Play It Again, Uncle Sam

Louder for the people in the back, I guess.

I didn’t watch yesterday, I’ve seen enough things go up in flames lately without watching democracy burn. I studiously avoided social media except for Substack, where I follow a bunch of other writers who are equally astounded and saddened that this is what so many people decided they wanted, except a little harder and more oligarchy. A little bro-techier billionaire matchmaker vibe if possible, please, not quite enough toxic masculinity last time. Throw in a Nazi salute at the end of the Season Two Premiere, let’s really turn up the dial on outrage, and give the gaslighters a lot of meat on the bone right off the bat.

I taught a private yoga client in the morning, he’s the only one I have. I’m picky about private clients, I really don’t take them on anymore unless it feels like an absolute yes, or they’re a friend of my literary agent, Dana. She’s been waiting for me to finish my book for eleventy billion weeks, so I will do anything for her pretty much. I know that sounds weird, like why the hell wouldn’t you take on private clients, isn’t that where the money is? And yes, if teaching yoga is your main source of income, you’ll make more money with private clients than group classes, but it’s such an exchange of energy when you’re in a room with someone that way - you really want to like them. Also, you might have realized if money is the thing that drives you, writing and teaching yoga may not be the right career paths. My mom wanted me to be a lawyer.

Teaching public classes isn’t what I do anymore, I closed my brick-and-mortar studio in Santa Monica in 2018, after nine years of welcoming people through the doors every day. I’d been teaching at other people’s studios for years before that. Most of what I do is online when it comes to teaching these days. I also lead in-person retreats, and I write. I have one public class a week, and one private client, who, thankfully, turns out to be one of the nicest guys you could ever meet. When I moved to Los Angeles, I never said no to new clients, because I needed the money. It’s not that I’m loaded now, I’m not. Those of you with paid subscriptions make it possible for me to keep writing, and I appreciate you so much (I appreciate you if you can’t afford to do that, too, truly). I don’t want to put things behind a paywall, though I may end up playing with that a little because I do have a kid in college and another heading in that direction soon.

These people. I made them. They got big and now they do things like go to college and drive cars. It’s weird. And they’re amazing.

I’ve always sucked at that part of the equation, putting a monetary value on what I offer. I still suck at it, but it’s on my list of things to work on this year. I have learned along the way to put a very high value on my mental health and physical well being, though, so progress not perfection. By the time I’m one hundred years old, I’m going to be really fucking awesome, just watch.

When I first got to Los Angeles in January of 2002, I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about things like that. I was supposed to leave NYC mid-September that year, but then 9/11 happened and I could not bear to leave my hometown when everyone was walking around in a daze and the sky was the wrong color and there were Missing posters taped up everywhere, people still hoping the loved one they hadn’t heard from was alive, but concussed. Alive, but in shock. Alive, somehow. The thought of it still makes me cry, instantly. I waited to move until January, when I could see the city would recover, that we would rebuild - that it wouldn’t ever be the same - but we would sustain.

That’s what people do, we hold each other up, we cry together when there aren’t any words, we show up for strangers when the unthinkable happens, we hold our friends closer and tighter, and somehow, we keep going. It’s happening in Los Angeles right now, and all over the country for those of us who are despondent about *gestures wildly* everything.

I hit the ground running when I got out here, otherwise I would not have been able to stay, pay the rent, pay the utility bills, buy dog food, or lease a car until I figured out how to buy one. I taught classes all over town, and took private clients whenever someone referred me. That’s how I ended up in the Santa Monica mountains with a client whose assistant used to greet me at the door, take me to his study, and leave me there to wait for him, never knowing how long I’d be waiting. Sometimes he’d walk in a few minutes later, ready to go, sometimes I’d wait forty-five minutes and he’d walk in telling me he was sorry, Oliver Stone had called.

