Many of us came here for Halloween and it was the name Sleepy Hollow that captured our imaginations. Rather than hold onto the NT name from yesteryear (<1996) why not hurl ourselves even further forward: I propose that Tarrytown—which coexists with us and enjoys basking in our rep were it not for the sad fact that we reside in separate towns paying taxes for side by side duplicate services like firehouses and public works—follow suit and change its name to South Sleepy Hollow.

Hear me out: in my dream (and also in the short fiction I wrote last year for the new Tarry lit mag), we both secede and merge to form the new town of The Hollows (comprised of hamlets Sleepy and South, respectively). Here, in this brave new world where we embrace change and costuming, Halloween is not a holiday but a season.

Wait, we knew that already, didn’t we? Ever-eager Halloween here already spans from about Labor Day to Thanksgiving, i.e. Fall effectively. Scratch that. Now we also have Halfway to Halloween festivities whatever that month that was. There’s no end to our ‘weening.

Share

A new Substack I stumbled upon which I obviously enjoy is called “Every Day is Halloween” where Lisa Morton had a recent post announcing the fact that Home Depot has joined us in this (lucrative) epiphany. “Home Depot has finally admitted that Halloween is no longer just a holiday,” is the headline. (Also noting the important return of the 12-foot Skelly.) She quotes from the HD’s own press release:

The Home Depot’s viral 12 ft. Skelly is officially back—and bringing some terrifying new friends.

Bigger, bolder, and spookier than ever, the highly anticipated collection is redefining seasonal decor by blending massive scale with impressive engineering.

The cultural shift is clear: Halloween has transformed from a single night of tricks & treats into a celebrated season of its own.

Morton’s response:

Subscribe now

But what if it’s only/already August in the Hollow and we’re trying to slow time and savor these last hot dregs of summer rather than speed it up and hurry to our deaths? May I suggest a trip down other unfortunate people’s bad memory lane with some old-timey charm: enjoy dark tantalizing storytelling from a well-versed, dramatic tour guide by kerosene lantern light in the Murder and Mayhem tours that run at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery Saturdays now through September. Now—in these dog days? Yes, all the better to get ahead of the fall crowds.

Without giving it all away, following are some tricks and treats from my two-hour tour, care of intrepid host Laura. She knows her way around the many acres, even over bumps in the night by lantern and moon. The tour is ambitious and lasts past my bedtime but it was so worth it. Now I can better boast about the bad behavior and terrible tragedies we have buried in our midst and not just haunting our fictions.

• Let’s begin with time travel and travel-travel to the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, IL that killed 600 souls within an awful 15 minutes. This got me thinking about the stories I grew up hearing about with my grandparents’ memories of the Hartford, CT circus tent fire of 1944 and all the terrible charred bodies from it. Luckily, the silver lining of such events was that they helped advance modern safety standards and regulations. Multiple exits, learning not to coat tents in gasoline, etc. The Van Ingens, buried here, lost five of their six kids in the Iroquois disaster.

• Then there’s the poor dad who offed himself with carbolic acid in 1899 after he lost his second son to war and suffered a mania from which he couldn’t recover. He had already lost his first son from a head injury he suffered whilst playing leap frog!

• The sunny “Bliss” name does not typically connote murder until you come across this greedy daughter who decides she needs to unload her own mother in order to access the inheritance from mom’s first short-lived marriage to an incredibly old and rich man. The daughter allegedly uses three times the fatal dose of arsenic stirred into the clam chowder. Allegedly, because she was never charged and still won $3M, in a case claiming that the arsenic must have been in the makeup, or the chowder was rancid, etc. Relative Henry, by the way, became infamous as the first motor vehicle fatality when he stepped off a trolley and got hit by a car.

• Hoge’s Point, a place I never before heard of, was the site in 1891 of a train exploding that was loaded with hundreds of pounds of dynamite, sending the train and its passengers in the river between Irvington and Tarrytown where Mario Cuomo Bridge now meets land. Tarrytown Train Station was the triage center, with not all bodies recovered. Twelve of the injured and killed were Italian workers, one of whom was named and buried here, from what was then considered the worst industrial accident in the country.

• There’s the mystery of the SS Morro Castle ocean liner returning from Cuba to the US, during which tour the captain was found dead followed by seemingly spontaneous fires and more fires. Feels like a bit of the Titanic fiasco when the lifeboats couldn’t lower because they had painted the pulleys shut. Death count: 137. Buried in the cemetery are the cook and her daughter, Dora and Lilian Gerringer. The burned boat was propped up at Asbury Park for a tourist attraction for a little while after its event. And the good news: some fire safety now also made its way to nautical culture.

• How about the dude named John who lost his Tarrytown factory in a card game. In 1925 he can’t go on, and in his goodbye-to-life letter, he blames Prohibition for his demise: “Can’t get any good beer.” (At least he’s not the other guy we heard about who claimed “God made me do it.”)

• Ann Lohman was an abortionist in the 19th century. A self-described “professor of diseases of women” (such as unwanted pregnancies), she invented a French persona for herself as Madame Restell and with her pharmacist husband peddled pills and procedures. Eventually she was indicted for baby murder and slit her throat in the bathtub. Her body was dug up later to prove it was really her down there. The coffin had a window so she could see to the beyond. Ironically considering her day job, her grave is quite notable as it boasts a statue of a baby in a cradle over the tomb, supposedly designed by her for her granddaughter.

• Neighbor Dr. Eugene Crowell was a fan of the occult in the 1800s. He liked talking with the dead and spirit writing. With this skill, he channeled notes to the living through his hand. He wrote in his spiritualist book that he got a lot of his insight from the mourning he had done at his son’s grave. These were the days in which kids often predate the parents.

• Albert had a grocery near the Kensico Dam. As is also the norm, he was over twice the age of his young bride when he was (not the norm) found with gashes/blood that look like an ax murder. People suspected his wife Emma’s brother Charles but who knows. Meanwhile the son Bertie was buried alongside three young cousins that fell through the ice and drowned. So it goes those days, I’m afraid.

• Finally, did you know there was a Sleepy Hollow Massacre? It was pretty small but called that in the paper. A few holiday meals between neighbors in 1870 went amuck with a shotgun. The excuse for the perpetrator of the double murder was that he fell off his horse when he was 13.

Believe it or not, there’s much more true lore here, so you’ll have to go take your own tour as I can’t see all the names or make sense of what I scribbled in my notepad in the dark. As I love to create a multi-sensory experience on these pages, let’s sing this one to sleep.

Remember the Ramone’s “Pet Sematary” video with the absurd gravestone that looks like a prop of a bumpy cross? Well it’s real, and it’s here—though please note you can’t bury your pet in our “sematary.” They dug a hole for this 1989 production—which would never fly under current Superintendent Jim Logan’s watch. You can see the frigid winter air on their breaths and dream of chillier seasons to come when it all goes downhill (in a good way?) from here.

Who’s Victor? He must be buried here somewhere.

Leave a comment

When Heather Cox Richardson, American historian/professor/writer, says she heard some stellar oratory, I believe her and go give a listen. Granted I’m living under a bit of a rock where I hadn’t heard NYC Mayor Mamdani’s energetic victory lap of a speech for the recent Knicks’ ticker tape parade day, but at least I got there eventually care of HCR.

It is quite a speech—caught in full here—full of joy and specific storytelling:

And just before that, I got to hear both Mr. and Mrs. Obama giving grand oratory surrounding the launch of Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center, in two inspiring clips below. Oh how we miss this man.

And Michelle demonstrating her matrimonial love like no other. The “awe” she says she feels every day for her spouse.

Share

All three of these graceful and moving orations remind us that words matter, but also very importantly are rooted in love, for a certain place and its people. I was writing in recent weeks about this sort of specificity of local/loco with Sleepy Hollow, my chosen home. How the self merges with the surroundings, if you let it and live fully.

The Obama Center couldn’t be anywhere but Chicago, they both said. The Knicks are a true fable about the grit of New York, 53 years of our “sick suffering hearts,” says Mamdani. And finally, when faced with a 99.6 percent chance of failure, taking it as a challenge and “in that .4% we go to work.”

One writer took the time to praise all three speeches—which happened to fall in short succession in a few thrilling days—in the essay, Obama and Mamdani Show How It’s Done:

This week, we saw two distinct visions of what it means to honor and celebrate the United States.

The first is the one you know, the Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle in Washington, where President Trump presided over pyrotechnics, blood sport and general mayhem. Ostensibly planned to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation—which, as we all know, was founded by a cadre of mixed martial artists and podcasters—it was in reality a birthday celebration for a president who sees himself as the embodiment of the nation or who, at least, is unable to step out of the spotlight for even a moment.

Billed as though it was for the American people as a whole, the U.F.C. event was not, in truth, for the public; it was for Trump and his most dedicated supporters. With its aggressive machismo and shock-jock sensibility, it was designed to exclude all but the MAGA faithful—and even then, only those who subscribed to Paramount+.

The opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago was not technically an event to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And yet it had the tone and tenor of a more traditional celebration. There were popular celebrity musicians—Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen and the Roots, among others—to perform for the crowds. And our living ex-presidents—George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden—sat in attendance as Barack Obama introduced the center and offered a few words of reflection.

In the same week, the Knicks’ victory and the most energetic, jubilant speech from a youthful, idealistic mayor (who also gets stuff done):

In the absence of a White House administration that values the cosmopolitan and egalitarian aspirations of American democracy, we have these moments that speak beyond the specific circumstances of a professional basketball team or a library to the country at large. It is both a heartening reminder that we have not, as a public, abandoned our highest values, and a sad commentary on the political leaders who have, if they ever believed in them in the first place.

