A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me…

…want to fucking puke.

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If you only know me by my political writing, this may seem quite out of left field. But I am, in fact, a science fiction and fantasy novelist by day—and today is big news in that part of my world.

*Drumroll*

I am so beyond thrilled to announce that my spooky summer gothic story (with a twist we don’t tell others about so they can enjoy the reveal!), When He Calls Your Name, has been nominated for a Hugo Award!

And god DAMN what an absolutely stacked category and overall ballot!

Thank you to anyone and everyone who nominated it, this really means so much to me. I am so proud of this story, and I had hoped it would find an audience, but it’s always impossible to know what will or won’t strike readers.

You might think, after 22 years and more than my fair share of ceremonies, it would be old hat and no big deal. Not even a little bit true. The first time I saw an email in my inbox saying I’d been nominated for a Hugo I felt like I’d been bodied by a speeding freight train--and the train got me this time, too. Just being read, spoken of, having my work acknowledged at all, beggars my heart. In this era? It beggars my everything.

All I ever wanted in my life was to write my little stories and have people read them. What a nomination like this says to me is that the dream happened, and that’s the whole game, for me.

If you’ve been following me for a bit, you probably know I’ve been nominated...many times. I believe this is somehow my 13th nomination, which seems like madness. I have not actually won for fiction, though, or alone. Ever. Only as part of the old SF Squeecast gang. I’d joke that I’m the Susan Lucci of the Hugos...if I felt confident anyone remembers who Susan Lucci is.

So I don’t really expect to win, especially against that incredible slate. And I’m not being self-deprecating when I say that’s more than fine. Much like Suze, I long ago learned to focus on a pretty dress and a fun trip--and I’m on the hunt for my vampire gown as we speak! The honor really is the nomination, and I’m over the moon about it.

The awards will be given out at LAcon in August. Consider this your obligatory notice that anyone can vote with a supporting membership, and that supporting membership, while not free, comes with free copies of every nominated work. And the retail price of that package comes out to far more than the membership fee.

But all I really want to say is just thank you. Thank you for all these years. And please keep reading fiction. Fiction written by human beings. Human beings working day over day over day toward that same dream I’ve had since I was a child: tell a story by the fire to other people and know it mattered to them, even if just a little.

See you in Los Angeles!

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Oh Internet of My Youth.

For so long, I have looked back on you with melancholy sadness, bittersweet longing, a cloud of nostalgia of the best and worst kind. The sort of feeling you have toward a home country you cannot return to, a street you grew up on now lined with strip malls, or a lover once held tight and now lost.

You were the one that got away.

But the thing about nostalgia is that it is a clinging cloud, and clouds obscure the landscape. The more I think about the Way We Were, the more clearly I remember us. It’s not that all that love is wrong or untrue, or wasted on you, beautiful, weird, disgusting, awkward, miraculous thing that you were. Those worlds of good, those little villages, that fellowship, those nights by the blue screen-fire, the lives you made possible, the friendships you facilitated, that was all so real, and maybe more importantly, very much authentic, not a droning monotone of bots talking to bots about bots.

I believed in you. I believed in us. In the potential to make a world different than the one we thought was non-negotiable. And I guess it sure is different. It’s also nothing like you said it would be before you locked us all down and felt totally secure that we could never, ever leave. Before the mask came off.

But you promised.

You promised that the problem with the Old World was that the popular kids were in charge. The jocks and preppies, the born-rich, the beautiful and strong, the ones who found it easy and natural to fit in, the regular cast of the yearbook photo-spreads, the social butterflies, the goody two-shoes churchgoers, the bullies, those so accustomed to being in charge they never had to even look at the rest of us on their way to the top.

But you promised.

You promised that if we just flipped the script, if we could just start over with a new new world where the geeks and nerds and weirdos and techies were in charge for fucking once, if the ones on the bottom could find a way to the top, if wealth could find its way to the nerds in basements instead of prom kings and queens in parades, if the outcasts and matheletes and student body secretaries and artists and science kids who actually knew how things worked got to make things work, if the obsessive and the dedicated with their strange and wonderful passions were to remake the world and its rules, things would be better. They’d make different choices. They’d know what it was like to be powerless in a way the powerful never had before, and so they’d naturally remember the little guy. They’d make mistakes, sure, but different mistakes. And since science has no trouble adjusting to new data, they’d easily learn and adjust to any missteps, too.

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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by merchants, scraped, digested, weaponized…

Today, if this is relevant to you, is the final day to file a claim in the massive* Anthropic Copyright Settlement, and I just finished filing mine.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Yes, I put it off til the last minute, and other than my usual dizzying procrastination abilities, I definitely did that because I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to face it. I knew, because my agents emailed me instructions, that at least two of my books were on that list, and probably more. But it was so unutterably depressing to have to actually deal with that, and all it means. To have to accept this money despite the filth of it, because the world is too expensive not to and I have a child, and also know that almost all systems of ethics or morality toyed with throughout history would say that taking blood money sucks shit and taints the soul. I don’t know, maybe I hoped it was only two. I am, after all, small beer in all this, just a midlist genre writer hacking it up hackily. Maybe only a couple of my babies were used to straight-up fuck humanity’s hopes, dreams, potential, stability, and basic social capacity in thousands upon thousands of ways.

Fifteen.

Fifteen of my books were used in the gargantuan effort to train AI to replace us all to no good end whatsoever.

And that is not too much compared to writers more famous than I. My work was a small drop in the ocean than fueled these models. I’m not trying to make this about me, because it isn’t, so much as purge the absolute helpless rage I felt entering the names of such a swath of my life’s work into form fields to get a few trash dollars back when the damage is already grotesquely done.

Because I am a small drop in the ocean, but fifteen novels is not a small drop in the ocean of me.

I know a lot of you here don’t actually know me as a fiction writer at all. But that’s what I do. That’s been my life’s work since I was barely an adult. Social media comes and goes, but stories have been my passion, my touchstone, my everything. I’ve never been a vast commercial juggernaut with my fingers on the tastes of the masses. I have fought to keep writing the weird shit I want to keep writing even when it didn’t sell. I have fought to stay true to myself and what I believe is important while making enough money to live. It has never been easy. But each and every time, I have tried so hard to put art into the wild that is strange and beautiful and connective, that connects people one to the other with a daisy-chain of printed pages. I write books that are deeply and profoundly me, usually pretty uncomfortably emotionally available and vulnerable and wordy and out there and experimental—and painfully in love with this world.

And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.

I think what shocked me most is the scope of the theft. They didn’t take everything I’ve written. But they took something from just about every year I’ve been writing. All the way back to The Orphan’s Tales. The fucking Orphan’s Tales. A duology I wrote when I was 22. When none of this was even a glimmer in the eye of Sauron. When I was just a dreamer dreaming up fairy tales to tell by the fire, with no notion that they’d ever be published. And Palimpsest and Deathless and all the Fairyland books and Space Opera and a lot more. My whole life, scraped to teach a bot to replace every possible way to live in this world with more of itself. The grey goo of the soul.

These are little books. Even the ones that were bestsellers, they were books about the small and the helpless learning to be strong, about love and longing and strangeness, about hope and wyverns and rock stars and girls who turn in to geese. They’re full of queer people and marginalized people and hurt people and people who cannot find a way to belong to a world that doesn’t want them to be at all. They’re not some hot commodity that would be of obvious interest to the grindhouse corporate maw, they’re just little pretty things. Made with yearning, made out of the stuff of my marrow. They’re not easy and they’re not normal, they’re nothing like the hollow monotone insincerity, the false and hungry cheer of LLMs. But somehow they are part of that. Which means I am a part of that.

For fuck’s sake. My books are my babies. I poured everything I had into them. I made them in good faith that the act of telling stories was in and of itself beautiful and worthy. That they could touch someone, maybe change a tiny bit of how they see the world, communicate what I could not by any other means. They’re a thousand late nights trying to find the right words, a million despairs at elusive endings, a million ecstasies of finally getting it right, sheer tonnages of loneliness and self-doubt and pride and want and togetherness and joy, hundreds upon hundreds of moments of real genuine living that crystallized into the seeds of a story, the long searing thread of whatever it is in us that needs to create something or we’ll just die of not doing it, masticated, compacted, and vomited up to convince every corner of society that a phone is better than a person.

And there is no use-case for AI that doesn’t come down to just that, sooner or later.

I am angry. I feel disgusting. I feel complicit in all this. In the LLMs that are rejecting job applications and denying health claims and starving out whole sectors of workers and cockblocking anything approaching education and pretending to be a therapist or a partner or a friend and making certain that once all the jobs are gone, at least we won’t be able to make art anyone else ever experiences, either. It feels like they went back in time and mugged that 22-year-old doofus kid. Stole her fairies and her heroes and her lovers and chopped them up to make monsters.

I just wanted to tell stories. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, since I was a child. I don’t know what the actual digitized fuck Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all these other ichor-dripping creatures of the oncoming feudal night want, or what their fucking problem is. Couldn’t just let us have an internet and try to live life. Had to Absorbaloff everything into their revolting oligarch-gullets. It’s certainly not to help anyone or make anything easier or improve anything. I don’t think it’s even to make money particularly, since they have it all already and constantly make dumbfuck decisions that hurt their profits. But they stole from so many storytellers to do it, to tell a story of a world that is nothing, contains nothing, produces nothing, and knows nothing.

I just wanted to tell stories. And I thought, for awhile, that for all the struggles and stress and weirdness of my job, at least, as far as jobs go, I made my living without hurting anyone. As long as you don’t start JK Rowling about with your influence, writing stories is a pretty ethical line of work. But there is no job like that, I guess. My weird little gnarly over-emotional purpley-florid babies are a small part of something that’s hurting more people, more severely, more deeply, than most other technologies could ever aspire to.

And again, I know in the grand garbage scheme of curbstomping us into serfs, my part in it is very small. But it’s mine, so I’m fucking mad. And hurt. It may sound stupid, but as I entered every title of mine into those fields I felt so personally betrayed by these ghouls. For fuck’s sake, my own books were part of what trained something that is going to skull-drill my own child’s education and job prospects. There’s really no way to Good-Place-math that to come out right, to make that not sting.

And I’m mad for all of us who were stolen from, forced to give the best of us to these corporations without our consent or knowledge, and only in retrospect, when caught, offered a few pennies from the lord’s purse to take or leave, but if left we get nothing and the harm still compounds.

Obviously, I’m not going to stop telling stories. But it’s hard not to thing this will happen again, to anything I write, because in the end $1.5 billion is only a lot to us. It’s nothing to the forces behind Anthropic, and that they can portion out so much and steam right on ahead should tell you just how *not massive at all this blood pocket change really is.

And it’s absolutely gutting. To live with it. To look at a list of the very specific actual grains of Fantasia I have, in my longest nights, held up against the existential darkness to say I was here, I had a heart, I used it as well as I knew how, I made what magic I could, I left something behind and know they were stolen, along with so many others, to be nothing but grit in a road paved through the wasteland fascists, liars, and tech vampires long to consign us to, just to allow their golden carriages easy passage and a comfortable seat from which to view the damage they so dearly love.

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Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?

Not really, I guess.

Am I going to do it anyway?

I mean, have we met? Of course I am.

Now, when we all found out that Trump had gone ahead and bombed Iran, killed its leader, seemingly without any plan whatsoever other than YOLO, did I shake my head like I was a hundred fucking years old, which is what it feels like these days, and think about all the other times my country bombed the shit out of another one and either kidnapped or killed their leaders?

Clearly.

And when that video of the violent cartel enforcer caravan going by the street name “ICE” cheerfully murdering Alex Pretti started going around LITERALLY FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN MEDIA TIME, did I think: well, now people will care, because that looks like a very nicely-groomed white man with a concealed carry weapon they shot in the back and not literally any other kind of human person, because all the other kinds have been getting killed for some time now and/or the whole time?

Sure did, friends.

When everyone, even conservatives, started actually finally (temporarily) pushing back against the sweaty, meth-blistered, right-wing romantasy the White House instantly pitched to their eager agents in the press room, like the President, with all the authority that office still drags with it, presenting to the public as fact, a full narrative of who is to blame, who is innocent, and what the victim was thinking and doing, let alone a totally fabricated one, is anything like a legal, normal thing to do, did I think: Wow, so even Renee Good wasn’t enough for the Great American Id, because white doesn’t fix woman and queer in that shrunken, desiccated hive-mind, but now we can actually see and understand very clear high definition video? No nasty nicknames like AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) for Alex’s entire demographic this time? What a shock, view and behold how shocked I am.

And then, when the phalanx of Renfields, Wormtongues, and groveling Trashcan Men that have ruined everything for everyone received permission from their masters to, very gently, poke at the edges of the utter reality-shearing fugue state that allowed anyone anywhere to ever believe Donald “Father of All Bombs In My First Month Because Big Beautiful Boom-Boom So Fun” Trump was the candidate of peace, a sentence I can’t even write without cringing it’s so pants-eatingly stupid, did I tap my feet to a nasty song I’ve been forced to listen to all my life?

Yeah, of course. We here in Garbagetown are not, as they say, brand new.

Did I then go online, see people being genuinely horrified and trying to figure out what to do about it, and start splatting into their replies yelling about how they shouldn’t be surprised because America has always been like this for everyone who isn’t [insert demographic here] and if they weren’t so privileged they’d know that?

Despite the existence of yesterday’s not-at-all-funny essay about Baby’s First Foreign Intervention that I definitely did write (carefully not including that very sentiment) no I fucking didn’t because it’s one of the most unhelpful, unproductive, pointless, performative, actively harmful to any kind of movement toward getting out of this eternal shit-shower sentiment I can even think of and I’m beyond tired of hearing it.

Even if it’s kind of true.

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I remember it so clearly.

One of those childhood memories that gets etched in glass, permanent lasered onto the inside of your skull, sometimes for good reason, sometimes just a moment that stands out among other moments, a redheaded memory in the long fog.

It was early winter and I was in fifth grade. I caught the school bus before 7 am, as everyone in our neighborhood did. Everything was wet and sunny and pale, slick and blindingly bright. Outside the bus smelled like pine trees, mucky leaves, and ozone. Inside smelled like cheap lip gloss, hairspray, permanent markers, and sour socks. I unshouldered my backpack and slid into the second cracked vinyl seat next to my only friend, a blonde girl with big glasses named Leigh. The door made that signature hydraulic-piston-creaking-hinge noise combination as the driver shoved the lever closed and the engine started complaining about the hills again.

I was quiet for a minute. Stared out through the hoarfrost of hearts and initials and misspelled swear words scratched into the bus window behind Leigh’s frizzy head. I was quiet because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like everyone must know. That’s why the boys in the back row were so rowdy, the older girls in the middle were whispering, that’s why the driver seemed so tired and sad. They must all be feeling what I was feeling. Angry and afraid and sad and confused. They must all not know what to say, either.

But I had to say something to someone or one of my organs was gonna just pop. One of little ones you could stand to lose, hopefully. Maybe not pop. Maybe ooze. Like one of those old crappy snake-bomb firecrackers that sludged out coil after coil of horrible black rope but never made any noise.

“Leigh,” I whispered. “We just invaded Panama.”

She turned to look at me with those huge pink-translucent rimmed glasses taking over her whole face. I even remember the sunlight glinting on the little gold cross she wore. Leigh’s parents were super religious and ran a Bible camp out of their backyard every summer. I was dying to go, not because I was so hot for God, really, but mainly because I wanted to spend the summer at Leigh’s house.

“What’s a panama?” Leigh said.

And that’s it, that’s the moment that crystallized so perfectly that I remember it in total detail thirty-five years later. What I remember isn’t that the US invaded Panama in December of 1989, though I do remember that.

What I remember is that none of the other kids knew or cared what the hell I was talking about.

