The Eagle Has Landed

Maybe it’s the daily onslaught of living in America right now, but I have become obsessed with the Big Bear Bald Eagle Nest Cam-1. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should click that link and come back to read the rest of this in three hours when you’re done watching, but it’s a live feed of a Bald Eagles’ aerie (aka, nest). The camera is right there with them, you are up close, and if you watched Silicon Valley, you might have an extra laugh about my obsession. I do have the feed screencast to my tv right now, so click the link at your own peril I guess.

I wasn’t sure, so I looked it up, and Bald Eagles typically lay eggs once per year - and have 1-3 eggs per “clutch”- unless they lose the first clutch. I didn’t know it was called a clutch when Bald Eagles lay eggs. Also, we call them “bald” because of their white feathers, and bald is the old English word for “white.” Learning new things is good for your brain, so we should all make sure we’re doing enough of that.

Half the people in this country could open a history book and have their minds blown, and I really wish they would. I know some of those people, and I bet you do, too. They’re wildly confident, and I guess you can be if you don’t know how the story ends. Back to eagles. If the eggs from the first clutch don’t hatch, or if they don’t make it for some other reason, Bald Eagles may try again - but if they’re in colder environments like the Pacific Northwest or Big Bear - that may be it for the year. Guess the mood and the temperature have to be just right.

“Don’t touch me, are you nuts? It’s fucking COLD!” Photoholgic on Unsplash

Apparently I’m really late to this Big Bear Bald Eagle reality tv show, and I’m kind of upset no one told me. The parents in this series are Jackie and Shadow. They had chicks in 2019 and 2022, but lost eggs in 2023 and 2024. This year, they have three extremely cute, grey, fluffy chicks whose necks and heads kind of “bounce” in unison when Jackie stands up. They look like little muppets. I haven’t seen their dad Shadow in the nest yet, I’ve just seen pictures of him. I’m exercising self-restraint, maybe he’s out there hunting, and not off with his twenty-year-old girlfriend like my dad was when I was a baby. Shit, no restraint after all.

I don’t usually like to have anything on when I write. I don’t mean clothing, I wear clothes, I mean noise. I’m now trying hard not to imagine people writing naked. I don’t think it would be comfortable. I know some people love to have music in the background, like Maggie Smith, and some writers like background noise like a baseball game or Mad Men, like Lauren Hough. Some people like to write at coffee shops, but my brain is not made that way - I can’t focus. I need it to be quiet. I don’t need the house to be empty, I’m okay with noise in other places, but I can’t write if there’s a tv or sound system on in the next room, and it’s loud enough that I can make out the words. If there’s a group of teenagers around, forget it, because they are always twenty times louder by default.

I like the live nest cam, though. I can hear cars going by somewhere, so this nest must be fairly close to a road, but mostly it’s the sounds of nature and the wind, and the crunching of sticks when Jackie gets up and shifts position. Sometimes she yells or makes these weird clacking/barking noises, or the chicks squawk. It’s mostly pleasant and comforting. We could all use a little comforting these days, and frankly, if a house-sized Bald Eagle wanted to come sit on top of me and keep me warm, fed, and protected, I wouldn’t turn it down. The metaphor here is too obvious to state. We’re all living the nightmare scenario where the Bald Eagle eats your face, rips your heart out, and laughs while you cry. Then it waits for you to pay your taxes, and tells you to say thank you.

You find yourself wondering why Bernie is the only Democrat touring the country talking to people. It can’t be the “let the guy have the first 100 days” rule, because he isn’t playing by any rules. He’s selling Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House. Black ping pong paddles at the Address to Congress pale in comparison to topless French women taking to the streets in formation, calling for feminism and not Fascism - and you really lose your mind when 10 Democrats vote to censure Al Green - because with friends like that, might as well roll over and invite Putin to move into the White House. Maybe fluff his pillows while you’re at it.

I had a dream last week that I was following Paul Crenshaw and his wife Jenn in a car. Mind you, I haven’t met either of them in person, but there we were in my subconscious, driving somewhere together, caravan-style. Maybe we were on our way to Mexico, or Canada, though why would they want us? My daughter was in the passenger seat. Even though we were in separate cars, I could hear Paul say I should watch this upcoming intersection because it was big and confusing, and people would take the left and often find themselves heading into oncoming traffic.

