HOLEY MOLEY

This week I hosted the fourth biannual Sleepy Hollow Show & Tell for those lucky enough to live within a 10 or so mile radius. For those who don’t, a cutesy recap of my intro:

I say “cute” because I presented for once—I figured you can’t host a thing forever without playing the game yourself—and I don’t mean cute to proclaim my own cuteness; I mean cute because my object d’share was adorable. I love the word “adorable” because it contains “adore.” Worthy of adoration. A wonderful way to say I like you with way more romance-language-root oomph. J’adore! I adore itsy bitsy items. My object was this lilliputian leather-bound dictionary with a snap and no less than 18,000 words and definitions packed therein!

This precious Little Webster, as proclaimed in gold on the well-worn brown cover, dates back to maybe the late 1930s or thereabouts, I assume when my dad’s sister Shirlee (born 1929 in West Haven, CT) was gifted this and made her mark on the inside cover. “If lost return to Shirley Madsen.” Which is interesting to me because I know she was born Shirlee (and spent most of her life) with the double e’s determined by her Danish parents, but perhaps for some time period the fame of Shirley Temple might have made my dad’s older sister desirous of new more normal namesake. Had the young child rejected her Danish immigrant parents’ likely confused spelling and opted for the Temple type so popular then instead? I will probably never know as she has passed and so has my dad, but I’ll ask her daughter and daughter-in-law and report back.

In the meantime, this wee dictionary made it through her life and mine so far, as it somehow ended up on my childhood den bookshelves where I opened it and admired and adored it endlessly. How could they choose among so many more possible English language words to land on these special 18,000? And how to sharpen a definition into a just one or two words? What art of selection (and excision) this must have required. Surely this little treasure became part of the tapestry of words and books that formed my interest in being a writer someday.

Through the years, something like a cigarette burn hole appeared in the delicate first page. Closer inspection reveals it’s a greenish edged mark that became a hole etched through the friction of time from the circular pressure of the front metal snap. Now it’s something of a glory hole through which you see some letter bits from future words. I need my reading glasses to decipher this portal closer. There’s some kind of dark magic in there for sure.

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QUESS WHAT

As I passed the tiny book around to the admiring audience of the S&T, I riffed some more on our attraction to such little things. What is it about these tiny objects that delight us so? Is it just girls who cherish doll furniture and faux wooden houses complete with tiny china and art the size of postage stamps? I once thought I found a great deal on a cabinet on eBay which shipped for suspiciously cheap until I realized I hadn’t notice the dimensions. It was a miniature model of furniture fit for a toy human not a real one. So much for our full-size living room.

I love world-building exercises, and I especially love the artists who create a dense, believable world full of tiny things. Like the sweet Marcel the Shell trilogy of short stop motion films narrated by comedian Jenny Slate. The moments where Marcel, a tiny shell plopped on plastic shoes with one plastic eyeball plugging its shell hole and a painted mouth, describes how he navigates a big world with his chosen objects. Guess what the bed was in my fancy hotel: a muffin. Guess what I use as a hat: a lentil. Skis are man toenails, beanbag chairs are raisins. Ingesting soda bubbles comes with the fear of launching into a float. The smells from a tennis shoe might knock you out. His brother killed someone by impaling him on a brush. And guess what his attempted pet is: a human hair leashed to a charming ball of lint.

AWE-FUL, AWFUL DETAILS

When we see these cute things, or even these lint balls in the world of Marcel, we want to “own” them or at least drag them around for a while. Come on, says Marcel, yanking when it gets caught on a table leg, I love you. There’s the little world-building that feels both delightful and treacherous in the story of fanciful writer Aimee Bender (another name with ee)’s “End of the Line.”

It begins:

Awe-ful details like the above “drop of whiskey inside the indented crosshatch of a screw” and “thread of chicken” along with, later, the way he gifts his pet with a pet—an ant in a cage inside of the cage—start seeping into just awful. The view of the big world around the little man is nothing if not daunting. How would he escape if “the doorknob is the Empire State Building. The backyard is the African veldt.” The big man starts messing with the little guy, which soon becomes abuse. Perhaps he might do so in ways that seem little to the big man but to the victim are huge. Why would the man torture him like this? For pleasure? To exert his power? Simply because he can? It even gets weirdly sexual in super-uncomfortable ways as the big man insists the little man reveal his penis, and then demonstrate how it works. The little man, to get through this task of getting off in front of a monster audience, takes his mind to a happier place:

Later he tries to send good vibes out to his kids and wife in the midst of his imminent demise:

But he doesn’t die because the “big” (i.e. lonely, pathetic) man wants to see even more of the little man—where he comes from, his little people, how they live. He’s set free but there are predators everywhere.

He waits for, and rides, the tiny blue bus. The bus accepts him without money. The little people passengers can smell this recent history on him. These terrible scenarios aren’t unique. “All the little people around him could smell what had happened. They lived in fear of it every day. The newspapers were full of updates and new incidents.” Meanwhile, in bigville,

Finally, the beautiful ending that I didn’t share with the group because I didn’t want to share all this unearned when we hadn’t read/experienced it all. (And neither have you probably, so do read the whole story if you wish, painful and poetic as it is, before I bring you to the sad and lovely conclusion.)

How the tiny tables are turned when it’s the big man in the end who little people pity. The big man even pities himself. He feels shame, as he should. He wonders where are the creatures larger than him—to help put him in his place, I suppose. Some perspective is needed in order to better behave. Where are those aliens the size of God, indeed.

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SHARP PARTS

Lately I am playing freaky fairy godmother (i.e. crazy cat lady) and fostering one batch of kittens after another in rapid succession. Some of them start out sweet but turn sour though we always still love them. They are of course the softest cutest beings, but their claws soon grow into painful points that dig into my flesh with their neediness, while their bellies can easily flip and emit puke or loose poops. They fart constantly. Nonetheless, each set surpasses the last in my estimation. These are the ones, the best ones, yes these, or more specifically this one, and then somehow we surrender them, and get another set, and another, and no this one is the one. Still, they have an expiration date when they return to the shelter for their operations and adoptions into real “forever” homes, bless their racing hearts.

Each batch seems to require more work as I assume more complications. Once there was the sickly duo I had to syringe back to health; having achieved that, I thought I could master the feral who don’t meow and repel affection. Of Mice and Men came to mind when I cornered kittens hiding behind the toilet bowl with one hand on each side so they had no choice but let me pet them, dammit! Then came the dutiful grey momma cat with her four hungry black beast-babies. She was award-winning with her sacrificial patience as they bit and tugged endlessly at her sore teats. She was only one-year-old herself, baby having babies. But the bored wisdom in her was profound if innate. I wanted of course to keep her with the Macbethian name of “Grimalkin” I gave her, like it or not, and I also wanted the most fragile of her kin who we considered our former Poe reincarnated because he looked and acted identical.

And when Gri-momma inevitably returned to the shelter along with two of four fat-enough kittens, the scrawnier ones were left behind for more of my awkward parenting. I could enjoy a further doting on Poe 2.0 while she shredded my legs climbing me like a tree trunk. Finally, set number four sets in, “the silver trio,” and one starts puking Monday which another takes up Tuesday.

This is my hobby now—scrubbing rugs, scooping poop, navigating a herd, doing my utmost to keep the most vulnerable alive. Perhaps a way for me to fill the dread-void I feel coming when my eldest flees for college in just mere months. I’ve got to stay busy. Keep producing. Do more than ever. Human the heck out of these little litters. Do they love us back? Or are we useful? Do they know they can use their adorableness to manipulate us into doing whatever they want? They own the household, holding my keyboard hostage as I try to type this right now.

Perhaps in lieu of farty foster kittens, always temporary and yet perpetual, I could bring something else small and desirable to the next Show & Tell. Like these tiny tool charms with working sharp parts. These scissors really slice! I was obsessed with these golden pieces when I was a girl and I squirreled them away in a treasure box in between cutting tiny pieces of paper. The other day when I was cleaning my teen’s room (sometimes you have no choice but to mother against all odds), I found the same set there from my youth, being cherished. In a special box. In the special drawer.

Pride unbuckles in my heart. A piece of who I am and what I care about has rubbed off. I’ve left one good thing.

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*Blame all typos on kittens.

Watching the new series on Netflix, which is riveting, reminded me of the other plot points I had forgotten, here so vividly rendered in eerie clarity by the BBC, and brought up so many topics to write about that I don’t even know where to begin—how fine the line between order and chaos, man and monster, allies and enemies, life and death, beauty and beast. You can’t help but compare girls’ camp to boys’ between the amazing series Yellowjackets where girls go a little cannibalistic and here where the (younger) boys who seem even more menacing luckily don’t.

I guess the difference is merely environmental and not innate: the boys seem to have an abundance of fruits and pigs to keep them busy and distracted from eating—if not from killing—humans.

Pigs are a recurring animal for me lately, triggered by a new pulp classic, the time not so long ago when Trump told a female reporter, “quiet, piggy.” And I just can’t stop thinking that line anytime he does anything now, how desperately I want this beast to shut up and go away.

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Until that happens, let’s more fully visit the great pigs of literature, starting again with the lovely Charlotte’s Web, and sponsored by a spider.

Charlotte A. Cavatica, secret selfless star of Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (1952), is a writer but this doesn’t become known until later. At first, she seems vicious.

It begins with a kind and literary “Salutations” (a big word the pig doesn’t recognize) coming from a “large grey spider…about the size of a gumdrop,” waving one of its legs at Wilbur and saying this elaborate sort of hello.

Wilbur thinks she’s beautiful. She says, I wish I could see you better too, but I’m near-sighted. Suddenly she is distracted by a fly tangled in her “sticky threads…beating its wings furiously, trying to break loose and free itself.”

She narrates to Wilbur as she attacks, and eats. “First, I dive at him. Next I wrap him up.”

“There! Now I knock him out, so he’ll be more comfortable.” She bites the fly. “He can’t feel a thing now,” she remarks. “He’ll make a perfect breakfast for me.”

He’s shocked she eats flies. Sure, she says, also “bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midges, daddy longlegs, centipedes, mosquitos, crickets—anything careless enough to get caught in my web. I have to live, don’t I?”

But also, they are “delicious. Of course, I don’t really eat them. I drink them—drink their blood. I love blood.”

He’s demoralized by her “bloodthirsty” ways.

But their friendship grows and she proves to him how loyal she is, generous and kind. She proves it through her words and deeds, which come at once entwined in the form of messages rendered in a web.

First: “SOME PIG”

Then: “TERRIFIC”

The rat helps pull in ads from old magazines from the dump for further contestants. Rejects: Crunchy, Pre-Shrunk; and next winner for the web: “RADIANT”

We witness here the true power of language—not only the fact that these words appearing in webs seems miraculous and launches the pig and his farm into fame, but also that the words could be inspired from the pig or more often inspire him:

Wilbur was now the center of attraction on the farm. Good food and regular hours were showing results: Wilbur was a pig any man would be proud of. One day more than a hundred people came to stand at his yard and admire him. Charlotte had written the word RADIANT, and Wilbur really looked radiant as he stood in the golden sunlight. Ever since the spider had befriended him, he had done his best to live up to his reputation. When Charlotte’s web said SOME PIG, Wilbur had tried hard to look like some pig. When Charlotte’s web said TERRIFIC, Wilbur had tried to look terrific. And now that web said RADIANT, he did everything possible to make himself glow.

And then at the county fair, under the gold letters that said ZUCKERMAN’S FAMOUS PIG, the last word on the web, as collected by the rat Templeton from a newspaper clipping, has to the best one of all because it will be Charlotte’s last in life, and secondary to her greatest achievement, which is the creation of her egg sac of 514 babies.

HUMBLE, “has two meanings. It means ‘not proud’ and it means ‘near the ground.’ That’s Wilbur all over. He’s not proud and he’s near the ground.”

Wilbur is a Bronze medal winner (sadly he can’t compete with “big”).

After the fair, Charlotte quietly dies. “Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.”

But the humble pig knows and remembers that the show was never about him.

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So Charlotte’s Web is less a story about a pig than a writer spider who abuses flies to survive, and Animal Farm features a farm taken over by its pigs, who with increasing power come to more closely resemble humans in the worst possible ways.

In the perceived hierarchy of animals on the Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945), pigs are highest for their intelligence, next dogs.

Major is something of a founding pig, father of over 400 children, who on the farther reaches of his life has a vision of a new world order for the farm animals. His key words, were Charlotte around to web them, might be “majestic”, “wise,” “benevolent.”

But also you could use words like “revolutionary,” “rebel.” His sermon: the nature of life is work, misery, and you die. He wants to break the cycle. The underlying element to extricate: Man.

Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. A1most overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion!

Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

Major dies and next-in-line pigs Snowball and Napoleon pick up the cause vs. Mr. Jones the farm owner. They teach themselves to read and write, the chain of command measured by education.

They develop a system of thought called Animalism, Manor Farm becomes Animal Farm, and they follow these new

SEVEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal

Their song is “Beasts of England” and their and mantra “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.”

In time, classes emerge of workers and bosses.

They build windmills nonstop (see: Chasing Windmills) and blame Snowball (see: Scapegoat) for the first destruction (by storm!) of the plans that Napoleon had once urinated on. It takes two years to build the next windmill attempt (which dies by explosion). The third attempt at windmill kills Boxer horse from the effort.

Another built at last, and they want for more.

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer-except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work, after their fashion. There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the supervision and organisation of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand. For example, Squealer told them that the pigs had to expend enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called “files,” “reports,” “minutes,” and “memoranda.” These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace. This was of the highest importance for the welfare of the farm, Squealer said. But still, neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour; and there were very many of them, and their appetites were always good.

The work of the management, the dreadful paperwork, and before you know it:

A new expression is born, “Four legs good, two legs better.”

And the commandments morph as needed, or fall away altogether.

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

In the end you have the former oppressor humans and pigs their former slaves, together at the table, playing cards, bickering like siblings.

But they had not gone twenty yards when they stopped short. An uproar of voices was coming from the farmhouse. They rushed back and looked through the window again. Yes, a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials. The source of the trouble appeared to be that Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously. Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Nature can be ugly, man can be uglier. When our inner beast comes out and runs amok on an island, it’s very troubling to say the least.

“Kill the pig,” writes Jack in the sand, the one who becomes the most vicious little human of the Lord of the Flies series.

But it’s the pig who knows better, who knows the heart of darkness lies within and connects them all. It’s the rotten boar’s head in Lord of the Flies (the titular character actually), who speaks the subtext out loud (or loud enough for intuitive “batty” Simon to hear). The head says in the book version:

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The precarious construction of the Underworld looks something like this according to classic artists who try to envision the depths of suffering based on words from writers like Dante:

Take this upward funnel and revert it and you have this sort of sandcastle below known as Babel. When we hear the word Babel we think of precarious, like a leaning tower of Pisa, but, you have to admit—compared to Hell—this version looks quite stable:

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Babel is something of a Ziggurat, or a temple in the form “of a terraced compound of successively receding stories or levels,” which seems like sounder construction to me.

But other artists like oft-goofy Brueghel take the mythic tower to the wobbly extremes originally intended:

The story of Babel—though the word Babel doesn’t actually appear in the Bible—is in the book of Genesis and, as a generic if awful tower, is meant to explain the origin of different languages and cultures. A wobbly construction of competing words.

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia), where they agree to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh, observing these efforts and remarking on humanity’s power in unity, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other and scatters them around the world, leaving the city unfinished.

The confusion of tongues (Latin: confusio linguarum) resulting from the construction of the Tower of Babel accounts for the fragmentation of human languages: God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood and so God brought into existence multiple languages, rendering humanity unable to understand each other.

Biblical things that make you go hmmm. God didn’t like humans thriving (building cohesive towers) or surviving (avoiding flood) or communicating clearly? Lessons I derive from this to apply to our own whack times: human leaders should not try to erect structures competing in size with their egos because they are too dumb to understand history, language and culture.

Give me confusio linguarum any day over whatever garbled tongue this man speaks:

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Since I came upon the Library of Babel newsletter on Substack, I’ve sort of applied this term to a short book I just finished reading, a wild rant of a novella published in 2022 by Storybook ND, called Spadework for a Palace by Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, translated by John Batki, and handed to me by a friend.

Verses my previous musings on if “bad” men have any consciousness about their badness, this book is 100 percent consciousness. Stream of consciousness in the flood (as we might try to build above), the subtitle is “Entering the Madness of Others,” with a epigram: “Reality is no obstacle.” Our protagonist is a library clerk, bored and distracted with his endless notebook entries where he articulates his obsession with his namesake, Herman Melville; dreams of constructing a library of books that just exists inaccessible to anyone with no entrance; contemplates art and architecture from his immersed angle; and meanwhile provides hints in the foreground of his life unraveling (wife leaving him, job ejecting him, now he’s in a mental ward).

On art:

The madman attempts to plunge the depths of fathoming where he is/what’s it about underneath in a way that only certain artists even begin to broach. A rare moment where the author takes a breath and uses punctuation and white space is when he’s really making a point or quoting someone special:

WHERE ARE WE.

I’m not sure whether all this is now sufficiently clear.

That we are in Manhattan.

And that Manhattan lies on top of a rock.

And this rock is a giant whose size, mass and weight bring about the most intricate interconnectedness between us and the monumental forces of nature.

And the present-day and, I am sorry to have to write, the future prevailing situation in Manhattan hides this interconnectedness.

And that it is the architecture of Manhattan that hides it.

And that the architecture that took shape in modern cities hides our exciting connectedness to the question of WHERE ARE WE.

