I love hot baths maybe more than is sane-
Hopefully they never give me a brain aneurysm –
If they do, then please cremate my body and it would be amazing if ashes were spread around the world.
But I’ll be dead.
So if you want to use spreading my ashes for a world travel opportunity, go for it. And if you don’t, that’s okay too, because I’ll still be with you either way.
And let’s hope that the brain aneurism thing ever happens, but if it does that’s my ask.
I’ve been too shocked to write. My brain overwhelmed- short-circuited if you will- which is the point of all the rapid fire fuckedupedness of the last month. But I’m rebooting motherfuckers.
A friend said this administration isn’t the supervillian they imagined. To that I say:
Let’s be real … Hollywood is aspirational and always shiny, even in its darkness- red coat little girl- would one more name ever be enough. This is not Hollywood, this reality and it’s the underbelly of the swamp turned over by mass consumption of fools. PT Barnum is said to have said (tho not confirmed) “a fool is born every minute,” but that ratio of fools would be too few fools for this level of fraudulent foolishness- pure evil is also not to be equated with foolishness, but I digress.
This rattle we are living within is not that of supervillains, but the heavy asphyxiation of a nation by a level of megalomaniac narcissism we’ve not experienced in several generations. Instead of children telling on their neighbors & parents, we have forms to complete for “investigations” against schools or teachers who aren’t aligning with The Assministration. This is stranger than fiction and that’s how we know it’s not Hollywood, but cold reality.
I hear intonations indicating people are coming to from the bitchslap that was the 2024 election. People are sliding crowbars into the gears of The Assministration. Voices are joining, action is building, resistance is growing. Let’s just not stop acting. They don’t expect The Others to fight back. But there’s 99% to their 1% and we are scrappy and have less, but more to lose (nothing and everything).
This isn’t Hollywood and they aren’t supervillains. This is a fight they’ve been planning and, sadly, at least half of the 99% thought it was Hollywood and their trusty hero was a bumbling good ol’ boy who just wanted to do good for his teammates. Thing is, that good ol’ boy is the drunken quarterback of a losing team that peaked in high school and has been stroking his dick and revising his legend for the last 40 years. Fuck that guy.
It’s time to kick him off his stool and make him as irrelevant as possible. It’s a heavy stool but we can knock it over. Do I know how, no. No, I do not, but I know we can keep mucking up the cogs and hijacking their hijinks. It’s not gonna be easy and it’s gonna get messier before it gets better, but this country is a shitshow worth fighting for- and by that I mean the good people that are my neighbors and your neighbors and their neighbors. This country is a shitshow, but it’s got some good people and they are worth the fight.
Hollywood could never make this shit up. We are way better than Hollywood.
A week or so ago, I knocked a stack of glass votive candle holders out of a cabinet. They shattered with epic velocity and shards of glass were everywhere. While vacuuming up the mess, my vaccum got jammed. I didn’t have time to mess with unjamming and managed to sweep up what remained of the glass. It was a situation passably managed & I left the vacuum staged near my kitchen- like a low-priority patient in an understaffed ER- to be dealt with in order of urgency.
Today, I finally had enough bandwidth to look at the wounded warrior of domestic convenience and, wouldn’t you know, it took ten minutes to get the vacuum working order. I just had to pull off the long hose and fish out the mangled mess of glass wrapped with dog fur. With a few jabs and shakes, I fixed my vacuum! It worked again – I double tested it by sucking a whole new batch of dog fur. Pleased with myself, I was.
But with that fixed, now the a/c in my truck is more balmy than cold. I’ve been dreading this moment, but getting by and by with an occasional coolant charge that isn’t hard to perform. Now, however, it’s more mechanical, becoming another thing I’ll need to handle.
The only thing I’m certain of, as I age, is that there will always be something to keep up or repair or retire & replace.
Anyone who ever tells me “everything is great” is fully suspect. I once had a friend who answered, “How’s life?” with, “Oh my life is great, for a kid in Haiti, so I can’t complain.” What he was saying is it’s all perspective and you can be “blessed,” have all the general necessities covered and even some luxuries, if you’re lucky, but the reality is life, & everything in it, is in a stage of decay. Nothing will ever remain perfect.
I try to listen for those perfect moments and find them outside of all the Life Things that will inevitably break down and fuck up and cause us angst, but some days it’s harder than others. Some days boundaries are crossed or you just can’t seem to get traction in life and on those days that things aren’t great and there’s no reason to say “everything is fine.” Some days everything is shit and that’s just the angle you gotta build from- those are the days your attitude will make or break you. On those days, it doesn’t mean you don’t show up, but also don’t be shy to say, “Fuck it. This is all I got.” Here I am, fighting the good fight- sometimes with a drier tank.
