Category Archives: Rants and Laments

Day Two of Deep Despair*

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Don’t tell me to shine brighter, fight harder, to organize, to protest, to call out ugly, illegal maneuvers, and dirtified truth.

At least not today.

Dirtified? As you can see, today my thoughts vaporize into a dirtified atmosphere, an atmosphere unnaturally overheated for November, an atmosphere gone rank with defeat.

If John Lewis could get up and fight… Yes, yes — I will look to him and to Susan B and Navalny and Douglass and Fanny Lou Hammer, but not today.

November 6, yesterday, reminded me not so much of Hillary‘s defeat in 2016 as it did of that infamous day in 2001, 9/11. A beautiful blue sky. Warm air. Delicate breeze. Children squealing and playing across the fence. They have no idea, I thought on 9/11. They have no idea, I thought yesterday. The wreckage to come, both immediate and obvious and gradual and insidious, as yet beyond their ken.

I have so many questions, so shut up with your no guardrails talk and by the way, did your third bestseller about Trump make you enough money to feel OK about the damage your withholding, in part, wrought?

We know about the absence of guardrails. We know. This time he has gargoyles and vampires – Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller – and jumping dipshit apartheid enthusiasts (yes, more than one) and the cadres of pod bros, who are shamefully crowing today: #YourBodyMyChoice.

So many times in 72 hours, I’ve heard someone utter a variation of a death wish. Why won’t someone just take him out? Why can’t he just drop dead?

But we are so far down the road of Trumpism that merely eliminating his greasy shit-stained face will not do the trick anymore.

Shit-stained is not a metaphor. His face is literally the color of sewage.

What I wonder is will good-hearted, right-minded lawyers, like the ones who showed up at airports all over the country after the Muslim ban, armed only with their laptops and allegiance to the Constitution, show up again? Will it matter?

How much do bulletproof vests cost anyway?

Sometimes I think the average white person will have to be made to understand on a visceral level what it means to be Black in this country before we can heal.

Which might mean that white terror spiking for a few years constitutes a silver lining.

Then again the suffering associated with barreling our way to fascism may serve no purpose at all.

We don’t have to worry about another coup or endure months of listening to that mendacious talk about election fraud. THAT’s a silver lining, though not a particularly attractive one. At the very least it’s proof positive that it was never even for a second about election rigging.

Is Boston gonna be safer than LA? Or New York? Are those even questions I should utter out loud? And if I tell you we are retired and on Medicare and reliant on stock income to live and that I’m worried about the stock market — what of my priorities then?

It does gall me to no end that this man’s special brand of toxic influence will continue to poison my twilight years. What about RVs and beaches along the Portugal coast? What about hiking with a new hip and the joys of trading cloth? Or even, what about having the presence of mind to throw myself headlong into climate activism?

I hate him with a passion I hadn’t known I possessed is a thing you hear a lot. Otherwise well-regulated folks say this, a little astonished at what the hideous fraud inspires.

Is there a way to brace for day one? The day he’s promised will be bloody — a little bloody, maybe a lot bloody — the day he’s asserted he’ll be a dictator, pardon all the insurrectionists (probably giving them jobs in his administration). It’s also the day he’s promised to begin the massive deportations that were the centerpiece of his campaign.

People VOTED FOR THIS.

Newsflash: his followers do not yet know that they will be paying the tariffs. They do not yet know that the tariffs will cost many of them their jobs. The tariffs will not be funding childcare or making housing more affordable or lowering the cost of goddamn eggs.

In her concession speech, she talked with grace and poise and beauty about how in the darkest night we can see the stars. I got her drift but all I could think about is what an incredible president she would have made. The grief in that.

And stars? I couldn’t even see the comet from where I live. Didn’t catch the seemingly ubiquitous northern lights. But I can put my head down and read, I suppose. Especially if I give up watching the news even a little.

I ask by text if my sons are OK. Mango Mussolini might be shitting on my twilight, but he’s poisoning their middays. My heart breaks for them. The tears on all those young faces listening to Harris, standing in front of Frederick Douglass Hall, listening to her admonitions about not giving up, about continuing the fight. And then my own tears.

The boys want to know if I’m OK. They’ll be fine, they say. They’ll be OK, they say. But mom, are you OK? Maybe they know me better than I think. The younger one advises that I unhook from social media.

Yeah, but nah. 

Hunker down means something different when you’re a homeowner than when you’re not. Hunker down means one thing in an affluent, white suburb and maybe means nothing at all in a mixed urban landscape. Hunker where somebody might ask and, with what resources?

How quaint it feels now to recall taking the mic at a Newton City Council meeting — this must have been 2017 — imploring them to send a petition to Congress asking them to explore possible bases for impeachment. Tentative, respectful. But oh no, we were told, it’s just not done.

