Category Archives: Rants and Laments

We’re All We Have

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In yesterday’s AWA workshop, Kathleen Olesky supplied a Langston Hughes poem entitled Tired as a prompt.

Will 50 million protest this weekend? 70 million? If we are all we have, it had better be a good showing — the signs held high, rage surging on the street. We are all we have, our signs, our rage, our collective refusal to go along.

Let us take a knife and slit the skin somewhere obvious, but not life-threatening. Let us then watch vermilion beads of blood form along the edge of our self-inflicted wound. And then let us turn toward a person near, not unlike those handshaking mandates issued from the pulpit, introduce yourself, offer a greeting of peace, except this time let 25 million people turn to the other 25 million people and take blood oaths — “We swear we will not lie down in defeat. We swear fealty to each other. We swear fierce loyalty to our discernment, to our bones filled with the marrow of justice. We let our lungs breathe in freedom, which resides somewhere in our atmosphere, and likely somewhere reachable.”

Our blood-sealed oaths will signal a willingness to protect one another, to go the distance, to scar the skin in service of a better America, an America ready to be restored and go not one, two, or five, but 10 times further in the departments of honest tolerance and government that serves all.

The vermillion beads of blood will not lie, they cannot. Neighbor, put your sign down for one minute and trust my blood as I shall trust yours. We swear. We swear not to give up.

“Is it time for the tar and feathers,” asks one purveyor of the early history of our revolution. Is Renee Nicole Good like the fallen Bostonians of 1770, five of them, whose arbitrary and unfair deaths at the hands of a tyrant’s occupying force triggered the revolution and made Thomas Paine write the pamphlets that ignited the populace to take up arms?

We are all we have both inspires and terrifies.

Five years after the Boston Massacre, which was hardly a massacre but certainly what we would today call a mass shooting, five years later, a resolution was put forth. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. “The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” That was 1775. Now 251 years later we ask, we wonder, must we also take up arms? Is that what it will take to redress our grievances, to act in defense of freedom?

I still can’t quite see it, but I can easily imagine canceled midterms and maybe a rerun of Jan 6, this time with rainbow-striped flags.

I am so tired of waiting and wondering how this is all gonna turn out. The ancient political scientist online piping up,“we won’t recover from Donald Trump.” The Canadians on my feed screaming, “Don’t just complain do something!“ causes a private smile at the not very funny circumstance of an insane tyrant, shitting all over America and our allies being what it takes to crack that polite Canadian veneer.

But nothing is funny about this. The stakes are too high. He cannot be allowed to attack Greenland, can he? Little Pixie Speaker of the House says of the Venezuela bombings and abductions (practically under his breath and walking away, always walking away from the cameras), “It’s inappropriate.“

Inappropriate? Is that what we’re calling lawless violent tyranny now?

But honestly, that he said anything even mildly opposed to his Dear Leader shocked me, so complete has been his subjugation. Lindsay Graham crawled out of hiding. Where has he been? Speaking of unabashed Dear Leader recitals. I didn’t remember what an awful bite he has and here I refer to his teeth and jaw, not his powers to menace.

In other news, we can drink again and eat all the meat we want again as long as it’s organic. Things are upside down. So does that mean we can be fat and drunk when the measles rash erupts on chest and neck?

There’s nothing funny about this. We are all we have. I don’t have time to read about how this absolute firestorm of destruction has been decades in the making. No. No. Just swear to me, let our forearm blood, smeared one on the other, act as a pledge that says we are not finished.

The moral arc may have long ago snapped, but it doesn’t mean we are done. Let us become good and kind. Let us become good and kind, even in the face of illegitimate and rampant destruction. Let us breathe and bleed and resume carrying our signs even if we can’t quite believe that that is what it will take.

Later, I will sit down on a bench in Boston Common in view of The Embrace and eat an orange I quartered before leaving the house because no matter what, oranges are tasty in the winter.

There are no worms eating at the rind, no dessication, no mold – just sweet and juicy fruit that eats like sunshine.

Because I’m not actually recounting the events of the day here is a link to a Threads account that does so.

Rant/Lament 11/20/25

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When the fence goes up, jackhammering can’t be far away

This piece was written to a prompt in an AWA workshop about two weeks ago. Is it a rant or a lament? You decide.

The squirrels can have my edits. Torn, tossed, soggy with rain or blown by bitter autumn winds, I don’t care. You didn’t believe me, did you? Fine. Continue. Square the circle, whatever that means, and purge. Continue the scrabble. No nest-making now, but nest-undoing. You thought you knew me, but you didn’t. And anyway, I ran away. Chicken bones near the curbs — evidence of unruly neighbors. Pork cutlet remains, too. Who eats a cutlet in the car and then tosses the bone out the window? It’s as astonishing as it is common.

