could eat. She’s from India, and he said that’s how they do it there, but he would tell her, “Ma, they don’t do that in America. You can’t just walk up and offer to hold a stranger’s baby!” I thought back to when my kids were little, and how I hadn’t had any help. I think I would have let his mother hold one of my babies so I could eat. I think we could all use a little more help and support, a little more kindness. Probably a lot.

There’s Newton’s Third Law, but there’s also Chaos Theory, the science of the unpredictable, and I want to end with that in case you’re feeling low on hope. On my forty-first birthday, I was in Mexico with my kids and one of my best friends. We were on a whale watch, just us and the guides, and we’d been at it for almost an hour. My son was five, my daughter was three. It was a good day, the weather was beautiful, the water was gorgeous, and if we didn’t see any whales, it was still a great birthday. But seeing a whale would be pretty phenomenal, and suddenly it occurred to me I could ask.

So I closed my eyes, and I thought, “It’s my birthday, and I know this is a really big ask, but it would be so incredible to see a whale breach. I would love that so much, so I thought I would ask as my birthday wish, thank you for considering.” Mind you, I was sending the request to any potential whales in the area. Then I opened my eyes, and my hand to whatever you hold holy, fifteen feet away from our boat, a gargantuan whale came straight up out of the ocean. It was the most gravity-defying, mind-bending, outrageously amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

There is also this, an emergency landing made by a twenty-one-year-old flight instructor in Pensacola, Florida this week. Y’all, this young woman landed her small plane on a freeway, and no one got hurt, but if you’re thinking that was a spoiler alert, I assure you, nothing I’ve said has prepared you for this badass landing. If she can do that, we can slide our way into a better reality before it’s too late. I know we can.

Sending you a lot of love, friends. Come meet me in person in October!

Also, the horror, despair, and heartbreak of recognizing your old friend is now standing on the other side of that line.

That’s the nutshell version of our conversation, but as ever, we dug in. We both have older teenage/young adult kids on the cusp of their own heroes’ journeys, and the mixed bag of pride and unending love, along with mourning for the days of chubby arms around our necks, waists, legs, is real. So is the joy of the new kinds of adventures you have with your adult kids.

We both saw Disclosure Day, and Dina just saw The Odyssey, and wrote about her feelings, too, so after you listen to this conversation, if you’d like more (you will) you’ll find her essay here. Get ready for gems like this, which you’ll also hear in our talk,

So yes, we laughed a lot. I wrote about losing a friend this week, but also about the pain of being asked to pretend things aren’t what they are. There were some tears in this episode, too. You can find my essay here. This is the heart of it,

It’s always such a joy to be in conversation with all of you.

Sending you so much love. Watch out for those Trojan horses ;)

Ally & Dina

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That’s the moment love starts dying on the vine. What’s the point of standing there, smiling with sad eyes while we murder any chance of intimacy or trust between us? The first time someone asks won’t be the last. The first time is a test, and failing is the only way you win.

The intensity of my stance on this probably comes from one too many mornings as a kid, waking up in my bed remembering the night before, and wishing I didn’t. Seeing a flash of my mother’s beautiful face all twisted by rage, and the feeling of my spine pressed up against my cold, ballet-pink bedroom wall, my arms up like an X, trying to protect my head, my own face, whatever I could. There wasn’t any point trying to cover my heart, it always broke, and there wasn’t any point trying to understand, because no kid ever can.

Regardless, I was expected to act like nothing had happened the next morning, to leave my room with a smile on my face. If there was a hint of remembrance, and I’m not talking about anger or any kind of attitude, I mean if I seemed quiet or sad, or even if I startled easily, a storm would start brewing immediately. The ground underneath me would become slick and dangerous. I learned to hold things in, but I can’t do that anymore. I can’t, and also, I will not. I’m a grown woman now. If that’s the ask, the answer is no.

A few months ago, or maybe it’s six because time is strange these days, I met an old friend for coffee. He was a close friend for twenty years, someone I believed I knew. There was a time I trusted him and thought I understood his heart. I would have said he was a good human being who thought all people deserved to be treated with dignity and empathy. I haven’t seen him as much in recent years, but a person’s nature doesn’t change, that’s what I used to believe. I’d noticed he’d been posting some strange things online, though. I thought he must be confused, but it was me who had gotten it wrong.

It turns out my old friend — a straight, white man with crystal clear blue eyes and dual citizenship, a man, that is, with nothing to fear — loves the president. He thinks he’s funny, and that he tells it like it is. Haha. So funny when kids are going to bed hungry because SNAP benefits have been cut. He liked Charlie Kirk, too, he thought he was “encouraging people to have good debate and productive conversation.”

It was like getting punched in the gut. He’d gotten me a matcha latte, but I couldn’t touch it. I get quiet when my heart is breaking.

No one deserves to be killed for their disgusting beliefs. Equally true, there is no “context” in which it’s okay to say the racist, misogynistic, homophobic things that man said, and going around to college campuses talking over eighteen-year-olds, and telling young women that 1 in 5 of them have not been assaulted, actually, that there’s no way that’s true, does not make him a hero, or good at debate. It makes him absolutely wrong.

Stating your wrong, uninformed, wildly offensive opinion loudly and with confidence might just make you another drunk idiot at a bar, but when you are in your thirties, and millions of young, conservative people follow you, and you say that same thing over and over again on college campuses across the country? Yeah, it’s not okay, and that’s just one example of one of the horrible things he said.

One individual — citing the National Sexual Violence Resource Center — said that one in five women will be raped, a statistic Kirk categorized as being “pathologically insane,” adding the contention was partly responsible for men trending toward conservatism.

“You want to know why men are becoming conservative?” Kirk asked. “They’re told that one in five women have sexual encounters that result in rape. We as men know that’s a bunch of rubbish … we’re tired being called rapists at every turn.”

I felt pretty sure I’d told my friend I’d been assaulted at sixteen, grabbed in a stairwell at thirteen, had men rub their hard-ons against my legs on crowded buses and subways at rush hour when I was fourteen, fifteen, been followed onto an elevator by a guy who whipped it out when I was twelve, been flashed in Central Park at eight years old by a man who masturbated in front of me, a thing that is now “trending” and even has names like “gooning” and “sharking.” The guys who do this are “gooners.” The “gamification” of sexual assaults has begun. Fantastic.

Now my friend was sitting across from me, defending a guy who stupidly said 1 in 5 women couldn’t be the victims of sexual assaults because that would mean the United States had stats like the Congo, and if that were true, no woman would go to college. He also said a lot of the time alcohol was involved, and sex was happening between teenagers, and it was a “grey area” because consent was given and then removed. I can think of few more terrible messages to spread on college campuses.

My friend smiled and told me I should focus on my own life, because how was any of this really affecting me, anyway?

Aside from the fact that categorically and fundamentally, I will always care about my neighbors, let’s pretend I was a selfish asshat who only cared about myself and my own life and family. If I get in a car with my kids and drive across the country right now, my son’s rights to lifesaving healthcare remain the same, but my rights and my daughter’s change every time we cross state lines. It’s hard to put into words how personal that is to me.

My health insurance used to cost $346.46/month, but when this administration refused to extend the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) subsidies, the plan I was on jumped to $1706/month, so I had to switch to a plan that is little more than bankruptcy insurance. Meaning if I end up in the hospital for some reason, it will not bankrupt me. Of course, if I end up in the ER, this administration, so full of “don’t tread on my rights, bro” supporters, now wants everyone’s un-redacted ER visit information, a thing you should know about.

Is that a HIPAA violation? Yes, but they’re tracking “product safety”, see, so there are exceptions. Babies who end up in the ER because a crib isn’t safe and needs to be recalled, or a kid who was riding a bike with faulty brakes? They can gather that information, and it’s good they do. Used to be they’d gather information about the product, and redact the person and their address and DOB.

They’d exclude things like adult suicide attempts, or injuries that result from domestic violence, because those are absolutely HIPAA violations, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission does not have the right to gather that kind of information. But KONZA is telling hospitals “they’d better comply or else.” It’s the constant refrain of this administration, and it trickles down from the top.

You might want to see if your local hospital is complying with KONZA if you care about your privacy, because they hold onto your information and also use AI because they want everything to be privatized and gathered into one big data system. Oh! And KONZA had a data breach a few years back and the medical records of 30,000 people were improperly handled, and they didn’t tell any of those people. That also feels personal to me.

My son is going into his third year of college, and my daughter is heading to college this time next year. For one year, I’ll have two kids in college, which I try not to think about too hard or too often. We can do anything for a short amount of time, right? But they messed with the system and the income threshold, and I don’t know what will happen with the FAFSA this year, or next, or the two years after that.

It’s all a big wait-and-see game, stress is hard on the body, and my insurance sucks as previously mentioned, so I’m glad I have tools and know how to stay present, but I am human. I have my sleepless nights. Meanwhile, the cost of gas and groceries have skyrocketed, along with everything else. So it is affecting me, personally? Of course it is, it’s affecting all of us.

That’s not to mention being a woman in this culture, generally. It’s not safe to speak up if something happens to you, or if you’re worried about your kids. There’s now a name for people who wipe out their entire families, instead of getting a divorce like a normal human being: “family annihilators.” Even if you want a break from stories like that, there’s really no way to avoid them, that’s how common they are.

So much of the time, you find the cycle of violence is being passed down from father to son, and can’t help but wonder what it would have taken to break the chains that bind. Why it’s so hard for women and children to get help when they need it?

It worries me to think of the things that are being normalized. The Tate brothers got arrested, and in this current insanity I feel grateful (thank you, U.K., god knows we don’t do anything about pedophilia-obsessed, sex-trafficking rapists in the United States), but their attorney, who looks like he graduated from one of Tate’s PHD (Pimping Hoes Degree) programs, was talking about how awful things are for the poor Tate boys.

Now, according to him, there’s a “target on their backs” due to the nature of their charges, and the “political hierarchy” in jail. The Tate brothers are in real trouble, everyone! Inmates are walking by hurling insults at them, calling them the “p-word”! How quaint! Their attorney wouldn’t say “pedophile”, but he’ll defend them.

My dude. Of all the things I do not care about, the emotional well-being of the Tate brothers is at the very top of the list. It’s so high up, I can’t even see it. I’d have to put on a pair of really short grey capris, and grab a very tall ladder, and start climbing toward the sun before I could even begin to see a glimmer of that thing you’re floating as a “care”, and then I’d be like, nope! That was just a trick of the light, better keep climbing.

I jest, I will never care about the internal lives of those misogynistic, stunted sociopaths. Glad they’re somewhere they can’t hurt anyone for now, and I hope they’re extradited expeditiously, then convicted for life without parole. That’s the absolute end of my care. Barron might care, though, and Don, Jr, too.

Part of the problem with a reality tv personality cosplaying a president for ten years, a man who played a “savvy businessman who understood the ‘Art of the Deal’” on The Apprentice, but was nothing more than a sleazy conman who’d declared bankruptcy multiple times as a regular method of gaming the system, a shapeshifter who has been a Democrat, an Independent, and now says he’s a Republican, but is really just a Malignant Narcissist, is that everything loses meaning after a while. Alternate Facts!

There was a time when this man said he believed in a woman’s right to choose, but the thing his supporters will never understand is that he’ll say whatever he needs to say to get what he wants. Even that is not simple, because there’s what he thinks he wants, and what he actually wants.

What he thinks he wants is money, power, status, and the respect of strong men everywhere, especially men who rule by force. That looks like strength to him, because he’s weak and shallow. He thinks if he can rule the world, he will feel better, but you might have noticed, he has the title. He is currently the “leader of the free world”, but does he seem happy? Satisfied? At ease?

He’s obsessed with President Barack Obama, with President Joe Biden (who never fell asleep at his best friend’s funeral), with late night comics because he’s so thin-skinned, with Rosie O’Donnell because she’s smarter and funnier than he’ll ever be and has people who love her for who she is, with trying to get out of paying E. Jean Carroll, no matter how many times juries confirm he sexually assaulted her at Bergdorf Goodman.

Now he’s even asking the Supreme Court to get him out of paying the money he owes her for the defamation lawsuit because he said those horrible things about her during his first term, and they decided to grant him the immunity of a king. Well, have fun, the king has come knocking again. To him, Supreme Court justices are no more than fixers, and the ones he nominated are supposed to decide in his favor. Just fix it, dammit, that’s his motto.

He doesn’t want to pay his debts. He doesn’t want to be accountable. He finds loyalists to help him break whatever rules need to be broken so he can grift to his heart’s content. Last year that meant $2 billion emoluments-be-damed dollars, but that isn’t enough. He’s still not happy.

The golden jet from Qatar doesn’t do it, and it isn’t even outfitted properly and has already cost American taxpayers upwards of $400 million dollars in alterations. He doesn’t care. The press conferences where he berates journalists, especially strong, brilliant women, saying things like, “Quiet, Piggy” and “Fake News” and “You’re a terrible person, you know that?” None of that makes him feel big and strong enough.

He starts wars he thinks he can win because we have “the greatest military on earth” as we should, since we spend more on our military than the next 6 countries combined, and I’m talking about China, Russia, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. He uses our military like it’s his personal fighting squad.

I feel certain there’s something in the War Powers Resolution about mandatory congressional approval after 60 days, and withdrawal if not. The only exception or extension is an additional 30 days to safely remove troops. There is nothing about a temporary ceasefire (and let’s be so for real right now, we should call it a half-assed pausefire) stopping the clock.

Now we’re in over our heads in a war no one asked for or wanted, and it’s only escalating. This is the exact situation every other president has carefully and astutely avoided, because they were smart enough to understand the Middle East is not a place where you ride in like a bunch of cowboys. “Operation Epic Fury” my god. This is why you don’t put men like him, like Hegseth, or like Stephen Miller in charge. You don’t surround them with spineless bootlickers like Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio, men too weak to do anything but freeze, fawn and sell their souls or adjust their eyeliner.

Is the president awake, pacing the floors of the First Family Residence? No, because if everything goes to hell, he’ll just blame someone else. He’ll say our Allies let us down, or the Dumocrats cut spending, and somehow it’s their fault, or it’s Obama again. He probably wasn’t feeling terrific, though, because he spent hours over the weekend creating AI versions of himself as a hero on his lame-ass social media site.

They’re the kind of creations a middle school kid would make alone in his room, and never show anyone, because even an eleven-year-old would know they’d cause any emotionally stable person to feel second-hand embarrassment. The void in this eighty-year-old man is as wide and deep as the ocean. He’s not going to have a breakthrough, he doesn’t have enough time. There aren’t even people in his life who recognize he needs an intervention, and hashtag Florida-Retirement-Life, stat.

What grown adult has hours to make dumb movie posters starring themselves? I have bills to pay, responsibilities, interests, creative projects, and people who count on me. I have a dog who needs to be walked. I don’t have whatever accounts you need to create a cartoon version of people I dislike, but it must take time, right? He has hundreds of millions of people he’s supposed to take care of, not that he thinks of his job in that way, but that is the job. This man works for us, he’s a public servant who has cut SNAP benefits and started a war that’s cost us billions, whilst grifting billions for himself.

How does he think it’s okay to post like that as POTUS, and why are his supporters laughing along? My old friend finds him funny. He “tells it like it is.” Really? People are suffering and dying. They always are, of course, but they’re suffering and dying needlessly, because of that man’s actions.

Citizens are being executed in the streets. Members of our immigrant community are being chased by masked men in unmarked cars, and as we have all been screaming for years now, ICE agents are wildly easy to impersonate, because they’ve been given free rein. They don’t have to present ID. They don’t have to show their faces. They don’t have to offer anyone due process. This administration has given them no limits.

So now men are playing dress-up with outfits they bought off Amazon, and guess what? They’re not drag queens. They are not “men in women’s bathrooms.” Nope. They are rapists. They are masked men in unmarked cars, chasing down young brown women, pulling them over, pretending to be ICE agents, and then sexually assaulting them. If you are someone who said you cared about girls and women in bathrooms, why don’t you care about cars? Roads? Detention centers? Detention centers? Detention centers.

Listen to me, please. They don’t believe white women when we come forward. Men, I mean. Police. Far too many women, sadly, sometimes our very own mothers. Ask me how I know. They do not believe white women, women generally, or young girls, we all know this. We get attacked a second time in the court of public opinion.

If you have any doubt about that (and if you do, you haven’t been paying attention), please watch American Nightmare on Netflix. It’s about the Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn home invasion/kidnapping/assault case on Mare Island in Vallejo in 2015. I won’t say much, but there’s a moment where I almost stood up from the couch because I was so enraged I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’ll tell you this part without giving anything away for those of you who don’t know the story.

There are other women before Denise, prior botched attempts. One of these women calls the police, as you do in a home invasion, whether the man successfully assaults you or not. This woman, who lived alone, explained to the officers in detail what had happened. These officers then called this woman’s boyfriend, a man who did not live with her and was not there during the attempted home invasion/failed assault, and asked him if his girlfriend was “attention-seeking” and whether he thought she could be lying. Police called the boyfriend of a woman to see if he thought she might just want attention. I’m surprised they didn’t ask if he wanted to have her committed.

That’s what white women deal with, so I want you to ask yourself how you think undocumented women and teenage girls are doing in detention centers where they tell you up front they are “not responsible for the behavior of the guards.” Then think about a president who spends his time making movie posters of himself running for a third term like it’s funny, in the middle of all this chaos and pain, all this anxiety and heartache for so many people.

I don’t have to tell you this is not presidential, it’s not even halfway normal for a regular man sitting at home. He should not be spending his time playing with fantasy memes like a middle school bully while the world burns. He can keep spouting his talking points about Iran not having a nuclear weapon, but Iran wasn’t close to having a nuclear weapon, unless this administration lied to us back in June. We aren’t stoopid.

We have mothers and children and innocent civilians all over the world who should be alive, and we have our service-people, too, no matter how they try to lie about those numbers, and pretend we’ve had two different wars, instead of one long war they shouldn’t have started and cannot end.

He and Elon Musk can say canceling USAID didn’t lead to the deaths of millions of people, but the data says otherwise, and I have friends who worked there for years. Aside from that, there’s the emotional toll of living this way, and worrying all the time. Not that I would want to be like my friend, out there living his best life.

Any normal president would be racked with guilt, trying to figure out how to change course. Maybe calling a trusted mentor, or a close friend, or talking to his wife. Not this guy. Roy Cohn is dead, and if he were alive, he’d be helping him make things worse. “Attack, counter-attack, and never apologize.” Lovely. His wife doesn’t give a fuck about Christmas, so I don’t think she cares about the common folk.

This man, who should be unable to sleep because he is devastated to realize he has thrown the world into absolute turmoil with his ignorance and hubris, instead spends hours creating memes building himself up and threatening to run for a third term, or going after Stephen Colbert, or pretending he has muscles.

He’s had a run of days that are alarming, and a terrible string of public appearances. I saw a clip from the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and could not make sense of what I was seeing. The Wall Street Journal won for “courage and accountability” for their coverage of the birthday card/drawing/poem the president sent to Epstein on his 50th birthday. You know the one, where his signature is the young woman’s pubic hair. Super classy.

The POTUS said it was “Fake News”, he didn’t draw it, he didn’t send it, and then he sued for defamation, a thing he does when he thinks he can win, or when he thinks he can intimidate people. But when he sued, he doxxed one of the journalists, Khadeeja Safdar, the only Woman of Color on the team. Hers was the only home address that was revealed in the court documents, and she and her family had to leave their home and relocate. They had to deal with death threats, because of him. So imagine my surprise when he sat there shrugging and laughing as Wolf Blitzer recounted this story, and then as he stood up and shook hands with the team of journalists winning these awards.

Ms. Safdar shook his hand, but turned on her heel and rolled her eyes simultaneously as he tried to speak to her, and he shrugged and laughed and mugged at the audience, again. As if being close friends with the world’s most renowned, international, sex-trafficking-pedophile-rapist is funny and not a big deal, and threatening the safety of a journalist for doing her job well, is just another day at the office.

I couldn’t make sense of it, because what I was seeing didn’t make sense. Then Kaitlan Collins won an award for “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure” for her coverage of the Zelensky visit. She’s CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent. She’s in the trenches every day, asking the president questions, and getting under his skin. She’s intelligent, hard-hitting, and professional. She’s also unflappable, and doesn’t lose her cool when he tells her she should “smile more” because she’s “young and attractive.”

She will push back sometimes, like the time she told him she’s not going to smile when she’s asking him about Epstein survivors, because it’s not a happy topic, and she’s being respectful of the people Epstein victimized. Most of the time, she’s tenacious but calm. There she was, being recognized for excellence, and this man just had to make it about himself, and tell her to smile more on the world stage. Because women don’t hear that enough.

Of all the things he could have done on the night she was being celebrated and acknowledged, the choice he made was to insult and attempt to diminish an accomplished, secure, poised, successful woman, one who is a freaking rockstar and a fantastic example for young girls everywhere. How bottomless the void.

The day I met my old friend for coffee, I thought he must have only seen some Charlie Kirk clips. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while, so I assumed there had to be some kind of misunderstanding on his part. I could not imagine he’d gone down the rabbit hole, or that he would support an administration that included the open, unapologetic, enthusiastic racism, white supremacy and xenophobia of Stephen Miller, nor the misogyny of a man who said he “grabs women by the pussy”, and his sidekick who said “childless cat ladies” were the real problem, and people with kids deserved more of a vote because they had a greater stake in the future of the country. Tell all the 17+ kids who enlist and put their lives on the line, that the VP thinks they deserve less of a vote.

I thought a man who said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the pets of the people who came here” and a VP who said he’d back up the president’s lies and make up stories himself if that’s what he needed to do, would surely be a dealbreaker, because I did not think dishonesty aligned with his values. I didn’t think racism, bigotry or misogyny did, either, and I don’t find any of them funny. I thought any one of those things would be enough for him to say, absolutely not, I am 100% out. But he was not confused, I was, and when that became clear to me, of course I tried.

I tried the way any of us would try to push back and offer facts and figures, but I did it calmly. I said what about this, though? What about that? Don’t women and girls matter to you? Don’t People of Color matter to you, you’re married to a Woman of Color. Doesn’t the LGBTQ community matter to you? You’re not from here, don’t immigrants matter to you? How about decency? Empathy? Kindness?

He told me DEI was racist because it infantilized Black people. I told him white women benefited from DEI policies more than any other demographic. Veterans, too. People with disabilities.

When my old friend started talking about George Floyd and fentanyl, not the 9 minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck while he cried for his mama, I knew he was gone. I didn’t know the person I was looking at anymore. I knew I was done, too.

