Hello, fellow Garbagetowners!

I’m working on a new pair of essays, slowed temporarily by having had very painful surgery on my hands, which do tend to be helpful when it comes to typing letters into machines in satisfactory order. But also slowed by the flurry of activity that goes along with publishing a new novel.

Yes! It’s true! I do not actually make my living yelling creative profanities at American politics and/or the internet at large! I’M NOT LIVING THAT $400K A MONTH PUTINBESTIE PLATINUM TIER MLM LIFE.

Nah, I’m a science fiction, fantasy, and horror novelist and short story writer. In fact, “Garbagetown” in “Welcome to Garbagetown” isn’t just a reference to how rubbish this world truly has become, but also a reference to my climate dystopian book The Past Is Red. I’ve been doing this thing for twenty years, and book #49 is coming out next Tuesday.

There she is, looking all shiny and new! Space Oddity is the sequel to Space Opera, the most elaborate result of an idle Twitter dare ever, and one which rather a lot of people turned out to be very fond of. Both together are possibly the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done—Eurovision in space, but also political commentary, and then also gonzo comedy on top of that. Look, it’s easier to show you. Here is how Space Oddity starts:

Wait! Don’t run away! Yes, if you follow me elsewhere (Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) you’ve probably already seen posts like this and BELIEVE YOU ME, I get that they’re annoying in just precisely the same way as PBS pledge-drive breaks, but it’s my job and I have to, so let’s get through this together and we’ll all move on to the bar.

So, ya know, anyway, ahem, you should definitely pre-order (or regular order if you’re reading this after 9/24) the ebook or hardback or amazing audiobook performance, because of how much I and my 1st grader and my animals enjoy eating and being inside when it rains. And honestly, if you like the way I write here, this book will definitely be your jam, baby.

If you’re reasonably local to Portland, Maine or NYC, I’ll be having a bookstore launch party this thursday, 9/27, at 7pm at my extraordinary local indie bookshop, Print: A Bookstore here in PWM (and anything of mine you order from them you can get signed for free before shipping), a Eurovision karaoke book party Friday night (9/28) at 8pm here where I live on Peaks Island at the American Legion (hush, it’s rad) though I don’t expect many islanders are Garbagetown readers, then reading at Brooklyn Books & Booze in…uh…Brooklyn, on 10/15. Come if you can!

And finally, as I mentioned before, I’ve set a casual sort of stretch goal here, in which I offered to commit to a regular posting schedule if we could get 500 paid subscribers (to which number I’ve included new Patreon patrons who told me they got there from here as well) and I’m thrilled to say we’re up to 401 all-inclusive as a result of that, so only 99 to go! Double digits! If you were waffling, now would be a great time to sign up. Paid subscribers here get access to a companion piece to every public essay, in which all my too-spicy-for-me-to-want-to-deal-with-sea-lions opinions wait to yell even louder.

That about wraps it up for admin business for the moment! New pair of essays next week! Swans everywhere! Let’s get back to cathartic swearing! If nothing else, we have all of us had a better week than at least one guy in North Carolina!

In conclusion, this is Fiona. She is a very beautiful and intelligent border collie. She has fetched herself a copy and would like treats. She thinks you should also have copies. Just saying.

Fiona is just saying, obviously. I would never. I am very quiet and unobtrusive. But border collies? FULL OF BEES AND INSISTENCE.

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I’m finally about to get CUT ON!

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Hello…um…Garbagetowners?

It is your friendly local yeller of things here.

We’ve been doing this for about a year and a half now, and as I mentioned before, it remains commented upon to me privately that I do not post enough of the essays you all come here for.

As I said in that post, this is about my fourth job (I write books! One is coming out in September!) and it doesn’t make me a huge amount of money, unlike many folk you’re certainly aware of who make a whole living here.

But as my post frequency or lack thereof keeps coming up, and I do deeply enjoy and value the community and commentariat we’ve grown here, and this is a really intense time politically, but…I’m a single parent with a small child and many animals to feed as well as, occasionally, myself, I thought I’d make a suggestion/offer:

If we can get up to 500 paid subscribers, of any type, I’ll commit to doing a pair (one public, one for too-spicy-for-prime-time hollering under the paywall) of WtG-brand long-form essays every month instead of…whenever I can while not going broke.

That’s a fair jump, but not impossible, and I know the economy is hard…but the economy is hard and I have to balance this against my paying work somehow. And you’ll get the fresh new essay from today plus all the other treehouse club posts from the last 19 months.

I have no idea if it’s possible to make that jump, but I guess we’ll see. I feel embarrassed even suggesting it, so that’s super fun for all of us!

I will also count any subscriptions of the same monthly/yearly amount to my Patreon if you message me to tell me that’s why you’re subscribing. I know many people have issues with Substack, and I’ve made it a policy to cross-post any paywalled essays here over there 24 hours later as long as someone actively asks to see it. (My Patreon is a much cozier place, dedicated to art as this place is to politics and cultural screaming. I like that separation, but one or the other is and should be fine.)

So there’s my offer for making WtG a fixture. Hopefully this place has value to you—if not, that’s fine too and we’ll keep on as we can and current events inspire.

Please register to vote and vote Harris in November!

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I’m incredibly happy to see people here, there, and everywhere embracing Kamala Harris and rallying to elect a woman of color to the Presidency. Not only that, but by and large resisting the tired old wadded-up wet pants middle-school knee-jerk ha ha what a stupid slut, am I right, fellow excellent gentlemen who definitely aren’t still mad their English teacher was a woman and/or a girl rejected them and taking that out on all of society because I can’t handle my big feelings attacks that this country just instinctively projectile vomits in the direction of any woman who commands even a bit of authority. Especially one using that authority to say something beyond tee hee I make granola shirts from scratch while worshipping my conspicuously absent husband and that’s more than enough identity for me so I DEMAND IT BE ENOUGH FOR YOU now give me money to hear more of me speaking about how women shouldn’t speak!

I’m also….pretty damn surprised. And extremely concerned it isn’t going to last. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the general vibe has gotten really fucking weird when it comes to gender over the last decade. Famous people and regular people and every sentient podcaster mic in between have spent years now happily spilling bilge that would make even the rankest 1950s misogynist blush, right out loud with their own government name attached, and without the courtesy of even so much as a flaccid Al Bundy punchline.

Has the general vibe when it comes to gender always been extremely weird and like unto an ourobouros cooking its own tail to serve to her husband in silent adoration? Of fucking course it has. In some ways we’re only just now speaking about how truly demented the treatment of half this species by the other half has been, for how long, and at what cost. But for a minute there, it wasn’t just completely socially acceptable to talk about women like cattle the way a whole bunch of ALLEGEDLY NORMAL people have gotten super comfy doing. And honestly, it’s been a couple of centuries since it was cool to just get out there and YELL ABOUT WOMBS ALL THE TIME WHAT IN THE MEDIEVAL HALLUCINOGENIC BOSCHIAN BUTTSCAPE OF HELL, YOU GUYS.

I’ve talked about how much I value my little cusp micro-generation before, the cultural transitions being born in 1979 has let me witness first-hand—and this is one of them. Because I remember when it changed. There was a part of my childhood when I distinctly remember the main question adults asked me was how many kids do you want when you grow up? And I remember when it changed to what do you want to BE when you grow up?

A terrifyingly large portion of the population wants to change it back. Maybe they always wanted to change it back. But for awhile, they were at least quiet about it. Now, punishing women for not having children is the stated position of a major party’s Vice Presidential candidate, and he’s not even close to alone, or even the worst peddler of egregiously garbage opinions on how tight to cinch the leash on women being treated as human at all.

And a world where some of the most popular podcasts, politicians, and media content regularly lays out how fundamentally worthless women are and intently discuss methodologies for abusing and exploiting them for the pleasure and profit of men without any real consequences, even social consequences…I have a hard time believing 100 days isn’t plenty of time for America to find a way to justify choosing full fascism over a woman in charge again.

The 2016 election is a huge part of how we got here. And while the relationship might not be obvious, the rise of TERFs and their absolutely unhinged hatred of transwomen is a very real by-product of the steep rise in acceptability a scorchingly radioactive brand misogyny has enjoyed since Hillary Clinton got up there, dared to breathe in the presence of power, and spooked the shit out of everyone who hadn’t already lost their ever-loving minds because a black man got elected twice.

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Hey, funny story, remember a week ago when I said not to give up because it’s impossible to predict what happens next in any situation that involves the ancient and crumbling semi-sentient lich-boil Donald Trump?