Subscribe now

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

What makes for great oratory? I’m sure HCR would mention the British Prime Minister who served during WWII, Sir Winston Churchill, as among the finest in history—alongside Lincoln. “So gifted was Churchill that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for ‘mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values,” states an article on his legendary ability. Churchill himself, who didn’t just happen upon the art but studied it, once wrote a guide to help future speechmakers.

Churchill wrote:

Long before politics and wars (and winning them), Churchill was a writer and wrote an essay (unpublished) called “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric” in 1897. Here he broke down the craft into five points he borrowed from Greek classics, Shakespeare, Lincoln and others.

1. Precision - The ‘exact appreciation of words’ which includes ‘the continual employment of the best possible word.’ Churchill’s advice was to use ‘short, homely words of common usage.’ These words needed to be understandable, but the sentences didn’t need to be short. Ideally, they would have an ‘internal rhythm.’

2. Tempo and rhythm. The ‘influence of sound on the human brain’ Churchill believed, was most impactful when ‘the sentences of the orator… become long, rolling and sonorous’. Great orators are able to express their words in blank verse— as opposed to regular prose. Shakespeare was his life-long influence when emulating this type of blank verse.

3. Accumulation of argument. In Churchill’s words, ‘a series of facts is brought forward all pointing in a common direction… the crowd anticipate the conclusion and the last words fall amid a thunder of assent.’

4. Analogy. An apt analogy connects or appears to connect distant spheres of abstract thought. It appeals to the everyday knowledge of the listener and invites them to imagine. Churchill asserts that analogies ‘translate an established truth into simple language’.

5. Wild Extravagance. My personal favorite. Churchill said that ‘the emotions of the speaker and listeners are alike aroused and some expression must be found that will represent all they are feeling’.

You can see all of this at work in our contemporary masters—the repetition, the rhythm, the “wild extravagance” paired somehow with precision. It’s all about juxtaposition and contrast: the colloquial alternating with flourishes of poetry and deep feeling. Complex but relatable ideas well-told. These notable words that are meant to feel off-the-cuff but come rehearsed, practiced (and never too much). Their ultimate sincerity.

Who is a contemporary or historic speaker you admire? What techniques do they employ to inspire our awe and activate our hearts? Are good speakers, like Flannery O’Connor once said about a good man, increasingly hard to find?

Leave a comment

Driving an ancient Tesla (2013), named Katinka, with free unlimited supercharging grandfathered in is like willfully choosing the oldest bricked computer to drive around as a car. But it works, and the joy of free charging (effectively driving for free) has taught me to relish the journey. Anything over two hours will likely require a stop along the way, and while the car is regrouping, we paused-passengers can chat, play games, eat at a roadside stand, buy drinks and/or pee at the otherwise useless gas station, press the escape hatch and go for a walk and surmise the landscape beyond the highway. I never cared much for driving, but I adore this stopping.

Subscribe now

The older I get, the more I want to slow down. I do a lot—too much—but I am not the most efficient. I pride myself on doing things by hand, with intention and interest. I like manual labor and the sore proof after.

The other day, I started listed highlights of the so-called Slow Movement from my own life:

• Charging my EV with activities packed for the breaks

• Reading books on paper from the library (and walking there to get and return them)

• Walking or riding a bike whenever I can around town instead of driving

• Rather than using a notes app, writing notes on paper in a leather-bound composition notebook I switch out when full (this leather cover is among my favorite things in life, and I’ve had it for decades)

• Cooking from cookbook recipes

• Literally bookending the day with books—reading in bed (on paper) before sleep, and with coffee in hand when I awake

• Meditating, just ten minutes, also in bed, before I have time to talk myself out of it

• Sending homemade cards via snail mail with old 10 cent stamps glued all over the envelope

• Homemade gifts with care for anyone will appreciate them

• Printing photo albums into annual coffee table books, or one per trip

• Downsizing not upsizing my phone when I need to get a new one (and only ever refurbished)

• Watching movies via DVD, also retrieved on foot from the library

• Going off-grid on the weekends as much as possible. I may have power there, but I do not have phone use

• Board game night with strangers that become familiars (also at the library)

• Taking baths, when time allows and stress requires

• Propagating plants from cuttings

• Adult coloring or any kind of crafting turned up a notch

• Saying No to things, setting over-commitment boundaries

• Which also leaves room, as I’ve written here before, for more valuable yesses

• Collecting things from beaches (such as, currently: those spiky seed pods from the nasty water chestnut; these deserve a post for themselves, stay tuned)

Share

I am grateful to live in a place that not only understands such values, but seems to promote them at every turn.

Here in the Hollow, we have artist/activator Kersten Harries encouraging us to decorate squares for our community quilt, cover the fences with hand-cut snowflakes, and weave with shredded t-shirts.

In an age when the National Endowment on the Arts says “Reading’s at risk,” we have two newish bookstores in our little zip code (leaning literary at Transom, Tarrytown; and for youth/teens at Sleepy Hollow Bookshop) with another tantalizingly named Devoured one for fantasy/lore growing via pop ups.

Recently I attended the Picture Book Appreciation Society at SH Bookshop where adults read their favorite illustrated children’s books to each other. What could be sweeter or finer than that?

Enter two new slow, wonderful shops, one of which has gone viral, the other which is quietly luring the arts-inclined to play with ink and paint:

Shopping local is about having an experience, making connections. The opening of the new retro-inspired Village Confectionary was an event Beekman Ave has never seen outside of Halloween season, complete with police on standby (in case anyone went into sugar shock?) and a cotton candy machine. Giddy families lined up all day down the block just for the privilege of being an early bird to scoop up ounces of classic and custom candies presented with love by former TV/movie producer Kate Bolger.

Then there was the more meditative way I entered the new Marigold Arts studio space—by quiet invite, where beloved local arts teacher Jane Kang Lawrence conducts intimate workshops for the after-school crowd, adults by evening, drop-ins, and custom classes/parties tailored to your needs at 19 N Broadway, 2nd Floor. Her schedule is here.

The space is charming as is Jane, who inspires an ease with watercolor I never before enjoyed (pictured in images I share above). In this introductory watercolor sketch session I learned some key lessons I never heard and improved the experience: stop to let your paper dry and return to it later; pool your color in a wet patch and play; swirl a brush tip as you finely drag to make a long thinning line… It was all so satisfying.

Jane’s online introduction, complete with flower:

It’s been exactly one month of Marigold🌼 and I realized I never properly introduced myself, so hello! I’m Jane! I’ve been teaching art in NY since 2005. I currently teach ceramics, studio art, & photography at our local HS and I also teach clay camp @tarrytownartscamp. I previously taught in NYC for 17 years, including at an international HS where visual arts supported students in building language skills. I am a @pulitzercenter Teacher Fellow and an advisory council member, I believe deeply in the power of art education in student development and am committed to sharing its importance locally & globally.

I love helping people discover their creativity and grow their skills as artists! I especially love teaching adults. It is never too late to start something new or return to a creative practice. One of the reasons I opened this studio was to create a welcoming space where kids & adults can learn, explore, and make art without pressure. My classes focus on building skills, confidence, and joy in the process.

Cheers to building skills and increasing joy. Going slow is the best possible speed, all the better to chat to your cozy art class tablemates as we rinse our brushes and explore new techniques and colors.

Clearly Sleepy Hollow Country, like a fine New York bred wine, keeps improving as we age with grand new entrepreneurial ventures to lure you up and down the main ave from DeCicco’s, Cozy Coven, Honey and Gold Flowers, North River Oyster Bar. Cast a spell, smell the marigolds, slurp an oyster, bella la vita.

Leave a comment

This is the most literary of hard-boiled detective novels because the main character, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette’s syndrome and emits language all day in irreverent outbursts, odd creations, and non sequitur manglings that convert the whole landscape of urban grit into a surprisingly tantalizing word salad. What raw truths would I find there about the state of gender in our times?

Subscribe now

I knew this was a man’s world I was entering but that there must also necessarily be (as there always are) some side-piece females far more significant than they may at first appear. The very fact of calling this book Motherless Brooklyn calls attention to the centrifugal-force founding female part, the haunting of absence that becomes one of the most important themes. So I was on the lookout for mothers in particular, and women in general, in a book rife with hyper-masculine car chases and stake-outs and dumpster murders.

The gang of misfit teens who once get taken in by Frank Minna, their shady mob sort of father figure, come straight from an orphanage. Frank grooms these wayward high school boys into whatever he needs them to be, adopting them as his minions by sprinkling them with $20 bills. Before this, Lionel “grew up in the library of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys,” in downtown Brooklyn, where he read every book and tried to control/fathom what came out of his mouth. With Frank, he settles into himself a bit. The uncontrollable tick becomes a trademark that Frank is fond of, perhaps as a great leveling agent to throw people off the scent of whatever crap he’s up to.

Women, though fringe, always loomed large in their boyhood imaginations. In the Home for Boys, they watched a ton of TV…

In this man’s world mix, it is a girlish though somewhat gender-neutral woman who starts and ends the story—who turns out to be named “Kimmery”—with “short hair, squarish glasses, that was all I saw before her back was to us. She wore a pea coat. Sworls of black hair at her neck, under the boyish haircut. Twenty-five maybe, or maybe eighteen.” Essrog discovers her going into the Buddhist “Zendo” where the minions are on a stake-out for reasons unknown.