I followed him carefully, I was very focused, but some way or another even though my foot was on the gas, my car slowed and there I was with my daughter, facing oncoming traffic. I managed to drive us to the shoulder in a very illegal, but-yay-we-didn’t-die maneuver. We were just stuck there on the shoulder, with drivers speeding by shaking their heads, flipping me the bird. Then a cop came, a woman cop in a car, and I explained what happened, wondering if she was going to arrest me. But she nodded and said this shit happens all the time, and escorted us across the intersection.

I’m sure it meant something about friends you can trust who warn you about danger, and things you can’t avoid even when you’ve been warned. Things all women know, and take in their stride, and doing whatever the fuck you need to do to save your daughter. Probably says something about the people shaking their heads, driving in the other direction - voting against their own interests and telling you to go fuck yourself while you try to save them.

It’s like those people with coexist bumper stickers cutting you off in traffic, or wealthy white women who’ve had abortions, voting for this administration - because as long as they get what they need when they need it, they don’t give a shit about anyone else. I wonder how many men who voted for this administration have paid for abortions themselves. Some ten-year-old girl raped in Texas or Tennessee? They could not care less.

They’re destroying the Black Lives Matter Plaza today. Using jackhammers, not just painting over it. Petty, racist, cruel. Taxpayer money being used to destroy something meaningful, while we cut funding for cancer research, right? Apple removed International Women’s Day from its calendar here in America because apparently they also kiss the ring, and seem to have forgotten women are 51% of the population, responsible for 85% of consumer spending. But I’m typing away on my MacBook Air, so now what? This is why we can’t have nice things. Amazon stock is trending down, though, so keep at it.

NASA was asked to scrub “Women in Leadership” from its website even though men never would have reached the moon without Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson - and women have always been an integral part of NASA’s history and success, whether this administration tries to diminish their impact or not. The Defense Department is supposed to wipe photos of the Enola Gay off of its sites because the pilot’s mom was named Enola Gay and they just run code, see? They don’t actually think. GAY GAY GAY. I’m just going to start saying GAY randomly.

There are some people I should block or delete or whatever. I’ve already done a lot of that, of course. I’m thinking of three or four people right now, only one of whom I know well - the rest are people who are in the “wider yoga community” out here in LA. They all have a lot of money, and they support this administration, explicitly, or implicitly. Two of them do it by way of RFK, Jr. They will talk about how he’s an anti-establishment hero who has won court cases against DuPont and Monsanto for contaminating water supplies with toxic chemicals that harmed human life, and devastated wildlife habitats. They cite his good work with Waterkeeper Alliance. Terrific, who could argue against any of that?

He’s also a person who thinks vaccines should be studied more, even though they’ve been studied a lot. He thinks they aren’t safe. He has promoted the theory that thimerosal - a preservative that has been phased out of modern vaccine formulas - is responsible for the rise in autism diagnoses, and that the government knew, but “knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children.” (He stated that in both Rolling Stone and Salon in 2006, which happens to be the year my son was born - undoubtedly why I remember).

Really? The government knowingly let the pharmaceutical industry poison a generation of children? That’s quite a thing to claim. The link between vaccines, thimerosal, mercury and autism has been debunked by the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and every other certified health organization out there, but that doesn’t stop RFK, Jr. His fear-mongering and spread of misinformation continues to this day, and you really oughta stick with me for a minute, especially if you think he’s a good person to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

I was scared of the vaccination schedule when I had my son. It seemed like so many shots in such a short period of time - I think it was 38 shots in two years. I told my pediatrician I was scared, and he said we could slow things down. Do the vaccinations that really needed to get done, save the ones that could wait, and spread them all out over a much longer period. He also sent me studies before we did anything. Studies from Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine. If I had questions or concerns, we talked about them at length. If I wanted to postpone anything, we did.

Meanwhile, I was an attachment-parenting, baby-wearing, exclusively breastfeeding, co-sleeping, super typical SoCal, yoga teacher mom. I’ve been vegetarian most of my life, I was a strict vegan for a dozen years, a pescatarian off and on, mostly off. When my son was ready for solid food, I made it myself. I am lucky to live in California, where it is not hard to find organic produce from local farmers at farmers’ markets. Or at least, it always has been, but that was before we had a president who decided it was fun to play with tariffs.

I’m sharing these things with you so you understand I am not some Big Pharma, bring on the drugs, here’s my baby’s chubby little arm, kinda gal. I think we over-prescribe in this country, treat the symptom, and line the pockets of people like the Sacklers. It’s horrifying. I think our entire “healthcare system” is more system than care, and that it’s broken and needs an overhaul, so people are served, and not CEOs.