Two weeks after that slowly-broiling bag of walrus-drool and noted shadow over Innsmouth slightly turned his head, then posed for his little Monroeville Mall Glamour Shot, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, NOT EVEN REPUBLICANS, GIVES EVEN THE SADDEST AND MOST PEBBLY OF SHITS ABOUT A FULL-ON ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT.

It’s genuinely impressive how holistically Trump and his semi-leashed trained RNC have rake-faced their entire response to a shooting that should have sealed the election for anyone even remotely normal. It is gone from the headlines, and frankly, already was before Biden’s grand gesture and the bonkers twists and turns of the last four days.

You know, the way this Substack usually works is that I post a public essay, and then a follow-up piece under the paywall, featuring a great deal of yelling I wanted to include in the original but about which didn’t want to deal with a bunch of bad-faith screaming in the comments.

I have two separate 2500 word chunks of almost finished follow-ups to Keep Calm and F***ing Stop This S*** that I have to delete because SO MUCH KEEPS HAPPENING that 72 hours later the first one was wildly out of date, and 24 hours after that, the second one was totally irrelevant as well.

It’s fun to be right. It’s definitely way more fun to be about things not being quite so dark as they seemed…right up until Sunday afternoon, when I was not right at all.

The first follow-up that will now die in drafts concerned what an acidically horrendous idea I thought it was for Biden to drop out, how dangerous, boneheaded, as bot-infested as a Wesley Crusher science project and as astroturfed as a fucking stadium the whole movement looked, and how frightened I was that it might actually happen.

And when literally everyone I’ve ever met started texting me to tell me the breaking news with which a gatling-gun of shrieking ALLCAPS ENDTIMES alerts had already choked my phone into quivering submission, I was genuinely horrified. I deleted all the social media apps, turned on airplane mode, and locked my phone in a fucking drawer because I knew I simply could not take it right that second. The utter fear for the future. The panic for my very young child. My own cynical pessimism so tenderly nurtured and grown by the constant shamefaced Eeyoring defeatism and infighting of my own party, even in the face of the oncoming fucking sandworm of this smirking, shoddy-ass Goon: Messiah, the ICE must flow, shambling Mad Libs: Oops! All Racial Slurs highly-absorbent diaper-elemental American gom jabbar of a community-theater fascism reboot.

I headed straight for the bar and parked my open mouth under the tap because the last eight years have training-montaged me into assuming crash position any time the Democrats make an active strategic move. The problem was, it had to be Harris. We could not stand up and look the country in the eye with a straight face and tell the truth, that the Republicans are a life-threatening disease in our democracy, while elevating any other candidate. Harris is the only possibility anyone cast a vote for in the primary. She is who we voted for to replace Biden if he could not serve. Anyone else would be a smoky backroom deal to circumvent the primary process, as unofficial and technically unnecessary as that process may be.

And I just couldn’t. It’s been too long since 2016, and too much. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t believe that the entirety of the Democratic Party, a big tent bursting at the seams with a clown car of loosely-aligned individuals with their own aspirations and goals, plus a shit-ton of craven grifters, firebrands and cowards, Beltway boyars, and an even shittier ton of non-Party members who have worked far harder to nailbat that organization than they ever have to speak the softest tsk-tsking of conservatives, would rally around a woman of color. A woman of color the left has hated like hellfire and incremental policy changes for the crime of daring to Run Without Being Bernie, and whose name the center has barely bothered to pronounce correctly more than twice in a row. America has gotten so much more radioactively, venomously misogynistic in these last eight years, so much more openly white supremacist, so much less ashamed of its worst instincts and suspicions, I truly believed this nation would enthusiastically choose fascism over a woman. Again.

And then. And then it started. The endorsements, the donations, the support. The bloody coconut memes. The energy. The impotent Looney Tunes rage of the GOP as their convention, their button-eyed Other Brother of a VP candidate, their arrogance, fell apart to the point of barely managing to choke out a flaccid her laugh is stupid and she’s stupid splutter days later. People finally being able to admit that Biden was a good President and give him at least some shriveled dried-up version of his flowers. The youth interest and positivity. The joy the online world, which had basically forgotten how to say anything nice to or about anyone, fucking Care Bear Stared into the void for Kamala.

Oh, god. Everything felt so much worse.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with hope? Hope? Fucking gross. I can’t afford that shit. It’s the hope that kills you! Like, ALWAYS. Graphically. Explosively. I barely remember what hope feels like. I think the last time I felt it was when we were dancing in the streets because Biden had won. Even on my little Maine island, dancing in the streets, kids, grandparents, so many of us. I don’t want to hope. For the length and breadth of my entire political life, every time I think I’m as cynical and jaded as I possibly can be, America finds a tiny little ember of stupid sunny Disney princess bluebird-alighting optimism deep down inside me and then strangles the fucking life out of her. I’m used to grim white-knuckled bracing for whatever comes. Hope feels like a dress that’s too big for me now. It hangs funny. It’s not fashionable anymore. It gapes and billows in weird places that show too much for public wear.

But what the hell. I got a lot of belts and a sewing kit.

(By the way, if you want to make fun of me for feeling so strongly about all of this, you can very kindly, gently, and lovingly, go insert a plastic glove between the cushions of your favoritecouch and fuck it all the way to whatever reeking golfball-gargling techfrathell JD Vance’s sugar-free Edgar-suit crawled out of. If people you know and respect are afraid for their lives and their futures there is a reason. We were supposed to have gotten over ew it’s so lame to care about literally anything when it became so crystal clear that pretending to be too cool to care about things meant it was easy to take those things away.)

Here’s the thing, though. It all feels possible right now because it’s early days. Momentum hasn’t been with the Dems in some time, and it’s heady stuff.

But we still don’t know how this is going to turn out.

No more than Trump’s shooting made victory inevitable, Kamala’s rise does not cinch this. A week ago, all that Let’s Go Brandon merchandise had, you know, any kind of meaning at all. Next week, neither I nor anyone else with a crumb of honesty left can tell you what the situation on the ground will be.

It’s STILL impossible to predict what’s going to happen next.

The media and the GOP and most of the internet were screaming for Biden to bow out, but it’s pretty clear that either they didn’t actually expect him to do it, or that he wouldn’t do it until it was too late, instead of the cinematically perfect timing that obliterated the RNC, assassination attempt, VP pick, and everything else from the public Give-a-Shit-O-Meter. Or they assumed, as I did, a nasty battle royale of cutthroat saints and ghouls slugging it out at the open convention every pundit goes to sleep praying for, an orgy of backstabbing and bloodslinging that would leave any eventual victor both too damaged for voters to embrace and drowning in too much residual resentment from their peers and their peers’ fanbases (ugh, I will never not loathe that “fanbase” has become a word commonly and worse, correctly, applied to politicians’ supporters) to rally a real coalition in November.

That salivating carrion-bird, mostly right-wing billionaire-controlled media hasn’t gone anywhere. That Hungry Hungry Nazis free-for-all GOP even the New York Times is bafflingly running cover for hasn’t either. They’re in disarray right now because they weren’t prepared to go against a popular Harris, but I promise you, the talking points will come, and when they do, they will be the nastiest centipede-brained notes from that Event Horizon gore dimension you have ever heard. they don’t have time to give her the full Hillary, so what they dish out in the next hundred days is going to be some seriously pustulant, concentrated shit.

The GOP will be supported in every drop of wild-eyed spacebat bile they spew by an army of bots fueled by the Thousand Dark and Writhing Young of the Black Goat of the Internet, Chat GPT, conjoined at the heart with a complicit media and online commentariat that desperately wants its Trump years back.

It will not just be the right. The Copmala memes will resurface, the accusations of sleeping her way to the top will even be trumpeted by women who should know better, and while neither those nor any of the old 2020 mudslinging was actually true within proper context, and none of it, especially calling her a cop, is going to freak the normies the way the online left thinks it will, the campaign will have to have better answers to them than they had the last time round.

And it will not just be things that actually happened with a different context than is useful to a political culture in which the first to make the accusation reaps the rewards. There will be pure lies that make the rounds faster than the truth can tepidly whisper a retraction on page 9. There will be conspiracies and fucking Black Lady Space Lasers and clones and blood-drinking demons and a mountain of bullshit shoveled faster and more furiously than it ever has been, because they have that little time to make it all stick. And every grain of sand will erode some of the amazing support and goodwill giving us all a light to look up to right now.

Then there will be the debate, which will happen at least once. And while I see everyone chortling with glee over seeing a prosecutor disasemble a felon on live television, I’m not so sure it will go that way. She was good but not great in the primary debates, though those are different creatures. But Hillary won her debates while the Biff Tannen you get from Wish.com babooned around behind her and admitted to crimes live on stage and it never mattered whatsoever.