Another page, another paragraph. Can I run screaming from the room now? He’s defeated. Wilted and decomposing before our very eyes, but still entrenched. The paralysis of immorality must be overcome. My toes are numb. I can walk. I can climb stairs. But it is hard for me to put on my sneakers. Hard to shove the lower veggie drawer closed with my right foot. I have to stop and think: “Not right foot. Left.” Marching orders. Unanimous consent. A disappointed pixie. Short jokes from someone 4’11”? I’ll take them! Like the one about a good snowstorm in Chicago swallowing Bovino whole. Lake-effect weather vs. a little beast in tactical gear. Who knew whistles on neck ropes would become essential urban wear and PS not purchased from Target or Amazon? Costco delivers, I’ve discovered. Two shirts on their way. Somehow I don’t have many long-sleeved shirts anymore. Not sure how that happened. When is the BIG BOYCOTT by the way? “The Big Boycott” sounds like a federal bill or a boy band. Because we’re out of food. I’ll cook up cabbage remnants with red onion. Open a can of chic peas. Or something. In case today is a day not to shop. Nov 20.

Have you noticed the banners on Amazon? No, of course not. You’ve quit Jeff Bezos and good for you! The banners read BLACK FRIDAY WEEK. How to erode traditions and gut meaning, calendars, and sense with greed. Can’t wait to see the Met Gala this year. Maybe Lauren will show up wearing a fig leaf and nothing else. Betty Boop pumps and a black lace jumpsuit (unlined) will not do. Are long-sleeved shirts like socks now — vanishing into an inaccessible alternate universe? I’d like to go home, whatever that means. Years versus preference. For instance, I like the Berkshires and haven’t lived there for more than forty years. We were talking about boycotts and now all I can think about is Brodie Mountain Road, how it curved up and over and then down to home. THAT home. The one I lived in for all of a year, so make that  make sense.

Shit in the attic. Shit in the basement. But only a few long-sleeved shirts and by the way most of the ones that remain are pink. How did THAT happen? “Love is as essential as air.” Who said that? Seriously, do you know who said that?

There’s peanut butter in the house. We won’t go hungry. Oh, and ravioli in the basement fridge. How bad can things be with peanut butter in the cupboard and ravioli in the fridge? Costco ravioli, it should be said. I put the pasta on a waist-high shelf so I wouldn’t have to bend and open a drawer or think about which foot to slide it shut with.

It’s cold out there and I don’t want to walk the dog but will. Walking the dog is one of those things that keeps me whole, offers up a physical prayer to the neighborhood, as if showing up on the streets religiously says, “Here we are world, making the rounds, grateful to be alive even with the detritus of pork bones and yet another house being torn down.”

“Another House Being Torn Down” could be the caption for my town. One chapter would be about the buildings coming down and another about the buildings taking their place. Generally: no traditional roof lines, no color, ugly siding. It’s a thing. A style? I call it “Dentist Office Chic” because that’s what these oversized homes look like — office buildings. It must be cheaper to skimp on clapboard and angled eaves because, you know, greed. Even if this town had felt like home before, the furiously noisy pace of tear downs and the questionable taste of their looming replacements would make me a stranger here.

June 5 stream. Rant or Lament? You decide

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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

 

Passage from 1/1/2024

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This morning, I found a few pieces of yellow paper with this scribbled on it. It describes, in part, riding the T home from Boston. We’d gone to The Mapparium with a friend. It’s a bit stream of consciousness but enjoy anyway.