He texts me every so often. I don’t text back, which isn’t my style at all. I don’t ghost people, ever. I already told him how I feel, though. I can’t be friends with someone who supports this administration and thinks the president is funny. None of this is funny to me. Sometimes his texts are lofty and a condescending, in that way a man can be when he’s decided he knows how you feel. “You’ve put me in the enemy camp, but I’m the same person I’ve always been. I still love you. Your ‘idea’ of me is the issue. You’re open minded. Come for a party in my backyard, we’ve been through so much together. This time in the world is breeding division.”

Your choices have consequences, that’s all. One of the consequences is I don’t want to be friends anymore, it’s simple and very sad, but not confusing. It’s not because of my “idea” of you, it’s you. We don’t have to agree on everything, but none of our values line up anymore. I’m not going to stand in a field of manure and pretend I smell roses for anyone. I care about my neighbors, I always will. And, it’s also affecting me, personally, and you haven’t looked beyond the tip of your nose long enough to grasp that, so what kind of friend am I losing, anyway?

I’ll be with the people trying to fight for sanity, empathy and kindness. We’ll have our own party where we don’t ask each other to pretend things aren’t what they are. Where love can bloom.

Sending you a lot of love, friends. I appreciate you so much.

P.S. Here’s my AI statement: Hi, Ally here. Everything on my ‘stack is coming out of my very human brain, my lived experience and my heart, for better or worse. Each essay takes me several hours a day, for multiple days. I edit relentlessly. I don’t use AI for any part of the process. I don’t use it at all. I love my em dashes, I used them long before LLMs were trained on our stolen books. I sound like the old lady from Titanic. I love writing, even when it’s hard, maybe especially then. Thanks for being here!

Would y’all want to meet me in person in Northern California, October 16-20th, 2026? I found this stunning retreat venue, Mount Madonna Center, that is perfection:

Think: a writing, healing, recentering, reclaiming, reconnecting renaissance. A soothing reset for your over-taxed nervous system. Daily guided meditation, and very gentle yoga, fine for beginners, first-timers, people who think yoga is not for them, etc.

Writing prompts, writing circles, opportunities to read your work out loud, hiking, laughing, talking, hugging, (I cry easily, so that will almost definitely happen, and you are free to join), and time spent amongst the redwoods. If you haven’t spent time with redwoods, it’s amazing. Mindfulness exercises and breathing techniques geared toward your own creative process, practical tools you can take home with you, for those days when it all feels like too much.

Time spent slowing down, trusting your intuition, quieting your mind, surrounded by kindhearted, compassionate people, immersed in nature. All the good things.

The Schedule:

Check-in is anytime from 3-5pm Friday, I will be waiting for you, and I will be the one jumping up and down. I will not be able to help this. If everyone is checked in by 4 or 4:30, we’ll go for a walk around the grounds. We can play that by ear, but I will be there to greet you, absolutely.

Dinner: 5:15-6:15pm

6:30pm: Opening Circle in the Main Studio at Seminar House. We will get to know each other in a circle, like we did as kids, just like it sounds. I used to feel so uncomfortable during circle time when I was little, and now I love the awkward vulnerability. If you don’t love it, there will be 3 short questions you can answer, or you can go off book. I will come sit next to you if you want me to, and I will make sure you feel safe, I promise.

We’ll do a little post-driving, post-flying, shoulder, hip-and hamstring opening for people who traveled all day, just gentle, easy stretching and breathing.

Surprise writing prompt and ten-minute free write.

Then we’ll head into Open Mic Night: share what you just wrote, or poetry slam, word slam, sing us a song (off-key is fine as long as you do it with heart), bring your guitar, tell a story, read something else you’ve written, share something meaningful, or you can simply listen! There is no pressure to share, and that goes for the whole weekend except circle time. I do want everyone to say hello <3

Saturday

8:30-9:30am: Guided Meditation, Deep Breathing for a Quiet Mind, and one grounding technique for anytime, anywhere. Writing prompt, free write.

10-11:00am: Brunch

11:15-12:30: Group hike

12:30-2:30: Free time

(Snack from 1-2 in the Dining Hall)

2:30-4:00 Seminar House Main Studio: Everything is Personal, a talk about writing and what it is that makes people care. Whether it’s memoir, fiction, or an essay about current events, how do we reach people? Why would anyone stop what they’re doing and want to know about what happened when I was four, or when you were thirteen? What characters live inside us like old friends, and why does that happen? How do we write about the things happening in the world, or anything, in a way that feels personal? Writing prompt, free write.

4-5pm: Yoga on the deck, weather permitting.

5:15-6:15: Dinner

6:30pm: Main Studio, Seminar House, Writers’ Circle: Read what you wrote during the afternoon free write, or read something else you’re working on. Depending on how big the group is and how people are feeling, we can read and offer feedback. We may do half the group Saturday night and half Sunday in that case. I will give you a word-count when I know the group-size :)

Sunday

8:30-9:30am: Breakfast

11:30-12:30: Yoga on the deck, guided meditation.

12:30-1:30: Lunch

2:30-4pm: Inviting Your Feelings in for Tea, a talk about not “should-ing on yourself.” Are there certain emotions you were taught to edit or repress? Even now, are there emotions that are easier to express versus ones you’d rather avoid, not just in your writing life, but in your life, life? Whatever happens in one, affects the other, so let’s blow the cover off that barrel and get messy. We only have the one life, after all, as far as we know. Writing prompt, free write.

4:15-5pm: Group mindfulness walk to the lake with journals or sketchbooks. We will sketch the lake when we get there, and write what we saw on the way. No sketching experience necessary. Further instructions in person ;)

5:15-6:15: Dinner

6:30: Seminar House, Main Studio: Writers’ Circle: Either Part 2 of Saturday night, or we will read pieces we are working on and give feedback. This will likely turn into storytelling later in the evening, and I have no doubt we’ll end up on the deck underneath the stars eventually.

Monday

8:30-9:30am: Breakfast

10-11am: Group hike

11:30-12:30: Yoga and meditation on the deck

12:30-1:30: Lunch

2:30-4pm: What’s stopping me? A talk about the things that get in our way, or sometimes feel sticky. Whose story is it? What do I owe the people I write about? What are legitimate issues to consider, and what are things to release with love? Are there hard lines in the sand, and if so, what are they? Writing prompt, free write.

4-5pm: Group mindfulness walk to garden with journals or sketchbooks. Write what you saw, sketch when we get there. More details coming, some things are worth the wait.

5:15-6:15pm: Dinner

6:30pm: Main Studio, Seminar House: Open Mic Night: read a piece you’ve written over the weekend, or something you’re working on, or poetry or word slam, sing us a song, play your guitar, tell us a story, share something from your heart. You can’t get it wrong.

Tuesday

We have to be checked out of our rooms by 11am, and out of the Main Studio by 12pm, but let’s make the most of our last half day!

8:30-9:30am Breakfast

10am: Main Hall, Seminar House: Closing Circle: just like a real circle, it’s not the end.

12:30: Lunch, then hugs!

I am already so excited I can hardly take it.

Please note, this is a schedule that we may need to adjust based on weather. If it’s raining, we can switch things up and hike in the afternoon. If it’s too cold to do yoga on the deck, we’ll do it inside. We’ll take things as they come, but I guarantee it will be beautiful, and we will be together. The rest of it is details.

Pricing

There is a $400 non-refundable deposit to hold your spot! Once I receive it, I will send you the magical direct link Mount Madonna Center has created for our retreat. Please note, this is the only way to sign up for the retreat, as they have created a page just for us.

The additional price from there will depend on the accommodations you choose (options below), but that number will include all your meals, accommodations, taxes and fees.

Accommodations and all Meals, fees, etc:

Cabin, Shared with Shared Bath $846:

Shared Room, Shared Bath $926:

Glamping Tent, shared bath $1166:

Private room in the Conference Center, 2 twin beds, ensuite bathroom $1766

The only other costs would be optional treatments like massage or other spa treatments if you wanted to add them.

*All meals are vegetarian (they can accommodate vegan, gf, etc), and there’s no alcohol, so I want to make you aware of that.

If you have any questions about any of this, please message me!

If you are ALL IN RIGHT NOW, you can secure your spot by sending a

$400 non-refundable deposit to me over Zelle (ally@yogisanonymous.com is my attached email, and Allyson is my legal name. It will ask for that when you Zelle, but please don’t call me Allyson, that’s only for when I’m in big trouble), or you can use PayPal, Venmo, Pay Later, Apple Pay/other debit or credit cards here!

Once I have your deposit, I will send you the dedicated link for the retreat on the Mount Madonna Center website so you can choose and book your accommodations there!

I could not be more excited about getting to spend some time with you IRL. I can hardly take it :) Please share with people you want to hug in person, under some redwoods, or anywhere, really. It’s about time.

Sending you a lot of love, friends xo

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As a woman and a feminist raising both a boy and a girl in this world, one of the things I wanted most, was for my son to grow into a man who genuinely respects and likes girls and women. I wanted that for him as much as I wanted it for all the people around him.

There weren’t a lot of guidebooks on the subject. “How to Make Sure You Don’t Raise a Misogynist” has yet to be written, and it’s 2026. There were some good books to read when I got pregnant, of course. “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys” is a classic, and “It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons”, and “It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters” are excellent companion pieces. Nonetheless, we’re all swimming in patriarchal waters, the programming runs deep, and the messaging is everywhere.

Some things are explicit and some are implicit. I remember when my son Dylan was little, I let my mom know I didn’t want toy guns as gifts, I wasn’t having toy guns in the house. She laughed and said okay, but he would just end up putting his middle and index fingers together with his thumb in the air, and run around the house making “pew pew” sounds, because “boys and guns are biological.” As if there were some evolutionary predisposition toward gun violence and killing, written into the Y chromosome.

Some of you may be shocked to know this turned out not to be true.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with Dylan. He is nineteen now, and no longer bursts into the kitchen dressed as a Jedi on a random Tuesday night while I’m cooking dinner, much to my chagrin. I’m nostalgic for those days, and those nights when he and his sister and I curled up, and I read to them for hours. I suppose I felt more able to keep them safe then, and maybe myself, too.

I feel a deep grief for all of us, because the water hasn’t changed, and it’s making us sicker by the day. I had so many experiences as a girl and a young woman that made me feel unsafe and scared and unsure of my value, but also the value of girls and women generally. Now as a grown woman, I worry for my daughter, but also for my son, and for all of our children, and when I say “our children”, my overriding belief is there’s no such thing as other people’s children.

We all belong to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. If you ran into my children somewhere and they were in trouble, I hope with my entire heart you would look out for them the way I’d look out for yours if you weren’t there. Everyone is someone’s child, even if they are sixty-eight. Even if they are ninety-two.

Dylan and I talk about pretty much everything now, and on the day in question, we were talking about the kind of men who enjoy asserting their dominance over women. He said it made him feel disgusted to have any kind of power over a woman, and I asked him why he thought he felt that way.

I was surprised by the way he answered that question, he said so many things about masculinity and male identity and what it’s like for boys growing up in a world that secures a place for them before they arrive, and as we were talking, I said I wished so much I could share what he was saying on the podcast, because he was saying things in a way that had never occurred to me. He said we could have this conversation on the podcast. So we did. This is it. It’s my favorite episode ever.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and if you have young men in your life, I hope you will share it with them. I know I’m his mom, but I think this is the kind of message more young boys need to hear, and frankly, plenty of grown men, too. I don’t say that as any kind of dig. I say that in acknowledgement of the fact that we have systemic issues, and also with a deeper understanding on the other side of this conversation thanks to my son: Boys, young men, and grown men alike, often have no impetus to consider what masculinity means to them, and what kind of men they want to be.

My whole heart lives inside my children, and so, I offer you my heart, friends. All you have to do is hit play.

P.S. That’s Dylan playing guitar in the intro and outro, too. Had to mention.

I wasn’t worried, though. I had a boyfriend I loved, my first boyfriend, and even if I hadn’t, I knew this man was too old for me. I said he was too old for me many times, and I said that to him, directly, because he made it necessary. I was polite about it, he was my boss after all, but I made it clear I was not interested and not available. I thought I had it handled, I thought I’d managed to say it to him with a smile, without making him feel rejected, and without getting myself fired.

Nonetheless, this man would send dozens of roses to me at the hostess stand, he would stand there when there was nowhere else for me to go asking about my college plans, he would pay me compliments, his cheeks would flush when we talked, and his eyes would dance all over the place. His last girlfriend had been twenty-three. She was a soap star, I knew who she was. He was thirty-seven when I started working at his restaurant. Lots of women wanted to go out with him, he was charming. He was just too old for me.

Then my boyfriend left for school on the other side of the country, and I started freshman year at Barnard College. I didn’t know anyone, I’d skipped my senior year of high school, and all my friends were having their final, fun, “party year” together. Sometimes (often, those first few months of college), I regretted I wasn’t back there with them.

My boyfriend, always a gregarious guy, was making new friends at his new school easily, and I would hear them in the close background of our calls, telling him to hurry up. Sometimes they were girls’ voices, and I felt sure it was a matter of time before one of them convinced him long-distance relationships were unsustainable.

Meanwhile, Restaurant Guy (RG) continued with his full-court press. I felt abandoned by my boyfriend, which was neither rational nor reasonable — and I felt this way even more when he let me know his plans to come home for Thanksgiving were falling through. Eventually, I had a coffee with RG one night after work when I was feeling especially lonely and despondent. He, of course, said he would have picked a school closer to home if he’d been in the same position. Which he might have been if he were twenty years younger.

Not long after, I broke up with my boyfriend. I did not do it with the intention of beginning a relationship with RG, I did it because I was sure we weren’t going to make it four years this way. The phone calls were never private, neither one of us could afford to travel to the other, and I felt sure he would rather be free to have fun. I figured I’d probably feel that way, too, eventually. I no longer felt like part of his life, I couldn’t even picture his life. I was heartbroken, though, the way you are when you’re seventeen and don’t yet know you survive heartbreak.

RG was there to swoop in and cheer me up. He’d take me for coffee after work, or downtown to a new restaurant he wanted to check out. He’d order six things on the menu for us to try. He’d say I was so much smarter than the women he usually spent time with, and I could do anything with my life. He opened up about how much he missed his mother, and about his first wife who’d cheated on him and left him for a wealthier man — a story I should have listened to a little more carefully.

He kept asking me to go to the Hamptons with him, but I knew what that really meant. In the city, I could scoot around and go for coffee or go to dinner as his little friend, but if I went away for the weekend with him, that was code for taking the relationship in the direction he had wanted it to go from the beginning. By then, I thought maybe I’d read him wrong. Maybe he wasn’t this playboy guy after all, maybe he was a decent man who grieved for his mom and had been betrayed by his ex wife. Some May-December relationships were not problematic, right? Those thoughts had started to creep in, and he’d been a good friend, or so it seemed. He couldn’t be going to this much trouble just to get me in bed?

I said yes to the Hamptons. He was ecstatic. I am not going to give you a play-by-play, but I am going to say that what happened when we got there felt very much like a thing he’d done many times before. Like a mating ritual on his boat. I am not a betting person and I do not have money to lose, but I would bet if I got three of his exes together and we compared notes, he did the exact same set of things with all of us. I cried after. I did not feel special or good. I dove into the water and tried to make sense of what had just happened, because I felt used.

Things changed pretty quickly after that. He went from besotted to cruel on a dime. No more roses. In fact, I didn’t get roses from him again until over three years later when I left him and he was trying to win me back. I wasn’t the same girl with her heart on her sleeve by then, I was hollowed out. Crushed. But I’ve skipped ahead.

Instead of compliments, there were constant criticisms spoken so casually they’d leave me breathless. Maybe you shouldn’t have that slice of pie, you don’t want to ruin your body, after all. You should have talked more at that dinner party, people are going to think you’re quiet because you have nothing going on inside your head. You should have spoken less when we were with my friends, you don’t know how to read social cues. Why are you wearing lipstick to school, do you like some guy in one of your classes? Why did you tell that friend of mine how old you are when she asked, it wasn’t any of her business. Why do you act like such a child, it’s embarrassing, I can’t take you anywhere. You didn’t really look great tonight like my friend said, it was just the lighting. Maybe I’ll get you a boob job if we’re still together when you’re twenty-five.

This is the abridged version, but it went on the entire relationship, which was, of course, most of my college experience. He tore me down and kept me feeling anxious and alone, because that’s what a man pushing forty has to do to keep a very young girlfriend around — or, at least, that’s what men like this believe. He has to make her fall in love, and then make her feel like she is not enough. That way she won’t leave. She will start to agonize over why she is not leaving, and hate herself for it more and more as time goes on.

Every couple of weeks there’d be a night I couldn’t find him. He had three restaurants at the time, not just the one where I worked, so he would often spend the night going from place to place, because restaurants are “all-cash businesses” and you have to be there or people might steal from you. He would tell me how he’d been fooled in the past, and people you’d never think would screw you over would be the ones to break your heart. Which turned out to be funny words from him.

He had a cellphone, one of the first big clunky ones, and I could always reach him on his way from one place to another on a regular night, or I could find him at one restaurant or another if I called. Except for the nights when I couldn’t, and those nights felt like death. The managers would say I’d just missed him, but I could hear in the way they said it that they were lying, and they knew that I knew. We all knew.

Meanwhile, when I was at school during the day, if I failed to call this man between classes, there was hell to pay. He had me on a tight leash. If he didn’t get a call from me when he expected one, he assumed I was sleeping with the entire football team, which was a projection, of course. I was faithful like a puppy. I would have done anything for him. Nonetheless, he would go berserk, accusing me of all kinds of things, while I cried and swore I would never hurt him.

On the nights I couldn’t find him, I knew in my entire being he was with someone else, but I could not prove it. It was a thing I knew from growing up with my dear old dad, going on dates with him when I was a kid. Being parked in front of some woman’s tv, while they “rehearsed” in her bedroom. He was an actor, and that’s what he always told me. Then we’d go home and my stepmom would have dinner on the table and he’d say we’d been at the playground. Once in a while she’d catch him in a lie and it would be awful. He’d act like the victim, and I’d stand there watching my dad lie to a woman I loved, and a woman who loved him.

I knew what a lie felt like from inside the experience. I knew what a man’s voice sounded like as he walked through the door of his apartment after he’d been with another woman. I knew the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as this man I loved called me crazy for standing there sobbing, instead of admitting I was right. Those nights made me feel a desperation it is painful to think about, even now.

If you’d put my parents in a blender and popped out a person, it would have been him. He was an Olympic-level womanizer like my dad, and emotionally unavailable to me like my mom. Have I mentioned there were twenty years between my parents? Also, is free will really a thing, or are we destined to repeat some cycles before we can break them?

As a grown woman, it’s easy to see I was a girl thinking if I could get a happy ending in that relationship, it would make me feel better about all the things I hadn’t healed from my childhood. I didn’t know yet that it doesn’t work that way, because I hadn’t spent enough time in a therapist’s office, on a yoga mat, or on a meditation cushion. You can only know what you know.

I tried to leave so many times, but it was as if he could feel the exact moment when he should do something thoughtful, or say something sweet. Just enough to keep me hanging on. A seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-old has no chance against a man who is forty, forty-one, forty-two. None.

I wish I could go back in time and knock on that high-rise apartment door on one of those nights that felt like agony and say, “Hi, here I am, You of the Future. I know this is 100% Twilight Zone. I came here because I need to tell you something, and it is not that we won’t have flying cars in 2026. It’s that this man you’re living with will come as close to destroying you as anyone, because you end up staying too long. We need to pack up this very minute. Everything you think is happening, is happening, you do not need to wait for proof. The proof is what you’re feeling in your bones. Also, this won’t make any sense to you right now, but one day you’re going to read that this man you’re living with is in the Epstein files. Let’s pack.”

I might not have listened to anyone else, but I feel like a visit from Future Me might have done the trick.

You don’t get to do that, though. You don’t get to go back in time and rescue the younger version of yourself, you just get to have compassion for her, and you get to tell her she’s safe now. I am pretty certain all the versions of us we ever were are running through the halls and the grassy fields of our internal landscapes, and sometimes those versions rise to the surface because something happens in the present that is reminiscent of something that happened in the past.

Maybe our seventeen-year-old self comes and sits cross-legged inside our hearts with tears streaming down her face, and we want to throw ourselves in front of the speeding train coming at her so she doesn’t get obliterated, even though we know she makes it. Barely.

Grown men dating young girls and very young women, think girls and women are expendable until they have daughters of their own. Then they might adore their own particular girls, but they won’t extrapolate, they won’t suddenly have an epiphany and care about all girls, and discover a new and profound respect for women everywhere. Let’s not get carried away.

Men like that are not capable of genuine, abiding regard and concern for women and girls, because they are deeply and pathologically insecure, and trying to fill that void with external validation of their worth. Maybe enough women will do it, or enough money. Maybe if the women are younger and hotter. Maybe if they aren’t women at all, but girls, maybe then. Maybe more cars or faster cars or more expensive cars. Bigger apartments in better buildings on higher floors.

Larger houses in the Hamptons, and when houses won’t do, time to shop for estates. How about more restaurant openings, and more good reviews. Maybe it’s time to open hotels. Invitations to enough parties with enough of the right people. How many parties does it take to feel whole?

Guess that’s how you end up being friends with Epstein. Glad I wasn’t around to see it.

A man like that loves you while you serve him. He wants you when you are unattainable, or when you have no needs, as long as you are making him happy, and increasing his perceived value when he walks in a room — but who is perceiving that value? Whose respect does he care about, and whose calculations? Other men, of course, and only those men who seem more powerful than him, to him, based on his value system.

I left because I knew if I didn’t I would die and I didn’t want to die. I left because he made it impossible for me to do anything else. I left because he hurt me so badly in the end, he might as well have ripped my heart out of my chest and tossed it out of a moving vehicle. For three years I’d kept offering my heart to him even when he was cruel. Once in a blue moon he would stop and stare at me like I was a species from another planet, holding something pure and sacred that he might have wanted once, twenty or thirty years ago.

He came after me for a while. Roses again. Apologies. He parked outside the new restaurant where I started working and sat there watching me. He showed up at the gym, and when I saw him in the reflection of the mirror, I went into fight or flight mode. I let go of the bar I’d been pulling overhead in some effort to get strong again, and the weights clanged down and made me jump. I could feel everyone around us turn to look. I couldn’t breathe, I hadn’t seen him for weeks, but he looked relaxed. If I hadn’t known him so well, I might have missed that his face was red and he was breathing through his mouth. He was working hard to look casual.

He stuck a post-it on the mirror in front of me. He’d drawn a smiley face on it and written a note that said, “Don’t be mad at me.” If you knew what he’d done, you would gasp at the degree to which that note did not meet the moment. Imagine Brutus holding up a post-it note with a smiley face as Caesar lay dying, and know that I am not one for hyperbole when it comes to betrayal. “Don’t be mad at me, bruh.” Smiley face.