More about this rock, this artifice of Manhattan:

So that in fact here in Manhattan we have nothing to do with the Earth we live on, and therefore have nothing to do with reality, that is to say everything is covered up, reality is covered up, and an artist’s or a philosopher’s task is to demonstrate the plain structure of the relationship that may restore the connectedness between the Earth and humans.

Around this rock, there is ocean, and what’s way down there? This odd little book’s Melville fixation makes me really want to take up the quest again of reading the giant Moby Dick, which I actually loved in college for its moments of tantalizing weirdness (memorably Queequeg and Ishmael in bed, for instance).

And these tantalizing Ahab attempts of trying to get to the real meat of the matter, as the author quotes here:

Ahab addressing the severed head of the whale, as Hamlet addressed the skull, here it is,

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which though ungarnished with a beard, yet there and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secrete thing that is in thee. Of all divers, though hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful waterland, there was they most familiar home.”

And so from this frigate earth, I present you this week with these somewhat nonsensical Babel babblings of minor non sequiturs, because I like words, meaning, and exploring the impossible depths. These are worthy subworldly missions. To chase the great white whale or circuit the dark side of the Moon or diagram the rings of Hell or ponder the absurdity of such structured Manhattan. Our President, star of this wayward reality show that is killing us all, and only crazy in the worst ways, has torn up the East Wing and aims to build a monumental arch for the country’s 250th anniversary (or rather for himself) that would dwarf other structures with its 250 feet (vs. 99-foot Lincoln, 164-foot Arc de Triomphe) and celebrate not these wonders but rather the demise of democracy.

As I hope even his most ardent (former?) fans are realizing, he is not here to build but destroy, so let’s let our batty author of The Palace riff on that a bit:

Destruction is going on every single moment, and the astounding meaning of Woods’s message is that the whole works, the entire workings of the universal is destruction and annihilation, devastation and ruination, how on earth can I say this right, in other words there is no dichotomy at work here, no such thing exists, it is imbecilic to talk about antithetical forces, two opposed sides, a reality describable in terms of mutually complementary concepts, silly to talk about good and evil, because all is evil, or nothing is, for total reality can only be seen as continual destruction, permanent catastrophe, reality is catastrophe, that is what we inhabit, from the most miniscule subatomic particle to the greatest planetary dimensions, everything, do you understand, and again I am not addressing anyone in particular, everything plays the roles of both perpetrator and victim in this drama of inevitable catastrophe, therefore we simply cannot do otherwise than acknowledge this, and deal with the makeup of destruction, for instance the enormous forces that are shaping our Earth at every moment, we must confront the fact of war on Earth, because there is war in the Universe, and here comes Melville again with his brutal notion, that there is all of this and God is nowhere, that benevolent God the creator and judge is nowhere to be found, but instead we have Satan, and nothing but Satan, do you understand?!

Comprenez-vous? Some nonsense makes a ton of sense. If good literature can teach us anything: choose your madman wisely.

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We women aren’t doing well these days, if you can imagine and want to bother asking. Wait—brief clickbait bombardment interlude while we pause from the earth-burning to witness the plastic bodies stuffed into these absurd dresses for the Met Gala at $100K a pop for the sake of the Bezos—yay!

But then today I got a voicemail from my mom wishing me a happy Mother’s Day forthcoming (instead of the other way around as I should be calling her), and I’m planning on vending some homemade things during an outdoor holiday market with only one willing daughter, and the Town Hall custodian wished me a fine you-know-whatsit, and then I couldn’t avoid this anymore. I like to try to be timely here after all.

How do we pretend to celebrate this Mother’s Day when we all feel so tragically Motherless? So very lost, rudderless. Angry, betrayed, disappointed, and confused. Why would they call that website “Motherless?” How in the upside-down world—where an Epstein-filed disgrace like Trump is still our President—does any of this lunacy make sense?

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I came upon this essay on Substack, What Happens When the World Is Motherless, that moved me enough to share with my forever friend Dana, who responded, “The fact that a pornographic website is called motherless is deeply fucked,” and “the world feels very fraught.” Indeed on both counts. Of course I’m preaching to the choir with Dana of the fem-lit, so I also shared with my (new!) boyfriend, whom I very much appreciate for appreciating the magnitude of the missive.

Elayne Kalila renders this fucked fraught world with staggering line breaks that rocked me (and offered some room to breathe in between her ripping prose):

I am sitting at my kitchen table reading the CNN article.

I have my tea next to me. The morning is ordinary. The light is coming in the way it always comes in. And I am reading a sentence about men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before they rape them.

I read it once and my brain stops and refuses to let it in.

I read it again.

Then I hear myself say it out loud, because that is the only way the words are going to land in my body.

“The website is called Motherless.”

And when I hear my own voice say it, something tears open. The horror moves through me in a wave that starts in my chest and keeps going. I am shaking. My hand is over my mouth. I hear myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen.

What the fuck.

What the actual fuck.

What can possibly be next.

The f word is more frequent these days, you may have noticed. The word of our age. Our state of mind and body and dis-united states. The word you might use to describe drugging and raping your partner. As the author notes, this comes on top of The Files, the SAVE Act, the death of Roe vs. Wade. I’d swear to God if I thought there was one.

All other atrocities aside in this story, why in the whack world re: the Motherless part specifically? Why would a website showing videos of men doing this to the women they supposedly love, the mother of their children, be called that?

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Kalila continues, unable to begin answering the question without setting the scene first on the site:

Motherless.com. Sixty-two million visits in February alone. Twenty thousand videos of what the men on the site call “sleep content.” Tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In those videos a man lifts the closed eyelid of his drugged wife on camera, to prove she is fully under, before he films what he does to her.

A Telegram group linked straight off the site. About a thousand men strong. They trade dosages the way other men trade fantasy football tips.

Bottles of tasteless liquid for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pop, shipped anywhere in the world.

Livestreams of assault at twenty dollars a viewer. Crypto preferred.

This is not the dark web. This is the indexed, legal, ad-supported internet. This site had more monthly traffic than most newspapers. And the name at the top of the masthead is Motherless.

She expands the site name to define how we all feel now in our age of fierce, if often somewhat forced, independence:

You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.

When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.

When you cry you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.

Your body has been braced since you were a small girl and you do not remember what unbraced feels like. Your shoulders are up near your ears right now. Drop them. Feel how fast they come back up.

You learned to mother yourself before you were out of primary school because there was not enough to go around, and you have been doing it ever since, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

Widen the scope more, and we take this subject to a social framework. Our isolation, in this era of epidemic loneliness filled only with dopamine hits from our phone pings. “Motherless” means we lack more than transactional encounters. Take this further to the cultural, policy, political level and:

Birth is a medical emergency managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Death is a medical failure managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Menopause is a deficiency to be corrected.

Menstruation is a hygiene problem.

Aging is a cosmetic crisis.

The wisdom of a woman at seventy is worth less, socially and economically, than the smoothness of a woman at twenty five.

There is no cultural container for grief that lasts longer than a funeral.

We call a woman hysterical when she is telling the truth and composed when she has learned to swallow it.

The word crone, which once meant keeper of the deepest wisdom, is now used as an insult.

Your local high street has three nail bars and zero elders.

Dana’s Substack, by the way is called Future Crone, which she means in the best way. On the Archetypal level, the essay continues, we’ve lost the goddess mother, “who for tens of thousands of years was the central image of the sacred.” Now we have only this very male “God” and his God-made-fleshy son. What have we lost? Or hidden? Or killed?

Spiritually, where we used to be very populated, we now too stand alone, as Kalila writes,

I am grateful for this Kalila, able to articulate what I couldn’t find the words for right now. So I’m heavy this week on the quotes but sometimes it’s nice to just steep in this mother-wisdom, let it sink in, and share.

I am writing this list long on purpose, my love. I want you to feel the length of the severing. Ten thousand years of pulling the Mother out of everything. Two thousand years of putting her to death every time she tried to return. And here we are, arriving at the inevitable end of that arithmetic, and we are shocked that men built a website called Motherless and sixty two million people visited it in a month.

Motherless.com is the logical outcome. It is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough. The men there were not imported from some other world. They are our world. They are our sons and our husbands and our fathers and the man who delivered your package yesterday. Some of them are us on a different timeline.

Of course this is where it ends. Where else could it end?

For me, it won’t end here but become, of course, my favorite thing, perhaps a three-part series. I am pending the arrival of Motherless Brooklyn to read from the library (a book about hoodlums who are fatherless too), and will explore my own feelings of disconnect with my own origins more personally after this awkward “holiday.” Until then, let’s try to re-mother each other.

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Now, we’ve advanced past vices of that type. Where our youth used to be dumb in a drunk way, now they are surprisingly sober but superficial and socially inept. I remember being in NYC and hearing about a teen who died retrieving her dropped cell phone from the subway tracks, not to mention the kids who ride the rails for the sake of the selfie.

Death by Selfie, I wrote about here before, but how about pondering death by the phone itself. We used to worry that the radio waves collected by phones might give us brain tumors. I think that’s the least of our concerns. Now it’s death by distraction. Death by delusion. Death by dissociation. Death by device, by design.

Or just by walking into traffic because you’re too busy texting and get hit by a bus.

Or imagine losing your toddler to a kidnapper because you were on your phone and didn’t notice when your precious progeny got snapped up by the one bad but opportunistic stranger in the crowd.

If you were a bad egg in a creeper van, you might have a grand time taking advantage of all these innumerable distracted gaps and loading loitering humans pell-mell into your sliding door.

We know about Distracted Driving (number one cause of death for teens the US, according to NHTSA study). Distractions can be categorized as visual, manual, and cognitive. Using your phone for texting can hit the sweet spot of all three, looking at it, typing, and thinking.

According to Whitley Law Firm, personal injury lawyers, “When an accident occurs, one of the first reactions by officers is to determine if a distracted driver was the cause of the accident.” As you can imagine, they often are. Anecdotally I’m hearing about friends lately getting tickets for this, even when they swore they weren’t using their phones behind the wheel. Now that the bluetooth is biting into any possible free airspace we have, it’s a fuzzy line. I for one am glad they are more aggressively policing this.

From the National Transportation Safety Board some recent data:

• ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Using a cell phone while driving, even hands-free use, is dangerous to yourself and others. Cell phone distraction increases risk because you take your eyes off the road (visual distraction), your hands off the wheel (manual distraction), and your attention off the driving task (cognitive distraction).

• Drivers who text are more than twice as likely to be involved in a crash than drivers who are not distracted.

• In 2023, 64,979 crashes involved cell phone use while driving, and 397 people died in crashes where at least one driver was using a cell phone. These crashes and deaths are preventable.

• Texting while driving is prohibited in all states except Montana. Using a handheld cell phone while driving is prohibited in 31 states (some exceptions exist for navigation tasks). In addition, many states prohibit cell phone use of any kind by novice drivers, teen drivers, and school bus drivers.​

I’ve negated this problem altogether, and any temptation, by completely excising the phone from one aspect of my life and replacing with money. Installing the SafePilot app on my phone through my USAA car insurance program (other companies have their own native apps), means it’s monitoring my (car) movements at all times, vis a vis cell phone use, and I get a substantial discount of my insurance rate (up to 30%) when I interact with my phone zero times while driving. The base discount just for having the app in use at all is 10% with higher possible discounts based on your stellar driving score. The score gives you demerits for any cell phone use (only exception: I can activate a podcast or a music app before I take off, as long as I press no further buttons en route; weirdly the same is not true for conversations I start before driving—not allowed). “Harsh” breaking incidents get you demerits, which only sucks when it’s a family of bears about to cross the road right in front of you (or more typically in these parts: geese) and you really have no choice but to pause. I’m in such a habit now of consciousness of this app and its strict rules, that it does take me a moment to realize I really needed to brake for these animals.

That braking glitch aside, I love living by this new policy of zero phone use in the car and am glad I can give a example for once to my kids. Remove phone, regain freedom. The car has become a phone-free zone, so I try—try—to get them to do the same when we’re road tripping. Look up! Look out! Let’s talk about something real or loudly sing a song. But the fact is I have to ask their phones to look up an answer to a question we may have en route.

I’ve also (mostly) successfully extricated the phone from my bedtime, lest I die of not enough sleep for which, as I’ve written here, many of us can blame that blasted blue light.

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We know that drivers texting is a problem, but what about the jaywalkers (paired with the traffic of distracted drivers) in a place like NYC. You’d think there’d be dead bodies all over the crosswalks. Surprisingly, in a NYC.gov report from 2019, people are pedestrianing better than I imagined:

Despite the increasing attention to device use and pedestrian distraction, the available national or New York City fatality data do not support a strong connection to fatalities. Data from the United States’ National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2 suggests that portable electronic device use by pedestrians occurred in only a small fraction of pedestrian fatalities (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2010-2015). According to the last six years of available national data, fatalities involving the use of portable electronic devices by pedestrians ranged from one to twelve per year, representing 0% to 0.2% of pedestrian traffic fatalities.

Still that’s up to 12 deaths which is not nothing! And in terms of injuries,

Using emergency room data from 1,075 pedestrian injuries (2008 – 2011), researchers at Bellevue Hospital found that 7.7% of admitted pedestrians were using an electronic device at the time of the crash.

Office of Compliance data from back when we were younger and phones fresher in the year 2010 and the risk of usage might even involve sewage:

Several recent cases confirm the hazards associated with walking while texting, talking on cell phones, or listening to mobile devices. A teenage girl in New York City fell six feet through an open manhole while texting. She sustained minor injuries but was exposed to raw sewage. A Florida teen was not so fortunate; he died from injuries received when he stepped into the path of oncoming cars as he crossed a busy city street while texting. A university exchange student stepped into the path of a bus while jogging and listening to an Ipod in North Carolina. A man sustained a broken finger when he tripped and fell while talking on his cell phone. It is worth noting that at least three people in the Washington D.C. area have died in accidents this past year while wearing headphones. As these few examples indicate, walking while using electronic devices has become a common hazard that needs to be addressed. The American College of Emergency Physicians has issued a warning that texting while walking, driving, biking, or rollerblading can result in serious injury or even death.

Cell phones, texting and even just wearing headphones cause hazardous inattention to your surroundings, lack of situational awareness, eyes taken off the path of travel, and noise-induced hearing loss. (Also I just tell my kids to please not walk around all the time with headphones because: obnoxious).

Here’s a freaky video of the greatest worst hits of people risking death to retrieve their beloved phone, via the Adventures Gone Wrong channel:

A catalogue of awful stories of folks tossing caution to save a phone, in short summary:

• Australian teen, phone fell between two huge boulders, tried to reach it and fell head-first into crevice. Truly stuck and had no cell service to call for help. Seven hours upside down while rescuers removed boulders. Sustained injuries.

• 2022, Washington’s Olympic National Forest, woman in mid-40s using the outhouse, phone slipped out of pocket into dark stinky depths. Took toilet apart, attempted to fish out with dog leash. Leaned in with leash to support herself. Head first into crapper (a la that shitty scene in Slumdog Millionaire). Stuck in least pleasant place imaginable on earth. Did find phone and made a call for help. Fortunate not to be overcome by toxic gas or injured. Embarrassed and left after.

• Mount Vesuvius which wiped out Roman cities in 79 AD, quiet since 1944 with last major event 1631. Man and his family, he tried to take selfie and dropped phone in crater. Climbed into volcano crater with unstable slope. Slipped into ash. Stopped on ledge. If any further, it would mean plunge of 1,000 feet. Volcano guides lowered rope 50 feet to pull him out. He hadn’t bought tickets so cited for trespassing in restricted area and putting himself and rescuers at risk.

• 2023, Australia, video call between 23-year-old hairdresser and her boyfriend, she slipped onto balcony below. Tried to go down and reach neighbor, no one home. Leaned over and tried to grab railing to climb down, slipped and fell seven stories into upright glass pane. Severe injuries, right leg paralyzed. Phones are replaceable, she said!

• One death one: 2019, Chicago, phone dropped onto tracks, mom of three. Struck by train. Didn’t make it to ladder to climb up. Driver not paying attention.

And a moment of phew (depending on your perspective) from fairly recent news, as cited in the NYTimes:

Sept, 2025, a Spirit Airlines pilot was told by air traffic control to veer 20 degrees right to avoid running into Air Force One on its way to the British Royal visit. “Pay attention, get off the iPad.” A massive near miss you may have missed?

“Get off the iPad” is a scolding you might expect to hear directed at a child on a flight — not at the pilot flying the plane.

But that stern directive was issued by an air traffic controller who repeatedly warned the pilot of a Spirit Airlines flight on Tuesday morning that the commercial plane was flying too close to Air Force One, which was transporting President Trump to the United Kingdom.

The air traffic controller went on to tell the pilot, “I’m sure you can see who it is” and “Keep an eye out for him. He’s white and blue,” referring to the exterior colors of the president’s aircraft.

“Safety is always our top priority,” the spokesman said.

It was not clear whether the Spirit Airlines pilot was using an iPad while flying the plane, although pilots are permitted to use portable electronic devices to display aviation data like navigation charts, checklists and operating handbooks.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

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At first my kids and I grabbed the low-hanging fruit. Collect 200 points without even leaving the introvert house just by answering some questions about why is the Hudson River often brown (it’s just silt stirred up from being tidal and having weather, not the pollution, so jump in!). Then easy actions like unplugging the energy vampires in your house (and after watching What We Do in the Shadows, I find an energy vampire hilarious but not on my electric bill.) Then, the 400 tier points become 600 once you start venturing out with the further crew recruitment of a new boyfriend. (I wonder how many couples have bonded over these hunting excursions; perhaps there will be some flower crowns for us at the end). First around the block—find the pollinator garden, plant some seeds, compost—and then further afield and more verbose. Donate to the food drive in Hastings, hike in Ardsley, thrift in Irvington, speak to a shopkeeper about his cheese in Dobbs. I’ve been now, at a rapid rate, to more preserves within mere miles than I knew existed, discovered Mom’s organic market has food refilling stations, learned there’s a collapsed cave dedicated to someone named Kate in a Glenville park, and poked around the back corners of weird Public Works outposts to recycle my e-waste. Current conditions: points accrued 36,200; 68 missions achieved; 4th place!

