Well, that happened.

Followed by a simply wonderful fortnight of sifting through the ashes of the social contract looking for charred chunks of hope and decency and finding pretty much FUCK ALL. Also sifting through the WhAt WeNt WRonG hot takes of everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk’s ketamine dealer to the feral diaper-hunting meth-opossum prowling around behind my house who’s got all the answers.

It’s been a real treat.

There is a palpable, completely revolting sense excitement among the media. They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes! Ooooh what hot little monster is Trump gonna couple up with this week? Time to get called heroes of the resistance for shitposting on the internet just like we were going to do anyway! But among regular goddamned people who didn’t want to actually set the world on fire to cook their horrible burgers and yuk it up with the other sadists in the Bad Uncle club, there’s a real well, fuck it vibe going around.

What else is anyone even supposed to say at this point? It’s gonna be real bad? Yeah, we’ve all been saying that. No one cared. Trump is going to fill the cabinet with whatever Spirit Halloween remote-controlled jump-scare ghouls he thinks will make out with him most enthusiastically or hurt the most people or piss off liberals or, hey, fingers crossed, all three? Yeah, apparently that was a plus. Nothing’s going to get fixed, rights will be lost, and every piece of the country that still works in any way is gonna get its teeth kicked in while a nation of aspiring Mad Max extras laughs and pretends it’s awesome? And all that’s assuming we don’t get into a war because Putin told his monkey to get dancing? I don’t know, man. Guess so.

I’m not a politician, I’m not an analyst, I’m not an economist—hell, I don’t even have a podcast, which means I’m barely a real person. I feel just as fucking defeated and cynical and scared and hopeless and holistically disgusted as everyone else who can define the word tariff without Google and doesn’t own a major newspaper.

But as the shock has begun to wear off, and the sadness numb, what’s left over?

Oh, Christ on a fully-fueled megayacht I am so fucking angry.

And finally, I get to say: IT’S BOTH SIDES, BABY.

And that’s why this particular primal scream of useless rage at the oncoming Snowpiercer baby-eating bug-train of the future is under a paywall, because EVERYBODY’S GONNA GET SOME today, and if you want me to fight with you about it, you gotta pay the troll toll.

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I have things I want to say, and swear about, you know I do. But today I just want to sit with all of you a minute and share something.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book, mostly, but not entirely, for children, called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Rather a lot of people liked it.

Over the years, that one book became five. Five, and two short stories. And then, in 2016...well. I don't have to tell you. And back then, devastated, not knowing what to do, I got very political online very fast. And I had to deal with a lot of entirely manners-challenged people online who sailed in to tell me how stupid and wrong I was and how much they enjoyed my fear. Because that's a normal thing to feel and do, apparently--and apparently still. But these people would take one look at my profile, see the word "Fairyland," and instantly assume they knew everything about what a dumb, flighty, empty-headed girl I was. Inevitably, they'd screech GO BACK TO YOUR FAIRY TALES at me like they'd just won the argument.

So I did, and I wrote a standalone prequel story called The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End--and Further Still. As a way to process, and to help my friends and readers, perhaps, explain what happened to their kids.

In 2016, I didn't have a child of my own.

Now, I had to take that story down when the big anniversary Fairyland box set came out, Beasts was included in it. But several people contacted me this week to tell me how much the story helped them back then. And it would seem nothing matters and there are no rules anymore, so I don't really give a shit and I'm going to put it back up in case it might help someone else. It's not right for it to be unfindable right now without paying for a five-book set. (You do not have to have read Fairyland at all to read this story, it’s meant to be entirely standalone. The only trick is to know this all takes place long before the action of the novel, in which these forces are defeated by the usual rag-tag group of heroes. The big epic story everyone likes hadn’t even begun, and these characters couldn’t imagine something like that even being possible in their darkest hour.)

It's so fucking sad that, reading this story over this morning, eight years later, there wasn't any need to update it to speak to the present circumstances. Same as it ever was. We're stuck in a time loop, all of us. I was 36 when that man came down his golden escalator. I feel ever so much older than 45 now. And I'll be almost 50 by the time there's any path out. A sobering thought, to understate it rather dramatically.

Do I believe in the hope this story contains today, written when there was some possibility of believing it wouldn't be as bad as we feared, and that the country didn't actually want this? I'm not sure. I don't know what I believe right now.

Except that I do believe in stories. You gotta believe in something.

And I do think, even if you don't feel hopeful, maybe especially if you don't feel hopeful, you have to put on a good face and try to find it, and if you can't find it, fake it a bit, for those who need something to hold onto. We all have to give each other something to hold onto. And sometimes, if you fake it for a minute, it becomes real enough. A small magic the mind can do for itself.

So here is that story, and I dearly wish that it provides somebody out there with a little hope to lean on until their own homegrown is strong enough to stand tall.

The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End—And Further Still

Once upon a time, three rather large and unusual creatures grew very tired indeed of fighting, day and night and day again, fighting the same overwhelming and unyielding enemies, fighting with all their large and scaly might, as well as their claws, teeth, flaming breath, and occasionally, walloping rune-carved giant’s hammers they found lying about where others had fallen. Because the sun was setting rosy in the sky, and because they could hardly bear to put one foot in front of the other, and because, at long last, their fates had been tucked firmly into bed and told to stay there or else, these three rather large and unusual beasts sat down upon a rather large and filthy hill in a country called Fairyland. The hill was filthy because a great battle had been fought there. Bronze and wicker and glass armor lay everywhere strewn about. Swords and axes and scissors and needles and a million thousand arrows turned that hill into a pincushion. Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea. The three creatures sat carefully on their haunches inside a prickly prison of blades and bows and bucklers.

One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, their eyes were very orange, their horns were fierce and sharp, they had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.

If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.

The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer.  No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.

It had been a ferocious fight, all against all. One side sent Witches and Magicians and Unicorns and Manticores and Gnomes, whoever would stand, whatever would serve, until, in the end, the last warriors had no more to hurl at one another but their shoes, and then they hurled those, too. The other side Pookas and Dragons and their own Witches and their own Manticores, but most of all they sent Redcaps, in wave after wave, some riding great beasts of the air, some charging on great beasts of the earth, stout and furious creatures who kept their hats red with the blood of those they hated. Stray flashes of spent magic still burbled and rumbled through the valley. Dragons, Wyverns, Sphinxes, Griffins and Harpies, the Flying Ace Corps, wheeled in long, exhausted circles, looking for stragglers to carry off.  Below, the fallen lay where they had lost their last struggles against the army of Redcaps, and even the clouds had begun to weep.

“We lost,” said A-Through-L. His strong voice went all funny in his throat.

“Looks that way, Ell,” said the Green Wind. He did not sound very concerned. “May I call you Ell?”

Ell nodded and sniffed in the cold autumn wind. “The Marquess is going to rule over all of us forever and ever, and she is…she is…terrible.”

“Suppose so.” The Green Wind blew smoke out of both his purple nostrils. The Leopard purred and said nothing. Cats are not terribly talkative.

“But how could we lose, Mr. Green? It’s not possible. All the Sirens and the Witches said we’d win as easy as supper and twice as quick. They said no one so wicked and cruel and so awfully angry could ever rule Fairyland. They said that sort of thing only happens in other worlds that are not so full of magic and wonder as ours. All the prophecies agreed on it.”

“I think I see a Witch in that cage by the big oak tree,” the Green Wind noted, pointing with his pipe. “Being menaced by a lion.”

It was true—down deep in the Valley of Soft Ears, a gargantuan blue lion roared into a silver birdcage, where a young man all in black cowered with his arms curled protectively over his cauldron. Witches brew up the future in their cauldrons, you see. They take up a wooden Spoon and boil a soup out of everything you did today and everything you did yesterday and all the days before, and everything anyone you ever met did, too, and that is how you get a prophecy. This is very much like what statisticians and journalists do in our world, only with less tasty onions and mutton and incantations. Neither of the Wyverns could hear anything over the din of the battle’s end, but I am a Narrator, and my powers of hearing are extremely keen, for I must listen through every closed door, every secret meeting, every whisper in every corner of a tale. I shall tell you what the lion roared. It roared: you will make a new future in your stupid bowl, and it will say all the things we want it to say and none of the things we do not! The new future will say that everything good in Fairyland is down to us and everything that goes sideways is down to our enemies. It will say that we are the best people, with the best plans, and the best words, and the best rulers in the history of bestnesses. Make it say the old King and Queen are liars and villains but the Marquess is a truth-teller and a champion who has released the world from sorrow forever. Make it say she is the only one who can fix Fairyland and make it great.

And to this the Witch said: But none of that is true! Fairyland isn’t broken! The Marquess lies and steals and cheats and snatches folk up for her own use and hates a great many more people than is healthy for a growing girl. Our old King was marvelous! The Queen just wasn’t very good at parties, that’s all. The worst thing she did was accidentally burn up a book of spells one time.

The lion snarled: if you say it, if you boil it up in your bowl, it will become true. Everyone believes Witches. You will be rewarded with gold and jewels.

And when the Witch still refused, the lion thrust a paw through the bars of the cage and swiped away the young man’s wooden Spoon, the great emblem of a Witch’s power. Then we do not need you, laughed the lion. We control the Spoon! Everyone will believe us now!

“But we tried so hard,” whispered the red Wyvern on the hill.

“Why should that make any difference?” answered the Green Wind, who was somewhat older and therefore somewhat more accustomed to things not going his way.

Ell frowned and stared at the churned-up dirt of the ruined hill. He scrunched up his orange eyes so as not to cry.

“Well, because….because it’s a bad story! Stories aren’t supposed to end like this. They’re just not! Things are supposed to get better. Things are supposed to make sense.”