Sometimes he’d take a call halfway through a session, come back twenty minutes later, and expect to keep going even though he wasn’t warmed up anymore. I didn’t know how to be assertive those days, how to say the hourly rate was good, but not if I was going to be there twice the scheduled time, or that my time was valuable, too.

Hard to write in this pose.

Then there was the assistant who called because her boss had found my website and he wanted a session with me. I got to the place in Century City, followed her directions about parking, went up the elevator to the top floor of this building, and found that it opened directly into his foyer. He had the entire top floor, views in every direction, so I was alarmed when I followed the woman through endless hallways and doorways, only to find myself being led into his bedroom.

I took in everything at once - the unmade bed, the closed blinds, the wall-to-wall thick carpeting underneath my feet. Huge, professionally-framed, black-and-white close-up shots of a vagina, presumably the same one, on each wall. The glistening clitoris getting the pride of place directly above the headboard, and the guy, standing on his yoga mat at the foot of his bed, carefully watching my reaction, and smirking. His assistant had ducked out before I’d had a chance to have any reaction at all. She delivered me to him. (In case you’re wondering how any woman could have voted for this.)

And don’t get me wrong, I love vaginas, I think they should be celebrated. A man who wants to have artistic shots all over his bedroom is not my issue, though I assure you if I dated a guy like that and saw his bedroom for the first time, I’d be talking to my girlfriends about it the next day because it would feel … noteworthy. If you’re going to hail something, the clitoris is not a bad choice. But your bedroom is not the correct place to do business, unless you are paying for sex.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

When I said hello, and asked if we could find a room without carpeting because it would be better for his balance, he said he was happy where he was. When he intentionally fell out of triangle pose fifteen minutes into the session, knocking me onto his bed, trapping me underneath him, all I could hear was my own heart pounding inside my head. He didn’t get off me right away, and I am quite sure he knew I was not okay. Even though I tried to hide it, act tough, act like I wasn’t scared or didn’t know that even if I’d screamed bloody murder his assistant would not have come - there’s no doubt he could see the panic in my eyes, and probably feel my heart racing.

He pushed himself up and looked at me from three inches away, as I tried to shove him off me, waiting long enough to make sure I realized I was at his mercy. Then he laughed and said sorry, and rolled off me. I took off, furious, mostly at myself for not leaving the second I walked in. Took a wrong turn at some point and ended up in a room with his assistant, who stood halfway up out of her chair asking me if everything was all right. I told her no, everything was not all right, her boss was a fucking pig, and I needed her to walk me back to the elevator, which she did. I was shaking, and to my utter frustration there were some tears streaming down my face, which can happen when someone gets off on showing you exactly how vulnerable you are.

Cruelty is a turn-on for some people. That’s why they win, and still decide to make you fight for your right to stay in the country where you were born. The cruelty is the point. That guy didn’t pay me for the session, either. These guys are a dime a dozen and we just made one president. They stop twisting the knife if they feel like stopping, or if they think you’re going to cause too much trouble for them if they don’t.

I’m pickier about who I work with as a private client than some people are about who sits behind the Resolute Desk. Go figure.

My private client is a really good guy, he’s an artist, and a talented one. You’d want his paintings in your house. He’s funny and smart and kind, he went to Phoenix to knock on doors for Harris/Walz the weekend before the election. Talks about his wife the way some men do, where you can tell right away this is a man who respects women. We didn’t discuss politics yesterday, though. We didn’t even have to agree not to talk about what we didn’t talk about. We’ve all been dealing with the fires out here, that’s enough grief and despair for anyone. Instead we got right to it. Started paying attention to sensation, breathing deeply, moving, making shapes, staying curious. Hugged when he left.

I answered some emails and worked on my book and read some essays that helped. I responded to comments under my own essay from last week, and left a few for people who wrote some things that made the day less devastating. Checked in with three different friends who’ve lost their homes. Arranged to pick up clothes from people who want to donate, and drop off to people who need things but can’t make it to clothing drives right now. Made a plan to have lunch with one of my closest friends and my daughter, who was off from school for the only reason worth celebrating.