The more I rack up points, the less I can stop. It occurs to me while I spend about an hour a day driving to various spots around the series of Rivertowns all strung along that beautifully brackish Hudson coast like pearls, that this is not an activity for the faint of gas. I am grateful as usual that I have an EV and can proudly do these journeys for free or next to nothing. What’s the carbon footprint of all the Earth scavengers scouring the villages of their earthy treasures in their oil-based automobiles? Can we offer more points for the carpoolers, the trainbound, the pedestrians, the bikers, the bus riders? (There are two missions to get on a bus and a bike).

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This hell or highwater Age of Hormuz is a fine time for me to re-sound the original alarms for which I once started this Substack. I began here to share my off-gassing mission. An insane scavenger hunt of sorts where I ripped out perfectly good infrastructure from my house and started over with 100 percent electricity and a mad goal of reaching net zero someday—gathering an incredibly rapid boil induction stove from someone’s house on Long Island; turning my discarded gas lines into a pipe tree, as you do; installing heat pumps with a willy nilly nexus of new silver ductwork worthy of the tent camp in ET. The old fat-bottomed Tesla named Katinka became important to this equation once I realized you can find certain used models (like Model S’s predating 2016) that may be grandfathered in with free unlimited supercharging at Tesla stations for the life of the car no matter the owner, and free data to boot.) Finally, came the solar panels, essential last piece to this scenario, which I have yet to write about but when I do it will be accompanied by Lorde’s sunny “Solar Power” song.

There’s no time like now in the world’s circling of the eco-drain to jump on the off-gassing track. Eco as in both ecology and economics, as we should heed both the science and the math. This should be a mission for which you can score 100,000 points in the scavenger app, and Pass Go by not paying $4.29 (current price per gallon at my local gas pump). Instead of freaking out about Dementia Don starting an oil war in the Middle East (and making things way worse), take this as an opportunity to make the switch and begin to choose to live in a place (for now, your home) where none of this matters.

According to many a recent study and this article on Natural History Museum, getting to net zero “is cheaper and greener than continuing the use of fossil fuels.” Net zero dreams are good for your wallet and make sound economic sense for the world.

A rapid transition to net zero could save $12 trillion in the coming decades.

With renewable technologies likely to become cheaper than fossil fuels within a decade, switching now will allow the world to have a greener and cheaper future.

Going green is no longer just the smart decision—it’s also the most profitable one.

A team of researchers from Oxford University predict that a rapid transition to green energy sources such as wind and solar power could save anywhere between $5 to $15 trillion compared to taking no action.

This forecast held true in 80% of scenarios modelled by the team and could save even more money if green technology continues to improve.

Professor Doyne Farmer, who co-authored a paper detailing the findings, says, ‘There is a pervasive misconception that switching to clean, green energy will be painful, costly and mean sacrifices for us all—but that’s just wrong.’

‘Renewable costs have been trending down for decades and are already cheaper than fossil fuels in many situations. Our research shows they will become cheaper than fossil fuels across almost all applications in the years to come and if we accelerate the transition, they will become cheaper faster.’

‘Completely replacing fossil fuels with clean energy by 2050 will save us trillions.’

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And if you look at what’s playing out in the bendy Strait, opting out of fossil-fueled energy is a smart move for our safety, says a business reporter for Yahoo! Finance.

The global push to move away from oil and gas has long been framed as a response to the effects of climate change and the need to take care of the planet. But a widening group of strategists, analysts, and industry participants argue that the transition is being reshaped by a different, more immediate driver: energy security.

The disruption to global energy markets tied to the war in Iran and escalating attacks on infrastructure in the Middle East has sharpened concerns about the vulnerability of fossil fuel supply chains, prompting renewed debate about how countries can reduce reliance on imported hydrocarbons.

“One of the predictions you can make out of what’s happening is that it’s going to turbocharge the energy transition,” Jeff Currie, chief strategy officer of energy pathways at Carlyle, said at CERAWeek by S&P Global, a major energy industry conference, last week.

“The energy transition never had anything to do with climate change ... Security was always paramount.”

Oh well, sigh me and Greta Thunberg who wish people would be compelled enough just by the death-of-earth part, I guess we’ll take progress in whatever form it comes in. Money and security, so be it, as long as these factors really finally motivate.

Back to the more important work of my weekend scavenging. Only days to go until this all ends on May 4. The world? No, the hunt. Mission: Save the Planet—what’s the runner up gift basket for that? Happening upon random rusty metal cart with tires and no gas tank in the bird-infused forest, 600 points.

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On my recent family trek around Nordica, my girl-teens and I came upon a gaggle of them—what would you call a group of Furries when they hail from all sorts of species?—in Sweden. At first someone with an animal head, fox I believe, came past us in a sweet little cobblestone alley surrounded by Shakespearian Tudor, in our chilly wanderings of Malmö. Then there were others—wolf, bear, oh my—gathering near the main train station. One of them, bare headed for now, had a Brooklyn sweatshirt and seemed like a normal human man who of course my kids were embarrassed I started to talk to. He told me they were here for the convention of course; his friend under the mask from Ireland I believe, and he from Boston. From there we’d depart over the 10-mile bridge back to Copenhagen, and here in a different country, these friendly furries seemed to follow. A whole parade of them was approaching us as we wandered the river’s edge trying to chip our way through the icy air to reach the little iconic Mermaid. Sadly, the video I captured of them all, eagerly waving with their big paws as they marched past, didn’t make it home. Perhaps deleted by my dread teen censors, I’ll never know. Encounter dozens of chubby walking teddy bears and it’s me the mother they find embarrassing, go figure.

The furries are even after my cohorts. A friend attending his astronomer conference in the western desert reported back that they were there too, sharing his hotel elevator in Phoenix. Did he saddle up to any at the bar and get some hairy tea? Unfortunately he had nothing more to report.

Furries, because they gravitate to where the wild things are, are even sometimes spotted at Mar-a-Lago.

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“Why is this Party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Giving Furry Vibes?” asked Mathew Rodriguez on Jan 15, 2026, on Them.us. The answer: because it is.

Let them eat kibble.

A fundraiser held at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort that featured people in dog masks and aristocratic attire has been criticized for both its allusions to gilded decadence and its furry-like atmosphere.

The Hero Dog Awards Gala, a fundraiser for dogs that work with law enforcement, included cocktails, dinner, and professional dancers; it was these paid dancers who wore the dog masks and swanky clothes.

Footage from the event, which took place on Friday, went viral on social media throughout the week. The clips featured dancers wearing masks representing various dog breeds engaged in 18th century-style dancing, clad in gowns and tailcoats.

Not only do faux-fancy upright canines in suits remind me of the characters in my friend’s excellent cult classic fiction Monster Dogs, but they also speak to these odd (shall we say again say hypocritical) cosplaying tendencies of the right wing in this oddest of moments. Why do we always find so much unbelievable weirdness in the closets of the most vehement so-called Christians? Why is the faux-mourning Erika Kirk wearing glitter pantsuits surrounded by fireworks? So many contradictions when you can’t decipher smile from lies in a MAGA-surgery face. For all of Kristi Noem’s costuming, we now have the counter-costume of her husband with his balloon-laden tee-shirts. Everyone so painfully masked.

Yet despite hiring them for their entertainment, furries in particular have long been yet another thing that causes unfounded fury in the right wing.

Furries have often been used as an anti-trans scapegoat among right wing circles. In Texas, Republicans even introduced legislation to ban people identifying as animals in schools, despite that not actually happening.

Though some mistakenly seemed to think actual furries were at play during this event, others raised criticism about the tone deaf nature of the Aristocratic stylings as some experts say we are currently living in a new Gilded Age.

“This is some weird ass dystopian shit,” liberal commentator Vince Wilson said on X.

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Curious to experience some weird ass dystopian shit for yourself? Or just get a soft hug from a somewhat familiar friend you may recognize from some demented Disney dream gone wrong? You can find a FurryCon near you here in this worldwide convention tracker. Looks like the one my family bumped into, NordicFuzzCon in Feb 2026, happened to overlap with our time in Sweden and leak into nearby Copenhagen just for fun.

NordicFuzzCon made its debut in 2013, with over 170 attendees from more than 10 different countries. In 2026, the convention welcomed 5,957 attendees from more than 66 countries, making NordicFuzzCon one of the largest international furry conventions in Europe.

These human-animal hybrid gatherings are getting ever more popular. Is it because the internet makes everything more popular, that the world is more accepting, that people require in these dire times more fur and costuming? Yes x3!

What happens at a furry convention? From the latest (freezing) FuzzCon,

NordicFuzzCon is an annual event taking place in Sweden. It is aimed at members of the international furry community—people with an interest in animals with human characteristics, such as Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck—but all are welcome to attend.

At the convention, we offer many different activities, including dances with live DJ sets, panels on art and costume-wearing, organised tabletop and video gaming, and much more! While we can’t guarantee you a good time, we do our utmost to offer the most scrumptious smörgåsbord of entertainment this side of the fjord.

It wouldn’t be Sweden without some smörgåsbord. More of this anime buffet from their About Furries page:

Furries are fans of anthropomorphic animals. An anthropomorphic animal is an animal with human-like characteristics. This includes many classic cartoon and comic book characters, such as Donald Duck, the Moomin, and Sweden’s very own Bamse. Anthropomorphic animals are a part of our everyday lives, and they have been a part of human culture for thousands of years from the Egyptian god Anubis to werewolves in folklore.

Most furries have a personal species. This is a species they identify with, and which they will use as an avatar online and in the real world. Some choose more fantastical creatures as their personal avatars, including dragons and unicorns, or even impossible cross-breeds such as folfs (fox combined with wolf). These become personal characters, often with some added distinguishing characteristics like clothing accessories or colourful fur patterns, and they are usually referred to as their fursona.

It is common for furries to get artwork made of their fursonas, and some even get complete costumes made based on these anthropomorphic avatars. These animal costumes are commonly referred to as fursuits.

Over the last decades, furry has become its own thriving international fandom. Every year, there are dozens of furry conventions all over the world. At these conventions, furries meet to create and sell art, dress up and cosplay as their fursonas, dance, and generally have a good time. Often, conventions will collect and donate money to animal-related charities as well.

A Bamse! A folf! I think we met those! Fursuits, fursonas. I just love hobbies that come with their own dictionaries.

For more answers to my many questions, I knew I’d find a niche for this in my beloved Reddit. Someone is always articulating what I want to, such as: “What’s up with furry conventions?” Is this sexual, innocent, everything in between? Yes, whatever you want.

People join the furry fandom for different reasons. It has a very high group of Neurodivergent people, so a lot of people gravitate toward it because of people like them. Some people (like myself) just like furries as a design, would never suit. Some people like being able to put on a mask (well, head, literally), to be someone they can’t be out of suit.

It’s been popular for decades, but it’s gotten more mainstream attention since the internet became mainstream.

Fursuits are usually toony because they would be in uncanny valley and less cute if realistic. There are also only a handful of top quality suit makers, and they each have their own styles. A suit costs several thousand dollars, it can be $500+ for just a partial (a head, feet, hands, and a tail), depending on the complexity of the character. It’s very specialized with little competition. I guarantee you if you go to a con, most people with suits will have gotten them from the same maker(s) because if you spend that kind of money, you want to make sure you’re getting good quality, and they’re usually like super high quality like your usual professional sports mascot costumes.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

_Samuel Johnson from Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale (1809)

What’s a profile of your typical furry, if there’s such a thing here as typical? Writes Hal Herzog, Ph.D., in Psychology Today:

Demographically, the furry fandom is comprised predominantly of white males in their teens to mid-twenties. For the most part, they represent what you would expect to find in a typical geek or nerd subculture: Above-average school performance (nearly half are college students), an interest in computers and science, and a passion for video games, science fiction, fantasy, and anime. Less typical, however, is the fandom’s LGBTQ demographics: Furries are seven times more likely than the general population to identify as transgender and about five times more likely to identify as non-heterosexual. Given this composition, it should come as no surprise that the furry fandom is a community defined in no small part by its inclusivity. This fandom embraces the norms of being welcoming and non-judgmental to all.

This author says furries are rarely, if ever, sexualizing these costumed activities. He doesn’t mention neurodiversity though the profile he outlines above seem to fit it. FurScience posits autism and furries definitely have a connection:

Many people on the autism spectrum thus become overwhelmed in highly stimulating, chaotic environments, and may seek quiet, order, or routine as a refuge. People diagnosed with autism also tend to have a range of differences in the ways their brains process information: for example, some have difficulty recognizing faces; some process verbal or auditory information more slowly; some are extremely sensitive to visual patterns. People on the autism spectrum often have difficulty displaying and interpreting nonverbal social cues, such as body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions, and may have trouble with non-literal social communications such as sarcasm. As a result, many have a harder time forming and maintaining social relationships, and may struggle to navigate school, get and keep a job, and find their place in a wider social community. Social isolation poses a significant threat to their quality of life.

While people on the autism spectrum often struggle to find a place where they belong, some find community, connection and friendship in creative cultures that are organized around shared interests. The furry fandom is one example. According to survey data from our research team, 10–15% of furries self-identify as being on the autism spectrum—a number that includes those who are formally diagnosed with autism, those who feel that they are on the spectrum despite not having been formally diagnosed, and those who are unsure whether they agree with the autism diagnosis they have received. For many of them, the furry fandom provides an important source of social connection, support, and fun.

I posited the theory in recent weeks that lighter eyes can be harder for the neurodivergent to make contact with when they somehow make the observer feel more exposed. Any eye contact no matter the eye color can be harder. It makes sense that a mask—and a friendly furry animal one at that—is best.

When I look back at the family history and my kids photos through the years, you’d think they were furries. The way the two piled in together to wear one oversized giraffe costume as their pandemic PPE for a few years around the house; how we took a friend along for their trio of full-animal gear to a birthday visit to a petting farm (kangaroo, elephant, giraffe). But we had to add an edge of menace to them. Our furries, not entirely comfy, came with Halloween-appropriate teeth. And my daughter’s exposed elephant eyes are clearly up to no good.

What’s the species of your inner animal? Does it want to come out? May we all be a little furrier.

I could get into this. I wonder what sort of cross-breed might suit best for the office?

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I would like to sue for damages.

This week took the cake. And let it get trampled by photo-opp kids on Easter egg roll fake turf, poisoned by the odor of a 1,000 gilded uncapped Sharpies, and shoved down our throats with a chaser of 100-proof “end of civilization as we know it” tweets, until We the Poor People, reeling, had to call 911 for emergency help (i.e. navigate the White House and Capitol switchboards to demand our reps invoke the 25th Amendment).

He is unfit for office! We are all unsafe! I screamed into the voicemails. The nation is traumatized!

Meanwhile, in lovely languishing contrast to this, we have a quartet of beautiful space artists producing their violin-heavy Moon album, full of hugs, tears, poignant messages, otherworldly images of things like the terminator line between lunar day and night, crater-namings, and the best kind of nostalgia that simultaneously takes a leap into imagining a better tomorrow, as we took the last such mission from 1972 and propel it to updated perspective where space travel still matters, science and hope endure, and the future can still happen.

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Without this yin/yang, I might have fallen to my death this week from the pathetic distance of office chair to floor, destroyed by the social media uproar. Contemplating, in the same moments a ship can be named “Integrity,” how the most powerful man on that brilliant marble we inhabit possesses none. At least, thanks to Artemis, we had something in the sky to consider. Something greater than this shitshow.

The ship name came from the crew and was announced at a NASA press conference in Sept. 2025:

The name Integrity embodies the foundation of trust, respect, candor, and humility across the crew and the many engineers, technicians, scientists, planners, and dreamers required for mission success. The name is also a nod to the extensive integrated effort—from the more than 300,000 spacecraft components to the thousands of people across the world—that must come together to venture to the Moon and back, inspire the world, and set course for a long-term presence at the Moon. Integrity is rooted in a shared core value of NASA, the agency’s astronaut office, and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

The definition of integrity come in three parts from Merriam-Webster:

1. firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility

2. an unimpaired condition : soundness

3. the quality or state of being complete or undivided : completeness

Soon after the four astronauts surpassed the 1970 Apollo 13 record for the farthest humans have travelled from earth, they discovered a crater at the boundary between the near and far-side and had another special naming. They wanted to name the feature of the lunar landscape after crewmember Reid Wiseman’s late wife, who died of cancer too young in 2020, after urging him to continue focusing on his dream.

“So at certain times of the Moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth,” Jeremy Hansen said, his voice cracking. “We lost a loved one; her name was Carroll. The spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie.”

The astronauts also saw another crater they asked to be named after their capsule, “Integrity.”

“Integrity and Carroll crater. Loud and clear,” Mission Control responded.

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Ground Control to Major Tom: what we’ve got down here, in the meantime, what we’ve got here is failure to communicate. What do we name this?

Trump is tweeting on his Truth Social, Easter Sunday, before the crack of dawn,

Later Trump, flanked by a bunny and his forgettable wife, talks about war in a moment too surreal for even Donnie Darko:

And they said normally when you’re in very hostile territory—and I don’t think it gets much more hostile than Iran, they’re capable fighters, they’re very tough people and there are others like that—you don’t mind when the enemy is weak but that enemy is strong. Not so strong like they were about a month ago, I can tell you, in fact right now they’re not too strong at all in my opinion, but we’re soon gonna find out, aren’t we?