When it was clear I was not coming back, he replaced me with another young woman, not as young as I’d been, but young.

I called his house to warn her, the way other women had called me, but I did the same thing they’d done. She’d answer, and I’d pause, listening to her say hello … then she’d hang up. I didn’t do it to upset her — I wanted to tell her to run — but I couldn’t find the right words. I knew it would be fruitless. Blessed be the fruit.

She got out faster than I did, and I don’t know how many women came after her, and before the woman he married, because I stopped paying attention. He has daughters, though, I do know that. He became friends with Epstein long after I knew him. He’s a multi-millionaire or billionaire now, which was his dream. I am sure it’s still not enough.

It’s never enough for men like these, and I will never understand why so many grown women don’t see through them. It’s why they go for young girls and young women — women their age will not put up with their shit, except for the ones who will. Proximity to men who do not respect women will never keep a woman safe, and it will not keep their daughters safe, either — or ours.

I love these people who think this is not a club. This is 100% a club, and the president is in it. Musk is in it. Peter Thiel is in it, and JD Vance belongs to him. It’s a bunch of uber-rich white men who believe the rules don’t apply to them, and they can order up whatever they want. They believe they should never have to pay for their mistakes or their lies, nor should they be inconvenienced by the vagaries of the weather or anything else “average people” have to manage.

Voting rights? Stupid, lowly peons who can’t even figure out how to afford groceries — let alone game the system — getting to decide the president can’t keep fleecing the country to the tune of $2.2 billion dollars a year? Hell no he doesn’t think something as meaningless as a free and fair election should decide his fate, or our own.

He feels entitled to the presidency, to the billions of dollars, to knocking down the East Wing, to building a helipad instead of restoring the South Lawn as promised now that the ridiculous cage matches are over, to a golden jet from Qatar that has already cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in alterations, to lying his ass off if that’s what he needs to do so that his supporters continue to believe his bs about the 2020 election — an election that took place while he was president! Under his Eye! An election that has been proven over and over again to have been accurate.

He doesn’t care, though, he wants to do whatever it takes to retain his grip on the Golden Goose. Consider that he literally got out in front of the entire country and said that of the last three presidents, he is the only one who could not manage to conduct free and fair elections. This is a man who will never admit he’s made a mistake or say he’s sorry or admit to weakness of any kind, but there’s no getting around it.

In 2016 when he ran against Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was president. Elections were (presumably) free and fair, because he has no issue with them, right? He won. He’s not suggesting there was a problem with the elections in 2016, so we can conclude President Barack Obama was better at running free, fair and safe elections. In 2024, Joe Biden was president, and the president is not complaining about election interference from “deep state actors” or “China” with that election, so it stands to reason, President Joseph Biden did a better job running free and fair elections.

So wow, out of the last three presidents, two of whom were Democrats, it seems the ONLY president to not be able to keep our elections safe from election interference was him. I cannot believe he finally admitted he is not as good as Presidents Barack Obama and Joseph Biden. I never thought I’d live to see the day. I wonder how they were able to make sure there wasn’t any foreign interference in our elections, but he couldn’t. Huh.

He’s surrounded himself with angry little men who will not stop him from spewing this nonsense. While his speech was laughable, Stephen Miller’s speech at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism (ummm…wut) was despicable, but his soul left his body long ago. He is nothing but a white sheet now, screaming racist, fascist slurs, securing his suite in the depths of Hades. Please turn up the heat down there, it’s not roasting-hot enough.

Joining him in Backwards Land, and securing their own suites, were Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent. If someone set out to make white supremacy, white Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism and patriarchy look like the least appealing concepts in all of Creation, these would be the men to send in, so well done on that I guess.

The entire Cabinet is full of cosplaying tough guys, because those are the kind of men a man like the president thinks are macho. Say that three times fast. A man who thinks “men on women’s sports teams and men in women’s bathrooms” and “drag queens reading to kids” are the problem, when every woman alive will tell you the problem is angry heterosexual men, and very often, ones you know (AND NOT ALL MEN, but definitely not transgender people or drag queens), a man who will say “no more transgender people in the military” and probably not women, either, but definitely not transgender people — but then turn around and say he wants to start testing the military for testosterone levels and shooting them up if they need it?

You just can’t make this up. Gender-Affirming Care for Manly Military Men, by Pete Hegseth, the man who can’t do a pull-up, lacks the integrity of even the most average guy, and thinks women don’t need to vote.

Then “girl dad” Faux News host Jesse Watters thinks it’s hilarious to make jokes about all the rapes that are gonna happen as a result, and it wasn’t the first time he made jokes about men “just whipping it out.”

“You know what’s going to happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it — triple boost. And then they’re going to get out there and women on base, you better be careful,” Waters said. “Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals, and you better watch out.”

Yeah, that’s really funny. Nothing like rape jokes mixed with misogyny and racism to really get those laughs going. It’s so funny, I hope they fire your ass without severance pay, and I hope your daughters grow up and decide they don’t want to know you. Genuinely.

I want to leave you with some hopeful news, though, because there is some. Men like this are not strong. They’re angry and scared and lashing out because they can, and I mean that, literally. That is not strength. That is not power. Men like this are broken, and broken men will never win for long.

For example: Stephen Miller tried to get his neighbors arrested for protesting his racist and inhumane policies with sidewalk chalk messages. When that didn’t work, he and his family sold their $3.75 million dollar home and moved to a military base where they joined other senior Trump-administration political appointees living in Washington-area military housing. They now have the U.S. military adding to their personal security detail to protect them from scary sidewalk chalk messaging.

JD Vance is making so many insane last-minute requests from the Secret Service on such a regular basis — requests that cost taxpayers outrageous amounts of money, and require Secret Service Agents to change their plans on a dime — they have insider jokes, and even coins and badges mocking him. Bobcat is his nickname, OTR stands for “Off the Record” and refers to his off the record movements — such as shuttling his son to a golf lesson, a request that was interrupted by thunderstorms, not common sense. The coins and badges read:

“Bobcat OTR Survivors Club.” The logo includes the motto, “Advance. OTR. Repeat.”

The use of a military helicopter for a child’s schedule is unprecedented, with agents usually using SUVs to ferry children around, current and former Secret Service supervisors told MS NOW. Using the helicopter for the golf lesson would have required approval from the White House Military Office, which reports to President Trump. The helicopter costs $16,000 to $24,600 in taxpayer funds for every hour of use, according to estimates from the 2022 Department of Defense budget.

Imagine being so out of touch you think it’s okay to spend that kind of money getting one of your kids to a single golf lesson. The absolute audacity of mediocre men.

But my favorite decent news story of all right now? The Tate brothers were arrested in Miami, and Mr. Manly Manosphere was wearing some too-short, too-tight, fetching grey capris, and too-tight open-necked purple top. Please note, Barron is friends with these misogynistic human trafficking rapists. That’s all! Just wanted to mention. Men who talk about owning women as property, but then get arrested in shiny, tiny, grey capris are kinda telegraphing their deep need for therapy.

They should just stop fighting their feminine side so much. Maybe they wouldn’t be so enraged and violent. Maybe if the Tate brothers had been allowed to wear sparkly things as boys, we could have avoided a lot of pain for a lot of girls and women, and I’m just spitballing here. Maybe the problem with most violent men is they’ve rejected their softness and vulnerability because they were told it made them weak, but rejecting parts of yourself doesn’t make them disappear. You just end up carrying around a lot of shame, and repressed shame leads to all kinds of trouble.

Aside from that, softness and vulnerability aren’t weak; it takes real strength to be vulnerable. You know what’s weak? Using the size or power you have to inflict pain on people who can’t defend themselves. That’s the weakest thing there is.

Sending you love, friends.

Some of that might be my nature, some of it is surely nurture. I grew up in an environment where it made sense to pay attention to the clues, to test the waters, to look for any change in the weather, in an effort to keep the peace, and keep myself safe. Maybe you relate, and understand I don’t mean the literal weather. Old habits die hard.

However, sometimes people make it exceedingly easy to figure out whether you want to ride the ride. They might say something so demeaning about women and girls, you no longer have to wonder about what kind of person they are, or what kind of values they hold. If a man said he grabs women by the pussy — you would know without any doubt, that man has no respect for women at all, and would not be a man you would want to encounter alone.

You would not trust him with your daughters, or anyone’s daughters. Certainly not a country-full of daughters. That is not a man who is going to be thinking about women as equal, full-bodied human beings who deserve dignity and respect and the same rights as boys and men. It’s clear as day.

If a man said assault victims should “just take some responsibility for themselves” to avoid being attacked and, “act like an adult for fucks sake” and stay away from alcohol so they don’t end up in “a compromising situation” you would also know this is not a safe man, and not a man who respects women or understands the world we’re living in. You wouldn’t need to spend more time deciding if this was the man to represent your interests as a candidate, unless you didn’t care about the interests of girls and women. He’s spelling it out for you across the sky.

The Maya Angelou quote comes to mind, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Or to give it a timely spin, “When someone shows you they’re a predatory-abusive-rapey-misogynistic-narcissist, believe them the first time.”

There is a human desire to twist ourselves in knots when we don’t want a thing to be true, or we want something so much, we are willing to convince ourselves what we’re seeing or hearing is not really that bad. When the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tapes came out, people who wanted to vote for the president said, “It’s just locker room talk.” But that is predator-talk. That is malignant narcissist-talk. That is misogynistic talk. That is the talk of a man who believes the rules do not apply to him.

Progressives who stuck with Platner, overlooking one scandal after another, saying “Conservatives don’t care if their candidates are predators, so Progressives shouldn’t, either,” and, “Way to go with your purity tests, hope you’re happy when Susan Collins wins” … seem to have forgotten the foundation of the Progressive Party, which is all people deserve to be treated with dignity. If you are going to throw girls and women outside the circle of care instantly because you want to “win” — you will be winning more of what we already have. No thanks.

Here’s another question on my mind this week — how many times can you lie to people before they stop believing you at all? There’s “flooding the zone” with constant mayhem which exhausts people, but there’s also the never-ending river of gaslighting. I can see how exhausting people might work in their favor, but the constant lies have created a scenario where they have no credibility with anyone who is sane. I cannot see how that’s a good thing. That’s where we are now. Maybe that’s the downside to “alternate facts.”

That’s why people were clamoring for “proof of life” from the office of Mitch McConnell, and why those requests reached a crescendo over the weekend. Even when they put out a picture of Mitch with his wife on Sunday, people wondered if it was AI generated, or a recirculated picture that was released in 2023. Hey tech bro billionaires, y’all are the ones who just love your environment-destroying AI, so enjoy the chaos. Apparently the photo is real, and as long as Mitch keeps voting against the SAVE Act, he is not my top concern.

Lindsey Graham dying Saturday night of a “brief and sudden illness” — which seems to be the result of aortic rupture/cardiac arrest — was certainly unexpected, especially while everyone was looking at Mitch McConnell. His younger sister’s appointment by the governor to finish out his term is not so strange. Spouses take over in these cases frequently, and Lindsey Graham was not married.

I don’t have anything else I’m going to say about Graham right now, except I believe he knew what was going to happen in 2016, he knew without a doubt he’d been right after January 6th, 2021, and he could not find the moral fortitude to do what was necessary for the country. He will go down in history as one of this president’s great enablers, and that is a real shame for him and horrendous for us.

The two stories that broke my heart last week were the ones that left two families shattered. ICE agents shot a husband and father-of-three, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an unarmed business-owner on his way to work. Of course they said he “weaponized his car and they shot him in self-defense” (script lifted from the Kristi Noem presser about the Renee Good murder), and of course they were not wearing their body-cams. They tried to blame the Dems. The medical examiner ruled Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death a homicide.

Lastly, the investigation into the death of Nolan Xavier Wells in Mississippi is ongoing. I will go ahead and warn you, I broke down fully talking about this because I am a mom with a son the same age, and the thought of what Nolan’s family is going through as they try to get answers about a story that makes no sense is so painful. I talked about the conversations all parents of white children need to be having with their kids. The thought of whatever Nolan went through at the end is hard to bear, and once again, there is no such thing as other people’s children. It’s why I saved this story for the end.

I genuinely hope we do a better job of taking care of each other soon, friends. Life does not have to feel this way. We could be loving each other, and staring at the stars.

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The apartment was decorated with balloons and streamers. My beloved Nanny, aunt, uncle and cousins were there, and so was my mother’s best friend Cheryl, along with other friends of my parents, all dressed like they just stepped out of Klute.

Everyone sang Happy Birthday. I guess everyone but my mother expected me to stick my hands in the cake, but I did not. I watched everyone singing, and then I looked at the cake again. There are pictures of this from many angles, and it became a bit of family lore. Me, looking at the cake with my hands hovering in the air like two question marks. My mother had raised a baby with manners. My mother’s friend Cheryl, who I called Aunt Cheryl when I started talking, and who I cannot call anything other than Aunt Cheryl to this day — could not bear it.

She came up behind me with her twinkly eyes, took my two tiny hands, and shoved them in the cake. She was trying to help me act like a normal kid. I stared at her and then at the frosting on my hands, and started crying. My mother took me to get cleaned up. Aunt Cheryl had the right idea, but it took me about forty years to figure it out.

I share this with you so you understand, I have always been a watcher. I take my time figuring out what I think. I take my time figuring out who I can trust. No one would accuse me of diving right in, or throwing caution to the wind, or judging a book by its cover. I have always been drawn toward spontaneous, wild people, though, because I must have known we need balance in life, and some of my seriousness was borne from necessity. As grownups, it’s not easy to quantify nature or nurture in any of us to an exacting degree.

I don’t need as much time these days, I do know that. I have learned the very hard way, when I don’t trust my intuition, I’m always sorry. I still go slowly with some things, but if a person shows me who they are — and who they are is a draining asshat — I don’t need a second warning. If someone tells me a story that doesn’t add up, I don’t question whether it’s me. I know if I’m being deceived, whatever the reason.

Even easier, if someone has a Nazi tattoo, I don’t sit around and wonder if they got it emblazoned on their chest and somehow didn’t realize what it meant. FFS. Y’ALL. You don’t have to jump to conclusions to decide that’s a dealbreaker.

But also, I don’t need four whole women to come forward with sexual assault allegations before I decide this is a man I don’t want to know. I don’t need three women to come forward. I don’t need two. Nothing good happens to women or girls who decide to talk about what happened, the cost is always greater than any possible “reward.” Women and girls rarely get anything for their bravery but grief, and more trauma. They get attacked again. Especially today, when social media has turned people into the most vicious, heartless versions of themselves.

Even E. Jean Carroll who won her case, has not been paid, and if you mention this to the president’s supporters, they will deride and debase her, and sneer that it is “just a civil case” — as if that somehow changes the fact that a jury found him GUILTY of attacking and sexually abusing her — penetrating her with his fingers in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room — which, if you need things parsed out, does not qualify as “rape” in New York, but does qualify as rape in federal court.

Side note: Isn’t it interesting how women’s rights to bodily autonomy change from state to state, and somehow or another it always seems to end up in favor of the rapists, the child molesters, and the P(ieces)OS who commit incest?

In New York, someone can only be convicted of rape if they can prove vaginal penetration by a penis. In Carroll’s testimony, which mirrored what she had described privately for decades and publicly for the first time in 2019, she said Trump used both his fingers and his penis in the assault. But during the trial, the jury had only concluded that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” Kaplan’s decision from last year reads.

That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.

Facts, jury trials, and convictions be damned, his supporters will copy Dear Leader’s talking point that this is politically motivated and a “witch hunt” because “she wasn’t his type”, easily the most misogynistic and disgusting non-defense imaginable. I wonder if they ever stop to consider why it is when he tries to sue E. Jean Carroll for defamation, it gets laughed out of court. Or how they’d feel if they were assaulted at a department store, and whether they’d want strangers laughing about it on the internet.

Even when you “win” as a woman in these cases, you don’t win. You get more grief. More people saying horrible things about you. Meanwhile she hasn’t been able to be intimate with anyone since it happened. It is incomprehensible how much pain and suffering this one man has caused to so many.

Graham Platner finally dropped out, and he did it like an angry narcissist, as anyone who has ever been with an angry narcissist will tell you. I almost could not believe his handlers didn’t make him reshoot the “we are suspending our campaign” video twelve more times, until he could cosplay a humbled man more convincingly. A man who might have remembered to mention that he has the utmost concern for survivors of assault, or a man who says he is sorry for all the pain he’s caused. Instead, he tripled and quadrupled down and said the allegations were false, all of them. Let’s see if he sues anyone for defamation.

It made me think of a couple of people I used to know, and every one of these memes:

Republicans who voted for the president need to realize when it comes to anything resembling morals or ethics, the bottom fell out for them long ago. When you vote for a man who says he “grabs women by the pussy”, the Goodbye, Ethics ship has sailed, and you purchased a ticket. This is how it goes, you don’t get to have it both ways. No drama, just how it is. We can all be grownups. Rapists are rapists, and if you don’t draw a hard line there, at least own it and wave from the deck. Don’t try to talk about Graham Platner, though.

Maybe next time, Dems will vet progressive candidates with serious people, not out-of-state baby-consultants who aren’t from Maine and don’t even know how to give an interview without it seeming like an SNL/Onion mash-up. The linked interview is painful to watch, and apparently, the only qualification to vet candidates was truly unfathomable vocal fry.

It has surely been a disappointing ride for so many reasons, and it’s unfortunate it needed to go this far, but it is not a surprise that this is where we ended up. Susan Collins’ team is disappointed, too. They were happy for her to run against Platner, because they thought she’d be able to focus on his scandals, and not the wildly unpopular policies of this administration. Even though it took a very long time for people to see the writing on the wall, maybe there’s still time to find a happy ending.

While we’re on the topic of endings, Mitch McConnell has been MIA since June 14th, when he was hospitalized; no one has seen or heard from him since. His office has not said why he was hospitalized, and his last vote was June 11th. On July 1st, independent journalist Desirée Townsend released an EMS recording of a call made from McConnell’s address the morning of June 14th, informing first responders that CPR was underway, someone there was unconscious due to cardiac arrest, and they needed Advanced Life Support.

The detestable Laura Loomer posted shortly after the release of the recording that she’d heard from high-level people at the White House, Mitch McConnell was brain-dead and hooked up to machines, and a cover-up was underway. Normally I wouldn’t take her word for anything, but Desirée Townsend reported she was hearing the same unverified claims, and she was reporting from the hospital where McConnell remains.

Within hours, well-known Republicans who’d been mum about the situation for weeks were suddenly reporting they’d had “20-minute conversations” with McConnell from his hospital room, which seems extremely, completely, laughably hard to believe. I don’t think Mitch has had a 20-minute conversation with anyone in a very long time. Governor Andy Beshear has now formally asked Mitch McConnell to please give him a call and let him know what’s up. Yo, Mitch, spare me two minutes and let me know you’re alive!

Otherwise, the law would indicate it’s time to schedule a special election. Not that Republicans in Congress care about the law anymore, LOL. They only have until August 3rd to schedule the special election, though. After that, his seat remains empty until November. There are rumors that Republicans are trying to “Weekend at Bernie’s” this thing to avoid the special election so Thomas Massie doesn’t run, not that he’s said he would.

If this were a Dem, they’d be raising hell. Remember Dianne Feinstein? And hey, I thought she should have stepped down, and I am all for term limits. In any case, they have 52 votes instead of 53 without Mitch, and he’s voting against all the SAVE Act crap (or someone is on his behalf), so I don’t really care. Let him rest. But is the “everyone is having 20-minute phone calls with Mitch” story credible? No, m’fers. No. It is exceedingly hard not to assume they are lying liars who lie a lot.

Remember when Kristi Noem said Renee Good had been part of a mob of “angry rioters” who surrounded ICE agents who were blocked in on an icy street, and that she’d “rammed them with her car” and so an ICE agent had shot her in self-defense? Of course you do. They are at it, again. ICE has killed an unarmed man on his way to work.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of this ICE “mission”, he just drove a white van and “looked like the person they were looking for” and somehow that’s all it took for him to end up dead. His death has been ruled a homicide, though of course the agents are saying he tried to “weaponize his car” and “run over one of the agents” which is getting really old.

Lorenzo Araujo ran into a pole which you can see when you look at where the van ended up, so I am really unsure how a car could have fit between the pole and his van, and prior to that, ICE agents were chasing him in their unmarked cars. His wife and three sons are devastated. One of his sons found out his father had been killed because he saw a video on Facebook, and he heard his father’s voice calling for help. My heart. All of his children were born in the states. Lorenzo had his own construction business, he was a good, family man. Now he’s gone. If you are in a position to help his family with funeral costs and legal fees, there is a gofundme.

It’s going to take a while for the DA to go through all the footage from neighbors and surrounding stores, because for some wild reason, none of the agents were wearing body cams, which they 100% are supposed to wear at all times, and they had the GALL to try to blame Dems for a “disruption in funding” because their audacity knows. no. bounds.

DHS is the one government agency that has been over-funded during this entire nightmare. For the fiscal year 2026 they have an annual base budget of $9-11 billion, and it’s bolstered by the remaining billions they already had from massive, multi-year funding allocations, which gives them an actual annual spending allowance of nearly $29-38 billion. In June (last month), Congress approved an additional $70 billion immigration package for ICE and Border Patrol through reconciliation — a portion of which will be spent on this administration’s continuing mass deportation efforts (aka: long-term detention/for-profit/free labor camps), along with the acquisition of more large-scale “regional processing centers” aka “inhumane detention forced labor camps.”

So we can jump to every single conclusion about why these ICE agents weren’t wearing body cams, and not one of them has to do with any funding disruptions.

Of all the stories, though, Nolan Xavier Wells is the one that hits me in my mama gut and makes every alarm bell go off. I am sure you have heard what happened by now, but I want to talk to you as someone who has a nineteen-year-old son who goes out with his friends all the time. I have an almost seventeen-year-old daughter, too. This story makes no sense.

If my son went out on a boat with three of his good friends on July 4th, and they went to an island that can only be reached by boat and has no cell service, and then my son’s three friends returned that evening and said my son was “talking to a girl” and he told them he wanted to stay behind, and he’d get a ride back on someone else’s boat — so THEY LEFT HIM (in his swim trunks and nothing else, no less)? I would not be okay with that at all. But also, it would never happen. My son would not do that, and my son’s friends would not do that, full stop. Eighteen and nineteen-year-old kids know better than that.

Nolan’s parents were on Good Morning America today, and they cannot fathom why he would ever split from his group. They said they always taught him, “If you go with a group, you stay with the group. If you go with five, you come back with five. You do not separate from the group, there’s safety in numbers.” It does not sound like Nolan would have decided to leave with some other boat voluntarily.