Lionel’s the most obvious token freak among the orphan gang. At one point, they visit the house of the two men Matricardi and Rockaforte, who seem trapped in time in their mom’s old parlor. “Exactly as she kept it, we never changed a thing,” says Matricardi, next to his friend, two old men seated in plush chairs in brown suits. And later, “Everything exactly as she kept it, she would see it and know. If she were here, bless her sweet pathetic soul.” (Note the “Matri” right there in his name since he can’t let her ghost go.) The parlor is festooned with golf leaf on the ceiling’s plaster scrollwork, a super-sized grandfather clock, vases with flowers, ancient carpet layered with color, walls covered with family photographs. It’s a shrine to their matriarch as if she’s the altarpiece of their church.

Then the boy squad has the benefit of meeting of Minna’s mom, referred to by her doting son with affection as the “Old Stove.” Carlotta Minna, a ceaseless cook who churns out food that she sells to neighbors by word of mouth and quality of her reputation.

Frank doesn’t stop time and preserve a mom-shrine the way the two old Matri guys do. The minute the poor Old Stove dies, in comes a replacement in the form of Frank’s hot new wife. Julia emerges when he disappears between the end of what started as a shady moving company and the beginning of a pretty inept detective agency. The boys of course take notice. An original woman to replace the primary original woman.

Share

When Kimmery enters the scene (or rather gets noticed in a scene and becomes a player through just happening to be somewhere and open to conversation), she seems to break the two classic female prototypes available to us of Madonna/Whore (stove mom/sexpot wife). It almost feels possible from their brief budding relationship that Lionel could find real, deeper companionship since she is quietly and refreshingly complicated. Age uncertain, gender a little fuzzy. She’s not caricature-female with boobs and lips and sass (or a sauce-stained kitchen) but instead exhibits: the Buddha nature of a gentle soul, tender, empathetic, a good listener. In Kimmery’s presence, Lionel feels safe enough to let the words rip freely.

Here’s a sampling of the things that come from his mouth throughout the book, which seem to accelerate when he meets her:

At first, italics indicate Lionel’s unspoken Tourrettian slurs while normalized text connotes the spoken, such as: when chewing White Castle with “brain going Characteristic autistic mystic my tic dipstick dickweek,” and later outloud, “Eat shit, Bailey!” But as the book progresses, the distinctions blur and it becomes more unclear what is thought and/or said. The reader’s discomfort/anticipation rises as Lionel finds himself in places where he should probably stay silent. You don’t know if he can behave, or if the thoughts will leak into verbalized words and get him into trouble (more likely).

There’s the increased tension when he talks to a police officer and screams “Scaredycop!” or when many are meditating in the Zendo and Lionel can’t stop an explosion of further z words.

At some point he uses the term “echolalia” which I had never heard before, and thought was just another product of his wordplay.

But echolalia is a real condition once entered into an 1915 text book for mental disorders with this poor guy below outed as the poster boy in a questionable caption.

By medical definition, care of the Cleveland Clinic, we’ve come a little further in our understanding than mere “mental disorder.”

Echolalia is the repetition of words or phrases spoken by someone else. Children use echolalia as they learn how to communicate. It usually resolves by age 3, but may be a sign of developmental delay or an underlying condition if it continues or appears during adulthood. It’s common with autism spectrum disorder and Tourette syndrome.

I think it’s interesting that Lionel uses the term echolalia, which embodies echoing, repetition when he generally is more original than that. In his case, it’s the echolalia salad part that is key. How he might take the slightest hint of something heard, experienced, learned but then expand it into a whole riffed rap chorus of conjoined related letter-clusters from his past, present surroundings, imagination. His gang and gang leader call him a freak, but perhaps he is simply the young stove to compare to our Old Stove, cooking words and waxing poetic/frantic, reputation spreading by word of mouth.

To bring it all back to the motherless theme, let’s consider the Mother Tongue and what might happen in a mom’s absence. How might language take hold without the milk and nurturing of mothers? Early vocabulary and the primal mommas go hand in hand. In this case, the boys of Frank’s gang were lost boys, reared in an orphanage, supervised by television, the source of their education about women until they encountered real ones care of Frank. (It’s worth noting that Brooklyn is Fatherless too; Lionel spends the book trying to solve the mystery of the murder of his father figure who stepped in in the absence of any fathers or mothers.

But I think it’s the female magnet that draws out Lionel’s messy expression the most. The complicated intersection of words and women is where this novel starts to hum in ways unexpected, uncontrollable, alive.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

On this weird ball of Earth, in this exact summer, in this loco/local place of Sleepy Hollow—since we are about on July 19 (rain date!) to be visited by our third annual Mermaid Festival, when these enticing hybrid sirens emerge from the Hudson to mingle (and maybe mate?) with humans—I thought it would be fun to explore some of the systems surrounding their magical beings and revisit the Elemental movie I wanted to love but didn’t. First this story starts with gnomes, of all things.

Subscribe now

The word “gnomes” derives from the Latin gnomus (from Greek gēnomos) meaning “earth-dweller.” As outlined in this Glorian post, Paracelsus, Swiss alchemist and physician of the 16th century, in his free time constructed a four-chambered mythology. He divided creatures into “elementals” or Nature Spirits of four distinct groups—gnomes (associated with earth), undines (water), sylphs (air), and salamanders (fire). He figured humans, by the way, could be categorized by the fifth element (ether).

After gnomes [which I explore more in a previous post here] come —

Mermaids —or undines—, the spirits of the water, increase the ability to feel and have access to love—water is the supreme medium to transmit and amplify. They are beings of a refined sensuality, connected to dreams and with the ludic appearance of nature (seduction, erotic joy and concealment).

The sylphs, the beings and spirits of air, are arrogant expressions of the word, of the ascendant energy; sublime, invisible and light. They are beings of great beauty and harmony, physical and intellectual, they generally dominate the arts. Clarity, transparency and detachment are some of their qualities.

Salamanders, fire manifestations, are the expression of will, power, intensity, and ardor (spiritual and erotic). Her incendiary nature can make them volatile and dangerous for those who interact with them—if they don’t have earth qualities.

This sort of four-chambered world view (like our achey breaky hearts) leaked into things like Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, where fairies, King Oberon, Queen Titania, and their servant Puck, mess with pliable humans through potions and illusions. Much occurs in the forest under the light of the moon. Some say the four disturbed lovers themselves represent the four elements with Hermia (fire), Lysander (Air), Helena (Water), Demetrius (Earth), all whipped up into a tizzy until a natural balance must be restored (each Jack to their Jill, if you will).

Share

Elements were historically organized according to descending weight: earth heaviest, then water, air, finally fire. Dirt sinks in water, air bubbles rise in water. Ether goes to the heavens. Across ancient cultures, none of these are actually elements but they correspond to states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, energy (fire).

Which brings me to the 2023 Pixar animation Elemental. I had great aspirations for this film, the colors akin to the moods of Inside Out, which I adored. The working metaphor for the movie is that different races are composed of different elements but that they still might find a way to come together in friendship and even love, as we all should—but it doesn’t work at all.

The premise fails miserably as it falls flat and misguided. Fire and water not only don’t mix, but they do not have even the slightest chemistry required of children’s movie cartoon costars.

I don’t usually go out of my way to seek out rotten tomatoes but this man’s 20 minute rant on Everything Wrong with Elemental makes some good points. My problems with it too are scientific. CinemaSins agrees:

Having all these elemental races in close quarters for immigration is a nightmare waiting to happen. How many times has a water person put out a fire person? How many times has a flame guy accidentally started a brush fire in a family of soil people? Separation here would be an important safety concern, not racial discrimination. These aren’t aesthetic or cultural differences, these are actual physical, scientific differences. This is the problem with trying to create a metaphor about race relations and then giving the races involved actual fundamental incompatibility.

Yes, that. Isn’t the whole point of fighting racism to try to prove the underlying principle that we all bleed red and originate from the same species? But this movie—leaning into the premise that we are built of wholly different materials while trying to reach the same conclusion—just doesn’t translate for me on any level since we really cannot get along under these circumstances. They make an argument for MAGA’s kind of divisive America, not the democratic one we aspire to. Assimilate. Snuff out fires. Evaporate water. Something needs to give before we all drown each other out with all this white (nationalist) noise.

Somehow the neuroscience of Inside Out really works for me and instead of suspending disbelief, I watch in wonder. Yes those gum machine marbles of memory popping really feel like adolescence and Family Island collapsing into a dust pile feels like the worst hardship of being a parent, leaving me quaking in my empathic emotions and near empty nest mix of hope and heartbreak.

There’s no room for such empathetic recognition in Elementals because we’re too stuck worrying about the logistics, the ouches, and impossibles.

But mermaids. Mermaids—spirits of the water, supine goddesses with sparkly fins—certainly they are real and can happily conspire with us. We in the land of October witches and horsemen san heads also of late have come to believe in July undines. Maybe other seasons and moods beyond spooky and the autumnal crunch of dead leaves matter too. The exuberance of sweaty hot summer where you might be inclined to jump in the river, or crawl out of one.

Maybe we need a new elemental movie starring the four types of gnomes, mermaids, sylphs and salamanders (add five for those sidekick humans, game for whatever), enjoying a magical midsummer day’s romp in Kingsland Point Park. Who will be stirred into a tizzy?