But then he must have gotten the memo that it’s Christianity’s highest holiday and he’s at an egg roll of all things, so he continues:

Today we have more than 40,000 eggs supplied by all of the great egg farmers that are with us. So if eggs is a big thing and it was a big thing to our great First Lady, who’s here someplace, I think this is our First Lady—what do you think of our First Lady? She’s a movie star.

Dementia Don wanders the lawn to grill reporters on who’s lower IQ, Biden or Kamala. Then he complains to kids about Biden’s use of the autopen. “Who likes the fake news?”

Around the same time, a holiday greeting from space to soothe our souls, from pilot Victor Glover:

The amazing images that keep coming:

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

There are the suspenseful 40 minutes when the moon blocks radio signals and the crew is on the far side, in the blessed silence loud with awe. There are more colors than they’d imagined, more poetry! On April 6 from about 6:45 pm to 7:25 pm. we hold our collective breath.

After emerging from the fly by, more rousing, moony words by Christina Koch:

But then, on the morning of April 7, another terrorizing tweet from our Commander who chooses something altogether sinister.

Is this real life? It can’t be. Perhaps we’re all just trapped in a video game where clicks get billionaires ever more dollars (it’s true). Take me back to that floaty place where sweet scientists talk in lovely tongues.

Victor Glover on the mic again, preaching:

You can’t help but wonder what Glover means by “get through it.” Get through this terrible time, I assume, these manufactured wars, when a country, the whole world really, is being held hostage by a mindless amoral maniac. Where our democracy is on death-watch. You could feel the crew cringing when they had to take his call from the White House after returning from the dark side. He’s still here?

It takes an astronaut to see it clearly. Former astronaut Mark Kelly calls it like it is. He was among the group of congressional Democrats in Nov. 2025 who filmed a video to urge troops to disobey any illegal orders, not to commit war crimes—like the President is calling for in neon highlighter now. From the Guardian:

“I said something that was pretty simple and non-controversial—and that was that members of the military should follow the law,” the Arizona Democratic senator, a former US navy officer and astronaut who flew on four separate space shuttle missions between 2001 and 2011, told MS Now on Monday night.

Kelly then alluded to how the president went on social media to say Kelly and the others had engaged in “seditious behavior, punishable by death”—while also republishing another user’s post containing the phrase “hang them.”

“And in response to that, Donald Trump said I should be executed, I should be hanged, I should be prosecuted,” Kelly said to political talkshow host Rachel Maddow.

He added: “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the constitution.”

MOONSCAPE

What we have here instead in the moonglow is love, sweet love, books and songs.

The phrase, “I love you to the moon and back” originates from the 1994 children’s book Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney. In the story, Little Nutbrown Hare (more bunnies!) tells Big Nutbrown Hare, “I love you up to the moon,” to which Big Nutbrown Hare replies,

After the first moon mission of 1969, with Neil and Buzz of Apollo 11 setting foot on the lunar surface realizing Kennedy’s dream, and a series of flights to follow with the sixth and last in 1972 on Apollo 17 and a three-day visit, the Apollo program ended. But the moon-infused art of the era endured. David Bowie assumes his Ziggy Stardust persona and has a trippy Moonage Daydream in which he’s an alligator, a space invader. The Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon arrives in my birth year 1973, the eighth studio album of the British progressive rock band, which blew my mind in the ‘80s when we played it on my brother’s incredible basement speakers with the subwoofers that rocked the world.

The lyrics and soaring conclusion of “Eclipse,” the 10th and final track, seem to demand inclusion on the playlist for the ages as they encompass everything we can fathom and beyond… Wait, what’s that? Melania issues in a non sequitur press conference that she never had sex with that man (Epstein), and, oh thank goodness, in the next moment, we know that these Gen-X heroes have made it back. Peppermint candy-striped parachutes splashdown in the ocean as planned, the crew emerging one by one, they are safe. Safe and sound, incorruptible, mission complete.

Closing words from Reid Wiseman and then the final song:

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I had another essay ready to go for this week (about Furries, of all things, stay tuned) but then balloon-looney Boob-Gate happened and like many of you I am now hopelessly adrift on distracting inflatables.

What the heck is going on under Kristi Noem’s husband’s stretched tee-shirt? What the actual holy fake-Christian sanctimonious pet-killing cosplaying heck??

It’s the hypocrisy that gets my goat (or a dog named Cricket). I couldn’t care less what her confused sad husband is up to in his free time, but his cock-eyed kinks were hiding supposedly under the surgerized nose of the woman holding the keys to the national secrets and security, the woman who loudly condemns transgender rights and health care, marriage equality, religious liberty, LGBTQ+ programs, drag shows, and—almost just minor marginalia at this point in our wobegon history—doesn’t mind when her agency assassinates an innocent lesbian right there in the face in broad peaceful daylight.

Anyhoo (huffing in my paperbag), it’s the balloons that got a rise out of many of us this week because: what a hoot! the hilarity! the hellfire and hypocrisy! and it all happens to align ever so uncannily with a timely piece I heard Friday morning on NPR about…

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HELIUM

Forget oil! I don’t want to wage war in the Middle East for oil when we can more cheaply convert entire countries to sustainable energy rather than rely on these dirty fossil fuels at this point in our death circle down the earth end-drain. But helium! Did you know that the US-induced shitshow in the Strait of Hormuz is also messing with the helium industry? Did you even know there was a helium industry? I for one, decidedly did not, until I got enlightened recently by a shopkeeper who blows up balloons for a living. The Purple Ostrich down the road would love to decorate your best fest, among peddling their other “no rules” gift items. But guess what? The price of those fun foil balloons is higher these days because of the helium that goes in them. And now, maybe the whole industry is as besieged as our oil tanks.

Take a listen to this 3-minute piece of journalism in which some fun puns are of course inevitable. Strait of Hormuz closure deflates global helium supply:

Yes, helium is essential to balloons that rise in the sky when a kid loses their grip. But also to rockets that make it back to the moon (for the first time since 1972!) like this week’s other giant newsworthy event, the April Fools launch of the Artemis II mission.

Helium is essential to the manufacture of semiconductors (affecting computers, smartphones, and our new best pal AI), and even to MRI machines. MRI scanners require “approximately 2,000 liters of liquid helium” (which puts to shame that 1/2 liter of water I drain every time I conduct a ChatGPT query).

Dr. M. Mahesh, radiology professor, is one of the talking heads of helium in this piece who tells us how a nebulous gas/liquid we never gave much thought much about, gets around:

Dr. Mahesh says it’s too early to know if what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz is affecting medical science yet. Now, helium is a gas at room temperature, but it’s transported in liquid form. It needs to stay cold—like, negative-400-degrees-Fahrenheit cold. This is a problem for the containers holding liquid helium that have been sitting for weeks in the Strait of Hormuz. Around the six-week mark, the product will evaporate. South Korea and Taiwan are feeling the shortage the most. They’re the biggest consumers of helium from Qatar, a major producer that is no longer shipping or making it. And while the U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of helium...

BRAD BORGGARD [CFO for North American Helium in Canada]: You can’t make up for the fact that a third of world supply has been offline for a month.

The global helium market is worth an estimated $4.1B. That’s big B for billions or breasts or balloons or bimboification or whatever you have on your mind right now.

That’s according to the consulting company Grand View Research. And the growing demand for semiconductors is expected to increase the market value to over $6 billion by 2030. But semiconductor makers, like GlobalFoundries, don’t appear to be immediately concerned. In a statement, they said they don’t anticipate any near-term impacts but that the situation remains fluid. Scotten W. Jones, the president of Semiconductor Manufacturing Economics, says he’s concerned about the shortage. But even if this leads to a price bump, he doesn’t believe it will be put onto consumers.

Well thank goodness, says the reporter, because it’s time again for a pun:

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I think I always thought helium could be conjured at home, in the same way I might concoct a volcano on a paper plate with baking soda and vinegar. But no, it is mined.

From HowStuffWorks, helium is two parts magic and one part deep-space (or deep earth) science:

Helium is abundant in space, where it’s produced as a product of the fusion reaction inside stars such as the sun. The naturally occurring helium on Earth, though, comes from a different sort of process. Deep inside the Earth, radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium decay and turn into other elements. The byproduct of these reactions are tiny fragments called a-particles, which consist of two neutrons and two protons. Those particles pick up electrons from the environment around them and turn into helium, which gradually rises up through the crust and is emitted into the atmosphere, where it keeps rising until it gets into space.

For the helium that fills our balloons, along with all that tech, we can actually link this to the oil and gas industry:

Fortunately for us, helium also gets into the natural gas that oil and gas drillers extract from the ground for use as fuel. That gives us a supply that we can use for blowing up balloons, as well as for a wide variety of other industrial processes, ranging from arc welding to MRIs to manufacturing silicon chips for computers. There has to be a certain amount of helium in the natural gas—at least 0.3 percent by volume—to justify all the trouble of separating it from natural gas.

This is done through industrial processes that filter other impurities, such as water, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide from the gas. Finally, a process called cryogenic processing is used to cool the gas and remove the methane that makes up most of it, leaving behind a crude form of helium that is about 50 to 70 percent pure, with small amounts of argon, neon and hydrogen making up the rest. Then, the crude helium is purified through another cooling and filtering process that results in a form of helium that’s more than 99 percent pure.

With those questions resolved, I have some bigger ones. Do hot air balloons use helium? No, they literally heat air which makes the air inside the balloon lighter than the other cooler air outside and provides lift. Giant airships do use helium. At first I thought: oh no, Hindenberg, but luckily our modern Goodyear blimps learned a lesson from that New Jersey tragedy. Early airships used highly flammable (but more buoyant hydrogen) and we all know what happened with that.

Another pressing matter to investigate: how does sucking helium change your voice? Because really that’s what I want to do right now if I come across a tank of this good gas. Answer: helium, as we know now, is lighter than air. When you swallow it you will squeak because the soundwaves under these conditions are able to travel almost three times faster. But also, as one of my good readers notes, we don’t recommend this at home because: headaches, dizziness, perhaps fainting and death.

So on that note, give a listen and hand a human-blown balloon to this voice-modulating kid who knows a lot more than any adult windbag in power these days.

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It’s nothing you haven’t heard before: our President is a spoiled brat.

But what stunned me the other day in one of those paralysis-inducing moments in front of my old-timey kitchen radio when I have to stop whatever I’m doing to gird myself for the dissonance of his voice again, that this is indeed real life—was the way Trump applies the same language for how he can get whatever he wants, whether he’s talking about, say, a sexy lady, or a whole nation of Cuba.

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Let’s listen:

• Trump says of Cuba, just days ago from the Oval Office: “I do believe I’ll have the honor of taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form, yeah, taking Cuba. I mean whether I free it, take it, I think I can do whatever I want with it, you wanna know the truth. They are a very weakened nation right now, they were for a long time.”

He can do whatever he wants with Cuba. If this doesn’t sound a little sexual (rapey) or spoiled (rancid) and remind you of the time he said that about tariffs, or the time he said that about sending troops into US cities, or the time before that when he said that about shooting someone in the middle of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue during his campaign, or sigh, the most terrible time forever burned my brain (the time that mattered least when it should have mattered most), when he said that about a beautiful woman/any beautiful woman whose mere proximity triggers his unedited kissing and groping—well if you don’t remember all that cocky childish crap, here you go:

• Feb. 20, 2026, on tariffs: “I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country. I’m even allowed to impose a country-destroying embargo. I can embargo. I can do anything I want, but I can’t charge $1… I can do anything I want to do to them, but I can’t charge any money. So I’m allowed to destroy the country but I can’t charge them a little fee.”

• August 2025, on sending troops into major cities: “So the line is that I’m a dictator but I stop crime. So a lot people say you know, if that’s the case I’d rather have a dictator. But I’m not a dictator…I just know how to stop crime. Not that I don’t have the right to do whatever I want to do, I’m the President of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger, and it is in danger in those cities, I can do it. Most people say…if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.”

• Jan 2016, on murdering that doesn’t matter: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said at a campaign rally.

• 2005, hot mic from the infamous and inconsequential Access Hollywood bus: “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.”

“Doing anything” may include the following claims, as recounted by CBS News way back in Oct 2016, when there was much more to come:

But at least three women have now come forward to contest that dismissal, telling news organizations he groped them in personal encounters at his home, at Trump Tower in New York, and on a commercial flight. Trump’s campaign said late Wednesday that it would file a lawsuit against the New York Times over a story published by the paper earlier that day, with the accounts of two of the women.

Also Wednesday, People magazine published an account by one of its reporters who recalled Trump “pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat” during an interview session at his Mar-a-Lago home. The alleged attack, according to reporter Natasha Stoynoff, came as Trump’s wife Melania, who was then pregnant, changed into a different outfit in another room before they continued their joint interview. The encounter was in 2005, the same year the now-infamous encounter with Billy Bush was recorded, according to Stoynoff.

Meanwhile, a former beauty queen is confirming Donald Trump’s own words about walking into pageant dressing rooms unannounced, following recently resurfaced audio recordings where Trump boasted about his ability to do so as the owner of the Miss USA pageant.

Tasha Dixon, who competed as Miss Arizona in 2001, told CBS’ Los Angeles station that the GOP nominee had entered dressing rooms while her fellow contestants were “half naked.”

“Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis,” Dixon said in an interview with KCAL 9. “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”

In audio from Howard Stern’s radio show in 2005, Trump could be heard discussing how he would use his position of power in the pageants to peek at women while they were undressed.

“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know I’m inspecting it. I want to make sure everything is good,” Trump told Stern at the time. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”

“Doing anything” can include the unlimited creepy comments about how Trump would love to date young girls (now or soon), including his daughter:

• 1992 Escalator Incident: In a 1992 Entertainment Tonight video shot at Trump Tower, Trump is heard talking to a group of young girls on an escalator. He asked one girl if she was going to “ride the escalator” and then said to the camera, “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

• 14-Year-Old Girls: In another 1992 incident reported by the Chicago Tribune, Trump asked two girls at a youth choir event how old they were. Upon learning they were 14, then-46-year-old Trump replied, “Wow! Just think—in a couple of years, I’ll be dating you.”

• On Stern, in a 2006 interview, when asked by Stern if he could be “banging 24-year-olds,” Trump replied, “Oh, absolutely,” and “I’d have no problem.” When pressed on his age limit, Trump said he didn’t want to be “a braggart” but later joked that he wouldn’t go as young as 12, citing a desire not to be like disgraced Congressman Mark Foley.

• Again on Stern, in 2004, Trump allowed Stern to refer to his daughter, Ivanka, as a “piece of ass.” He also told Stern in 2006 that she was “always been very voluptuous” and that she had “the best body.”

• “The View” (2006): While appearing on the ABC talk show with his daughter, Trump said, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” He added, “Isn’t that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?” while the audience and hosts laughed.

• Rolling Stone Interview (2015): In an interview with Paul Solataroff, Trump commented on his daughter’s beauty, stating, “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father...”

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I WANT IT NOW

You know who else is a spoiled brat? Veruca Salt, of course, who doesn’t want to date a child but is actually a child. So it might be slightly more expected that a rich little girl might lack manners and be excessively demanding. But nonetheless, Willy’s having none of it, and promptly (after her song of course) sends her down the chute.

And the song lyrics:

I AIN’T EATING NOTHING UNTIL I EAT ME SOME MEAT

I overhead someone say that one day. As I walked down the city street. And he talked into his cell phone as if no one else existed in his midst. People are funny, I thought in that moment, and never forgot that line.

Does “brat” have anything to do with “sausage” like in a German bratwurst sort of way?

Unlike how it may sound and feel—and alluded to above when Veruca may descend the tube to be “sizzled to a sausage” in the furnace, “spoiled brat” does not derive from that brat. The two are found to be etymologically (if not psychologically) unrelated.

According to Etymonline:

brat(n.)

c. 1400, “a cloak of coarse cloth” (Chaucer); probably the same word as Old English bratt “cloak,” which is from a Celtic source (compare Old Irish bratt “cloak, cloth”).

As a term for a child, William Dunbar’s Flyting (c. 1500) is usually cited as first use; but Dictionaries of the Scots Language questions whether Dunbar’s use means “child” or “garment.” The child sense is clearly attested by 1530s. The transferred meaning is perhaps from the notion of “child’s apron,” but also compare bastard, “child conceived on a saddle instead of a bed.” OED notes that “evidence of the transition of sense has not been found.” In earliest uses the implication is of an unwanted or unplanned child rather than a reference to behavior; differing from a bastard in that a married couple might have a brat. From the association of brats belonging to low-class people evolved the sense “uncouth, ill-mannered child” by 1808. Used of adults thought to have childishly selfish or rude manners by 1968.

Resolving that a brat might be an unwanted child and not derived from the tube meat (a usage that only dates back to 1911), doesn’t change the sense that this ill-mannered child is not fit for human consumption. She doesn’t belong in a chocolate factory with her golden ticket. He doesn’t belong in the White House where every surface is starting to look like he covered it in the shiny discarded foils of devoured sweets.

Wouldn’t the Wonka soundtrack make great outtro music for our pouty, demanding Chief? And Veruca Salt’s demise the best possible exit?

What would Willy do? What would you?

Today I march—twice—for the third No Kings Day. Join an Indivisible event near you and say a loud resounding Nope to this wurst of brats.