Watching the country unravel under chaos puppets and knowing so much is up in the air so taking deep breaths, staying vigilant, and ready to step up if I see something going down. I know what to say and what my rights are and the rights of others- papers for me & kiddo are in order (though I do need to make copies). I’ve frozen my credit & opening a bank account with no connection to other companies or IRS. Building community and finding ways to be joyful.
As I watch what’s happening though, hearing about more folks in hospital for flu, avian flu decimating flocks, immigrant workers refusing to go to work for fear of ICE, and recently learning that prisoners are regularly allowed to fight fires in California for barely any wage. All these together send me to predictions. Our population will get hit with another pandemic soon- it may spread past our shores. Labor will get harder to fill for low wage jobs. The prison pipeline will become a larger economic boon to the government and their private contractors cronies. Soon immigrants will either be sent home or put in labor camps and victimless crimes will be prosecuted more harshly to provide able bodies for jobs from farming to firefighting. For the systems that hold power in this country, empathy has had its hands bound and voice gagged. The company store just gained an exponential boost.
Everything has a wave- a high and a low- good & bad- toward & back. We’ve just lived through a high spot in history- improved quality of life, equality, and a move in the right direction towards equity. It wasn’t the best, but it was high for the history of this nation. Now that we’ve had the high there is a low that must be survived and that part of the timeline has begun, but we can fight it from tipping too far down. We must see each other & within communities we must look out for others, pick up those falling behind. We can watch out for others and build longer tables. Come together in love and acceptance – embrace those who simply want to live their lives. Love has always been and will now continue to be the greatest resistance.
As I walked away from casting my vote today, I was washed with an immense sadness for a country cracking around me in ways that I feel no one will be able to understand or comprehend for some time and that will continue to echo and chip away across the planet. This country has its problems and it always has- it began as a stolen land for those who were escaping a persecution. It started from a puritan base so the freedoms the founders spoke of are not the definition of the freedoms we stand by today.
The melting pot this country became is what I served for and what I stand for, but there’s never far a current that clashes against the vibrancy that lives in the heart and imagination of what this country could truly become. No matter how this election goes we are headed into harder times before brighter times. I hope my countrypeople shatter my darkest fears and we come out shiny, but that can’t be known til the time passes. Until then and after, just keep being good to each other – it’s the one thing we can always do.
At least once a week she wants a hard re-set.
Full speed into the back of stopped traffic.
Tear through a red light with a cargo truck passing in the perpendicular.
The sign reads slow to 45, but keep it at 65, don’t curve or slow into the highway overpass turn.
How the days bled from one into another week with punctuations of cooking and cleaning and interrupted sleep. Just one little ‘accident’ and it would all stop. Just. Stop. The noise. The demands. The uncertainty. The fears. Just one little accident to end it all.
All of the hard re-set possibilities would cause moderate to severe injury, possibly death. The level of her consideration of re-set, rear-end, t-bone, or sailing into and possibly over an overpass, would depend on the week.
After a hard re-set, there would be quiet. No demands on her time. No coordination of events. No conversations she’d rather not have. No worrying. Oh the worrying. It wasn’t a conscious worrying, but it was a never ending worrying about her daughter. The love was so strong that she stopped trying to explain it. She stopped trying to describe how it felt to have part of herself in the world, but with no control of its consciousness. Just her inside someone else’s body, but not knowing their world and as that other her grew bigger and more into their world, becoming more like her and also further away. The quiet worrying grew. The desire to be Present, while also a pulling darkness to re-set. She didn’t want to die- just wanted it all to stop for maybe two months. Just a medically induced coma to sleep through and a year of PT. A re-set.
When she was back, it would all still be there, but shifted. The shift might be worse, might be better, but her heart might have a rest for a bit of time and she might not feel so terrifically overwhelmed through every moment.
The truth though, is that life would keep rolling and while the re-set could possibly maybe help her bring it all back in- The re-set could possibly maybe calm the turmoil in her mind- The re-set could possibly maybe keep her heart in her chest for a bit- it would also tear more that just her world apart. People would worry. Her heart outside her body would be destroyed with worry. A re-set would stop hers and everyone else’s life in the worst ways. so …
She slams on the brakes.
She turns out of the cargo truck’s path.
She slows into the turn.
Another week to worry and wonder after the peace of a hard re-set.
Spread Your Dreams 