I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I’d been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.

Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we’re ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.

And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.

Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.

Even if they give the operation a neat little nickname. (For Panama, it was “Operation Just Cause,” and let’s take a moment to give that one a big wow.) Even if the leader of that other country is a horrible person who does all kinds of illegal stuff and kills his own people kind of a lot and nobody likes him, not even, or maybe especially, his own people. Even if everybody plays a bunch of word games about how it’s not really preemptive or an actual invasion, just a sparkling strategic operation.

Invading other countries is wrong. Kidnapping or killing the leaders of other nations is wrong. How could my country do that? Was my home bad? Was I bad, too? Weren’t there rules about war? We had a whole color-coded system just to go to the bathroom at my school. Wasn’t there a system for this? Aren’t you not supposed to be able to just do war because you felt like it? Were all the grown-ups who taught me to be proud of my nation and work for its future lying or did they not know?

What’s a Panama?

I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who geneuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn’t have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.

I was just little girl on her way to school.

Like a lot of little girls in Iran. Only that day in 1989, I got to come home from school. That day in 2026, those other little girls didn’t.

And I’m sure they believed a lot of pretty, simplified, half-formed things that weren’t true, too. I’m sure they believed there were rules, like I did.

All these years later, another century, another winter, another war. And I still don’t know what to say. Now I know that in fact my country does do this, pretty frequently. It had done many times before I was ten and did many more times afterward.

They did, once, feel they needed to lie about it, to dress it up so it looks like something anyone would want. And I also know that it is a profoundly dark sign that they no longer bother with the effort.

I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don’t think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don’t know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can’t figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it’s still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.

And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won’t stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It’s all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.

And though I frequently forget, I do know that no matter how upset I am, no matter how axiomatic it seems to me that everyone around me must know what’s going on and be just as horrified by it, just as desperate to fix it, for the most part, everyone’s just stuck on the same shitty bus, barely chugging up over the hill, cracked seats and vandalized windows and a muffler from the depths of hell, not thinking about anything but their own worries and needs, all headed toward the same destination, not because they want to go there, but because that’s where the machine is heading and the doors are locked, for our safety, of course.

I’m one of the grown-ups now. And I didn’t tell my second grader about Iran. Just like Leigh’s parents didn’t tell her about Panama, if they knew. I’ve participated in the generational lies of this place. Because I still don’t know what to say. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong, even the people doing it. But they’re going to keep doing it, not because there is a goal to be achieved, but because they want to, and they like it, and, at a very distant third, they might think it will give them more power and allow them to keep what they have. But that part isn’t really that important. It isn’t the reason, any more than God was the reason I wanted to go to Bible camp that summer. The people driving the bus just want to feel the way they feel when they push a button in a comfortable room and other people they don’t know or like die. They want to feel that way forever.

How do you explain that? To children? To grown-ups? What’s a Panama?

Maybe I don’t even know anymore.

I hope for a better outcome than I expect. I hope there are answers on the other side of this. I hope to find a little optimism at the bottom of this very deep box.

But I’ve spent thirty-five years staring out that long-vanished bus window repeating a non-sensical question in my mind. Staring out at the same moment happening over and over again even though it’s not supposed to happen at all, at America catching fire, hissing and sputtering as endless coil after endless coil of hideous black smoking dead rope spools out onto the cement in silence while claiming to be something of value, something to enjoy, claiming to be a firework.

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There is a large general strike in Maine today to protest ICE. It has quite a bit of energy and momentum behind it, and much of the city is closed.

As someone who can (kind of, sort of) not work for a day if I need to, I figure the least I can do is join the side of good.

Therefore, though the follow-up to The Good, The Pretty, and Fear Itself is done, along with Patreon goodies for the month, I will be going dark today.

Solidarity forever. Fuck ICE.

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I just haven’t known what to say.

You can only watch a man get blown apart by the government on the daylit freezing streets of a major city for the crime of trying to help a woman off the ground from so many different angles before you feel like you should say something. Everyone is yelling in the desperate hope that yelling can still be enough, the least you could do is use that word thing your brain is good at to make some small attempt at helping the country off the ground.

But I just haven’t known what to say. Silly gifs and the services of Sir Swears-a-Lot Bear don’t really cut it. To say, as many have, that it’s wrong and fascist and evil and grotesque has felt so small and useless—and it’s not like we haven’t all been saying that for really, quite some time now. Saying this exact thing was coming. Saying once it started, stopping it would be a lot harder than checking a box that didn’t have a man invented in a fucking Antichrist factory that mass-manufactures clearly-labelled Antichrists for the highly-competitive international Antichrist market next to it. To say, as many have, that now that they’ve done this to a white man exercising his second amendment rights, a whole lot of people are finally finding a last crumpled, lonely, half-frozen fuck to give between the couch cushions of their discontent, has seemed too cynical and unhelpful. At least there was one to find. I guess.

To say, as many have, that I am afraid, so afraid, for my family, my loved ones, my child, my little world almost entirely filled with what these smirking, plastic-masked carcasses of humanity would consider the Wrong Kind of People, has seemed both selfish and redundant. Another helpless cry of fear to add to the maelstrom.

And my god, I’ve been afraid. We all have. For so long. Many much more than I. I don’t remember what it felt like to not begin each day by swallowing a dark lump of existential dread. I don’t know how many more layers of fear you can Jenga onto the pre-stacked tower before it just doesn’t make any difference anymore. Fear is just where you live. What you eat. What clicks on in the morning with the heat. What you do to relax. What you work on on the weekends. What makes up the cells of your body.

I started writing this piece about ICE about a week and a half ago for an entirely different reason. Before we all knew the name Alex Pretti, but after we knew the name Renee Good. And every single day something new would happen to make it all worse and what I’d written out of date. I’m pretty sure this will be out of date before I get to the last paragraph.

I wanted to tell you what’s been going on in my state, not because I live in Minnesota, because I don’t.

I live in Maine.

It’s very hard for me to tell how much of what’s happening here has penetrated media outside of our local bubble at all. My feed is full of it. Signal has been a constant hyperactive Pachinko-machine rattle of speculation, ideation, planning, paranoia, and actual news. But my feed would be full of these stories. Maine is my home. Many people I follow also live here. The engagement algorithm that, bizarrely, may well be most singularly responsible for the rapid unspooling of just about everything, makes sure I see it. But yours may well make sure you don’t, just as it makes sure I don’t see over the garden wall of my own pre-existing interests.

Now, ICE has been in Maine before. They have taken people before. But over the last two-ish weeks, they’ve surged into the state and ramped up operations here while everyone’s been paying attention to Minnesota. Hundreds of people have been arrested. According to the governor, there are many more arrests being kept secret. People have been removed from running cars, beaten on the street, taken in front of their children, or their children taken from them. And they do not give a fuck and aren’t checking anything—one of the people “detained” was a correctional officer.

And I’m pretty sure (but would love to hear otherwise from your experience—I don’t expect it, but it would be nice) we’re not the only city getting hit while the media is focused elsewhere. Well. Maybe not so much focused as begrudgingly being forced to look because the people are already looking, then comfortably repeating whatever the government says without question, commentary, investigation, or concern until the designated Mildly Criticize a Minor Official programming bloc from 1-1:06 am EST.

I say two weeks ish, because we’ve been hearing about them coming for quite a few weeks longer than that, and it’s fairly unclear when, on that timeline, they actually arrived and began the state violence they’ve given the nastily cutesy yuk-yuk name of Operation Catch of the Day. GET IT? BECAUSE WE DO SEAFOOD HERE IN MAINE HA HA PEOPLE ARE MEAT WE ARE GOING TO EAT IMMIGRANTS HA HA GET IT GOLLY GEE KEVIN YOU AND ME ARE SUCH GREAT GUYS! Or if it even matters when ICE got here.

After all, the desired effects of their presence took hold long before they did.

I’m not sure how to express the level of fear that took hold of my state in the days and weeks after it was announced that ICE intended to begin significant operations here. Everywhere I knew that Mainers talked online was a frantic mess of rumor, speculation, paranoia, and occasional fact. People announced ICE agents were staying in this hotel or that, only to have employees of those hotels insist it wasn’t them. Sightings were frequent but doubted even by those who posted them. They’re in Portland, no, Lewiston, no Wiscasset, no the Target in Scarborough, this car in this parking lot has government plates, that guy in mirror glasses was staring at everyone who walked past. Everyone trying to figure out what the MO would be, what kind of cars they would drive, where they would go to try to find targets, what could be done, what businesses were or were not supporting their presence so they could be shunned or supported. It reached this fever pitch of Crucible-like posts every minute and more. I saw them on Congress St, I saw them in Riverside, I saw them at Hannafords.

Which is what happens when they don’t wear uniforms, drive government cars, or show ID. Everyone jumps at their shadows before their bodies even catch up. Which, in turn, is precisely why that shit is fucking illegal.

So for a long time, it was pretty unclear whether or not ICE was actually here in new numbers at all—until they definitely were, and are now. And in that strange, unreal little window between coming and here, I saw my city pre-emptively change. Contract, look around every corner, change where they shopped, ate, how often they went out and where, businesses unable to operate because so many employees are afraid they’ll be ambushed. People changed the routes they drove, how they got their kids to school, or didn’t, as taking parents and children at public schools’ pick-up and drop-off has been going on for several months already, so people are fucking terrified of school and their own jobs now.

Oh, but don’t worry, anyone right wing and white hasn’t changed a thing. They sail happily along through public life as they always have. I can’t help but think that’s the point, really, and it happened before the new operation even began. That anyone brown or liberal/leftist or gender non-conforming or otherwise vulnerable retreats from public life and public view so that MAGA can believe we’re all just vaguely, unaccountably, finally, miraculously, gone.

If they can’t see us, we don’t exist, which is the goal. Just like the masks and their raging, apoplectic insistence that not only would they not wear them, no one else could either—if they didn’t have to see other people wearing masks, they could pretend there was no pandemic. No world-shattering event changing everything in unknown and frightening ways that their perfect idol, Mr. Only I Can Fix It, couldn’t handle even a little. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. And just gone is perfect for them. Most conservatives still feel a little twinge at the idea of full-on death camps for 49.7% of the country (and counting!). Not a large twinge. But a twinge. Alligator Alcatraz was a threat of death if you tried to escape, but they could tell themselves it was only a regular prison in Florida; then they made it a joke because it had to be a joke for them to cope with not actually believing it was only a regular prison in Florida.

But if they just don’t ever see us again they don’t have to think about it, they can just enjoy the New Recipe America: Oops All Whites edition and imagine that it all happened naturally so they’re still awesome people being awesome awesomely.

There’s too many of us Wrong Sorts to full-on snatch us one by one off the streets just yet. But if fear can take back the streets for white assholes, then they get what they want anyway.

They can pretend we’re gone. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. Snakes their shit-smeared saint drove into the sea.

And yes, with the fear and the contraction there was and is organization, too. Protests even in subzero temperatures. A local strike Friday. I barely remember the last time anything else was posted on any of the local sites, forums, subreddits, servers, etc I follow. There have been rallies and events and food delivery volunteers and spotters. There have been businesses refusing to serve ICE agents. There have been helpers, helping, and trying to do more. The laser-focus of it, even before that poor fucking man tried to help a lady up, both gives me hope and makes me indescribably sad. I wish this focus and putting aside of all other differences could happen at any time other than the direst hours. I wish I didn’t know it’s going to vanish as soon as people feel like it’s over, which is why Bovino got punted and Noem might have to sit in the naughty chair or whatever the fuck Trump is doing instead of firing everyone on Twitter this time, so that people can feel like it’s over and stop making conservatives uncomfy by not wanting to be murdered.

And for the record, absolutely none of this in Maine is about immigration. We’re 46/50 for immigrant population numbers, the literal lowest-crime state in the union, the most elderly, 9th least populous. We share a border with Canada and way more of us are native French speakers than anyone realizes. We’re a blue state that almost always gives an electoral vote to Republicans—and one they often need to make their bloodmath work. It’s not even about white supremacy primarily, except in the sense that this is all about white supremacy: except for sometimes when it’s Vermont, Maine is the whitest state in America. Portland itself has a somewhat sizable Somali community and a fair number of asylum seekers, but Portland Maine is a tiny fucking place. Even if you include all the outlying towns. Hell, even if you include Lewiston. “Somewhat sizable” means a blip on an even medium-sized city’s fact-sheet. And it’s January, this city is quiet and frozen and half-closed down even on the weekends.

This is about terrorizing people under the assumption that such a small city will not stand up for its own folk—and pathetically, about how much Donald Trump hates our governor, a lady named Janet Mills most of the state doesn’t even seem to like all that much. But Janet said no when President Trunchbull told her to ban all two trans athletes from playing high school sports, then tried to remove funding for lunches and education generally, and she still said no, so he hates this state he knows nothing about.

It’s started to get weird in recent days. ICE agents have gone a step further than “uniforms are a liberal plot” to trying to “blend in” with the most laughably stereotyped idea of what a Mainer wears you’ve ever seen in your life. Yes, indeed, it is a state of 1.3 million Brawny Paper Towel Mascots. With Arkansas accents. Bro is that beard even real? I’ve seen better beards on Drag Race.

And since this is all very depressing, please take a break to feel a deep sense of cheer watching two of these fuck-ass bubs get drummed out of a bar in the Old Port because when the massive storm came, ICE agents went out on the town to kick up their heels and enjoy the Portland nightlife.

It’s been quieter since two feet of snow blanketed everything. I guess ICE takes snow days, too. Poor babies need rest from all that Call of Duty cosplay id-fluffing. But I do think it’s intentional, that this is all being done in the extreme cold, even if the Walmart SS can’t handle it. In the off-season when there is emptiness to work with. When people are easy to corner without the tourist crowds. To control the response. To limit the number of people able to protest. Minnesota and Maine are two frigid states. And I think smaller places like mine are being raided very deliberately, stress-tested, chest-checked, while attention is focused on Minneapolis because other ICE news can’t break through the roar. So here, and I assume elsewhere, ICE feels it still has impunity.

Minnesota casts a long shadow, and in such shadows devils will play.

No one’s been murdered here yet, that we know of, but I shouldn’t fucking have to write that sentence at all, should I? Just like Mainers shouldn’t have to volunteer to deliver food to people of color because they’re afraid to leave their fucking homes.

But they do. And I do. And one of these days I probably won’t be able to write that sentence anymore because people here will be dead, too. Please don’t be fooled by Trump backpedalling or punting a Greg for the masses. It means nothing and he doesn’t care. At this point, I shouldn’t have to type that sentence, either. But I do. Trump backpedals when and only when he feels his personal popularity wobble. But none of this is going to stop, not in Minnesota or Maine or anywhere else. If there was even the most wavering diaphanous gleam of a chance this was a real breaking point with change in tow, you’d know the names of Alex Pretti’s killers by now.

I haven’t known what to say because I don’t know how to make it sound like this is all going to be okay, and I really do try very hard to find a way to say that about most things, even if I don’t believe it. Especially if I don’t.

I can say vote in the midterms, but they’re a lifetime away. I can say be a helper, protest, strike if you can. And it’s true. But if I have to dig deep for something to make it better I don’t have a lot in the tank. “State actors in masks abducting and murdering citizens of that state in public with impunity and explicit cheerleading from all corners of leadership” is one of the few things everyone can point to and say fascism, but Trump’s approval rating is still 36%. And it’s not like Good or Pretti were the first, they’re just graphically on video, then graphically lied about instantly by a government that’s supposed to know you can’t just announce guilt and innocence from the White House Press Room, and in Alex Pretti, these ghouls finally managed to stumble on the legendary “perfect victim” that even GOP Joe can’t quite find a way to laugh about—but they’re working on it.

I have two bits of optimism. Maybe.