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On my death bed I will likely recount the weird 13 years in New York City when I was at the height (lowest point?) of my clumsiness, enduring an episodic string of trippy yarns too over the top to believe, akin in absurdity to a Quixote attacking windmills. When a normal wander across some blocks would end in a pile of garbage, a pack of dogs, a basement trapdoor, or the ER. These memories have sharp parts but maybe the more I tell them they can soften the edges with humor and grace (not grace like a ballerina—obviously—but grace like kindness) into something resembling a ball. In time it won’t even be a heavy marble but more of a beachball, something to toss on a sunny day on a bittersweet memory pile known as Clumsy Island, AKA Manhattan or Brooklyn. And maybe instead of waiting for my death bed for this telling (because who knows about the dementia), I could just suck up my shame and share them now.

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Interspersed with pix from a graphic novel on a stumbling, fumbling short-lived young long distance love by Jeffrey Brown called Clumsy (2002), and in no particular order, because I couldn’t possibly try to parse this out chronologically and they all equally epically suck atomic fireballs and involve walking or running, here you go. The catalogue of my indignities for your schadenfreude delight:

LEARNING TO RUN

1. Jogging incident, the first. I would try to run here or there. When I lived in my first apartment in the city, next door to the Empire State Building, I would try to run from my home above the Gap at Macy’s/Herald Square to the East River. If this wasn’t the center of the world, I know not where. Having an edge, a riverfront park would help so I could get away from the tourist masses who would sometimes stop me in my headphoned tracks (sometimes even pulling the cord of said headphones since I looked like the only one for blocks who must live there—who else would try to jog through this shit?) to ask me where the ESB was. Right there! I pointed up to the building we were standing under at the very moment. Literally right there for godsakes I jabbed in the sky with my finger. And ran off. Kinda proud that I lived “right there” too and kinda perplexed why in the world I would want to. How in fact had I ended up right there, long story for another time. Or, when I lived on the Upper West Side for many years, and I would jog to the other boundary of this island and hightail it to the Hudson on the West Side. Or, depending on my mood, to the middle of everything in the middle of everything, Central Park—if I was feeling ambitious.

This time I ran to the river as I did before work when there was less time to work with. I ran in the morning with music which certainly added some padded oblivion to my journey, or at least the perception of padding. I was running in Riverside Park and didn’t notice (or hear) the herd of dogs (a clump of them knotted together with their leashes and big like wolves) racing to beat me. Somehow I never fall the way you should, so a herd of dogs body-bumping me from behind didn’t send me keeling forward like you might expect but careening back. Physics be damned! I was knocked to the ground, bang on the back of my head, and wasn’t quite knocked out probably because there were multiple dogs around me trying to lick and/or figure out what the heck with an owner somewhat apologizing and trying to help me up and I, I just needed to skedaddle because I was overcome by my usual level of embarrassed.

I didn’t feel great in the head, but I just thought that was the good blood rushing toward the embarrassment. I can’t remember if I was able to run home (to make this run end faster) or if I had to slow down and walk. By the time I was getting out of the shower and getting ready for work, my reflection in the mirror was split into panes of vision alternating between horizontal blocks of fuzzy and clear. Wow, the world is striped now! I thought, and somehow still thought it was a good idea to get to work. I walked the 20 blocks to upper midtown to the offices of Bookreporter.com where the freshly published books arrived all day long from every house in the city and we young 20somethings got paid pretty well (too much) for this dreamy new dot.com where we read or not read whatever we felt like. Today it turned out I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I thought it was a better idea—I couldn’t help it—to lay me down upon the rug in the boss’ back room office in her typical absence, because I could no longer sit up straight. My head hurt. I definitely felt funny. I narrated the tale of how I got run over by a pack of dogs in the park and landed back on my head rather than forward on my hands. Caring coworker Dana urged me to get back home. Where I was given homework to not-sleep. She knew it was bad to sleep with a concussion as if we were in a horror movie starring Freddy. Ah yes, must be a concussion. She called me often once I went home to lay down and not-sleep. Are you sleeping? No, not any more. Ok good, will call again soon.

2. Jogging incident two. Brooklyn now where I’m way cooler. Right? Right? There was no obvious place to run now. I was too landlocked, the river too far. Not even really a park anywhere near me that would be worthwhile. So I zigzagged along willynilly in the zone at the apex where Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Williamsburg came together. Hispanic, Hasidic, or Black depending which direction you walked, with me in the middle near the hospital and the McDonalds along the J train squatting in an oddly situated pink Florida-style house. I often ran west and then north through Hasidim and then Hispania because these were my stomping grounds in the environs of the bar I owned for some years. My standard route, dependent on traffic lights. I ran and navigated sidewalks and oops, there I go again, flying slow-mo through the air, clawing the sky, trying to right myself and not fall again. Again!? How I do always fall. I was angry this time. It would have just been a scratch, a big bleeding scratch on my arm, but at this point, this many years into my NYC experience, I was really starting to question my ability to navigate my way safely at all through life. I was so mad at a scratch that in my effort not to scar, I lubed the thing up daily with so much moisturizer that I turned it accidentally into a much bigger problem. It looks like a long burn now. It should have a better story. I guess that’s true. The sidewalk burned me again. Someday I would do better, and not use cream.

3. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is a walking or a running incident. I suspect I may have been walking because there’s no reason I would have been running in this area—around the eastern parts of Grand Central station, I’m not insane. But there’s too many other walking incidents down below, so let’s just round this off and call it a run. What does it matter anymore when I don’t get that far or fast before I fall? Mid-summer when the city garbage stench is at its primal peak. I remember a dark street where the sun didn’t dare to shine, dwarfed by the towering buildings around me, and sounds a cacophony of taxis, cars and garbage trucks with their mouths opening to eat the refuse. But they hadn’t yet gotten to these bags that were formerly, from another angle of the sun from another previous hour of the day, baking there like giant black steam buns. The plastic looked softened, melty. The rotten food parts inside reaching their peak. There must have been 100 full black garage bags in this towering pile. Which actually I didn’t see until I was in it. Me and the rats probably. Face plant for no reason at all (save for the one where I was probably looking up at the architecture and not down at the world largest trash pile only rivaled by the “Magic Mountain” in the Philippines my roving journalist friend Matt once wrote about so brilliantly for Harper’s before his tragic passing). I ended this journey in this soft hot stinking (magic?) mountain of trash. And for a second I just wanted to stay there and burrow in, it felt nice and safe. And so utterly gross. I got up, wiped my legs, face and chest, and ran off to my next humiliation.

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LEARNING TO WALK

1. Walking incident, one. Dana and I, now true bosom buddies of the BookReporter office fiasco, enjoyed books and also the related perks of the publishing/advertising industries. We often ventured after work to some cocktail party hosted by Condé Nast with someone like George Stephanopoulos in our line of vision as we got distracted by the passing of the tray of shrimp. On this evening, I believe we had already attended a whole series of such events that week and were weary but still game to keep trucking to yet another cocktail party of course. We were going to walk uptown to my apartment to regroup and leave from there. We were probably hungover from the night before and hungry for only the kind of junk a hangover demands. I bought a hotdog from a street vendor. Then of course in mid-bite early on in the dog, I stumbled (forward this time) but instead of stopping my fall and losing the snack, I committed to holding onto the hotdog. That was my choice, not entirely conscious. It was my chin that broke the fall, and my chin that broke. Something bad had happened to the bottom of my face, it seemed by the shocked look on Dana’s face when I scampered up still holding said dirtier hotdog. The worst that happens in these incidents is the act of falling itself and then, no matter the outcome or injury, you need to exit the scene of the shame as quickly as possible as if everything’s fine. I’m fine, Ok, no problemo, I said wiping my skin and feeling wetness. Dana’s facial expression revealed it wasn’t fine. And yes I’m still going to eat that. We were pretty close to my apartment at this point. I said, let’s just get to my place as planned and I can cover it up a little with some foundation and we can continue to the party! She tried to play along and be a good sport, like yeah sure we can, fill up that chin hole with makeup. We got home and I saw my sorry chinny-chin-chin in the mirror of the apartment entry and agreed it was rough. We decided there wouldn’t be makeup enough to cover this. In fact I needed stitches. So we went to the ER at the closest hospital, a need which I never experienced in my time in NY. For all my minor mishaps, never doctors. And oh the doctors we would see!

Dana was a champ and waited with me in the lobby for many hours. We were hungry and thirsty. The hotdog was insufficient. There was no water. We had been counting on those good cocktail party wieners wrapped in puff pastry and stiff cosmos to further fuel us. Now it was just waiting and waiting. Never did she forsake me. Finally, I got called into an inner room, which I thought was great progress, but only involved more waiting, and now separated from my friend. After what seemed like many more eons, a man comes along in harlequin pants. Yes, like baggy clown patterned pants. Beggars can’t be choosers. I was thrilled to see him. He said something like, oh that looks rough, as I recounted how I fell on my face eating a hotdog, and he said “put an egg on it.” I said, wait what, I must be hallucinating, are you my doctor? And he said no, my brother’s a patient down the hall, but a raw egg on it might help for now. And he went away into the buzz of fluorescent lights down the hall toward his brother with those pants. Who was that crazy-pantsed man anyway.

Finally, along came a man who did identify himself as my doctor and at that point I really was delirious, enough to think, as this incredibly handsome young fellow was stitching my sorry ass hole face, that he was so close to me and so fine that he must really like (love!) me, in fact he was bound to ask me out and this is how we’d have that incredible meet-cute (not that it was called that back then) moment to tell our future babies about. He stitched me up and sent me on my way like a good doctor should—but where’s my new doctor boyfriend I wondered, that’s ok, he’ll find me! Then I got back to the same mirrored hallway of my apartment building and saw that the physician’s attentions only resulted in this new sort of facial hair—black pokey stitches sticking out of my chin to further announce to the world what I had done and how ridiculous I am.

2. Walking again, dear lord. You know statistics show that the most amount of car accidents happen closest to home. It’s obvious math, since that’s where you spend the most time. Frequency begets fatalities. Or in my case, walking around this city of trash and sparkling brilliance and danger-dogs and hotdogs equals falling. And the fear of falling becomes a real paralyzing thing so I’m almost forgetting how to walk at all by now. Coaching my feet on how to go step by step, watching the ground always, arms out. Nervousness breeds more nervousness, not a good look. It’s worth noting that though I certainly clocked in a large amount of drinking hours at all hours in this city that never sleeps, the memorable falling incidents (or all of them) only seem to happen during daylight when decidedly sober with the maximum amount of spectators. Like this one, walking incident two, where I was walking along a street of Brooklyn which of course had a lot of cafes and shops to window shop. I was walking close to one bar on the sidewalk, noting how there was a narrow table along the plate glass window inside with a row of happy patrons sipping there, looking out. They were seeing me seeing them when—whoopla—there she goes into the basement. One side of the metal basement trap doors were up and the other were down. That’s bad news! Death trap! So I was just walking right over the flush panel and didn’t see the opening flap until I was in it, tumbling down the stairs in front of my front row of attendees behind the plate glass. I got out ASAP and brushed myself off and hightailed down the street before anyone could make any fuss about me. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine, practically sprinting away from their concern. I think this time I held back tears, not entirely fine.

3. Now I have a baby to protect on these mean city streets. Which are usually quite kind actually, it’s me that’s the problem. I’m the problem it’s me. I remember even when I was pregnant that I walked around harboring a floaty feeling, a secret knowing that I had something sacred in me that required protecting and no one on the streets knew about. I felt special, other, significant, mother, as early as week two. But then this inner knowledge grew visible/external when that baby became a belly that strangers wanted to touch and bless or became a full-fledged baby-baby that often was attached to me as if a parasite strapped to my chest. I don’t know why I would wear a baby on my chest necessarily when the back might be just as precarious (see: pack of dogs above and how I might fall whichever way) but Kaia in her Brooklyn-baby first year of life was indeed often in the front seat. Facing out to see and be seen. Which meant when a bus went by once someone screamed out the open window that my baby’s finger was sticking out without a mitten, oh the horror!

And then there was the time, when—you know it’s coming—I tripped on yet another crooked sidewalk that didn’t smoothly abut with the concrete slab of sidewalk next to it and oh gosh, me and the baby for fuck’s sake, and my baby’s little bald forehead is going to hit the sidewalk first. This time the people really swarmed me. Helping us up, asking if we’re ok, doling out advice in Spanglish. This time it was far beyond embarrassment, because I was mother now, and mother’s lose all ego. I became the vessel that cares for this other being, and here I was failing, falling on her. All my weight, the weight of my shame, all these accrued ignominies, falling on her delicate pink exposed forehead. She had a mark, I couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen, the red splotch was growing and would soon be a scab. I went to the doctors, who happen to work en masse in the hospital on my block. None of them wanted to hit on me—I at least knew that this time, they just wanted to help, to do their jobs. She was fine, I think. But to this day, age 17, my daughter wonders if she might have developed ADHD-Inattention because her clumsy momma splat her to the sidewalk full frontal on the face once. I don’t think it works like that, I say, as I nervously Google.

I (and then we) survived years of this in NYC. How is it that I’m still alive? No broken bones, many scars. There is absolutely no moral to this story, besides I haven’t fallen here in Sleepy Hollow, where I’ve lived since 2009. Or I mean not as often, not as visibly, not with wounds, hounds or spectators. So it must be a very good place for me to be, just the right spot. A place where my legs connect to my torso which receives commands from my brain, and the system runs well and keeps me successfully attached to the sidewalks.

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[Crowd gasps and shrinks in their seats.]

No, don’t worry, I don’t mean that really. No one does. I mean the millennial indie band called Democratic Socialism with attractive lead singers AOC and Mamdani backed by Bernie in his mittens pounding on the drums. Mamdani has proven this flavor of democracy can win, by a landslide, at least in New York City. Could it pretty please be the path to excite, inspire and even heal a damaged and demented country in the mid-terms and beyond?

Too divisive? Too dangerous? Too lunatic fringe radical left domestic terrorist? It shouldn’t be.

Until then, I feel like someone’s ugly Cybertruck will get sucked into the world’s biggest pothole if we don’t all die of the measles first.

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In addition to collecting essay topics in Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden, as random and inconsequential as pizzles, fermented fish, and cream puffs, there was the pervading observation throughout my recent cold Nordic travels of: Wow, look at how well they do absolutely everything over here. It all just…works.

Northern Europe is ripe with architecture hundreds of years old, yet still it stands, charming and perfectly stuccoed on the outside while likely retrofitted on the inside with heat pumps and all the modern fixings. Ancient history stands proudly next to progress with the contrasting symmetry of the likes of the palatial Louvre and its glass pyramid entrance. The porous cobblestone streets don’t develop potholes and require constant Public Works repaving, they just absorb and flux between seasons. All cars, often petite and electric, dutifully stop for pedestrian crossings. Every intersection is a smooth-moving roundabout. Public buses, even the most rural, accept credit cards, so no awkward pre-ticketing required. In fact my girls were bummed we couldn’t collect coins from each country as everything operated cashless. My trip was entirely funded by touchless Apple pays. The train from downtown Copenhagen to the airport takes 15 minutes and costs about $5, complete with outlets, luggage racks, and civilized seating at tables. At the Keflavik airport in Iceland, check in was completely automated (including printing boarding passes, attaching tags to luggage, and feeding our luggage onto conveyer belt for our own scanning a la grocery store) and took 10 minutes. Every public bathroom has hand dryers built into the faucets. The toilets have the option of mini- or maxi-flush modes. Windmills as far as the eye can see.

Highly volcanic island surrounding by the Atlantic, Iceland architecture felt surprisingly contemporary compared to the continental countries, as if most old infrastructure had been wiped away by lava. I wondered how the ancient former stomping ground of Vikings could feel so new but, contrary to my eruption theory (outside the molten town of Grindavik), my research revealed that the older buildings of turf and stone proved difficult to maintain and were largely replaced outside of historical sites. Construction might look newer due to the early proliferation of industrial materials (corrugated iron came into favor in the 1860s as more enduring against the harsh elements), the simple timeless style of the Scandinavians, or the fact that many buildings burned down. Mostly imported timber was replaced by concrete in the early 1900s after a fire destroyed many buildings of capital Reykjavik.

Native trees are rare on Iceland (only covering 1% of the island!), which makes it feel like a spare moonscape like none other. It’s trending now to transport stands of evergreens from other countries to supplement the shrubby scrubby natives, but driving any distance reveals miles of lava fields. There was something romantic about the black rock with a black house on it that struck me as so serene and desert-like. Perhaps the Vikings left little impact since their homes were also pretty geo, packed underground like hobbit holes with the subtle rise from the buried mound of a grassy roof.

Icelandic infrastructure is incredible in that—along with the great credit card buses and those ever-flowing roundabouts—there is essentially free hot water to heat homes and bathe with just endlessly available underground. As tourists we got to partake of the geothermal daily in multiple ways from our showers to the luxurious spa waters to the steamy outdoor hot tubs at most places we stayed. Look up at night from the warm pool of the hotel or boarding house and the sky-crossing stripe of grey you think is a cloud suddenly morphs and swirls into green glowing Aurora that grows and dances for hours until you prune, what could be finer.

Our tour guide on the way to the frozen falls, geyser, and continental divide site-trio on the coldest day imaginable kept us warm with facts about this magic if stinky piping hot water of Iceland. It may smell like rotten eggs with its hydrogen sulfide gas but it will keep your skin so soft. It’s not exactly free to pipe this hot water (176°F) directly from the ground, but it’s incredibly cheap. And it’s connected to 90% of the properties in the country. Combined with hydropower, Iceland generates nearly its entire electricity and heating from renewable energy.

Stick around long enough and you may even got to partake of the good universal healthcare. Since our flights home were delayed (blizzard, New York), we got to enjoy a few extra days in hottest water/coldest air Iceland in which my daughter could be injured. Immediately upon checking into our Viking bungalow, my daughter got a substantial splinter lodged deep under her fingernail from all that imported timber. Which for us, as tourists, meant she gave her name, birth date to the local clinician, and we paid the equivalent of a $100 something in however many Icelandic kroners to be the first and fastest appointment with kind and efficient care.