As usual, as always, all Trump has to do is not shit out of his mouth directly onto the moderator (over the shoulder is fine) to be hailed as a winner by the media. While Harris, as usual, as always, will have to be perfection personified. She has to present coherent policy that satisfies every corner of a Democratic coalition that must now include literally everyone who isn’t ready to be a cartoon Nazi, but she can’t be boring or stiff or use any nuance or big words or she’s a charisma-free schoolmarm. She has to attack Trump with both clever memeable zingers and devastating statements of the facts of his malfeasance—but she can’t be too angry or she’s a sooper skary angry black woman whose “only platform is not being Trump.” She can’t be shrill, but it really doesn’t matter what she says, every woman who says something a man doesn’t like is shrill to that guy. She has to defend both Biden’s administration and separate herself from it, have the perfect answer to every question, never let Trump yell over her but never yell over him, and look both beautiful doing it and also not too beautiful because WE LIVE IN A GARBAGE PLACE FULL OF GARBAGE AND THAT GARBAGE IS ON FIRE.

Her VP pick will also have to be perfect. Everything will have to be perfect—or this big blue Care Bear Stare will have to hold the line when its inevitably not and Democrats are fucking terrible at doing that. Especially when asked to unify around a woman, let alone a woman of color from California. Part of the reason for the sound and fury on the right is that Dems almost never stop taking a sledgehammer to their own knees long enough to unify like this. No one knows how to deal with it. Everyone expects it to fall apart because it usually does. And it may yet.

Then there are the events that are too frequent now to call Black Swan Events. The things we can’t predict, like a conservative incel trying to take down his own guy. I can’t tell you what any of those will be, but I can tell you at least one is coming. It will be bad. Overseas or at home. Putin, Iran, Netanyahu; Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, the list of foreign despots and homegrown oligarchs who want their sweet baby Trump back so he can sleep through their dances of death and money goes on and on and they won’t be idle for long. Whatever the October surprise is will likely not be as clearly stupid as Hunter Biden’s laptop. (And don’t worry, they may call her childless now, but they will go after her stepkids and anyone else they think is vulnerable.)

And there’s the plain old revolting, ancient misogyny and racism that will be an issue when all those Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you they don’t see color or gender actually get into the booth. Lift up any rock )or any comments section) and it’s always there. The laugh thing seems pathetic now, but there may well be just enough time to get just enough people to sing their old song: I don’t know, she’s just not likeable.

We have to put in the work, and we have to be prepared to maintain this unity in the face of a political ecosystem that’s extremely favorable to conservatives on every level. And then, if that unity does hold up to unreal stress-testing? They are planning to and will try to cheat and steal this country out from under those of us who just want to go about our goddamned lives any way they can—which is not me being paranoid, it’s what they have said out loud every day since January 6th and put in preliminary work to accomplish with statehouses and courthouses.

I hope we’re ready.

I am still so worried. I am still so afraid. She’s a good fucking candidate. But that’s rarely the real problem.

But hey. I don’t know. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like the joyful embracing of Kamala Harris’s nomination these last few days. Not even in 08. Maybe we won’t throw her to the wolves the way so many before her have been summarily tossed. Maybe a loud, bright, unembarrassed laugh can drown out a scream of hate.

I was so wrong about Biden dropping out. I was wrong about people’s willingness to rally around Harris. Maybe I’m wrong about the worst of my fears. Maybe there’s a reason to…well.

I’ll conclude this week’s sermon with a parable.

I don’t think many people know that a “biden” is a type of flower. A rather pretty one, but not terribly showy or fancy. It won’t be the main star of any grand arrangements. You won’t win a prize at a fair for even the best of them. They’re just quite nice little things.

I had a few in my garden this year. And to be honest, they’re not doing very well. It’s been too hot; they got pretty fried in July. And to be honest, I didn’t do a great job watering them. I was so busy with so many things. I didn’t pay enough attention. I didn’t notice them drooping. They didn’t scream out for attention the way thirsty roses or snapdragons did.

But they’re not gone yet. They’re still pretty green. A few blossoms left. There’s one particularly huge, sunny one I’m working hard to save.

And you know, right next to them, there’s this crazy coconut tree that suddenly sprang up out of nowhere a few days ago, and it’s growing every single day.

Make America Laugh Again.

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Well, that was quite the little weekend, wasn’t it?

I was steaming fucking mad before the weekend. I’m just radioactively disgusted now.

With America? With gun violence? With “the tone of political rhetoric”? With the media? With Republicans? With Democrats? With 2024 holistically?

I mean, yes, but no more than usual. Because literally nothing has actually fucking changed since Saturday night.

No, I’m disgusted with us. My own alleged side. Everyone from ostensibly lefty commentators to that famously “liberal” media to regular everyday Jo and Joanna Six-Facts who aren’t particularly involved beyond being normal enough to remain not-fascists.

Goddammit, Us, what are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves? Why are we like this?

All I saw and heard Saturday night was total abject certainty that the election was over now and Trump had already won. No point in even trying anymore, right, fellow lefties? Just accept it, babe. It’s hopeless. It’s basically already happened so might as well buy a red fucking hat. Look how handsome and powerful he looks totally genuinely jumping up in ecstasy and screaming at his followers to fight for him. Daddy is SUCH a Big Daddy! Just give up, it’s only your rights, no big whoop.

And all that weeping and moaning and rending of garments was from US. The right was absolutely delighted. All the ghouls came out to smile their crocodile grins at us and gloat. They couldn’t even keep up the pretense of a vaguely normal solemn-shock-and-dignified-perserverance reaction between Tweets. The millisecond it happened the right was giggling with joy, high-fiving each other, laying out their best Gilead Commander cosplay, and counting every unhatched domesticated bird they could conjure up in their beetle-infested imaginations. Hardly any of their “thought leaders” seemed half as concerned for Trump or horrified at the shooting as positively turgid about taking this out on Democrats for the rest of time and using it every way they could to stomp half this country’s face into the mud. The night their candidate was shot, the Republican Party was just out there saying “we are going to use this to hurt everyone” AND WE JUST INSTANTLY GAVE UP AND SAID YES YOU’RE RIGHT IT IS INEVITABLE.

And this after weeks of the most appalling display from the media, who fully ignored or actively buried every horrifying Trump story, pretended Project 2025 didn’t exist, and said precisely nothing whatsoever about Trump’s own trashslime debate performance in their rush to drool and pant heavily (while trying to look like they weren’t disturbingly excited) over the absolutely fishfuck insane idea of ditching an incumbent candidate four months before an election because the President had half a bad debate. Every single person with even the most vaguely magical connection to politics just out there submitting their old West Wing spec scripts to social media like one of them was gonna get picked up by the big bosses at Reality Studios with, apparently, a fucking sea nymph’s idea of how the system actually works.

At the slightest excuse, we just vigorously chuck ourselves off a Victorian cliff clutching our pearls in despair and sighing to the wind that nothing could be done instead of, I don’t fucking know, not behaving like a caricature of wishy-washy weak liberals who can’t even back their own guy for five seconds in the face of an oncoming freight train of globally catastrophic dystopia.

Sometimes I hate us so much. We are so willing to believe the worst and beat each other down and so unwilling to put any of that energy into…well…anything else.

And yeah, okay, I had my moment of oh fuck who cursed us, too. But past the first twenty minutes, at no point did I think this was nearly as sure a thing as the media, who fucking bolted to release their barely-concealed ceiling-net of red balloons and confetti and rev up the celebration party bus, insisted.

First of all, if the last eight years have taught us anything, it should have taught us that Trump is Asimov’s fucking Mule and it is impossible to predict what happens next in any given circumstance involving his gaseous horrormouthed presence. The idea that what has held true historically is somehow fixing to start holding true for Trump is a pretty weird conclusion to belly-flop into. Four months is forever in terms of news cycles. Every story from four months ago is gone from the headlines now, even Gaza. If this happened in October, maybe. But we’re busy packing our bags for an all-expenses paid trip to failure in July?

Second, assassination attempts make people sympathetic when the target was sympathetic before, or behaves in a way that inspires sympathy afterward. Screeching GO FUCK YOURSELVES WE’VE ALREADY WON AND WE CANNOT WAIT TO CRUSH YOU ALL approximately thirty seconds after the shutter snapped on that thrice-damned photo I’m already sick to death of seeing plastered everywhere doesn’t exactly red rover new and/or remotely normal voters to the side.