Was doing as well as can be expected, all things considered, and then someone sent me a thing they thought I would like - it was a meditation - but it enraged me, which is maybe funny on a certain level. There’s probably a market somewhere for meditations to piss you off to the very depths of your soul, but you can just turn on the news for free, so it wouldn’t be a successful grift if that was the idea. It pissed me off because it was recorded by a straight, white, upwardly mobile dude I happen to know, talking about how we all just need to practice non-attachment and gratitude right now. And yeah, I mean, that’s always going to be the way, but dang fella. Maybe let one of the people who are affected by what just happened in a slightly more primal way - decide when it is we can start thinking about non-attachment. It was very, hey ladies, I’m here to help you in your time of need. He was also offering a coupon code for essential oils for people who feel like their lungs are hurting from the wildfires, so that did not engender a warm feeling in me, either.

There are a lot of good men out there, and I appreciate them, and I mean that. And it is also true that in almost every conceivable way, straight, white, upwardly mobile men are just as safe today as they were yesterday. It is easy to practice non-attachment when you do not have to worry about your bodily autonomy, when you can walk into an ER with a life-threatening emergency and know you’ll be treated instantly, when (unless you’re the victim of a mass shooting) you do not have to worry about your physical safety when you leave the house, or wonder if you’ll be believed if you’re assaulted and go to the police. When you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be shot over a traffic stop, or if your child will be bullied at school until the point they can’t figure out how to go on. When you aren’t sure if you’re allowed to love who you love openly anymore - and if you are, for how long.

So, this would be an okay time for you to not tell the rest of us the best way forward, even if you mean well. I mean, you could have given it a day, no? You don’t have to step in and take up space every time. Believe me when I tell you, there are plenty of meditation teachers who are part of marginalized groups who can speak to this moment in a way that you cannot, because they know how this feels right down to their bones. If you want to help, talk to other men about rape culture, the Gisèle Pelicot case, the current president…there are no shortage of rapists to choose from! Just pick one, and talk to your buddies about it, that would be great. Or talk to them about the wage gap, or maybe talk to your bosses.

I’m going to go ahead and have my feelings, and I’m going to invite all my friends to gather near and have whatever feelings they need to have. I may even invite them to the desert to howl at the moon at some point if that’s what we want to do. It’s fine for us to be depressed for a day. It’s fine for us to be bereft, despondent, numb. It’s fine for us to open our mouths and breathe fire. When we’re ready, we’ll breathe deeply, redirect our attention, and take care of shit like we always do. We’ll fight back in ways that matter, we’ll show up for people in our communities, we’ll keep each other safe as best we can, and we’ll be grateful to have one another. We’ll be grateful to you if you help. You don’t have to wait for us to get started on any of that, if you want to get a head start, please do. I think you might be kinda late on the conversations about consent, anyway.

One thing I will not be doing is giving my time and energy to people who don’t respect me. Last time around I let this awful human being and all his cohorts live in my mind way too much, and I’ll tell you, that’s what they want. That’s the game. These billionaire bros want to keep us clicking and screaming at each other, the same way they want to keep women buying beauty products and ever more diet aids, until we shrink ourselves down so much there’s nothing left. These fuckers want us to exhaust ourselves with rage as the planet burns and they fill the skies with rocket fuel and machismo. That way we’ll have nothing left in the tank to fight back.

Last week in the midst of the wildfires and grief, the evacuation alerts and some 9/11 PTSD, I let it get to me. I let the heartless comments from people on the internet knock the wind out of me, until I ended up in a pretty dark and desolate place. If it can happen to me, it can happen to any of us. We need to be smarter than that. Those comments are going to get worse for a while, not better. They’re going to get worse until we realize we’re on the same side, and they are the ones we should be fighting. Those bros up there on that stage yesterday - Zuck staring down the shirt of Lauren Sanchez, Bezos making no secret of how far he’ll go to own the skies because I guess dominating planet earth isn’t enough, and Elon, well, we all know what he did, we saw it. The billionaires boys club doesn’t want us to get the grift. They’re betting all their private jets and social media apps and newspapers we aren’t going to be that smart.