You don’t leave your friends behind with no way to reach anyone if something goes wrong. You do not do that, and it is insulting to eighteen and nineteen-year-olds everywhere to suggest otherwise. If your friend was talking to a girl, you’d tell him to get her number when you got back to the mainland.

At the very least you’d find out whose boat your friend was going to take back, when that boat was leaving and what the plan was, and you’d make sure your buddy had his phone and whatever t-shirt and shoes he brought along, so he could text you when he had a signal to let you know he was back, along with something to throw on when he got off the boat. You’d make sure you had the number of the person he’d be riding with if you didn’t have their number already.

You take care of your friends. That’s what a friend is.

And we are FOR SURE going to talk about the fact that these were three white boys who left their Black friend alone. If you are white and you have children and you have not talked to them about how to look out for their Black friends, we need to talk. That is a conversation I have been having with my kids since they were old enough to be heading out into the world on their own, and we live in a liberal city on the west coast, often called “the Left coast”, the land Faux News hates with a snide and venomous rage. Even here, this is not the same world for my blonde, blue-eyed son or my white, brown-haired daughter as it is for their Black friends.

My kids can take chances on the street. They can get loud and be silly. They can dance around, and chances are, if they annoy someone inside a house the worst that will happen is that person will stick their head out the window and yell at my kids to keep it down. A real jerk might call the cops, but if they did, the cops would start asking questions. What do the kids look like? Do they seem drunk? Do they look like they live in the neighborhood (code for what is their race)? If that person said the kids are white and well-dressed, just annoying and loud, the cops probably would not bother to come. If they did show up, my kids would get a warning. The cops might even joke around and say the person in that house is old and cranky, wink wink.

If someone calls the cops because a Black child is making noise on the street, there are no guarantees that child is making it home for dinner. There are no guarantees that child is ever having dinner again.

A Black child cannot be loud and silly on the street. If you do not explain that to your white children, and you send your white children out into the world with their Black friends, you are making their Black friends less safe, because what if your white kids get rowdy while they’re together, and some neighbor calls the cops? Also, you are raising kids who are oblivious to their own privilege, and they will not be the kind of kids who grow up looking out for their friends, especially the ones who don’t look like them.

I don’t know what happened to Nolan Xavier Wells, but I do know that the parents of his friends do not seem to have taught their kids some very basic things about being white in this world, and that strikes me as very fucking odd, given that this happened in Mississippi, a state that has a long and sordid history of not taking care of its Black children.

I am trying hard not to jump to conclusions, but it is not easy to come up with many reassuring reasons Nolan’s mother had to track his phone on Snapchat and Life360 in order to figure out where it was, and when it looked like it was back on land, it was only then that Warren said they had the phone, but Nolan had stayed behind on the island. Nolan’s friends did not bring his phone to Nolan’s mother, she had to track it to see where it was, and then she asked her friend to go and pick it up while she frantically made phone calls trying to figure out where Nolan was.

His “friends” have deleted their social media accounts and lawyered up, and I can’t think of good reasons to do that if there’s nothing to hide. If my son’s friends did that, I would not be feeling like they were doing everything possible to help me understand what happened in the last hours of my child’s life. If you, like me, would like to contribute to the gofundme to help Nolan’s family with funeral costs and legal fees, I know any little bit is appreciated.

Lastly, there is a story out of Chicago about a woman and her husband who went jogging together on the 606 Trail in Chicago at about 7:30am Sunday, July 2nd. I shouldn’t say they went jogging together, because the husband took off, and the wife jogged behind, and that’s when a man grabbed her by the neck, put her in a chokehold, threw her to the ground and began groping her over her clothes. I imagine her husband was wearing headphones.

She managed to fight her attacker off and get away, but he chased her, grabbed her again, threw her to the ground and knelt on top of her. A woman inside a nearby house heard her screaming, and alerted her husband, who ran outside barefoot and told the woman and the attacker he was calling 911. His wife then ran out with an aluminum baseball bat. (I love her). The attacker ran off, the house husband grabbed the bat and ran after him, and he and another person were able to detain the attacker until the police got there.

The victim was taken to the hospital by ambulance and was treated for her injuries, prosecutors said. She had suffered bruising to her left ankle, the left side of her neck, her right knee, her wrist, and her forearm, as well as swelling to her hand and a twisted and swollen ankle, prosecutors said.

I don’t know when her husband found out what happened. I imagine he got to the end of his run, stretched, watched the path for longer than seemed right and started texting his wife, or calling. I’m guessing, I don’t know this part of the story, or why he didn’t hear her screaming. He probably runs a faster mile, and she likely told him to go on ahead. Maybe it’s what they always do. I don’t want to vilify the guy, but also, I do a little bit. Because he can just go running, y’know? He can put on his shorts and sneakers and run, and not think twice about it, but not a single one of us who isn’t a man can actually do that tiny, simple thing, and I wonder if that ever occurred to him.

I don’t want to jump to that conclusion, but sometimes in life, it’s so hard not to, isn’t it? I want so much to live in a world where the conclusions I jump to are that people will take care of each other. I want to trust if my children are out in the world and I’m not there with them, strangers will be kind, just like I swear I would be kind to anyone’s child who came across my path, and it wouldn’t matter to me how old they were. They could be sixty-eight, and they’d still be someone’s child. It costs nothing to be kind.

We all belong to ourselves, to the world, and to each other. I don’t know why that isn’t the most obvious conclusion of all. Sending you so much love, friends.

*Thumbnail Photo by Hossein Ghodsi on Unsplash

Years might go by like that, where you try and fail to be quieter, more helpful, less full of needs, more aware of their signals, thinner, prettier, smarter, less whatever it is that seems to set them off about you — a thing that changes all the time. You won’t ever get it right, and that’s the only thing you’ll know for sure.

When you’re older, it might look like bargaining. I want to spend time with you, but not when you’re drinking. If you drink, I’m going to leave. Let’s meet for lunch, how about that? Then it might mean wrestling with whether you actually leave when the person you love orders wine while you’re still unbuttoning your coat. It won’t matter if you stay or go, you’re in a hostage situation. The alcohol is king, you’re just a pawn.

You might suggest joint therapy next, and feel defeated and depressed when your loved one stands up and announces in the middle of the third session that therapy just isn’t for her, and she’s never understood people who find it helpful to talk to a stranger about their problems — managing to insult you and the therapist simultaneously as she walks out the door. The therapist can handle it, but you are twenty-five and struggling.

Eventually, it will look like moving 3,000 miles away, hard as it is, figuring out what geographical and emotional boundaries are — that will be the best solution you can find. A way to love your mother, but also take care of your heart, because it can only break so much. It turns out you really can’t save anyone, like all those memes will tell you. Because no matter what move you make, the person you love will never look directly at the problem. They’ll always say the problem is you and your hypersensitivity or ingratitude, or the problem is money, or the problem is a situation that is happening at work.

To make herself feel better, my mother would buy things. She would redo the living room, change the paint color, reupholster the couch. She would get new deck furniture for the lake house, spoil her dogs, send her grandkids, my kids, gifts. She would buy a new sweater, a new piece of jewelry, a new pair of shoes. She’d get her hair blown out. She always looked put together and perfect on the outside and it hurts my heart to think of it as I write.

Her hair, curly as mine, blown out straight, her lipstick perfect, her perfume lingering hours after she’d left, but not in an oppressive way. Sometimes I’d catch the scent and stand there, breathing it in with tears streaming down my face, wishing I could bottle up the good part.

She was on top of everything, she had lists and plans and was one of the most capable people you could ever meet. She kept a roof over our heads when I was a kid. But she would not solve the only problem that would have liberated her, or me, from a terrible cycle of suffering. Strangely, life solved it for her in the most brutal way possible. I suppose it gave us three weeks of clarity, but the price was like a knife through my heart. I am grateful, and yet.

That is what I was thinking about this week. The way there are real and immediate problems to solve, and people who are suffering, right now, in real time. The way we could be solving these problems if we looked directly at them. Instead, we have people at the helm who pretend we need to be addressing problems that don’t exist. They pretend with their entire chests, like addicts, and I suppose they are. Their drugs of choice are influence and greed. They seem to enjoy them with a cruelty chaser. The white powDer makes them crazy.

It’s hard to keep up with all the pretend problems we don’t have, but the latest one is “Birth Tourism.” This is the main argument actual attorneys made in front of Supreme Court justices when they argued against birthright citizenship, a right protected under the 14th Amendment, Section 1, right at the top:

The POTUS’s attorneys argued that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” doesn’t mean what it means, and parents have to be “domiciled” here even though it doesn’t say that, and to hear them tell it, this “birth tourism” is a huge problem. Friends, you would think we have millions of hugely pregnant women pole-vaulting themselves over the border every week so they can give birth on “our soil” (ew Mike Johnson, ew) and take advantage of “the welfare state” (ew again).

Here is his exact quote: “I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years. You just come on to the soil and have your child, and then they’re, they’re able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else.” If you’d like to see those words coming directly out of his mouth, and also the look on his face when he heard about the SCOTUS decision to uphold birthright citizenship, you can — because the decision came down during a live press conference.

His face turns red and his breathing changes. He has a visceral response to the news that there was a 6-3 ruling on birthright citizenship (5-4 on constitutional grounds) when it should have been unanimous. That’s not why he’s upset, though. He’s upset because he was hoping they were going to strike it down altogether. He knows his boss is going to be rage-Truth-Socialing all night, and he’ll be dealing with the fallout. Let’s go back for a minute, though, and do a little math. It will be fun, I promise.

First, there are roughly 3.6 million births in the United States each year. According to the Migration Policy Institute, even the most generous estimate of births that result from “Birth Tourism” — that is, women intentionally coming to the United States to have their babies for the sole purpose of getting them U.S. citizenship — and this is based on U.S. Census Bureau data, and The Center for Immigration Studies — would be 26,000 annually. That is the most generous estimate possible, and it is highly and hotly contested, but let’s go with it. Let’s say 26,000 hugely pregnant women pole-vaulted over our borders, landed on “our soil”, squatted down, had their babies, and wrapped them in American flags. Any guesses as to the percentage of births that would be annually?

0.716463843%

Also, when Mike Johnson speaks of the “welfare state” he’s talking about what he likes to call “entitlement programs” and among those he includes Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Some people are confused about how Social Security is funded, how Medicare is funded and how Medicaid is funded. They are not all being funded in the same way, or all coming out of ”the same pot” and it is worth a little time familiarizing yourself with the basics if you feel unsure. That way you know when your government is swindling you, or your representatives are not looking out for your best interests, which they are not.

Regardless, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for “entitlement programs” and Mike Johnson knows that very well. Their U.S. born children are, but why wouldn’t they be? You know who else is not confused about this? The Vice President, JD Pants on Fire. Here’s what he had to say about Amy Coney Barrett being on the correct side of the bench for this decision:

“Well, look, do I think she made a mistake in the ruling? I do,” the vice-president said. “I don’t know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien, or a person for example who’s pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship … I don’t think that’s what the framers of the 14th amendment had in mind.”

He knows very well it doesn’t work that way. If an undocumented woman has a baby in the United States “on vacation” — because that happens all the time [insert eyeroll] — neither she, her husband, nor any other member of that baby’s family “gets the benefits of American citizenship” and it’s disgusting for the VP of the United States to lie about that. He’s an attorney, he went to Yale, he knows.

It’s so odd, because I could swear he’s on some book tour about his “spiritual evolution” (excuse me while I pause to laugh for five minutes) and recent conversion to Catholicism, and while I am not Catholic, I spent my early childhood with my Italian Catholic grandma, and I am absolutely positive he is not supposed to be lying. There aren’t enough Hail Marys for that man’s soul.

It’s clearly a talking point, though, and it’s probably coming from the white nationalist who never got picked for dodgeball as a kid. This is what happens when boys buy into the version of toxic masculinity where cruelty and violence equal power and virility. Dear young teenage boys, does Stephen Miller look virile to you? Also, can we all take a moment and contemplate the reality that the POTUS (this is my new favorite moniker and I may stick with it for a while) chose this hateful creature to be part of his administration? Imagine choosing to spend time with Stephen Miller. That alone should be disqualifying.

In any case, Stephen Miller went on a rant about the Supreme Court decision, and said because of birthright citizenship, “We have people…from third-world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology…they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital...and then that baby is automatically a citizen.”

So, we could be here all day, but the general consensus is the wheel was invented by Sumerians, as in Mesopotamia, as in modern-day Iraq. Same goes for math, which led to “modern technology” — we can trace it back to Sumerians and Babylonians, to Egypt, to ancient Greece, eventually to China, India, and across Europe. You know who definitely did not invent the wheel and/or math? White men from America in suits and ties.

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for benefits, but they must contribute to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and they do. A lot. $651.9B in tax contributions, $215.8B in contributions to Social Security, $58.7B in contributions to Medicare. Our immigrant community makes us stronger in every way, but to hear Mike Johnson, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller tell it, immigrants are the problem.

Birth Tourism is not a thing and not a problem. Birthright citizenship is a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, full stop.

“Men on women’s sports teams” is not a thing, either. We have people who are choosing between groceries and getting medical care. Parents skipping meals so their kids can eat. People working three jobs to try to keep the lights on. Those are problems. Becky Pepper Jackson, fifteen and the only openly transgender girl in West Virginia who can throw the shot put and discus, is not a problem. She’s a freaking rockstar.

It makes me sick to my stomach that Brett Kavanaugh was the one to write the majority decision. As if he has any concern about keeping girls and women safe, or “respecting women.” We all remember Christine Blasey Ford, Debbie Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick. That’s not a man who respects women, and no one is confused.

No one is confused about what will ensue from this decision, either. This won’t be good for transgender athletes or transgender people, period, but it also won’t be good for women or girls, or cisgender girls who want to play on girls’ sports teams. This won’t be good for any of us, and it’s heartbreaking. My heart hurts for transgender kids who feel like they have no safe place anywhere.

You know there will be coaches who take advantage, and if you don’t know, then you aren’t a woman, and you haven’t been paying attention. There will be some coach somewhere who decides he needs a girl to prove she’s a girl. The fury I feel is real, because these people have already tried to pass legislation requiring genital exams for high school girls to play sports. That’s what this Supreme Court decision does. It does not make girls and women safer. It does not “respect” girls. It endangers them, and news flash, girls and women are endangered enough.

There are a lot of very unwell people in the world, and we don’t need to make it easier for them to have access to our children. That’s the last thing we need to be doing. I really thought I couldn’t be shocked at this point, but I have to admit, this next thing got me. Here’s what they were teaching at a “Vacation Bible Camp” in Lexington, Kentucky last week to a room full of tiny kids: Commandos for Christ y’all.

Soldiers with very real looking machine guns executing “Satan” — a man dressed in black — on stage at the front of the room, while all the kids chanted, “Take him out, blow him up!” In a world where children are shot down at school every fucking week, this is what they’re normalizing in the name of Jesus? A “skit” where a man is executed? What Bible is this, is it the $60 Bible the president is selling? Because that would track.

“Men on women’s sports teams” are not a real problem. Men like these, indoctrinating children this way, absolutely are.

If you’re someone who thinks we need to get money out of politics, you won’t be happy about yet another decision of the Roberts’ Supreme Court, which might as well be called Citizens United, the Sequel. In some kind of bizarre fever dream, the Court decided putting a cap on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties was the equivalent of “restricting free speech”, because billionaires influencing the political landscape is totally the same thing as “everyone can say whatever they like as long as it doesn’t incite violence” — but, here we are.

This will undoubtedly affect the midterms, because now there’s no limit to the size of the checks donors can write to party committees, instead of individual candidates. Democrats tend to thrive on grassroots fundraising with small-donor donations, and Republicans tend to attract more money from large donors, so hopefully Melinda French Gates wants to keep balancing the scales singlehandedly, or at least showing all billionaires how it’s done.

I don’t get it at all, because if I had a billion dollars — or if I’d made 2 billion dollars in the last year alone! — you could not stop me from getting a committee together to start solving the world’s problems. I can’t think of anything more fun or rewarding. But not these folks. They just want more crypto and AI. They want to cancel programs for the families struggling the most profoundly, and give handouts to the people who need them the least, in the form of tax loopholes — otherwise known as the true entitlement programs.

The United States Postal Service has been on my mind lately, which is, of course, a sign of the times. I remember learning about Benjamin Franklin, the Revolutionary War, and the rebellious, treasonous, inspired beginnings of the U.S. postal service, and maybe you do, too. (This was long before I learned a different, less sparkly, Manifest-Destiny-washed version of American history, of course). I even remember a field trip to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue, where the “motto of the postal service” is etched in stone above the entrance:

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Between the ideals of an “informed electorate”, “The Pony Express”, and the poetic inscription above the door, I was entranced. I would have been even more besotted if someone had told me the motto was derived from a passage in George Herbert Palmer‘s translation of Herodotus‘s Histories, referring to the courier service of the ancient Persian Empire:

It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.

I probably would have said I wanted to grow up and deliver the mail, and why not?

Postmaster General David P. Steiner is threatening to follow the POTUS’s proposed rule, and only deliver mail-in ballots to states willing to turn over their voter rolls. This proposed rule is, of course, unconstitutional, and it’s “solving” another problem we don’t have. We do not have election fraud.

States control their own elections, and the president is not entitled to voter rolls. He is trying every way possible to disenfranchise voters who don’t support him. I am sure Ben Franklin is rolling over in his grave. The USPS delivers the mail. The president does not get to rule by Executive Order, or by stomping his feet, but he does if people let him. So far, too many of the people around him are solving pretend problems, and ignoring the ones that are painfully real. These people are addicted to power and greed, and they like that cruelty chaser.

You know what, though? There is another, lesser known inscription on what used to be the Washington, D.C. Post Office — and is now the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum — called, appropriately, “The Letter” — and written by Dr. Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard University. This poem was lightly but notably edited without permission by then-President Woodrow Wilson, and inscribed. At least he didn’t put his name on the building I guess. It strikes me that this is a poem, but it’s also a list of options. We could choose to be any of these:

I like those top four, how about you? Sending you consolations if you need them, and so much love. It may not be the 250th we hoped for, but there’s nothing to say we can’t gather the Scattered Family Together, and Promote Mutual Acquaintance of Peace and Goodwill Among All People, yet. Our 251st might be the best year ever.

Don’t give up, friends xx

If you’re nodding, you know how disconcerting it is. Sometimes it happens when the argument doesn’t seem like a big deal, and then you’re at a serious disadvantage. The first time you’re on the receiving end of that play, it’s like finding each foot on a different tectonic plate, even if you’re in the middle of your living room. If you take the bait and follow their lead, you’ll lose your footing altogether.

“Wait. When did this happen? What did I say?” you might ask, confused. Rookie move. Here comes the list of things you said or didn’t say that day, according to them, and there are going to be other things, from other days. You’re going to find out this person has a card catalogue of your mistakes through the years, through their eyes. Some may be valid, some may not, but since you weren’t given the chance to communicate at the time, who’s to say? Now you’re in a conversation they’re choosing, fighting the battle they want to fight.

You’re hurtling through space with a person who has the upper hand. They’ve decided where you’re going, what the ride is about, and what sights you’ll be seeing along the way. To the left, please note the time you didn’t laugh at a joke I made at that dinner party in East Hampton in front of all my friends. To the right, you’ll see the day we were at my brother’s house, and you didn’t tell my family about my new business endeavor because you never think about how I feel. We’ll be getting off the train here so you can walk around and buy a postcard.

Good luck getting back to the original issue.

Maybe all you wanted was to feel heard and understood. That’s usually all people want when they’re in an argument with someone they care about. Maybe the original problem wasn’t even a huge one, you simply wanted to communicate and know this person saw you and cherished you.

How about when you’re in an argument and realize you’re the one who’s in the wrong? Haha, that’s always fun. You misunderstood, or maybe you realize you could have extended more benefit of the doubt, or expressed yourself with less heat. Maybe you let the past, color the present. Then your option is to own it, or dig your heels in further. Healthy people in a healthy relationship will own it and give a full-chested apology. Some people can’t or won’t do that. My mother could never admit she was wrong, and it led to so much pain and suffering — for her and for me.

My dad was worse. He misheard me once when we were walking up Columbus Avenue on a sunny afternoon. He thought I said something disrespectful, and he hit me upside my head so hard my ear was ringing for half an hour. Tears sprung to my eyes instantly. I was shocked because we’d been having a lighthearted conversation, and I asked him why he’d done it. He repeated what he thought I’d said, and I told him what I’d actually said, and he harumphed. That’s the best way I can describe it. He got a pained look on his face and made a noise in his throat and kept walking.

I assumed he must feel horrendous, I imagined how terrible I would feel if I’d done that to someone I purportedly loved, so I swallowed my own feelings and took care of his. I acted like I was okay. I continued our conversation as if I wasn’t in pain and my ear wasn’t ringing and I didn’t have a horrible pit, low in my belly, because my dad had lashed out at me violently and publicly for no reason at all.

When I got older and tried to talk to him about my childhood, tried to see if we could have some real conversations, he’d say, “Your childhood feels like another lifetime. I don’t even remember what happened.” Very satisfying.

People who refuse to acknowledge they’re human will disappoint you at best. At worst, they’ll behave like cornered, wild animals. If they’re really unwell, they’ll start lying to cover their mistakes, even if the lies are preposterous.

These days the word narcissist has lost its meaning because we use it for every thoughtless interaction we have. The person who doesn’t say thank you when we hold a door open. The person who doesn’t let us merge on the freeway. The person who asks for too many samples at the ice cream parlor while we wait on line.

If you have someone in your life who cannot tolerate criticism, who is never wrong, who cannot say they’re sorry, who has grandiose ideas about their own importance — but also deep underlying doubts about their worth — who needs admiration and external validation, and talks constantly about their perceived successes, who thinks the rules don’t apply to them, and who seems to struggle to put themselves in your shoes or extend empathy when you’re hurting…that’s a little closer to the DSM criteria. It isn’t easy to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and it isn’t easy to love people who are on the spectrum. There is a spectrum.

If you live in the states, you have someone like that in your life. You probably think about him more than you’d like, because he’s the president. Which is kinda weird, because normally a person ought to be able to go days without thinking about the president, and if a person is thinking about him, it isn’t thoughts like, Please tell me he didn’t really post something that is so horrifically racist, even for him.

One of the parts that is most exhausting for me is when we end up in the wrong conversation. There are so many days when we should be talking about one thing, but he does or says something so outrageous, depressing, diminishing, debasing, or objectively nuts — it takes over the news cycle. That’s no accident. Even journalists I respect can get caught up in the madness.

