The Dark Side of the Moon

There are so many things in life that can be debilitating. We really aren’t built for sustained stress, we’re built for short bursts of it - and I’m talking physiologically here. We’re meant to be able to run from the oft-referenced saber-toothed tiger, to race our asses off like our life depends on it because it does, and then to dive into a cave and collapse, catching our breath and waiting until the tiger moves onto other prey - knowing we’ll live to see another day, or at least another afternoon.

Evolutionarily (that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?) intense pain would not work in your favor. Stubbing your toe whilst on the run would really suck. It’s not like you’d have the time to stop, hold onto the nearest tree trunk, and allow a stream of every expletive you know to come pouring out of your mouth as you waited for the pain in your toe to subside. You’d end up as lunch that way, your final breath spent dropping f-bombs as the tiger swallowed you whole. Bummer for you, good day for the tiger. Anyone else hearing Circle of Life from The Lion King playing in your head? How ‘bout now? You’re welcome! Maybe now it’s Moana, you’re welcome again.

Migraines are not fun, and I know because I’ve had them for as long as I can remember. I wrote about them this week because I had the first cluster I’ve had in a while, but also because peri-menopause is…an adventure, a journey, a process, a transition that can go on for years - and because it is not a thing men experience, we haven’t devoted a lot of medical research or funding to understand what happens, and what helps. Fantastic. That sure isn’t gonna change now, we aren’t even funding pediatric cancer research anymore. Just gold leaf for the president.

Also, we have a culture that teaches girls and women to be ashamed of bleeding every month, even though literally no one would be here if we didn’t - so I think we can be done with shame now, please raise sons who will grow up to be men who will happily buy tampons/pads etc from the drug store like they’d buy floss, thanks. It’s not a big ask, believe me. Try pushing a cranium out of your vagina. If you don’t have a vagina, you should definitely not scrunch up the face attached to your cranium if someone asks you to buy tampons. Think about that if you need to, that’s all the help I’m willing to offer.

Also, there is the stress of not knowing what is going to happen on any given day when you wake up in the country where you were born and cannot fathom what is happening. The financial and emotional stress of not knowing if you’ll be able to afford health insurance in January, wondering what you’ll do if you can’t get mammograms and skin cancer screenings, and if it will be feasible to drive to Mexico to buy medications you used to get through insurance.

The heartache of not being able to protect your neighbors, of not being able to keep your children safe, of not being able to stop the madness as we roll back environmental protections and give up on trying to address the very obvious climate crisis, which is more obvious all the time.

The rage of watching people who comment as a fifty-four-year-old immigrant selling tamales is tackled by ICE and has a heart attack right there on the spot, and people say, “Well, if she was here illegally, that’s what you get. You either believe in the rule of law or you do not.” Meanwhile their president just cut a deal with a child-raping pedophile-helping perjurer who now enjoys barre classes at an open-air prison camp in Texas, instead of serving her twenty years behind bars, which is the very least she should have done. The very least. How these people can pretend they care about the rule of law is astounding and it’s also insulting.

Yesterday CNN aired clips from an interview with a pastor whose name I won’t share here, though I am linking the interview because if you haven’t seen it, you really should. The thing that troubled me the most were the comments under clips wherever this was shared, and it was shared widely. So many people expressed the feeling that “men like this should not be platformed” - but men like this have already been platformed - they are in the U.S. government, at the highest levels.

Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Russell Voght, Peter Thiel, Mike Johnson…all of these men are conservative/evangelical far, far right Christian men who are in bed with the Heritage Foundation - and very much enacting Project 2025. A huge part of Project 2025 was eroding voting rights, and women’s rights and the rights of every marginalized group. That’s the SAVE Act, friends. That’s Louisiana v. Callais. That’s all the bans against gender-affirming care, and if you think marriage equality is safe, you aren’t paying attention. They’re coming for it all.

Peter Thiel believes women’s suffrage is bad for the country. Please take that in - the Vice President of these United States, the man second in line if our 79-year-old-McDonald’s-eating-sundowning president takes a header off the White House roof - is funded and backed by a man who thinks America would be better off if women just let their husbands do the voting. What about women without husbands? Their dad or their brother can cast the vote for their household. These men everyone thinks should not be platformed (and I agree, but that ship has long since sailed) - the pastor in this interview, Pete Hegseth who supports him, and I’m quite sure the VP himself behind closed doors - they are already everywhere. They are crawling all over our now gold-leafed government halls, doing deals and passing legislation.

It’s what the restrictive abortion bans are about. It’s why they want to get rid of no-fault divorce. It’s why, eventually, they want to ban birth control. Sounds crazy, right? Like it couldn’t happen? If that’s what you’re thinking, you are not understanding who these people are or what they want. We’re on the dark side of the moon, friends. Really hoping we can find our way back.