I also believe in science and medical journals and epidemiologists and people who have devoted their lives to these pursuits, a lot more than a person who would take advantage of a tragedy and put the lives of children at risk because he thinks he knows more than everyone in the room. Arrogant men will be the death of us.

Multiple things can be true at once. A guy can have a history of some excellent work as an environmental lawyer - and let’s be clear, he was part of a legal team and his last name is Kennedy, so it’s hard to say how much of the legal work he did himself. This is a man whose own family has distanced themselves from him, advised senators not to confirm him as head of HHS, a man who seems to like to transport the carcasses of found dead animals in his car, sexually assaulted his kids’ sitter, and hangs out with Roseanne Barr. And then there’s the brain-worm.

This is a man who left a roadkill bear cub in Central Park as a prank when he was sixty years old. We will never know how much money NYC spent trying to understand how a bear cub ended up in Central Park, but I would wager a bet his “prank” wasted millions of taxpayer dollars. Anyone who didn’t grow up a Kennedy (and also every other Kennedy) could tell you that is not funny. So forgive me if I’m not convinced he was a great legal scholar, but maybe he was, people do change.

All of that mayhem is nothing compared to what happened in Samoa. Junior has a theory that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children, but he can’t prove it because he doesn’t have a control group. He’d need a big group of unvaccinated children to compare to vaccinated children, which would mean he’d need a big group of parents willing to trust a guy with no medical background - over, say, actual doctors who will tell you we’ve eradicated diseases like the measles and polio because of vaccines. Well, we had eradicated them.

In 2018, Samoa was dealing with a healthcare system that had been stretched beyond its limits. There were not enough doctors and nurses to serve the population. A nurse on the Samoan island of Savai’i did not read a label carefully, and mixed an expired anesthetic into a vial of MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, killing a baby. It makes me sick to write that. Not long after, a second child was given a vaccination from the same mixture, and also died.

The ministry of health paused all vaccinations, and recalled the MMR vaccine - the one people are most concerned about when it comes to autism, no matter how many times the connection is debunked. The Prime Minister announced the tragedy on Facebook, saying they would be investigating the cause of death.

Antivax groups seized on the story, including Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense. Eventually, two nurses in Samoa were implicated and arrested - the one who mixed the expired anesthetic into the vial, and the nurse manager who convinced a hesitant mother to allow her child to have the same vial administered even after the first baby had died. Nonetheless, RFK, Jr. continued to sow seeds of doubt about what had happened, even after the nurses pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to five years in prison. Ten months after the arrests, Samoa started up its vaccination program again, but parents were hesitant.

You can read more about the details here, but Kennedy visited Samoa in April of 2019. He met with the Prime Minister, and with the director general of health, hoping to convince them to try alternative measures to vaccination - thus finding his big control group of unvaccinated kids. They were not swayed by his arguments because he is not a doctor. Wild, imagine that.

In September of 2019, the first case of measles in Samoa was reported. By October, it was declared an outbreak, and by November, a national state of emergency. That is when Junior thought it was a good idea to send a letter to the Prime Minister, who was dealing with a grieving country and a national health crisis.

“On Nov. 19, as the deaths neared 20, Kennedy wrote a letter to Malielegaoi, baselessly suggesting that the crisis was caused not by low vaccination rates but by a hodgepodge of possibilities, including ineffective or defective vaccines and newly vaccinated children “shedding” the virus to unvaccinated ones.”

Which is why I don’t like or trust the guy, nor do I want to hear about his wins against Monsanto when the issue at hand is measles. That’s what these people do, the ones who support this administration - via their love of RFK, Jr. - and I know, because I haven’t blocked them. I haven’t yet because some part of me hopes they’re going to see the light. It’s the stubborn part of me, the part that wants to believe facts matter, and will eventually get through. What do you do when people are determined to drive themselves off a cliff and you realize your wagon is connected to their bumper?

We had a second measles death in our country last week, an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. That’s two deaths now, the first was a child in Texas. We haven't had any deaths due to measles in this country since the year 2000:

“As of public health updates on March 7, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported over 200 measles cases in a dozen jurisdictions, with over 90% of the cases linked to a measles outbreak. West Texas had 198 cases and 23 people hospitalized. Most of these cases are in children 5–17 years old who are either unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown. The outbreak recently spread to New Mexico, which reported 30 cases.” You can read more here. It’s not a bad idea to call your doctor and see if your own measles vaccination is still protecting you by getting a titer test. Much of this depends on the year you were born.