The man all in green lifted one emerald eyebrow. “Oh? Did you never find a story in all of your Papa’s bookshelves in which a wicked dark lord rose up and put a crown on his own head? In which the cruel tyrant covered the land in night and ravaged the countryside, destroying and devouring and devastating the lives of people both gentle and kind? Did you never find one single tale in the corner of your noble father’s stacks where folk banded together and rose up against this terrible King, standing back to back and crying out: we do not look to be ruled?”

“Well, of course I did, Mr. Green! But in all those stories, at the end of all those stories, the dark lord was cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheered and danced and had a party afterward. But the end of this story is that we lost and she gets to do whatever she wants to us forever. How shall we ever have parties again? How shall we cheer? How shall we dance? I don’t think the Marquess likes dancing. I think she only likes cheering if people are cheering her name and I think she only likes parties if they’re her own birthday and she gets all the presents.”

“Perhaps this is not the end of the story, then,” the Green Wind said kindly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. It was important to say it to the brokenhearted, to the young, to everyone, even if he didn’t believe his own words. Especially if he didn’t believe it. If no one didn’t say it, it couldn’t even start being true.

“It feels like the end,” said A-Through-L with a strangled cry.

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind took off his green helmet and laid it on the grass between two arrows. “But haven’t we had tyrants and fools and hobgoblins on the throne before? Haven’t we had rather a lot of hobgoblins? Aren’t hobgoblins rather more the rule than the exception?”

“Yes…”

“And haven’t we always patched up their mischief and gotten back to more or less living how we want to live and loving who we want love and making what we want to make and being who we want to be?”

“Yes…”

“Perhaps Fairyland is stronger than her goblins, my ravishing reptile. Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.”

“But this is different! Oh, I feel it in my bones! She is menacing the Witches and hunting down the Stregas who heal our wounds and she told the foxes and rabbits and minks that they deserved to be Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Their Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy and I have heard…I have heard she even wants to outlaw the study of Queer Physicks. How will we have magic without the queerest of all the sciences? Oh, I know all about Different, Mr. Green, for it begins with D. And this feels different.”

“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind stroked the Leopard of Little Breezes’ spotted head. Far below, a Griffin cried out in pain and ran terrified from the ruined battlefield, the ruined valley which once held so many soft ears. “But perhaps you are right. I have heard worse still, Ell. I have heard the Marquess longs to build a wall between Fairyland and the human world, so that no human children may ever come here and have adventures again. Though I may have some small thing to say about that, myself. The Marquess is certainly deplorable, and she lusts after deplorable things.”

“But if she is so deplorable, why did all those noble Dragons and Griffins and Gnomes and Centaurs and Glashtyn and Pixies fight for her? She has an army of dreadful, sneering Redcaps who love her desperately and want nothing more than to stain their caps even redder with the blood of her enemies. I suppose I understand the Redcaps. It’s their nature to hurt things. But the others? There must be something wonderful about her if they love her desperately. You cannot love anything desperately that does not have some tiny wonder buried inside it.”

The Green Wind stared into the darkening sky for a long time. “There is a dreadful sort of spell that certain people can cast, Ell. It is a very ancient and powerful spell, but difficult to pull off. All the circumstances must be just right. If you fall under the spell, you hear a story every night when you fall asleep and every morning when you wake up and you hear it twice at lunchtime. It is a story about yourself, a story that sounds so good and true that you fall in love with it. You want to hear it again and again. You snuggle up to it for warmth. You set a place for it at the dinner table. The story tells you that the world is an easy and simple place, and you—yes, you!—are the very center of it. You are a hero, the hero, and nothing beastly that has ever happened to you is your fault. Very soon you will be loved and treasured and celebrated the way you ought to be, the way you always should have been. Very soon indeed…if only those wretched…oh, let us say Satyrs. If only those wretched Satyrs were not taking all the good bits of everything for themselves and keeping your cupboards empty.”

“Why would the Satyrs steal from me?” breathed Ell, wide-eyed. “What have I ever done to them? Are all these frightful battles their doing? Let’s go and talk very sternly to them, at once! Anything, if only I might feel safe and warm and hopeful again!”

The Green Wind laughed sourly. He shook his head. Starlight reflected in his eyes. “No, my woebegone Wyvern. You don’t understand. The Satyrs have done nothing to you. They live in the forest and eat mulberries and moonbeams and dance at their Sabbats. What has that to do with your sorrows? It’s only the story.  You see what a good story it is! Why, it’s the story everyone and their auntie wants to hear! It’s the best story, the softest and coziest story every told! You began to believe it at once, and you have never had a quarrel with a Satyr in all your life. But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not? And once people hear this story, once this spell is cast…they get lost inside of it. They cannot see anything but the story, and if anything comes along that might tear the tiniest hole in the story, they will hate it like a fanged toad, for the story has become more important than even themselves. That is what the Marquess did, only she used the foxes and rabbits and minks instead of Satyrs to finish her spell. And all those Redcaps and all those Dragons would rather die for her than let any harm come to the story that sings them to bed at night. Because the world is not easy or simple, and it is very, very hard to get to sleep when the dark is so deep and the cold is so sharp.”

The Wyverary twisted his claws together. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, then. If it’s only a story. If she only wants frightened people to sleep well and sleep soft. Maybe she doesn’t really mean any of it, and once she has her crown, she will be kind and good. People do all kinds of fearsome things for the sake of crowns. I’ve never understood it. Crowns itch.”

They looked down into the gruesome battlefield, now pale with mist and full of the sounds of weeping. A throng of Redcaps were stalking the wreckage, looking for anyone with wings. Whenever they found some poor half-dead Harpy or Ifrit, they pulled a long bronze chain out of a great rough sack and fastened down their wings, one to the other, with an extremely serious looking lock. Ell’s wings prickled with gooseflesh. The Green Wind said nothing. The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned, showing her teeth.

“I suppose you’re right,” Ell sighed. “It is rather silly to think the best of someone whose done all this to us already. I hadn’t much hope. But…” A-Through-L’s eyes grew very big in the dark, two enormous pumpkin-lanterns floating in the shadows. “But…oh, I know it’s a ghastly thing to say, but perhaps I might be safe, at least? You and I and your Leopard? We are not foxes or rabbits or minks, after all.”

“The spell grows and grows as people fall under its power. And to grow, it must always have new food. I cannot promise that the story will not start whispering in certain ears that Wyverns are lazy criminals who ruin the radiant city of Pandemonium with their dirty nests and fiery breath and loud crowing.”

“I’m not a criminal! I’ve never even been to Pandemonium!”

“It’s the story, my dulcet dragonkin. The story doesn’t care what is true. It only cares what feels true. And you are big and frightening to people who are neither reptilian nor capable of flight. Who knows? Perhaps the Marquess will even find a way to banish the Winds and we will be exiled, too.”

“Oh, I am so afraid! I am so sad I can hardly stand staying inside my skin! What are we going to do, Green? How are we meant to live? Is the Marquess’s story so strong that it can just stomp all over my story forever? They’re going to chain my wings and if I can’t fly, what am I? Who am I?”

The Leopard of Little Breezes lifted her spotted black-and-gold head and rested it on the Wyvern’s great red toe.

“Do you remember the first magic you ever learned, Beast?” The Leopard’s voice was soft and rumbly and rough as a mother cat’s tongue.

Ell did not think he knew any particular magic even now, except for the magic of being who he was. Yes, who he was was a very large, very red, fire-breathing lizard who could fly, which was a bit magical, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“The first magic anyone learns is saying No,” purred the Leopard of Little Breezes. “It’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their magic at everything to see what it’ll stick to. And if they say No loud enough, and often enough, and to the right person, strange things will happen. The nasty supper is taken away. The light is left on at night instead of turned out. The toy comes out of the shop window. It is such old magic, such basic magic, that most folk don’t even know it’s magic anymore.” The Leopard of Little Breezes rubbed her paw over her ear. “You can say No to that story. You can say No to the spell, to the Marquess, to the lions, to all of it. And if you say it loud enough, and often enough, strange things will begin to happen.”

“But that’s easy. I can say No all day long!”

The Leopard growled. “It’s very much harder to say No to a tyrant than to say No to a plate of beans or a dark bedroom. Harder still to do it while your wings are tied down and blistered. And you cannot stop saying it, even if it would feel so marvelous, so easy, so much less work to just be silent and hope it all comes out right somehow.”

Ell’s eyes filled with turquoise tears. “It does sound hard. So terribly hard. I don’t want to live through this sort of story. I want to live through one of the nice tales, the ones that take place between hobgoblins, the ones where you don’t have to spend every day blistering and saying No to horrors. Why couldn’t we just not have horrors at all? Then no one would have to say No.”

Oh, my dear, darling Wyverary. So do we all. But so few of us get to. Not even a silly narrator like me. The only comfort there can be is that very few sagas of bravery and wonder occur in the space between hobgoblins. Perhaps, my most beloved lizard, one will even happen to you. But that is not much comfort, I know.

“But then, of course, there is the other side of the apple. There is Yes Magic,” the Green Wind said gently.

“I like the sound of that better, even if it begins with Y,” nodded the Wyverary.

The Leopard of Little Breezes looked up at the Wyvern with enormous black eyes. She spoke in a very soft, very serious voice, the voice any cat uses when the time for yarn and nip is past and there is only the cold night coming.

“Every time you say Yes to anything, to anyone, you change the shape of your world. You agree to supper with a stranger, and now you have a friend. You say that you would certainly like to take a journey to the ocean, and now the ocean is in your heart forever. The Redcaps said Yes to the Marquess, and the world is very much changed. But we…we must say Yes to each other. We must say Yes to the needful, to the suffering, to the lonely, to those the Marquess punishes for saying No to her. We must band together, back to back, and say Yes to everyone who lost today, for we are all family now, and our loss is our new last name. If we must hide, we will hide. If we must flee, we will flee. If we must fight all of this all over again, we will do it and complain the whole time. We must say Yes to the story where, after a long battle, the dark lord is cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheers and dances and has a party afterward. But most of all, we must say Yes to the truth and the speaking of it. We must say No to silence. And perhaps, one day, a long time from now, something new and extraordinary will happen and the Marquess will defeated, and she will blow away on the wind, no heavier than a memory.”