I watched Anderson Cooper interviewing Adam Kovac from Scientific American about the Reflecting Pool debacle, and much as I respect and like Anderson Cooper, the interview was annoying and disappointing. Though it focused on various potential causes of the peeling paint, including the most likely — failure to properly apply the coating/shoddy work — and other contributing factors that no scientist would have recommended, such as the presidential motorcade sliding up before it had a chance to cure, the rushed deadline for a project like this, and the massive amount of hydrogen peroxide dumped in by Parks Department workers as they waged war on blue-green algae (at the administration’s behest, no shade to the Parks Department workers) — it also included a question about potential vandalism, when we all know there hasn’t been any vandalism. There has not been any vandalism. I’m writing it twice for good measure. There are cameras pointed at the Reflecting Pool 24/7.

I’m so tired of the lies.

When you give a man like the president the mic, and allow him to say blatantly ludicrous things, when the push-back is far too mild because he’ll yell, “Quiet, Piggy!” or “Fake News!” if anyone holds his feet to the flame — and then respected journalists include a question about whether the peeling paint could be from vandalism — you’re in the wrong conversation. You’re giving credence to a claim with no merit.

If we’re going to continue to talk about the Reflecting Pool, let’s talk about it in terms of incompetence and corruption. Let’s talk about the no-bid government contract, the company that got the job to paint the pool, and a guy named JJ Cafaro. It is worth clicking on the link if you haven’t seen JJ, because he traveled here to 2026 from a 1930s gangster film. I’m at a freaking loss, y’all.

By the way, the company that was contracted is called Green Water Services, and is also known as “Green Water Solutions”, so the jokes write themselves, but they aren’t funny enough to justify the $16 million in taxpayer dollars, and obviously the project will need to be redone. Unless we just leave the swamp as is and let the next person fix this mess, along with all the others he’s leaving behind.

What we should be talking about today is the housing bill. We need to be talking about this, because it is everything that is wrong with this president, and it needs to be a story his supporters understand. I do not care whether they admit to you or me that they understand, I only care that they realize what just happened.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, Congress passed a huge bipartisan housing bill in an effort to address the housing crisis here in America. It is the most holistic housing package signed into law in decades, and this legislation was spearheaded by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Tim Scott (SC), along with Reps. Maxine Waters (CA) and French Hill (AK) in the House. It would boost the U.S. housing supply in the longterm, and lower costs for millions of Americans who pay rent or own their homes. It would not be a cure-all — no one bill will be — but it would be a significant step in the right direction.

It includes provisions to lower housing costs, make it easier to get new builds approved, and shift control over housing to the local level. It would give Americans feeling the most financial pressure some much-needed relief right now.

Sharon Wilson Géno, the president of the National Multifamily Housing Council, says that the bill’s impacts on affordability will first be felt by lower-income Americans.

“Our housing-affordability challenges are the greatest, and significantly much more so at that very low income end of the spectrum,” she says, adding that “the federal government actually has most control and most opportunity at that part of the housing market.”

The House passed the bill in a 358-32 vote on Tuesday and the Senate passed it 85-5 on Monday. That level of support is what’s colloquially called a “veto-proof majority.” Meaning it has so much support, it would be crazy for any president not to sign it and take the win. Republicans would really like some kind of a win. They are worried AF about the midterms, as they should be. They want to have something to turn attention away from the astronomical gas prices, grocery prices, and failed war with Iran no one wanted.

It went to the president’s desk to be signed into law on Wednesday. The signing ceremony was going to be televised, and was being set up live. He canceled his plans to sign the bill in a social media post.

Do we need a Schoolhouse Rock reminder about how a Bill becomes a law? If he’d signed it, it would have become a law right then. If he lets it sit on his desk for 10 days (not including Sundays) without signing it while Congress is in session, it becomes law. If he vetoes it, the bill goes back to the House and Senate, where they can vote to override his veto. They would need ⅔ majority in the House and Senate, respectively. Normally, I would say it would die there, because Republican senators never want to displease their mighty overlord, but given the shocking bipartisan support and the initial votes? I think it would survive. They are all thinking about self-preservation.

What has this petty little man done? He said, “If you want your housing bill, I want the SAVE America Act, aka The Disenfranchise Marginalized Voters Act, The Poll Tax Act, The Gilead Act, The Tradwives Don’t Care if Their Husbands or Dads Do the Voting Act, The Let’s Pretend We Don’t Have Free and Fair Elections Act.”

There is no support for the SAVE Act in the Senate amongst Dems (and four Republicans), because again, non-citizens do not vote in our elections and we do not have a problem with election fraud. The president wants to disenfranchise voters who he knows will not be voting for him. It would not be the worst week to call your reps and remind them how much you hate the SAVE Act.

Maybe there are some nineteen-year-old tradwives and a few of their MAGA/MAHA moms who don’t care about giving up their right to vote, but most women, liberal and conservative alike, are not going to support that plan, no matter how much Pete Hegseth’s pastor might long for that day. By the way MAHA moms, the Supreme Court made it harder to sue Monsanto today, so glad you got Red Dye 40 out of those M&Ms, but now we have AI data centers everywhere, and this decision. Plus, y’know, all the racism and bigotry and forced birth for children in states with restrictive abortion bans. You realize you could have just gone organic in your own homes, right? Or protested/boycotted Mars, Inc.

The reason the president wants the SAVE Act so badly is he doesn’t want liberal women like me to vote. He doesn’t want the marginalized groups he’s been waging war against to vote, because he knows we are awake and furious and not going to vote Republican.

He’s got the USPS involved now and it looks like David Steiner is corrupt, too. “Happy to go along with whatever Dear Leader says. You want to demand voter rolls before we deliver mail-in ballots even though that violates the Constitution? No problem, sir, happy to kiss your ass!”

Anyway, the president has taken a bill that is good for Americans, that would give the people struggling the most some sorely-needed help, and he is holding it hostage to get what he wants. He says the bill is “of little importance” and housing is all about interest rates, and no one knows more about housing than him. Okay, if it’s all about interest rates, remember when he said he was going to get banks to lower their interest rates and put a 10% cap on credit cards for a year by January 20th? Elizabeth Warren does! Please enjoy this very satisfying clip where she mops the floor with Ms. Lindsey Johnson, and manages to do it with a smile on her face.

You know who isn’t worrying about the cost of groceries or credit card debt or how to take care of his family or healthcare costs or housing? I bet you do! The president. He’s building like crazy all over the world and increasing his wealth every single day. Emoluments be damned.

You wanna know what, though? I’m glad he’s doing this, much as I worry for people barely making it, or not making it at all. I’m hoping we can all hold onto each other a little more tightly for a little while longer. It’s getting harder and harder for anyone to spin this any way except right side up. We will show up in full force in November, however we have to do it. We’ll show up early, in person, whatever. We will organize and we will get there. The courts are on our side. Not the Supreme Court, maybe, but the federal judges have not lost their minds or their morals, not all of them.

I want you to hold onto this reality when you feel hopeless or scared, because it’s the thing they don’t want us to see. It’s the conversation they don’t want us to have:

If we didn’t have any power — if voting in November didn’t matter — they wouldn’t be trying this hard to stop us.

That’s about all the warning I can give you, but it’s more warning than we get in life. It’s something, right? An opportunity to strap in or walk away.

My mother’s birthday is coming up, June 26th, and I always feel a gravitational pull this time of year. I miss my mother like I breathe. The ache is familiar now, I notice it the same way I notice my freckles; I don’t notice it much at all except when I do. What surprises me is the tears, and how they’re right underneath the surface all the time. How I can think of her, and already, the screen is blurry. How I’d give just about anything for one more conversation — one where she still has her voice and her laugh.

If you didn’t know me, you might read this and imagine my relationship with my mother must have been the kind you encounter sometimes. Those mothers and daughters who have their own language, an understanding, a knowingness. I have it with my own daughter now, which also makes tears spring to my eyes. I guess it must be the knowledge that unconditional love exists in the space between you and another person. I’d observed that kind of mother-daughter bond a few times when I was very young, watching my friends with their moms. It hurt to be around, though I tried never to show it. I was happy for my friends who had that. I knew it must be my fault that I didn’t.

My mother chose Chardonnay, and sometimes other drinks, even after I made it clear she was causing me pain in every way imaginable. Deep down I thought I must not be that great if I couldn’t win out over alcohol, but I had some understanding that she was in the mix, too. She had her own choices to make.

At fourteen, after dealing with the volatility for years, you start to ask yourself questions. What could I have done at seven years old to deserve that kind of wrath, though? You start to have thoughts like, No kid deserves to be terrorized and hurt by the person they love more than anything.

By sixteen, you’re as tall as your mother, and one night when she’s in a drunken rage, coming at you for the millionth time, you say, “If you hit me again, I’m going to hit you back.” You are all fury, and shaking voice — and also, pure, broken heart. You surprise yourself, and by the looks of it, you surprise your mother, too. That’s the last time she raises her hand to you.

We did not have the kind of relationship that other girls and women envy, and now maybe you think it was awful, but that wouldn’t be accurate, either. It was painful. I loved her wholeheartedly, and she was the kind of person it hurts to love. She loved me in that way where I was supposed to tolerate everything and anything from her, but if you crossed me, she’d get in the line of fire like you crossed her. Only she could go for my jugular. If I could have trusted her, that might have come in handy, but I learned early not to make myself vulnerable. It was only a matter of time before she’d betray my confidence in some slurred and devastating way.

She had a lot of shocking loss in her life, and her response was to try to control everything to avoid being hurt. You might have noticed you can’t control anything except your response to whatever happens, and I’m sure she noticed that, too. Every time someone let her down, or things didn’t go according to her plans, she got furious, and every night at about 5pm, she opened a bottle of Chardonnay, and then another. Sometimes one more after that. She’d start earlier, if circumstances allowed. “It’s 5 o’clock, somewhere!” she’d say on those days, and I’d feel everything in my body contract.

My mother was never wrong about anything. She’d never apologize the next day, I would. I’d write her letters saying I was sorry for not being a better child, I’d try harder, she deserved a good daughter. I would try not to be so thoughtless or stupid or lazy. I wrote these letters when I was so little. I’d blocked it out, but she saved the letters, and I found them when I was packing up her apartment in March. It all came flooding back.

If I went to her friends asking them to get her some help, they’d tell me she wasn’t an alcoholic, she was a “social drinker” and I was “overly sensitive” and “dramatic”, words my mother called me. She also called me Little Sarah Bernhardt, then she’d roll her eyes and her friends would laugh. They weren’t there in the apartment late at night, though, they didn’t know what was happening, and I surely didn’t tell them the awful parts. My mother taught me, “We don’t air our dirty laundry.” I would never have betrayed her.

Everyone knew my mother was an alcoholic. Anyone with eyes could see, but no one who wanted to stay in her good graces would say it out loud. My mother could be incredible. She could be kind. There was always a room in our house for a friend in need. She was charismatic and very smart. She could also be terrifying. No one wanted to be banished from the Queendom. I was what you call collateral damage.

There are so many people who can never admit they’re wrong. They’d sooner not have you in their life. I don’t understand it, I think you’d have to live inside that frame of mind to fathom it, but I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of those ultimatums. “Accept my version of reality, or we’re done.” Pretend I’m not an alcoholic, or this isn’t going to work. Deal with what I did or said, don’t make me own it, or we can’t move forward. Those are my boundaries, we aren’t going to deal with yours.

That is not a fulfilling way to be in a relationship. Everyone is wrong sometimes, everyone makes a mess of things once in a while. Acknowledging that is nothing more than acknowledging you’re human. Refusing to admit and assert it is a huge red flag. For anyone who grew up with parents or caregivers who made demands like these — for anyone who has ever been married to someone like this, has a sibling like this, or a close friend — living in our current reality in the states is taxing on the nervous system.

We’re surrounded by people who operate this way every day, and one beastly child-man who does real and actual harm to so many truly good human beings, and refuses to be accountable for anything. He does this because he is broken inside. Malfunctioning.

I’ve already done so much work on clear communication and learning to identify what I can control (my response to what is happening), versus what I cannot control (everything else), I do not wish to give a petulant, stunted, petty little man the ability to exhaust me, enrage me, or ruin my day. It becomes challenging when that man is the president, and I happen to care about human rights and women’s rights and girls’ rights and children everywhere and BIPOC and the LGBTQ community and the planet and the Constitution and I dunno. Decency and ethics and not living with the constant fear that we’re going to end up hurtling through space because he’s just going to become more and more unhinged and no one who could, will stop him.

So, I try to find the balance each day. I want to be informed, but I do not want to be flooded by his zone of ever-constant cruelty. I do want to be able to help my neighbors, extend a hand, support people doing good work on the ground, and not give up. Giving up is not an option.

In normal times, such a man would never be president, but alas, but alas.

One of the things that helps me float are facts. They’re like little life rafts that keep me tethered, and calm my weary heart in the midst of a sea of gaslighting. I grew up this way, and maybe you relate. Experiencing a painful reality, and then having people tell you what you saw, heard and felt is not what happened. Accept my version of reality, or love will be withdrawn. You’ll find yourself banished, in the storm, alone. I can no longer accept a false version of reality from or for anyone. If that’s the price of admission, I’d rather grab my oars.

So here are a few things I think we all need to understand, since we won’t get the truth from a man who can’t admit he made an unfathomable mess of things. We won’t get the truth from the people around him, either. And then I want to share some collateral damage — not because I want to break your heart for the sake of it — but because I want to leave you with a heart broken open. It’s a good way to be.

The Memo of Understanding the president signed at the G7 yesterday is really, really good. For Iran. There are 14 points in the memo, but here are the 5 main takeaways for me.

In a nutshell the MOU agrees:

1. The U.S., Iran and their allies will stop military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, and agree not to fight with one another anymore, or even threaten the use of force. Israel has already said it will not be bound by any agreement between the U.S. and Iran, however. So…right off that bat, this deal does not seem to be dealing.

2. The U.S. will lift all sanctions against Iran, and lift the blockade of Iranian ports. This will give Iran shiny new access to world trade, a thing all previous administrations since Carter have prevented. That way they could exert pressure over the Iranian regime if and when necessary. Guess that’s over. Also, Iran can immediately begin selling oil on the world market.

3. Iran will give it “the old college try” for the safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz — with no charge for 60 days! After that? Who’s to say, really? Not the United States, that’s for sure! “The Islamic Republic of Iran will conduct dialogue with the Sultanate of Oman to define the future administration and Maritime Services Administrator Hormuz in discussion with other Persian Gulf states in line with the applicable international law and the sovereign rights of coastal states of the Strait of Hormuz” — which… sounds like fees. In the Strait that used to be free and open. Awesome.

4. The U.S. will thaw frozen Iranian assets immediately and “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development” of Iran to fix all the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. The U.S. will grant all “required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions” — so it seems like Iran is back! Fully participating in world financial markets. We are really getting owned here. Y’all, one thing I can say. The midterms? LOL. This deal sucks so badly. I don’t think I have ever seen a deal suck as badly as this deal sucks. Yet somehow his supporters think he’s a good businessman. Will this change their minds? Nah.

5. Iran reaffirms it won’t develop or procure a nuclear weapon. Just like they affirmed to President Barack Obama in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action he negotiated. Except in President Barack Obama’s very good deal that did not cost the lives of 150 Iranian schoolgirls, civilians, 13 of our service members, $300 billion dollars to pay for the destruction we caused and $113 billion at home and counting, plus wreaking havoc on the world’s economies — the new MOU doesn’t contain any language about a method by which we check to make sure they aren’t developing or procuring a nuclear weapon. So…honor system, I guess? Well, actually, the president said if Iran “doesn’t behave” we’ll, “just go back to bombing them right in the middle of their head” — which sounds very presidential and will probably do it. Oh, and he called President Barack Obama a “stupid sonofabitch” a bunch of times, bwahahahahaha.

There is going to be an insane Iranian LEGO video with a banger soundtrack any minute. I’d be laughing harder, but I live here and in all reality this is heartbreaking and all so unnecessary. This is our country, and at some point soon, we are going to have to clean up the huge mess this man is leaving in his wake.

I grew up believing in the three branches of government, believing in the checks and balances, and believing in the Constitution. I never thought we were who we said we were, and I can’t tell you exactly why, though I have thoughts. Maybe it was because my dad and stepmom let me watch Roots when it aired in 1977, all eight nights of it, and didn’t decide it was “too upsetting” for a six-year-old when I sobbed my heart out. Maybe it’s because my stepmom was handing me books from the time I was little, and she didn’t worry about age-appropriateness. I read Watership Down in third grade, and I only remember that because my third grade teacher told me it wasn’t a book for eight-year-olds. I read it at home after that. I read The Color Purple when I was ten.

I’d read Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Jazz, Playing in the Dark, and just about everything Toni Morrison had written by the time I graduated college, not because they were assigned, but because I loved her writing. I still do.

Whatever the reasons, and I’m sure the reasons are books and authors like Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Bell Hooks to name a few (exceptionally great time to buy Communion, linked here, if you haven’t), I’ve never been confused that we had a lot of work to do as a country if we ever wanted to be the country we said we were. I simply thought we were on a trajectory that was moving in the right direction, but at a snail’s pace. I believed in our checks and balances. I believed in the Supreme Court.

I thought most people were basically good, and given the chance, they’d help a person in need if they were bleeding in front of them. I’m less sure of everything than I used to be, which might be a sign of getting older, but also might be a sign of the times.

If there’s one thing this grifting president and his administration of grifters have done really well — and there is — it’s that they’ve exposed the cracks in our foundation. The cracks are where a now-trillionaire slipped into the Treasury with 6 kids and their flash drives. The cracks are where those kids sat when they ran code that canceled countless programs, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people died, and continue to die. The cracks are where senators forget the oaths they took and look at their stock portfolios instead. It’s where they say, “Thoughts and prayers” when children die, and die, and die, and keep on dying.

Too many people have been left on the fringes, and those are the areas we need to mend most desperately. That’s where people are bleeding. If you don’t care, there are cracks in your foundation, too. It’s probably not your fault. Maybe it’s something you were taught, maybe it’s fear and it feels safer to be furious, like you’re less vulnerable that way, but you aren’t. We’re all vulnerable, it’s built into the experience of being human. You can be angry and hardened and you’ll still be vulnerable, or you can be kind. That’s the choice you get.

I’m going to tell you something unspeakably sad now.

In Senatobia, Mississippi on Sunday, police responded to a call at a Walmart about possible shoplifting. The item in question was a box of diapers. The alleged shoplifter was a Black woman. She was with another young Black woman who was holding her baby. There is cellphone footage from a witness in the parking lot that shows police officers running toward the car as the driver is pulling out of the lot. Officers in the video are behind the car and to the side of it. It is not possible to see officers in front of the vehicle if there are any. Shots are fired. The car drives away.

The baby’s name was Kohen Kartier Wiley. His mom says they went with the family friend to Walmart, and the friend paid for the diapers at the self-checkout. She has the receipt. Her attorneys have asked Walmart to release the video from inside the store. Kohen Kartier Wiley’s mom has not been charged with anything. When shots were fired, Kohen was hit in the ribcage. The driver, her friend, was hit and is critically injured, but somehow drove them all to the hospital.

By the time they got there, little Kohen had died.

In comments under posts about this tragedy, far too many people are saying it’s the mother’s fault — she shouldn’t have brought her baby “to do a crime.” She should have put him in a carseat. I’ll tell you what. She has the receipt, so she didn’t commit a crime, but even if she did, what kind of human being calls the police if they see a young woman and a baby, and their friend is shoplifting diapers?

What kind of police officers draw their weapons on two women and a baby for shoplifting diapers? I guarantee if those were two white women and a white baby, that’s not what would have happened. They would have followed the car and gotten the license plate. That’s if they’d gotten a call in the first place. Why would anyone call the police over diapers for a baby? You pay for them. Isn’t that what you’d do? I would. You pay for them. And if you’re the cop? You’re really gonna chase someone’s car over diapers for a baby? Let alone pull the trigger? You’ve lost the plot.

Then, when members of the community showed up at the Walmart hours later to protest, they were tear-gassed by police. Police in formation, arms locked, many dressed in riot gear. A white police officer shot and killed a Black baby, and shot at two Black women over diapers. The community shows up because they are — understandably — outraged, and they get tear-gassed for exercising their 1st Amendment rights to protest? What’s even happening anymore.

The man-child in the Oval Office says the Reflecting Pool is “American Flag Blue” but it isn’t. It is American Algae Green, and it’s reflecting the scum that’s growing across this country. It’s time for us to remove it.

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

― Malcolm X

Rest in peace sweet Kohen Kartier Wiley. You deserved a much better world.

For those of you who’d like to meet in person, how about a writing retreat in NorCal October 16-20, 2026? All deets below!

Reconnecting Renaissance

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At first I didn’t understand what the group was — it seemed like it was an off-shoot of another page that had been about travel, but after a while I realized it was fascinating, and a good place to do a little informal research about women I might never meet. There were roughly 35,000 women in this group from across the United States, from many different backgrounds. The topics were as far-reaching as you might imagine (these are not actual questions, but things like):

“I’m going to a wedding this weekend, should I wear dress A, B, or C? Please be kind, I had a baby six months ago and feel self-conscious. I am breastfeeding and my boobs are huge and I’m bringing a pump, and I hate pumping. This is the first night I’ll be away from my baby.”

Then there’d be 942 votes on which dress to wear, but not just votes, women saying, “You look fantastic! I can’t believe you just had a baby. Wear that dress, and I hope you know how beautiful you are!” And, “I hated pumping, too, but try to enjoy yourself, your baby will be okay! Dance, breathe, and have a fun night out. Also, your boobs look GREAT.” All supportive stuff.

There might be a parenting question that would get people riled up — “Would you let your seventeen-year-old daughter sleep at her boyfriend’s house if his parents are okay with it?” Or one where everyone would be supportive, and I’d feel relieved:

“My mom won’t accept my transgender daughter, and I don’t want to spend the holidays with her this year as a result. It makes my daughter so miserable, and ruins the holiday for her and for me. I have tried talking to my mom many times, but she refuses to listen. I have sent her books, podcasts, everything I can think of. I have broken down in front of my mom and tried to be patient with her, but I can’t do this to my daughter, it isn’t okay. Now all my grown siblings are upset we aren’t coming, the cousins are upset, my dad is upset, too, and my mom isn’t speaking to me. What would you do?”

There’d be design questions, “I’m redoing this room, do y’all like this paint color?” Or travel, “Hey, I’m heading to New Orleans for the first time, please give me all your tips!”

I used to like it. Once in a while a woman would post a recipe that was fast, easy and delicious, right as I was wondering what to make for dinner, or someone would post about the grief they were experiencing because they’d lost someone and didn’t know how to function — just as I was feeling knocked sideways by the intensity of missing my mother.

People would often share things they wouldn’t share on their personal pages because they didn’t want their close friends or family to worry, but they needed to tell someone. Cancer diagnoses, fear about their very depressed teen, a divorce they hadn’t announced to their inner circle yet.