There’s the sense throughout of what a world we might achieve when people come together to do big things. Since 2020, a regionally transformative 10-mile bridge connects Sweden to Copenhagen. We were now just this easy morning scoot via efficient train away from another country in our international excursions.

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What’s the catch? Well, you know, there’s never any free lunch. (In fact lunch is quite expensive in these parts). Is it worth it? A resounding yes, say the locals, the economists, and the scientists.

According to the “Nordic Model,” for your higher tax rate you enjoy universal healthcare, free education through college, and all the benefits of systems and safety nets that not only function but work like a well-oiled Swiss watch. This isn’t capital-S socialism where the state owns the means of production but free market social democracy. Unions are strong, market freedom is often higher than in the US. And guess what? Handing a good share of your diurnal nonsense stress over to the government and not having to figure out how to hustle for health and education makes for a healthier and more educated people, which makes for a robust, more equitable economy; and a better economy makes for happier people and so on.

When we Americans complain about higher taxes, I always cite the happiness index that comes at this price. I personally would pay anything not to deal with insurance and the FAFSA.

As of 2020, all of the Nordic countries rank highly on the inequality-adjusted HDI (Human Development Index) and the Global Peace Index as well as being ranked in the top 10 on the World Happiness Report.

In the World Happiness Report, as of 2025 (using a three year average up to 2024), Finland ranks 1, Denmark 2, Iceland 3, Sweden 4, Netherlands 5… factoring in rankings of social support, GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, perceptions of corruption.

US is ranked 24th, which by the way ranks very low on the freedom scale, something we supposedly pride ourselves on. No comment on the corruption.

Why are we supposed to believe, as a sign of our patriotism, that our failing infrastructure and low happiness (switch out with obesity, heart disease, depression, stress, etc.) are supposed to be good for us? Would you like fries with that?

Why are we unwilling to learn from these countries, our elders?

In his article in Psychology Today, “What Would Democratic Socialism Mean for America?” Benjamin Radcliff, PhD., asserts that “The ‘European Nightmare’ produces greater happiness than the ‘American Dream.’”

The more your fundamental needs are met at the basic levels, the more freedom you have to pursue higher level aspirations. Picture Maslow’s pyramid and the hierarchy of your happiness.

This takes us to approaches that stress the provision of just such human needs. The most prominent of these is what the Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam has labelled ‘liveability theory’, which simply suggests that people are happier in those societies that are the most liveable, in the sense of providing the highest level of human needs to the greatest number of people. In this interpretation, people are simply happier when more of their needs as human animals are met. The influential work of the late US psychologist Abraham Maslow provides a model for understanding those needs, from the more basic lower-level needs necessary to obtain the higher-order ones. Food, clothing and shelter—our physiological needs—are at the bottom of the pyramid, followed by financial security, employment, and freedom from fear or crime. These are safety and security needs. Esteem constitutes the next level—these include friendships, romantic love, and immersion in social networks. A sense of being valued by one’s community and an amount of agency, or being able to make decisions of consequence about one’s life, form the higher level needs of self-respect and self-actualisation.

Because countries who charge higher taxes deliver higher quality of life, of course this equates to more satisfied and successful citizens. So—brace yourself—paying higher taxes actually makes people happier. Which would basically just about shock anyone to death if you said this out loud in the United States. Try the phrase “welfare state” to really rub it in.

The policies most conducive to human wellbeing turn out to be essentially the same ones that Einstein himself originally suggested: those associated with social democracy. In reviewing the research in 2014, Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a political scientist at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey, found that ‘societies led by leftist or liberal governments (also referred to as welfare states)’ have the highest levels of life satisfaction, controlling for other factors. Looking across countries, the more generous and universalistic the welfare state, the greater the level of human happiness, net of other factors.

The phrase ‘welfare state’ is pejorative to many Americans, but it would be less so if they had a better understanding of what it implies to the rest of the world. In the abstract, a welfare state means a society that has created a system of protecting people against the insecurities of everyday life by socialising risk and reward. This implies not only the staples of social protection—guaranteed access to healthcare, unemployment insurance, and pensions—but benefits unknown in the United States, such as state-mandated sick days (in Germany, six weeks at full pay, and then up to 78 weeks at 70 per cent) and guaranteed vacation days (four weeks at full pay in Germany). More surprising perhaps are ‘family allowances’, or grants paid to all families with children, regardless of income—every German family receives 184 euros (or around $205) per month, per child. Minimum guaranteed earnings are also much higher in countries approaching the welfare state ideal – Denmark’s effective minimum wage is about $20 per hour. It is this sense of shared risk and shared prosperity that prompted the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme to observe that: ‘With all its faults, the welfare state remains the most humane and civilised system ever created.’

It is public policies that are humane and civilised that foster the conditions which allow people to actually enjoy being alive.

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She wore gold and let her light shine from the inside out. As written in the NY Times,

I think a lot about this magical inner girl inside of me, long muted, the one who got snuffed/smothered/suppressed when I started “achieving” good grades and got a goofy eyeglass prescription. When I started to become aware of “other” families, what “normal” people thought, the “gaze,” and boys I was too shy to talk to. When I stopped singing “The sun will come out tomorrow” at the top of my lungs in the backyard, letting the tune giddily carry along the river, and started wearing short skirts in the chilly fall to get the attention of that secret crush of mine, Dave. When it stopped being about who I was but how I looked. How shocked I was many years later, a Yale grad, an author, an adjunct writing professor, when my dad asked me, ever awkward me, why I never pursued modeling.

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An interview with 60 Minutes recounts how Alysa was a teen queen by 13, winning the national title in skating. By 16 she competed in the Beijing Olympics, and the notorious demands of the sport and its power over her spirit and body had burnt her out. She completely quit, traveling, taking college classes, having her “best life” without missing it at all. Until suddenly, the urge rose from within to get back on the ice. Soon she decided to come back on her own terms, re-emerging on a sort of Taylor Swiftian own-your-own-catalogue kind of level:

I get to pick my own program music. I get to help with the creative process of the program. If I feel like I’m skating too much, I’ll back down. If I feel like I’m not skating enough, I’ll ramp it up. No one’s going to starve me. Tell me what I can and can’t eat.

Most importantly, she fired her dad who had pushed her to her limits with his desire and demands for her success outranking hers; she would now be in charge of her career, the rink now a stage for a self-possessed star. No longer a slight girl but a strong woman. Raccooned hair, pierced, fierce, and free.

Sadly when you think of these young female skaters, you might think of the prime target age of the Epstein trafficking ring, these girls just entering puberty, girls young enough to be their daughters, or granddaughters. In one of his many crass interviews with Howard Stern through the years (compiled here in their terrible glory by CNN), Donald Trump sets his lowest boundary at 13 when the shock jock host asked if he has an age minimum. (Not to mention he loves to comment about how hot his own daughter is).

No, I have no age—I mean, I have age limit. I don’t want to be like Congressman Foley, with, you know, 12-year-olds.

I think of pageant girls, aspiring models, or just the everyday teens attracted to the promise of $200, who were fed into the Epstein machine, groomed and ground at the rate of a few per day until the numbers reach upwards of 1,000. I think of how moldable girls can be now with online filters and heavy make-up, commodified like the plastic Kardashians. I think about the pornification of our beauty standards and our bedrooms. I think about my own teenage girls and what they are up again in this hyper-sexualized/commercialized world; will they make it through this confusing noise to the elusive promise of becoming confidant adults who can advocate for themselves and determine their fates, who can become whatever they want. But can they? How can we override the message they receive instead, when they witness a series of highly qualified women always lose the highest office (“we’re not ready for a female President”) while arguably the worst man on earth gets to take over twice, if not indefinitely.

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I feel it weighing heavily now on so many women, the dispiriting truth in the ongoing, ever-worsening Epstein story, of how pervasive, accepted and even sanctioned sexual abuse is, how despite the seeming victory of the #MeToo movement, how far we’ve supposedly come through the decades since Suffrage and the Women’s Rights Movement, that nothing seems to be happening to these many men implicated in the files (at least not enough in America and least of all for our very President). You might think it’s now a rich people problem, a hazard of wealth and the heightened access to whatever they want that comes with that, no matter how young, but this fascinating, if disturbing article debunks that.

In the essay, “There is one word that explains how so many men can be in the Epstein files. So why is no one saying it?” Celeste Davis bemoans the revelation in the files that every kind of powerful man imaginable is in there, those we’d least expect, like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra (“God is a construct. Cute girls are real”), physician Peter Attia, linguist Noam Chomsky.

No sector of society is safe.

Leaders from each and every one of the institutions that run our world—politics, business, tech, academia, wellness, philanthropy, entertainment, spirituality—are all over these files.

It’s gross. It’s everywhere. It’s destabilizing.

Leaving us asking… how? How could this happen? How could so many people let this happen? In plain sight? For so long?

The author charts how media generally answers these questions, gathering a list of articles that point to Wealth, Elite Networks, Institutional Failure, or Blackmail.

Everyone is asking how did these men get away with so much rape?

No one is asking what would cause so many to want to rape so much in the first place?

It’s as if the Epstein files have exposed an entire field being taken over by noxious weeds—miles and miles of weeds—and then instead of digging to the root to eradicate the weeds’ seed, we are hyper-focused on what exact water and fertilizer enabled the weeds to grow so high.

We’re acting as if weeds/rapists are just a given.

She wants to get to the bottom of why we have rape in the first place.

Why aren’t we talking about why so many men when given power continually choose to use that power to rape women?

WHY AREN’T WE TALKING ABOUT THAT?!

Money and corrupt elite networks of billionaires are certainly not off the hook here. Those are important conversations to have.

But while money may have enabled Epstein’s sexual abuse, it didn’t create it.

One in four women have experienced sexual abuse. Billionaires seem to do a lot of raping, but they can’t do THAT much raping.

Davis brings up the haunting case of the Gisele Pelicot, whose husband easily found over 90 men to have their way with his drugged and unconscious wife in their little French town. How hundreds more must have seen the post where he solicited for this opportunity and didn’t report it. This makes me think of that sting operation show that aired from 2004-2007 “To Catch a Predator” and how men congregate every time in any place to access a supposed underage girl (despite how popular that show was). Not billionaires, just regular guys, your neighbors, supposed “good” men. Not monsters.

The world is not divided into monster men and good men.

Rather, the world we live in seems to plant a seed in the minds of men, that when watered with enough power, opportunity or anonymity this seed so very, very often blooms into rape.

Not every seed blooms into a weed. Not every man rapes. But they all exist in the same fertile soil for it to be possible.

Let’s dig instead into this soil. Is the rape instinct innate in men? Is it boiling up in the testosterone? Studies show no. (Findings determine, to name a few: “sex offenders do not have higher testosterone than non-sex offenders,” and, “trans men who who increase their testosterone do not become more abusive or start raping.”)

Is it cultural then? Yes. Entirely.

The World Health Organization has concluded that “Violence against women is rooted in and perpetuated by gender inequalities.”

The UN also came out with a report linking rape with gender inequality that said, “As gender equality improves, the prevalence of violence against women is lower… This is borne out for both physical and sexual forms of abuse. …Countries with greater equality between women and men have lower levels of violence against women.”

Gender inequality in this context means the devaluation of female status and the dominance and entitlement of men. Along with this for men comes the pressure to live up to standards of masculinity and the shame of falling short, or what psychologists label, “masculine discrepancy stress.”

The one word she’s looking for that explains why so many men (who fall short or live up to expectations) still end up in the files, and in the Pelicot case, and into the trap of “To Catch a Predator”? Patriarchy.

It seems weirdly anachronistic to even say the word. Haven’t we come further than this? Aren’t we past that by now? Wasn’t feminism already won? Obviously not. The Epstein files and all these other cases against women and girls prove how very far we have to go to rejigger the societal, systemic imbalance.

Jonah Mix, in 2016, writes about the exploitation problem of pornography:

I’m not interested in a world where men really want to watch porn but resist because they’ve been shamed. I’m interested in a world where men are raised from birth with such an unshakable understanding of women as living human beings that they’re incapable of being aroused by their exploitation.”

Imagine that. I can begin to imagine such a world when I watch the incredible skating of Alysia Liu and have renewed hope for the rise of many more girls she might inspire in whatever their passion pursuits, existing outside the smothering structure as much as possible, creating their own choreography.

And I foster my own long-lost inner magical girl, who grows larger and louder inside of me the older I get. She is 52 now and gaining strength. Soon she may surpass me.

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Oh sigh, but why? To both prospects, my kids decreed “nope.” Not to mention that for the Swedish leg of our journey, for which we had all of a few hours until lunchtime demanded we hightail it over the 10-mile bridge back to the country of our hotel, there just wasn’t the time.

You might also say, despite the allure of beautifully elaborate cream puffs taunting us behind every bakery glass case, that the underbelly of these Nordic cuisines is, in fact, pretty yuck (which in Swedish translates to usch). I’ve got one pescatarian kid who is only willing to eat the non-exotic tunafish in a can merely because it’s not cute and furry and one kid who just doesn’t want to eat any fish at all, so together we were navigating some grim territory with these fermented fishies.

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A sampling of the menu at our first stop, harbor town of Hafnarfjordur, Iceland, in the lovely if kitschy Viking Hotel with its adjacent viking-themed restaurant Fjorugardurinn (photos from bemused customer reviews on Trip Advisor), offers up heads of sheep and suspicious chunks of ram’s testicles presented like a really tragic charcuterie board. (Oh how this previous pizzle theme endures no matter what!)

What’s whey pickled food? What’s Þorri? Intrepid or crazy Icelanders still celebrate the mid-winter holiday (from mid-January to mid-February) of Þorrablót, which once paid homage to Norse thunder god Thor (perhaps no relation etymologically speaking with the word Þór, but people nonetheless toast Þór/Thor interchangeably during their celebration which used to involve pagan sacrifices).

The holiday fare reflects the traditional food of the desolate, frozen time of mid-winter when what you had available was just the wurst. Your old food by now was likely cured/smoked/fermented/pickled such as, fermented shark (hákarl), sheep’s head (svið), ram’s testicles (hrútspungar), and dried fish (harðfiskur). Whey-pickling means you are using the whey (as in “curds and whey” and “along came a spider”) as your preserving agent. Or as my AI overview offers in a hipster foodie way, “Whey-pickled food refers to the use of liquid whey (a byproduct of yogurt or cheese making) as a starter culture in the lacto-fermentation process, creating probiotic-rich, fermented vegetables, rather than traditional vinegar pickling.”

You lost the winteriest Vikings at that mention of vegetables there. We’re not doing greens in these parts and especially not this time of year. Rather this informative video (complete with sidekick gagging) mentions the “rotten” shark, “sour” naughty bits, and also the lovely blood sausage or “sheep’s blood wrapped in a ram’s stomach.”

Where is that Black Death aquavit when you need it. Let’s do shots.

While we’re here dying for a palate cleanse, Brennivín is the signature liquor of Iceland, also known as “Black Death” though it is deceptively clear. From Wikipedia, “it is distilled from fermented grain mash and then combined with Iceland’s very soft, high-pH water, and flavored only with caraway. A clear, savory, herbal spirit, the taste is often described as having notes of fresh rye bread.” That all sounds very refreshing right now and I’d have some if only everything around here wasn’t so damn expensive.

The “blackness” of this drink actually stems from 1935 when Iceland was only partially emerging from Prohibition (news to me that other countries had this too). The government mandated a black label on the aquavit which of course made it more popular, along with its 75 proof alcohol count. Which is pretty standard (or even low) in the spirit world but still might help you forget that it’s often paired with that fermented shark during that dreadful festival.

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Another stop on our tour of the weird world of Nordic cold cuisine reiterated the greatest hits playlist, though maybe some of this informational text on the walls of the Viking World museum in Keflavik got a little lost in translation. They seem to merge below the pickling means with the pickled products in a confusing and awful stew of ick. Are we pickling our food in seal flippers and whale fat, or eating the pickled flippers and fat? And does it even matter at this point? Let’s not argue over who killed who.

With all of this funky junk in our midst, who needs a Disgusting Food Museum? But I admit, I wanted to go explore the liminal, vaguely edible space where even the Scandis might draw the line. From the museum’s intro materials online:

On the menu at the food museum (which includes 80 items, some available for smelling and/or tasting at the bar, if you dare) is:

• Surströmming – fermented herring from Sweden

• Cuy – roasted guinea pigs from Peru

• Casu marzu – maggot-infested cheese from Sardinia

• Stinky tofu – pungent bean curd from China

• Hákarl – well-aged shark from Iceland

• Durian – infamously stinky fruit from Thailand

Ah the rank durian, which somehow my brother found in Brooklyn and put in terrible Tupperware which he spooned his creamy stank-fruit from for days, ruining my shared apartment for any humans for weeks.

I regret from my trip to Thailand not trying any of the roasted bug buffet I found at an outdoor food stand. I am fairly adventurous of palate save for maybe most organ meats, but in that moment I think traveling alone made me timid. I do happily eat plenty of foods that disgust my kids: anchovies, bleu cheese, ground cricket powder in a power bar, and yes, even pickled herring, like the mad Dane that I am (ancestrally speaking).

I learned on this trip to not just jump eagerly into the morning fish of the cold breakfast buffet as if it may be the very same you remember from your childhood, when Dad had a jar of these preserved chunks with onions as a special occasional treat in the fridge. I actually recall that herring as delicious and joining him when he forked out a precious piece. But this fish in the Viking Hotel breakfast was not crisp and vinegary as I remembered but rather soft, lukewarm and suspicious, in both creamy white and grey varieties. Could this be the difference between a whey ferment and a pickle? I choose pickle. Maybe there’s a reason they serve this to us in a faux cave with very dim lighting.