It’s a real humdinger of a conundrum to bank on sympathy and shock from the voting population when you’ve taken such care to frame sympathy/empathy as weak bullshit, and snapped angrily at the nation to get over it and stop giving even the most hesitant of shits about victims after every single shooting for decades on end. Not to mention joyfully engaged in so much unprecedented, comic-book evil chaotic clown-car-of-goblins-with-the-rickets nonsense that the concept of being shocked by current events just seems like a fun nostalgia I Heart the 90s trip.

They keep telling us to stop caring about other people. You can’t do that so hard for so long and then kick back and expect the caring to flow in the way it would for a normal candidate who never let a pandemic rip through states on purpose because not enough people there voted for him, actively killing many of our family members for their own benefit—and profit. Who shrugged and told everyone to suck shit if they actually cared when children were mown down by assault rifle fire—and insisted that that reaction was the Correct American Way to Do and Think Things.

Y’all said we were stupid asshole-babies for caring about shootings approximately 900,000 times this year. Just because you love him so much you think he’s the special exception to every single rule doesn’t mean anyone outside your play group does, and those are the voters everyone needs, so don’t be surprised if they…you know…

Plus, four months is plenty of time for some follower of the new President Pennywise in his blood-red tie to make an attempt on Biden, and for the right to show no sympathy whatsoever while laughing their asses off as they have anytime any lukewarm Democrat—or you know, children in a schoolroom—has suffered in any way.

The most callous comments I saw in the immediate aftermath were variations on “too bad the shooter missed.” And sure, that’s unkind. Not as unkind as literally anything that’s escaped a Republican’s midden-mouth concerning anyone not a Republican in the last… *checks notes* ever, but unkind.

It’s also very wrong. The first thing I said to my nieces was thank god he’s not dead. Thank god it’s only his ear. Because that’s the nightmare scenario. That’s the martyring. Then, if the violence isn’t completely unhinged, Nikki Haley (probably but who knows, it seems unlikely they’d go with something they disdain as much normal protocol to elevate a woman of color) ascends and very likely does win against Biden as Trump becomes deified and people do that ugly little trick where they pretend someone was good just because they died. And really and truly, we are lucky beyond belief that bullet only grazed his ear. If he’s still wearing that bandage in four months he’ll look like a ridiculous crybaby—the one thing the right 100% is but can’t stand to be seen as. If he’d been hit in a place with a longer recovery time that kept him in the hospital not being a jackass 24/7 so people could worry about him, or put his arm in a sling or his leg in a brace, if it had been an injury you could see, then yeah, that sympathy might kick in, because he’d seem in need of protection.

But, thirdly, he’s not a martyr. Because he’s still here. And he’s fine. Overclocked dickassery fully charged up and raring to be a total fucking psychopath at the RNC. So nothing has changed whatsoever. Looking “strong” might feel good to him and to them in the moment, but takes away a big part of the motive force of sympathy—to protect someone vulnerable. Trump isn’t vulnerable. He couldn’t even pretend to look hurt. He was THRILLED. He jumped right up with an active shooter on site to get his photo op, a very normal response from a normal human person. And he’s tossed the tried-and-true response to this sort of thing into a volcano because he doesn’t have any idea what human people with human feelings are like, so it never occurs to him to appeal to that. Come on, none of us had to read that Trump didn’t call the widow of his own supporter who actually died, or the injured (but Biden did). Did anyone, even the most devout and worshipful cultist, ever think he would? Why would he start now?

I had to go looking on purpose to even find out the name of the professional first responder who died. (It’s Corey Comperatore, by the way.) That is such a massive PR blunder I can hardly believe the party that couldn’t stop braying SAY HER NAME when Laken Riley was killed could possibly make it. That guy’s name and face should be everywhere. His wife should be speaking at the RNC right now. That guy is the martyr. That’s the one who lost something for their wretched “cause,” the person we can all sympathize with at least a little because he’s fucking dead. They should be howling SAY HIS NAME and Trump should be praying with the family and bringing them to his house, paying off their debt or mortgage or setting up a fund for his kids or something. But our Tangerine Trujillo, and his folk, are physiologically incapable of doing that, even if it benefits them. Because that would take a tiny part of the terrible light of collective attention away from the guy who thinks he’s Captain America now, and make someone else the face of it all.

They’re so hard for their revenge they can’t even play the PR right. No press conference, golfing immediately, no talk with the widow, no pretending to abhor violence. They can’t play the victim because they can’t stand to be seen as vulnerable even if it would help them. They simply have to smirk behind their hands so their base knows they’re super amazing and strong and cool and awesome and alpha.

Then there’s the fact that I have a hard time believing anyone who wasn’t voting for Trump is thinking oh no the guy who keeps saying he's gonna start blasting as soon as he's in office got minimally grazed by a bullet and is totally okay and golfing right now. Better change my vote and embrace fascism! Now, I bet it’s all rather more shocking when media is so laser-focused on the dream they had one time about reporting on a contested convention and absolutely burning Joe Biden at the stake that they just barely bother telling anyone the bloviating bully said he's considering murdering a new group of people today. But nobody, no matter how uninvolved in politics, just has no idea that Trump likes hurting people. That’s sort of his whole brand.

And all this was before it came out that the shooter was one of Trump’s own beautiful beloved darlings, a disaffected white 20-something gun-stroking manchild whose reasons have no reason because reason is not part of the Republican platform at any level. And my god, are they disappointed. They were so excited for it to be one of us. Oh, fingers crossed it’s a trans person! Maybe even a black trans person! A party can dream, right? But no, the guy who got people to just ignore reality wholesale, embrace profound madness and eschatological violence, who encouraged their hate and their growing distance from anything resembling normal behavior, who openly and in public hopes for a Civil War on his own behalf every day…got a minor injury from a lone wolf functionally indistinguishable Kyle Rittenhouse, who they call a hero.

I don’t think that’s a narrative that’s going to move a lot of swing votes, if such magical things actually exist.

Look, Doom Patrol. The election is four months away. Four months before COVID we were all Christmas shopping crammed in together merrily breathing each others’ snot and literally never washing our hands like that was just totally fine. Because it was.

Four months is far more than enough time for the right to completely pile-driver themselves into the mat, eat their own teeth on this topic, and alienate everyone who hasn’t lovingly worn the “Q” off the Q buttons on their keyboards yet.

They’re already doing it. They literally can’t help themselves. They were immediately crowing victory, they’re crowing now, sneering and smirking and laughing at everyone who isn’t in their club of Demographics Who Are Semi-Safe Until We Run Out of Others to Brutalize. Trump announced J.D. Vance, a white authoritarian fuckbeard with the world’s most kickable face, who does nothing to bring in undecided voters, but really must believe you gotta stick it out in violent marriages because he’s prancing down the aisle toward the same one the GOP can’t quit. The RNC is in full scream-sweating fangs-out fall-in-line-maggots swing and no one seems to be upset or shaken, they’re all celebrating like it’s Mardi Gras on Cocaine Planet—so why should anyone feel bad for them? They look super-stoked! No one likes Now I’m REALLY Gonna Get Ya as a campaign slogan. It’s incredibly off-putting, and they couldn’t WAIT to rub everyone’s noses in the reeking shit they’ll make of our future.

But the thing is, we, who are busy not shooting people over here on the center-to-left, seemingly can’t even hold it together for 48 hours to give these mule-headed Pleasure Island cast-offs a chance to fuck it up for themselves, as they have every single easy lay-up political opportunity that’s ever landed in their laps, because their pure need to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic regular plain old shitty-uncle assholes right now always, well, trumps their plans to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic uncontested rulers of all mankind. They get ahead of themselves. They blow their wad too early. They post their plans online and storm the capitol before they have the numbers and assume they’ve got it in the bag when the bag hasn’t even been opened yet.

What is wrong with us? Are we just nihilistic and semi-suicidal as a culture now? Is that even possible? Fuck it, McDonalds’s is too expensive so why not let it all burn this is a sensible thought that I should have and share enthusiastically. Wishing for everyone and everything I know and love to suffer endlessly because reform and compromise take too long for not enough of what I specially know is perfectly correct isn’t something I should seek therapy about at all.

We don’t even seem to be able to try solidarity or optimism or even…criticism of anyone but each other. The bile the left holds for conservatives is a cup of sweet tea next to what we have for other members of our own coalition.