The first is that Trump does backpedal when he feels his personal popularity wobble. Always. And it wobbles when people are angry enough, loud enough, often enough, and in enough numbers to break through the algorithmic silo and start rolling up critical mass. As much as I Grandma on about how posting on the internet feels like making a difference but doesn’t…it can when the President is a fragile little fucking makeup-caked engagement-farming influencer who can’t psychologically bear his follower count going down by even one digit. This administration does outrageous things to find out where the boundaries are, like kids pushing against the pieces to find the soft one that will give. So there has to be push-back, or they’ll just light the boundary on fire. And here in the FUCKING UPSIDE DOWN, Trump actually seems to care more about online fury than real-world protests. This specific dictator is uniquely vulnerable to internet bullying tactics, which might be his only silver lining.

So say something. You have to say something. Even if it’s not very different than what everyone else is saying. Say it often. Say it everywhere. Say it loud.

If you stay loud, you don’t have to get loud.

The other one is just the pool of lava I dissociate into regularly. I find myself drifting off and thinking more and more about The Oklo Reactor these days, all the things the fact of its existence made me feel, all its majesty and strangeness and the messy weird burning garbage we all are because of it. I think about it all the time now. Maybe I keep trying to think big, to think in terms of historical eras and massive currents of time and energy, because if you think big enough, this too will pass. Into a molten inferno of agony, maybe, but pass.

But still, I just haven’t known what to say. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been having the same that’s fascism, they’re fascists, they want fascism/shut up stupid lib it’s not like they’re disappearing people on the streets you’re crazy the only fascism is if I have to be nice to people who aren’t me conversation my entire adult life. Seeing the same disingenuous smirk on the same satisfied, untroubled faces as they raise their opera glasses and/or Oakleys to view pain they believe will never touch them as entertainment and personal validation. In some morally corkscrewed sense, as their own salvation. Oh, now it’s bad? Cool. Still won’t vote for anyone but these exact people who love doing this and love telling you how much more of it they’ll do. Great. So no change, then.

Do you know what the word fascism means? I don’t mean the political system, I don’t mean the endless bad-faith internet arguments over whether this or that act of insane clown political malevolence is technically fascistic or not when it didn’t take place in Germany in the 30s. I mean where the word itself comes from. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

It comes from the word fasces. That’s Latin for this:

It’s a bundle of rods that either did or did not have an axe stuck through the middle of it. It was carried before magistrates to symbolize the unity of the state (the bundle), the ability of the state to punish its citizens (rods), and the presence of the axe was meant to wordlessly that the state has invested this particular magistrate with the authority to execute you with no cause but the passing judgment of their own whims.

It’s not a technicality. It’s not a warning. It’s not a neat little political science definition. We are here. They are here. And the fear they bring does half their job before you ever see them. Which doesn’t mean they don’t love the other half. That fasces is what ICE carries before them into your city and mine.

You might not be able to see it, but they feel it in their hands, and oh, how they exult in its weight.

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Remember way back in 2016, before the election, when there was some leftover Scrooge-ember of warmth still innocently traipsing around the place and making jokes about elections could feel somewhat cozy and not like punching a baby, then guffawing in its face about how it has no future and never will? When Tom Hanks went on SNL and did a monologue as America’s Dad giving us a concerned talk about what we’re doing with our life?

Well, this is that. Only I’m not America’s Mom by any means. No one is, because America hates the absolute bunting out of anyone who even vibes like she wants to be our Mom.

I’m not even America’s drunk auntie. No, at best, I’m your weird out-of-town cousin no one really invites to things who talks too much and makes everything awkward by caring way too much and too bluntly about shit that’s not my business. And I’m not really talking to America, but to individual Americans, my fellow Americans, even. Except that I don’t think this vast pain really stops at our borders. It’d be nice if it did, in a way.

But when you’re in real trouble, I’m the black sheep cousin who’ll take you to a bottomless-booze brunch and lay out what that man is doing to you.

Welcome to the Girl What the Fuck Bar and Grill. Have a seat right over there, cousin. In the smoking section because we all already have the same cancer, so what difference does it make?

Hey, sweetheart. Order whatever you want. It’s on me. I just want to talk.

How are you feeling these days? Not great? Yeah, I get that. Not great in a weirdly specific way that, when you wake up and look around every single day, it really seems like everyone is also weirdly, specifically, feeling?

For quite a few years now? Say, just to pull a random number, nine or ten?

Have you, for example, felt, oh, I don’t know, overall kind of frozen and numb? That is, when you’re not completely emotionally unregulated with anger or pain or frustration or panic even though, before all this, you’d gotten pretty good at regulating those things?

Felt like you were walking on eggshells all the time? Paranoid? Anxious? Suspicious? Had trouble trusting others or believing they actually care for you? Really struggled to let your guard down at all?

Have you had memory problems? Like, with things that didn’t even happen that long ago, but are suddenly hard to recall at all? Brain fog? Confused all the time, unable to focus, concentrate, even on things you used to enjoy? Have you had trouble with your perception of time? Felt like you were just drifting through the days without really experiencing them, let alone relishing them? Felt distant from your own life, like you’re not the main character of your own story?

Hypersensitive to criticism but also feeling like you’ll never be good enough to actually feel okay, or even deserve to? Finding it tough to make decisions, even small ones? Replaced your sense of self-worth with being brutally hard on yourself and becoming convinced that even trying is hopeless? Felt isolated, lonely, lost? Maybe a little self-destructive, nihilistic, lashing out? Or hypervigilant, unable to not expect the worst? Deteriorating health for unclear reasons? Overspending what you don’t really have or clinging to every penny when you don’t really have to? Unsure of what’s real and what’s not? Have you felt like you need to apologize for your own existence, or had trouble feeling safe even when there’s no direct, imminent danger? Have work and relationships, even hobbies and ostensible fun, become difficult to manage or give much energy to? Maybe constantly felt like you’re not doing enough even though you’re objectively at your limit?

Everyone I even know of is feeling some or all of those things. Most everyone I hear about, even statistically, is going through it to that exact tune.

Funny, that.

Because it’s not long COVID. (Okay it might also be long COVID.) Those are all symptoms of having suffered or currently suffering narcissistic abuse.

I came across an article about recovering from a narcissistic relationship and how difficult it can be to stop feeling like a fucking husk all the time (of course, I really don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking from experience or reading such articles because of said experience or know anything at all about this sort of thing. I’m just talking shit on the internet about topics I’m utterly ignorant about like we all do don’t worry about it), or to escape the cycle of behaviors that used to be necessary to survive but are just bonkers maladaptive when your world isn’t being ruled by an insane clown who hates you for breathing.

I mean, it’s not subtle. The President of the United States goes on TV every day and tells more than half of the nation we’re worthless, evil, horrible, at fault for everything he does, lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, and that all we deserve is suffering. Then he tells us how great he is. Then back to how the rest of us shouldn’t, and have no right to, exist here.

And I thought: Well, shit, all of us are doing those things and feeling that way. All the time. That’s a bullet point dissection of That Thing Everyone’s Been Suffering and Trying to Talk About. That suffering we usually chalk up to cost of living, working too much, COVID, AI, the modern world, enshittification, the wrong timeline, pick your cause, it’s the Great Malaise.

Because Donald Trump and his Skeletor-horde of dipshit cryptids, but mostly Donald “The Mule” Trump, have subjected all of us to the cycle of narcissistic abuse for a fucking decade, and that shit sucks the life out of you. It takes what you were and sticks it in a blender to puree so your abuser can gulp it down and take whatever power you had left. It makes you forget what joy even was, or if it was. Your brain literally gets so overclocked with fear and shame and confusion and constantly strategizing and re-strategizing some kind of methodology that would stop what’s happening that it can’t handle anything else. It can no longer fully brain, because its functions have been permanently epoxied into fight/flight/fawn mode.

And it doesn’t stop when you get out. It can actually get worse. It can stay worse for a long time, because your abuser re-wired your consciousness to serve his or her needs. And, oh, America, honey, baby, it’s vanishingly rare for a victim of narcissistic abuse not to go back to their tormentor at least once.

We really thought we’d made it out in 2020. We danced in the fucking streets like an 80s music video about humanity coming together to rock. We were sure we were safe. That we knew better now. That we’d see the signs next time. We wouldn’t let ourselves be hurt like that again. We’d learned. We’d grown. We’d escaped.

But we’d been rewired. Rewired to serve the needs of a sadist who was no longer in charge, whose needs were suddenly gone. We’d beaten him, but we hadn’t beaten ourselves. We hadn’t beaten the vacuum left when he went, not in power, but in needs to serve—and America simply doesn’t and never has known how lean into the same work and devotion to serve our own needs the way we lean into serving the needs of cruel authority figures.

It’s not completely our fault. Our own parents never taught us any better.

As we stepped out from his control in the early 20s, we could see and understand and correctly place the blame on Trump and some few of his flying monkeys for their actions, but none of us had any real interest in looking, long, hard, or otherwise, at our own enabling, our appeasement, our willingness to isolate and self-mutilate for the sake of either his approval or at least a brief reprieve from his rage, at our complicity in our own torture. We thought we’d just go right back to Life Before Him, but the problem with that is the Paradox of Narcissistic Aftermath: the people we were then were already gone, but the problems his full technicolor surround-sound 24/7 drama-inferno distracted us from were still sitting there, unsolved. Worse than that, his entrance into our lives had already been greased by a deep, unspoken desire to avoid solving those exact problems, a longing to be distracted from them.

In 2020? 2021? 2022, 23, 24? We figured we’d dealt with the problem. We didn’t even try; frankly, we didn’t much want to even start, to deal with what we’d allowed ourselves to become to survive him. Of course, never just him, but everyone who came before him to lay the groundwork for us to accept his cruelty. Which, you know, not for nothing, is called grooming.

We couldn’t shake all the habits we’d formed just to get through each grueling, stupid, impossible day. Doomscrolling was always millions upon millions of people anxiously checking in on their abusive parent/spouse/orange overlord’s mood every morning to see if we’d be able to have a semi-rational, not even good, just neutral day, relatively free of pain-hurricanes and pride-buckling disasters he spun up out of thin, wholly unnecessary air to feel a little more alive watching us scramble to contain the damage. We didn’t just let, but actively shoveled blame onto our own side for anything that went wrong because it was never safe to blame our unbalanced, unpredictable bully—because after so many years of being blamed, blaming ourselves and never him became an ingrained habit.

And we couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop feeling like nothing mattered, like everyone was just waiting for a vulnerable moment to let their mask fall and show they’d always hated us. Resource-guarding, snapping at everything, snarling, backed into a corner that was suddenly open air—but still felt like the walls closing in. Couldn’t remember how to socialize or build things or function in public because we’d been forbidden to for so long. Couldn’t stop instinctively centering him in every conversation, every news story, looking for his opinion, anticipating his plans, speculating about his reactions to every little thing. Lashing out at ourselves, our friends, our rebound relationship. Blaming ourselves—of course it was always our fault, we are stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse, he said so all the time. After long enough, the human heart just starts to nod along to the beat. And then the beat becomes a truth we don’t know how to reject anymore. Stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse. Oh, we Democrats brought it on ourselves, didn’t we? Look what we made him do.

And then, well, once we were out, once we had a moment to dance in the sun and take a breath of our own, he didn’t seem so scary anymore. Still horrible, still a monster, but it’s not like we’re getting back together so it’s sort of okay to laugh at his jokes again, right? He looks so successful on social media! PRETTY FUCKING CLEARLY a whole lot of people started remembering the “good" times, forgetting the fear and pain he put us through because that’s what the hurt brain does for us. It’s gross and fucked up to admit that the fight/flight/fawn years at least had energy to them. Adrenaline, cortisol, these are incredibly damaging stress hormones to have rocketing through your system long-term, but in the moment, they do make you feel…purposeful. Energized. In motion. Sharp and clear.

Distracted from all those other problems, at least. Problems that are a lot harder to solve than ditching one bad man.

And as we went into withdrawal from those constant stress-chemicals and the corresponding dopamine and seratonin that compensate when you either do something that feels like it met the moment (you know, like posting about it online) or at least get a pause from the madness, we started looking around for somewhere to get our fix again. Someone to hurt us so we can get back to the oblivion of a familiar pattern of pain.

Our friends don’t look like friends anymore. We only see faults. That’s what love is, right, finding fault and lashing out? That’s what our bodies learned. And this new guy/girl we’re with is boring, he/she doesn’t activate our burnt-out receptors, and he/she seems to genuinely like us so he’s worthless. Or he’s a secret demon vampire because that’s all we deserve.

And then Narcissus comes waltzing back, looking for his supply again. Which had to be us, now. All of us. After he’d gotten four years drinking from the firehose, nothing else would do. Even, maybe especially, if you’ve dealt with real narcissists in real life, it’s hard to even get your head around one so utterly definitional of the disorder that their basic maintenance dose of narcissistic supply is the entire planet’s attention.

In the myth of Narcissus, we are not Echo, begging for love, to be heard. We are simply the water in which he sees himself reflected forever.

And that beast was fucking thirsty by 2024.

It’s hard for anyone left of President Snow to characterize Trump’s behavior from 20-24 as lovebombing, but that’s what it was, just like 15-16, when he was pretending to be cool with the gays and the minorities and the ladies and everyone the GOP wants to drop-kick into a black hole. Whatever else is specifically wrong with that guy, he’s also such a pure, limit-break narcissist that those two periods are his mask-on good behavior. Before he had to pretend to be some kind of fun to some kind of person, he was just openly partnering with Jeffrey Epstein to run child beauty pageants and raping with impunity, and that’s just what we know about so far. Not screaming into a camera every single day that every liberal needs to die is, in fact, Trump and his party being charming on a first date.

But I said he’s done it to all of us several paragraphs ago. Because his followers have really been stuck in the classic cycle. Lovebomb/Idealization—Devaluation—Discard. Sometimes all of them in a single day.

And I suppose I can force my Empathy Hat on long enough to say that must be a real mindfuck. It’s probably understandable, from a certain point of view, that so many of them have given up and bellyflopped into pure fiction and insanity. When you’re being gaslit about basic facts every day, the mind starts to fall apart. It truly can’t tell the difference between real and His Perception of Real anymore, because this huge person in their life keeps telling them what they know happened, didn’t, and what they know didn’t happen, did. Where else was there left to go but disconnection from reality? Where was there to put all that confusion, shame, fear, disappointment? The narcissistic cycle is impressively fine-tuned to scramble your logical processors and squeeze out your sense of selfhood so it can be replaced with a sense of his selfhood.

He promises them the moon, tells them he loves them, acts like a funny, cool (what they think is cool), successful guy who’s gonna give them the life they always wanted. Or acts like a victim so he’ll be pitied and babied and fussed over as the most harmed person in the world or history and also multiverse (there’s the covert-type, and while everyone armchair diagnoses him as malignant, to me he’s clearly a c-c-c-combo of all three NPD presentations) or slaloms back and forth, often in one sentence. Then he turns around and tells them they’re dumb overdramatic fuck-ups he doesn’t give a shit about and they keep cheering because they’re still hung up on the rush of the first part, waiting for that time to come back, that guy, that feeling of belonging and release and possibility. So it must be a joke! He’s just joking. He loves us really, that’s just what he’s like, you wouldn’t understand our relationship, it’s so special, so unique. You don’t understand him like we do. That’s just his sense of humor, we don’t mind. He doesn’t mean it.

Some of us fight. Some of us flee. Some of us fawn.

Then he gets elected and starts eating their faces for breakfast every day, telling them he fucking loves eating faces, but complaining about the taste of theirs already. On Day One, so to speak.