A-Through-L looked down into the Valley of Soft Ears. He could see the Marquess there, strutting through the ruined earth with a crown on her head and a smile on her lips, knighting her gloating generals and showering them with jewels and titles and kisses. He could see her men fastening bronze chains round anything that flew. He could see the trees drooping down in sorrow, their leaves just barely tinged with red, with autumn, with the coming of September.

“I understand what you mean,” Ell said finally. His whiskers whipped in the sour wind. He straightened his back and his scarlet tail. “You mean defiance. I know all about Defiance. It begins with D.”

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I know it's my job to be one of the people who Says Something About It.

I know it's my job to be one of the people who says something comforting, or at least insightful, or at a minimum cathartic. I'll try soon. I promise.

But I just don't have anything right now. I can't even look at the analysis, or the internet at all. Not yet. I don't even know how to describe what I feel. I would have to actually cheer up to climb my way through to plain old nihilism right now.

And when the post-mortems are all said and done and the numbers are crunched, that's what I think happened here. I'm not sure what Democrats could have done differently. In 2016 this country was fucking around thrill-seeking and wrecked the family car. I think now we're just openly self-harming and seeking the void.

But what the fuck do I know. I hope the media's happy. They got what they wanted and can pretend to be concerned while calling themselves heroes of democracy.

It all hits over and over, different angles of how dark this truly is. I didn' t have a child in 2016. I don't even know how to look at them now. I am so afraid. I feel so helpless and empty.

I don't know what's going to happen next. Neither do you. Neither does anyone, especially those who tell you they do. I know most of us are stuck dealing with whatever it turns out to be. Most of us don't have anywhere realistic to go, and there's no escaping America's reach, anyway.

So the only way out is through. This is the challenge of our lifetimes. How to resist and how to live. It fucking sucks. I have no answers. Not today. But I keep thinking about the old zen proverb.

Master, what do I do before enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

Master, what do I do after enlightenment?

Chop wood, carry water.

So I suppose that's all I have in the way of comfort. So far. For myself or you.

What do we do before disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

What do we do after disaster?

Chop wood, carry water.

We have to try. We can't give up. We have to take care of each other as best we can. We can't let ourselves be silenced. We have to circle up, backs to backs, and protect one another, especially those who are most vulnerable to this oncoming future. We have to find a way to hold on to whatever is nailed down well enough in America that they cannot steal it, whatever structures and bulwarks can take our weight. There will be some.

But for now, in these last three months of the era, we chop wood and we carry water. We hold our children and our loved ones. We try. Because there isn't anything else we can do.

We still have each other. We are going to have to make that enough.

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It’s almost over. One way or the other.

I think I’ve aged ten years since the first primary. Twenty since 2020.

A century since 2016.

And I do feel cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. Cautiously. Because I have SOME VERY REAL PTSD ABOUT 2016. When we were so sure. When, even with everything going on, we thought there was no way America would elect that guy. That we were on the verge of the first female President. When we were excited to see the oh-so-cocky MAGA camp meltdown in defeat. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I wore suffragette white to vote, and a jewelry-version of RBG’s dissent collar.

And I will never forget watching everything slowly fall apart at the Democratic Party’s official event

And I’m…not real thrilled to see this same sort of sentiment floating around the day before this election.

Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro

I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.

You know what I trust?

I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.

It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.

I’m hoping, too. But it’s very easy to forget how much of this country doesn’t pay attention at all, how much of this country hates women and POC and have no reason to be shy about that anymore, how much of this country went through their most formative years before the Civil Rights Act, Roe, or women being allowed their own bank accounts, how much of this country was so traumatized by COVID they have just aggressively memory-holed the entire thing plus everything else we went through from 16-20, and how much of this country literally just doesn’t give a shit, wants to watch the world (just not their cute lil house) burn, and profoundly enjoys watching others suffer.

And that part of the country? Never miss an election. They turn out every time to vote for pain and anger and fear and repression of others. They fucking love voting, because they fully understand it’s how they can get their way whether there’s more of them or not, while the rest of us seem to have a real tough time with that lesson.

I live on a small island. I moved here on November 1st, 2008. A few days later, we elected Obama in a landslide, and it was one of the most special nights of my life. Everyone crammed into the local bar, watching it happen. We’d voted in Ohio before moving so that it would count more, and when Ohio went blue, you’d have thought my ex and I had done it just the two of us. We didn’t pay for a single drink that night. The joy in the air was so intense and wonderful.

All those people, so happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something real. That the world was about to change.

AND THEN TWO YEARS LATER NOBODY FUCKING SHOWED UP AND THE WORST REPUBLICANS MOVED ON INTO CONGRESS. And we were all surprised! I’m not exempt from this at all, either. I was young and dumb as a broken fencepost and I didn’t vote in the midterms. Have I learned my lesson? Yes. Has everyone else? I MEAN MAYBE BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Democrats just hate voting regularly. If all registered Dems voted, even Texas would be blue. But we don’t. We just refuse. Someone else will do the work, right? Someone else will make it okay. Someone else will fix it so we don’t have to pay attention.

And then we’re all shocked when SCOTUS is made up of out of three decent people, two out-of-touch old men, a seething frathouse rapist, a corporate lich, Serena Joy, and Clayton fucking Bigsby.

You can’t be shocked. We have to turn out, and at best, we seem to be able to manage it about once every other Presidential cycle. People keep whining that Democrats have been calling Republicans fascists for too many cycles, but we’ve been doing that because it’s literally just the same people over and over again. Reagan’s administration was half Nixon men, the first Bush’s was half Nixon and Reagan men, the second Bush’s was whoever was still breathing out of that ring of hell, Trump’s was half bonkers right-wing grifters and half whoever was left standing by the 2010s out of Roger Stone’s ancient shrieking goblin tribe of well-dressed national vampires. Who had mostly also been around since Nixon, plotting revenge. It’s been the same gang of Pennywise understudies slurping out of the public trough while starving the rest of us since my parents were kids, and yes, they are fascists. They just think it’s not fascism when they do it. It’s just the way things oughtta be, don’t you know?

THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT ALL FASCISTS THINK BUT FINE WHATEVER.

The point is, my heart is full of hope but my guts are full of dread. Not because of them, because of us. Because we have failed to protect ourselves and our neighbor so many times by giving up our voice and choosing not to vote. Because so many of us still want to vote for Jill Stein even though I’ve never met one single person who genuinely loves her and wants her in (funny how her not being perfect is fine with protest voters but the candidate with an actual chance not being perfect is intolerable), only those who want to use their vote to punish someone else. Because when optimism abounds, Democrats stay home.

Yes, it can be hard to get time off of work. It is also hard for Republicans to get time off, and early or mail-in voting is available in all but three states, only one of which is even close to a swing state (New Hampshire, because New Hampshire just HAS to do their own thing). Yes, voter suppression is everywhere, so yes, we have to try a little harder in some places. But we have to try. Please try. No, voting for Kamala isn’t going to end capitalism or fix Gaza or even make your groceries cheaper tomorrow, but what it does is make those things even remotely possible in the future.

The Democrats have been begging people to vote for 18 months now. I’m begging. Please don’t sell us to that creature and his rogues’ gallery. Please let us just try to get a little better every year, to fix more problems, to end more injustices, as best we can, within the law, as best we know how, within contemporary mores, as best we are able, given that America doesn’t actually rule the world. And if you aren’t voting because you think America is an evil empire—hold onto your fucking hats if MAGA wins.

Nothing is perfect. Everything sucks to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we get to just nihilistically lie down and let these weirdos tell us who we are or how we can be allowed to exist. They don’t get to do that.

Everything hinges on tomorrow. Go. Vote. Speak. Say no to the last nine years of having to hear that man absorb and curdle every single part of daily life into his own stew of narcissism and sadism. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us, who want to determine our own lives and have a political party in power who can be persuaded to act for the people. Who, most of the time, try to all on their own.

Or do it for the next generation who cannot speak for themselves yet, but deserve to grow up to be whatever they can be, and not punished for not conforming to Gilead’s latest decree.

I don’t care who you do it for. I hope you do it for yourself. Just vote.

And if Kamala wins, if we escape this particular bad timeline, you have to keep voting. It isn’t ever over, because this push-me-pull-you between conservative control and liberal freedom has been going on for centuries. It does not end. Don’t you dare leave her hanging out to dry in the midterms. There is no permanent victory. And yeah, victory tomorrow doesn’t fix much right away. That work is hard and unlovely and takes so many years and so much arguing, so much compromise. But the needle does move. Toward something more open, something brighter. The first step is just not literally electing a supervillain.

There is and can never be any final repudiation of conservatism. You have to show up every time, forever, or there is no progress, on any cause you or I care about. And some progress is always better than losing progress.

It’s just one action a year. If my generation can finally learn to do that, maybe there is a future ahead that has room for all of us, and not just a few rich men full of hatred who think love, mercy, peace, kindness, and diversity are mortal sins.

Don’t get cocky. We can lose so easily tomorrow. Fill in the little bubble next to: I and my loved ones would rather not descend into a ravenous maelstrom of suffering today.

We don’t ever get to tune out again. Let’s get this done and start arguing over how to fix things rather than arguing over our right to continue existing with people who never wanted us to in the first place.

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I don’t know, man.

I just don’t know.