We’re in this masochistic abusive relationship with the right where they’ve groomed us and ground us down and told us we were worthless so thoroughly we flinch whenever they take a breath and just fall utterly apart when they get mad. The media, who hasn’t been on our side since mostly always, says our guy is too old? Yes, masters, he is too old, all is lost. Social media says our guy is somehow personally and solely responsible for the oldest continuous conflict in human history despite doing more than any President ever has to reign it in? Yes, masters, revolting nickname accepted, all is lost. Republicans stand by their man no matter how many times he rambles on about sharks or airports during the American Revolution, but Biden stutters like he always has, and we join right in with the media telling him to fuck off in to the sun despite there being no one whatsoever anyone can agree on to take his place and everyone knowing full and goddamned well that this clown-tantrum country will not vote for a woman of color, not even over a fascist who promises to eat our faces on Inauguration Day, even if they won’t admit it out loud.

Is some of this bots and astroturfing? Oh, far more of it than we’ll know until it’s too late, I’d bet. But a lot of it is just traumatized fucking people using social media as therapy to purge their anxiety and terror without realizing all that outpouring of individual despair creates a collective zeitgeist of surrender and hopeless misery—which motivates no one to vote or organize or believe in anything but an inevitably dark future.

We have to stop this. We have to stop giving up in advance. We have to stop accepting the blame for conservative’s sins and responsibility for their extremism. The problem is not that we call the right fascists the problem is the right is full of fascists.

The problem isn’t that Joe Biden is old, it’s that the media doesn’t want Biden and is providing cover for a monster to sink regular boring old democracy that isn’t fun to heroically report on. And pretending, like everyone else, that things will just go on as normal if Trump wins and they’re just kidding about all the horrors they’re looking into the camera with a smile and announcing “We are very much not kidding and are tickled pink about doing this as soon as possible.”

I don’t really care if you hate Joe Biden or think he’s old and Trump (who is 78) looked cool in a photo he clearly had an actor’s instinct to pose for. It’s not a joke, and it’s not impossible for it to happen here. If America falls to fascism fleeing the country will not help. Fascism must have prey to survive and grow. This nation has the greatest military in the history of the world and is embedded in every aspect of the global economy. Do the math. Everyone will lose everything. White rural resentful men, too. If you think your precious 401K survives Project 2025, you need to read it again.

All hope is NOT lost.

What we choose to do and say now will determine the future in November. I am begging you all to pull it together and stop backbiting and self-sabotaging, stop using social media as a hallucinogen, stop demanding the impossible and dismissing the possible from our own side while celebrating the tiniest decency the other side occasionally fakes. I don’t care if Biden isn’t left enough or perfect enough or young enough or magical superhero unicorn enough. Another Trump term is the end of progressive policy in this country. Another Biden term isn’t. So suck it the fuck up, don’t give them the narrative they’re insisting we MUST follow (because we must always follow) and vote for Biden’s team and Biden’s SCOTUS if you can’t get behind what Biden himself has accomplished because the media hates him like fire so we don’t all lose our rights before they get around to killing us. And if the rhetoric of Republican party can get one of their goodest boys to come within a head-turn of murdering their own adored leader, that is not hyperbole.

If they beat us and the darkest timeline comes to pass, it better not fucking be because we refused to fight back.

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HEY THIS IS A SUPER FUN TIME TO BE A PARENT, AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT?

Spoiler: It’s fuckin’ not.

And since Senate Republicans smugly shot down protecting the right to birth control right after we all had the honor of listening to Kicky Kicky Ball Boy, the Very Specialest Boy Ever to Grace Us with His Luminous and Wise Eminence, mouth off about what a waste of time it is for a woman to be anything but an adoring, silent wife and mother, silently raising as many babies as he wants, making bread silently from silent scratch, never asking for anything (more silence, girl! Where’s your head?) but his bimonthly (not guaranteed) glance her way and occasional remembering of her name (plus up to 75% of the children’s names!) as she watches him, silently, like a nervous border collie awaiting the next command and/or punishment, I THOUGHT WE COULD HAVE A LITTLE TALK ABOUT THAT.

Most of our culture is still clinging by its claws to the bedrock assumption that every household has a stay-at-home parent to deal with sick days, snow days, half days, Covid outbreaks, doctor’s appointments, playdates, extracurriculars from straight out of the womb, regular 9-5 business hours meaning no one has time for basic offline life logistics, least of all the people working those shifts, the crushing expectation of constant child-enrichment and engagement and no unsupervised time but don’t forget to serious limit and oversee any screen time, every single thing costing 2-3 times as much as it did three years ago when everyone also needed two incomes to make a go of it because go fuck yourself, that’s why (especially you, Joe Biden! Ha ha it’s not your fault but everyone’s gonna blame you anyway!), including child care of any type, school hours that don’t cover work hours, spring break, winter break, mid-winter break, and the looming eldritch creature called summer break (and don’t start, because I love my kid, but it’s three months with nothing but camps that cost more than cars, waiting lists, nannies and babysitters that cost more than trucks, and zero jobs, not even teachers, that take three months off every year. I used to think parents who looked forward to fall so school would start were the ones who never wanted to be parents, but I get it now, it’s brutal).

And on and on. Yet most households do not have a stay at home parent. What they have is (usually, not always) one parent who is working full-time and also constantly struggling to cover the enormous amount of labor and time that goes into raising children and maintaining a household—even if that one parent is married to someone who is working full-time as well. It’s mind-breaking shit, and there rarely seems like any way out or through.

Especially when suddenly, the news and social media and a bunch of rich white assholes who enjoy life as a perpetual child, pampered, cared for, shielded from harsh truths, and indulged in their loud but totally naive and bizarre opinions by a small army, only some of whom are paid, are screaming at us that we all need to have a bunch more kids on the chop-chop, and seem totally baffled as to why that hasn’t made the continent tilt with all women bolting toward maternity wards.

Almost every parent I know has an all-access unlimited strugglebus pass to this journey. It crosses just about every demographic boundary—I assume the very wealthy can pay their way through it, but what the fuck would I know about them. And I hear so often, from so many people, online, offline, in group chats, everywhere, that it didn’t used to be this way, that it shouldn’t be this way, that we need “a village” again, that if only we had a village like our parents and grandparents did, life wouldn’t be this way.

Now, I’m not gonna sit here tutting from my high, high throne of…also being totally unable to balance all this, thus failing both work and motherhood daily, and say they’re all wrong. It didn’t used to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It is completely unsustainable for it to stay this way, particularly if the billionaire toddlers of the world magically expect more children out of us groveling morlocks down here in the dripping hell-vaults of real life, not less.

But I think most village-less people raising children in the developed world right now are seriously misunderstanding what “the village” is/was and the price it demands, misremembering or misinterpreting our own childhood memories, or both. Or maybe just optimistically longing for a fucking break and imagining a system that never existed, at least not in a way that would actually solve the problem.

First of all, and this is no kind of original thought springing from my own unique and precious brain like unto Athena (who you just KNOW was a major behavioral problem in her preschool class. Just ask Pallas), but it must be said anyway: “the village” was literally always women’s unpaid labor.

OH NO BUCKLE UP I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT GENDER! BUCKLE UP AND PLEASE KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES.

The thing is, I don’t say the village was always women as a criticism or even necessarily a complaint. It’s simply a fact. You can apply morality to it or not, but the fact won’t change just because it’s uncomfortable. Until extraordinarily recently, the “traditional” division of labor used to leave almost all the assistance dreamed of by my generation as labor to be performed, freely, cheerfully, promptly, unceasingly, and preferably invisibly, by women.

But don’t worry! As St. Mitch used to say, it still does, but it used to, too!

Whether we’re talking about grandparents and aunties and older siblings (and yes, the occasional male relative as well. Often one, who for one reason or another they weren’t allowed to discuss openly, didn’t feel at home with the traditional male side of the family) helping out with the next generation or an actual village in which unrelated people band together to share the load for everyone, it still ends up, most of the time, being a gilded metaphor for a vast network of women providing physical, mental, and emotional labor without acknowledgement or payment.

Many of us remember weekends and even whole summers at our grandparents in our own childhoods. We remember lots of help for our parents and daycare being somewhat unusual for us. Those childhoods, for Millennials on up, were both not that long ago and eons ago in terms of social evolution. For reference, women got the right to use the financial system without a male babysitter five years before I was born.

So I think, I hope, that deep down most of us recall that “grandparents” usually meant Grandma and not Grandpa, at least until the male children were old enough to fish or golf or play pool or nail things to other things or witness a sport or whatever activities Grandpa was going to be doing anyway.

And yes, yes, I know your Grandpa was super woke and wonderful and worked 200 hours a week while doing everything domestic to perfection while Grandma rested in luxury or ran about town on account of being the best man who ever lived and he tenderly nursed all the grandbabies at his own breast.