What’s a disgusting food you won’t eat? Or better yet, what’s something perceived by others as disgusting that you will?

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Such as my road trip to White Sands, New Mexico that very much depended on the fullest of moons to blur the boundary between sand and sky. While organizing an August trip to an island off the coast of Mexico in bioluminescence season, the goal was getting as far away from the full moon at the end of the week as possible. A new moon would be preferable to have the darkest night sky possible—all the better to see the glowing underwater creatures with—but we’d have to make do only days away from full. Still the tiny marine algae iridescing in the funky muck were truly tiny amaze-balls.

For this current adventure, I looked at the calendar for winter dates when the Northern Lights (my lifelong quest to finally really witness) might be at their peak in Iceland and Denmark and discovered the week of my daughters’ second winter break in February also happened to hold all kinds of weird nordic treats we wouldn’t want to miss, though still only somewhat tangentially.

In Iceland, the time leading up to Easter includes the odd day known as Cream Bun Day or Bun Day, Bolludagur, observed this year on Monday, Feb. 16, 2026, a holiday when…wait for it…children earn these baked treats when they spank their parents. Yup, buns for buns. Atlas Obscura writes:

Once a year, Icelandic kids receive or fashion a wooden stick with a paper decoration on one end. Then, they try to spank their parents with it, yelling “bolla, bolla, bolla!” (“bun, bun, bun!”) as they go. In return, adults reward children with choux pastries, stuffed with cream and jam, and topped with powdered sugar or chocolate. Every successful spank earns another pastry bun—at least, on Bolludagur, or “Bun Day,” it does.

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This sweet and suspicious event has happened the Monday before Ash Wednesday since the early 1900s. In a country of <350,000 humans, the per capita bun ratio for the holiday is staggering. Bakers prepare over one million sweet buns, which makes that almost 3:1 buns per person, not counting us tourists and not to mention all the secret baking that might take place at home to supplement this artery-clogging flogging affair.

Deceptively pagan Christians just love to indulge before the sacrifices of the Lent season, marked by Ash Wednesday. We have, for instance, Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras when you indulge (show your tits?) before the 40-day period of fasting and penitence begins.

Or in Iceland, bun bun bun, which I guess will take place as we skedaddle to the airport and fly our tired asses to Denmark for the second leg of our tour. We will find some pastry en route—or else!—and my sugar-sticky teens will surely delight in the sanctioned slapping of their poor frazzled momster.

Then it’s time for further WTF fun in Denmark since we land on the very same day that is known as Fastelavn there, which also has a history of flogging and buns and… throws in some reluctant cats for good measure. From Scandinavian Standard,

The main tradition associated with the holiday was the placing of a black cat in a barrel and beating the barrel with fastelavnsris (this can be anything from a stick or a club or a bunch of twigs) until it broke apart, releasing the (probably traumatized) cat. This was done to ward off evil.

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This sanctioned black cat abuse doesn’t happen anymore and was, luckily, never that popular. Before cat-in-barrel beating it was an 18th century Good Friday tradition to flog children “to remind [them] of the pains of Christ on the cross.” Before cats and kids, it was traditional to beat infertile or young women, “as the Good Friday flogging ritual seems to have been conflated with a similar fertility ritual.” Hmm, great. Then, in comes the tradition we are now acclimated to from our raw Icelandic heinies—wherein another version of Fastlavn involves kids waking their parents by hitting them for pastry. If my kids slap me, I don’t usually dispense pastry, but whatever. The cat motif pervades, if only in the decor:

Luckily, our flogging days are behind us and we now just fill a barrel with candy like a piñata. Children dress up and, at neighborhood and/or school events, hit the barrel with bats until it cracks open and spills the candy. The barrel often still has an image of a cat on it; the person who breaks open the barrel is “Queen of the Cats,” (kattedronning) while the person who breaks the bottom of the barrel is “King of the Cats” (kattekonge). In the past, the title came with a year of tax exemption (uhhh what). The candy is then divided up equally among the children.

See how nice and egalitarian everyone is here in these Scandinavian parts?

In addition to the breaking of the barrel, children dress in costume and go “rattling,” (the only way I can translate this word, which in Danish is raslen) where they sing songs door-to-door and beg for candy, buns or money. If they don’t get what they’re after, the threat of mischief comes at the end of the song:

Will my girls sing for candy in a foreign land? Probably not. Will they slap my bum (when no one’s looking) for a pastry? Most definitely.

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My girls and I are only here on this little island for a mere two days, packed with a circle-loop tour, late night Aurora viewing (fingers crossed), a Viking Hotel and its stuffed animal head decor, and this romantic post-flight detour to luxuriate until we prune in our extravagantly priced geothermal spring access. Sorry kids and curious readers, we can’t make it to the Phallological Museum this time.

Remember when I planned a cross country road trip with a detour to the penis bone collection hanging over the pool table of a dive bar in Pennsylvania (sadly no more)? Well this museum, from what I learn online, takes that to the next level. The world’s only “genuine” penis museum, thirst-traps with this splash landing page full of giddy video clips of two ladies giggling over bones in jars, gift shop silicone, drinks in phallic flasks, and Belgium waffles dubiously shaped in a special iron. I guess for the same reason I avoid the bizarre penis-trappings of a bachelorette party I can easily skip this, but I do remain intrigued.

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The history—but pro tip: maybe don’t call a man’s penis collection “meager”?

In 1974, when I was but a wee one-year-old, Sigurður Hjartarson, was gifted a “bull penis pizzle” as a joke from his teaching staff when he served as school headmaster. The theme continued and accrued specimens—as some of his employees had summer jobs at a whaling station—of various sizes and species. By 1980, Hjartarson had amassed 13 penises from half of Iceland’s land mammals, which obviously meant he needed to keep collecting. In 1997, said “meager” museum, of 62 specimens and counting, opened in Reykjavik. By 2004, the museum required more space and moved to whale-watching town Húsavík, taking on some foreign mammals and more tourists. Weirdly, an item unrequited in his collection until 2011 was a human specimen. With this, Sigurður’s quest seemed fulfilled and he retired, putting his odd empire in the hands of his son who moved the museum to the capital and doubled its size. By 2020, time to triple the size with room for a phallic-themed bistro of course which brings us to its current location.

While adult tickets are pricey (about $25), children under 14 are allowed free entry, which seems odd that they would even care to be there at all. In reality, even if we had the time, I don’t know if I could get my older (and highly embarrassed) teens onboard with this icky activity.

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More importantly, “pizzle”? From Wikipedia:

Pizzle is a Middle English word for penis, derived from Low German pesel or Flemish Dutch pezel, diminutive of the Dutch language pees, meaning ‘sinew’. The word is used today to signify the penis of an animal, chiefly in Australia and New Zealand.

The word pizzle is also known, at least since 1523, especially in the combination “bull pizzle”, to denote a flogging instrument made from a bull’s penis.

In William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 1, the character Falstaff uses the term as an insult (Act 2, Scene IV):

If you wanted to combine your pizzle with a flogging, here’s this handy bullwhip fashioned from bull penis skin. How meta is that?

And oh, Guð minn góður (my god), who knew that coats of arms often have private parts poking out…now that I see this, I will never not see it. A further piece to add to the pizzle puzzle:

In heraldry, the term pizzled (or vilené in French blazon) indicates the depiction or inclusion of an animate charge’s genitalia, especially if colored (or “tinctured”) differently.

Sneaking a little penis into your special insignia I guess is common practice until as recently as 2007, when a Swedish commander objected, finding the depiction inappropriate for a uniform worn in a battle.

Nowadays, a pizzle (dried bull penises or bull sticks) are demoted to just a dog treat, occasionally enjoyed by humans for their supposed health benefits and stamina, and sometimes reinforced by a metal rod down the center, a version “cured by a taxidermist” that can become a cane, say for that certain weirdo you might want to begift with something unique this Hallmark holiday.

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There are innumerable diatribes I could quote on the topic, but here’s one among the most recent, a detour during a meeting with oil executives from early January:

I can proudly say that we have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office and we’re gonna keep it that way. My goal is to not let any windmill be built; they’re losers. They lose money, they destroy your landscape, they kill your birds, they’re all made in China… They use coal, and they use oil and gas, and some nuclear, not much, but they don’t have windmills. They come and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before. They are the worst form of energy, the most expensive form of energy and in eight years they’re rotted out anyway. Go take a look at Palm Springs, California, and take a look at what that looks like, it looks like a junkyard, a junkyard of steel. So, we don’t approve, and I’ve told my people…we will not approve any windmills in this country.

Pity the poor productive windmill! In New York, our anti-sustainability Prez halted a few major wind farm construction projects that would have helped add desperately needed electricity production to our maxed out grid. Breaking news: I’m thrilled to report they now seem to be back on track, care of court orders to resume work as of early this week. In one project alone, already 45% complete, that’ll be another 600,000 homes powered from offshore wind. Wind and solar are real low-hanging fruit in the energy game, if you ask me, but according to our literary canon chasing windmills has a tradition of being bound up with lunacy.

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Windmills have been getting a bad rap since Miguel de Cervantes’s epic episodic quest of Don Quixote launched what is considered the modern novel in the early 1600s.

This famous Quixote excerpt puts windmills on the map as the folly of fanatics, which later leads to the 1971 movie adaption They Might be Giants, inspiring the self-same band name. “Quixotic” even becomes its own word—surely a dream for any author—meaning “exceedingly idealistic, unrealistic, impractical.”

“Just then, they discovered thirty or forty windmills in that plain. And as soon as don Quixote saw them, he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have ever hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.”

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

“Those that you see over there,” responded his master, “with the long arms—some of them almost two leagues long.”

“Look, your grace,” responded Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants—they’re windmills; and what seems to be arms are the sails that rotate the millstone when they’re turned by the wind.”

“It seems to me,” responded don Quixote, “that you aren’t well-versed in adventures—they are giants; and if you’re afraid, get away from here and start praying while I go into fierce and unequal battle with them.”

And saying this, he spurred his horse Rocinante without heeding what his squire Sancho was shouting to him, that he was attacking windmills and not giants. But he was so certain they were giants that he paid no attention to his squire Sancho’s shouts, nor did he see what they were, even though he was very close. Rather, he went on shouting: “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”

At this point, the wind increased a bit and the large sails began to move, which don Quixote observed and said: “Even though you wave more arms than Briaræus, you’ll have to answer to me.”

When he said this—and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, asking her to aid him in that peril, well-covered by his shield, with his lance on the lance rest —he attacked at Rocinante’s full gallop and assailed the first windmill he came to. He gave a thrust into the sail with his lance just as a rush of air accelerated it with such fury that it broke the lance to bits, taking the horse and knight with it, and tossed him rolling onto the ground, very battered.

Sancho went as fast as his donkey could take him to help his master, and when he got there, he saw that don Quixote couldn’t stir—such was the result of Rocinante’s landing on top of him. “God help us,” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell you to watch what you were doing; that they were just windmills, and that only a person who had windmills in his head could fail to realize it?”

“Keep still, Sancho, my friend,” responded don Quixote. “Things associated with war, more than others, are subject to continual change. Moreover, I believe—and it’s true—that the sage Frestón—he who robbed me of my library—has changed these giants into windmills to take away the glory of my having conquered them, such is the enmity he bears me. But in the long run, his evil cunning will have little power over the might of my sword.”

“God’s will be done,” responded Sancho Panza.”

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Fast forward hundreds of years to another ever enduring classic that I felt compelled to read in recent months when Trump called a reporter “Piggy” and I sought solace in the good pigs of literature like Charlotte’s Web and Animal Farm. Only, Animal Farm’s pigs take a turn into authoritarianism when they oust their human leaders and morph into something much worse. The surprising sleeper character of the dystopian farm fable is actually none other than the recurring windmill.

From George Orwell’s hit of 1945, which you can read online here, here’s a whole host of quotes below on the pigs’ very stubborn and Sisyphean quest to build a windmill, at all costs. Under the clumsy mis-management of a pig duo that includes practical Snowball and megalomaniacal Napoleon, the first iteration gets destroyed as soon as they finish, and then the second, until finally after many years of grueling deadly effort they achieve a third.

Napoleon produced no schemes of his own, but said quietly that Snowball’s would come to nothing, and seemed to be biding his time. But of all their controversies, none was so bitter as the one that took place over the windmill.

After surveying the ground, Snowball declared that this was just the place for a windmill, which could be made to operate a dynamo and supply the farm with electrical power. This would light the stalls and warm them in winter, and would also run a circular saw, a chaff-cutter, a mangel-slicer, and an electric milking machine. The animals had never heard of anything of this kind before (for the farm was an old-fashioned one and had only the most primitive machinery), and they listened in astonishment while Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in the fields or improved their minds with reading and conversation.

At this Snowball sprang to his feet, and shouting down the sheep, who had begun bleating again, broke into a passionate appeal in favour of the windmill. Until now the animals had been about equally divided in their sympathies, but in a moment Snowball's eloquence had carried them away. In glowing sentences he painted a picture of Animal Farm as it might be when sordid labour was lifted from the animals’ backs. His imagination had now run far beyond chaff-cutters and turnip-slicers. Electricity, he said, could operate threshing machines, ploughs, harrows, rollers, and reapers and binders, besides supplying every stall with its own electric light, hot and cold water, and an electric heater. By the time he had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to which way the vote would go.

Seeing as they are only animals, this labor was absurdly challenging.

The windmill presented unexpected difficulties. There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all the materials for building were at hand. But the problem the animals could not at first solve was how to break up the stone into pieces of suitable size. There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind legs. Only after weeks of vain effort did the right idea occur to somebody—namely, to utilise the force of gravity.

The hens woke up squawking with terror because they had all dreamed simultaneously of hearing a gun go off in the distance. In the morning the animals came out of their stalls to find that the flagstaff had been blown down and an elm tree at the foot of the orchard had been plucked up like a radish. They had just noticed this when a cry of despair broke from every animal’s throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins.

They blame Snowball instead of the storm, a real scapegoat of a pig. Onto the painful second attempt, would have to be much sturdier, no less than three feet wide (which reminds me of the impossibly impressive stone walls of Sleepy Hollow’s own Old Dutch Church, built by the enslaved of course though the plantation owner Philipse takes credit on the plaque to this day).

Still, it had been decided to build the walls three feet thick this time instead of eighteen inches as before, which meant collecting much larger quantities of stone.

In the autumn, by a tremendous, exhausting effort-for the harvest had to be gathered at almost the same time—the windmill was finished. The machinery had still to be installed, and Whymper was negotiating the purchase of it, but the structure was completed. In the teeth of every difficulty, in spite of inexperience, of primitive implements, of bad luck and of Snowball’s treachery, the work had been finished punctually to the very day! Tired out but proud, the animals walked round and round their masterpiece, which appeared even more beautiful in their eyes than when it had been built the first time. Moreover, the walls were twice as thick as before. Nothing short of explosives would lay them low this time! And when they thought of how they had laboured, what discouragements they had overcome, and the enormous difference that would be made in their lives when the sails were turning and the dynamos running—when they thought of all this, their tiredness forsook them and they gambolled round and round the windmill, uttering cries of triumph.

And then just that: a heart-breaking explosion.

Terrified, the animals waited. It was impossible now to venture out of the shelter of the buildings. After a few minutes the men were seen to be running in all directions. Then there was a deafening roar. The pigeons swirled into the air, and all the animals, except Napoleon, flung themselves flat on their bellies and hid their faces. When they got up again, a huge cloud of black smoke was hanging where the windmill had been. Slowly the breeze drifted it away. The windmill had ceased to exist!

“What matter? We will build another windmill. We will build six windmills if we feel like it.”

“It is my lung,” said Boxer in a weak voice. “It does not matter. I think you will be able to finish the windmill without me. There is a pretty good store of stone accumulated. I had only another month to go in any case.”

Against all odds and the life of horse Boxer, they do it, a third windmill. What astounding grit (madness?) to keep going and going and going. Finally, it works, but not quite as intended:

The farm was more prosperous now, and better organised: it had even been enlarged by two fields which had been bought from Mr. Pilkington. The windmill had been successfully completed at last, and the farm possessed a threshing machine and a hay elevator of its own, and various new buildings had been added to it. Whymper had bought himself a dogcart. The windmill, however, had not after all been used for generating electrical power. It was used for milling corn, and brought in a handsome money profit. The animals were hard at work building yet another windmill; when that one was finished, so it was said, the dynamos would be installed. But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.

The exciting elusive thing they chased was not what they received. Turns out the hard working animals’ dream of light and economic liberty brought them instead to more poverty and toil when the plot is twisted under corrupt and anti-visionary leadership. The animals would continue to labor with no rewards while their bosses alone would benefit. The hard-won windmill would not produce unbridled power as hoped but just dutifully grind grain, obeying the mission of keeping the workers small, tied to the ground, bound. Snowball with his bold ideas of a different democratic, sustainable world has been ousted, sacrificed. The remaining pigs (bloated Napoleans all) weirdly walk around upright on two legs now, drinking, gambling, bickering with the ugly humans they once reviled and revolted against.

They could have been giants.

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On NPR, the story of a pre-teen girl who gets her period for the first time. Menarche is a poetic way to say that, but this is not that pretty. For, this Hispanic girl lives in Minneapolis and she is the daughter of a single dad who is undocumented, and she’s been in hiding for weeks in the house, waiting alone when he sneaks out to work—alone and scared when this strange yet normal event happens which has her bleeding profusely in a way she doesn’t recognize, with no supplies, information, support, or access to get any. Because: ICE.