But he’s good at this, if nothing else. Whenever his malevolence gets close to actually breaking the spell and losing them, he goes right back to lovey-dovey language, writing checks and subsidies, even drug rescheduling because an unexpected present goes really far with people starved for something that feels real. Or, more often, he opts to do some mean horrible bit of anti-social sadism, just the way he knows they like it. Just like the old days, when they were courting.

And round and round it goes.

Conservatives feel the malaise, too. It’s just a different flavor, because they’re the golden child, and the rest of us are the scapegoat.

The fact is, it’s completely fucking exhausting. Ennervating. Stultifying. To spend a decade—A FUCKING DECADE—in a world where every single conversation involves him, every personal choice has to take his judgment and eventual reaction into account (I know couples, gay and straight, who chose not to have children because they couldn’t be sure of their own rights in Trump’s world, let alone those children’s. Human beings do not exist who would have otherwise, just because he might react badly). Every time you tune into any kind of media it will orient itself around him or the effects of his deeds like the protagonist in a comic book movie, to the point that no one has to specify to what the pronoun him refers anymore. This fucking guy ate a whole pronoun! That used to belong to half the species!

The gravity of that, once it’s weighed on you for years, is so hard to escape. And harder still to cope with not having that weight crushing down on you while still bulging with the muscles you built to carry it. Still needing to feed that new bulk.

Of course, when someone does slide back into a nuclear-blast site of a relationship with an abuser like this, they pretty quickly remember why they left.

But now they’re stuck right back at the beginning of the labyrinth with a different 80s guy with weird hair saying fear me love me do as I say. And it feels so much more overwhelming to leave all over again, to do all that work you already did, to dig yourself out when you just watched yourself fuck up all that progress like the piece of shit he always said you were. So much more impossible to get out from under it, especially when the friends and family who supported your exit the first time are a lot less sympathetic the second time around. Or maybe it seems so much more possible the good times will return, since he was just acting like he cared again. All depending on what “good times” means to you, I suppose. Plus it’s far more embarrassing to admit you went back to the guy who hurt you and used you than it was to just get fooled once by a guy who’s quite good at fooling people.

But he didn’t learn to appreciate his position in your life and treat you better. He learned exactly what you’d accept from him without consequence. So the second time is always unfathomably worse.

Obviously, many of us did not choose to go back.

I mean…sort of.

We definitely chose not to commit to our new political relationship. The media, which is just made of people in the end, all the more so since journalism has been outsourced to literally everyone with a pulse, chose to express apoplectic anger at anyone else displaying even the mildest versions of Trump’s river of toxic sludge. Everybody on the left chose to inflict a lot of the abuse Trump shat down our necks on Biden, Harris, and their administration—plus also just a lot of people on our own side, over any disagreement on anything at all. Good lord, we canceled anyone who got any traction or influence as soon as humanly possible, and it was only ever somewhat assisted by bots and bad actors.

Which is…wait for it…also one of those symptoms of having suffered narcissistic abuse. Becoming hypercritical, but also hypersensitive to criticism. Blowing small disagreements way out of proportion and over-reacting, then finding oneself unable to back down because your literal physical endocrine system learned backing down does nothing to stop the attacks, it just shows weakness and weaklings get fucking eaten. These are usually behaviors learned from the abuser, because imitating someone with power over us, subconsciously, can feel like a logical way to get some power back, or at least appease the creature who loves only himself by appearing more like him. Doesn’t work, but it feels like it might.

That, and once you start feeling like nothing you do matters anymore, well, nothing you do matters anymore.

And once it came time to reject old patterns and move on with our lives, to show that we’d done the work, it turns out a huge number of us didn’t really have any energy left for that, or even protecting ourselves or our loved ones. Or doing anything. Voting for a regular politician regularly, but not in a way that felt like being a paladin in a life or death battle against MegaSauron, didn’t light up our adrenaline pathways or flood them with sweet fulfilled dopamine.

I guess sometimes, when you’ve been asked to be the only one doing the right thing for years, being selfish can feel like the morally right thing to do. And doing nothing feels even more right, because nothing matters, you’re so tired, and you don’t even know how to go back to normal life without a monster in it. You can barely remember how that worked, so now, the monstrous feels familiar but you feel like a stranger, and you really, really need therapy about that, but group therapy for a couple of hundred million is tough to put together and you don’t want to even think about the co-pay.

We’re all suffering the way children of narcissistic parents, spouses of narcissist, employees, anyone who has to live a huge portion of their lives connected to someone who requires all the oxygen in any room to even begin to exist, suffer. And we continue to hurt ourselves and each other because we’ve been taught by example that the ability to hurt is a valid measure of personal freedom—which is a whole nine-ring circus of fucked-up. But humans just want to feel safe, and rarely do, so they’ll take anything. That’s what narcissists want, too, it’s just that whatever happened to them when they were kids to break them this specific way means they can only start to feel safe when others are powerless and devoted only to them.

After all, if you’re the only one with power and everyone is desperate to please you, you won’t be abandoned. Won’t be hurt. Can’t be invisible as you always feared, always knew you were to the people with power over you.

Ugh. This Empathy Hat is itchy.

To the dark side of the brain, the animal instinct side, Trump seems mighty safe. Even from bullets. Even from the law. Seems like the only person with agency anymore. So people either cling to him in hopes that safety and freedom rubs off, or dwell in a daze of unhappiness and hopelessness, helplessness and anxiety, a forever Now in which no long-term plans even feel possible because our brains know a new trauma is gonna hit in the next minute.

He could die tomorrow and it would take years upon years for our brains to not know that, if they ever did.

Now, we can’t you-go-girl our way out of this, at least not for a few years, if the Nothing allows elections ever again. And even if the regime ends, we will 100% go through all these stages and symptoms and malaises and reactionary behaviors all over again trying to figure out a way to recover without actually working on ourselves at all. In some ways, I hope Gavin Newsom does pull it off, because I don’t like him that much, so I kind of feel fine letting him take on the chin the absolute level of misplaced hate and anger we’re definitely going to aim at the next Democrat with any power because we couldn’t aim it at the shitheel who actually hurt us. He seems good for it.

The only thing that’s actually going to get your groove, back, America? I hate to say it and you hate to hear it, but darling, you’ve got to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get your pride back. I’m not talking about patriotism or military parade bullshit or singing I’m Proud to Be an American with a trembling lip. Because fucking barf.

But a whole lot of people, for a whole lot of decades, have poured a whole lot of energy into convincing everyone of every party in this country that America itself is worth nothing, not even standing up for. That we’re bad, either for a legacy of hatred and violence or a legacy of not enough hatred and violence, either way, we’re corrupt garbage, we’ve always been corrupt garbage, so we deserve what we get. That we could never be or do any good, we are completely unredeemable and disgusting, that we should never have existed, that no part of our system or anyone in it has the smallest merit.

If no one believes in the system, if no one, for a moment, will stand up for the system, the system crumbles. It’s crumbling now.

And yeah, we’ve been bad. A lot. We’ve done some heinous fuckery to ourselves and to others. I’m not saying history didn’t happen. I’m not that white. Nor am I blind or an idiot. So everything I’m about to say is actually quite hard for me, because I, too have spent most of my life laughing at the idea of the promise of America. Quoting George Carlin, being cynical, hating most things about this place I was born.

But it doesn’t work.

A country that thinks itself incapable of virtue will utterly gorge itself on vice.

People who believe they deserve nothing will allow anything to be done to them, through them, with them, and in their name. And the people who yell loudest about how much they deserve are always the ones terrified to their marrow that they don’t deserve anything at all, even a single crumb of grace. The phrase America Sucks knows no political side. And if it sucks, why not burn it down? Does it matter that much who’s holding the match?

And that’s how these leeches slither in. On a road slicked for them by apathy, self-loathing, and masochism.

If you convince anyone they are wrong and bad, incompetent, monstrous and undeserving to the core, you teach them it’s okay to act as though that’s true. That it’s okay if they’re treated as though it’s true. You remove their ability to believe they can change or grow or become anything but more rot from a rotten root.

And that’s what a narcissist ultimately does. They leave you feeling like a husk because they used you as one. As the vessel they needed to pour all their own self-hatred and pain and fear and insecurity and loneliness and darkness so they didn’t have to own it or process it, so they could say you were the bad one all along and walk free.

We have to find a way to stand up for ourselves, to reject what is, admittedly, horrendous, but claim what has been good and what could be good again or anew. To start imagining new shapes tomorrow could take and reject the patterns we’re stuck in. To not just react, but act. To remember that an immigrant is a guest, and one of the most ancient rules of civilization is we do not harm guests. To remember that difference is just reality, no two of anything are the same and cannot be. To defend each other, stand for something, say no to the void. To redefine the promise of America and genuinely give a shit about it, about ourselves, about how we treat ourselves, what we’re willing to accept.

To make our escape plans and bide our time. Like so many trapped souls have had to do on the individual level. We must do it on a mass scale.

Something like national self-care. Not a spa day, but self-care nonetheless. Because we haven’t been taking care of ourselves. We let ourselves get sick, we let ourselves get hurt, we let ourselves suffer and starve. We let ourselves hurt others, because we stopped believing it was in us to stop. We’ve let everything that we used to care so much about slide. We have to remember, not who we are, which is a mess, but who we wanted to be. Once upon a time.

And until we do, there will never be an end to the men and women who want us hopeless, who want us frozen and numb and confused, who want us scrambling for their regard, who want us bone-tired from working to keep them happy, whose highest goal is to walk on our backs so their precious feet need never touch the ground.

Baby, honey, America, Americans, humans, Earthlings, I love you. You’re better than that. You do deserve better.

Someday, I hope you believe that as much as I do.

As much as I’m trying to believe it. Really fucking hard. Every day.

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You know what, 2025? Everyone hates you. You have no friends. Not only are you not invited to any holiday parties, but I talked to Everyone, and Everyone actually went out of their way to make a You Are Cordially Uninvited Forever card and the production value was actually really lovely. Embossed and everything.

January seems like another, also shitty, lifetime ago. Every day is simply so much unhinged bullshit it’s impossible to keep up with just the three or four worst things that happened to the most people before end of business, let alone the smaller disasters waiting to meet you in your area. Yes, it’s by design, but knowing that the Great Overwhelm is being done by design doesn’t really help, or do anything at all. Bad Times Always is an amazingly effective paralytic, as it turns out.

Everyone I know is exhausted. And depressed. Not in a normal basically maintainable Adulthood Sucks Ha Ha Insert Boomer Joke Here way, but in a Life Is Now Being Slowly Digested By a Gelatinous Cube way. And alternating dissociating from the endless tire-fire around us and screaming into the void hoping to hit on some magical combination of eldritch syllables that stops all this. Unfortunately, we’re all using our phones to do both of those things.

Was it better in 2024? I mean…yeah, a little! Up until November, anyway.

And I keep thinking about all those “Young” Republicans we got to read about a few months ago, and then, like everything else, had to promptly forget because something exploded. Giggling like schoolboys vaping in the bathroom over how dreamy Noted SuccessMan Adolf Hitler was and calling themselves Nazis (so brave, so cool) in their shitty little private Bratz Boyz Group Chat. And everyone doing the same fucking brainless shambling square dance they always do when Republicans openly and obviously do super-public Nazi shit while repeating YES WE ARE ACTUALLY FOR REAL NAZIS five times in that self-same school bathroom mirror hoping Stephen Miller appears and brings them all an early Christmas. Normal people all point out that this is clearly Nazi shit, Republicans pretend we’re crazy while smirking their way through still more Nazi shit, the media asks no questions and investigates nothing, but does run stories on how over-sensitive liberals are keeping the government shut down. Lather, rinse, ingest conditioner.

Their ease. Their relaxation. Their casual fun.

That media dance has been repeated many times since. But it’s always the same. And it makes us feel even more helpless, because we all watched that media drum a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign a year ago; we know they can still be a media and still make things happen, they could still help us, but they don’t and they won’t. So then we all just go back to work because what the fuck else can you do? Ground beef is $8 a pound. People are dying everywhere. Decisions are being made that none of us have any control over at all, and half of us will only become aware of next year when vaccines are illegal and you have to present 2.5 white babies to pollsters as valid ID to vote.

And all the while, through the careful steps of this endless monstrous dance, all over the internet, I see all these people, most of them even organic, from inside and from outside this country, looking at a TRULY grotesque pantomime strip-tease where the dancers keep taking off bits of clothing and pretending they’re going to reveal something other than just a shit-ton of swastikas under there and ask the same question phrased a hundred million different ways.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why aren’t you Americans rising up? Why aren’t we Americans rising up? Why are people just letting this happen? Someone should do something! It’s going to be too late really, really soon! Surely this time, this act will be enough and someone will do something!

I remember, back in the Before Time known as January 2025, people asking why Americans weren’t marching in the streets. And everyone saying it’s cold, wait for summer. But then nothing really materialized during the summer, either.

And now it’s cold again.

There have been protests. But the Dance of the Sugar Plum Media doesn’t report much on them, they convene and disperse and are forgotten. And the gelatinous cube gurgles as we dissolve just a little more.

Hell, even Trump has said out loud, into a microphone he knew was on, looking at a camera that he was fully aware was likewise rolling live, to people who allegedly work for the press and not him: “Wow, we actually really thought this was gonna be a lot harder and y’all would fight back but I guess not!

And then that pustulant undead Hamburglar laughed. At us. In disbelief.

Many answers to this question have been barfed up into the hive-mind’s overused airbag of the soul over the last Spy Hunter oil-slick-and-nail-dump of a year. And they’re all true.

It is cold. We are demoralized from years of “resistance” meaning absolutely nothing except blood-wrestling in a pool of grifters, liars, and bots. (God, remember all those White House “insider” accounts that got so huge in 17-18 because people really believed they were who they said they were and their every breathless cheerleader-screech that the end was right around the corner oh and also they all fucking vanished and were always nothing?) It is a geographically gargantuan country without an obvious central city or focal point to protest around (I mean sort of. Trump Tower is right there, and I never see anyone picketing it). It is more difficult to find the fire when (barely) a majority did, allegedly, vote for this. Everything is so expensive there’s little time or energy left over to fight with. The media is complicit, and algorithmically siloed so that people aren’t receiving the same information more or less ever. Whatever the left is in the Year of No God 2025, it’s profoundly divided and hates itself more than anyone on the right. The pandemic did take the wind out of everyone’s sails, maybe especially those who refused to believe it was happening.

And we do very much expend our energy and receive our dopamine in exchange for just openly weeping into the festering sore of what the internet has become, which sure does feel like doing something, even though it isn’t. Oh, don’t we ever.

But I don’t really think any of those very valid reasons are the main problem. Other than the tech issues, all of those factors have been around for quite awhile and didn’t result in this deep freeze of the mind.

No one’s doing anything because no one knows what to do.

Seriously, what exactly is it we’re supposed to be doing to fix this? No one has any idea what might even begin to be effective in this bicameral hellmouth of a situation. Protest? My siblings in solidarity, we’ve been protesting. For decades. It has rarely, if ever, made one sad little bubble-wrap pop of difference in government policy. My generation protested Iraq and inequality on the backs of our parents teaching us that if the government does a bad, that’s how you fix it, just like they did with Vietnam. And it changed nothing whatsoever, pretty much like they did with Vietnam, because the protests weren’t why Vietnam ended, they just drummed Johnson out of office, water-slide swirled Nixon in, and scared the conservatives so bad they worked for 50 years to make sure nothing like that could ever force them to share oxygen with a dirty liberal ever again.

I remember so clearly coming home from an absolutely gargantuan protest of the Iraq War and watching George Bush look into the camera and say he did not care how many people protested, this was happening. And I’m not sure I ever really believed too much in American democracy again. If it doesn’t matter how many people protest, everyone could and the government would do what it pleased anyway. Which lined up with actual events a lot better than the utter canonization of the 60s protests ever did.