They’re going to keep fueling the flames. They know what to say to their own people, to the folks who voted for this. I read the inauguration speech this morning because I really can’t stand the sound of his voice, and I’m glad I did. It’s written for people who want to hear slogans, and don’t want to be burdened with annoying things like science and climate change. Listen, I wish we could have nice things, too. I wish we could do whatever we wanted all the time and not hurt anyone and not face consequences and y’know, just have a good time. It’s kind of like wanting to eat chocolate and smoke cigarettes and drink hard liquor every day and night. It would probably be fun for a while, but then you’d start to feel sick, and eventually you’d drop dead. We need to be reasonable. Drill baby drill isn’t gonna get the job done, the planet is in trouble whether you want to face it or not. I guess if you’re 78 you could decide you don’t care because you’ll be dead soon enough. Some people are, in fact, that selfish. You really don’t want them to be president. You are going to figure that out if you haven’t yet.

He’s a showman. He’s a big man. He likes to be the star, the bloated know-it-all, the guy who can solve the problem better than any other guy you’ve ever met. He alone can solve it. He’s always wanted to be in the billionaire’s boys club, and the con’s on him, they’ll never let him in, not really. They think they’re better than him, that he’s uncouth. But they’re smarter than he is, and that means they know what they’re doing and that is some dark shit, friends. These are soulless men who do not care about any of us. They want to build rockets and put the American flag on Mars, and I wish I was kidding, but also, I hope they go. I hope they all go together and stay there, that would be the best possible outcome.

So the game is to keep us jumping, to keep us holding our heads in our hands, or screaming at each other on the internet. To keep us clicking and tuning in so they can keep making money with advertisers. If we don’t show up and click, after a while, there won’t be a reason to advertise, and the money goes away. This is Facebook, it’s Instagram, it’s every Meta platform, it’s X and Fox News, it’s MSNBC, it’s the WaPo, it’s Amazon, too. It’s everywhere we tune in and get outraged and click on a link and scream in all caps. We are consumers, we’re doing the work for them and we need to stop, but stopping doesn’t mean we give up, it means we play smarter.

Yes, it was a Nazi salute. Don’t waste your breath or your energy on this. If anyone wants to say differently, that’s their problem. We have to stop wasting time getting upset when we see something and are told we didn’t see what we saw. It’s outrageous, it’s despicable, it’s reprehensible, it’s on-brand, and it was no accident. It was intentional, and designed to get “the liberals” in a frenzy. Don’t play their game.

I know the people who voted for this don’t see it yet. They won and they’re celebrating, in their angry, kick-you-in-the-face kind of way, but they aren’t going to be celebrating for long. The price of eggs isn’t going down, neither is the price of gas. He just pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, like he said he would, so expect more wildfires, hurricanes and flooding, and a president who uses the suffering of his citizens as leverage to get more of what he wants. The people who voted for him are going to feel the pain, whether they realize that now or not.

We can hate them for putting us in this situation (again), but the cost of hating each other is going to keep rising, and that’s how they win. I hope we can solve that one sooner than later. I am not harboring hate in my heart. Grief, yes. But I am spending the energy I have loving the people I love harder, bigger and stronger, and I’m directing my attention to the things that might help, even if they help in small ways. Sending you love. Go easy, friends. You’re not alone.

What an insane start to 2025. I may be nine thousand years old. If you’d like to meet me to talk about how we get through this without losing our minds, or giving up, or playing the game their way, I’ll be here 01/24/25 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version, which goes out Saturdays. If you want to meet me in Croatia in June, I’d love that so much. Wish we could go tomorrow. I love y’all.