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

*derives from Latin word locus, which means “a place”

When the world news entails wars our own country instigates for no apparent reason alongside a President’s personal vendetta against algae blooms, you might develop a thicker than usual shell of what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-about-it. You might decide to give up showering and never again leave your house and your processed vat of cheesy comfort noodles again. And you might certainly forgo celebrating the Fourth on the mouthful holiday of this semiquincentennial.

But, if I can thank this last difficult decade for anything, it’s the way (at least for a while) that it did the opposite. My rage over Trump’s first victory ejected me from my couch and into my community. The same way I suppose having kids once did, when I dabbled in learning to lead through their extracurriculars. The way I made mom-friends with the other somewhat searching mothers satelliting their kids on the playground; how I grew into organizing their Girl Scout troops from Daisy to Cadet; when we tried on every class, volunteered for every Earth Day trash pick up. And then the crisis recalibration of this President happened and we found comfort in discovering all the many like-minded who also wanted to gather and brainstorm and fight—and cry—in reaction to this Brave New World. We coordinated a Unity March to make our Hispanic immigrant neighbors feel welcome when he promised to deport them; we met in living rooms, church basements, and took the Women’s March bus to Washington.

Many people’s approach to this era of escalating authoritarianism and divisiveness is not to choose sides in the battle but to say the battle itself is the problem. All government is bad, any angle. I always try to counter this with: but look at me. I’m Suzy McGovt earnestly behind the scenes with zero ego attached, doing my quiet work to help the people when I can in my own small ways; there are plenty of people like me, at every level all the way up. And especially locally. You want to make a difference in the big wide (weird) world—maybe that’s not very possible. But you can easily make a difference right here. All you have to do is ask nicely, or be the one rare person who cares enough to show up at the City/Town/Village board meeting. They will listen if you make yourself heard. It doesn’t take any more than speaking up.

The older I get the more I learn that this is how we live best on this planet, in our own small spheres, doing our best to improve the immediate here and now. I made some hokey rhyming comment to someone on Substack the other day, but the sentiment is true:

Subscribe now

When I lived in New York City, I realized one day after five years that I had finally reached the comfort steeping point. It took five years to get to the place where the big city felt like home, and for me that meant that no matter where or when I ventured out of my apartment, I would cross paths with someone I knew. That was an invigorating feeling, and it made the city of millions feel much smaller and warmer. (Also learning the subway system and knowing I could wander anywhere on the grid all day and never be lost—other nice milestones that certainly helped along the way.) Then I moved to the outer boroughs, Brooklyn to be exact, and I fast forwarded my timeline in a new neighborhood by opening a business. No longer would I slowly let a community accrue by happenstance over months or years; I would create it from scratch and Sawzall. The bar was more of an arts lounge that depended on nightly events to keep slogging away. Soon it seemed to attract every creative type within a five-mile radius. By that metric, I had succeeded.

Then I bailed, with a baby and a husband and even a Subaru, to start anew in Sleepy Hollow. This was no ordinary place but a little literary village steeped in stories next to its other village sidekick with more restaurants. Here I found the best way to enter fast was being a reporter and hitting the pavement. I walked everywhere with an infant, and then another one, strapped onto me and/or rolling ahead, making our mark via tossed baby bottles smashing on pavement. It felt like I met everyone, or at least anyone doing something newsworthy, which doesn’t take much in a place of 20,000 souls. I saw a lady walking across the street once with purple hair, and I thought, “I’m going to be ok here.” Turns out that lady is the puppeteer who now rents out one of my garage bays for puppet-part storage and of course you know her too because that’s the kind of sweet place we live.

Fast forward to now. Kids nearly grown and flown, gulp. I am so proud of living here, my identity having merged with this place in the same way it once did with Brooklyn, another place I would never leave. This place has become my brand. Sleepy Hollow, inK. is the name of my freelance miscellaneous business, also my publishing imprint. Of course I had to publish a version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and I run a biannual Sleepy Hollow Show & Tell. I embrace costuming for Halloween to the degree that my kids are embarrassed by my effort and think I’m crazy (see below).

Recently I experienced an aha moment that I’ve really arrived in my best possible life, at this ripe age of 52, edging on 53 next week, where every year—I’ll admit it—my guiding mantra is “best year ever.” I was invited by the long-standing (14 years) Superintendent of the famous Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Legend author Washington Irving is buried, the founder of this fictional place we get to live in. Jim Logan invited me there to interview me for a book he’s writing, a compilation of the real ghosts of Sleepy Hollow beyond the obvious Headless Horseman. For a place that the internet claims to be “the most haunted” in the world, I’ve never been convinced since I haven’t seen any. But he wanted to talk to me because back in 2015 one of the ways I really dug into this community was recording a monthly series of oral histories, topic by topic, for two years. We (myself and the Warner Library director) started with interviewing the workers of the General Motors plant that sat on our Hudson river 100-acre waterfront for 100 years until it shuttered in 1996, leaving a void wherein North Tarrytown would become Sleepy Hollow at last. Halloween (tourism) would save us all. The second topic for the oral histories, since it was the month of October, would be the “real ghosts of Sleepy Hollow.” I recorded four stories you can hear here, along with the accompanying article I wrote for local news site The Hudson Independent.

In interviewing me about why and how I was affiliated with recording these stories Jim would reference in his nonfiction compilation, he also thought it was important to ask me more questions as a local personality in my own right. Who me? I was startled and flattered. No I haven’t encountered ghosts but boy have I made up a few. I recounted how I wrote a piece for the new local-lore-inclined new Tarry lit mag we have as of last October’s launch, of a version of this place where there was a great density of both living and dead. And how if you thought about it, if there really are ghosts, we should be much more crowded with them, since there are many more dead than living people in the history of humans on this dear queer ball of ours. And then I talked about how I just wrote another quirky story on the very cusp of the submission deadline for the second year of the annual Tarry. (At first I wasn’t going to try, but then I couldn’t resist the prompt. On the very day of the deadline no less, the ides of March, I wrote a whooping 10 pages that aren’t entirely bad.) More ghosts in this story, but really more concentration on/in/under the grounds of this very cemetery whose office I was sitting in now. In my new mythology of here, these teens dig up a body in 1979 and disturb the earth/Earth, so much so that their dirt manipulation shifts tectonic plates and causes earthquakes which lead to more earthquakes and may or may not eventually (100 years later) be responsible for the demise of the whole planet.

This is where my minor epiphany arrived, a rare special realization that I am in the flow of life, the exact sweet spot of this lazy river current that just has me on a raft with a refreshing drink with the day and the water the perfect temperature and the glint of sun in the golden hour making everything glow just gorgeous. (And how hard I worked to get here but don’t tell anyone). The thing is that story of the teen grave robbers was my romanticized version of a real story from 1979, from actual newspaper clippings I found online, the search prompted by my former colleague Michael giving me a little tease of the story when he told me he had been in the local courthouse on the day the boys were coming before the judge for their abhorrent crime. Jim of the cemetery wouldn’t tell me much more about it when I brought it up last time, only revealing that I wasn’t wrong but he couldn’t say more. He’s very protective of his dead and honors the dignity of his role. So much so that Halloween and its clot of tourists having their way with his cemetery can really get his goat. But this time, in the cemetery headquarters, when I had come to him to share stories and contribute to his book project, he was loosened enough to feel safe to share. He told me about these guys and their tale, and oh my, it’s a doozy. Whereas in my fiction they dug up a woman because they were fond of her and in a somewhat sympathetic way desired contact, in his story, in real life, they were drugged thugs who happened upon an open grave and thought it was a fun idea to drag out a newly buried body and pose it sitting up at a nearby tree. Horrific. This would not be in his book.

Then we talked about the ghosts who aren’t really ghosts though the people living here seem to really want them to be. Like that very real lady who used to wear towels on her walks home late at night from the Tarrytown Lakes (I supposed after her illegal swim?), often with a Q-tip lodged in her ear. Unlike the lady who wears white who is said to haunt Raven’s Rock (and is in the book), this lady of the towels (including one wrapped around her head, attest multiple people), was just one caricature among the odd humans who actually live here. Which brings me to:

Share

LOCO

*Spanish for “insane,” though of uncertain origin, perhaps from Arabic lauqa, fem. of alwaq “fool, crazy person.”) Unrelated etymologically to “local”

There’s the where-ness of who I am, locally cultured, free range cheese of Sleepy Hollow. And there’s the who-ness. I am my own special breed of loco. The older I get the more comfortable I get in my own skin, in my own identity, in my special KMad kind of crazy. This is what the older crones told me I could look forward to someday circa mid-menopause: they told me the more I know my values, my priorities, my codes, my ticks and tricks, the better life would become. I haven’t mastered this existence in the slightest but I feel that having fully tapped into the aforementioned flow—which has a lot to do with this calmer confidence of knowing I am being my most authentic self most days—I am on the best possible path. I can’t think of a better feeling and I’m pretty sure even someone like Jeff Bezos, with all the unlimited money that enables him to buy a human sex doll for a wife, probably doesn’t feel that way often or maybe even ever. And maybe that’s why these richest of men, these gazillionaires whose money seems to double daily (Elon in the outermost ether now as unhappiest trillionaire), will never think their unlimited excessive fortunes are sufficient. Because still their tanks are empty. They still don’t know who they are or find any joy from the journey.

Joyce Carol Oates famously roasted Elon last fall on Twitter:

So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates—scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’

To which he replied, she’s mean. (Which is also a typical crone thing to be, so I’m sure she’s fine with that).