As with most things, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

Well, what the hell are we every day people supposed to do with that? You cannot motivate people with: HEY KIDS! IF YOU DROP EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIVES AND TAKE TO THE STREETS, RISK YOUR LIVES AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND LOVED ONES, AND DO IT EVERY SINGLE WEEK AT A MINIMUM, PROBABLY NOTHING SIGNIFICANT WILL CHANGE AT ALL (MIGHT GET WORSE THOUGH!) BUT HEY AT LEAST YOU’LL LOSE YOUR JOB!

The women’s protest of Trump’s first inauguration was the biggest in history, until the next mass protest of Trump’s administration, and almost every protest after that. And nothing happened. There isn’t one single thing that can be pointed to as a victory that grew out of those events. So yeah, we go, we make a sign, we protest, and then everyone yells about how Americans aren’t doing anything during nationwide protests—which is completely fucking fair because protests clearly don’t amount to much more than a flyer in a landfill. Don’t forget all those protests in France amounted to just about precisely fuck-all, the retirement age was still raised. But watching online, you’d think they won.

Support Democrats? I mean, come on. We’re just not going to do that. If we were ever going to do that, we’d be bitching about eggs again and the media would be roasting the President on the daily. There have been more articles about how thoroughly the Democrats are useless trash than about Trump wandering around the White House roof talking to the fucking trees and clouds, and everyone just goes along with the meme.

And are they useless trash? Maybe. Definitely Fetterman. But they’re also human beings (so I’m told) and I’d bet they’re as psychologically bodied by the dissolution of the system to which they’ve devoted their lives as we who did not devote our lives to any system we could avoid are. I don’t think they know what to do, either, because nothing they have done, and they have, because court cases stopping executive orders don’t actually just spontaneously generate like mice in a haystack, people have to prepare, file, argue, pursue them, and that thankless bullshit is where a lot of Democrat effort has gone, but no need to acknowledge it—and hey, don’t worry, no one will!

Remember that whole government shutdown? Remember those 8 senators (and fuck you very much, Angus King) who voted with the Republicans and we’re all super mad at them only not really because everyone’s already forgotten? Well…when Democrats were holding out, did anyone support them? Praise them on social media, drum up awareness and energy for them to keep going? Tell them they were fighting for all of us and not to give in because we had their backs? Say anything positive at all? Did you?

So maybe we just put that one aside because I don’t know that there’s anything Democrats could do to get people to speak positively of them anymore, even their own members. And no, Bernie Sanders doesn’t fucking count, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Full revolution? Well, I’ll tell you something about that eternal eschatological pipe-dream. If people don’t believe protesting will help, they’re definitely not going to abandon their entire existences to get immediately shot storming whatever facility people imagine will result in instant victory where conservative elements don’t get to have a say in the New Republic. Especially when no one can so much as organize a general strike, let alone a revolution. For fuck’s sake, we can barely convince the depressed progressive set to go out and do something fun with other humans after work, let alone the actual grueling carnage and privation of a kind of conflict almost none of us can imagine.

Because revolutions, and protests, require enormous plans. Logistics, personnel, consensus. Not just consensus on how to revolution, but what the revolution will replace the system with, a task at which the left is notoriously clownshoed. Babies, we can’t agree on what name to call ourselves. Other than the fucking People’s Judean Front.

And enormous plans require leaders organizing people into following them. Not just leaders like your local charity or PTA has leaders. I mean people with the reputation, charisma, public trust, and organizational ability to have huge swaths of people actually twitch a toe when they say jump. And by people I mean men, obviously, because we’ve seen what happens when a woman tries.

On the left? We have no plans and no leaders. And I’m not just talking about Democrats in office. I’m talking across the board. Partly because we on the left don’t like to do hierarchy or giving/following orders, it’s antithetical to our whole thing. But you don’t get a whole lot done without them and oh look, we’re not getting a whole lot done.

There is no one stepping up to be a leader right now. To tell us what to do to fix this and how—and maybe most importantly when and where to do it.

And I mean no one. Name the leader(s) of the No Kings protests without looking it up. Go ahead. Or Occupy. Or even your local Democratic Party chair. I’d say I’ll wait, but we all know I’d look like the guy who chose poorly at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by the time someone who definitely looked it up pretends to know.

I’m not talking about what Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders are doing, either, because when it comes right down to it, they’re doing exactly the same thing, which is JUST. FUCKING. TALKING. ABOUT. THEMSELVES.

I’ve been wondering for months why Bernie Sanders was touring the country giving the same speech he’s always given to the same people who’ve always listened instead of…using that same tour to plan, organize, and disseminate the details of a general strike.

Because he could do that. He might be the one person who could do that without getting blasted into space by the internet cycle of bitch/moan/grift. But he doesn’t even suggest it. Or any specific action. Neither does Newsom, but I’m not sure anyone really expects President Kenough to. But none of the lefty influencers or podcasters are making any attempt to organize people, either. Anyone who could be a leader actually making a movement and doing an action is just making memes and booking speaker fees.

I suspect because those things are all upside. If the meme or moment or particular phrasing takes off, they make money and gain fame. If not, no big deal, new media cycle incoming in about 30 seconds. Hell, the pervasive meme that capitalism is the root of every single problem, no matter how big or small, has an incredible, and god, I hope unintentional, numbing effect on anti-establishment energy. After all, if we can’t get rid of capitalism in one fell swoop, why even bother? Tackling any other problem is useless when it’s only capitalism that’s to blame. In fact, whispers the commentariat, voting and working to make incremental progress is actually bad and supports the evil system!

But if Bernie Sanders called for a general strike on a specific date and it didn’t happen, or it did and was very small, or it did and was huge but made no difference, or any number of failure conditions, his political leverage and reputation, as well as that of the progressive movement at large, would nosedive directly into the all-swallowing sea. If Newsom did, any Presidential hopes would be reduced to a single, long note from the world’s saddest trombone. If Hasan or Destiny or PickUrManWithAHeadphoneMicSurgicallyGraftedToHisSkull did and it wasn’t a massive success with real results, their personal cache, income, and brand would suffer, so in very real terms, fascism is a better result for them individually…right up until it isn’t. Because that’s how fascism always rolls, but people keep charging at that football anyway.

And when people who actually hold office and/or influence won’t risk their personal brand to take action other than speaking truth to their own power then congratulating themselves for being the best and rightest, when they’re the ones that actually could, what the fuck are the rest of us supposed to think? How are the rest of us supposed to organize when none of the people who are respected and well-known enough to organize are doing anything but talking? Kamala tried to be that someone and we couldn’t even be bothered to vote to not suffer horribly. The right is dark and full of terrors but they do take action and initiative, even if it’s mostly knocking down everyone else’s blocks because blocks are gay and then shooting each other in the neck because another podcaster said to.

And until someone does decide it’s worth all the shit-nados that come a leader’s way, everyone else is stuck in the cube of Schrodinger’s Democracy: is it alive or is it dead? Is now the moment, or is it the next one? Will the system hold against this violation or not? We can’t know until the guardrails get smashed, until the box is opened.

And if the cat might still be, just barely, alive? Then most people will keep buying cat food and hope for the best. Making most of us believe the cat might still be alive is far more advantageous to the Feline Murder Party than displaying its corpse.

These people truly excel at the dance I talked about earlier. Are we Nazis or are Democrats paranoid? Just little closer to the full reveal every time, but never quite there. It’s almost impossible to know which of the garbage they say they’ll do is the garbage they’re actually going to do, so everyone is frozen in place not knowing what’s even real. We haven’t invaded Greenland yet, have we? As yet, there are no Neurodivergent Buddyfriends Super Fun Time Healthy Sunshine Camps. We’re terrified all the time, but we can’t know whether this particular rich man blowing his own brains out of his blowhole about whichever issue he knows about as much about as he does his wife’s deepest dreams and ambitions is saying this is happening or lol I dreamed about this in sixth grade so imma say it to a microphone and see what happens.

So we all walk through this insane clown maze of illusions trying to figure out which one is the real Pennywise, and as it turns out, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t might be the most effective nerfing of the revolutionary impulse ever devised.

Because, though for those of us already in their targets, it’s very hard to get our heads around, for the majority of Americans, most of the horrors Trump and his little mean boy gang are giggling their way through are still abstractly coming through their phones and not their direct experience unless they or their loved ones belong to a scapegoat group—and will continue to, right up until they don’t because a new group's number is up and it’s their turn to suffer. The majority of us are not ourselves LGBTQ+ or immigrants or neurodiverse or even, for a little while longer, other than whatever white means these days. That’s why we’re called minorities. Many more are connected to someone in danger because of Trump but, well, people are selfish assholes, I don’t know what to tell you. A little more than half of us are women, but plenty of women aren’t on women’s side. Everyone promised if they took Roe away America would be in the streets, and look around at the vast landscape of fucks most people didn’t give about it. The media siloing and disparate populations very understandably self-segregating for safety means that the administration has to do very big things very loudly to reach everyone.

And they prefer the dance. Of course they do.

The only things that have gotten through across the board at all are the cost of living and the Epstein Files. The only thing that got through across the board last time was COVID-19. They’re betting nothing that big will happen again, and so are we. It’s a horrific bet, but apparently we’re all-in.

And abstraction is just very hard to turn into direct, confrontational action. Most people are concerned with themselves above all, most people are just comfortable enough that death on the barricades is not a clearly better choice than keeping your head down and hoping this will pass. Until something that hits every single household directly, and hard enough that no media narrative can convince people it isn’t happening, you simply aren’t going to see any real uprising.

As the year winds down, there’s not much comfort in any of that. SORRY. I do agree a general strike would be the most effective single action. But all the bad AI flyers on Facebook won’t matter until someone respected with power and skin in the game starts organizing in earnest. And they’re all much more than comfortable enough in their world of podcasts and memoirs and fundraising to risk looking unsuccessful at revolution. We all keep waiting for someone to do something because until Someone with a capital S does, there is no way for mass action to begin accreting mass.

And in the end, it’s impossible to convince people that it’s worth throwing away whatever we have left in this life on an abstract idea of “doing something” when the very leaders whose business is telling us how very serious this is, how awful the fascistic future is going to be, how deeply in danger we all are, won’t risk even a sliver of their comfort to do much of anything but continue talking about how brave they are to talk about how brave they are.

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Well, I’m back.

Everything better?

No? Not even a little? Cool.

I am sorry for the absence. It has been a ridiculous autumn around here. I spent most of it sick, so sick I couldn’t even sit up or focus my eyes enough to doomscroll endlessly, feeling, in addition to mucus, mucus everywhere, the actual physical sensation of my life’s energy slowly dripping out into a depthless pool of quiet tears.

First it was COVID (FOURTH TIME’S A CHARM!) for almost a damn month, then, less than a week after slowly slouching toward recovery, some other horrible bug knocked me on my already knocked-upon ass, and thus I drifted in the Void of Lost Time until just about Thanksgiving!

And, well, the other thing that turned life into a circus of stupid is so unbelievable and unrealistic I can’t bear to go over it all again, so I’m going to reverse the usual course and cross-post the Holiday Tale of Horror from my Patreon by way of apology and explanation for where the fuck I’ve been.

Because I only just found my notebook with all the notes for the next essay in it. So I’m working on it; see below.

Nevertheless, as it is on Patreon, this is locked to a paywall for reasons that are about to be very obvious—I live in a small place and I’m about to spill some beans on the snowy ground, and I don’t want anyone who isn’t onside enough to be part of one of my little clubhouses waggling their face about it.

Saints and ministers of grace defend us, let’s dive into the chaos vortex.

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Somehow, possibly due to various cursed objects I have unknowingly acquired over the years, I’m sick again.

And I fucking hate this pigshit elemental, her stupid pig-soul and her nasty pig-fuck feet which are, somehow, the most normal and relatable thing about her. So this isn’t going to be some well-researched 5000 word essay to touch the depths of your vulnerably human heart and fill you with big feelings about humanity.

I’m just going to tell you why Marjorie Taylor Greene is sounding vaguely sane these days, and not quite as much like an Innsmouth cultist wharrgarbling her way through DC like. Well. A white lady space laser.

Ok, so yeah, I get it. She’s sounding vaguely able to be allowed out on her own recognizance and not like the chittering mating grunts barfed up by the Chaotic Evil lovechild of a Beholder and a bottle of peroxide.

And everyone Wants to Believe. Because in the 20s, believing a Republican heart has grown three times its size due to finally seeing the error of their ways requires pretty much the same mindset as actually believing, point for point, Fox Mulder’s pinwheeling, luminous wet dreams in the 90s.

Fucking stop it. DO STOP BELIEVING. SHUT UP, JOURNEY. IT’S FRIDAY AND I’M TIRED.

Is she still insane? Oh, she probably never was. Just an adulterous asshole who loves nothing. Is she still conservative? I mean, is she still the aforementioned pigshit elemental trying to turn the rest of the world into her personal pigshit trough upon which to endlessly gorge? So yeah, still conservative. Is any of this genuine? Shut up. Don’t be stupid.

Is she aiming for a foothold on a leftie grift instead of the infinite rightie blood-money mine that disgorged her? Doing the thing that was so lucrative Back In the Time Known As the Day when any semi-decency-curious Republican was hailed as a Lion of the Resistance? It might be a good thought, but the pipeline is not quite so well-greased anymore BECAUSE WE’RE ALL EXHAUSTED WITH THE LIONS BEING TRASHPEOPLE IN LION-SUITS.

Plus, look, I don’t know how to tell you this if you don’t already know, but the left, being not so much into capitalism, is also not so much into paying for things. And the right is super into that, because they have wild fever dreams every night of they themselves being the One Who Knocks Gets Paid For Being a Superdick 24/7. So…probably not, when MSNBC is the only even plausibly non-rightwing dinosaur-channel and Hasan can’t even electrocute a dog on camera without woke snowflakes quietly wondering if maybe there was another explanation.

Is it all about running for President and/or Senate?

Ehhhh. Maybe that pissed her off. Maybe it was a good excuse. But that’s not what’s up. She’s an idiot, but she’s not actually stupid.

And that’s the most controversial thing I’m about to say.

Come now. Let us be civilized men. We all got the memo that America hates women so much they would literally vote for fucking anyone over a woman. The Xenomorph from Alien. The resurrected corpse of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. An LLM originally trained on Hanna Barbara cartoons and nothing else. Willy Wonka, post-human-trafficking trial. God damned Pennywise from IT. Anyone.

No one doesn’t know that, including the Eternal Ruiner of a Perfectly Good and Universally Recognized Magic: the Gathering Acronym, Marjorie “Tool Time” Taylor Greene. And I don’t really think she gives a shit about the Senate on any level beyond “I’m tired of doing the whole ‘democracy’ thing every two years, six and I always get re-elected sounds way better.”

Nah, here’s what she’s up to.

Hey! Do ya know what’s fun?

Being the very well-paid performatively crazy asshole in a room full of normies who continually clutch their pearls at your antics.

Do you know what isn’t really any fun at all?

Being the performatively crazy asshole in a room full of performatively crazy assholes, each of whom stands to acquire more money, power, and fame the more bugfuck unearthly gibbering lunacy they spout in the direction of the Chief Clown of the Evil Clown Car, who just loves getting sprayed with a firehose of madness on the daily.

When the Jewish Space Laser lady is having to compete—AND LOSING—for the coveted position of the loudest, most uncouth, most unqualified violently fascist maniac in a massive shrieking, writhing pit of unqualified violently fascist maniacs?

Aw. You guys! She has the Sad! She has to actually work instead of just brain-barfing up whatever hot liquid poison she found on 4Chan and calling that policy. Working SUCKS! Especially when you don’t get any credit for all your hard grinding for the master. When he doesn’t even see what you do for him. How you abase yourself. How you sacrifice every part of a normal life you ever valued. When you lay yourself naked on the altar of Satan for the pleasure of His Name and Satan himself looks upon you for just an awkwardly long time before intoning:

Nah.