Women were kind to each other, and if they weren’t, they got sorted from the bunch, quickly. If they didn’t get the warning the first time, they were removed from the group. I was impressed with the moderators. I liked that there was such a huge cross-section of people from across the country. There were women with husbands, women with wives, transgender women, women who were single, women who liked to swing with their partners, women who were divorced and dating again for the first time, women who were widowed.

There were women of every color, size, and socioeconomic background, as far as I could tell. Some posts were about sex toys, sex positions, sex questions. No one judged. If you weren’t into something, you moved on. No one seemed to feel the need to comment on posts that didn’t apply or appeal to them.

It felt like an online coven, and that’s what I started calling it, even though that is not the name of the group. In my mind, it’s “The Coven”, or it was. You could dip in and out, but there was always a little magic afoot. It was a small source of joy and support during the pandemic, and during the time my mother was dying and I didn’t want to burden anyone in my life.

There were by-laws when I joined the page. This was a good fifteen years ago, so I don’t remember all of them, but it was the basic stuff. Be kind, be respectful, don’t sell anything here, no politics. Fifteen years ago “no politics” meant something different than it does today.

Like everything, times have changed and most good things have frayed around the edges.

Now women post because their husbands are looking for jobs, but it’s been six months and they haven’t had any luck. Does anyone have any leads in the finance/tech/transportation/manufacturing industry? Someone will write back and say maybe your husband should run his resume through ChatGPT and see if it can be updated to highlight his skills in a more appealing way. Someone else will say Claude is better for resumes than ChatGPT. A third woman will respond that AI is horrible for the environment, and there are human beings who could look at his resume and advise.

It’s ironic that someone is suggesting her husband use the tool that is very likely responsible for his firing in the first place, is what I’ll be thinking, but I won’t write that, because I’m sure it’s considered “politics” — as it should be. Everything is political.

Then someone else will say “Her husband is OUT OF WORK and it’s insensitive to suggest he pay someone, he can’t afford it, and ChatGPT is free!” Another woman will like that comment and respond, “IKR?! Google uses water, too [eyeroll emoji].”

And yes, it does, especially now that Google has made it a lot harder to opt out of AI Overview — a thing many of us find aggravating enough to find alternatives. I switched to Ecosia, where you can turn off the AI feature in settings, and they plant trees every time you search. Is it going to solve everything? I wish. But there are ways to be mindful, even with the search engines we’re using, and why wouldn’t we use the one that plants trees?

There are people who don’t want to think about the icky part, though. They want to pick up their devices or open their laptops and do what they need to do in the most expedient way, and so be it if that makes huge AI data centers inevitable, because AI itself is inevitable. The horse has left the barn, they’ll say, so just deal with it and let Claude write your grocery list, or plan your vacation, or tell you how to talk to your monosyllabic teenager, or have it summarize the complicated story you’re trying to tell. Why tax your brain trying to think too hard?

One reason might be that people who live near those gargantuan monstrosities like Musk’s Colossus in Memphis, have horrifying, undrinkable, unusable brown water coming out of their taps, and they listen to massive explosions underground for months — the kind that leave cracks in the foundation of the houses they worked for years in order to buy — and they hear a constant buzzing noise, and the lights from these AI data centers stay on all night, glowing ominously.

Their energy bills have tripled because electric companies pass on the costs to working class customers, and the local water supply is compromised — when we are already facing droughts across the country. Far too many of their children suddenly develop asthma, while their parents suffer from COPD or other lung disorders. They can’t open their windows anymore, because the air quality is so awful, because xAI is using an insane number of unpermitted methane turbines.

These data centers get pitched to local governments by corporations owned by billionaires. They head for marginalized communities first, or communities they know are hurting, as if the marginalization happened the way rain happens, like it wasn’t by design.

Then they head toward communities that are in trouble. As if farmers can’t afford diesel and fertilizer, and who knows why?

They promise millions in tax revenue and jobs, at a time when these communities are desperate. The majority of the jobs are construction jobs, though — they last until the centers are built. The billions invested by the corporations are easily recouped when they lay off thousands of employees they can now replace with robots. Who cares if the community is full of people with cancer, asthma, and COPD when the project is complete? You don’t think the corporations care, do you? The board members? The billionaires? Erin Brockovich is on the case, thankfully.

I don’t say this on The Coven, and I don’t go there much anymore. It no longer feels magical to me, and I’m on screens enough when I write. The only people I want to talk to on screens are my actual family and friends who are far away, and those include the people who read my stuff and want to engage. I’d rather see my family and friends in person given the choice. Other than that, I’ll talk to my dog. He’s very smart.

Just for fun, I’ll show you something. It’s the current word count of my memoir. I have an entire draft in a drawer. I really started writing the book I’ve been wanting to write after my mom died. It’s going to need a monster edit. I know that. I know exactly what I want to do. A lot more than half of what I’ve written won’t make it into the book, but I need to write it the way I’m writing it first. I’m sure there’s an “easier” way. I could not be less interested.

When did we forget — the struggle makes us stronger? I’ve had to work my ass off for pretty much every worthwhile thing in my life; certainly for my peace of mind, and definitely to get to a place where I know who I am, and don’t chase after love or approval. I don’t want to struggle all the time, but don’t you know people who’ve had everything handed to them just a little too easy?

Pete Hegseth comes flying to mind, and my facial muscles do a thing when I write his name, like I’ve smelled something that’s gone bad. The president comes to mind, too, and he makes me so ill, I never write his name, and I never capitalize president.

They’re the kind of people who expect to get what they want all the time, because that’s how it’s always been. When things don’t go their way, it isn’t pretty. I’m sure you’ve seen the Meet the Press interview by now. There’s the president, spouting his lies about the 2020 election for the eleventy millionth time, and there’s Kristen Welker saying no, you have no evidence of fraud. You’ve never presented any evidence. The election was certified. There were recounts. None of them changed the outcome. Joe Biden won. The end.

He doesn’t like that at all. He talks over her, and starts in about California — and the thing that is deeply upsetting as someone who lives here, is the absolute disregard he has for the harm he could cause. He’s done it before, as we all saw. Actual human beings could get hurt (again), and he does not care. He knows how to incite his base. That’s what makes me furious.

When Republicans win, the elections are perfect. When they lose, elections are rigged.

Heads I win, tails you lose. That is a game children play.

This man is stomping his feet and turning red and storming out of interviews, because the very Blue city of Los Angeles rejected a preposterous MAGA d-list reality tv star — to be mayor. Shocker! Almost like we knew how that would turn out. If he’s going to get that upset over something so small and obvious, he’s too emotional for the job. He should try smiling more.

He does know how it works out here. He’s confused about many things, but he’s not confused about this. This is how we do it in California every election.

We’re to believe the president thinks our election was rigged, but only for mayor of Los Angeles? The governors’ race where Hilton came in second was not rigged, but the mayoral race where Pratt did not advance, was rigged? What a very specific and odd kind of rigging we’re doing!

I have lived here since 2001. When I moved, I had to go to the DMV to get a new Drivers’ License, which is when and where I registered to vote. They use your Drivers’ License number, your address, your signature, and the last 4 of your Social Security number.

If I’d grown up in California like my kids, I would have pre-registered to vote like they did. You can do that at 16 or 17. At 18, every citizen born in California is automatically registered to vote, using their Social Security number, and the DMV if/when they get their license.

We have voter ID requirements, and we have a very thorough, painstaking backup system (which is slow but accurate). What we don’t have is people who understand the voting laws in California, but that’s because they don’t live here.

Los Angeles did not want that Prattdaddy, crystal-selling, Sandy Hook denier/ conspiracy theorist running the city. It was never going to happen, and it isn’t a mystery.

I wanted to share all of that about our voting system here, because now the president has demanded Republican senators pass the “SAVE America Act” which is even more “Handmaid’s Tale” than the SAVE Act. So the House passed it, and now it’s heading to the Senate. It’s about how “only Americans should vote” — and funny thing, only Americans do vote. Which they know.

Here’s something else everyone needs to understand. He cannot cancel the midterms. They are going to happen. He knows sane, alert Americans are FURIOUS and unhappy. He knows if he loses control of the House and Senate, the grift of the century is over — and that’s the best case scenario for him. He spends the last two years as a lame duck president, watching all the bs he’s done come undone.

No more coverup of the Epstein files, and who knows what happens, then? They sure seem worried, so it can’t be good. No more ICE terrorizing the immigrant community. No more pay-to-play presidency. No more pardoning his cronies. No more backdoor deals and Nvidia trades.

Worst case, he’s impeached, convicted, and hauled off to federal prison. They’d probably put him near Ghislaine, but he doesn’t want that. It’s not like he’d go to Pilates class.

He does not want to die in any jail. The people around him do not want to go to jail. Their motivation to avoid that scenario is hard to quantify. Everyone needs to be meeting this moment with the same level of desperation they would if they thought losing in November would land them behind bars. Not theoretically, literally. How would you behave? Please do that, because whatever freedom you think you have is very much on the line.

If he can’t cancel the midterms, what can he do? Exactly what he’s doing. He can keep screaming “Crooked!” and pretend we have a problem with free and fair elections in this country, when we do not. He can send his DOJ to sue states for their voter rolls if they don’t want to lose access to mail-in ballots — even though the Constitution gives STATES the right to control and manage their own elections. The federal government is not entitled to demand state governors turn over voter rolls. Please note, this means the state would send the DOJ your name, address, DOB, Drivers’ License number and/or last 4 of your Social Security number, and more.

I want you to think about Musk and the DOGE boys for a minute. “Big Balls” and the five other twenty-somethings he sent into the U.S. Treasury with flash drives, who took everyone’s most sensitive financial information, and walked out the door. Then those same six kids ran code to find “fraud and abuse” and also cancel funding for anything that had to do with “DEI” — and as a result, hundreds of thousands of people DIED, because along the way they canceled USAID.

They also canceled countless programs we needed, funding for cancer trials, and tens of thousands of essential, highly-trained, irreplaceable human beings. Then they desperately tried to re-hire them weeks later, and wreaked havoc we are still paying for all the time. Maybe you’ve heard about the screwworms?

Aside from the fact that they are not legally entitled to it and want to use the information for nefarious and disgusting reasons (i.e. to remove eligible voters from voter rolls, to scream fraud when there isn’t any, to cast doubt on elections when that is perhaps the only thing we do really well in this country), these people cannot be trusted with our personal information.

In the “Agreement” the administration is demanding states sign if they want to continue to have access to mail-in ballots, there’s a whole section about how the voter rolls will be transferred to the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ (they surely aren’t protecting anyone’s civil rights these days) using their “secure portal” and only a “small number of employees” will be able to access it, and they’ll have to use 2-factor authentication, and oh, if there is a security breach it will be rectified asap.

Sounds as good as getting a case of Athlete’s Foot. I can already see the letter offering a free year of security monitoring on the dark web after the data breach. No doubt the free monitoring will target you for ads when you sign up.

Additionally, in a move that is so abhorrent I barely have the words to describe it — after actively and successfully gutting the VRA, these despicable creatures are now citing the Civil Rights Act in their legal case to demand this information. They have no shame, not that this is anything we didn’t know. To me, however, it is an ever new low.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

These really are the most Fuckery of Times, but this is the moment to dig deep, friends.

What else can we do in the face of people who come up with a term only they could?

Cage Match Diplomacy

I am astounded to report “cage match diplomacy” is a Memo of Understanding — which sounds like a concept of a plan, but is actually a formal, but not (yet) binding agreement that Marco Rubio signed with Dana White, CEO of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) today. Rubio called the UFC “The United Nations of Fighting” which sounds super diplomatic. Maybe — and this is just a thought — but maybe someone should tell the Secretary of State what “diplomacy” means?

“The MOU signing will mark a new public-private partnership to enhance sports diplomacy initiatives and collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts,” the State Department said in a press release.

Cool, cool. Totally get why this would be a priority and wouldn’t be rife with conflicts of interest. It has something to do with making seven different mixed martial arts part of our “new diplomacy outreach policy” with other countries, and y’know, finding common ground. Things we all enjoy doing together, like watching two grown men beat the ever-loving shit out of each other in a cage.

So strange, but you could not pay me to watch, and that’s the kind of thing I would never have let my children watch when they were little, and not-so-little — and it’s the kind of thing I’d hope they would choose not to watch now (and feel sure they would not enjoy). They’re also selling VIP packages for $1.5 million dollars! Who needs health insurance? As long as the president and his family are happy!

Maybe Iran will send a fighter since the president cannot seem to end the war he started that no one wanted or asked for. Maybe the Iranian fighter can duke it out with Stephen Miller until gas is back to Biden-era prices, could we do that?

One thing we can be sure of, in all of this manosphere-style diplomacy, billionaires will make more billions.

I can see it, can’t you? There will be some kind of Paramount+/CNN/CBS/Skydance streaming package “proud patriots” can buy to watch the fights, and I feel certain they will build this insatiable beast a throne and give him a crown and let him decide who wins.

American fighters will enter the White House Lawn Diplomatic Cage Match dressed in gold “presidential” merch ($99.99 on the UFC site, no doubt), and fighters from other countries will enter after kissing the ring and kneeling at his feet, and the last fighter standing will be the winner. This display will lead to greater diplomacy, somehow, and other words I can’t make my brain formulate because it’s such a mindbogglingly bro-stupid idea, but I’m sure his supporters will defend it. Even the ones who call themselves Christians. Who cares about rules, lies, grifting, or violence if the right person is doing it, I guess. I didn’t think that’s what Jesus said, but maybe I missed that verse.

Perhaps when the president gets angry with his Cabinet members, or when Republican senators don’t lick his boots enough, that’s where they’ll have to go to be humiliated. Head to the Diplomatic Cage like real men! That would probably clear them out, fast, actually. This really is their Roman Empire, and I think they should all stew in it. You want to know why I’m not too far off with any of this? If you go to the UFC website right now, you can buy a presidential medallion in honor of the United States of Corruption. Price? $12,000.

Me? I’m opting out wherever possible. Maybe just like AI, we can type -Roman Empire in the search bar. -Idiocy. -Violence. -Lies. -Corruption. -Fuckery.

I want to +Love. +Art. +Kindness. +Good friends. +Digging my toes in the sand. +Compassion. +Poetry. +The Night Sky. +Holding Hands. +Time together. +Laughter. +Say fuck no to all of the nastiness.

I know we can struggle through this together and come out stronger, and not in the cage match way, in the way of the heart.

Who wants to meet for lunch?

Sometimes people wait so long for the perfect time to embark on an adventure like this, they never see the places they always wanted to see, and then it’s too late.

It was partly because Texas Highways kept sending her out on the road to cover stories, and Lauren likes to drive. But also, it was because the internet had “broken her brain.” In Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America, Lauren captures the experience of being chronically online, and what it’s doing all of us. Things you can’t do while driving: scroll on your phone, answer texts, check Twitter.

It’s easy to dehumanize people on a device, we all know this. It’s another thing to be on the receiving end of a wild lack of compassion when you’re going through a tragedy — personally or collectively. If you live in places like Texas, Florida, California — any state with extreme weather that is also hated by “the left” or “the right” — then you know how it feels.

It was brutal to be in the midst of wildfires in California, for example, watching them devour entire neighborhoods overnight, while people online were saying, “Whatever, those celebrities will just buy new mansions next week.” Haha, super funny. Let me check the app again to see if I need to evacuate with my kids and my dog, and the artwork from their childhoods and the photographs I can fit in my trunk.

We’ve all had our less-than-compassionate moments, though, it’s a sign of these times. I’ve had so many conversations with the kindest people I know, and that is the worst lament of all — “I’m a good person, I’ve never wished ill on anyone, I don’t want to be this enraged all the time. I don’t want to feel hate in my heart.”

Lauren crosses America with Woody in tow, and meets all kinds of people along the way — because, Woody. People you might dismiss or even disparage online, but in person, everything changes. In Monster of a Land, you see the country with Lauren, and the people in it through her eyes, and realize maybe all this rage is misdirected. The ideas you might have had about how a place would look when you got there, or how the people would be if you stopped to chat…what if they were all wrong? What if the enemy isn’t who you think it is?

What if we could solve everything by being a lot kinder to one another … and opening some local pubs? Checking on our neighbors? That would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

We had such a great conversation. Lauren very generously read four passages from her incredible book. I hope you enjoy the talk. I know you’ll enjoy the ride. Monster of a Land: In Search of Modern America comes out June 16th, but you can order it now! It’s the road trip for our times.

Badreads

Essays, bad jokes, rants, and unsolicited advice from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Hough, and a dog named Woody Guthrie.

By Lauren Hough

When I got to the hospital, I did all the things you do. I left my belongings in a locker and put on the robe with the open back, which I pulled forward and clinched so it would cover my ass. Then I followed a nurse into another room where I got onto the table where the surgery would happen. She asked me some questions, verified allergies and confirmed I wasn’t on any medications. Then the anesthesiologist came in.

He was tall with dark, curly hair and had a mask on, so I could only see his eyes, but he smiled at me and told me his name. He confirmed my weight and asked if I knew how I normally responded to anesthesia. I told him in the past I’d always been very sensitive. He said he was giving me twilight medication, I would be breathing on my own, and able to respond to questions. He said if I felt uncomfortable at any time to let him know.

Then the doctor came in and he went over some things, too. He made the same jokes he undoubtedly makes before every surgery. He was a specialist I’d only met a few times, but he seemed like a decent guy. He and the anesthesiologist had a nice rapport. The next thing I knew I was counting backwards from ten, and then I was waking up in the recovery room. I was covered in a few blankets, but freezing, anyway, and I could hear someone sobbing. I realized quickly it was me.

A nurse came in and said it had taken me a lot longer to wake up than usual, my blood pressure had been lower than they’d expected. The friend who’d come to drive me home had been waiting patiently for over an hour. I called my kids on the way home. All I wanted was to get back and snuggle with them.

The next day I was hobbling around on my leg, the site of the surgery. My phone rang, it was the anesthesiologist. I sat down at my dining room table. My daughter, two at the time, was hanging off of me. My son was coloring with crayons. I was surprised the anesthesiologist was calling to check on me and not the doctor, but then I thought maybe he was concerned because it had taken me so long to recover.

“I hope you don’t mind, I got your number off your medical chart…” he began. That struck me as odd. Was he not supposed to make sure I was okay? “You were really funny during the surgery. We were cracking jokes back and forth, and I thought there was a vibe. I wanted to see if you might want to have dinner with me.”

I froze. I was completely stunned. I did not remember cracking any jokes, I did not remember anything. “I’m sorry…what?” I asked, “I was funny? I have zero recollection of anything that happened after I got to the number seven.” My kids both looked up at me. “Oh. Really?” he sputtered. “Okay. Yeah, I thought there was flirting, I’m sorry.”

“No, there wasn’t. I literally could not tell you anything at all about anything that happened. There’s just a blank space where hours of time from yesterday have disappeared. There was no vibe, because you drugged me for my surgery, a thing that is your job.” My hands were shaking and my voice was shaking a little, too, but I tried to smile reassuringly at my kids. I didn’t want them to be scared.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called you, this was a mistake. Could we please keep this between us? I could get in a lot of trouble. I’m sorry I bothered you.” He hung up.

My son asked me who was on the phone and why I was upset. He asked why my hours from yesterday had disappeared. Then he drew pictures of disappearing hours. I drew pictures too, but my mind was racing. The anesthesiologist got my phone number off my medical chart to ask me out because he thought there was a vibe. Wtf. He had drugged me.

When my kids were immersed in fun again and no longer asking about the man on the phone, I looked up the most common twilight medications. I found they usually give people some combination of propofol, midazolam, and fentanyl, and temporary and anterograde amnesia is a common and desirable effect — something the anesthesiologist must have known. No one wants to form memories of a surgery in progress, a thing I could have asserted, because I woke up during general anesthesia once.

I had a terrible feeling about the whole thing. Here’s a man tasked with putting people under, literally holding people’s lives in his hands. Too much medication and he might kill someone. This is a man whose judgement I shouldn’t be calling into question over something that ought to be obvious to any decent guy — if you have access to a woman’s number because of the work you do, but she didn’t give you her number, don’t “shoot your shot.” You aren’t owed a shot. Clearly, he had no sense of boundaries with his female patients. There was no way he hadn’t violated my privacy by accessing my medical chart.

But if I called my doctor’s office to tell them what he’d done, he’d probably get fired. If I called the Medical Board of California, I felt sure he’d get in serious trouble. My old wiring was firing up, the motherboard that sent messages like, “This is a bad thing he did, but you don’t want to be responsible for getting someone fired, do you? You don’t want to be the reason this man has his license suspended, right?”

My dad had taught me from the time I was a little kid, my job was to take care of him. I was supposed to keep his secrets and be his sounding board and his little wing-child when he took me on after-school dates with lady-friends. It was my job to let him sob in my arms because all these awful women — women who included my mom and later my stepmom — kept asking him to be faithful, and my poor old dad just wanted to be free to spread his vasectomy-safe seed far and wide. It was the seventies, man.

As I got older, the messages kept coming. My job as a young girl was to be kind and polite. Don’t talk back. Don’t be sad. Don’t be angry. Don’t be loud. Don’t be so quiet. Don’t make things uncomfortable. Put a smile on your face. Don’t be rude. Say please. Act like you’re having fun. Say thank you. Boys act that way because they like you. He didn’t mean to hurt you. Don’t cry. Don’t eat too much. Boys will be boys.

He said it was consensual, and I believe him.

It took me a couple of hours, and maybe it helped that my daughter was wanting to be held, wanting to be picked up, wanting to rub my earlobe between her thumb and index finger — a habit she formed when she stopped nursing. Whatever it was, I realized if I called to tell the doctor what had happened and the anesthesiologist got fired, it wouldn’t be because I called. It would be because the anesthesiologist called me. He was responsible for his choices and his actions.

I couldn’t live with the thought that some woman might get hurt because I was worried about protecting a man like him. Why would I protect a man like him? I called the doctor’s office and he got fired. I called the Medical Board of California and filed a complaint. I don’t know what happened after that.

We all have choices to make, and ultimately our choices define us.

I have a hard time with people who make choices but make them slant. Last week when we were in the lead-up to the jungle primary out here in California, I saw the comment of a man who said he’s voting Republican because his family is Republican and he’s always voted Republican, but he’s not a MAGA Republican, and doesn’t like MAGA policies. He believes in equal rights for women, he supports the LGBTQ community, he doesn’t want ICE rounding up anyone’s great-grandmas, he thinks the anti-DEI stance is wrong, and he believes in climate change and science.

That’s the kind of thing it’s hard for me to walk by, because it makes me want to bash my head into the nearest wall. If you’re voting Republican, you’re voting for the current Republican Party, led by the current president who is the head of MAGA and all related policies. It’s his party, and there’s no opt-out circle you can fill in, nowhere you will find: “Republican, but not like that.”