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From All Things Considered, please give a listen for five minutes on:

How an errand for a 12-year-old immigrant in Minneapolis became an underground operation

On the morning of January 17 in southern Minneapolis, something very ordinary happened: a 12-year-old girl got her period for the first time.

Everything that happened after that was out of the ordinary.

For the last two weeks, federal immigration agents have been on the streets of Minneapolis, conducting one of the largest crackdowns in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. The Department of Homeland Security says it is getting criminals off the street; many immigrants and people of color who spoke to NPR say they are terrified of going outside.

That’s how the simple act of obtaining a menstrual pad for a pre-teen’s first period turned into an underground operation involving a faith leader, multiple neighbors and a clandestine network of Minneapolis volunteers.

A girl we’ll call “E.” because minorities have been made to be afraid to use their real names now in Minneapolis, let alone do anything else, wakes up to the shock of getting her first period. She is scared, and isolated. Her dad, a single father, is at work, which is only possible these days because he gets a ride from a white neighbor who volunteers to drive him so he might be safer as an immigrant traveling in the city under siege. E. hasn’t gone to school for weeks and has been trapped inside nonstop. She has no menstruation supplies—she wasn’t expecting this, or even aware of what “this” is—and didn’t know what to do. She calls her dad for help, who calls his pastor since he can’t leave work, who calls volunteers, who call neighbors. Because it would be reckless for the girl to go out, two of them travel together to get products and sneak into the back door of the house undetected, far more clandestine than such an operation should ever have to be. The coordinator of the delivery is a nurse at a clinic where E. is able to go for advice the next day. The girl is clueless about what is happening to her and needs answers.

E. asked Lizete, “Am I sick?”

Lizete shook her head. “This isn’t a disease,” she told her. “You aren’t sick. It will happen once a month. It’s totally normal.”

Lizete reminded her that even though it’s hard to talk to her dad about this stuff, E. has an army of women behind her.

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This saga reminds me—too much—of Anne Frank’s story, and how she too came of age in hiding. Can you even believe we can make these connections between the United States, 2026 and WWII Europe in the 1940s, but here we are. I think almost any girl coming of age in any era who reads Anne’s published diary will never forget this teen and her candor, her hope and vitality in the face of such atrocity outside her hiding spot in the “Secret Annex” she and seven others stay in undetected for just over two years in Amsterdam above her dad’s office space. I couldn’t stop thinking about my own vivid memories of this book after hearing the NPR snippet so I had to go read it again for the first time since my youth. Luckily my daughter had a copy on her bookshelf, which she of course has permanently imprinted in her brain now too. I spent this week’s snow day pouring through the journal entries, shocked by how contemporary Anne often sounds, how worldly and erudite, even through her typical anxieties and girlishness.

Anne describes intimately in her journal entries getting her first period, and even experiencing her first kiss with the boy upstairs. Whereas for E. in Minneapolis there’s confusion, fear, and lack of sex education, for Anne there’s no shame or ignorance, only a surprising amount anticipation and excitement, which is amazing considering the time period and their circumstances.

Anne Frank, her older sister Margot, her parents, and another family, are in hiding from July, 1942 to August, 1944. Her published journal starts at age 13 and abruptly ends at 15, getting us right into the head and heart of a boy-crazy (and maybe even possibly girl-crazy if given the chance) girl who reads voraciously and has crushes and dreams and annoyances with her mother. But now she also has to navigate how to bathe in private and flush the toilet when no one might detect the sound below and worry about such things for the sake of their survival as a network of friends deliver goods they need. They can’t go outside, at all, and must exist behind black out curtains. Still, she’s read enough to have a healthy sense of sexuality and her changing body, and hope for love in her future, a career as a writer ahead of her someday. She is actually excited for the changes to come. After reading about someone’s menstruation, she writes, “Oh I long to get my period—then I’ll really be grown up.”

And a month later,

PS. I forgot to mention the important news that I’m probably going to get my period soon. I can tell because I keep finding a whitish smear in my panties, and Mother predicted it would start soon. I can hardly wait. It’s such a momentous event. Too bad I can’t use sanitary napkins, but you can’t get them anymore, and Mama’s tampons can be used only by women who’ve had a baby.

(She does add a note a year and a half later when editing her entries that she’s embarrassed by her “indelicate” descriptions here and surprised at her “childish innocence…): “Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I’d like to be.”

Among the house rules: quiet by day, no laughter, can’t open curtains, only use electricity sparingly. No German news, or books, or language allowed for their own well-being. Schedules for when you can use the plumbing and home schooling. Of course never leave, no daylight, no sunshine, no fresh air, no playing outside. Still Anne feels guilty having a warm bed to sleep in.

I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth. And all because they’re Jews.

Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night or day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared. Every night hundreds of planes pass over Holland on their way to German cities, to sow their bombs on German soil. Every hour hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of people are being killed in Russia and Africa. No one can keep out of the conflict, the entire world is at war, and even though the Allies are doing better, the end is nowhere in sight. As for us, we’re quite fortunate. Luckier than millions of people. It’s quiet and safe here, and we’re using our money to buy food. We’re so selfish that we talk about “after the war” and look forward to new clothes and shoes, when actually we should be saving every penny to help others when the war is over, to salvage whatever we can.

Believe me, if you’ve been shut up for a year and a half, it can get to be too much for you sometimes. But feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem. I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free, and yet I can’t let it show. Just imagine what would happen if all eight of us were to feel sorry for ourselves or walk around with the discontent clearly visible on our faces. Where would that get us? I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager badly in need of some good plain fun. I don’t know, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about it with anyone, since I’m sure I'd start to cry.

She skips past her menarche moment somehow despite all her eagerness, but we do get it in medias res and with such incredible positivity:

Anne expresses an attraction to girls and a desire to touch herself, but when she reads an article about “blushing” she goes to the only available kindred spirit nearby, Peter, by default. What’s staggering is the feeling of isolation you can experience, even when in what must have been a claustrophobic group, surrounded by a sister, family, friends. So many things inside the restless young mind you can’t fully express on a rare day she experiences when Peter opens an upstairs window:

She’s been experimenting with kissing Peter now for a few months, and they are talking—only talking—about sex, how the parts work. There’s much less food for them to eat at this stage, and some of it is rotten, and as I approach the end of the pages, there’s such a sickening feeling as only we know she is nearing her demise. Still Anne’s unrelenting cheeriness, even while starving:

I hadn’t had my period for more than two months, but it finally started last Sunday. Despite the mess and bother, I’m glad it hasn’t deserted me.

In the final pages,

And then it just stops—all that potential and desire—and you have to read the epilogue to hear the awful truth we already know, that after all that effort of hiding and hard work of staying safe, the eight were ultimately captured. That they were separated in different concentration camps. That Anne and her sister, together at least, died of typhus only about a month before they might have been freed. That it was her father, the sole survivor, who retrieved all these personal, intimate writings of his pubescent daughter and decided they were important enough to bravely share with the world.

I could sob or get angry about these lives cut short, about the absurd tragedy of it, and about this poor girl experiencing similar isolation and attacks on what should be her magical girlhood in Minneapolis—which I do—but I can also view it all imbued with some of Anne’s wonder and infectious spirit. Look at the community that rises up to help E. in this moment, the network, the care. Look at this amazing city holding itself together when it could just as easily fragment into singular despairing individuals. Look at how they resist, and love, and reveal their stories so much bigger than they can ever imagine, or would ever choose.

Look how strong our material.

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Mind you, I like my comedy flirting with existential dread in the vein of Waiting for Godot and a good glob of what’s-it-all-aboutism, so what more perfect interlude to get me through this interminable January than a seven-minute screening of pure delight and despair known as the Last Pickle, care of my kids who would prefer I didn’t share here. But since this already lives on the public YouTubes (and we talked about it in therapy), grab a healthy snack and sit back:

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A few years ago, my girls led their NYC Take Two film academy team of summer camp kids on this mad mission to write, edit, act, and prop-master the heart out of this epic pickle biopic, which—against all odds—won first place among the programs that season. I say against all odds, because we didn’t rear your typical trophy kids (no sports, not competitive) so never expect such results. The fact that they excelled at this project (and enjoyed the process) was thrilling enough; the award added extra oomph. If I were still in grad school, I’d write a thesis about the sweet and savory depth of its messaging and technique. But since I’m here, I’ll unpack it a little more informally for your benefit.

You’ve got Mitchell, the pickle in the brine jar, and Duane, the tomato, next to him on the shelf of the mostly empty fridge. Mitchell introduces himself,

Duane encourages him. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna get picked today, Bud, I just know it.”

Sadly, in a pick-me world where apparently getting eaten is more useful than being spared, Mitchell gets left behind, and eventually tossed.

Scene change. Now we’re in a pile of garbage. Mitchell is mostly out of brine and transfers what’s left from his big jar into a little one, so he can carry along enough to stay hydrated.

Contrast to the old grape he meets who’s gone raisin. “I used to be so beautiful, so smooth and soft. Now I’m so..ahh [she screams].”

And then something every aging woman of this era needs to hear:

Mitchell sets off on a quixotic quest for his life’s purpose. Does he matter? Why are we here? The raisin advises him, as a wise old character in fables often does, to ascend some far peak to seek answers. Maybe climbing the highest Trash Mountain will reveal something. But look out, “there’s a monster—a huge cube of compressed trash and broken dreams” he might encounter, “The Notorious Compacted Garbage Monster.”

Old lady Raisin, who used to love adventure is excited for the opportunity to join him. The character they meet along the way: a raccoon of course, who they convince him not to eat them but join the journey for the promise of better trash elsewhere. Raccoon and Notorious CGM see each other from afar and it’s heart-eyeballs at first sight. The monster calls it like he sees it: “Roar, you’re trash,” he says to the pathetic pair of old food. “That’s right I am,” responds the raisin with a withered voice.

Much like the children’s song, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” there’s only ever more of the same.

The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
The bear went over the mountain
To see what he could see.
And all that he could see ...
Was the other side of the mountain.

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Mitchell is so disenchanted. There’s nothing special here to show for their troubles. “I wasted our time.”

But then, there it is: New life! A baby tomato plant, a sprout from Duane’s seed. The tiny tomato might die here in the hot sun if it weren’t for Mitchell sacrificing the last drops of brine to help it thrive while Mitchell shrivels. This was the point of living, to die like this. (And it’s a good death, full of slow-mo flashbacks, then panning out to planet with a sappy soundtrack, “It’s a Wonderful World.”)

In other words, Mitchell mattered. We all do. If we can achieve any inch of such things—adding joy, helping someone, community-building, connection—we are worthwhile. That’s a life well-lived, no matter any accolades.

But, it must be said—since we seem to live semi-permanently now in the Upside-Down where a Nobel Peace Prize winner, whose country we just hijacked for oil, just hands over her trophy to our pouty anti-peace President—keep your paws off that trophy, or else. It’s ours.

First Place, Last Pickle, proud mama.

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But what about those irises? The kaleidoscopic complexity of colors available to humans through nothing more than DNA (or tinted contacts) might to some signal beauty or emotional depth or…too much to bear.

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My friend said something interesting the other day, which happened to add a new layer to riff on my eyeball theme of late. He suggested lighter colored eyes are easier to “read.” I immediately thought of a Filipino boyfriend I had many years prior—how his fully dark eyes were like monotone marbles to me, shiny, opaque and lovely if somewhat inscrutable. It occurred to me that lighter eyes—with their greater contrast between iris and pupil—might seem more intense through this juxtaposition and somehow more decipherable and emotionally compelling.

I’m lately into doing a four-minute staring contest with an intimate partner in the edging-toward-boyfriend stage of early dating. It’s both intimidating and exhilarating to try to stare unflinchingly into this most private/most public space of our precious eyeballs, while, gasp, they might be doing the same to mine. It’s so confronting, so vulnerable. Will they see in there the great mass of my fear, or traces of the magic song of the inner child before the self-consciousness (and grade four eyeglasses) set in? The recklessness or the shame? The imposter syndrome or the genius? Will I likewise detect in them something secret, spicy, or scary?

What do everyday irises, when not over-runneth with black pupils, have to tell us? Could these ancestrally bequeathed color rings really be that rich? We can only measure their power in the interplay between the two parts, aperture and dispersed. If our eyes are the windows to the souls, the pupils let the light in, while the iris encircling might provide the Shakespeare.

My friend and I surmised in this iteration of the staring game, that each of us has one evil eye, the one on the left. Soulmates? In the shadowy light of dusk we were working with, it seemed as if one pupil of his had gone oblong, a bit reptilian. It was surely just another mirage. Meanwhile, in my left eye he detected the same. If not snake exactly, some edge. I forgot to put the sound on the phone’s timer so the four minutes went on interminably until we couldn’t take it anymore. Is it possible that if both our eyes were darker hued, we’d just glaze over this event easily in the shadows, but since we are mutually light-eyed, we had plenty of shape-shifting to search and believe we saw?

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Studies show people tend to perceive brown eyes as more soothing, trustworthy. While pastel eyes are psychologically linked to assumptions about deceptiveness, cool, distance. These same studies also show that these eyes rest on faces that are also read and misread as all these features form a composite inextricably linked. “We concluded that although the brown-eyed faces were perceived as more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones, it was not brown eye color per se that caused the stronger perception of trustworthiness but rather the facial features associated with brown eyes.”

On a Subreddit for neurodiversity someone admits darker eyes are easier for them to look at since you don’t know the line where the pupil ends and the iris begins. Making direct and prolonged eye contact can be intimidating for anyone, but for someone with autism, for instance, this level of engagement might be completely overwhelming. And, interestingly, this might be especially pronounced when you’re dealing with lighter hued irises.

One post starts with this question:

This sounds freaking ridiculous but I just want to know if other people have this weird affliction. It feels nuts to even type out.

For reference, I have autism, ADHD, and OCD. There’s no problem making eye contact with people who have brown eyes, in fact I tend to overdo it, but with blue-eyed people it’s very uncomfortable. It doesn’t even matter what our relationship is, like it’s easier for me to look a brown-eyed stranger in the face than my brothers, who have blue eyes.

Which is followed by no less than 46 commenters who did not at all find this ridiculous:

• I’m autistic and just had a doctor’s visit with a doctor who had at least light eyes if not blue. I found it very uncomfortable to look him in the eye because everyone in my family has brown or dark eyes. It’s not creepy or strange to me, it just feels like light eye colored people “see” more when looking at me, probably just my mind getting uncomfortable because they are more piercing than dark eyes. In general, I don’t like looking people in the eye, and I feel better when looking away because if I can’t see you, you can’t see me type of feeling, but I have less of a problem with brown eyes than blue eyes for some reason.

• I have hard time keeping eye contact with people that have light colored eyes, I have to break eye contact constantly to keep from going nuts. It’s not that the eyes scare us, it just triggers anxiety and self-awareness.

• I have a feeling it has to do with how pupils dilate and how different colors appear. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m much more comfortable looking into the eyes of my brown eyed friend because brown eyes make the size of the pupil harder to distinguish. It all blends together. When I make eye contact with my blue eyed bsf, especially in bright lighting, her pupils will look so small, which is pronounced because of her eyes being so light. Small pupils generally indicate more light coming in and more focus, which might be why you feel more “seen,” thus uncomfortable.

Could it be that with lighter eyes, it’s not what we see exactly as how we might feel disturbingly more seen?

People tend to find larger (dilated) pupils more attractive, all the better to see when the irises around them are lighter. You can readily surmise the extreme opposite from this picture below (and empathize with all the neurodivergent above) in the pinprick pupil of bright daylight or perhaps something that resembles an insane person. Please stop shooting laser beams and let me be. Then again, the other model might be high on murder or mushrooms for all we know. This is indeed quite complicated.

Dilated pupils (mydriasis) happen for all kinds of reasons. Mydriasis by definition means larger pupils than normal, i.e. taking up more eyeball space than the iris.

From the Clevelandclinic.org, the most common causes of dilation are, beyond an obvious absence of light/sunlight:

• An eye exam (eye drops used to examine nerves and retina)

• A reaction to medication (antidepressants, antihistamines, anti-nausea, anti-seizure, atropine, botulinum toxin, meds for Parkinson’s disease)

• A brain injury

• The use of recreational drugs (cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, methamphetamines, psychedelic mushrooms)

• Sexual arousal (increased production of oxytocin hormone)

• Adrenaline

The big-pupilled among us might also be in love, anxious, lying. Without a drug test and/or a lie detector how is one to know? In any case, we must find all this intriguing enough to want to look further—if we can stand it.

And, just to up the eyeball ante to the 16th degree, says PsychologicalScience.org, the eyes are of course embedded in a whole face, which is part of the fleshy messy mass of body language, and leads at last to end on the very meta note that here we are trying to figure out how eyes work with our own exquisite, sensitive, myopic, mystifying eyes.

“Human expressions are highly complex—when enumerating our facial muscles, we computed that there are at least 3.7 x 10¹⁶ different expression combinations, which is about the same probabilistic space as two Powerball jackpots,” says Lee. “We looked at a subset of this space—just the eye region—and found that one simple physical dimension (widening vs. narrowing) explained a majority of this complex space in social communication.”

Findings from a second study showed that the eyes provide equally strong emotional signals when they’re embedded in the context of a whole face, even when the features in the lower face don’t indicate the same expression as the eyes do.

Thus, relative to the rest of our facial features, the eyes seem to have it when it comes to conveying complex mental states.

“This finding underscores how the origins of reading mental states from the eyes relate in part to how the eyes see,” the researchers write.

The power of what we can see with our own eyes…

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