Poor baby bear! That must suck.

Wasn’t it just so much more fun when any time she randomly mouth-sharted in the direction of a recording device it made the national news and went viral on all the totally-not-astroturfed social medias? Man, what a great gig. I wish I could make millions not doing my job while feeding narcissistic sociopaths the half-digested remains of KiwiFarms like the hideous All-Mother of a Thousand Seagull-Young.

But now?

Lil’ Templeton the Rat isn’t getting any attention. She doesn’t get to rip words she barely understands out of the internet and hand them to someone way smarter to actually make something out of these days. She actually has no voice at all in this administration, and Baby’s First Bratz Doll really thought she would, for the same reason, apparently, FUCKING WAY TOO MUCH OF AMERICA thought they would.

1. When Trump hates the precise kind of human I am (eg a woman, a poor, brown, gay, and/or literally everyone who isn’t him), my big snuggly protective bear daddy doesn’t mean me! I’m special!

2. When Trump specifically looks me in the eye, tell me he fucking despises me, personally, and says no to all my dreams, I still won’t take any actual action against him, even words. Because words can hurt, y’all!

3. It’s gonna be basically like the first time when a bunch of crumbling establishment dinosaurs were running things and I’ll still skate by.

Oh no, my lady! This time, everyone in the administration is an unqualified, constantly-hallucinating, bonkers-racist/sexist/whatever-you-got Temu Renfield who can puke about locally-sourced Atlantis-flavor adrenochrome, and, so sorry for our players at home, that’s not even the current meta anymore!

So she can’t stand out. She can say the most unhinged spatial-anomaly-level battered star-shit and frankly, it’d rank like fifth in the news of the day. She’s been outgunned by Actual Vampire Peter Thiel. When a dude who controls half the internet and is just frankly and publicly acknowledged as a person who imbibes the blood of other persons to extend his own life is building his Barbarossa Dream House inside the right (I mean, what, he’s gonna choose the left?) ear of the President of the United States, where a dumb stegosaurus-toed bleach blonde bad-built butch body bitch gonna go from there?

Well. As it turns out…she did find a way to be the craziest voice in the Electric Bugaloo administration. By sounding vaguely normal and sane.

That IS the craziest thing you can do in TrumpWorld. Just sound a little normal. Get a Business Female Blow Out and wear a Serious Person Black Suit. Go on The Shows and just say regular fucking shit because out of that hellsphincter it sounds like Karl Screaming Marx come back to bless us and lift us to the light.

Also, just between us Normal People, look at those anchors looking at her exactly the way a dog looks like a cat that’s suddenly acting like a dog.

Oh but isn’t it curious how everything that ichor-waterfalls out of her fang-hole like one of the Event Horizon Latin demons makes national news again.

Funny, that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has not changed her act one fucking bit.

It’s just that sane is the new crazy in the Grand Guignol Theater of Vampires that is the second Trump Administration.

She just can’t get attention for barn owl screeching about Jewish space lasers anymore (in part because half the left would believe her) so she’s done the only thing no one else who works for Trump these days is willing to do, the single bridge too far: pretend to have normal opinions about issues, expressed normally, in normal media, which, coming from the political fucking equivalent of LARGE BLOODY MARGE sounds like soothing nature sounds because we’ve spent the last ten years non-consensually subscribed to WORLDTOILET TERROR TORNADO SOUND EFFECTS.EXE.

The report is this Clairol Zombie is semi, tepidly, tentatively, coyly saying things Bad Dad wouldn’t like if he ever heard about it, which he doesn’t because, let’s be real here, she’s not hot, for Mar-a-Lago standards of hot, and that’s all he cares about, because he told her not to run for Senate.

SO SHE ISN’T GOING TO RUN.

Oh, what a new leaf this fucking stump has turned over! This crawling sycophant, on her belly before the Serpent King. She’s a free citizen! Run, Forrest! But Papa Ubu said no, so she grovels and obeys—but on the school playground, she can’t even bring herself to whisper: Teacher sucks! she just mumbles something about the juice selection at the cafeteria and expects to be seen as a badass rebel who’s really showing true leadership now for some reason.

Yeah, nope. She’s just doing whatever she can to stand out. Not because she’s in danger of losing her office. The empty streets of brainfuck Georgia aren’t going to vote for a Democrat, heaven forfend, am I right, fellow Graboid-spawn? Because she’s addicted to the dopamine rush of being hated like pure fire by everyone who doesn’t worship every twitch of her non-Euclidean feet.

For someone who was stuck as an unemployed CrossFit greaserat (YEP) before sacrificing a lot of really nice goats who loved their babies to get elected to Congress, that dopamine rush is beyond any heroin addict’s deepest fantasies. It really didn’t matter how anyone felt about her, she was seen. She was verifiably real. The existential void of profound meaninglessness was kept at bay, as long as people were saying her name online, every second on-the-second.

Now the existential void of profound meaninglessness absolutely has Trump’s blessing to run for Senate in any state it likes, as long as it’s cool being the little spoon in the ruins of the White House every night. But Margie doesn’t.

Don’t listen to this hoof-brained labubu hanging off the right’s rear-view mirror. Don’t give her the curious-dog look. She is a creature of social media, farming engagement like the oozing algorithm-incarnate she longs to be.

Miss Marjorie’s just finding out what all conservative women (and, on a long enough timeline, men, too) find out: once they’re done using you to hurt everyone like you, you never existed.

OMG LOOK! I got through all that without saying the word Nazi!

She’s a Nazi, though. She just thinks her shirt ain’t brown.

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After the straight-up saga of Velveteen’s incredible journey east, I thought you might like to have the happy ending. In case you don’t follow me on BlueSky where I’ve been uncontrollably...oh god, am I about to use the word “squeeing” for the first time in years? I suppose I am. Uncontrollably squeeing about this magical creature. Wow. I hadn’t really though about how rarely I see the word squee these days compared to ten years ago, let alone fifteen years back. That feeling sort of...retired as things got to be the way things do currently be and look like they’ll continue to be.

But what else can you do when a gorgeous absolutely stained-glass hearted anime wolf-fox is suddenly just hanging out at your feet all the time?

So yeah, it’s been a “wait, what” of a week. Days just...went somewhere. We’ve been so busy making our costumes and other Halloween House Business--AND SETTLING OUR NEW DOG INTO HER NEW HOME.

Not that she’s needed much settling. I am not exaggerating when I say Vell is the most well-behaved, gentle, loving dog I’ve been lucky enough to be around--and the most well-behaved, calm, and quiet husky I’ve ever ever heard of. I’m so used to puppies, and years of work ahead with a new one, I hardly know what to do with myself but just start teaching her new things, because she’s just no trouble whatsoever, only joy. I keep telling my sister-in-law that her dad must have been so good at training dogs because she is basically a human in a fur coat. Last night I even took her to the island bar (American Legion Post 142!) and she was sweet and peaceable and chill until the Chiefs lost, then she had an inexplicably strong number of opinions to share. In a conversational tone and volume that could never bother anyone.

I’ve never met a two year old husky I felt like I could take to a bar and actually relax myself. She can even be off leash (with some guidance, she’s still a sled dog and she always feels like runnin’) in the woods with me. THIS MAGIC DOG.

From the minute our fifth and final leg (Independent Teapot, first names redacted for privacy) brought her home and she laid down on my feet, Vell has just seamlessly made herself a part of our household. By day 3 she knew what time we leave for school in the morning. She’s chosen a spot in the house. Last night my 7 year old hugged me and she gently pawed us to let her in for a group hug--then jumped onto the pile and licked our faces silly. She’s even super respectful to the cats! Who are not respectful to her in any way, shape or form! And are LIVID with me for what I’ve done to the universe itself by allowing a dog in it!

On Friday, one of the kindergartners saw us and SCREAMED to the entire student body: ATTENTION EVERYONE! BASTIAN AND THEIR DOG ARE HERE!

And in about half a second, these kids lined up along the fence, without anyone telling them to, to have a turn petting her. As of today, Vell has started howling greetings to all “her” kids on the playground as soon as we crest the hill between our house and the school.

I mean, I’m sure she’ll misbehave at some point...oh! She did swipe a slice of cheese (aged habanero cheddar thank you very much) off my cracker when I went to get a glass of water. Not the whole thing, she just delicately de-cheesed the cracker and looked around like it was a deep and unanswerable mystery no one could ever explain. That’s the worst thing she’s done. I took her to a neighbors house where they get the neighborhood dogs together to play before work in the mornings and even though the other pups were all young, thus pretty rough, and one puppy continually grabbed her face with her paws, she never so much as growled.

Also, she sings. Well, she’s a husky, obviously she sings. But she only sings to songs she likes, and so far...how do I make anyone on the internet believe that the dog that came to me by chance, tragedy, and magic, who I did not raise or influence at all, loves Rocky Horror and sings along to every. single. song.

The Childe is over the moon in love. I came downstairs a few mornings ago to them petting her gently and whispering: “You are precious as a diamond, more good than good. The most appreciated dog in the whole world.” They’ve been singing a lot of This Is Velveteen to the tune of This Is Halloween as well.

Obviously, we are just beside ourselves with love for this gorgeous mythical beast who lives with us now. There’s times when you just feel so lucky--and I thought I felt lucky that five wonderful people were willing to drop everything and help this dog. I had no idea what a special girl she really was. Every driver said they wished they could keep her--I almost can’t believe we get to.

We are so lucky.

And we’re helping her get over all she’s been through. She’s still grieving. The very first day I walked her to school, she saw one of the dads with a thick plaid overcoat on. Vell howled and bowed and whined to him. I texted my sister-in-law and asked if her dad wore a lot of plaid. She called me at once and asked why I said that. I explained, and she said that her dad always wore this particular plaid overcoat because the cancer treatments left him cold all the time. Little things like that come up and it breaks my heart. She hates going upstairs and avoids it if she can...because her dad had a one-story, no stairs. We’re trying to soothe her as much as she soothes us and convince her that she gets to stay with us forever.

I told my kid that if we’re lucky and take good care of her, she could easily still be around when they graduate high school. This will be who Bastian always remembers as the dog they had growing up. Dogs are funny like that. If you’re a dog person, and I am, they curl up around eras in your life. 10-15 years. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And there’s no remembering those years without the shaggy friends who were your constant shadows. I moved to the island where I live 17 years ago Saturday. I moved here with two dogs, both of which are buried on the island. They were my heart in furry form, and Vell isn’t going to be any different, I can tell. She’s our girl. For always.

There is still some magic in this world. We make it, together, when we care about things outside ourselves just a little more than necessary. When we see how big small things can be. When we try more than we have to. Magic was always small, and quiet, and always hard to pull off, that’s part of what makes it magic. And I refuse to stop believing in the good just because it’s small and quiet and hard. Just because the bad is loud and big and easy to find anywhere you look.

Some of the best things I know about are small and quiet and hard to pull off

I’m gonna try so hard for this dog. For my life and my community and my child and my people, all the little worlds I’m part of. For my family, chosen and blood, for my sister, for the man in the plaid overcoat this dog will never forget. So many people tried so hard for us. Thank you so much to the saints who got in a car (I hope we all stay in touch on the group chat! We’re family now), and thank you again so much to everyone who chipped in to cover expenses when I know all too well how tight all our belts are right now, and everyone who’s followed this saga and taken something from it, because these days, rays of light, in whatever shape they occur, are more precious than a diamond, and more good than good.

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Oh my god what a month this has been!

If you follow me on BlueSky, you may have seen what’s been happening over the last five or six days...and now that it’s really, actually happening, I want to tell you all about it in greater than 300 characters.

Also, I got COVID (again) and have been so brutally sick all month I feel like I disappeared off the face of the earth, so it’s quite understandable if that’s how it’s seemed. My lung capacity is still floating somewhere around month-old birthday balloon and standing up has become a fascinating challenge, but I’m slowly getting better.

Just in time for an old-fashioned internet miracle.

I’ve been so busy organizing the logistics of said miracle that I haven’t had time to post about it for everyone who wasn’t up at 11pm however many nights ago this started.

THIS IS THAT POST.

So my sister-in-law Amanda and I are very close, she is a wonderful human and the “in law” part stopped being a thing awhile ago. And her father died about two weeks ago. We knew he was sick, and that the end was on the horizon, but this was much sooner than expected, and there hadn’t been time to put everything in order.

And he left behind that beautiful baby up there, a 2 year old snow-white husky.

Well, sixish days ago, Amanda called to check up on me because of said falling off the earth, and we got to talking about random things. I mentioned how badly Bastian has been wanting a dog, and that I’m trying to hold out for a year because I just can’t handle training a puppy right now.

And my sister said “uh...how do you feel about huskies?”

Now, she had no way to know this, but my first dog of my own was a husky, and when she was two, a very awful landlord of mine forced me to give her up or lose my housing. I found her a wonderful family and she had a spectacular life on a literal farm, but it broke my heart to lose her.

She sent a photo, and I had such an odd feeling, one I’ve only had once before, when I first saw a photo of Lord Byron. My hindbrain just went oh that’s my dog, the way it had once thought oh that’s my cat. And she’s not a puppy. And despite being a husky, she’s a pretty chill and gentle girl. And I never got rid of most of Sage or Grimm’s things, or the dog bed and toys I had for Fiona, a border collie I was long-term dog-sitting until a few months ago, so I wouldn’t need to buy anything...

But at that moment, I really thought there was no way it would be possible. My brother’s family lives in southern Oregon, it couldn’t be further away. And according to Oregon law, if you don’t own your property, any animals found will be taken to a shelter--my sister couldn’t get there in time to claim the dog. She was on a five day hold, and that’s about all the time we had to figure it out. So the usual ways (cargo plane ride, various non-profits who relay rescues around) were either unworkable because of the needed lead time or so expensive to do on such short notice. I told her I’d look into it but I wasn’t optimistic.

I spent most of the day finding out just how much it would cost to fly her to me in any of the methods I knew of (good god) and was on the verge of calling Amanda to say I just couldn’t manage it when it occurred to me: back in the day you’d ask the internet if anyone knew another way, and someone probably would. You just don’t anymore because it feels like everything has to be politics on the social medias these days.

So late at night I explained briefly to my BlueSky followers and asked if anyone had any ideas that wouldn’t cost me Every Money.

Genuinely, I just wanted some guidance as to how people do this with rescues. I wasn’t trying to get people to solve my problems for me--I didn’t even cross-post to all the other sites I use since the Great Twitter Diaspora, that’s how much I wasn’t trying to rally anybody to my own cause. I just didn’t know what the steps I should be taking were.

I didn’t expect in any way for the Old Millennial Internet Spirit to fucking activate.

People started saying “Well, I can drive her to x if you can get her to y and cover expenses...” and a chain started forming that could almost work to get her here. Except for the middle of the country. There just didn’t seem like any way to bridge between Idaho or Montana and Minneapolis, where the next westernmost volunteer was.

Then Linkwood Anarchy Hub appeared, and said he could take her all the way from Portland to Minneapolis. Stormzand said he could pick her up at the shelter in Eugene and get her to Portland. SimonsFolly said he could take her from Minneapolis to the New York State Line. RisaWolf said she could get the pup from any NY state border to New Hampshire, and IndependentTeapot said she could bring the girl all the way home from New Hampshire.

And these amazing, kind, generous, thoughtful, beautiful human beings leapt into action so fast that that very smug-looking pup up there who clearly knows how lucky she is, left the shelter Saturday afternoon and is cruising through Idaho as I type this sentence.