Of the 51 people I’ve dated since marriage—51, ack, the number is approaching my actual age and I would like for that to stop—I haven’t met many people who seemed fully cooked and charactered. The ones who come across as most confidant initially are usually the ones who actually soon reveal themselves to have the least access to their inner identities (call them narcissists or narcissistically inclined or sociopaths or what you will). The guy who ghosted (granted I was silly enough to let him do this twice) had a swagger about him, but I realized (in retrospect of course) that this need of his to be seen and admired and lusted after was only an empty attempt to disguise his lack, to fill a void, his insecurity, his not-enoughness, his bottomless hollow. Why is it so easy for someone like me—who is so much—to keep landing like a moth on so many false lights? I learn, dust off, do it again. Sure, there are nice boys in between, but some of them prove too eager to please me, too bendable to my will. The latest was a guy whose ambitions were gobbledygook—they literally made no sense and he couldn’t even articulate them clearly, let alone start making strides to make them happen. The closer we got to a real committed loving relationship, the more he would pull away between dates, regrouping, doing his own thing, gulping the air of less expectation in my absence. He broke it off right when I knew the L word was about to bubble up—from both of us—I could feel it coming, and he choked. He rattled off a million reasons in the break up convo I forced him to have instead of going silent and slinking off. We were incompatible, he wasn’t good at relationships, he liked his independence, we wanted different things, he wasn’t ready, he was going to let me down, he mislead me, he was using me. All true, and all a bunch of bullshit. I think the real reason was he was avoidant and scared of being found out for the empty fraudster that he was. It felt good to not mourn so much as pity him. Of course he would be back on the apps right away, there’d be another a better option, and he’d do the same hurting and again and continue ultimately alone.

The internet, the media, is meant to make you restless. The apps, the swipes. All the countries we’re supposed to visit and pose for selfies before their fountains. (Now all the tallest antennae towers you can climb with your lover!) All the beautiful people you could be, or maybe date. No one knows who they are, no one is supposed to. So I guess people might sense in me (the better older me) some anachronistic trait, an old-timey quality of secure selfhood. I am who I am. I’m scarred. I’m scared. I’m brave. I’m amazing (to myself). I’ve made a ton of mistakes that I am never ashamed of. I hold no space for regret but it’s healthy to examine history.

Alain de Bottom has a video where he talks about the essential question you should ask in early dating, “Tell me your crazy.” I love the question and his treatise, that you want to see the truth in people as soon as possible, not the performative mask they wear to pass in early dating.

What’s wounded you? What did you learn from it? What are the odd things that happened in your childhood that impact who are you today? What’s your inner child like? What are they saying? Show me your crazy.

If they are offended by your question, then you are not with a viable partner. You need someone who not only wants to share the answer, but loves the question. This is the beginning of an honest lifelong conversation. Which, after all my dating data mining and checklists, becomes the foremost goal: can I spend the rest of my life talking to this person?

I have a boyfriend now, a kind and consistent one, a local one, and just the right amount of loco. I haven’t asked him this crazy question yet, not in so many words, so busy we’ve been collaborating on all our schemes and scavenger hunts and I of course have a number of other questions that all somewhat swirl around this theme. Perhaps this would be the perfect convo for my upcoming birthday and this bittersweet American anniversary.

Our country as a whole would benefit from such introspection, investigating the seamier side of things, the skeletons in our collective closet. Dear America, what happened to you that hurt you? Don’t hide your wounds. Show me your inner child and I’ll show you mine.

This little magical beast in me is louder daily and more honest. I’m the Raspberry Birthday, as I used to yawp, since they always end up on my cake, ripening as I am. I can celebrate in knowing: I’m exactly who and where I’m meant to be—for now.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

Bitter & sweet, as they say.

Some other parent floating in the emotional dichotomies of this moment like I was (with his son graduating, but never really, as he is severely autistic and will probably stick around indefinitely) summed it up as:

Share

In recent weeks I wrote about my friend who has suffered a series of unfortunate events to rival fiction—discovering her blind mother after she had fallen to her death out of her 9th story window, to then getting run over on her bicycle by a full-size tractor-trailer on the mean streets of midtown. The big city has not been kind to her, yet she couldn’t possibly exist anywhere else. She has since undergone a number of surgeries where first they removed her lower leg, then higher, higher again until where she is now, above her knee. Before she gets a prosthetic, unlikely until autumn, she will require yet another surgery(ies) to prep the area. Unfortunately this involves the sort of awful manipulation you might expect from a root canal where they have to file your tooth into a point so a new device might have something to latch onto. Sorry for the graphic details, but same with what will have to happen with her stumped bone being the attachment point, since with all her complications from the accident she’s not a good candidate for the simple exterior addition of a new fake leg.

Meanwhile, Zofia, not sleeping well, in pain phantom or otherwise, suffering PTSD, trying to keep her newly opened bar afloat and money coming (hie thee to her Hideout if you’re anywhere near the Upper East Side), is still surprisingly game for anything. When I told her my eldest daughter was graduating from high school, without hesitation or even being invited, she said instantly, I’m coming!

The odd contrast of having a kid reaching the pinnacle of her kid life about to turn 18, get her license, vote!, and launch into all that college possibility alongside my friend who has been gnashed and spat but remains enthusiastic made the whole event that much more powerful. More than I could bear. When the robed throng started to process onto the field (via the track) toward us the eager audience, with my friend and I enjoying our front row VIP access in the handicapped area, I was immediately in tears.

Leading up to this moment I got to dabble second-hand for a few hours in the stressful, awkward education of what it’s like to try to navigate the sidewalks, trunks, and train platforms as a newly disabled person. No problem for Zofia solo to zip through Manhattan on her electric wheelchair, wait for a bus for 20 minutes, speed through Grand Central to catch her train on time. A conductor was on the look-out and directed her to the special car where he got a ramp for her to easily ascend. It was the suburbs that were trouble.

In her hurry to leave her friend’s apartment on time (where she squats on the couch to save money for medical bills), Zofia forgot the pair of crutches she usually gerry rigs with velcro straps to the back of her wheelchair for short trips, like getting up a few steps or the several feet from here to there. Once she landed at the Tarrytown station and I picked her up in my car, every little excursion from one door to another required either hopping on one leg and holding onto everything nearby, or getting the heavy wheelchair in and out of the car. I got yelled at for waiting for her in the no-standing area meant for busses when the other parts were full. By the time she arrived, she had to find me across the street from a ramp that didn’t even connect to the crosswalk.

We struggled every time to compact and lift the 65 pound chair into the car trunk, her balancing and holding a light post so I wouldn’t have to go it alone. When a nice elderly man came along to help this misfit duo, he hit his head on the edge of my trunk in the struggle. “Am I bleeding?” he asked my friend, looking worried. “No, you’re ok,” she said, but he kept rubbing his forehead to make sure. My trunk is treacherous. I always bash my head on just that very bit he hit when it hasn’t automatically extended to its full height. And apparently the bag of tools I had stowed in my car (as you do when you are always repairing sheds and RV toilets in the Catskills) had a Sawzall blade poking out that perhaps could be the natural culprit for the mystery of who sliced through the foam on the fancy wheelchair armrest on one of these in-and-outs. Oopsie. I realized as the kind old man was walking away, still rubbing his noggin, that he was the grandfather of a boy graduating with my daughter in an hour. “Oh, I’ll see you soon! Congratulations! Big day!”

I hate small talk, but what else to say; it was indeed a very big day. The biggest. I’ve always hurried each phase to get to these milestones, and here I am wishing it would please slow down.

It all felt so loaded. I kept feeling like I was going to cry just in anticipation of crying later. If you really want to let it rip, just have the student chorus sing “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac from 1975. “Landslide?” I asked Zofia. We shrugged. Until we realized that these lyrics, so familiar through the years we never really listened, we’re perfect.

Finally, it was over and I hadn’t cried since that song. Just feeling my way through, the sunset over the field, the smell of the handcut roses I brought from our garden, and taking in the messages that repeated between the speeches from both students and adults alike to enjoy the journey, be present. It was a theme that success might not resemble what you imagined, that life would be nothing if not a shape-shifting surprise. It might not be measured by jobs, awards, or money but rather kindness. It might be sitting here in this golden hour with an longtime friend who found it important enough to make this difficult journey for a kid she watched at an intermittent distance grow from bald baby, for me and the loyalty, and for herself.

We’re only ever getting older.

I was done crying so it never occurred to me that my daughter might take over carrying that wet torch. I was startled and moved when she came rushing towards us sobbing on the field after they had all tossed their mortar boards and then grappled to retrieve them wherever they landed. Then she struggled to find her friends and family in the chaos, and released her tears into the hugs.

Subscribe now

The last time my daughter raced toward me crying wasn’t actually that long ago. Cue the hues that pivot from Sleepy Hollow horsemen red to icy Nordic blue.

In Iceland in February, we spent a day in the airport-adjacent town of Keflavik. It was small but not that small, so the walk to the Viking Museum on the other side of town was quite a hike. On the way back, my two girls, led by the younger more stubborn one, insisted on taking a turn to the left when I had already told them we would turn to the right. It seems a small thing, who cares, but I was frustrated by their rebellion since we had already decided to walk along the shore back to our lodging, because it was beautiful and unique to see the slate blue ocean alongside the lava black sand and I was tired of negotiating every damn thing we do. I was motioning them from afar to come this way please. And the younger shouted no, we’ll catch you later, and waved me off, I guess thinking we would soon intersect on the next block. The elder went along with her sister as she often does. But we didn’t connect up ahead. I immediately faced a parenting paradox when it occurred to me—as the lower path I took got further committed to its stance along the shore and the upper roadways and town buildings were going to be nowhere in sight for a long while—that I must either retreat and retrace my steps to find them (and possibly fail), or I continue on this route and hope for everyone’s common sense and navigation to prevail. I proceeded in stubborn determination down the prettier path.