Was I surprised Donald “Art of the Happy Meal” Trump decided to round off an election bid that has been echoing through the last four years like a long, wet, deafening Dadaist fart in the fascist fucking wind machine by utterly mat-assing the dismount via one big ol’ Madison Square Garden Nazi struggle session full of ids let off the chain, smug gloating over their unstoppable supervillain plans, and absolutely crusted racist, sexist, and homophobic mouth-vuvuzelaing with a side of murderous rhetoric?

Come on. Not even a little bit. Last week he sad he wanted to be a whale psychiatrist super bad, you guys. It’s his passion. Can you even imagine how excited the staffer who got to book THE American Nazi venue for THE new American Nazis? (After making double sure it wasn’t Madison Square Garden & Lawn Care Emporium?) Oh, I bet he could hardly wait to send the dork army out to infest the media cycle telling everyone how stupid they are for making that very simple connection anyone would make, and that the Trump campaign 100% wants everyone to make.

This fucking clown-van full of wannabe Pennywises cannot hide their hideous flag-swaddled erections whenever they feel like they’re getting close to being able to kill everyone they don’t like and laugh about it on TV to thunderous applause. (That last part is key, though. Wholesale slaughter is just no fun if no one tells you you’re an awesome big strong handsome boy for doing it and throws you a big party to celebrate your achievement!) They giggle like schoolboys every time they say something naughty, coquettishly twirl their hair and wag their fingers at us, daring themselves to go a little further every time, then gasping at the audacity of normal fucking humans to…you know…take them at their word.

Was I surprised everyone got BIG MAD about a comedian calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage in the middle of a set that had far more vile and revolting racist-ass jokes lined up with which to bukkake that hungry audience Gallagher-style, opening for people who not only had worse and uglier shit to say, but people who are actually, publicly, loudly planning to liquefy our future and sell it back to us in leaky plastic bin-bags for millions a pop?

And that the media cycle hasn’t instantly buried that for them? (Don’t worry, they’re working on it. Very busy at the moment pretending Biden called all Trump supporters garbage, which he didn’t, and also it really wouldn’t be the same if he had, he called their comments on Latinos garbage, but no reason not to try to pull a Mortal Kombat fatality on democracy at the 11th hour, right, Fourth Estate? Honestly it’s so predictable and I’m so exhausted pitching myself into the cold and unforgiving sea is starting to sound pretty all right.)

And that this, this, of all the Tales from Beyond Cthulhu bonkers blood-drenched psychotically cruel 6000 pounds of hate and darkness in a 2.5 pound bag screeching murdershit Trump and his frathouse of D-list demons who failed to launch out of hell have pumped into this nation and the minds of all of us, this is what is making Latinos question whether to vote for him?

YEAH I’M PRETTY SURPRISED.

AND I WROTE AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT AN ISLAND OF GARBAGE FLOATING IN THE SEA.

WELCOME TO GARBAGETOWN INDEED.

Honestly, maybe I just don’t actually understand politics that well. Maybe I should scuttle this whole political essay thing entirely. I don’t get it. What? Why this? Because this isn’t even the worst thing Trump himself has said about Puerto Rico. My friends, he has hated you from the minute someone managed to get it through his hot buttered brain scramble that Puerto Rico wasn’t a fantastical land invented to flesh out the worldbuilding in West Side Story like Middle fucking Earth. This illiterate cousin’s uncle, who turns up every year to an intensely awkward Harkonnen Thanksgiving table cranked out of his diaper on ornithopter wiper-fluid has never said the words Puerto Rico without sounding like he just wiped something off his shoe.

It’s so hard to keep track of what I’m actually allowed to be angry about versus what I am commanded to instantly forget and not make a big deal of because FOONIE JOAKES.

I know remembering recent events is not exactly on trend these days, but…I mean…remember when he withheld aid because he though the mayor of San Juan was too mean to him? And threw paper towels at people after a hurricane? And repeatedly, repeatedly, as in, every single time the subject comes up, phrases his sentences in such a way that it’s completely clear that he either doesn’t know PR is part of America, doesn’t consider it to be despite reality, or thinks it should immediately stop? A guy who can’t put sentences together any better than he can put his shitty Spirit Halloween makeup on, but somehow, on the subject of this one place, is fully capable of cleverly crafting implicit rhetoric without slipping up and accidentally knowing the basic factual geography of the nation he wants to rule?

NOW we’re mad?

I don’t even want to get into whether it was funny, because that’s not even the point of conservatives saying it was a joke. I can’t express how disappointed I am in Jon Stewart for siding with his comedian-soul rather than his decency-soul and getting wrapped up in that part of the (barf) “discourse.”

Look: it wasn’t funny, it was stupid, tired, pointless, and even the set up revolves tightly around bringing up something important, that normal people care about, to a group of people the speaker knows don’t give one lonely windswept fuck, and only even understand the reference in the first place because it’s hysterical to them when normal people care about things other than themselves. It’s not even a joke, because that’s just what conservative edgelords actually think about Puerto Rico and the environment.

Have you ever seen one of this ding-dongs actually try to tell a joke? First, there’s only one punchline: I’m amazing, you’re a piece of human filth, and you deserve suffering while I deserve to watch. They almost always fall directly onto their faces and then blame liberals for not laughing. Dennis Miller, one of the funniest people ever, sent himself off to the hinterlands because even he couldn’t make conservative thoughts funny and relatable.

They also never say it was a joke when their attempts to comprehend comedy, an art form about catharsis, shared experience, speaking truth to power, and upending expectations to make people look at life in a different way, thus entirely antithetical to conservative ideals and goals, fail to get a callback. That would mean acknowledging their joke didn’t land and they’re the bestest at everything.

No, conservatives only bleat it was a joke when they’ve just said exactly what they mean and think, with a straight goddamned face, direct to camera, and a dim, flickering notion that they might get in trouble for it this time crosses their rage-dessicated brainpan.

(Ha ha they won’t.)

A joke relies on an unexpected reversal of expectations or upending of the audience’s everyday assumptions somewhere between the set-up and the punchline. But this specific audience never expected or assumed a set-up about a floating island of garbage in the sea was going to actually be about how we fucking created a floating island of garbage in the sea with all our consumerist hog-snorfling and short-sighted maritime policy. They assumed and expected it was gonna turn into some kind of insult at the expense of some group of people, because that’s their fetish, and no one turned up to Madison Square Fucking Garden on Discount Nazi Night to NOT get their fetishes seen to. They got what they expected, they just didn’t know which group of people, and were maybe mildly surprised it wasn’t Haitians, probably. That makes it a shit joke; the equivalent of yelling WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD in someone’s face and then blarfing back WE ALL FUCKING HATE CHICKENS AM I RIGHT FRIEND before they can say anything back, then expecting a Mark Twain Prize for it.

But hey, for once, I guess, we’re only sort of blaming the comic who said it, and mostly, correctly, pointing out that it’s all on the guy whose name is so grossly and obnoxiously in giant letters on everything. And it’s really no better to not vet what speakers plan to say at the biggest event of your campaign, in a place where SUPER-SPECIFIC PEOPLE HAVE SUPER NOTABLY SAID SOME SUPER-SPECIFIC TOP-TIER EVIL SHIT RIGHT BEFORE DOING EVERY LAST BIT OF IT?

Wait, what’s that? Oh, Hinchcliffe’s (which seriously sounds like Andy Kaufman’s new alter ego) set was absolutely vetted, because he planned to call Kamala Harris a cunt, and some poor intern squeaked out hey maybe not? Americans get pretty weird about that word? But A++ to taking a shit on Puerto Rico, bro! The part where you made everyone think you were gonna say something about the very real and very bad news great Pacific garbage patch but instead you switched it up and made a flaccid racist joke about your own country? Fuckin’ hilarious, bro.

I mean, first of all, at this point, why not call her the “c-word,” as the media is helpfully using despite being happy to print any other profanity these days, so that the right can pretend it stands for “communist” while, again, giggling and blushing and winking like a kid with a crush, and that crush is emphatically not on us. They might as well. The media would’ve laundered it for them with a smile and a backrub. They all think it. We all know it. If whatever gremlin-handlers are left doing actual campaign work were smart enough to balk at that, I’m not sure why “Latinos love having babies, they don’t care, they just come inside” was A-OK fun for the…well. Whole fuckin’ family, I guess. Maybe I just lived in Scotland too long, where cunt is a friendly greeting AND a floor cleaner, so I don’t care about that word anymore, but I can’t really see a comedian getting up there and being a misogynist prick moving anyone’s needle much. It’s kind of their brand.

BUT MAYBE I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT BECAUSE APPARENTLY THIS IS STICKING WHEN “YES I WILL TURN THE AMERICAN MILITARY AGAINST AMERICAN CITIZENS IF THEY DON’T AGREE WITH ME AND IF YOU THINK I MISSPOKE HERE IT COMES AGAIN, WITH GUSTO” DIDN’T.

Is this actually finally generating the kind of rage every single thing Trump has ever said since sailing down a golden escalator with Resting Mussolini Face should have? Is it actually making Latino voters notice that this toad-souled witch’s curse we’ve all suffered with for a decade specifically, violently, and really, really openly loathes Latinos in particular?

Maybe? There had been some new endorsements and a lot of think-pieces, but the shock and unexpected attention span with which the media is treating this seems all out of proportion given the rest of what happened at that exact rally and also since 2015. No part of the media landscape seems to be able to focus on the detailed horror, privation, fear, and mayhem Trump and Musk are promising to deliver for more than two seconds after the third Betterhelp.com commercial break. But this one they’re holding onto. Not the part where Elon “I Am Good At Many Business” Musk is Trump’s new running mate, not the part where these two billionaires have apparently agreed between them to Thelma & Louise the economy straight into the screaming void, leaving all of the Americas as an island of trash floating in the sea, and certainly not that both of them have acknowledged on the record that their plans will do exactly that and they’re looking forward to it omg so fun guys!

Obviously threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with a guy who can’t remember what he said an hour ago didn’t even make a fucking blip.