I know they’re trying to mess with the time-stamp rules at the USPS, but there’s no time warp with the ballot. It’s not like you vote Republican and somehow your vote is retroactively cast for Richard Nixon in 1969. It’s amazing how Watergate seems so quaint these days. I remember growing up hearing, “It wasn’t the crime, it was the cover-up.” Nixon used the FBI and CIA to try to obstruct justice and block the investigation into the burglary at the DNC.

The harder he tried to hide it, the worse the crimes he committed. Articles of impeachment were drawn up, and he resigned, throwing his famous Victory signs in the air for the last time. This is not that picture.

No one resigns today, though, and no one gets impeached. Crimes happen in broad daylight, and are announced on podcasts. Ivanka and Jared dive off the boat of friends and just happen to “discover an island in the Mediterranean.” They swim to its shore and hike barefoot to the highest point, becoming captivated. LOL. It’s Sazan Island — a former Cold War military base off the coast of Albania in the Adriatic Sea — and the “peninsula” she’s talking about is a wildlife and bird sanctuary. Of course they want to build a luxury resort there.

People in Albania are making their choices, too. Protests are massive and ongoing, and The Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organized Crime (SPAK) is investigating the deal.

But let’s circle back for a moment, because we all have choices, regardless of party, regardless of gender. There’s a mess in Maine four days before their primary election, because Democrats stuck with Graham Platner when they could have had Governor Janet Mills. No matter how many scandals came out, they just kept giving the guy more rope because he’s handsome! He has trauma. He has a redemption story if you look at it in the right light and upside down and through a sheet of glass in the rain.

Remember Governor Janet Mills at the Governors’ lunch at the White House? Remember how the president tried to intimidate her in a room full of governors because she wasn’t throwing transgender kids in Maine under the bus when he threatened to withhold funding? Remember how she said, “See you in court”? I do. Did the people in Maine forget? Did progressive women around the country forget? Do we all have amnesia?

After the exchange, Mills released a statement saying, "If the President attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine school children of the benefit of Federal funding, my Administration and the Attorney General will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides. The State of Maine will not be intimidated by the President's threats."

Oh. And then she won in court.

Anyway, we have to flip the Senate. If I have to choose between Graham Platner and Susan Collins (and I don’t, because I’m in California), I’d pick Platner. It’s just stupid that’s the choice. I’d rather vote for Mills.

I don’t know what to tell you my progressive feminist friends (and the men who purportedly care about us), but if we want things to change, I think we need to make better choices, too. Starting now. It’s like we all have retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Like the anesthesiologist has visited except for some unknown reason, he’s convinced us there’s a vibe. It’s the same vibe every time. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.

Personally, I’d love a world where we have a lot more time to make memories, because we aren’t so worried about trying to survive and keep each other safe.

We’d love for that to change.

When girls and women accuse “upstanding” young white men of rape — men like Brock Turner, Jesse Mack Butler, Mason Lee Gipson, Christopher Belter, Reuben Vanstiphout, Steven van de Velde, and Jacob Walter Anderson to name a few — judges will focus on their “promise and potential”, leaving the girls or women in the courtroom (and the ones watching from elsewhere), to wonder about the intrinsic value of their own lives, and if there might be anything special about the future that lies ahead of them. You wouldn’t think so listening to these judges, or looking at the sentences they give out.

Media rags will describe these violent young men as “baby-faced” and put them on the cover for weeks if the cases are high profile enough and it will help them sell papers. It’s been happening for as long as I can remember, back before Robert Chambers, though he was on the cover of newspapers for months on end. “The Preppy Murder” they called it, and even at fifteen, I wondered about Jennifer Levin’s mother, and how she must feel.

They described him as a “handsome altar boy”, but that was a narrative painted by his legal team. The truth was a lot darker, but it didn’t matter because he was selling papers. If he hadn’t been so arrogant, I have no doubt that judge would have been talking about his promise and potential eventually, but he got drunk at a party and decided to act out the murder on a Barbie and laugh about it. So he went to jail. That’s how far a guy has to go to pay for what he did. He has to strangle a Barbie on camera and laugh about it while he says, “Oops, I think I killed it.”

That’s when a judge will think twice about saying he has “promise.”

We talked about what it feels like to know as a girl and as a woman, this is what’s in store if you come forward, and, importantly, we talked about how to change things at home, in the judicial system, and in the world at large. Parents, aunties, anyone who has children, preteens and teens in their lives, please take note (without those young ears around). We talked about rehabilitation in the context of incarceration.

Huge love to the fabulous Dina Honour, you can find her brilliant essay on the topic here. My essay about this heartbreaking reality is here. I would be so appreciative if you would sign this petition started by award winning Criminal Behavioural Analyst Laura Richards to Investigate Judge Nicholas Rowland and Introduce Judicial Accountability Framework Now. We really can’t go on this way, it isn’t good for anyone.

Sending you lots of love, friends. Thank you to all who were with us live, and thank you to those who listen later. It is so wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Ally and Dina

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Sometimes you’re doing your day, and then suddenly you’re doing strange math, or strange maths if you happen to be in England, which I do not.

When I saw the news that a judge in the United Kingdom had decided three teenage boys — two of them now fifteen years old and one of them fourteen (they had been 14, 14 and 13 at the time of the assaults) — would not serve time for gang-raping two teenage girls in two separate incidents with 10 counts of rape between them — teenage boys who filmed these assaults, laughed as they did it, and then posted the “content” on social media for their friends to see — it took me two days to land on a single word for what I was feeling at all.

Sometimes my sixteen-year-old self rises to the surface and swallows all the words, because she believes they don’t matter. Then my inner attention goes toward protecting her in ways I couldn’t when we both shared a sixteen-year-old body that was violated by a man who didn’t care about the single word No. He didn’t care about the words Stop or Please. He didn’t care about any of my words or sentences.

I have not said a word to my sixteen-year-old daughter about this case, still; I am hoping she has somehow missed the news. The fury I feel is incalculable.

The judge found the teenage boys guilty as charged, and when their guilty verdicts were announced in court, their families let out audible gasps along with their tears. The boys also broke down and looked to their families for support. The boys wore white button-down shirts and had their hair slicked back as the verdicts were read, and I know this because it is, apparently, newsworthy. I read these details in multiple accounts. It seems to have worked on the judge.

Crisp, white, button-down shirts and slicked back hair? In that case, of course. Just a slap on the wrist for you, boys. Make sure you understand consent moving forward. Let’s get you fixed up and back out there. “No one needs to go to jail today.”

Here’s a question or five: If their parents gasped, is it because they were expecting a Not Guilty verdict? Is it possible all the families of all three boys have convinced themselves what their sons did is not rape? Or have they decided rape is not that bad? Or is it that rape is terrible, but not when my son does it? Or is it, Rape is terrible, of course, but my son was only fourteen so he shouldn’t be held responsible, Your Honor. Let’s not ruin his life over it, he’s just a kid, he didn’t mean it, his friends egged him on, he has so much potential, surely you can see that?

The teenage girls were fifteen and fourteen at the time of their separate assaults. The girls did not know each other. The first girl met one of the boys on Snapchat and believed they were in a relationship when he asked her to be his girlfriend. When she traveled to meet him, she thought they were going on their first date. When his two friends suddenly appeared, she was scared. It was clear this was the plan. It was “three boys against one girl” in an underpass, and they threatened to throw her in the river if she didn’t comply. They took turns for an hour-and-a-half. They filmed it.

After they asked “why she looked so sad.” They bought her a drink, left her at a bus stop, and blocked her on social media. When they shared the video online, she got messages from other kids calling her all the names you’d expect.

The second girl was attacked two months later in a field not far from the same underpass. The boys managed to separate her from her friends. They cut her pants off of her. They raped her at knifepoint. She was fourteen. They took turns there as well. There is a video of her lying motionless in the field with her face “buried in her hands.” The boys laughed. They encouraged each other.

The thought of her in that field, holding her face in her hands makes me cry. The parents of those boys should be crying because their boys have no compassion.

The videotapes were played at the 5-week trial. There was a screen between the girls and the rapists. The boys said the girls were lying. They said the first girl was flirting with one of the boys. They said many things that made it necessary for those tapes to be played and for those girls to relive the worst moments of their young lives in front of a room full of strangers in an effort to get some kind of justice. The court agreed the girls were physically overpowered and could not have consented to the attacks.

The first survivor read a poem at the trial that included the line, “All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that time comes.” She said she feels uncomfortable in her own body, suffers from flashbacks and nightmares and is no longer the person she was before.

In his sentencing, Judge Nicholas Rowland mentioned one of the teenagers had ADHD and longstanding anxiety, another had ADHD and a very low IQ, and the third had a mild cognitive impairment.

I have ADHD and I’m in perimenopause. Got my patch slapped on, I’m taking progesterone at night. That should do it, right? Plus grief and anxiety from waking up in a country where we now hold cage fights on the South Lawn. If this is all we need to get away with despicable crimes in the judge’s eyes, I’d love to meet him. I have a list of men I’d like to meet, actually.

“I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.”

He added that, “peer pressure played a large part in what went on.”

I see. He felt it would be better to rehabilitate them and reintegrate them into society than have them enter the justice system. He praised them for doing a good job in court and following the rules. You read the part where I said they called the girls liars, right? That happened during the trial. After everything they’d done, they conducted themselves in court in a way that made it necessary for the girls to re-traumatize themselves if they wanted some justice, and the judge praised their behavior. The girls heard him, of course.

In a statement read on behalf of the second victim, she said her school attendance had suffered and added: “I often feel overwhelmed, anxious and emotionally exhausted to the point where sitting in a classroom becomes unbearable.”

She described suffering nightmares and struggling to sleep, adding: “I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.”

“The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be.”

The judge praised the bravery of the two girls and told the first victim: “I hope when you look back on today’s date you will take some comfort from the fact you have shown that courage in coming along to court.

“You and [the second girl] have shown great courage in coming along to the trial and speaking as you did.”

He added: “The sentence I am going to pass cannot possibly undo what happened to you.”

It’s true, the sentence he passed, whatever it was, could not have undone anything that happened, but it could make things worse. He had an opportunity to make those boys understand in real, painful, and immediate terms that what they’d done was not acceptable and not a thing anyone can do and expect to carry on with life while they attend classes for a year, or eighteen months, or three years — classes scheduled around school and whatever else brings them joy.

He could have offered a sentence that would have made those girls feel their lives mattered, and were — at the very least — equally valuable to the lives of boys who could behave that way. That he’d seen and heard what happened to them, and was horrified, and that he would not let it stand. That he would make sure those boys paid a price and suffered enough that they would never forget the way they made those girls suffer. Sometimes suffering is a gift. It teaches you empathy, a thing these boys lack in spades. They think all they need to do is dress the part of upstanding young men, and they’ll be off and running, and the judge proved them right.

He could have sent a message to other boys and men: If you rape girls and women, you will pay in a way that will be more than “inconvenient.”

The message he sent instead is, “Girls, I’m sorry this happened, and you were brave to come forward. I am not going to criminalise what happened to you, though, even though rape is against the law. We’re going to let the punishment slide, because these boys are not the kind of boys we want to put away. You understand, don’t you, girls? They have all this promise and potential, and we don’t want it to get squandered in jail. They’d probably be ruined for life that way, and what good will that do? It won’t fix you. Sorry you can’t sleep at night, and have a hard time sitting in a classroom or existing in your own body. That sounds hard. But I’m going to let these boys go home with their blubbering parents today.”

I wish I could say this is some kind of outlier judge who favors boys, or a thing that is unique to the U.K., but this is so common the strange math happens everywhere. I don’t even have to search the internet for another example, I have them at the tip of my brain.

I could whip out names like Brock Turner who was tried here in California for assaulting Chanel Miller (more of that upstanding white boy promise and potential), or Mason Lee Gipson (no jail time for raping a fifteen-year-old and getting her pregnant because he was drunk, you know how it is — just paid the girl $690 and took some parenting classes, because he got paternal rights to the baby she had to carry to term as a result of the rape. There’s no exception for rape in Arkansas.)

Then, of course, there’s “up-and-coming baseball star” Jesse Mack Butler. That’s a case I’m sure you’ve heard of if you pay attention to cases like this, and you probably do if you’re a woman. You definitely do if you’re a survivor of assault.

It’s the kind of thing you keep an eye on, because it gives you a sense of how the justice system is feeling about women and girls, and that’s a thing that will matter to you if you care about women and girls — and also children and any people who aren’t straight, white men — not that you don’t care about them, too, because you do. Just not all of them — not the violent, misogynistic, entitled ones. You’re always hoping things might change, because there is some tiny part of your heart that broke at some point when a thing was taken from you that we could call innocence or trust.

Living with a broken heart is fine. I’d argue it’s part of the human condition. If our hearts weren’t meant to break and open, then carry on, and break and open some more, then carry on, we wouldn’t all be here fighting for the world to be better than this. It’s the hardened hearts that have always scared me, not the broken ones.

But sometimes if you’re in that broken open place and the world breaks your heart again before you’ve had time to recover — especially if you’re just a kid —

for example, if you’re in a place where maybe you can’t stand being in your own body for a while, or you hate falling asleep because you have nightmares about what happened, or you can’t stand to be in a crowd or to be near strangers, and you don’t even feel like yourself anymore —

maybe somewhere in there you manage to protect a tiny pool of hope. Some elemental part of you still alive from the Before Times that you cover over with the rage and shock of every young girl who has ever had her faith in the world stolen from her.

I don’t know how it happens. Maybe there’s a particular vibration, like the sound that only dogs can hear? Maybe there’s a sound that only our grandmothers can hear when some man has decided we’re nothing but a body to overpower. Maybe our grandmas are there on the ceiling with us — because I know I left my body and watched what was happening like it was happening to someone else — and I know if she could have, my Nanny would have come and wrapped herself around me any way she could. Maybe when I returned, I brought something otherworldly and molten along, just enough to gather up a drop of who I was, so it would still exist somewhere. Just in case it was ever safe to come out again.

I can feel it when I get quiet. I can feel it when I meditate. It’s like an iron thorn in my heart. I can live with it and I can love with it, and I surely do, but it’s in there and it hurts, still. Even now, all these years later. I know if only this world would fucking show up for girls and women and children — and every group of people who feel vulnerable because of the angry white men who feel the need to dominate and overpower everything, it might melt and unfurl something tender and sacred. It might release a thirty-nine-year-old howl that would turn the sky scarlet.

Jesse Mack Butler likes to strangle girls until they’re unconscious, and then rape them. He was a high school kid in Oklahoma, a big star on the baseball team. His girlfriend broke up with him after it happened one too many times and she started to be afraid he was going to kill her. She went to the school counselor and school officials to let them know what had been happening.

An ex-girlfriend of his reached out to her when the rumors started swirling. It turned out she’d almost died when he strangled her, too. She’d needed surgery on her neck. But Jesse Mack Butler’s mom was with him all the way, and still is. She just wants him to stay strong and say his prayers. Check out the body-cam video of his arrest. She’s a real #boymom.

No time served for Jesse because he’s got “youthful offender” status. He’s just a good boy who made some baaaaad decisions. I mean, multiple strangulations and rapes are pretty bad, and I don’t think “saying your prayers” is really gonna get you there, but maybe I’m wrong, because he’s home with his mama.

It’s the same in Belgium, in case you wondered. In 2023, a gynecology student named Reuben Vanstiphout, twenty-four at the time, was at a party where he saw a woman who had become extremely drunk. He offered to get her home safely, she could not walk without assistance. She left with him. He was a med student, her friends thought she’d be safe with him. Instead, he took her back to his student accommodations and raped her.

Sounds like the kind of OB/GYN we all want, doesn’t he, ladies? Apparently the judge thought so, because it was Reuben’s first offense, and he had this “promising medical career” ahead of him. So no jail time for Reuben.

The survivor appealed the verdict, but the decision was upheld. Just in case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about whose life was valuable in the eyes of the Belgian courts. Disappointing doesn’t cover it.

I don’t know if I can get across how often women and girls see and hear these stories. They’ve been happening for as long as I can remember, and they happen everywhere. It’s the same story every time, assuming the rapist is white. Here in the United States, if the rapist is Black the judge will not show all this incredible compassion if he happens to be fourteen, or if he has ADHD or anxiety. Judges don’t have a hard time criminalizing young Black teenagers or Black men in this country. Matter of fact, unarmed Black boys get killed just for being neurodivergent — they don’t have to commit any crime at all. Unarmed Black people, not just boys.

It’s like we have two different justice systems — one for white boys and men, another for the rest of us. And let’s be very clear, white girls and women fare better than girls and WOC.

I wrote an essay awhile back and it struck a nerve. It has a lot of comments underneath, mostly from women who relate, some from thoughtful men who are horrified, and a few from men who can kiss my ass. The comments still come in every so often because that’s what happens with essays that get a lot of views, you’ll get comments weeks later. I got one the other day from a man who said, “Don’t lump all of us in together. I love women, I have amazing women in my life. I would never be violent toward a woman, men who do that make me sick. Also, one of the details you mentioned in passing is wrong, you should have said it differently. I will stand with you, but I am not part of the problem. Signed, ‘A man who values women.’” I’m paraphrasing in case he comes back for seconds and says I misquoted him — I have no desire to go find the particular comment or call anyone out by name (George Grevend).

I’m kidding, I have no idea what his name is. I was and am too tired to tell him he is part of the problem, though I did point out I never lumped all men together, and I never will. I’m a fan of men, but guess what? NOT ALL MEN. See how that works? There was also a woman who asked me why I met a strange man alone at a bar, and then went on to explain how much smarter she is because she would never do that. I didn’t, lady. Maybe re-read the essay, I am too tired to do whatever it was you wanted to do with your shaming retort. We have to conserve our energy these days. There is much work to be done. We cannot sit around telling every Tom, Dick and Harry, “Not all men!” to soothe their damn egos every time they feel uncomfortable because there is a whole chorus of us howling at the moon together. We are exhausted out here.

I see men on this very platform saying feminism is the problem, and feminists are angry and want to blame men for everything and there’s no evidence of bias against women. There was a male writer who was saying that in the comments of a writer whose work I love. He posted links to his own essays claiming they refuted her assertions, so clicked on a link because I am open-minded, and realized I never need to read another word he has to say. I can’t take anyone seriously if they haven’t bothered to read a little history. Please note that it’s called HIStory.

Women never tried to stop men from having the vote, they never tried to stop men from owning property or having a bank account in their own name or a credit card, either. They never tried to pass laws telling men when they could ejaculate for fun, and/or when they could ejaculate to make a baby, and if they ejaculated for fun but a swimmer got through, that fertilized egg now meant more than any plans they might have had, it didn’t matter if it posed risks to the men’s own lives, it didn’t matter whether they could afford it, and if they tried to not have that baby, we could kill them.

Women never tried to pass laws that said if a man wears a condom, that counts as trying to prevent an egg from being fertilized and how dare he, and that’s basically attempted murder of a potential fetus, so we can go ahead and kill him, too.

There are no companies paying white women $0.15/hour more than white men just because. Just because they are women. Just because they have a vagina. That’s a weird thing to do, because your vagina doesn’t earn the degree and neither does your penis, your brain does, so you should be paid according to your brain, the end.

If women were making the laws, I can guarantee none of the above things would be happening. People would be paid equally. Then working parents could decide together who would stay home with the baby, if they decided to have a baby, which they would be a lot more likely to do if we had things like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare and paid time off — which we would if women were writing the laws.

Whatever, lame man on the internet, crack a history book or three before you write embarrassing articles that are really about how much you hate women, or just own it. Call your ‘stack I Hate Women SO Much They Really Piss Me Off and at least have some integrity. Believe it or not, we’d respect that more. By the way, feminism is the idea that everyone should have social, economic and political equality, full stop. If you are not a feminist because you need men to be on top, that’s a you problem, and you should probably get some help with it.

I have to talk to all the women right now, and when I say women I mean that inclusively (men feel free to keep reading). I am in California and we are having a messy governor’s race. It’s par for the course in 2026 I guess, but it would have been nice if one thing could have been…not insane. No point lamenting. Things started off with a bang because of a predator, Eric Swalwell. It came to light that he had a Snapchat account for years and was whipping his dick out on the internet and harassing young staffers, but also drugging them and raping them. Allegedly. Putting that there for my legal protection, I believe women.

Before he dropped out he was the frontrunner, the Golden Boy. Crisp, button-down white shirts and all that. Katie Porter was polling at 10%, Swalwell at 14%, Becerra 3-4%. Then Swalwell spontaneously combusted, and Katie Porter should have taken the lead, but a wild thing happened. Becerra suddenly became the “chosen one” and shot up right next to Katie Porter, and then billionaire Tom Steyer was right behind her. I thought, surely, people will rally behind Katie Porter. She has as much experience as Swalwell, she’s smarter than any other candidate (I’ll die on that hill), she’s more progressive, she’s not a billionaire, and she’s great on the environment. Also, she’s the only candidate who has talked about reproductive rights, free childcare, and two free years of community college. Huh.

We keep saying we want women to lead because women are going to care about women’s issues (which are everyone’s issues) as if their lives depend on them, because they do. Men are not going to care in the same way, and they have shown us that for a very, very, very, extremely long time. They have had an open runway and all the green lights and decades and countless chances, so. Yeah. Personally, I’ve seen enough.

Women — we absolutely have to agree that we are going to be ready for the smear campaign when a woman shows up to run. That’s the play.

A competent, smart, ambitious woman runs for office, and all she has to do is step a tiny toe out of her prescribed gender line in any direction, and it’s over. She’s already in a precarious position for having the nerve to step onto a public stage. She’s already letting her intelligence and ambition lead the way. Nonetheless, they will criticize her appearance and a million other details no man has to think about. We are going to have her back, or we aren’t, but they will go in for the kill. They’ll disqualify her because of her emails, or because she laughs too joyously, or because she won’t throw her boss under the bus while he’s still her boss — or if she does, then she’s a terrible person who throws her boss under the bus…see how it goes?

In Katie Porter’s case, it’s her “temperament” (read: she’s a bitch, how original. You realize women in the workforce have been hearing that for as long as women have been in the workforce, right? It’s another way of saying, You should smile more.) She told a staffer to “get the fuck out of her shot.” This was five or six years ago while she was filming something over zoom. The staffer didn’t even blink. She told Katie Porter she had a detail flipped, what she needed to say was X, Y and Z, and then she continued going about her business. Porter apologized to her as soon as the zoom was over. They kept working together for another four years.

Over 30 of Porter’s past and current staffers wrote a heartfelt, passionate letter in support of her, but the narrative stuck. If that’s all it’s going to take, we are never going to have enough women in positions of power to fight for us. Never. Also, it might surprise you to know, some women throw around the f-bomb. I KNOW.