But it had been done before. I found the reference and cited it (although it hadn’t been about impeachment but about trade embargoes). I quoted someone about a nation being brought to its knees or something. I wish I could remember. Did I mention twilight?

The young one texted he might be sundowning, but you’re not, I guess suggesting I have a mind to protect.

Hunker down. Divorce this or that. Recharge. Fight anew. It will become clear I suppose, as we begin to wade through the splintered wreckage of our republic how and in what manner to fight. But for now, I merely grieve, which, in this Irish-American soul means tending to a slow-burning fury with grievance and lawyerly arguments of harm.

How did I manage to go this long without saying it? Well here it is: Fuck!

Title of this post courtesy of Eileen from writing workshop this morning.

 

 

On the verge

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A million and a half people on the verge of starving and I wonder how is being on the verge of starvation different from starving itself?

Last night I made pasta. Defrosted sausages and heated them in a pot of jarred red sauce. A husband-away meal. Plated it up. Ate only a few bites, leaving enough to save for today. Too much to give the dog in other words, the dog who I guess is better fed than a million or more people in Gaza.

My husband would’ve eaten the pasta and sausage with gusto and I suddenly wonder if his healthy appetite and omnivorous palate have given me an inflated sense of myself as a cook.

Tortellini, the name, was inspired by the belly button of Venus, did you know? So said one clue in one Sunday puzzle or other.

Many friends recently cancelled their subscriptions to the NYTimes to protest ongoing failures in reporting — the relentless old Joe coverage based on a shitty poll that the Times themselves conducted being the final straw.

That’s why I did my Wordle and Connections this morning in a fugue of guilt. Why let principles interfere with enjoyable, habitual puzzle-solving though? I have so little else I tell myself when really I have so much. A full enough stomach to turn my nose up at a perfectly respectable bowl of pasta, for starters. A dog who loves me. Closets full of warm clothing which I still need but look forward to not needing in a matter of weeks.

I have enough long-sleeve shirts to give four or five away because I don’t like the necklines or the color, one a dusty blue that I never want to put on. I can order gum arabic without a second thought and plan to devote two solid morning to making ink out of wasp galls discovered out back, ink that I don’t even know what I’ll do with.

I can use expensive sake to make risotto because there’s no Chardonnay in the house and I live in a house where these usually is Chardonnay somewhere — in the fridge upstairs, or the fridge downstairs, or resting in the mini-wine rack. You heard that, didn’t you? The part about having two fridges?

I hope there are a succession of weeks where I can wear a long-sleeve shirt, one with a neck-line I like of course, and a light cardigan, weeks when I can leave the windows gaping open with maybe a fan or two running, before the stultifying heat arrives.

The stultifying heat used to limit itself to a string of days in late July or mid-August. You could certainly get by without AC. But now some years the heat arrives before I’ve even gotten all the storm windows raised, dropping like a wet blanket on the landscape, making gardening or walking a chore and forcing us to close our windows. All of them.

I am so tired these days. I try not to say that even to myself but there I am mid-afternoon frequently of late saying not out loud but emphatically to myself, I’m exhausted.

How many years have we been doing this, a fellow traveler asks. It’s creeping up on a decade. The frothy ribbons of fear, the grunge of despair, the hyper vigilance have long since taken up residence and gotten to know each other. They don’t care if the windows are open or closed as long as the internet and cable are functioning.

Yesterday I brought that sake-infused risotto to a friend — she is grieving a sister who died and died suddenly due to medical neglect and/or outright error — and I forgot my phone, the phone with the credit card wallet. It felt weird. Like having sex without protection or entering a party where you can’t remember the name of the host.

I’d intended to stop and get flowers and a sweet bite, but I could only scrounge up nine dollars — eight from the eyeglass drop down compartment in the car and one from the treat pocket in my hobo bag. So I only bought flowers.

Counting out those bills felt so strange, almost awkward and to realize that was to realize how in between I am, for I also find it strange to call up my square code and scan it — where? where do I scan it? — to get my Prime benefit, generally something like $1.89 off the total.

Amazon owning WholeFoods, Facebook catering ads to conversations (not even KEYSTROKES), Facebook owning Instagram, the hideous helmsmanship of a racist, immigrant billionaire over on Twitter or X, formerly known as Twitter (— imagine being such a dick that you force people all over the world to utter or print those extra words over and over — X, formerly known as Twitter), what a conflagration!

Such hideous monopolies and intrusions make it hard to offer more than a shrug at TikTok and the idea of an adversarial superpower harvesting data from our people. I mean it’s not like Amazon or Facebook are exactly on our sides, are they?

I know my kids are smart enough to not to input phone numbers, addresses, birth dates — I hope.

On TikTok, I have yet to get past the Chinese hip hop dancers and the comical wombats at feeding hour, so it astonished me to learn yesterday that some huge number of people rely on the platform for their news. All of their news.

