Written on 6/5/25 to the prompt: Suddenly, she’d forgotten…
In my neighborhood
Suddenly she’d forgotten how to pay the bills, missed the feel of coins at the bottom of her purse and the ease of inserting one into a meter. She didn’t know where to find their retirement accounts online or how to enter them if she did. Except it wasn’t sudden, was it? The gradual usurpation of pen, ink, envelopes, and stamps worked to her detriment. The last time she’d been in charge of paying the bills, the checkbook, with its tactile register and reassuring march of check numbers and dates, had been at the center.
Passwords were the bane of many people’s existences and she was no exception. Everything she did to make life more streamlined – facial recognition on her phone, passwords stored on her phone, credit card numbers stored on her phone – also made her vulnerable. And that was last year. Who knew what DOGE’s data-scraping and now Palantir’s insertion into government would do?
Longtermism was explained in horrifying detail in The Atlantic article she read before getting out of bed. It was so stunningly elitist a philosophy and so lacking in empathy and so embedded with the levers of power, that it’s amazing she got out of bed. It’s also amazing she didn’t stomp on her phone just like that heavy-booted villain in last night’s murder mystery which – talk about horrifying — she can’t remember the title of or the setting of, just the memory of that black boot stomping the protagonist’s phone to shards. “What then?” she asks for him. “What now,” she asks for everyone else.
She knows to turn facial recognition off when she flies and for once she’s grateful how invisible old women are, especially very short old women. The specter of being found out as a Trump-hating-elitist-east coast-liberal haunts her now and amplifies the years-old questions – Why blog? What is the point? Now instead of being mystified by people who have zero internet footprint, she envies them.
So many specters to face! The specter of widowhood and having suddenly to pay the bills and manage the accounts and pay the taxes. She only hopes she dies first – in her sleep, suddenly and painlessly, of course. The specter of white nationalism and criminalized miscarriages and bird flu and now – who knew? – the advance of a flesh-eating fly coming up from Panama.
You’d think longtermers would accelerate our response to the climate crisis. But no, these selfish pricks would rather, with their billions of dollars and mega-egos, hallucinate about colonizing Mars or about manufacturing islands as paradise-like as they are exclusive. Burning peons for fuel gets closer and closer to the national agenda.
It’s one thing to watch Gestapo Barbie, blinking furiously, define habeus corpus as the exact opposite of what it is or to see the wide-eyed freak-show heading the FBI casually and duplicitously declare that the budget will get done when it gets done after he talks to some people. It’s another thing altogether to watch Russ Vought, Project 2025 author and current head of the OMB, in full sentences and with smug authority declare why HE has not submitted a budget. His chilling narrative implies that the Impoundment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t matter anymore and why not? Because he says so, I guess.
Destruction is the name of the game.
I wish HE was a robotic clone who could be powered down by some secret cabal of MIT zoomers.
Who will save us? What will be left when this regime is at last toppled?
Chris Murphy’s new beard turns him into the age’s soothsayer – the truth-telling King of Swords slashing the air with his blade. “Focus,” he shouts, “on what they’re doing NOW, because there may not be 2026 elections.”
Installation celebrating early free Black community in Massachusetts. Walden Woods
The Atlantic article referred to is here. I learned about the flesh-eating flies in the recent Atlantic as well.
Insomnia collages from first week of June
Dee~ Spot on. Thank you.
Nice to know I’m not alone in those first & second paragraphs…and in that envy. Rough days.
Same. Not proud of my codependency but it works until it doesn’t, right?
Lament- rant- yes to both. Fear of how far to go with our gut responses to this horror. I constantly question wanting to do more, be a presence out in the streets and holding back bit I am an old woman, caregiver to my husband and that takes precedent but still…SO. Let me tell you a story from yesterday:
We rent an apartment and last year, the owner sold the building to a young Mexican American couple who own a stucco repair, construction and painting business and also own some rentals in Albuquerque. They wanted to own a small building here in Rio Rancho. They are proud members of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, all of their employees are Mexican and I suspect that some do not have papers. Their crew repainted the entire building and many of the workers only spoke Spanish. I did not tell anyone that I am Spanish because I enjoyed “lurking” listening to their stories, and jokes without their knowing that I understood them…guess that makes me kind of a jerk!
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security declared 23 of the 33 counties in New Mexico as sanctuary places and are breathing down our necks,; my county, Sandoval, is one of the sanctuary counties. To further add to this unease, the border between New Mexico and Mexico (south) is now patrolled by US Army troops. This long introduction is important to the story below::
Here in New Mexico we primarily use evaporative cooling aka swamp coolers. Temps have been rising and the other day, ours stopped working so a service order was placed with our landlords. The young, well groomed Mexican man who came to fix the cooler, yesterday was well dressed, nicely trimmed mustaches, spoke English with an accent but totally understandable. When the work was done, he came inside to check the programmed unit that works with the cooler. He quietly looked at me and asked if he could shake my hand. I was surprised but said yes and he said, he had noticed my sign, “Hands Off Democracy” stuck in my pot outside. He said it deeply mattered to him to know that I had put that sign out, made him feel that he was in a good home…I was so moved by what he said that for a moment, I simply had no words of response. Then I thanked him for letting me know and I did so in Spanish, not English which startled him so I told him how I am the daughter of Spanish immigrants and we chatted. He does have a green card but did not say anything more and I did not ask and will not ask. The point of all of these words is that we are in this together and anything, anything at all that we can do, we should do because we never know how it could matter…
What a gorgeous story and I so take your point that even a small sign in a tree’s pot near the door can make a difference.
Newton is a sanctuary city. Also the Mass governor has said repeatedly that “we’re gonna follow the law.” In other words: we’re not supporting kidnapping practices or searches without warrants, etc. It is so clear that Massachusetts is being targeted. Every day there’s another horrifying and sad story about a family and community being ruptured by thugs in masks and military gear.
Update: A Walmart is located about 5 minutes from my home. I have just learned that on Thursday, June 5th, ICE arrested several people in the parking lot:
“RIO RANCHO — The Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office confirmed June 6 that United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement made arrests in the Walmart parking lot off of Unser and Southern boulevards June 5. Lt. John Castaneda stated SCSO was asked to assist as backup in the ICE arrests in a Homeland Security Investigations case.”
When I mentioned in my previous comment that the DOH was breathing down our necks here in Sandoval Country, it was not an understatement!
Ugh. When I couldn’t sleep last night I watched stuff coming out of Los Angeles. That city is NOT having it.
And now we have this malicious, political prosecution against Abrego Garcia kicked into motion. Absolutely sickening. One prosecutor in Tennessee already resigned over it.
Marti~ I love this story of how good hearts can come together. ❤️
Agree. Agree. What has this country become?
Is that a question will we ever stop asking I wonder.
the men in charge, seemingly eager to invade other planets, I’m surprised Musk et al. aren’t already strapped into their rockets on their way to Mars (poor, poor Martians) instead they’re heading for Venice, where they are not welcome either….how much more of their crap do we have to put up with?
Saskia
Truly. I’m just agog these days at how much damage one man is doing. One petty impaired stupid man.