Is the media finally peering into next week and realizing how holistically they done fucked up?

Maybe? But why? Scrambling to distract from that whole festive arrangement of broligarchs suddenly caring so deeply and authentically about journalistic neutrality that they just can’t endorse a candidate this year. And only this year. For reasons. Really good, double plus neutral journalism reasons. They don’t even seem to care much about the rest of the technicolor Nazi floorshow on display that night. They opened by playing fucking Dixie, for god’s sake. It’s all out in the open.

I’m not trying to make light of what a nasty fuckdumb thing to say about an American territory that’s been treated unfathomably poorly by us for pretty much always. I understand how big the PR diaspora is. It could make a difference. Many things could that haven’t gotten this oxygen.

Quite literally, two days ago, Trump got his carcass up on TV and said he and the Republican Speaker of the House had a “little secret” plan to secure the election for him no matter what the voting shows, and then, a few hours later, that same Republican Speaker of the House also went on TV and agreed that it was a super cool secret plan and he wasn’t gonna tell because you don’t tell secrets and as far as I can tell no one gives a fuck beyond lol what lovable scamps!

Is that it? Better to blanket the news with feigned pearl-clutching over a douchebag comedian with an inevitably douchebag podcast saying exactly what Republicans happily admit they think about Puerto Rico any old day, when they can be bothered to think about it at all, and pretend it’s some kind of October surprise that Trump is a huge racist who likes racists and hangs out with racists and is basically a make-work programs for racists everywhere, than to deal seriously with one political party has become a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames nodding along and agreeing that yes, indeed, they are a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames GET IN THIS GIBBERING HELLJAW, AMERICA, while the very part of our society that’s supposed to be in charge of revealing the truth and pointing out when the government is getting too twitchy did virtually nothing to stop them?

That’s really all I’ve got. Because this country seems to still think it’s some kind of FUCKING JOKE that we’re all voting between a future with problems, but more or less normal problems normal people can try solving, and the gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames, and the skull of flames is doing pretty well in the polls once the media gets done saying they just don’t know Kamala well enough yet.

We have the opportunity to say no to that, to that terrible future where JD Vance gets to decide what happens to our bodies, Elon Musk gets to decide what happens to our money, RFK Jr and his purple Thanos face gets to decide what happens to our food and medicine, Stephen Miller gets to decide what happens to our neighbors, and Donald “Your Favorite Monster’s Favorite Monster” Trump gets to decide what happens to everyone else. AND WE MIGHT NOT. BECAUSE EW LADIES I GUESS.

I can’t comprehend why anyone is still laughing. Why anyone thinks life will just continue normally after Tuesday if these carrion-eaters get back into power. Yeah, conservatives think Puerto Rico is trash. They think we’re all trash. Just compost to feed their growth. I will never understand why it’s just so much fun to hate and harm other people than it is to just…be rich in an advanced technological society full of comfort, entertainment, and possibility where anything you want can be had in a moment. Or not be rich but still be pretty okay plus same, as most Trump supporters are.

But this is a bad world getting ready to shoot its shot, telling us it’s bad and will feel bad, and we’re still sitting around making jokes. The millisecond Biden said the word garbage, legacy media informed us all Trump was fine now and it’s basically the same. Normal, often shitty, but still functional, life, or a vast hellscape of pain? BASICALLY THE SAME.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. I wish I even had a guess. So many things seem to be happening that we can’t see but the media could, if they tried, yet won’t. Please vote. Please do the minimum to not let us become the new Reich. Please see through all this noise to a signal we can hold onto. Please don’t let these goblin men write the history of this century. They’re not even offering anything in exchange for our everything.

See, the thing about carrion-eaters is that something pretty big has to die in order for them to feast.

If we don’t literally lay down and die for them, they will starve, and we will go on.

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I am a professional science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. It is what I live and breathe. It is what I love. For twenty years I have stretched my imagination to tell the most out-there stories I can to as many people as I can. To imagine the future and the past, new technologies and philosophies and how to function within them.

So when I tell you people are getting really fucking weird about the line between imagination and reality, you need to believe me. It’s not ChatGPT that might end up putting me out of work, it’s the way we’re apparently just allowing millions of people to announce their personal epic science fiction spec script is reality, act on that conviction, still be treated as serious people to be taken seriously, and given influence and power. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WE DO NOT HAVE WEATHER CONTROL OR MEDBEDS OR CLONES AND JAY-Z IS NOT A FREAKING WEREWOLF.

Now, the way this Substack works is that each public post has a companion piece under the paywall containing all the things I wanted to say but didn’t want to deal with the usual horde of bad-faith concern trolling and screaming misinformation in the comments.

On top of that, this particular one is locked because I’m going to start off by telling a story about a family reunion I went to awhile back and the truly acid-addled-raccoon genre fiction presented to me, to my face in real life, by human beings I ostensibly share DNA with, as objective, common sense fact. To be completely honest, the last time I mentioned their worldview online, one of the relations in question popped up in the discussion and not only doubled down hard, but insisted on con-splaining how the sun works (spoiler: nope), not quite realizing that their version of Being Online and mine are very different. That person subsequently had no fun at all while fifty thousand people or so laughed at them and threw digital tomatoes.

I don’t totally know which I’m trying to avoid, that happening again and family members getting their feelings hurt/yelling at me, or my total fucking despair if it didn’t, because I can no longer be sure anyone on Twitter knows the difference between whatever they dreamed the last time they took Benadryl on an empty stomach and reality. God DAMMIT, Planet Earth.

But I’m going to unbury the lede and put the first rule for discerning What Is from What Is Fucking Squirrel Nuts above the fold. There’s a few other rules, but this one is just a simple and effective question to ask yourself when evaluating whether some stupid outlandish thing you heard is reality or JUST TOTAL GIBBON-SHRIEKING INTO AN INFINITE HALL OF NIGHTMARES. As a public service.

DON’T BE AFRAID, IT’S CRITICAL THINKING TIME. If the answer the following is yes…

1. Would life be massively easier, more fun and interesting, or at least massively more dangerous/exciting and interesting, than you’ve ever known it to be for one single second of your lived experience if this thing were even half-true?

THEN IT’S PROBABLY VENOMOUS DREAMPUKE EJECTED FROM THE SUGAR PLUM FUCKING FAIRY’S MONEY-SUCKING BILE-CLOACA, YOU CANTELOPE, STOP BEING SUCH A GORMLESS SUCKER.

Okay! All set? Time to talk shit about what my second cousins believe!

Let’s hop in the definitely-real Democrat-controlled time machine fueled by baby blood and straight men’s tears. Reserve yours now for 47 non-refundable installments of just $47.47! Product launch date: MAYBE!

I suspected something was about to shake dangerously loose in the collective American psyche around the summer of 2016, at a reunion of my maternal family in upstate New York, about six weeks after my maternal grandfather had died, a fact which will be quite important in approximately 35 seconds, the precise amount of time it took between getting out of my car and someone I’d never met before just bellyflopping with gusto into a Smilex vat of bugfuck nonsense…

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I suppose the bright side of, well, every goddamned thing I’m about to say, is that people finally seem to be noticing that the media, whether mainstream/legacy media, or the squalid chaos-bins of TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, and Meta, or even the atomized, janky self-checkout counter of news and commentary and commentary-on-commentary the rest of us have nailed together out of the last eight years’ worth of absolute fuckshit, is nothing like the orgy of liberal bias we were always told it was.

Wait, who told us that? Oh, was it conservatives? Like literally the whole time? Whenever the nasty, festering, soul-rotting hypocrisies and crimes and corruption and oppression they were gleefully pulling got so out of control the media couldn’t find any more ways to not report on it, and apologetically crafted mild-mannered weasel-worded headlines out of some new utterly heinous, deliberate and multi-pronged sadism? And we all just meekly bent our heads and accepted that everyone should just try to be a little more conservative in the future, after all, the poor things have it so hard, it’s so unfair to them that people don’t want to be their subjects and the crimes they commit to make themselves kings (or just for funsies) keep getting discovered, underplayed in the press, perfunctorily investigated, weakly prosecuted, and hurriedly forgotten?

Did you think I was talking about the COVID response? January 6th? Emoluments? Stolen documents? Fake electors? Bribing SCOTUS? Colluding with Russia to swing an election and undermining NATO to prepare for an antagonistic nation’s new war of land acquisition? Opening the entire treasury to the President’s friends without oversight and handing out billions in pre-forgiven loans (by definition, not loans)? Refusing to help their own state’s citizens suffering and dying in multiple storms, even so much as taking a phone call or voting for aid, because they don’t like the current administration and want to blame them for not helping?

My siblings in Christ, I was talking about Iran Contra.

Because it’s always been this way. ALWAYS. I don’t know what kind of roving, sentient, ravenous Memory Hole has taken hold of this world, but it’s eating REAL GOOD these days. Oh, is CNN shining up the conservative candidate with generous tongue-baths, weasel words, and strategic silences while breathlessly pointing and screeching at the liberal’s slightest ill-timed fart? Is the Wall Street Journal reporting on a speech in which the Republican suggested literally the worst economic ideas of all time as “nuanced and bold”? Is the New York Times publishing a whole lot of op-eds like they’re objective news and then you open the op-ed and it was clearly written by fucking Ungoliant?

I mean…yeah. They do that. They’ve always done that. Conservatives do not change, by definition, except to get more authoritarian. It’s kind of their whole thing.