My walk, instead of being as lovely as it should have been, was marred by the nagging of my conscience. Bad mom, bad mom, bad mom. They are going to be so mad at me, I thought. What if they can’t find their way. What if I never find them again? What will their dad say when I return empty-nested to New York? How long will this meandering ocean route take? Our AirB&B was on the other end of town. We had only loosely discussed that the end goal of the day was getting to this cave nearby to see this scene an artist created from a children’s story about a giantess. Would they remember the plan? Would they figure out how to get there? Or would they stop and fret and wait for me, trying to reach me, or try to find me somewhere and give up? I muscled through, my integrity/inertia and regret a great drain. It took about an hour to get to the other end of this shoreline, none of it fun, most of it with me grumbling “fuck.” Bad mom, bad mom, was the beat of every step.

At last, I was finally at the destination, though unclear if that was understood by both parties, so I zigzagged between the giantess’s cave out among the cliffs and our artsy place nearby. I wandered lost there for a while in this ceaseless limbo, when suddenly two shapes that appear to be—my daughters! One of them running toward me; Kaia was crying! We hugged like survivors. I well up as I write this, as she is 17 for only a few more weeks, grown, mostly, but still such a young girl, a child, an innocent. She was so grateful to see me again, as if she never would again. I felt the love, so rare yet coveted at this stage of parenting. (The younger teen sulked behind). She said they did stop within minutes by the next few blocks, and realizing they couldn’t see me or connect to the shore at this point, they hunkered down. They tried to find wifi and send messages I wouldn’t receive. They waited for me to return, and I didn’t. Eventually they set off walking, worried for their lack of innate direction, and they kept thinking they saw me everywhere, a frantic mom searching for them. They even thought they saw me driving the white mini-van of the lodging owner who had picked us up earlier from the airport. They thought I would have called the police and panicked. But I had just stayed my course and sworn. No turning back. They found their way eventually and we found each other. They thought I was going to be mad at them. Of course I wasn’t at all. But for crissake next time I motion this way to go through with plans I thought we already decided, you better come. I will always be your mom, like it or not.

Together we enjoyed the giant at last and how her oversized furniture and shoes made us feel small.

For your literary pleasure and curiosity, a GuidetoIceland and the Giantess:

In a mysterious cave by the marina in Keflavík town lives a Giantess with a heart of gold. The Black Cave of the Giantess was opened on the 6th of September 2008 during the town festival Ljósanótt - Night of Lights.

On that day, the Giantess moved all the way from her mountain into the cave in SW-Iceland. She doesn’t have a name, as she has forgotten it, but is referred to as Giganta - Skessan in Icelandic.

The Giantess is a character in the story of Sigga and the Giantess, by the Icelandic author Herdís Egilsdóttir, from Húsavík in North Iceland, who wrote the first story of Sigga and the Giantess in 1959.

These stories are a very popular series of children’s books about the little girl Sigga and the Giantess (16 in all). The last book in the series describes her migration from the mountain into the cave in Keflavík.

The Giantess is a kind giantess with a big heart, so kids never have to fear her.

She has a postbox in her cave for kids to leave letters for her, just in case they want to tell her something or ask her a question.

Toddlers can also leave their pacifiers on a tree in the cave.

In quick summary, how the girl met the giant in the first book:

Before her 6th birthday, Sigga got lost in the mountains picking berries and lost a shoe. She crawled into what she thought was a flat wooden boat, which turned out to be the Giantess’s giant shoe.

Instead of being scared, the two laughed and became best friends. The Giantess began attending birthday parties, and occasionally saved villagers from the likes of avalanches and fires. (Landslide will bring it down.)

In one book, the Giantess learned how to swim, and a whaler caught her in their net, thinking that she was a big, strange whale!

The Giantess saved the children of the village from an avalanche, and she saved some Spanish tourists from certain death in the Icelandic environment when they had not shown the forces of nature enough respect.

In yet another book, the Giantess walks out onto the drift ice and finds a polar bear cub, which she thinks is a cat, and takes it back to her cave.

The mother of the polar bear cub followed them...

As a normal mother would.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

In the meantime, the sappy, scrappy Littles demand more attention. There are so many precious, persistent small treasures to riff on, I feel yet another series coming on. The tiny voices are collecting into a chorus, as the mewling foster kittens claw my calves into shredded cheese. Everyone wants to be heard.

THE SHOW (& TELL) MUST GO ON

First, I hosted a Show & Tell to which many people came surprisingly unarmed with objects to share with their stories. Do we need to be schooled in how this kindergarten activity works? All ultimately fine, since everyone was game to share some pictures afterwards online which kept the conversation going and the community building. Even my friend who lives all the way down in the big city and didn’t come to the S&T was inspired enough by my essay to send a photo of his favorite small objects. Paper mâché pieces (with sunglasses to show size) he found at a thrift shop. So here you go: bird by bird (by way of squirrel):

Re: the lilliput Webster where my Aunt Shirlee is inscribed as Shirley. It’s funny what a name can stir and how flexible can be its interpretations. I realized after posting that the handwriting was likely my father’s. It just feels like something he would have done: man-handle his big sister’s little book and put her name in it, but spell it wrong in the process. And also, very typical that when she gets really old, for this tiny leather-bound book of words to end up in our house when he helped empty out her house, because that’s what our hoarder house did: it absorbed. I remember when she was aging, clearly in a wig with some longer straight stray hairs coming through the short fake curl, that we visited her cool homemade house on stilts in swampy coastal CT as she was preparing to settle into an apartment for the aged. But I remember the dictionary many years before that, so I’m not sure about this timeline. I asked the closest relatives who have more ambivalence or diplomacy than I do.

Aunt Shirlee’s daughter-in-law says: “I always spelled her name Shirley. At this time I can’t think why or how your dad ended up with it. Your father was a collector of miscellaneous items and maybe when Shirley had to downsize moving into an ‘apartment for the elderly’ she gave it to Elmer?”

And her daughter says, from The Villages, Florida, knee deep in poodle and flowers: “My mom used Shirlee but there were times when I saw her name as Shirley… Not sure why…”

So that wasn’t very elucidating but it fascinates me how fluid a name might be, and how my aunt, and others, might randomly shift between spellings, or just not care. And always, how pervasive my father in stories that should have nothing to do with him.

Subscribe now

NO END OF THE LINE

Remember “The End of the Line” story I shared where the little man is forced to masturbate in front of his big man abuser (among many other terrible things)? Who can forget! Well, I then discovered that The End of the Line also lives on in a little film, featuring the guy who plays that hilarious Russian in Stranger Things and a plethora of set designers that includes four “giant penis fabricators.” What a world, what a job!

Whether this is comedy or weird torture porn, you tell me. The comments I found online seem undecided surrounding the 2018 release. “Upsetting in ways I could have never predicted,” one viewer shares. Right down to the little pink piles of throw up, the whole thing is available on YouTube here, but trigger alert, the whole thing is a trigger alert.

From the film’s website:

END OF THE LINE is a short film directed by Jessica Sanders (Oscar-nominated, Sundance and Cannes winner) based on acclaimed writer Aimee Bender’s surrealist short story about a lonely man who goes to the pet store and buys a tiny man in a cage. The story explores themes of power and abuse of power in a highly creative and unusual way. Starring Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory, Florence Foster Jenkins) and Brett Gelman (Stranger Things, Lemon).

END OF THE LINE premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, screened in over 40 festivals around the world, and won Best International Film at the Molise Film Festival in Italy and the Jury’s Choice Award at the Discovery Film Festival in London. The film is part of Refinery29 & TNT’s award-winning Shatterbox Anthology, a short film series dedicated to supporting the voices of female filmmakers.

It helps on some level that the story was written by a woman and directed here by one, but this gender dissonance might also make it even harder to stomach. As I watched, and cringed, I recognized from Gelman’s other roles the almost maniacal/nervous laugh the big man emits when he’s angry, turned on, amused, annoyed. He is all of those things with his handy scapegoat, the little man, who tries to reveal his specific humanity to get sympathy (“You know I’m a man too, I’m just a little man; even if you don’t like me, it still hurts!”) to no avail. A side plot clearly reveals this scapegoatery when the big man goes to work with a rose/bottle of wine for his pretty colleague who rebuffs him immediately and of course the man comes home more prone to play with a small thing. “I paid a lot of money for you!” (namely $1,250 says the hanging tag in the old-timey bird cage) he screams bitterly when the little man doesn’t easily comply. Kind of like a man who when paying for a nice restaurant meal on a date might expect to “get some.” Big man goes as far as to put the little man down his pants, and more, and then when that’s not fulfilling enough, he wants to see the little man’s wife, and his children.