Meanwhile, our leader of the Department of HHS is spending his time talking about the benefits of fast food chains using beef tallow for french fries instead of seed oils. Measles? Yeah, he made a statement that vaccination is a personal choice, and cod liver oil and Vitamin A are also good. It makes no sense to argue with people who follow a man exercising this kind of judgement, but our fates are tied, so I hate to give up.

One of the people who loves RFK, Jr. asked me why I can’t be happy that DOGE is finding all this fraud, and the government will now have billions of “found money” to do good. I asked her how she would feel if Harris/Walz had won, and sent Oprah into the Treasury with 6 unvetted co-eds and some flash drives, and one of the co-eds had the social media handle @ BigTits. They stop conversing when you ask a question they can’t answer. She’ll come back and answer some other question I didn’t ask. Deflect, deny, depose. I’m heading to block them all after I hit publish.

Photo by Jongsun Lee on Unsplash

Shadow showed up in the nest with a big fish, so my apologies, sir. You were out hunting. Jackie took off right away, she undoubtedly needed to stretch her wings. I don’t know if she was aggravated, I’m not familiar with Jackie and Shadow as a couple. She didn’t stop to say hello to him, though, she just flew off.

Shadow fed the chicks. He tore off tiny pieces of fish with his beak, and leaned over the three chicks, but the one on the left was nudging the other two out, and for a few minutes, little Lefty was the only one eating. Then the chick on the right started fighting its way in, and the two of them took turns, but I started to get really anxious, because the third one was totally pushed to the back. At one point, it just turned away from the whole event and toward the camera, and I stopped writing because I had this bad feeling. You know the kind. That feeling when you’re worried the quieter kid is going to be overlooked.

I started relating to the bird in back, and wondering if this is how you get screwed in life. You don’t fight for yourself, the aggressive, loud chicks get the fish, and you just let them. You sit there with your stupid black ping pong rackets and say this is not normal, and the loud-ass birds eat the fish and squawk and grow strong and take every good thing from the nest.

I started hoping that Jackie would come back. I figured she probably makes sure all three chicks eat, she had fed them earlier. But I’m not going to lie to you, I started talking to the chick in back. “Get in there, Champ, c’mon now, don’t give up. Don’t just let them eat all the fish, you deserve some, too.” I was up on my feet by then, rocking back and forth. I don’t know if the first two got full, but after a while, that little chick in back managed to nudge its way forward and get a little grub.

It was enough to make me feel like maybe it will be okay. I don’t know how exactly, none of us do, but I know we can’t give up and let these people take our country. They don’t deserve the redwoods or the oceans. They don’t deserve the Social Security we’ve been paying into forever. They don’t deserve to scare our friends, or demolish plazas where the great John Lewis stood, not all that long ago.

I don’t know why Bernie is on the road alone, or why making phone calls is the only meaningful thing to do except for trying to help our friends and neighbors. I just know they don’t deserve to diminish women or terrify the Transgender community or take same-sex marriage away - because they are the worst of us. Truly. They’re scared, angry, petulant, vindictive people. They don’t make art. There isn’t a single one amongst them who could ever have a moment like this -

This is a moment I want you to see because it’s about pain, and what you do with it. It’s about making it mean something, so if your heart breaks, at least your suffering isn’t wasted.

May his memory be a blessing. May we all remember the power we have to make this suffering mean something. I don’t know what’s going to happen friends, but I know us. Our suffering will not be wasted. We’ll make art, like we always do, and it will matter. We’ll make something beautiful, and we’ll make sure the quieter kids in back get to have some. Maybe we’ll get a little louder, too, or go find Bernie on the road. Hell, maybe we’ll take our tops off and march, or at least write naked. You never know.

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Hello friends, sending you so much love from rainy Santa Monica where I’m currently writing with clothes on. I’ll be going live here at 11:15am PST this Friday, March 12th to talk about finding things that bring you some comfort and relief (necessary), not wasting your energy fighting battles you can’t win, fighting the battles that matter, and the concept of turning heartbreak into art. The podcast version will go out Saturday as usual. I’m heading to Croatia in June, if you’d like to meet me there it’s going to be amazing, please send me an email because we’re getting close. And I will meet you in the comments section, always one of my favorite places anywhere <3