Hey, remember when the New York Times knowingly ran fabricated stories just to get a cute lil head-pat from the Bush Administration, except without the head-pat part? Remember how fucking excited every single cable news network was to get their photogenic reporters artfully smudged with dirt and “embedded” with actual combat troops, with whom they would definitely never form tight bonds and feel reluctant to publish anything critical of? Remember how everyone involved with the Clinton impeachment was fucking someone, or many someones, other than their wives, with gusto, in office, and literally nobody said anything about it until years later when it didn’t matter anymore? And Trump having five kids by three wives, countless affairs, and pretty openly fucking a right-wing grifter on the campaign trail is not even worth clutching one lonely pearl about? And how hard the media mocked Hillary for saying there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down the President and then said nothing when George Conway went around laughing about absolutely running a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down the President (aw, he says it was so annoying to have to do that with fax machines and copiers! Poor guy!) twenty years later, and in fact, presenting that fucking guy as some kind of liberal rebel against his wife Kelly Ann’s conservatism because HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE? Remember when they all helpfully didn’t report on Reagan’s dementia? And stopped talking about Iran Contra as soon as humanly possible? How Carter is still thought of as some kind of uniquely terrible President despite being preceded by Nixon/Ford and succeeded by the infected root of the poisoned tree whose fruit we’re all still choking on to this day?

This is a minor sampling. You’d think people would at least remember 2016, when every NYT cover story was a sweaty, heavy-breathed, puff piece pretending to be Woodward & Bernstein “exposing” Hillary’s scandals while CNN just went ahead with the actual headline “Does Trump Transcend Truth?” while showing a live feed of his empty podium for hours, waiting for their bestest boyfriend to show up. Or how happily they all parroted the “migrant caravan” story and said nothing about how quickly it seemed to vanish after the election. Or any of the dozens of recent stories about Trump’s “resurfaced” background that didn’t resurface at all, the media just stopped talking about it and everyone forgot.

But I guess it’s more fun to pretend this bizarre eagerness to turn down the sheets of democracy for conservatives is brand new and everything before was somehow honest and fair—biased toward the left, if anything! Those sneaky leftists! Always maintaining a multi-generational united front to enact subtle, patient, incremental long-term plans to slowly win America to their side with the loyal cooperation of major corporations and without interference by systemic structures! YEAH THAT SOUNDS LIKE THE LEFT.

And it’s not about a “horse race,” either. That’s become the newest excuse for so many outlets sanewashing the fact that every time Trump opens his mouth what comes out is the elevator-blood from The Shining with some gobs of electrified shark and the fucking shards of Kristallnacht floating in it.

But it’s bullshit of the highest degree. Incredibly effective bullshit that allows people to acknowledge the problem and immediately shrug it off. It sounds right. It’s just cynical enough. It feels like it makes sense and fits with all our frustrations about capitalism and the media’s complicity in the rise of the new fascism. We can comfortably repeat it while still appearing cool and unfooled and smarter than everyone else. It appeals to our basic assumption that profit is the only motive for entities as vast as media conglomerates.

Still bullshit.

Honestly, I’m not even sure how the idea is believable to anyone for more than a minute or two. First of all, exposing Trump and honestly reporting on his enshittification of the modern world would bring in a whole lot of clicks, as would, you know, defeating the new fascism. That’s the kind of thing you break out the Big Boy Fonts for. Most of the country was literally dancing in the streets when Biden won—there would be zero loss of profit in uncovering Trump’s malfeasance and downfall. Not to mention, actual investigative digging would turn up some truly incredible stories. There is no reason not to investigate the ways the GOP has tried to set up cheating in this election, but it barely makes a blip in the headlines when yet another scheme turns up and is promptly not dealt with.

Second, when Biden was floundering in the polls, did the media go hard on Trump to maintain a close race and all those thirsty terrified eyeballs on their content? Fucking no. I was there. You were there. They ignored every insane thing Trump said during the debate and came together in an almost unprecedented unity to thump Biden out of the race and convince everyone he had Parkinson’s. Aaron Sorkin, of all over-blessed people on this dumbass rock, published an op-ed saying if the Democrats were actually serious about the threat of Trump, they’d completely non-democratically nominate Mitt Dog-on-a-Hot-Car-Roof Romney as their candidate the day before Biden dropped out. The media landscape was so unified that that was the creator of The West Wing’s solution: Well, if EVERYONE was conservative, we wouldn’t have all this division! Don’t like the new Hitler? Go with Himmler! See? All fixed!

Did the media go hard on Trump when Biden trailed him in 2020? No, they argued over who got to blow him first by cleaning up daddy’s messy speeches (oh those strategic broken quotation marks and ellipses have so much to answer for) and telling us all Biden couldn’t possibly win so get used to it. When the Butler shooting happened, did they finally start reporting on all the good Biden has actually done for the country to balance out the narrative that this clinched the whole thing for the party promising a new civil war? Not for one fucking second! You could feel the absolute thrill behind every outlet running that “epic!1!” photo as it suddenly became the only photo that had ever been taken in the history of the world, then the disappointment when the shooter turned out not to be the blue-haired trans immigrant communist abortion activist of the legacy media’s dreams. And every cable news outlet spent 2016-2020 swoonily reciting one now he’s finally becoming America’s President tone-poem after another, as though by the purity of their yearning they can make it so. I do not ever remember once seeing a pundit with moist eyes stare longingly at a Democrat and moan with pleasure that he had finally become our President, least of all because he managed to complete a State of the Union speech without ritualistically sacrificing a migrant worker on the floor of the House or dropped a giant fuck-off bomb on Afghanistan hoping it it would make him feel a big boy.

One half of our political establishment (and it’s not just the bleached Gibbering Mouther from Georgia) is openly discussing and disseminating the talking point that Democrats have a weather control machine that can create hurricanes (which they have not used to fix climate change because reasons) and direct them at conservatives. That, and I cannot stress this enough, is fucking crazy-ass wibbly-wobbly shit. Anyone who actually believes it is profoundly in need of powerful medication. Yet reporting on these completely out to lunch fans of radical science fiction, such as it is, has at best acted like this is funny, just another thing a Republican said and not completely disqualifying from anything but an in-patient treatment program, or reported it with wan, disinfected headlines like “Yes, They Can Control the Weather, Says Marjorie Taylor-Greene” while barely addressing multiple Republican governors refusing to save their own people as they drown and flee. We are now expected to just deal with pure moon-howling madness as a serious part of our national discourse.

Now, of course the media criticises Trump. They made billions doing just that. It’s the journalistic Eden they want back, so that they can copy/paste someone’s misspelled tweet and plaster Democracy Dies In Darkness above it. But they also carry water for him while offering nothing but scorn to any Democratic move or action, and super-gluing a megaphone to the lips of anyone with a grievance against them not fixing every problem instantly with a deadlocked Congress so that both sides look equally wretched. They insist on detailed policy from Harris while asking how Trump’s tummy is feeling today. Constantly ask how a Democrat is going to pay for programs to actually help people while never bothering to ask how a Republican plans to pay for infinite tax cuts, absurd tariff plans, and orgiastic military spending. Or if they do manage to squeak out a real question, most outlets turn right around and pretend Trump didn’t answer by rambling about nailing Haitian swans to lawnmowers or pledge to nominate Clarice Starling as Attorney General.

I’ve gone on and on, I know, and I could keep going until this is a 9-part series. This is where I’m going with it: what’s going on in the media is simply not about creating a horse-race, not only because it’s always been a race between a normal fucking horse and a geriatric centaur huffing that rage-drug from Firefly, but because no one seems to care what kind of race it is as long as the Democrat stays behind. Imagining it’s about money or ratings or both is just a lot easier to believe. That this craven, groveling behavior, not just from the media, but from a very uncomfortable percentage of this country, is about capitalism and profit and not genuinely preferring conservatives and putting their giant meat-paws on the scale for the daddies they never had.

America just likes conservatives more than it likes liberals. Over and over, time and again, this country bends itself into tesseracts trying to give Republican candidates a chance not to be the absolute fucking worst all the fucking time forever. They always are the absolute fucking worst they can get away with, and then everyone trips over their own children to forget and imagines that there was some kind of mythical “traditional Republican Party” that wasn’t like this and may one day return at our greatest hour of need like King Arthur with one divine hand in a hedge fund and the other in a meth lab.

I feel like I’ve spent most of my life hearing dyed-in-the-wool Democrats say they’d absolutely vote for a Republican who threw this or that sad little bone to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t all live in Gilead, only without the massive social programs, free food, clothing, and housing, or employment guarantees the actual clownshit evil Gilead had. I rarely see any Democrat not happy to say they liked McCain (don’t google the Keating Five, kids!) or whoever the new “welcome to the resistance” Republican is this month (before they inevitably yank off their fucking face and cackle that they were Old Man Fascism the whole time)

These days, I hear quite a few leftists saying Trump would be better because it would teach Democrats a lesson or accelerate the Rapture revolution or whatever idea was definitively proven to be a nihilistic mind-pit of wrong by the fact that the walking carcass was already President and all that happened was they got to hurt us and smile.

I have never heard a hardcore Republican say they’d give a Democratic candidate a chance under any circumstances whatsoever. Let alone a far-right Christian nationalist. In fact, the one thing the far right and far left seem to be able to agree on is that the absolute most disgusting and reprehensible, any, demonic thing to be in the history of the world is a regular old well-meaning liberal. Which definitely doesn’t come from having grown up listening to the entire media slowly morph liberal into a curse word no one even wants to say anymore and just sucking that shit down with mother’s milk.

There is just something dark and awful here, deep down, that wants a mean daddy.

America’s entire relationship with its two political parties (not to mention the “third parties” that only ever exist to carve off votes from Democrats and somehow never seem to harm Republican performance at the polls) is the grotesque acting out of an abused child, writ large. Generations have grown up with distant, authoritarian, or absent fathers as a romanticized ideal from Hollywood to the church pulpit, if not flat-out reality in so many cases. (Not all, tons of Dads are wonderful, tons of Moms suck and vice versa. This is about abusive patriarchal and maternal archetypes, don’t get upset, it’s a metaphor. This isn’t a gender thing, either, substitute Mean Mommy and Cringe Dad if you like.)