Somehow this all feels so much harsher in the focused lens of movie-making, without the buffer of the linquistic magic of someone philosophical and fantastical like Aimee Bender to guide us. In her story, we can feel slightly elevated that we are somehow on the good side of this, at a distance of sound moral judgement. A wise and removed reader! The man is made to feel shame, and the little people win in a way. We can cheer with them. Bad big man! (Not us). In the film, we are more implicated, enjoying the show—even if it’s just icky and we can feel icky for participating somewhat equally as complicit, as audience. There’s no rousing ending at the end of the line, no hope or redemption. Just a: What have we seen/done?

From Substack’s “One Sentence,” a piece on the story that inspired this by Ben Dolnick:

“When the little man’s back was turned, the big man snuck a needle-thin droplet of household cleanser into his water and watched the little man hallucinate all night long, tossing and turning, retching small pink piles into the corners of the cage.”

Oh! No matter how many times I read this sentence [from Bender’s story], it never fails to shock me. The grimly sober, torture-report language: household cleanser, hallucinate, retching. The precise and plausible sadism of that needle-thin droplet. And then those small pink piles — which, with their incongruous adorability (is this the daintiest vomit in literary history?), keep us at least partially grounded in the premise. This is still a doll-house world; it is also a world of genuine cruelty and suffering.”

Which reminds me of what we were talking about in Motherless, actually. So maybe this topic isn’t so far removed in the long-weave. Often it’s the little ones, the young ones, the vulnerable ones, who are manipulated in this way. But on the Motherless website, it was the men’s very wives who were drugged and raped while unconscious, the strong mothers of their children, the ones they supposedly loved. So you might just start to think: no one is safe.

Share

FAR FROM EMPTY SHELLS

Continuing on my little world-building bender of late, I finally watched the full length Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2021), care of my library on DVD, which was as good as I hoped, and sadder and deeper than I imagined. And comforting. It’s astounding how much humor, pathos, and affection a shell with plastic shoes and googly eyes can invoke when you can better witness him in his full environment, rendered not via cruel voyeur but sympathetic soul. There’s a great longing in the movie, and you can feel the prescient theme leaking through the full six years they made this to the pandemic era when it finally came out, that keyword “Community” lost and re-imagined was going to matter most.

We learn about Marcel’s predicament, alone with only his grandma in a house devoid of regular human inhabitants (just occasional anonymous AirBnB guests and a cleaning lady) until a kindly filmmaker comes along and finds Marcel’s situation fascinating enough to document. On the margins of this structure are the ghosts of broken relationships and marriages. The human couple that fought and broke up, traumatizing the one thriving “community” of little animated things who took cover for safety and got accidentally swept up into the leaving man’s luggage, and the end of the filmmaker’s marriage that brought him here to this now temporary rental. Grandma Connie wanders off and dies somewhere (evaporates into thin air?), and Marcel is tragically alone…until a viral search finally leads to a big weird reunion where he finds his long lost kooky crew.

When I meet the expanded community on the couch, jumping with glee, suddenly my questions are organizational and mechanical but also sociological and even spiritual—world-building ones again. What are the rules of this tiny kingdom, or more accurately, how do these random things get animated. I don’t mean animated by film technology and dozens of shell fabricators but in the universe of Marcel’s “reality”: what is the animus that might bring such random objects to life?

Within this family reunion are the unlikely characters of pretzels, peanut shells, pencils with wheels, and a TAMPON ghost! I was so intrigued by that ghost, not realizing at first glance what it was, until it appeared again with a rear view and you can see its “tail” string. What the holy haunting heck—are these objects just assembled from the detritus between couch cushions rather than born and bred? What brings them to life? How do they come to be? I soon realize from my movie-watching and my Reddit scouring that these are questions both irrelevant and irreverent. We don’t need a prequel to know how a seemingly empty shell holds a soul—it just does. It’s also not important why or how the community is full is freaks, but that it is indeed a joyous beautiful community of freaks.

So we can at least still go down the insanely deep rabbit hole of how the creators create this film, a film that got made first in audioplay (recording much more voice clips from actors than they’d ever use in real documentary style), then animatic (hand-drawn story board which in and of itself took three years!), live action and finally animation (like recreating couches for the stage sets for these tiny puppets). This film rivals in world-building the complexity (and budget) of something like Inception and creates a universe so believable and touching that here even Marcel’s little carsickness vomit from his perch on a map on the dashboard is charming. A look behind the scenes is worthwhile to appreciate the extreme care that went into all this, and how the heck the objects were assembled and came to life (at least on film), including that lurking tampon.

WORLD-BUILDING, EGG-BREAKING

Since I employed the word lilliput earlier, I am of course inspired to look it up. Who knew that Lilliput is one of two fictional islands (along with Blefuscu) that appear in the 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift? Oh to make a place that stirs enough that it inspires a word that endures. From Wikipedia:

The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards (730 m) wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings. Both nations are empires and the capital of Lilliput is Mildendo.

Descriptions of Lilliputians seems light on the fact of their tantalizing littleness and big on the politics, sadly. In particular there’s this weird warfare history surrounding the breaking of eggs, of all things. If you want to build a world, as I’ve riffed on before, first you have to destroy.

The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to “six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown.” The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu.

On that note, I end not with the breaking of eggs but with the state of my legs, because even (especially) the cutest kittens have claws that leave marks. They want to be as close to me as possible, I am an important member of their community; or I am a tree, a ladder, a scratch post to painfully destroy bit by bit. This is still a doll-house world; it is also a world of genuine cruelty and suffering. Is it cat scratch fever? Will it kill me? Are they trying to write me a message I need to decode?

We took a respite from fostering for a moment. Today’s Show & Tell, on the mend:

Love hurts.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

Independently of what you may or not find at the Pearly Gates, there’s the problem of how to proceed with the here and now: unpressured by the “this is it” urgency of existence, you might feel inclined to mess around with plenty of immortality to spare. Not me. I’m on a tight deadline and my atheism likely has much to do with how much I do. I am nothing if not productive, especially in the face of inevitable death—whenever it befalls me.

Dare I say people might behave better on earth if they had less religion to bounce around in?

This came up at dinner last night, as aging relatives visited from across the country as part of their annual trek to the rare cancer specialist in Boston.

“You only have this one life,” said my dear aunt.

“And it could end tomorrow when you get hit by a truck,” I darkly chimed in.

I have this on my mind as the grandmother in Westchester, stepping out of her car for her overnight cleaning job in NYC, just dropped to her death (via extreme steaming) in an open manhole. And since my friend’s blind mom fell out of her ninth story window last year. On the grim one-year anniversary of my friend discovering this terrible scene with her mother in the apartment courtyard, she now adjusts to her own big, bar-owning, life with one less leg to stand on. She will get a prosthetic and persevere like the punk she is, but in the meantime, it’s electric wheelchairs and crutches and painkillers and sleepless nights and excruciating ghost pain after getting run over by a tractor-trailer on her bike this winter in Manhattan.

Subscribe now

These folks may have/had faith, but it doesn’t change the outcome—that you go when you go, or lose body parts, or your mom, or don’t get to see the end of the play. I’d rather be prepared for all unexpected outcomes by having lived my best precious one and only life, just in case, so—should I be so lucky—I don’t lay there on a death bed bemoaning my regrets and what I shoulda coulda woulda been or done.

I don’t think my dad performed well at his hospice since the cracks of his attempted religion seemed to be showing through. I think he wanted desperately to believe that he was off to some heaven, but he was too much of a pragmatic engineer for that. Instead he was mad to be laying here, going too soon. Why weren’t we exercising him more. Why can’t he eat. This couldn’t possibly be it when he was meant to live until 100, at least. He took his anger out on the audience, all the projects he wouldn’t finish, those broken machines and rusty tools piled in the basement. Screaming and kicking outside of death’s door instead of issuing wise parting words to the grandkids.

I came upon this old post I thought I’d share from the Mirror about the insights of someone with fascinating perspective: A palliative care nurse reveals the top five regrets she hears expressed from her patient’s death beds. Her blog posts over a decade ago became so popular she wrote about this in her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying which had worldwide popularity from 2013 on.

These aren’t lessons in how to die so much as how to live and they remain evergreen. Let’s review:

5) I wish that I had let myself be happier

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits.

The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives.

Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

4) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down.

Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years.

There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

3) I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others.

As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.

Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

2) I wish I hadn’t worked so hard

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.

Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

And the biggest, most popular sad utterance from the death-bound:

Share

1) I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.

Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

Yes, many of these are obvious. We hold these these truths to be self-evident…but do we really…in our bones? Enough to act on them? So what’s your plan for today? For tomorrow? Not next year. I brag I’m so productive above (and always) but is that just the madness of a workaholic talking? Is it my introvert escape to stay here inside “producing” and not playing pickleball? Yes, I want to write dozens (or a handful) of impactful books and stories before I go, but I also want to forge a better relationship with my daughters, visit every continent, and get more sun on my face.

On that note, the highly anticipated and expertly Instagrammed Village Confectionary has a ribbon cutting today at 11 am and I can’t wait to meet my girls there and see how much “penny candy” costs these days. I’ve got a whole jar of Lincolns to spend.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

Perhaps those are the true inaugural words of our era, as emblazoned on the back of Melania’s Jacket in the early years of Trump Presidency 1.0, when we were young and green and thought this (a Trump Presidency, a Melania First Lady) could never happen again. Writes Vanity Fair:

Remember, back in 2018, when Melania Trump visited a detention center housing migrant children, and inexplicably chose to make the trip wearing a jacket with the words “I Really Don’t Care. Do U?” emblazoned on the back? At the time, the reaction was a deafening “What in God’s name is wrong with this woman,” on account of the fact that the garment appeared to send the message that she didn’t care about the plight of the kids who’d been separated from their parents thanks to her husband. In response, said husband insisted that the first lady was sending a message to the “Fake News Media” that she didn’t care what it said about her, a claim she later doubled down on. Yet according to a forthcoming book, the jacket’s message was actually meant for a party of one: Ivanka Trump.

