Category Archives: democracy

Thank you thank you thank you

Thank you poll workers and people who tirelessly canvassed. Thank you to the folks who phone-banked and who are curing ballots even as I type.

Thank you reporters and others who kept us informed (Aaron Parnass, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell to name just five).

THANK YOU VOTERS!

Thank you first-time voters, thank you voters who waited in line for hours, thank you voters who had their drop boxes closed on them, voters who had their polling places closed on them, voters who were supposedly gerrymandered out of having a voice. Thank you Black voters, Hispanic voters, boomer voters, party-switching voters, and young people.

Thank you, Beto O’Rourke and Stacy Abrams.

Thank you district court judges and lawyers who held the line, followed the law.

Thank you Trump for being so epically stupid as to put Paxton forward as a candidate.

Thank you Ukraine for bombing the shit out of bot farms in Russia.

Thank you friend Lisa for being tirelessly involved on the ground for years in North Carolina.

Thank you Pete Buttigieg.

Thank you folks who wrote Postcards to Voters (including me!).

Thank you for generations of activism and sacrifice by Black Americans. Thank you Black women for always understanding the assignment.

Thank you to the voters of Ohio and Michigan for seeing through the hateful rhetoric.

Thank you to the preachers not only for winning previously red states but for embodying what Christianity should look like.

Thank you to Rep. Garcia for his two word announcement last night: “Lawyer up.”

Signs: 10/18/26

7 Replies

Two friends of Danny’s got married yesterday. The three of them were roommates for many years. Close friends, in other words. I wondered: would they feel his presence in any way? I wondered what it would’ve been like for Danny to attend (still heartbroken, with Ella there). I wondered what thoughtful, generous gift he might’ve have gotten them, because he was amazing that way.

I also put it out there that I’d love to hear from Danny here, though in Newton it is mostly business as usual. Grief central. Fall activities. A No Kings Protest.

So he showed up. Twice.

First, it was the puzzle piece. Danny has appeared in puzzle pieces before (here and here), so when we finished this month’s puzzle and a piece was missing, I wondered — what about this time? I was prepared to be disappointed.

The nearly complete puzzle sat out for days. I vacuumed the rug underneath the table at least three times, each time scrutinizing the surface for that lone remaining piece and not finding it.

Then yesterday, there it was. Blue side up. Not six inches from the edge of the rug. Plain as day. Huh?

Hello, Dan!

Even if I didn’t subscribe to supernatural influences, I’d be hard pressed to explain how that piece got there. Stuck to the underside of the table and later fell? Stuck to the bottom of a shoe and somehow ended up there? No and no.

Then, early in last evening’s walk, we saw either a young hawk or a falcon directly overhead and quite near. This is unusual. Normally we see them around the corner and up the hill, not here near the house.

Moments ago that raptor flew right into the living room window — not ten feet from where I’m sitting. That has never happened before. Other birds, yes. A hawk? Absolutely not.

Oh my. Dan?

In other news, poor Finn had an anxiety attack in the middle of the night when yet another smoke alarm started chirping its low-battery signal. Chirp. Chirp. Oh, how it frightens him! Typically he pants hard and endures whole body shakes for at least an hour after the noise stops. And it always takes a minute to figure out which device is going off. Fortunately, Ken takes care of removing the battery, otherwise you’d have me swinging at the ceiling with a broom, cursing.

Last night we gave Finn a trazadone. It helped. I might’ve said, I’d rather the house burned down than put him through that again.

Poor guy.

The Newton Center protest wasn’t huge, though it was bigger than usual. What was notable was all the honking. So much honking!

Early October Saturday

9 Replies

Beauty abides. There is comfort in this.

Weekly protests matter even if small. I sat this one out in the coffee shop across the street.

There a friend and I talked about a journalist named Ryan Hatch and his discovery of Danny’s obituary through a CU alumnae magazine. What a sensitive response! It knocked me down, honestly.

https://ryanhatch.co/company-blog/2026/9/28/about-daniel-potochnik

Some of you have read it already.

One of my main takeaways is this: we do not know what our legacy will be. The fact that Danny’s life, including his love of Stephen King, moved a perfect stranger to such eloquence is amazing to me.

I hope kindness is part of my legacy. I hope my acts of generosity and sharing of insight will offset the impatience and frothing rants that punctuate my days.

Something to think about.

In closing, let me say that the Jack Smith memes on threads almost make the poisonous idiocy of this week’s hearing before the Senate worthwhile. Here are a few.

PS In one of the posts Jetpack spit up in the memory batch yesterday, there was one that referenced Danny calling to tell us (on October 4, seven years ago) that it was snowing hard in Boulder. I will forever miss these kinds of updates.

Liberty

14 Replies

From the archives. Exposures include paper and cloth creations.

Trump loves our enemies. Betrays our allies.

That is all.

Bodies and minds

15 Replies

I just had the worst massage I’ve ever paid money for. This guy used the same somewhat frenetic sweeping gesture on my back, over and over and over. He’d insert a little neck action or a quick rub of my arms and then return to sweeping, sweeping my back. Big circles. Nothing along the spine. No delicious pressure in the lumbar region. Not really relaxing.

And then there was how he sometimes used hot oil, which eventually felt good but was at first too hot and that of course made me tense up every time he went for more oil. At the end, he used a rough, hot towel to wipe my skin, which I actually liked but again it was initially too hot. WTF?

My thoughts didn’t help. I kept hearing in my head: I have a body and Danny does not. I have a body and Danny does not. Over and over the thought went through my mind like the masseuse’s ineffective and boring back sweeps. I have a body and Danny does not. At one point, I wondered about the Reiki session I’d set up for Danny the week before he died. Did he relax? Did she touch him?

On the table today I found it a little hard to breathe because the face hole was lined with a cloth that shrank the opening. My mind wandered. What if my masseuse was sloppy and inattentive because he was attuned to the ether? Any minute, he might ask, “Who’s Danny?” And then he’d tell me my son was near.

Ha! Such are the disordered experiences of bereavement, I guess.

I slept like shit last night. Apparently all I had to do was publicize my gratitude for decent sleep to bollocks things up. I was busy, busy, busy telling myself that I’d out and out failed at creating a family, because, well, look!

Ken woke up long enough to tell me that wasn’t true but I stuck with it as if a self-trouncing was the commandment of the wee hours.

Eventually in that wounding perseveration, I remembered Danny’s despair. Suddenly compassion entered the bedroom and bloomed in my chest. This wasn’t about me at all. Danny had not been able to handle how fully life had disappointed him. My poor sweet child could see no path forward. He was sick of trying.

Collection of collages about surrender, the solstice, death, and indigo

Last night I attended some Dem-blue organization’s zoom call because Jamie Raskin was slated to appear. I admire him deeply, but I’ll freely admit that I showed up at least in part because Raskin also lost a son to suicide. His 25 year-old Tommy left behind a note that said: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”

Paper collage dble-x’d with Paris Collage prompt

Danny quoted Stephen King: “Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

Because I don’t want to end with such darkness, I’ll leave you with a saying of Roberto Frega that Raskin quoted last night: “The solution to the ills of Democracy is more democracy.”