(If you want to contribute to expenses, and you do not have to, everything is so tight these days, but if you want to, here is Paypal and Venmo)

And to my knowledge, I have only interacted with one of the Pawshank Redemption (credit: Stormzand) crew on a long-term basis and was following before this Incredible Journey started. They just...saw something happening and wanted to help. And love dogs. And might possibly be saints walking among us.

I genuinely can’t believe this is actually happening. I’m pretty sure Bastian doesn’t actually think we’ll have a dog next week, even though they’re excited. But I told them not to set their heart on it when I asked now they’d feel, despite wanting a border collie, about a beautiful white smallwolf. Because I didn’t know and personally doubted if we could really do it in time. So I think they’re still in “don’t get your hopes up” mode.

But the hopes don’t need to be kept down anymore. The Puppy Express has departed on its Reverse Oregon Trail journey and could be here as soon as Tuesday night.

I know it’s not much in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t solve any part of the hellscape we’re all living in right now. And of course I’m thrilled because I get a puppy, but it also filled me with so much hope. We are still, some of us, who we always were. We are still capable of small marvels and caring outlandishly.

I think it’s gotten easy to forget we used to do this all the time.

Not necessarily the internet at large, and believe me, I’m well aware the pre-algorithm internet was anything but an endless vista of peaches and sunshine, but the geek community part of the internet. Which, believe it or not, hasn’t been all of it more or less since Usenet. The bookish, SFF, community-minded people who identified as geeks, not to make money off a new demographic, but just because that’s what we were. Who used social media to make genuine human connections, to craft things and be silly and make stuff, not because of some grindset, but because they wanted to. Before the incredible waterfall of human creativity the internet allowed to come into the light of day became just more content. Before the proto-oligarchs saw what little people were doing with their free time and saw the possibility of using it as bait to lead us all into the data-gobbling joy-disposal algorithm-driven online life keeps trying to become.

There was a time that you’d see crazy stories like this on Livejournal or Facebook or Twitter really often, people going out of their way for each other. To save someone’s house or business or pet or child. To get a faceless corporation to listen to someone they were screwing. To get help and information during disasters of all kinds. To tell each other about things we loved and find others who loved them too, or who might if they heard about it. To try a new way of doing art and making delight. I’ve been part of so many of these stories, sometimes as a helper and sometimes as a person who needed help.

But as more and more of the world has needed much bigger help than any small group of kind hearts can do alone, and as corporate grey goo has spread further and further into every digital space to enshittify, monetize, and exploit genuine human connection and creativity, and as so many scams of so many kinds have crowded out real voices, it’s gotten hard to find sparks of that old internet “let’s put on a show in the old barn and save Christmas” spirit. It’s easy to be cynical, and what’s shoved into our faces by the algorithm is meant to create that cynicism, to keep us separate and alone and too anxious to look away from the data-gobbling joy-disposal that online life is becoming.

I was having coffee with a new friend in town as this was all starting to come together, and she shook her head and asked me: “How are you doing this? How is this happening?” I laughed a little. It’s been so long since I made a new friend who doesn’t know my whole history! And I explained what was happening, and why I have the kind of followers I do online, and finally said: “I don’t know, the internet used to be a different sort of place, and when it was, I was a different sort of person, who made and did a lot of things and built a little universe or two...and when you pour your soul into something for a long time, sometimes it comes back to you in strange ways...so I guess maybe somewhere deep down, that place didn’t go anywhere.” And I thought to myself: maybe that person didn’t, either.

Maybe those little universes didn’t. Maybe nothing went away. They just got older and sadder and buried by the algorithm for being insufficiently profitable. Not gone. Just sleeping.

Maybe we can just choose to have it back. In small ways. On our own terms. And the thing about small ways is that they tend to add up.

Maybe unshittification is possible.

So I know one lonely dog whose owner died doesn’t change the world. It doesn’t make anything better on a big scale. It’s just a dog and a writer and her kid struggling with everyone else. But it’s changing my world. And helping me to remember that little, small, connective actions like this is what built that online life and made anyone want to be part of it in the first place. Which is, so sadly, what made all those techbro Decepticons want to eat up all that energy and enthusiasm so they could digest it into numbers in their bank accounts.

They saw what it was worth, and have done an excellent job making us forget that.

Thank you, Puppy Express Gang, for reminding me. For being amazing. For helping my family--my sister Amanda is so relieved that not only is this good girl getting an absurdly spoiled home, but she’s staying in the family. And I hope that somehow, somewhere, in some tiny way, a part of her dad sees how many people came together to look after his dog.

Thank you all, for putting on a show in the old barn.

I am so humbled by all of this. This care. It’s the little light of Fantasia in the dark. At least, that’s how it shines to me.

I’ll end by telling you about that little wolfie’s new name. Because to me, it says all of this in one syllable.

See, I had every intention of naming my next dog Pilot, after the Brontes’ dog and the wonderful Farscape character. But I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really feel quite right for this dog.

Yesterday, as I was wrangling the Puppy Express Group Chat whilst also chatting with the bartender at the place all the islanders go to wait for the next boat. We talked about the music playing, which was prime vintage 2010 indie rock, and about the old internet. Everything I’ve been talking about. We laughed about how no one wants to admit they liked this music now, it’s too sincere and banjo-y to be cool. And, you know, not often does a Good Thing just come out of my mouth without editing and rewriting, but I said: “For a little space, between irony and despair, we were very briefly allowed to like things. We thought things were going to get better now, for about half a second.”

So we were already Deep in Feelingsville when I told him about the dog and he started sharing stories about his own childhood dog--and offhandedly mentioned The Velveteen Rabbit.

And it came to me.

Some of you may remember the story of my then-6-year-old’s reaction to The Velveteen Rabbit. Not in all my days will I ever forget it.

Before I read it to them, I warned them: “Just so you know, I love this book a lot, but the ending is super sad, okay? Just don’t want you to be shocked.”

But when we got to the end, Bastian had the biggest smile on his face. “Mom, why did you say that was a sad ending? That was the happiest ending ever!”

I stared at them. The Velveteen Rabbit devastated me as a child. I cried for hours. In my tiny mind, back then, I was the rabbit, abandoned and alone and unremembered.

“But why is it sad?” The little one who has never been abandoned said. “Everyone got what they wanted! The rabbit got to be Real, the boy didn’t die, they got to see each other again, the rabbit got to meet that AMAZING fairy and the other rabbits accepted him when they were so mean before! Where is the sad?”

Later that night, I thought about that dumb dress from the Late Modern Internet. The one that some people saw as black and blue and some saw as white and gold and they’d all go to the mat for the colors they perceived. And the thing was, if you remember, that if you looked long and hard enough, or switched your angle on it in just the right way, you could see the other color, but it was almost impossible to switch back once you’d done it.

And for me, The Velveteen Rabbit will never be black and blue again. It will always be joyful gold. Everyone got what they wanted. And they did, at that. It doesn’t escape me that this dog could easily still be with us when Bastian graduates high school. That we’ll look back and say: wow, remember when all those people crossed the continent to bring her to us? Remember when you loved The Velveteen Rabbit?

God, what a story. And stories are all there is. Moments and stories add up to a life.

I bought my child a necklace made from the illustration of the fairy in the book. I put it around their neck and said: “I got you this so that you never forget that the way you see things is precious and unique. Sometimes in this world it’s hard to hold onto that, to hold onto such a big heart when everyone is telling you to make it smaller. But the way one person sees things can change everything. Can even change sadness into happiness.”

This is Vel. Short for Velveteen. Because if you look at something a little differently, something you really thought you knew and understood, and try to remember believing in things and in people, just one little shift can change sadness into happiness.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this breath of magic and connection blowing some light under the door in this dark, uncertain time. I will never forget this. Neither should you.

It’s all just us. The internet, the world. It’s just us, and if we choose to, in the tiniest ways, we can choose to keep our focus on each other instead of wherever it is the money men want us to look this week.

Maybe sometimes the tiny ways are all we have. Just because they’re tiny doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

Tiny adds up.

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I loved roller coasters when I was a kid. And I mean loved. What’s not to be completely fucking hyped about when you’re nine? Adrenaline, loud noises, crazy lights and music, speed, and the weird awesomeness of feeling like you’re in danger while knowing you’re actually totally safe, you paid money to ride this ride, and your mom is waiting outside the gate with your funnel cake and a shitty toy from the fishing game.

As an adult, while my brain still thinks FUCK YEAH LET’S DO THE DEVIL’S COLON, my body now knows full well how it feels to be seriously injured, knows it’s mortal and machines are fallible, and it’s no longer a blithe and bonny idiot made of bubblegum, stem cells, and superballs concerning the answer to the equation of speed + gravity + fragile sack of talking blood. So I always think I want to, and then when the ride tips over into freefall my stomach tenses up so hard for the impact it’s sure is coming that it physically hurts. I still go. Obviously. My kid-self internalized roller coasters are awesome don’t be a wimp just as hard as my grown-up self has internalized but I do not wish to ow.

But it’s not the same.

And more importantly, my love of roller coaster was always firmly rooted in the idea that I wanted to ride the ride. The restraints were for my safety, I had cleared the height requirement, we came to the carnival on purpose to do this, and if I chickened out while waiting in line, I could just leave and go pet a goat or something.

But now we’re all strapped into Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s janky fucking 19th century Imperialism-a-Whirl, the restraints are to keep us from doing anything about what’s about to happen to us, nobody is tall enough to handle this shit, and if we don’t want to do this anymore because the loop-de-loop track is clearly shredded, shooting sparks into a pile of dry leaves, and ends in a fifty foot drop into a puddle of spent nuclear fuel, well, too fucking bad for us, the operator sold the control board and drank a fifth of Dr. Prepper’s: Supermeth Splash.

These fucking people.

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It’s been a fantastic 24 hours, I’ll tell you what.

When I put the previous essay, on Charlie Kirk’s shooting (because what else are we even allowed to talk about right now) under the subscription paywall, I felt bad. I always want to give everything away for free, but do enjoy eating and sleeping under a roof, and this time, more than anything else, I was already feeling a bit weird about the utter Cujo-ness of the right leaping tall buildings to seize their Reichstag moment.

Turns out, it’s both a good thing I did, and also didn’t really matter anyway, because speaking at all was enough.

On Friday night, when a tsunami of unhinged violent Purge-hooligan shit came flying at me on X, a site I barely use except to crosspost the occasional quip or promote a new piece of work, I genuinely thought it was because of what I’d posted an hour before, which was this: White on white crime is a tragic epidemic sweeping the country. How many more will we lose to white gang violence and rightwing turf wars?It’s the culture, you know. These white celebrities glamorize a criminal lifestyle & young inner-suburb kids get trapped in the school-to-influencer pipeline.

And I sighed, and chuckled, a little ruefully, because of course that riled them up, the people who cry IT’S JUST A JOKE when their lord and savior tells a reporter about a new group of people he wants to murder can’t recognize satire even when it’s wearing an oversized sombrero with SATIRE stitched on it in neon green fuzzy yarn.

Yeah…so that wasn’t it.

Somehow.

What had happened was—and I say this with an exhaustion no simile can encompass—Mr. Elon Musk his own full-chested self quote-tweeted someone compiling a list of “Microsoft employees” who had “celebrated” Kirk’s death to be marked for retribution.

And my name was right there in the screenshot.

Now, first of all, was that screenshot, or literally anything I’ve said on the topic, celebrating anything? Absolutely fucking not.

It was a screenshot of Andrew Tate calling for Civil War (because that’s perfectly all right) and a comment on influencers freaking out as CEOs did post-Luigi, and a link to the Charles In Charge, Apparently essay right here on Substack. An essay that they definitely didn’t fucking read, because it was under a paywall, so I know exactly who the new folks who got a subscription to read it are (hi guys!) and I don’t think any of the Garbagetown treehouse kids are…uh…regular visitors to FUCKING CLOWNTOWN. We are garbage, not clowns. Sheesh!

Second…do I work for Microsoft? Well, I guess, sort of, if you’ve warmed up and you’re ready for a stretch?

I’m a freelance writer. I have been for 22 years. I’ve worked for all kinds of people—that’s how freelancing works. I don’t work for Microsoft per se, but I have written three short stories, in three years, for World of Warcraft, and thus, Blizzard.

You see? It all becomes clear. Gamergate, as, I suppose, was always inevitable, never left our basement, psychologically speaking. I touched a game or two while being a woman, so I am very fun to try to carve up online. The list started as Blizzard employees (still not an employee) and I guess someone thought that didn’t sounds serious enough.

So long story short, I’ve received a number of threats in the last 24 hours, ranging from hopeful prayers for my personal ruination and “firing” from “Microsoft” to full on death threats. Ooh, and I’ve been called a cunt more in 24 hours than ever before!

I’m a big girl, I’ve been on the internet longer than 22 years, and you know that means I’ve had my share of death threats, rape threats, every kind of threat. I’m used to it.

But this has been…unsettling. X is a much darker place than Twitter was, and I don’t even just mean the amount of porn that poured in with the threats. And what’s happening right now, where the right is calling for wholesale slaughter of any and all liberals and having zero repercussions, but people are being fired for being insufficiently sad about Charlie Kirk on Al Gore’s internet, is through the fucking looking glass, even for America, which hasn’t ever really seen the proper side of the looking glass to begin with.

I’m a tough bitch, but I’ve been shakier than I’d like over the last day.

Has Musk deleted the tweet? No, but the person he was quote tweeting has. Microsoft tweeted that they were taking it seriously and investigating. Have I been “fired”? Not yet, and I can’t be, because again, I’m not an employee, though I certainly could lose my contract. Am I particularly worried about that happening? I’d rather not lose a contract, but if my work for Warcraft was a huge part of how I feed my kid I’d probably…you know…have worked for them a little more.

Am I worried I’m going to be killed, or that the people tagging in the FBI to hit the alarums over a link to a Substack essay that, once again, they definitely didn’t read because it was under a paywall? Not…really? They’d have to take a boat and that’s too hard even for appliance repairfolk out here. And these people clearly have no idea who I am or what I do and just think I’m some random Microsoft DEI hire because they’re all gloating about how fired I’m going to be come Monday, which, even if it happens, isn’t exactly going to devastate my life the way they hope.

But it sure throws me for several recursive loops. I guess I thought that paywall kept me a little safer than it does. Remember how I always “joke” that I do it so you have to pay me if you want to call me a stupid bitch and tell me you’re going to strangle me? Much like everything a Republican says, it’s not so much a joke as the dead-ass truth with no punchline. And I guess just being a woman and talking is enough, they do not in any way have to hear what I say to want me gone.

There’s more but I don’t feel like looking at their dumb jerkoff fantasies anymore. If someone can, without a flicker of dissonance, call me a terrorist while literally trying to terrorize me into silence, get me “fired,” and dox me to groypers because they don’t like what they imagine I must have said…well. What is there to say?

It’s died down somewhat. I haven’t engaged or apologized, because that’s how we do now. We’ll see what happens Monday, I guess. We’ll see what happens now that the shooter, shockingly, turned out to be a white straight right wing terminally online weirdo sheriff’s son who hated Kirk for not being Nazi enough.

In the meantime, I just feel very quiet and anxious. Not as anxious for me as I am for all of us. I’m not sure it matters who Tyler Robinson is (and he’s not dead, at some point people will just…ask him) when the right went so mask-off so quickly and elected officials were publicly tweeting about killing all Democrats. Half the nation. More than half, as there’s more registered Dems than GOP. Because they imagined in their dreams that one liberal killed a podcaster.

They aren’t going to put that rabbit back in the hat. Mostly because they don’t want to, and when I said no one was as excited about Kirk’s death as MAGA, I wasn’t fucking wrong, was I? They’re celebrating. We’re terrified.

This is just…what celebrations look like to Nazis.