So America just keeps playing out this sick but classic pathology. Suck up to stern, angry, distant, uncontrolled yet controlling Dad, give him every chance to just stop being an asshole for five seconds; lash out at Mom because she’s safe and boring and will keep trying to help no matter what we do. If only she were better, if only she behaved perfectly, if only she loved him more, if only she gave him more, if only she gave us more, if only she weren’t so fucking annoying all the time!

But Dad? Dad is cool and strong! He’s a provider! He doesn’t need any of our shit! Cool Dad lets us do whatever we want! He’s not even here half the time because he’s so important and has so much on his shoulders! I mean, we can’t do anything Cool Dad doesn’t like, and he takes our lunch money every day and punches us in the stomach if he thinks the boys seem suspiciously gay today or the girls speak up or anyone asks where he was last night, he really seems to hate our foster-siblings and starts fights with our neighbors for no reason, and he thinks it’s Mom’s fault every time it rains, but we can play with guns and not pay for stuff and beat up other kids! Dad says school is stupid and we shouldn’t have to go! He lets us eat candy every day! He always gets his way and we want to always get OUR way too! He’s sooooo rad and funny and strong!

But Loser Mom can’t stop yammering about dumb crap like rules and decency and thinking of future consequences. She’s always making compromises and telling us we have to do stuff and be nice to others and get along and be patient and like, not drink from the awesome rusty fire hose because Dad takes a shit in the well every morning and use the filter pitcher instead. Or we hate her because she’s always cleaning up his mess and trying to placate him instead of (somehow) kicking him out in a superhero cape when Dad’s buddies run half the town and a whole bunch of the kids told her they’d go with him if she tried. IT’S SO CRINGEY AND WEAK. Ugh, Mom sucks so much. I wish we had a new Mom! But not a new Dad, because Cool Dad rules and he only beats us because Mom makes him so mad. And hey, it’s Mom’s job to take care of us, not Dad’s! She’s the one that’ll be judged if we fall apart; Dad doesn’t even want a family in the first place.

Americans love Cool Dad because he does not love them and never will, so we beg for crumbs, and hates Uncool Mom because she neither burns the house down with both of them in it nor will she ever stop allowing his abuse to seem less horrible by working to fix the problems he creates before they take us all down, so we can just call her a bitch and know she’ll still probably make dinner out of whatever Dad left after his last rampage.

Or if you’re a libertarian, I guess Dad going for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back is the goal.

And we just keep acting like this, over and over, forgetting what every cycle of Republican fuckup/Democratic damage control (conveniently leaving little time or funds for actual Democratic policy progress) should teach us: Lucy isn’t ever gonna let anyone kick that ball, and on the off chance someone managed to get a punt in, she’s filled it with catshit and TNT on the sly.

The media is made of people, it’s not a great eldritch beast of many eyes and mouths. And people have biases. They have fucked-up shit they’re working through. A lot of older people had Dads exactly like that because that was more or less how Dads were supposed to be until very recently: authoritarian, disciplinarian, distant, uninvolved in day-to-day household affairs, and primarily concerned with enriching himself, which riches would then trickle down to the rest of the family. Parental figures and the entire structure and cosmology of dominant Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions which have God as literally an absentee or punishing Father at their core, scald ideas about authority and its use into our tiny baby brains. The planet is still being run by very old people whose baby brains learned that fathers knew best, and the biggest, strongest, most authoritarian ones got to dole out the hurt and not get hurt themselves, or any consequences for acting that way—and quite a few rewards. It just hasn’t been that long since, minus actually beating his wife and children (and sometimes even then), this was considered the order of the natural world and the hereafter.

And then there’s something darker and uglier down there in the mess: choice and agency and the modern world are hard and scary. Being an adult is weird and crazy different than it’s ever been and living in the future isn’t exactly super fun. When people are scared, they retreat behind walls, behind whatever they perceive as strong, even if it’s cruelty, and jam their heads directly into the sand. I think a lot of people just kind of want to give up, give in, say fuck it, why try to be responsible for each other and accept those who aren’t like us and mind our stupid manners all the time and work together to keep this house standing when it needs so much repair? Why not just take a wrecking ball to it, or let that businessman with a briefcase who definitely has normal teeth and not fangs and super definitely isn’t drooling with anticipation, take charge so we don’t have to think about what’s right anymore?

There is this strange nihilism floating around about how close Trump is to winning. A this might as well happen apathy I cannot comprehend. None of this is inevitable. Even the reddest states have massive blue voter bases that still vote, and more that don’t turn out. We do not have to descend into this madness. It will be worse, not better, than anyone is imagining. We do not have to accept Garbage Daddy (and Trump is LITERALLY that Dad to his own kids and us) just because the neighborhood gossips would rather seriously discuss weather control, translate Dad’s drunken rambling like the priests at the Oracle of Delphi, and fume about how Mom hasn’t gotten the neighbors down the road to stop setting each other’s houses on fire while getting kicked in the head in her own kitchen all day every day, all the while some guy plasters every house with flyers saying weather control is totally real, but vaccines aren’t, and Terrible Mom is an Atlantean hell-dolphin hungering to eat us all (while hiding the tell-tale hump of a fiery fin on his own back under a techbro-casual bomber jacket).

IT’S FUCKING NUTS AROUND HERE. And we’ve just gotten numb and learned to live with it for nine years.

I don’t want to do this anymore. That’s always the downfall of the liberal voter base: we just want to go about our lives, so we do, and the shadows close in while we’re not paying attention. But we will keep doing it, even if Harris wins, and may the Atlantean hell-dolphins help us if she doesn’t, America (and wouldn’t it be nice if it were only America) will go right back to pawing at the trouser-leg of the patriarch who doesn’t love them in 2028 and 2032 and so on. People want to believe in the Good Conservative. They’ll grasp at any straw that lets them. The fight is never over, because it’s with the broken psyche of this nation, which is not actually that preciously unique in any of this, and that healing is measured in centuries, if it’s even possible.

Conservatism and progress have been at war since Uruk and Jericho—this one is our battle, it sucks beyond the telling, but we can’t just give up, no matter how determined the legacy media and the new online political ecosystem are to coddle full theocratic fascism into life—the truth isn’t that hard to figure out.

Democrats don’t control the weather.

And Republicans don’t control our fate.

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Not everything has to be politics.

Some things are all-consuming fires from the primal depths of time and the void.

Last Friday, in my usual bleary, resentful early-morning delirium, I followed a link in the comments section of an article about something beyond completely unrelated to the treasures hidden by that blue text (oh, concerned piece about long-term effects of America's increasing marijuana use, who knew you came bearing such gifts!) and pitched headfirst down a long rabbit hole, at the bottom of which, somehow, turned out to be a molten ancient nuclear reactor I feel just unreasonably affectionate toward now.

Obviously I immediately went to tell the internet about it, which is REALLY NOT THAT EASY ANYMORE since I guess we've all just given up on APIs and cross-posting apps because billionaires hate nice things.

Problem is, I get SO FUCKING EXCITED about learning something new (and this one is a DOOZY), and then EVEN MORE EXCITED about teaching others something new, that it's all I can think about for several hours on either end, and I don't quite know what book I'm going to DEFINITELY USE THIS IN yet, and work still must be done while the child is in school, so...I want to expand on what I wrote on the annoying micro-blogging websites here, where I can use BOTH primate tool-usey wiggle-parts.

So this is the bigger, grander, more in-depth, more accurate, and more ADHD EXCITEBIKE version, all in one place and much longer, just for you fine folks who support me here and over at Patreon*.

*The nine o’clock show is completely different than the seven o’clock show disclaimer: This essay and the Patreon one are not quite the same, so that everyone on each site feels they got their money’s worth of something special**. (Only 96 paid subscribers left to commit to a biweekly posting schedule!)

**Plus I learned more in discussing it over the weekend.

Look, there's a reason I became a writer, well, many reasons, but one of them is definitely that it's a great way to just be in graduate school and writing a thesis all the time, because research thrills and excites and absorbs me like little else. That is extremely stressful. It is also extremely stimulating! Another reason is that being a professional writer is a fantastic way to force other human beings to love and care about the obscure, irrelevant-to-daily-grindlife things you love and care about. I literally get short of breath learning something new and fascinating, and then, sadly for all of us, also literally, run around spinning in delighted circles like Maria in The Sound of Music singing loudly to the hills so everyone has to listen to my latest nonsense. It's deeply embarrassing, and I feel sorry for my friends.

But THIS ONE is the coolest thing I've learned about in a hot minute--both adjectival puns intentional.

When I first started reading about this, I wondered if maybe this was a thing everyone already knew about and I just missed somehow. If so, WE CAN GEEK OUT IN THE COMMENTS. If not, WE LEARN/FEAST TOGETHER. But I gather from reactions (heh) to the initial thread that it's not terribly well known to the general public, so AHHHH LET'S JUMP INTO A LIBRARY AND COVER OURSELVES IN BOOKSMELL.

SO. It turns out that, under the precise right (or very wrong) conditions, large natural deposits of uranium can develop spontaneous nuclear fission chain reactions identical to the kind we make on purpose in modern nuclear reactors.

This has already happened at least once. About 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.

How do we know a spontaneous natural nuclear fission reactor formed in Africa 1.7 billion years ago?

Well, in 1972, a bunch of French chemists were quality-testing reactor-bound ore from Gabon, and it turned out a LOT of the local uranium was already markedly depleted, far more than any previously-found Happy Fun Rock, some of it by over 40%. Which meant, at the end of the day, this lab's till was short a whole lot of radioactive isotopes that should have been produced by processing that Gabonese ore.

This being the Cold War, people were pretty uptight about accounting for and tracking all fissionable isotopes in or out of any given civilian facility because, you know, big boom bad, so somebody was in trouble and they needed to figure out pretty quick how this could possibly have happened in a fairly new mine, or someone was going to get real aggressive about who stole the doomcookie from the doomcookie jar.