I started with starving Palestinians and so perhaps I ought to come back to them. Good gracious, I want to say, fuck the pier Joe, just cut Netanyahu off!

Can you imagine if Biden lost to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who needs to return to power to avoid going to jail because he couldn’t say no to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who has to hold onto power to avoid going to jail? No wonder I’m tired.

My old habits of outrage will not get going these days. I hardly recognize myself sheathed in a passive silence. But to support one feels like condemnation of the other — a regular funhouse mirror tunnel of allegiances. And to protest the killing, the genocide, too much is to risk everything here. I am committed — committed — to re-electing the guy with a brain and a moral compass.

It was so easy to stick a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn. Give to the good causes. Take history on. Our history. American history.

But it was so complicated to take down, after a horrid and violently brutal few weeks of IDF retaliation, my I STAND WITH ISRAEL sign.

And then, a small defeated part of me wonders if perhaps in fact I know as little about the fight for racial justice as I do about the Middle East. Is that possible?

And, what cost my silence?

News rant (take two)

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Sometimes there are glitches going from my laptop to my phone. Today was such a day. So let me try again.

The prompt was to write about something ruined and/or improved. My response follows.

I don’t know what to believe anymore — the selling of swatches of his so-called “surrender suit” seems cheesy and crass enough to be true — but auctioning off fifteen-minute private meetings with his blow fish almost daughter-in-law?

In the photo her mini dress has two flaps that overlap but not nearly enough, so that the opening points upward to you-know-where. Her strappy platform sandals — one toe turned slightly inward! — are covered in silver glitter — not in this instance a nod to Beyoncé, just an assertion of her trashiness. “No Kissing” says the caption and again I wonder if it’s real because of the ruined face above the décolletage, the lips inflamed with filler such that the comparison to blow-up masturbation dolls is rather on point. Who would want to kiss those lips?

Those lips are often parted as she honks out her MAGA message. Can’t we all still hear her hollering out in triumphant shouts: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

Being who I am and given what sources I have collected, of course I’ve seen her “before face,” back when she was married to Gavin Newsom, before she was trying to outdo Elvira with the slutty garb and black eye shadow. She was cute! Attractive. Had a normal face. Perhaps she also had more normal politics.

And then don’t get me started on the Mar-a-Lago photos! You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Photo after stilted photo of big-boobed women in revealing dresses, wearing stilettos, flanking Orange Jesus holding up those god-damned thumbs — another quotidian thing he has ruined, along with red hats and our fucking flag.

I ask you: why is at least one of them so often canting her torpedo boobs into the demented wanna-be-dictator’s rib cage? I yell “Gross” every time, but that doesn’t quite capture the revulsion does it? Because it’s not just lascivious, tawdry, weirdly uniform sexual posturing, it’s also the attendant brainwashing.

It’s everything that makes these ruined women say, “He’s my man,” or “I like his policies,” or these days, “Biden crime family.”

Their delusions are uglier than their pouty lips and reconstructed cheeks, scarier than all those waterfalls of fake blonde hair (spare me, please!). Yes, spare us. Spare us the shared ruination.

Color Me Grey — A Lament

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This lament was written to the prompt of a black and white photo depicting a waterfall with rowboat suspended as if weightless at its base.

Color me grey. Remove gravity. Add rushing water, but make it still. Strip the leaves off spring trees and tell them to rustle. Pick the ants off fists of peony-buds so that the flush of pink stays tightly balled inside. Put one paddle in my row boat instead of two. Hide all partners. Put sky in the water. Remove sky from above the horizon. Dangle untruths like earrings on beauty queens. That old saying, “If you piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining, it ain’t raining,” comes to mind. Gravity might have governed once. Now we float above institutions and look down and wonder how they ever worked.

We ready ourselves to row and row hard, really put our backs into it, only to discover that there is only one oar. The old push to get out the vote is so cute anymore. The sticker on your lapel not a badge of much if your vote can so readily be thrown out. Men on the national stage are pledging to do just that and they’re not laughed at or removed with a cane.

One Texan speaks up and makes good trouble. He’s not even shouting. The armed men on stage point and holler with a Klan-like vicious unity. Get out! Get out! Get out! A Texan in a blue oxford shirt surrounded by arms raised, cameras filming the moment of infamy. Theirs, not his. Get out! Get out! Get out!

The water of time keeps falling over the ledge. So there is gravity — just not in America — where up is down and down is up and nothing rushes anywhere except violence. DNA of grieving parents required to ID some of the ten-year-old bodies. What does that tell you?

It almost sounds like armed officers escorted the shooter inside. You’re not “containing” anything if the perpetrator is locked in a room with an entire classroom of kids.

Why won’t shadows behave anymore, as in calling evil evil and not publishing a nuanced view of evil’s view of good. The Fourth Estate. Give me a break. Get in your boat and row. With one oar, you’ll go in circles, illuminate nothing, perpetuate everything.