But generally speaking, for most of us, Grandpa was often still working outside the home. Particularly before people started having babies much later in life. When I was born, my grandfather was 53, and he’d been a somewhat late father himself, at least for his era. My grandmother was only 48. When my son was born, my father was 62 and my mother 64. As the younger grandchildren come, they’ve hit or are approaching 70. They’re not even comparable stages of life. At 53, in the 80s, a man could be expected to be at the height of his career. And while women often worked outside the home in every era, no matter how hard certain influencers dream otherwise, they were so discouraged or, depending on how far back our little wayback machine wants to take us, barred from fields with silly things like career trajectories and big rewards and high incomes, that the person who could make time for kinkeeping was the one who always had.

So much, much more often than not, it was Grandma that we remember taking us in so our parents could take a breath. She raised the OG children, after all. Her ability and interest in constantly nurturing others was expected, and a lot of society’s structures relied on not examining that expectation too closely. FUN FACT, STILL DO!

Much like “holiday magic” was also always women’s unpaid labor, because apart from (sometimes) getting the tree and (sometimes) assembling toys, the cooking and decorating and cleaning and gift-buying, gift-wrapping, card-sending, organizing, hostessing, inter-familial conflict-resolving, child-wrangling, and planning were and very, very often still are, the responsibility of AFAB family members.

Likewise, in the multigenerational households so many of us are able to fantasize about as a better system because so few of us in our working years now have ever experienced one, it’s the daughters-in law, the aunties, the mothers, the daughters, and especially the oldest, the female cousins, the sisters and sisters-in-laws—and the female members of friends’, neighbors, colleagues’ households—who do most of the work of helping and supporting and organizing and maintaining social bonds.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this point without a whole lot of joking or yelling because it’s most often AFAB folk I hear longing for relief and community and just a little fucking help—and the sheer intensity of that longing creates a TRAGIC misunderstanding of what actually happens in a village.

This “traditional” village we all think we want does not give Mama a break. It is built, stone by stone, on a deep and pervasive assumption that she doesn’t need or want one.

When people imagine this village, they imagine someone being there to lovingly and respectfully take on some of their burdens now and then, which would give them space to live and rest and breathe and think for ONE GODDAMNED SECOND. Maybe even do something for themselves for a change! And then they can return rejuvenated and sane and go back to every day life just worrying about themselves and their immediate concerns.

But that’s not how a village works at all. You only get help because you gave it and will continue to give it. And the more help you get the more you owe. Yep, Granny is there to help with the new baby. And Mama will be on deck for her grandchildren, too. Just like she was for her siblings or her cousins or her neighbors’ children or whatever random fucking baby waddled by. There is no break, not just during childrearing years, but ever. It’s a system that requires a constant cycle of favors, and anyone who doesn’t pay in isn’t going to get much out because the village will hate them like fire and boy howdy if you think social media cancel culture is bad allow me to introduce you to kitchen table gossip because HOLD ONTO YOUR FUCKING HAT. Oh, you don’t have a hat? Maybe you shouldn’t have read that book instead of taking care of the hatmaker’s sick twins twenty years ago, hm? Or, you know, frowned when that hardworking haberdasher said you were pretty just because you were nine. Now you don’t get a hat, and neither do your grandchildren, because the village has INFINITE GIGS OF RANDOM ACCESS GRUDGE MEMORY.

Now get back to folding dumplings. The kitchen table comment section has disabled replies.

So welcome to the village! Your exhaustion isn’t just the twenty-odd years of your own child’s life anymore; you only get help with your own waddler if you’ve helped with everyone else’s from just about the minute you could , and will continue helping with everyone else’s for the rest of your life UNTIL YOU DIE OF A MASSIVE STROKE WHILE MENDING A BLANKET WITH A BABY IN YOUR LAP. (And yes, you guessed it—that is truly and actually how my great-grandmother died. Because after raising six kids and an almost mathematically infinite number of grandchildren and great grandchildren and a few neighborhood kids who had no one else while running a chicken farm for forty years, she was still minding the newest baby up until the millisecond her body gave out.)

And don’t think men were or are just totally outside this system, because they most certainly are not, even in the most “traditional” structures. They might not (mostly, generally) have had to manage the favor-economy themselves or worry too much about holidays or take on the majority of domestic tasks, and certainly in many cultures men had more time to themselves and the privilege to enjoy it, but in any given village, the men were still fixing shit and helping Bob build a shed and networking for money or advancement or both, or coaching or running for office or being part of the Lions’ Club or whatever Grand Order of the Water Buffalo society was available in their era and location.

But the majority of what my generation is crying out for help with isn’t building sheds. It’s the work traditionally done by women that women no longer have the time to do alone. A generation of AFAB people who were raised to forge a full life for themselves just like men…and no one really ever mentioned that the male version of that life tacitly included a spouse who would take care of everything at home. Someone also forgot to spend literally any time whatsoever talking to AMAB folk about other modes of life and work and love and connection they might explore in this brave new world we really, really, hoped would be a bit less shitty than the frightened old one.

And it’s never just the childminding, then or now. It’s remembering who’s sick and who’s dying and who’s bereaved and who’s destitute making an appropriate pain-casserole (or other culturally-relevant misery-carbohydrate) for all of them. It’s petsitting and tutoring and skill-sharing and fixing every item necessary for life and advocating for local issues and raising money for them. It’s knowing every birthday, anniversary, holiday, christening, retirement (for Grandpa only), graduation, birth, death, and never forgetting to acknowledge them the way each villager individually prefers it so no one gets insulted and withholds hats. It’s remembering that when you were broke, Helen gave you half her chickens’ eggs for months so now that Helen is about to lose her house you gotta do something for her or the whole fabric of society is meaningless and also the next time you’re drowning the village will watch from shore and whisper Helen to your slowly-sinking carcass. It’s giving a vast galaxy of rides to a vast galaxy of people: to and from hospitals, airports, relatives, funerals, games, events, schools, voting booths, churches, banks, the corner shop. It’s opening your home and wallet, often indefinitely, not just to your blood family should any of them get injured or ill or lose a job or flee from abuse or be accused of a crime or do that super gross inconvenient thing where humans grow old and need radical care and some needed it from birth, but to anyone in that network of lifelong trades, favors, labor, and support who has been there for you at any point in your life, and then, honestly, probably a few people who didn’t because they did help your spouse or your spouse’s friend or your spouse’s friend’s child. Or maybe everyone knows that person is just one of the few in every generation everywhere who was born a full-on chaos goblin who can’t handle life on any level and now it’s your turn.

Because it’s always someone’s turn.

Now, do we do a lot of those things even in our highly-individualistic society? And are AFAB partners, GENERALLY SPEAKING, still the ones expected to handle all that kinkeeping and emotional labor but also a full-time job that pays well enough to live in this silly-ass world? Yes. Of course. And of course men are taking part in this sphere more than ever, but statistics concerning second shifts and domestic labor are still insanely lopsided.

But as life gets more and more complicated, we just let more and more of those old responsibilities slide, or focus them on biological family alone, or simply refuse to spend our precious free moments grinding for everyone else on the promise of our going around coming around at some point. Or just never have kids at all. But in a village, there’s no such thing as childfree. You’re not exempt—you were signed up for this system of social debt management at birth and someone took care of your shrieking colicky mucus-ful baby butt, didn’t they? If you don’t have kids of your own, you have so much more time to help with Helen’s, right?

Fuckin’ Helen.

I just don’t think working adults these days want to do all that—because it doesn’t mean any real reduction in workload. Most of the time freed up by a village’s support ends up being spent in supporting the village, because everyone pretty much needs some kind of help all the time. And the mental load of remembering and modeling the needs of that huge network of people (even a small family has a large web of connections) sit on the brain stem with the approximate weight of the fucking sun.

And it actually increases the workload in terms of years spent in the clownshow plate-spinning depthless hellpit of child-herding. We like the idea that until we have kids, our time is our own. We like the idea that once the kids are moved out, our time will be our own again. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. Even older generations do—Boomer grandparents statistically spend much less time with their grandchildren than their parents did. We want a village to help us—and HOLY SCREAMING FUCKBLOCKS SO DO I—but I see very few people pining to spend their entire lives helping the village. Because you can just…do that, you know? Anyone can. You can start doing favors for your neighbors and I can almost guarantee they will start looking for ways to pay that back or forward.

And we’re all just so tired by the end of the day.

But once you get that cycle going, another problem arises. Another one that is CRAZY EASY to forget if you’ve never actually lived in a multi-generational household or a tight-knit small town. And it’s this.

Every single one of the people who help you in any way, from your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s son’s former roommate all the way down to Helen with her shitty blackmail eggs, now gets a say in how you run your life.