SCIENCE TIME.

Turns out the specific type of depletion in this ore told the story. In artificially processed and/or depleted uranium, the big players, U234, U235, and U236 are all affected. In the Oklo deposits, U235 showed the same type of depletion we find in spent waste materials left over from light water reactors. All the expected "product isotopes" and "daughter nuclides" that get churned up during fission reactions were present. But in our reactor waste, U234 and U236 are still present in small, altered amounts, because those isotopes are both consumed when neutrons merge and produced by fast neutron reactions happening during the fission process. So most of them get burned up, but the burninating process also makes more, so there should be some leftover at the end of it all, if not as much as the deposit started out with.

But in the Oklo materials, U234 and U236 were totally gone, because, you know, even at the crazy half-life of all this crap (250 million years, give or take), 1.7 billion years is plenty of time for it to fade to black. So this wasn't uranium humans had used to make anything go (reactors) or stop (bombs), it was ore that hadn’t been doing the VERY fiery splits for a long, long time.

The French team announced their findings: around 2 billion years ago, a self-sustaining nuclear reaction had occurred naturally within this pile of West African rock. And over the next many years, other sites, all near Oklo, showed the same markers, all part of the same extreme, widespread event.

It doesn't mean anything and it's not important, but it made me smile: that announcement took place on September 25th, 1972, which is my child's birthday, forty-six years before they were born.

So here's where it gets (more) interesting.

The Oklo reactor started doing its thing around 1.7 billion years ago, which is a very specific number. That puts it during the Paleoproterozoic era, when life on Earth was a loose gentlemen's club of sea algae and a few early eukaryotic cells. Before anything. Before dinosaurs or mushrooms or bacteriophages or even your mom.

Atmospheric oxygen was pretty damned new. It came from cyanobacterial photosynthesis...probably, and maybe a big comet or meteor hitting the Earth like Santa's gift bag, full of funkadelic outer space molecules.

Thus, the oxygen content of our atmosphere had only recently gentrified the joint & ticked up to a perky 2%, which is not perky at all considering our current atmosphere is 21% oxygen. DON’T JUDGE HER, EVERYBODY'S GOTTA START SOMEWHERE.

But Our Problematic Friend Uranium can only dissolve into water in the presence of oxygen, and the oxygen in water doesn’t count because, well, if you use that up it’s not water anymore. So all this uranium was lying around being a mountain and hills and ground, probably constantly inundated with groundwater for who-knows-how-long, until the oxygen in the atmosphere was thick enough to allow uranium to do what it does. The groundwater seeped into a uranium lode and moderated the neutrons being produced by natural nuclear fission into a self-sustained chain reaction just the way the rods & pools of a man-made reactor do.

Long story short? The Oklo reactor burned & cooled on a THREE HOUR CYCLE for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS until all the fissionable material was used up.

Yep. Three hours. Concentrations of the gases produced by fission trapped in the Gabonian ore fields allow us to actually know the time intervals of the reaction cycle from 1.7 billion years ago (which, what the fuck, we are amazing sometimes) and it's BONKERS.

30 minutes of mega-Chernobyl-style criticality that boiled away the Super Helpful lightly-oxygenated groundwater, then, once it was gone, without a moderator to slow the excited neutrons down (don't worry too much about it but there's a weird counter-intuitive thing where water cooling and slowing these neutrons is what makes the chain reaction stable enough to keep going, without it, the critical reaction itself slows down even though the neutrons are moving faster I DON'T REALLY GET IT EITHER) the chain reaction went through 2.5 hours of cooldown until the water could seep back in & the whole thing started all over again.

FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

So to recap, 1.7 billion years ago, when life was basically just Spicy Algae, there was an open, bleeding, unfathomably, incandescently hot wound, spreading for miles around curve-in bit on the west coast of Africa that ooze-ploded underground every three hours for several hundred thousand years, hurking out radiation, intense heat, & all kinds of xenon, iodine, caesium, & barium into the air, groundwater, soil, nearby sea, & very, very early photosynthetic organisms.

All this happened about 3km below the surface, which would seem safe enough shielding, except…that particular basin was once home to a shit-ton of geysers, unstable volcanoes, and still-antsy plate tectonics moving geography all around. Any one of these could have churned radioactive material to the surface, not to mention the possibility that the primeval geography was still very much in flux. Portions of the reactor may have breached the surface all on their own during portions of these hundreds of thousands of years of earth, sea, and everything else figuring out what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Now, I'm not remotely a scientist, but on reading about all this I immediately wondered if the Oklo reactors, and others, if they occurred elsewhere & we just haven't found them yet, alongside ultraviolet radiation, could be a pretty significant factor in Spicy Algae mutating into Spicier Bubbles & Piquant Fungi, and so on all the way up to us. Radioactivity doesn’t behave like it does in comic books, but it does create mutations when it doesn’t kill the thing whose DNA its shuffling like a shitty Reno card dealer whose favorite relaxation technique is meth. Most of those mutations won’t be useful or survivable, but some will, and will be passed on to the next generation, and the next, if they give anybody a leg up in the local environment.

See, 1.7 billion is a very neat number in terms of Earth's timeline: the evolutionary party started popping off not long after that. It would explain why so much of everything came from Africa and its extreme biodiversity despite lots of other fertile and temperate zones all over the place. It might imply reasons why the next earliest stage of life was indeed primitive fungi, mushrooms being things that spring up often in areas of high radioactivity because many can consume or otherwise process it.

A Primeval Splash Park of radioactive slag interacting with a few Floaty Cell Bois for hundreds of thousands of years, longer than all of what we would even recognize as human civilization has been around, slinging wrecking balls of recombinatory chaos into everything around it. Maybe all of us came from this Devil's Threeway of seawater, light, and magic rocks, slouching toward sentience, their hour come, well, maybe, someday, if we're lucky.

Maybe our mother is a stone in Africa. Maybe that's our home.

So I Googled it, & that was in fact the very next hypothesis made by actual smart scientists. QA techs may well have discovered the origin of life. This is a very real theory about the origin of the vast biodiversity of our Mutation-Happy Planet. Can we prove it? Not really. Are hypotheses that feel right and pretty and neat around the edges often wrong? Boy howdy.

And yet. Reading about all this felt almost religious to me. Which is the root of much misinformation, but we take what feelings of connection and purpose we can these days. Because not only all this *gestures wildly at the above*, but the glorious poisonous underground psychotic finger-painting that was the Oklo reactor was only possible because natural uranium deposits of uranium had much higher concentrations of U235 1.7 billion years ago than they ever would again. This could never happen now, not the natural fission of uranium or the groundwater reaction. Nor could it happen before it did, and very soon (on a planetary scale) afterward, it couldn't happen ever again. There was a tiny little window in which the deposits had enough U235 and the water was oxygenated just enough. Sure, a coincidence. Sure, a dumb-luck geological pimple-pop that may occur so rarely in the universe that life's apparent sparseness amongst trillions of star systems makes nothing but sense.

If God is a word you’re comfortable with, perhaps a way of thinking of such a force lies in the confluence of light, water, and stone, touched by the finger of time at just the perfect moment, then never again.

Maybe Plato was right, and those gods did split us all apart at the beginning of the world. Over and over again.

So whenever you feel like everything is terrible because mostly everything is terrible, remember that we are very likely just a runaway nuclear reaction that found a way to outlive its power source, get up out of the ground, walk around the place, screw everything up, make some really beautiful art, unscrew a couple of things, screw way more up even worse, have a lot of existential crises, leave the planet completely and venture out into the fucking stars, get bored of venturing out into the fucking stars, create sitcoms and pop music and Doric columns and fascism and religion and acid-wash jeans and musical theater and combustion engines and antibiotics and love and grief and hate and joy.

And also sometimes that ambulatory runaway nuclear meltdown became tigers or dragonflies or horseshoe crabs or bananas or the leather in a leather jacket or the hibiscus in an old lady's garden or a grey cat named Mystery limping up a strange human’s porch hoping for help, tomatoes in your salad or the General Sherman sequoia or your mother's piano or the olive in a martini or the pages of a book. It was dinosaurs for awhile. It was whales. It was Lucy, the little girl in C.S. Lewis's imagination or the skeleton in Ethiopia, and then it wasn't either anymore. The inferno even got fancy enough to figure out that it was a walking, talking, feeling, anxiety-riddled nuclear meltdown still-in-progress, and yet kept on going, on and on, out and out, more and more, maybe just trying to be, in aggregate, just a little better every cycle. On thirty minutes of real productive criticality every three hours. Every thirty minutes, another chance to escape a closed loop and make a new world.

And real talk, thirty minutes of actual productivity every three hours feels just about right these days.

So, honestly, it's okay to be a hot mess. It's what we came from. It's our birthright. It's our mother and father. It’s a miracle, if ever one has occurred. And it's beautiful, even as it's terrifying. It's us. An endlessly cycling fission event and all its horrifying, glorious byproducts, all confined in the bodies of trillions of organisms. We are all one. It's just that the thing that unites us is a catastrophic vivisection-by-flame of our every cell and deeper still, which really makes everything make so much more sense, when you think about it That crack in the Earth up there is a picture of Mom. Mom did her best. Sometimes your kids get away from you. Sometimes they don't call. The molten stone of the beginning of us is still inside, all the time, and it's just chemicals and minerals, it doesn't know or understand why your marriage didn't last or you lost that job or why dinner out is so stupid expensive now or who will win an election. It's just fire. It wants to burn. It wants to warm. It wants to move.

It wants to grow. It wants to breathe, and to live.

I think we've all done extraordinarily well for a bunch of broken, wet, rocks slowly cooling over eons in the middle of a void.

I think you've done amazing, sweetie.

And so did Mom.

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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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