If you followed me around with a camera twelve hours a day for six months, I am very certain there would be something along the way that could be used against me. A moment when my dog barked his head off at the mailman and I told him to please calm the fuck down. He doesn’t mind, I swear. He knows how much I love him. But if you saw a ten-second clip like that and didn’t know me? You might think I was an asshat who didn’t love my dog to the ends of this earth. I dunno.

Maybe you’d take issue with the way I sometimes pretend not to be me when I answer the phone and someone is trying to sell me something. I might “take a message for myself so I can call back later.” I might even forget to give myself the message. If men have this bar that is so low it’s in Hades, and women have a bar that’s so high you can’t even see it, we are screwed.

I have reservations about the top two Dems for different reasons. It sucks to choose between two men I’m not excited about when there’s a woman running circles around them, but we can’t have a MAGA Faux News host running the state, who thinks it’s brilliant to keep calling the fourth-largest economy in the world “Califailure.”

Sir. This is a Wendy’s.

I have been waiting until the last minute to see how things were going to shake out, because if Hilton pulled ahead, I would have voted for one of the Democratic men regardless of my reservations, just to make very, very sure one of them would be in second place. Thankfully, Becerra has a comfortable enough lead for me to feel sure he’ll land in the top 2, so I cast my vote for Katie Porter and I felt fucking good about it.

Meanwhile I am watching all these people wring their hands — many of them (supposedly) progressive, feminist women — because they don’t want to vote for either of the men for various reasons, but have overlooked Katie Porter for weeks and months, like she wasn’t electable. She’s not electable if you won’t elect her, this isn’t complicated. Your internalized misogyny is, though.

This won’t be the last time a wildly competent woman shows up to run for office. She will be attacked. Our job is to be smarter than that. Our job is to say, “I am not basing my opinion of this person on a couple of video clips, I’m basing my opinion on their decades of work and the policies they’ve laid out.” I literally had a woman out here tell me she didn’t like Katie Porter because “she’s not nice and she’s on Ozempic and she lost a lot of weight and now her skin looks saggy in her closeups. We don’t like to admit it, but we care about that in California.” No, honey, you care about it. Also, Katie Porter looks great in her closeups, NOT THAT IT MATTERS.

I filled out my ballot this week and put it in the ballot box yesterday. I spent a few hours last weekend looking up every judge and digging into who they are, because it’s amazing what you can find on the internet these days. The judges matter so much. They decide cases like the ones I’ve been talking about. They can listen to a couple of young girls talk about how their lives have been upended and shattered, and decide that’s sad, but the boys who assaulted them matter more — or they can look at those boys and say: “You’re not going to be wearing those button down shirts for X amount of time. You’re going to whatever the equivalent is of juvenile detention, and you’ll be going to rehabilitation classes every day, there. Christmas will happen there. Spring Break will happen there. Your crying families will visit you there.”

Maybe it’s a year at their age, I don’t know. Maybe new systems need to be developed, new programs, new options for minors who commit heinous, heartless crimes. I know jail isn’t a good place for rehabilitation, but telling boys rape is basically okay isn’t the way forward, either. How do I know? Because we’ve tried it this way for forty, fifty, all the years. It’s not working for anyone.

Girls need to be told their lives are worth something. Their promise and potential matter. They are special and worth protecting. I suspect if we started doing that, there would be hearts broken open all over the entire globe with tiny thorns that suddenly came free, and the hope that would unfurl would light up the whole entire sky.

It’s true that nothing can undo what has happened in the past, but the past does not have to determine the future unless we let it. Let’s please not let it. Kindness matters. Fighting the good fight is always worthwhile. Words matter.

Good sentences are everything, and not just to writers.

Instead, I’d felt funny during my ballet class that afternoon, a little lightheaded and fatigued, and also crampy. When I got home and told my mom, she went and got me a box of tampons from her bathroom. She told me there were directions inside. I won’t go into much detail, I’ll just let you know when you’re fourteen and you’ve never had your period before, you might not be able to manage the directions on your own. They weren’t great directions, and I was nervous and uncomfortable.

Maybe you’re thinking there’s no way to mess it up, though, and I’m here to tell you there absolutely is a way, and it has to do with imagining the entire tampon — including the cardboard applicator — stays inside you. I left the bathroom in a lot of pain. My mom looked at me with no discernible sympathy and said I’d get used to it. I spent a few hours in agony, wondering how women possibly did this, until a friend of hers came over and saw me perched on the edge of the couch. I was unable to sit in any comfortable way. She asked me to take her through exactly what I’d done.

She was horrified and asked my mom why she didn’t go into the bathroom with me. My mother got annoyed, shrugged and said, “She can read!” I went back to the bathroom to rectify my mistake, feeling embarrassed and ashamed.

I cursed Judy Blume with all my heart. It was easier than cursing my mother.

Today I went to the pharmacy to pick up my first estrogen patches and progesterone pills. I met with a doctor yesterday, and I have seven of the ten symptoms of perimenopause which include things like never knowing when or if you’ll get your period, hot flashes, insomnia, fatigue (because, insomnia), worsening migraines, increase in ADHD symptoms, anxiety, depression, mood swings, not an ounce of energy left for Mansplainese, and the urge to go live in a cliffside cottage in the Irish moors.

The thing about perimenopause is that it tends to coincide with huge life changes. If you have children, they probably hit puberty when you hit perimenopause, which means an adventure for the whole family. At the same time, if your parents are alive, they will likely start to need you in different and alarming ways. Maybe there’s a concurrent global pandemic for good measure. Maybe your mother — who has never been sick a day in her life — is suddenly diagnosed with ALS and decides you are to blame. Anything can happen.

How are any of us supposed to know if the changes we’re feeling are due to grief or hormones? I certainly couldn’t figure it out. At one point, about six months after my mother died, which was also six months after I had the first panic attack of my life, I went to my then-physician. I told him I’d been feeling exceptionally down — which wasn’t like me at all — but that I’d also lost my mother. I asked if we could check my hormones because my period was a little irregular and I was trying to figure out if any of what I was feeling was due to perimenopause, or if it was all grief. If it was all grief, I’d let it run its course, but if it was hormones, I wanted to know.

He smiled and nodded, then casually asked, “Would your family say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I didn’t understand his question and thought I’d misheard. I asked him to clarify. “If I asked your kids,” he said slowly, “would they say you’re unpleasant to be around?” I thought about it, and burst into tears. He said he could put me on a low-level anti-depressant. I said I just wanted a hormone panel.

In the end, I left and never went back, but that moment stayed with me. How his first concern was not for me, but for everyone around me. Was my grief an inconvenience for my family? Was I being unpleasant? My god. My mother had died in the most horrific way imaginable and there hadn’t been a thing I could do to stop it. Was I not allowed to not be okay?

I thought about women going to see him who might really be in trouble.

What are women to men like him? What is the point of us? Are we to be useful caretakers, drugged like Stepford wives if necessary? Must we be pleasant at all times? Do we matter at all as people in our own right?

I have a new doctor now, a woman. I love her. The first time I went to see her I went with a list I whipped out, because I was afraid I’d forget to ask something and I expected she’d be rushing. Then I realized she was listening. Not in a, “I know how to look as though I’m listening” way — genuinely listening. Leaning forward. Pausing. Asking questions. A doctor hadn’t listened to me like that in years. I said that to her, and suddenly there were tears all over my face. She wasn’t bothered by it, she just nodded, and handed me a tissue. She’s the one who referred me to the OB/GYN I spoke to yesterday. She also listened. There’s a common denominator here somewhere.

When I picked up the new meds at the pharmacy, I asked for a consult. The pharmacist didn’t tell me anything the doctor hadn’t, though. I should pick a place for the patch — there were options laid out in the directions — and use alcohol to wipe down my skin before I pressed it on. Change the patch once a week at the same time. Progesterone pills at night. Cool.

I got home and thought I’d put the patch on right away. Lately I sleep every other night, and you might think I’m kidding, but I’d be funnier than that if I were. I get a decent night of sleep one night, then the next night I’m up until 5 or 6am. Then I take a “morning nap” for a couple of hours and do my day. Then I sleep for a night, and so it goes. So I’m kinda over it, even though the sunrises are beautiful. I need sleep.

I looked at the directions as one does.

If you look at Step 3, do you see where it says there’s the patch, and it’s attached to a thick, hard-plastic adhesive liner, covered by a clear plastic film? And then they start talking about the silver foil-sticker? Yeah. Okay so the silver foil-sticker has no business in the conversation. It’s just there as this thing to throw you off, like we’re doing an Escape Room. And the part where it says: “You will see that Climara is an oval shaped clear patch….covered by a clear plastic film”…? Even in the figure it looks like you peel off a top layer and the patch is underneath. Nah. The patch is the clear plastic film. So if you try to remove a clear plastic film because you assume the patch is underneath it and they are giving you directions they want you to follow as if they’re…y’know, directions? That won’t go well.

I got furious, which is not a thing that happens often. You really have to work at it if you want to see me lose it. One thing that will do it are things that should be easy but are not. They could just say, “The patch sits on top of the hard plastic shell. Peel it off and slap it on, bitches.” But nooooooo. So I texted my bff and she FaceTimed me back. She’d just had a core biopsy of a lump in her breast hours earlier. It is nonstop fun being a woman, let me tell you.

I tried to position my phone so she could see the patch while I read the directions to her, because not every patch is the same. Then she assured me the thing sitting on top of the oval was the patch, so I peeled it off and stuck it on and positioned my phone again so she could see where I put it.

We discussed the merit of placement in all of this. She told me she currently has a “seventies bush” and doesn’t worry about shaving or waxing. We’re letting it all hang out today, friends. This is what women do when they’ve known each other forever. I went from being furious to laughing my ass off. Eventually we talked about feeling like everyone is hurting right now. No one feels safe.

I guess my expectations of people must be too high. Not all people, haha. We have to qualify everything these days, right? Thankfully, there are a handful of people who exceed my expectations all the time, and when I tell you I treasure them, you can take that to the bank. Maybe don’t take it to the literal bank, though, because banks don’t care about us.

You know those bank commercials with the smiling young guy in khakis or the young professional woman? They’re always in the middle of some scenario that would never happen — a couple and the banker sitting around a desk nodding with excitement as they look at pictures of the couple’s first home.

Or if it isn’t the young couple (and she’s usually pregnant, because of course that’s when you go to buy a house) then it’s a small business owner outside her bakery talking about how her bank was there with a line of credit when she needed it.

Maybe I should do a commercial about Citibank! They were my bank of over 25 years when they sent me a letter during the pandemic to let me know they were converting my line of credit into a standard loan … because they could. It was in the very fine print when I opened my business in 2009. In my “other life” I have a yoga website, I’ve been teaching for 30+ years. I’d used some of my line of credit a few times when there were projects I wanted to pursue to expand, but I’d always done them with bank approval, and always put the money back. My credit score is good. I work my ass off.

I begged them not to do it. I sent an email to the guy in charge of those decisions at my local branch, and told him it gave me a tiny bit of peace and relief to know that line of credit was there if I needed it. I reminded him I had two kids he’d met many times, and said they were home doing zoom school like everyone’s kids. I was working 60 hours a week. My mom had a terminal diagnosis on the east coast. Could we get on a call or zoom to discuss? He didn’t even answer, I just got a statement in the mail informing me my line of credit was now a loan and the first payment was due. So, I paid it back.

That would be some commercial, wouldn’t it?

Banks do what’s good for banks. There was a pandemic, they didn’t want to take a chance that businesses would go under, so they converted lines of credit into loans and leaned on small businesses to pony up. Nothing personal. It was silly of me to think they’d care about my kids or my mom, or that they meant it when they said they liked to support small, woman-owned businesses. That’s just a thing that sounds good to say.

Why am I talking about banks? Because banks and billionaires go hand-in-hand. We know this, or I hope we do, but half the voting public seems to think the guy turning the Oval Office into Vegas, D.C. is not a massive, outright grifter, and they continue to think that as he’s trying to steal taxpayer dollars for tacky-ass vanity projects, and to… what was it, again? Oh yeah. Reward insurrectionists right before the midterms. It’s all so insane it’s hard to keep sorted.

I wish we could get through to the people who still think woke libs with their woke tears are the problem, or immigrants are the reason things aren’t good, or it’s women with their “toxic empathy” who shouldn’t be voting, or feminists who have ruined everything, or queer people or Black people, or “men on women’s sports teams” or pick your marginalized group.

If I could stomach Faux News I would have turned it on, because I just cannot fathom how they’re presenting the things that are happening right now in any way that could make sense to anyone. How can this level of blinding corruption be confusing?

Charles Edward Littlejohn leaked the president’s tax returns. Littlejohn was an independent contractor who worked for the IRS, and he stole the returns (along with the tax returns of 405,000 other business entities) and leaked them to The New York Times and ProPublica because he thought he was serving the public interest by revealing how the wealthy avoid paying taxes — and because every president in the history of ever — except the current one — has voluntarily turned over their tax returns so the voting public can see they have nothing to hide, and to avoid accusations of conflicts of interest.

Littlejohn was convicted and sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison — the maximum sentence allowable by law. Justice has been and is being served, full stop. Nonetheless, the president decided to sue his own IRS for $10 billion dollars of taxpayer money. Pause and think about that. The man who committed the crime is in jail, he’s been punished — but that’s not enough for this president. He is willing to take $10 billion dollars from the American people he’s supposed to serve because he’s angry. But why should we pay? We didn’t steal his tax returns. What kind of president would take $10 billion dollars from hardworking Americans for a crime that had nothing to do with them?

It was an insane amount of damages to go after in any case — and it never would have stood up in court — because the case never would have made it to court.

Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution includes the “Case or Controversy” clause. In a federal case, there must be a plaintiff with a claim against an “adverse party.” In other words, two distinct litigants who want different things. When the president of the U.S. sues the IRS, an agency of the government he’s in charge of, demanding they pay him money from the Treasury he also controls — even the president himself knows he’s playing games:

“And they do say that, you know, it’s never been a case like this,” the president said at a rally this December, taking on the animated voice of a newscaster. “‘Donald Trump sues the United States of America. Donald Trump becomes president. And now Donald Trump has to settle the suit.’”

The judge, Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, appointed independent attorneys (court-appointed amici) to argue whether this lawsuit met the “adverse party” requirement. The deadline for their briefs was last week.

Before that deadline arrived, Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General — and Don Donnie’s longtime personal lawyer — filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure — which means, essentially, the case is dropped instantly. The court no longer has any jurisdiction, the judge doesn’t sign anything nor does she rule on anything. The case is withdrawn, over, dismissed — done before it’s heard. Todd Blanche knew they would not win.

I’m going to guess Faux News is not mentioning that part. Todd Blanche pulled the case himself and announced a “Settlement Agreement.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “settlement agreement” and something about the IRS case and the other lawsuit the president has against his own DOJ, I’m thinking it’s a legal agreement. I’m thinking a judge weighed in. That’s what I thought at first and I was stunned.

You know about the other lawsuit, the $230 million dollar case he brought against the DOJ? That’s the one where the president is suing because they had the audacity to investigate him over obstruction of justice when he refused to return classified documents he was hiding in a bathroom, ballroom, and office at Mar-a-Lago, and because they investigated him for Russian interference in the 2016 election, and then of course, there was the whole insurrection thing!

So basically, he sued his own Department of Justice for doing its job under the previous administration, and the takeaway is, if you don’t want to be investigated, don’t do illegal shit. But that isn’t the takeaway, because we live in a simulation.

(Also, let me save myself time just in case we encounter people who like to talk about Biden, who also had classified documents in his home. He sure did! He took his personal notebooks just like this other president…let me think. Oh! Ronald Reagan, that’s right. Anyway, here’s the whole-ass report about it, including the part about how Biden cooperated with investigators, invited them into his home, and returned any materials they wanted, instantly — whereas the current guy lied, obstructed justice, enlisted others to destroy evidence, and hid the records. Not the same! Yikes.)

The IRS case has nothing to do with the DOJ case, but they’re presenting them like they’re connected. A little smoke-and-mirrors, flood-the-zone, sleight-of-hand weave if you will. A settlement agreement makes it sound as though the IRS is trying to “settle” with the president, like they thought he might win this $10 billion dollar lawsuit. As if his case had merit.

My guess is they think his supporters are blindly loyal and they’ll believe whatever he says, so it doesn’t really matter. If he tells them he decided to drop the IRS case and agree to a much smaller settlement to make up for the “longstanding harm he’s suffered at the hands of the DOJ and the way it was ‘weaponized’ against him under the Biden Administration” — their answer will likely be, “Take my money!”

I don’t know how to get past January 6th, though. I don’t understand how anyone with any kind of integrity or love for this country can pretend that day was not horrific, heart wrenching and unconscionable. The man refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, and he incited an insurrection. We all saw it. Now he wants $1.776 billion dollars of taxpayer money to reward the “loyal patriots” who were willing to hang Mike Pence on his behalf? Are y’all serious? I’m no fan of Mike Pence, but I don’t want him hanged from a noose, and I don’t want to reward the people who would have made him swing, thanks.

I’d rather have affordable healthcare, groceries, free lunches for kids who need them, gas that isn’t $6 dollars a gallon, and a world where we aren’t allowing children to be casualties of our selfishness, violence, stupidity, and rampant greed — at home and abroad. I’d rather have my tax dollars spent on education — hiring more teachers, and paying all of our teachers well, so they aren’t exhausted and stressed out and spending the little money they have on supplies and snacks for hungry kids whose families were THROWN OFF SNAP BENEFITS.

I’d rather have my tax dollars spent making sure no one is sleeping on the streets. I’d like tax money to be spent on pediatric cancer research, and all cancer research, because I am tired of losing people, aren’t you? I’d like it to go toward green energy initiatives and every other way we can think of protecting this gorgeous planet and all the animals who share it with us.

I’d love for more funding, not less, to go toward women’s health in every area, because I slept like a baby last night, and I might have tried HRT a lot sooner if we all hadn’t been told we shouldn’t, because of one study twenty-four years ago.

Maybe there’d even be a little money left over to improve the directions on the box.

It asks the questions, how do we love what doesn’t stay? How do we give people grace when they can’t choose us, they can’t choose themselves, or they tell us goodbye for other reasons? Is our love still valid and worthwhile?

How would life be if people were their best and highest selves when life handed them curveballs — even painful ones? What would that look like, and what could grow if forgiveness was the soil? What if we didn’t hold on so tightly to our vision of how things should be, and instead allowed something wild and unexpected to take root and flourish?

Is it possible we’d be amazed? Is it possible everyone under the tree would blossom?

As if to answer those very questions, Katrina’s book, Hurricane Lessons: A memoir of betrayal and becoming is about the unraveling of her twenty-year marriage, and the reclamation of her true self. Sometimes you walk into a Pilates studio thinking you’re there to strengthen your core, and it turns your life inside out. The experience blows through your family like a hurricane.

You will be rooting for Katrina every step of the way, but you probably know that just from listening to the talk.

We talked about grief. We talked about complicated grief, and how relationships don’t end when people die. We could have talked for hours.

I cannot recommend these books enough. These are strange times in our country. There is a persistent and intentional attack on women’s rights, on the LGBTQ community, on women who have decided not to have children, and women who have children, but no support. There are systemic issues like the gender pay gap, a lack of affordable childcare, PTO, affordable healthcare, and a continued pressure for women to carry the mental load for everyone.

These are the stories we need in the world right now. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did (the joy) and I hope you will order these incredible books if you can!

Also, big shoutout and so much gratitude to everyone who showed up to be with us live! thank you for making us laugh, pretty sure the thumbnail attached here is thanks to you, and thank you for this incredible Jack Gilbert poem you recommended when we were talking about reframing relationships that end. A divorce is not a failure. It’s simply a relationship that ended.

Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Thoughts, free-writes, a poem or two, an essay here and there, upcoming book chapter previews. Live, from my little adobe at the bottom of the canyon.

By Kate Mapother

Surrendering to Sappho

Thoughts from a late-in-life lesbian.

By Katrina Anne Willis

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For those of us who grew up with chaos, uncertainty and violence, and learned hyper-vigilance as a tool of survival, waking up in this country day after day feels all-too-familiar. It’s an ongoing assault on the nervous system to hear the voices of smug men spewing contempt toward women, Black people, brown people, the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, survivors of abuse, or anyone who doesn’t please them, for any number of reasons — from the highest offices in the land.

Of course it’s not just their words, it’s the real-life consequences that follow. We knew when they overturned Roe women and girls would suffer, and — in many cases — lose their lives. Maternal and infant mortality rates have gone up in every state with restrictive abortion bans because that’s how it works.

Then they started talking about the SAVE Act.

The president canceled all funding for DEI programs in the government and in public schools and universities, refused funding for schools teaching critical race theory, and demanded all red states racially gerrymander their maps so he could try to retain his tiny majority stronghold in the House and Senate. Of course he didn’t say the quiet part out loud.

Now the Voting Rights Act is gutted.

The Epstein survivors get no justice, but the perpetrators of heinous crimes get their names blurred. Women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their own names until 1974, landlords could refuse to rent apartments to single mothers until 1988, and female senators were not allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993. We still have a gender pay gap.

I believe in my heart there are more of us who want the world to be a kind and loving place than there are people who are cruel and depraved, or pathologically self-serving. And I know there are many of us wondering what brought us to this precipice where we now find ourselves, and what do we need to do to gather everyone up, and head in a much better direction?

I don’t know how we do anything if we can’t communicate. I have had conversations with men who think if you’re a feminist it means you “hate men” and that is not correct. Feminism means you believe in equal rights and opportunities for all people politically, socially and economically, regardless of gender. It means you want to dismantle the patriarchy because you realize it’s making us all very ill — even the men and boys it was set up to serve.

And while we’re here, “down with the patriarchy” does not mean “erasing male voices” — it means we make a circle where we put the most vulnerable people in the middle — the kids and the elderly. We make sure they’re safe. The rest of us are in that circle shoulder-to-shoulder, no one is on top.

White supremacy, patriarchy, and technocracy are the ties that bind. They are an intertwined beast. That’s the systemic part of teaching boys not to cry, not to be vulnerable. Painting ourselves into these corners where men can’t ask for help or show emotion is not helping and it’s not realistic, and telling women they are not allowed to be angry is the fastest way to be dealing with an angry woman.

Dina and I talked about intersectional feminism and what it is, patriarchy, white supremacy, the wide range of normal human emotion, and Somebody, Somewhere — among other things.

Not sure exactly how or why, but we end up laughing a lot. Which is good.

I hope you laugh, too. I hope you do whatever you need to do, all emotions are welcome. Please let us know how you’re feeling in the comments, and if you have any questions .

Sending you lots of love,

Ally and Dina

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