The sidewalk rolls up in protest. A press conference of lies. Parents demonized instead of the supposed good guys with guns called out for their cowardice.

Beer bellies hemmed by holsters. Angry men raise their arms and point. Get out! Get out! Get out! as if demanding answers was the problem and not a room full of dead fourth graders and their teachers.

Enough. Enough.

I hear the children playing at the near elementary school the day after and wonder, Have they been told, and if so, how, in what words, with what omissions, and with what false assurances of safety.

How the mind splits. It happened to them. It having happened to them means it can’t happen to me. Nice try. The Boulder shoppers gunned down at one son’s regular grocery store. A man shot in front of my brother’s Glendale pharmacy, the flowers lining the sidewalk in ineffectual witness.

What did their parent tell their elementary-school-aged children when I can’t even tell the story to myself?

The Gilded Age with Hangers

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Can I eat this? Will I survive eating this?

Rihanna in her pregnant glory, aglitter. Hillary Rodham Clinton in a toned-down red satin gown with famous women embroidered along the hem. Say their names: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt. Blake Lively makes a satiny ascent, waterfalls of silk trailing behind her.

And the men! My favorite was the one who looked like a pirate — tall black boots, a string holding up his pants. I can’t think of his name. The young man with lavender hair and ruffled collar was yummy too — setting off discussions about male manicures.

At the very moment Glenn Close exploded onto the red carpet in day-glo pink, someone in the hallowed halls of justice leaked a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

Can I eat dissonance? Will I survive this? Will our daughters?

Repeat after me: a Christo-fascist state. Learn to say it. We now have a court that isn’t even political, it’s fucking religious.

Instead of calling right-wing stunts “performative nonsense,” how about calling them acts of terrorism? Wiping out two districts of Black voters in Florida, letting billions of dollars of food rot at the border just to make his opponent look bad, creating criminal penalties for doctors performing abortions.

I want to go back to an era when watching guests at the Met Gala is an exercise in petty judgment. Who looks fabulous, who looks ridiculous, where do we find the best cleavage and the ritziest jewels?

There wasn’t time for anyone to design a gown out of wire hangers. There wasn’t time for women to attach bloody ribbons to their lace.

If justice exists in the sky, can we coach her to come lower, to re-establish domains in Appalachia, in Houston, Miami, and the Ozarks? The fact that they surrounded the pillared halls of justice with fencing this morning tells you something.

But maybe we should skip the pink hats this time and work the phones instead. Waltham, the next town over, is sponsoring a protest tonight and I feel tired just thinking about it. I’ve been to two there already — one in support of releasing the Mueller Report and I can’t remember the other.

She can’t remember all the protests she went to under trump’s reign.

Can our hunger for justice outweigh every roadblock? Can it blow like Hurricane Andrew, taking out entire neighborhoods of anti-women strategies and policies, moods and feelings? I hope maintaining majorities in the House and Senate isn’t too much to ask for.

I turned twenty in Dublin. At the time, contraception was illegal there, abortion was outlawed, of course, and homophobia institutionalized. How Catholic, I thought. How medieval. Never in a million years did I think the day would come when Ireland was more progressive than America.

And what about the now-fully-ensconced Justices’ lies before Congress — and yes, that’s Justices’ with an “s apostrophe” because three of them lied to get their seats. Oh yes, Roe is established precedent. Oh yes, we follow precedent.

Riz Ahmed — that’s the actor’s name. One booted foot on the step above, crotch to the camera — pure, natural swagger. Unlike that other pirate, bloated and lacking his eyeliner. I can’t even absorb the story about the latter, but it infiltrates everywhere. The formerly gorgeous Johnny Depp looking like a bad batch of muffins in a suit. That dumb pony tail.

We all get old, but did we have to witness a time when our daughters have fewer rights than we did? I was in high school in 1973, on the verge of so much bed-hopping — maniacal about birth control as I was careless about everything else. I was spared the need for a procedure, but almost everyone I knew in college — or let’s say 2/3’s of everyone I knew — had a pregnancy terminated. Safely. Not without trauma, mind, but none of what was difficult arose from infection or fear of dying.

The Gilded Age was the Met Gala’s theme this year. The idea of robber barons is particularly hard to take at this moment in history. Five white American men possess more wealth than the bottom 60%. Or is it 80%? I don’t know — ask Robert Reich. Whatever it is, it’s obscene.

But we want our celebrities. Sparkling stilettos and borrowed diamonds on bodies lovely and distant, unattainable and yet, due to the nature of film, also somehow ours. Belonging to us.

Is God punishing us? If so, for what crime? What sin?

*. *. *.

PS I cannot figure out how to turn off comments for a single post so let’s just act as though I have? The topic has already taken enough out of me for now.