The article goes on to say it was the First Daughter with whom Melania was battling for premier status in the East Wing and Melania had reached the point in the tension where it was time to just put a sort of screw-you to Ivanka on…a jacket? I really don’t care though what this petty nonsense was about, do you? Because ultimately the timing for wearing such a bold-backed announcement was atrocious and tone-deaf, or simply cruel in light of her husband rounding up our immigrant children, but maybe she’s too dumb or self-interested to even notice. I don’t care about her intentions or mindset or lack thereof. Just the fact that she did this. And also, there’s no more East Wing, so…

WE DO NOT CARE

Now we are older and know better. We know so much we are frozen ice queen bitches. If Trump can win twice, then these pigs really can fly, and I may very well be a monkey’s uncle. We know anything is possible and at the same time: nothing at all. We (women of a certain age) also know the patriarchal machinery of the world seems endlessly eager to devour nubile breeding-age ladies and just as happy to then discard them chewed up on the other side of menopause, which is where we languish now in the shoals of this societal ambergris limbo. The Guardian writes of our fearless feckless new hero for this new liminal space:

If you’re a woman of a certain age with a phone, you’ve probably seen one of Melani Sanders’ We Do Not Care Club posts. In a fleecy dressing gown with reading glasses hanging off her like Christmas tree baubles, a sleep mask wonkily on her forehead, Sanders stares deadpan at the camera. “We are putting the world on notice that we simply do not care much any more,” she says. She uncaps a highlighter with her teeth, spitting the lid out of shot, then starts flatly listing stuff members of the We Do Not Care Club, her virtual community of menopausal women, don’t care about. “We do not care we have to go to therapy weekly; you are probably the reason we are there.” “We do not care if we asked you the question 13 times. We do not remember the answer; say it again.” “We do not care if you realize we are not wearing a bra: this, my friend, is freedom.

I’ll add that her club includes the peri-post-menopausal, here here, so many of us teetering for years on this precipice with no clue what we’re getting into because (surprise surprise) the science hasn’t really gotten that far, or at least any science that anybody talks about or doctors even prescribe. We certainly didn’t learn any of this from our mothers. For Melani, this started from surgery, in only her mid-40s just over a year ago in May 2025.

…when Sanders, 45, sat frazzled and sleep-deprived in her car, fetching the supplements that kept her (somewhat) sane since entering surgically induced perimenopause, she was wondering if she was alone. Pre-hysterectomy, she was a perfectionist, running her home, family and life with military precision; no more. Her sports bra was skew-whiff; her hair dishevelled. “I said: ‘Melani, you really just don’t care any more … Is it just a me thing? I just hit record.’”

2.2 million followers on Instagram and 1.5M on TikTok, a book, a website, and whatever else later she clearly has her answer. This is a movement, a sisterhood. We are not alone. Together, we share what we don’t care about in the comments and she gathers our rage/indifference to announce from her spiral notebook.

Melania Trump was 48 when she donned that Don’t Care coat. Was she the earliest foremother of the “We Do Not Care” club and this is our long lost (false) flag? I think I know what the sisterhood might say and it sounds like this: [insert chorus refrain here].

Share

I DON’T CARE

As a PBS kid a few things were true. Mr. Rogers would reliably switch his jacket for a cardigan sweater upon entry and an ornery, misguided boy would end up in the stomach of a lion. I loved the carton version of this Pierre story by Maurice Sendak from 1962, sung by Carole King in 1975. The full text here, because it’s fun if ultimately preachy:

If you want to sing along:

Subscribe now

I DON’T REALLY CARE

And now look how we’ve come full circle. History is a pattern and patterns repeat. The obvious lesson has not been learned. The all-caps moral was not integrated into our collective being. Trump 2.0, so much worse than the first. How did we get here again? Not caring enough is how we got here, and not caring enough is how we might stay here forever. We are stuck in the belly of the lion where spitting highlighter caps willy-nilly is our only weapon and Melania doing…whatever is Melania doing? Does anyone care? Not even our President apparently, not even him. She flicks his hand away with only slightly disguised disgust. She says “I don’t give a f* about Chreestmas” to her good friend on the phone with the same embittered ease she used to back-billboard with that coat. Honesty so awful it’s hard to believe.

The ambivalent wife of the Not-Care in Chief.

Trump is in his own zero f*s era. As he wobbles toward 80 some call it “sunsetting” and define it as end-game dementia, others just see him leaning into his true terrible self the same way a Melani/Melania menopausal woman might. Just this week from Time, his filter of course is off despite fragile negotiations with a country he stirred a war with:

When asked by CNBC about the possibility of Iran ending talks, Trump said that Iranian officials had not told him they would stop negotiating, but added that if the talks were over, “I don’t really care,” saying the exchange had “started to get very boring.”

“If they’re over, they’re over,” he insisted.

As he builds a ballroom, gilds everything in sight, demands a giant Arc de Trump, puts his ugly mug on a $250 bill for the anniversary of our American revolution against monarchy (ahem), and lines the National Mall’s reflecting pool with tacky Florida blue pool liner, Trump also admits out loud that he gives not-a-toot about the state of crisis in our wallets. Writes the Guardian,

Donald Trump has said the growing financial pressure inflicted on Americans by the war on Iran is “not even a little bit” motivating him to make a peace deal with Tehran.

With US inflation at a three-year high, and fuel costs still climbing after a sharp rise in oil prices, the US president said on Tuesday that he is not focused on the economic hardship sparked by the conflict.

“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran [is] they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House before boarding a plane to China. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”

The remarks come ahead of a US midterm election campaign season which looks to be defined by mounting concerns around affordability.

There’s so much chaos and inflation coming at us in a flotsam drip all day long, it’s too much to care about. It doesn’t all fit in the crowded cranium. We’ll drown. Or just die of despair. Best to just float here on the lazy river with eye blinders and ear plugs and our soggy summer escape fiction and…

*BUT WAIT!

May I have a word? Yeah me in the back. Well, mid-section of the theater for a late-run showing of a feature-length film moments before the end of its cinematic lifespan, for a matinee, or if I have a coupon, or if it’s a space movie that requires a big screen to get the full infinity-and-I’m-just-a-speck-of-dust effect. I finally took my girls to see Project Hail Mary because I’m usually the last to know about anything popular, and here I go crying before the movie even gets started. I know how this will go without even seeing the trailer. I am moved in advance just from a hint of the premise in the opening seconds. Here we are again in a cellulose world where the world is ending. Yup I feel you. And here we are again where a few lucky folks have the power to actually stop it.

This is a stupendous thing to me on multiple fronts. I cry because I’m massively envious. I envy a planet where people know the world is in imminent danger and are somehow actually collectively activated to do something to stop it. And then secondly, I’m envious of the folks chosen or self-selected to be the ones to stop it. How thrilling would that be? Talk about being “present”! Ryan Gosling’s Ryland is the charming reluctant hero but of course you know he will deliver despite all his attempts otherwise. How could you not say yes and step up in such a moment (even if you need to be kidnapped and drugged). But no one here on “this” earth at “this” time apparently would.

I cry at the beauty of what he gets to see outside his spaceship window. I cry when he gets to go witness the problematic but sparkling space phenomenon that is eating the sun and when he will risk his life (again) to take samples that will save not just one solar system but two. I cry when he really does save multiple civilizations—ours and one made from animated stacked rocks or whatever that is. I cry when he turns back for his special rocky alien friend and chooses love.

I cry because he gets to be the hero and oh what I wouldn’t do to be so big and so selfless. I want to live a giant, important life like that. If hapless (but genius) teacher Ryland can do all this while scooting across galaxies, then I can do whatever I want here in my little house in my robe, all day everyday, because life is short and democracy is dying and money is paper which may or may not have Trump’s face on it, and well screw it.

I can say that because I do care. I care very much. I am inflated with hope, if temporarily, as these movies intend. Ryland didn’t want to go on this mission because he cared too much, I think. He was afraid he would fail. Fearlessness is required even if we have to fake it, even while we remain very afraid. Can we hurry up with our own Hail Mary already? Some real final threatening push to wake up and launch a ship or something dramatic to save us? We need our this-is-it moment. Because being a member of the “We Don’t Care Club” doesn’t mean we don’t care about anything; it means we get to discard worry and effort and time over things that don’t matter. To make room for what does.

I want to add something important here about obstinate Pierre. It’s not the lion that just gobbles up the kid. The kid opens up the jaw of the lion and steps—willingly!—in. He does that to himself. And he can just as easily undo this error. It’s never too late.

I don’t care if you see me crying. That’s what I do at interstellar/armageddon movies when it’s time to press eject. Let’s go!

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

*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.

Share

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.

Subscribe now

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:

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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:

Subscribe now

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:

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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?

Subscribe now

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?

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

Subscribe now

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.

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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).

Subscribe now

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.’

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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.

Subscribe now

“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.

Share

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?

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Share Edge|wise

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:

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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…

Subscribe now

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:

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]

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.

Subscribe now

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...”

Share

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.

Leave a comment

[Appreciate what I produce here but don’t feel like committing to a paid subscription? Spare some change to Buy Me a Book.]