They get to have an opinion on every aspect of how you raise your kids, and also their opinions on the general quality of those kids’s deepest natures, which they will not be shy about sharing. They do not and will not conform to each and every parent’s hyper-specific guidelines for gentle parenting, baby-led weaning, screen-time limits, balanced whole-grains diet, avoiding allergens and pollutants, accepting the identities of those children even if they don’t understand them, or even not actually hitting children in the face for sneaking snacks. They’re going to do what they think is right, what’s easiest in the moment because they’re watching someone else’s kids tomorrow and that list of rules is even longer. And more likely than not, as soon as you can be trusted not to immediately chainsaw yourself in half the second an adult back is turned, they’re going to turf you out on your own with zero supervision apart from other kids who’ll ask if you want to see their dad’s super cool chainsaw before lunch.

This is, in fact, how a lot of abuse and adult-on-child bullying happened in the parts of we middle-aged folks’ childhoods we don’t get quite so nostalgic about. Yeah, sure, we were free-range. And a lot of us got hurt. A lot of us experienced things we never should have at ages that would be shocking now. And some of us just didn’t make it out of childhood. When I was 13, we moved to a small college town just after a bunch of high school kids on their own and fucking around like we all did, pushed a middler schooler they’d bullied relentlessly in front of a train. It was easier for parents and grandparents to let us run wild, but sometimes the wild was exactly what we found.

And sometimes being supervised was worse. If Gam-Gam believed sparing the rod doth spoil the child, you got that rod. If your neighbor didn’t believe in depression or ADHD or autism, you didn’t have any of those things the second you stepped foot in her house. If your aunt and uncle thought you were weak and soft, they made sure you knew it. And if your neighbor hated the kind of person you were, you still had to go over there when Mom had to work or pick up somebody from the hospital, and maybe, just maybe, it made you hide who you were for the rest of your life.

But wait! The village also gets a say in your job, your choice of spouse, your haircut, your hobbies, your pets, how many glasses of wine you have with dinner, every single choice you make in life. Depending on the type of village, they may or may not be able to compel you to choose differently, but they will 100% DEFINITELY opine at length about all of it like an HOA on planet-strength steroids.

We like the idea that we get to decide how to raise our children, whether to have them or not at all. We like the idea that we get to decide our own lives and associations with little to no input from anyone else. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. There’s no going no-contact with a toxic relative in a village, no deciding not to care for elderly parents just because they abused you, no surrounding yourself with only positive energy. Your village is your village. You can leave it, but people are people everywhere, and joining a new village is a VERY uphill climb.

I don’t think many of us would give up the individualism and self-actualization we prize so deeply in order to work from cradle to grave dog-paddling in the exact impossible-to-balance sea of troubles we can’t manage for a limited span and just for ourselves right now. Even rural American culture has become more insular and anti-social, less group-minded and more isolated. I don’t think that many of us would take free babysitting in exchange for a whole group of people getting STRAIGHT UP IN OUR BUSINESS about everything and losing all control over our children’s direct influences and formative experiences. I know I’m not letting Dipshit McRacist-Homophobe Esq who has a picture of Mrs. Trunchbull taped in her dream journal take care of my kid no matter how free she is—and she ABSOLUTELY feels the same way about letting a loud feminist queer lefty agnostic with rainbow hair and tattoos like me within five feet of her little soldiers for Christ.

We say we want a village, and we do—in the sense that we want to feel connected and less lonely as humans. That sense of community is certainly a huge gap that’s only being filled with worse and worse nightmares as the years go on. But we seem to want a village where everything else about how modern families prefer to live and pursue their own happiness stays the same, and that’s just never existed anywhere. There is no cultural framework where help flows toward working parents but not from them. Where we are beholden to no one but entitled to support. Where we only have to associate with people we choose to at our leisure. Where there’s always someone to pick up slack for us and manage whatever we find unmanageable.

That’s not a village, it’s a wife. Which is why conservatives, faced with the same difficulties, don’t call out for a village, they start changing laws so women can be controlled again. And that brings us right back around to the beginning. Yeah, it’s great to have someone to do all that and ask for nothing for themselves, but a whole lot of us (not all!) are trying SUPER HARD not to expect fully-realized sentient human beings to spend their whole precious finite lives that way anymore.

We may or may not actually want a village. I have a strong suspicion many of my peers in the mines of middle age right now would run screaming from the actual realities of one. We just want a little reprieve, a little help we don’t have to pay a mortgage for, and it feels impossible without returning to a way of life that necessarily curtails free will QUITE A BIT (citation: all of history forever).

We will have to find a new way. Fill in the social blanks that got forgotten along the way to modernity. We’ll have to build our own systems and hope they last (they don’t, ask any village where a teenager has ever drawn breath). We’ll have to do all the unromantic, tedious, slow, grinding work of fighting for better and hoping that favor comes around before we die (it probably won’t).

And you know, maybe if we weren’t all so fucking tired, we’d be able to imagine what that new way might be.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, EVERYONE!

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Hello, everyone. Very sorry I’ve neglected you. I’m working on a big new trad-WTG post, things have just gotten…complicated in my world. So I thought maybe something lighter and more fun would be a nice palette cleanser while I finish up both the post and the convention in Denmark where I am currently Guest of Honor and Not In My Time Zone. (Hey if you did not know, I am also a science fiction and fantasy writer!)

Yeah, so, well…depending on how many other streams you follow me on, you may or may not know that I have separated from my partner—it its a very stressful, anxiety-churning, financially ulcerating, and uncertain time in my world. I have no other way to excuse my silence but by saying there is pain, and there are ways through it, and not all of them are out loud.

So I made some stupid meaningless art, because that’s the only thing I know how to do when I’m lost. And I thought I’d share it round.

When I had the original idea to do this, several deadlines ago, I figured I'd post it under a paywall. Maybe people would give a little something for original micro-micro fiction.

But honestly I'm just so pleased with it I'm making it an open post so everyone can see what, specifically, is wrong with me that I would, while literally and actually losing hair over multiple by-wooshing deadlines and struggling to pay the cat's medical bills, feel compelled to buy a novelty claw machine which IN NO WAY TAKES REAL MONEY, and fill it with hand-written fortunes/mini-stories as a stress-reliever.

OKAY SO FIRST OF ALL.

Depending on how long you've known me, been following me, and/or reading my fiction, you may or may not know about my THING with claw machines.

My thing is I always win at them.

Now, I have strategies and philosophies about it, and a little knowledge of how the machines work as a last-ditch if none of the aforementioned philosophies or strategies seem likely to work out AND YEAH I MEAN OBVIOUSLY THE PHILOSOPHIES ARE CONVENIENTLY RELATABLE TO LIFE IN GENERAL I AM WHAT I AM. (Number one rule: you cannot care what you get. The goal is not to win a specific prize, it's to beat the machine. To get a prize at all. If you happen to want a prize that's advantageously positioned, good for you, but the ways of the machine are wily. If you care what you get, you've already become attached to an outcome that's mostly outside your control and the machine has won.)

But that all came later, reverse engineered from, and to explain, the fact that since I was about 10 years old, 9 times out of 10, if I walk up to a claw machine, I'm not walking away empty handed.

That bit of The Difference Between Love and Time where the protagonist is ten years old in Ocean Shores, WA, wins at the Time Claw, gets approached by a tiny kid asking her to win for him, which she does and goes forth always able to from then on? THAT SHIT IS ACTUALLY TRUE. It really happened, in that place, when I was 10, and ever since it's probably the only real superpower I got.

I FUCKIN LOVE CLAW MACHINES.

Do I want a real life-size actual one in my house? Of COURSE I do. But those bad boys are anywhere from $2000-$4000 and ain't nobody got cash for that. Not in this economy.

But awhile ago, while I was building the Speakeasy, I had this notion that maybe I could find a little wee dinky one. And when people came to the Speakeasy, they could get a fortune. And clearly they would be super rad cool original fortunes/mini-fictions/tone-poems by me, and in my head all this was just unassailably awesome.

Turns out, you can get a little wee dinky one for a cool $40.

Especially if, for no reason any human could ever fathom, it says BEAR MEAT in large, friendly bubble letters on the front. With a cute cartoon paw print for punctuation.

Spoiler: it did not come pre-loaded with bear jerky.

There were a lot of color and design options available but COME ON YOU KNOW I HAD TO GET THE WEIRD BEAR MEAT ONE. I probably would have given it a whimsical little name, too, but it says BEAR MEAT right on it, and bears have claws, so there's some logic there, and you're just never going to beat that in the Naming Inanimate Things Olympics.