The flowers could be eaten or thrown in the fire. Same with ambition. The sweater cuffs are rolled, the sleeves too long. I can’t stay. Really, I can’t find my way home. An anthem from the 70’s:  Come down off your throne. Toss off the ermine-lined robe. As if you ever preferred being clothed. But the naked knees and throat make such easy targets. Groveling can be done in pants or not in pants. So can sex. The man pissing at the Hynes Auditorium T stop had a big rip in the rear of his denim pants — his dirty, wrinkled ass visible through the tear. Somehow the sight of that flesh disturbed more than the pee arcing out of his penis. Two of us grab a seat going west. “Get in the old car. Get in the old car.” Light flashes on cement near Fenway, between trees near Hammond Pond. Everything has a voice, a place. To whom do you speak? What chorus pours forth? She once gave a damn, now her eyes burn, sometimes from the cold, other times from the heat. The rib cage is rusty. It’s caked with flaky debris, oxidized from exposure. We go in. Then we go out. The singing bowl silent. The shoes cold when we slide them on in the morning. He used to chew shoes, the dog, but now he doesn’t. He still likes coat pockets redolent with the smell of treats though. Did you close the coat-closet door all the way? A clock announces a dance. I made myself write “dance” instead of “doom.” Too much death talk gets boring. Where are we? Three seconds to midnight? Eight? I plan to stitch lines of green thread while sitting next to a fire later and I hope my eyes won’t be burning then. I hope the dog will have left my parka alone. There will be no savage music for accompaniment, and by that I mean no news from the red, red, red inhabitants on The Hill. The flowers stab the sky with their beautiful fecundity. The rug, he says, captivates me. Have you listened even a little? To the eggs, sizzling in the pan, to the clack of a keyboard, to a bossy ticking clock? I will leave my shoes where you won’t trip over them because I’m nice that way. I can’t wait to have two front teeth again, the apparatus of waiting so cumbersome and it makes me lisp. “Find another Isaac,” we pronounce as if it were a simple finger-snapping matter. I too will die if I don’t keep writing. Really? Is that really true? The home and its distractions. For instance, making butternut ginger soup. Then almond biscotti. Then hummus. There’s dog hair to sweep up, always. I like to do it when the sun shines on the floor so that the retrieval of order is immediately observable. Then there are leaves and branches fallen out back, needing disposal. Stairs to vacuum. A toilet to swish. And a beckoning couch. You get the idea. There’s so much to do that is not writing that my hands burn, my hips too, and my eyes water. I can’t find my way home. Maybe home is nothing without a hand waggling ink across the legal pad. There, it announces, I exist. I’m coming down off my throne. I’m not talking about death. The flowers are not mine, not any of ours. They circle the heads of state and by heads of state, I mean the crowns of diplomats. Those flimsy collections of cells and intention, bartering, pressuring, ordering, judging – but with what intention, you ask, what intention? How to make building materials out of rubble, is a thing I heard on the way here. Gaza. Gaza. Gaza. One co-author dead. Covid. Covid. Covid. I can’t find my way home and I have a home. I struggle to imagine otherwise. The clock telling me to eat an orange, to laugh, goddamnit. Orchid breath, singing, bull brain, and mercury feet. Why not?

This video was recorded on 1/1/24. (Unless you see a recent one from Boulder like my husband does?)

Pics below from December 2023.

I look a little deranged.

Rant. This is a rant.

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Written on Thursday May 15, 2025

He swims in sewage, speaks with the gargled voice of an underworld demon. He equivocates when yes or no would do. “Would you vaccinate another child of yours against measles?” “Yes, but don’t listen to me,” which we all know is ridiculous on its face, but also code to all the crockpots: do your own research, defy well-established science. The Internet rabbit hole. The death of expertise. Meanwhile, steroid-voiced hot-dog-skin sewer-swimmer fires the experts and disbands promising groundbreaking research teams. He is a nepo baby passed through a gargoyle filter. I can’t listen to him. I just can’t. Just because we can agree that processed foods are not good for you – I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma 12 or 15 years ago, didn’t you? – does not mean we embrace his lunacy. “Don’t listen to my health advice,” says the Secretary of Health, perhaps one of the most outlandish sentences he’s uttered to date. 

Coming up: a Surgeon General who sells crap online and didn’t finish her residency either because a) she wanted to pursue functional medicine or b) because she had a breakdown due to anxiety. What will she profess? Cigarettes are good for you? Blue green algae will cure whatever ails you?*

We forget Jeanine Pirro was elected and reelected as DA because of all that she’s espoused since them. Maybe she and Hegseth can drink themselves into a stupor, get made up just so (in the Pentagon, no less), and then go on Fox News together. Oh wait. There’s no slot available because that cunt a.k.a. our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is filling them all. There she is (again) raging against Venezuelans, spouting lies, propping up propaganda — forgoing any semblance of adherence to our Constitution or to the presumption of innocence.

The crackpot club. The dregs. The dark web. Laura Loomer (she gets her own category). The Incel Nazis. These are the foul folk running our government now — oh, and the AI queens looking to rule the world. Lucrative contracts with the Saudis anyone?

White Afrikaners as refugees? Just another smelly sock turned inside out. 

The head of education calling AI “A1” might be a boon to comedians, but does she offer anything else? 

Dumb motherfuckers. Corrupt idiots. Conflict–ridden billionaires. And the world is burning, burning, burning. 

Climate science being wiped from every government website until maybe a judge says otherwise and then a stay is imposed and then the stay is appealed and then the stay is lifted or not, and that’s appealed. 

Planes crashing and weather fronts not being tracked.

Can you believe there are commentators who think we’re still on the brink of a constitutional crisis? Even David fucking Brooks is calling for revolution. 

  • I don’t know much about her yet.

Also, I didn’t even get to NYU withholding a student’s diploma because he dared to condemn Israel. What is even happening?