Written on 6/5/25 to the prompt: Suddenly, she’d forgotten…

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.”

The Atlantic article referred to is here. I learned about the flesh-eating flies in the recent Atlantic as well.