I thought I was ready to go. But the capsules that came with it were way too small to hold folded up pieces of paper comfortably (ridiculously small, like they'd have been lucky to handle a single lonely Skittle) so I had to go order larger ones to achieve my dumb-ass dreams. Dreams that, at that point, I did worry were a bit out of my reach. I didn't have any ideas for shit to write in there, I was way overworked and no idea not immediately applicable to a book or story dared show its face in my brain. But whatever. My brain usually shows up on the night, even if it takes its SWEET GODDAMNED TIME.

So I found a kit full of capsules and toys and stickers that was the same price as plain capsules without toys and stickers, and I have a five year old, so hell yeah I chose that one.

Oh my god, the stickers and toys in that kit saved the whole half-baked scheme. THEY WERE ALL WEIRD AS SHIT. I mean, I guess there were a few fidget poppers and finger skateboards in there, but almost everything in the box looked like it arose unbidden from some seemingly-adorable-but-secretly-highly-disturbing anime I'd never heard of.

Why the fuck is that rat in an ice cream cone. I ask you. THAT IS NOT WHERE RATS GO. F SAFETY RATING FROM THE HEALTH BOARD.

Coming up with fortunes turned out to be not much of a problem at all, given inspiration like that. I spent about an hour writing out whatever popped into my head. I made myself rules no one else cares about but I NEED RULES OKAY. No discarding or editing, composed in pen so no erasing, No longer than five minutes to make each one, then on to the next. Bastian picked the sticker or toy, handed it to me, I wrote the mini-fic to go with it, sealed it up, popped it into the back of BEAR MEAT, and by dinnertime we were in business.

By which I mean not in business at all, as this thing takes only fake plastic novelty coins so it's not like any income whatsoever will ever be generated here, it's just...I don't know. I was moved to do this dumb crap, and now there's BEAR MEAT on my porch.

Now people pull a fortune when they come over and...well, honestly, they rarely know what to do with what they just read. I modeled the style a bit on this old horoscope column that used to run in the Sacramento indie rag when I was a teenager. I highly doubt they were ever based on real astrology, but we loved them for how weird they were. So sometimes people just look at me like I stabbed them in the heart when they read one and I FIND THAT VERY SATISFYING WHAT CAN I SAY?

My last job before I became a full-time writer was as a professional fortune teller (also a thing that sounds fictional but is not, and honestly, kind of amazing training for writing short fiction), and now I get to be that again a little.

Now I know a whole lot of folk pooh-pooh any and all mysticism or "woo" and that's fine. Much like the Claw Machine, I was always weirdly good at it, and while I had strategies and philosophies (YES YES ALSO APPLICABLE TO LIFE), mainly, they were reverse-engineered from what I quickly came to understand people were actually after: a little comfort, a little confirmation that whatever they'd already decided to do was the right choice, a little connection, a little touch of magic, or even the hope of magic, in an unremarkable day.

So don't get mad like I'm claiming to actually predict the future with these. Part of what I have always found very real and sacred about all forms of prognostication, regardless of culture, is the bedrock assumption that there can be and is divinity in randomness. That the card you draw, the stalk you case, the dice you roll, the stars' position at your birth, the flip of a coin, any simple action, has personal and significant meaning. That is so fundamental to the entire concept of fortune-telling it doesn't even get acknowledged or discussed. Without a silent agreement to try to believe that for a second, it all falls apart. Sure, some people believe a subset of humans is just straight-up psychic, but most fortune-tellers use tools that are designed to be randomly arranged/selected/mixed/drawn. And the Schrodinger's Faith the reader and the querent share for a brief moment is that this randomness is not truly random. If we try, we can understand the order this randomness expresses.

It's a terribly human search for, and conscious manufacture of, literary foreshadowing in real life.

Which is why I never called myself a psychic and don't like the word, even when I break out the cards now. I'm not psychic. But I'll tell you your fortune, and on a long enough timeline, it'll probably foreshadow something in your life pretty eerily well.

Stories do that.

And we all need a little hope of magic. Hope that the randomness of life might not be completely pulled out of the ass of the galactic core.

These are some of my favorite fortunes. I know my handwriting is a bit idiosyncratic and many internet folk have visual or other issues that make image-only problematic (which I 100% just typed as problemeatic THE BEAR STRIKES AGAIN), so I've transcribed them for ease of giggles.

There's obviously a lot more than these, but LIKE THE GENIUS I AM I forgot to take photos of each one before loading up the machine, and ADHD means always having a brain that won't go back and re-do a task even if /especially if the fix is very simple because awwwwww but I already diiiid that. So I wait til someone draws one and make them send me a photo of what they got. So this is what's been "won" so far.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I have been enjoying making them. I'll restock BEAR MEAT soon and continue to share the fortunes if you guys enjoy them--I'm oddly proud of this little extreme, pretty pointless, micro-fiction experiment. POINTLESS ART IS ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT IN THIS FALLEN WORLD. It's just so much fun to be a Forest Witch with a Cauldron of Destiny next to the mulch and the mosquito repellent!

PLEASE TO ENJOY BEAR MEAT IT IS DELICIOUS AND PORTENTOUS.

Nothing random. Only not yet understood.

***************************

No matter how you look at it, everything is just weird and hard. Mostly because we're all on fire and flying through space and we were all supposed to be dinosaurs but we're not. Might as well love people and make art, fellow failed lizard.

Ducks have interlocking corkscrew genitalia that makes it impossible to separate once the act of mating has begun, even if one duck isn't that into it, and that's why you keep choosing toxic people. You're not even into it, you just have a wound in your heart shaped like a corkscrew-knife.

The male seahorse carries and births thousands of babies and deeply understands both emotional labor and intersectionality, so ease up on what you've been told you're "supposed" to be.

You are an Adequate Monkey. Millions of years of evolution, billions of distant ancestors' lives of pain and passion, the rise and fall of countless eons spinning in an infinite hostile void, all came together to create you and then give you anxiety. HOLY SHIT, CONGRATULATIONS!

Any worker bee can become a queen if it's a space of its own and a TON of royal jelly. But the jelly is excreted by the worker bees in the first place; they could make themselves queens anytime if they read more theory, They should form a union. But this is actually about you. Queens of the World Unite.

This is Philippe. Philippe is pure evil. And he's after you. Philippe is also pretty bad at time management. And executive function. And he can't fly. Evil is usually like that. You'll be okay. Probably.

This is an alligator with an orange on his back. So...obviously nothing matters, existence is meaningless, and chaos rules this vale of screams. But good news! That work thing probably doesn't matter either!

Are you a customer who only wanted a treat and got served a flipping rat-cream cone? Or are you a rat who ate all the rum raisin before anyone caught you and now they have a big problem and you're a rat legend?

You deserve love. So does a footless teal four-armed bashful alien with a broken egg for a heart. But you, too.

This is Rufus. Rufus is an Actually Demonic Pig. But he doesn't let his culture dictate his destiny. He's going to nursing school. He's learning to paint. He volunteers with the Fire Department. So why can't you tell your parents how you feel?

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Note: the way this Substack works is that every public essay has a follow up piece under a paywall for the part I wanted to say but either didn’t have space for or, more often, didn’t want to deal with drive-by goblin-screaming by bad-faith internet vultures. This piece, somewhat unusually, follows on from two: Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

A little over a year ago, I started this digital space with an essay on, well, digital spaces. It was two months after Musk had taken over Twitter—oh halcyon days of innocence and youth! Everyone I knew, followed, was professionally connected to or wanted to be, whose politics I agreed with, whose morals I admired, all of them were very busy at that moment in time, very loudly proclaiming that they could not possibly stay on Twitter given Musk’s obvious econo-cultural malfeasance and vividly telegraphed nasty intentions.

It felt inevitable. A sorrowing sort of twilight moment. We were sure we’d lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots.

Because purity is so important, you see.

We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There’s no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don’t you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow’s most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement.

Because obviously I just can’t vote for Joe Biden. Yes, the alternative is grinding, authoritarian far-right fascism. I feel just peachy about letting that happen (to other people, I literally cannot imagine it ever affecting me, why yes I am the working class proletariat salt of the earth, you’re too kind), but I will not, not ever, NEVER OH NEVER SHALL I check a box next to someone who…has had to suck it up and quietly work with people they don’t like and profoundly disagree with in order to accomplish any version at all of the things I keep saying I want!

AND I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT FROM THE PAID ACCOUNT I NEVER DELETED ON ELON MUSK’S CRATERED HEARTLESS NAZI-INFECTED HAZMAT DUMPSITE TWITTER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE.

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