They didn’t even read it. But I need to die. I simply cannot get my head around that. I could’ve said Charlie Kirk was my very best friend under that paywall. They have no idea. I’m used to being blasted into space for daring to speak—but usually the blasters do actually know what they’re mad about. No longer necessary, it seems. And that is where we are now. I don’t see a lot of routes back.

Does that means I’m going to stop yelling about fascism? No, and go fuck yourself, fascists. I started this Substack specifically to have a place to vent about all this that was separate from the positivity I try to bring to the world in the rest of my work. And they’re not done being murderous psychotic hypocritical assholes with the emotional regulation of an electrocuted cat in heat, so I’m not done calling them out.

Back in the time known as the day, if you weren’t getting a death threat every once in awhile, you were barely using the internet. But no one used their real names, so they usually stayed at about the volume and efficacy of a fart in the wind.

But I’ll tell ya. Being told how you’ll die does hit a little different when you have a small child.

So unless the goldfish use their typical attention span and forget about this in a week, I’ll likely put the next essay under a prophylactic paywall as well, just until they forget my name. And how fat and ugly I am. It didn’t stop it, but it did remove a lot of ammo, and I feel safer that way, just for the moment. I do apologize. I’m not even going to link to this post on the socials, I’ve had my fill of the abuse and I don’t want them to see me addressing it as some kind of victory because I noticed their lunacy.

Nevertheless, that’s about all I’m willing to give those bastards who pretty notably aren’t calling Nick Fuentes a cunt. I’m not going anywhere. You can’t be fired from being yourself. At least not yet.

Wouldn’t it be cool if that were funny?

For now, I’ll leave you with the ray of hilarious hope that was the most recent piece of poo flung at me on that nasty smear of a website. Because, baby, you go right ahead. I love that for you! In fact, I invite all your friends, every single conservative in the world, to do the same. Royalties is royalties no matter what you do with it. Please do go ahead with your powerful, manly, devastating plan to pay me for your piss-baby tantrum.

Keep biting those boots, friends. We still have each other.

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Let’s get this out of the way: Charlie Kirk was shot last night while specifically talking about, and, as usual, not giving a shit about, gun violence. Yes, I’ve seen the video. No, I’m not a monster, I was shocked, and disturbed, and still am.

See, but then five fucking minutes passed.

I find it just terribly interesting that within minutes of that shot being fired, all I saw anywhere online was a tsunami of scolding about “the left’s” reaction. Stop celebrating! Show empathy! This is a national tragedy you MUST feel deeply about! You can’t make jokes or not care! IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU CARE. (Just let us hide the leftover balloons and streamers from Melissa and Mark Hortman getting assassinated two months ago super quick.)

I swear to whatever gods get it done for you the word empathy was suddenly everywhere.

I saw thousands of words of this before I saw one word of anyone “celebrating,” which consisted of…mostly posting Kirk’s own words about not giving a shit about gun violence, hating empathy, expressing fear about the right’s retaliation, and then conspicuously moving on to other topics.

DAMN, THE LEFT SURE KNOWS HOW TO PARTY.

In the cold light of the next damned day? Apparently Charlie Kirk was the most impactful and significant political figure in America today! Who knew? And despite it being 9-fucking-11, a day the right has turned into its own personal Anger Holiday, the only thing to be mourned or spoken of is…this guy, who was an influencer yesterday and today, I’m informed, is the most beautiful, illuminated pinnacle of the American intellect.

Frankly, over the last fourteen hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that absolutely no one is as excited about celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death as MAGA.

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While I was writing about the beautiful dream of Trump probably dying and how the media is handling it, which is to say barely touching it and enjoying a refreshing cool drink on the porch while still basking in the dopamine jacuzzi they filled to the brim by having hounded a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign for much less hyenashit insane behavior; I wrote a line, then kept moving it down the essay hoping to find a space to explore the idea…until I ran out of room entirely.

But that’s what the follow-up posts are for!

So here goes.

The line was this: legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are no the presumed audience of the fourth estate.

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GOOOOOD MOOOOORNING, VALE OF TEARS!

Things are going great, aren’t they? All those problems we were having, the problems that were so bad, so intolerably painful, so fucking urgent we just HAD to turn to Insane Clown Fascism because there was no time to lose waiting for actual policy to work, those problems are all gone now, right? Inflation, crumbling infrastructure, cost of living, wages and the jobs that hate them, Gaza, Ukraine, broken immigration system, broking electoral system, broken media, broken real estate market, broken educational system, broken healthcare system, inflation again, AI creep, homelessness, mass shootings, the Epstein files, gas prices, ancient and crumbling husk of a President, and also inflation?

All fixed, right?

No? Absolutely all of that is way, way worse and no one is even working on any of it, nor will they ever? It’s just been nine months of arresting and torturing random people, yelling fucking cartoon nonsense at microphones, cancelling things that are so basic and fundamental ten years ago hardly anyone realized you could get rid of them, like vaccines and rights, various incredibly famous people clearly and obviously stealing huge sacks of money and data then tip-toeing off with a dramatic shhhh like old-timey bandits, and people wandering through it all in a daze while the media just COMFORTABLY FUCKING RETIRES FROM BEING A THING I GUESS?

Oh, man, that’s so fucking crazy, because I was repeatedly told, by people of all socio-political-economic persuasions, that these issues were so disastrous and so pressing we simply could not elect anyone but…the guy whose only plan for anything is to lower his own taxes, then murder an immigrant.

And I feel like…oh, gosh, it’s just so hard to remember, but I feel like the idea that the President was dummy old, couldn’t speak right, and might secretly be dying was a huge deal a year ago. And also a few months ago. And also Jake Tapper is still yelling at random passers-by about it—because not so very long ago, the age and health of the President of the United States was so cosmically fucking important a household-name national newscaster kicked his own entire career down a well about it, well after that guy wasn’t even President anymore.

Oh well, at least you guys over there festering on the right got your super duper massively important issues addressed by Big Daddy, right? You got Disney to only make exclusively and only Big Strong White Boy Uber Alles media, trans kids banned from JV softball in all 50 states, all women executively ordered to stop excelling and do a pregnant with the nearest 8chan shitposter, and the Epstein files released for all to see, right?

Oh, none of those, either, really?

SO WEIRD.

It’s almost like this whole Ten Years at Donnie’s ride through the fucking Wonka Tunnel of Nightmares wasn’t about anything real whatsoever, apart from securing the freedom to act like a total dick to everyone at all times, which we already had. At least nothing philosophical, ethical, moral, or even particularly political.

Now don’t get me wrong, Project 2025 is a thing and it has been for a lot longer than it’s had a name. Progress has been made on the “what happens if we just take everyone’s rights away?” front. Shit has been going down, and it is terrible, reeking, authoritarian, bugfuck bonkers shit.

Look, if I said today the administration announced it’s banning all vaccines because vaccines are gay wokeism, you wouldn’t immediately dismiss that at all. You might not even fact-check me. And there’s a whole strain of conspiracy theory that definitely does insist vaccines make you gay and trans, and since the country is by and large being run according to the contents of early internet chain emails and misspelled grandpa memes, that’s not even a particularly wild possibility. Certainly not for RFK (the F stands for fucking brain worms!) who looks and behaves like a mini-Thanos just super excited to snap them kids.

But most of it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump himself. You know he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of that (other than mild interest in the murder parts) He clearly cares most about the monumental task of spray-painting every available surface with Home Depot brand metallic “gold.”

And he’s, you know, pretty obviously dying.

Or at least having some kind of allergic reaction to existence. Seriously, this guy is stumbling around puffed up like a demonic shar-pei that ate several thousand bees and his entire government keeps growling shut the fuck up he’s fine and anyway the bees were Democrats we’ve already begun construction on Bee Buchenwald and yes we are officially calling it that you’re a Democrat bee aren’t you, admit it, admit it! at anyone who so much as peruses the Get Well card section at CVS too long, except for J.D. Vance doing the chicken dance on camera and yelling I’m feeling fantastic, thanks! every time he does the stupid wing-flap.

Truly, you have done a spectacular job at life if the entire world starts putting champagne on ice and warming up the fireworks because you didn’t post on social media for a few days.

But something bothers me about how this is all going down—other than the 3-5 obvious things.

Is Trump actually at death’s door? Probably? Maybe? He looks like Violet Beauregard stuffed into a half-inflated rubber mask of James Austin Johnson, but evil just loves not dying when it should. Presidents have access to whatever Roswell-derived super serum medicine any lab could dream up, so he could go on for years as a vaguely human-shaped Franzia hooch-bag full of steroids, statins, stem cells, and probably adrenochrome, given the absolute state of GOP projection, that wobbles alarmingly whenever lightly grazed. (SCOTUS would decide that said wobbles constitute legally-binding Executive Orders, 6-3.)

Maybe that’s just what an old overfed vampire looks like past a certain point.

What bothers me is that if the last newsweek had happened in 2019, we’d know.

The first Trump administration was a constantly-rotating zoo display of monsters, to be sure. But they were, by and large, known monsters, who’d monstered their way through previous administrations monstrously, and rolled up their sleeves to kick it up a lil’ notch. They were creatures, but creatures of a long-standing system, invested in that system, with half an eye on where they’d stand in that system in the After Times. I mean, yeah, it’d be totally awesome if they could bring the whole thing down and crown themselves Kings of Eternity, but every step down from that goal was also a win, so they focused on partying while the party was hot.

Which is why they all leaked like fucking colanders.

They wrote tell-all books, they placed blind items, they whispered national secrets to anyone who even faintly smelled of social media clout. And as soon as they were fired, which was all the fucking time, they couldn’t repress their giggles about what an idiotic asshole Large Marge truly was for a second before running to blab it all to the first camera they could find. To the point that regular human people, neither part of the media nor the government, knew about a lot of things before they happened, things it’s literally insane for everyday citizens to know about, like January 6th.

Back a century or two ago when Trump was shot, I dismissed the various conspiracy theories about it being staged because I couldn’t believe a scheme that big wouldn’t instantly spew leaks like a football field full of sprinklers. None of them could keep a secret, surely we’d hear whispers the way we always did about everything.

But we didn’t. So it must have been real.

Oh and by the way, it’s sheerly astonishing how we’ve just helplessly accepted this empty-tabled no-chairs potluck of dork-ass potato-water-blooded failsons corralling us into a corner where we cannot even allow ourselves to consider any idea that remotely resembles a conspiracy theory, even when CONSPIRACIES SO MELODRAMATICALLY BLATANT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN IS OPENLY GIGGLING ABOUT DOING BIG CRIMES ON LIVE TV WHILST HIGH AS A CUMULUS CLOUD IN THE OVAL OFFICE are happening right in front of us, with only the most half-hearted attempts to hide them behind THE OCCASIONAL FUCKING HALF-DEAD POTTED PLANT. The President of the United States has repeatedly said Elon Musk secured the election for him with those gosh-dang computers he’s so good at and we just sigh and tell ourselves we can’t think about it or we’re just like them. Trump constantly panics, incredibly loudly, about the Epstein Files and hysterically screeches for people to forget they exist at least once a week, but we’ve voluntarily forbidden ourselves to even entertain the thought that, since he must know his base can’t stop slobbering all over him for longer than five seconds about anything, and everyone already knows he likes young girls, maybe there’s more to this than him being one of many customers. So now we just live like this, refusing to consider that several conspiracies might be underway from the exact kind of people who love doing conspiracies, and have done them before, over and over again, is a required demonstration of not being a fascist. So much so that I’ve almost deleted this paragraph three times because I don’t want to sound like those loose pinballs, either. FANTASTIC WORK ALL AROUND.

Anyway, the point is, that was my first tiny little alarm-bell ringing in the back of my head. It’s not 2019 anymore. It’s the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and this administration isn’t like the last one. Nobody’s been fired yet. I doubt they’re going to be. The people working for Trump Two: Apocalyptic Boogaloo mostly don’t have any real interest in government at all, unless you thought Linda McMahon just really passionately cared about education. For the most part, they don’t come from previous administrations. They’re not keeping their eye on a future in which the system goes on. They’re unearthly-rich tech oligarchs who are betting on AI removing the need for the masses entirely and parentless nineteen year olds named Big Balls and 80s celebrities trying out wildly off-label uses and a festive assortment of nepobabies and just Stephen Miller again because I guess he’s the squirrel-flaying little boy whose Christmas wish created this timeline in the first place or fucking something.

They don’t leak. Because they’re in this for themselves, not America or the GOP or even Trump specifically, except as the car the clowns came in. They’re all on their own individual grift and/or crusade for whatever (evil) cause they (evilly) dreamed about one time at (evil) band camp and felt a new tingly sensation suffusing their souls, which was all the evil.

Last time around, Trump was an unexpected limo appearing out of nowhere to pick up the hitch hikers of the old Republican party and get them to the church on time just when they thought they might have to change. The limo was rented, payments past-due, the muffler was barely holding on, and the floor was covered old stains everyone knew not to ask about, but no one really knew that yet, so they called it the best and most beautiful car ever and off they went.

This time, Trump is a crumbling meth-camper up on cinderblocks with a racial slur spray-painted on the side that will never move again but keeps pumping out product that keeps the addicts coming back: power, pain, and profit.

And I’ve started to wonder if the new Rogues’ Gallery knew it the whole time. That this was less an election than the handshake on a deal.

Because what’s happened here is REALLY odd. Trump is a storebrand freezer bag full of id-ichor, but he is actually the President of the United States, and the White House let rumors that he was fucking dead light up the planet for days before posting a hilariously hamfisted, half-assed, zero effort proof of life photo that made him look, somehow, more dead despite technically standing upright.

If you or I didn’t post on social media for a few days, and people started seriously speculating that we’d DIED, most of us would immediately log on and say we were fine, stop being weird. And the Trump we all know and hate would absolutely respond to any kind of rumor that he was anything less than the star of the new Superman franchise with a full-court media-barf of swaggering, pustulant Garbage Pail Kid villain-monologuing.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened, really. Other than things that made it worse, like clips of Trump whimpering about going to heaven and Vance volunteering that he was hyped to do Trump’s job, which, not for nothing, but Pence would never. Why, he’d rather actually have sex with his wife! And if by some chance his room-temperature water got spiked, there would’ve been severe consequences once Pizza the Hut heard about it.

But there weren’t.

It might’ve only been a few days, but that’s SUCH a long time for the Trump administration to let us laugh and rejoice at the prospect of his death. We all know they don’t care about the national security problems with that, but the psychological problems should’ve sparked some kind of response other than “nothing to see, it’s whatever” then “meh, here’s a shitty picture,” if Trump being active, in charge, or alive at all mattered to any of the people he brung to the ball.

The passivity of their side of it is genuinely remarkable. And I don’t think it’s about a distraction from Epstein or anything else, because Trump would never agree to look this weak, no matter how advantageous it might be. He hasn’t even done anything to punish us for openly cheering for his death for days on end. Anything he wasn’t already doing, anyway.

Then again, remarkable passivity seems to be a catching sickness. It would seem to be the motto of the era. It’s almost impossible to believe this quiet, unconcerned media is the same one that utterly detonated over Biden’s debate and continue to throw out wild theories about him even now. But the media is just…fine now. Fine with all of it. With their jobs being boiled down to copy-pasting social media posts for however long it takes for their bosses to figure out how to use ChatGPT and the President zombie-walking across the White House roof looking like RFK’s dead, decapitated whale isn’t even interesting enough to investigate.

If Biden, at any point, looked anything close to what Trump looks right now today, the uproar would blow out your fucking eardrums.

Instead, it’s already out of the news cycle.

Something isn’t right here, but not the way it hasn’t been right for a long time. Either he really is Reaper-adjacent or there’s some other reason he is or will be neutered enough that his own government (and their cute little three-legged rescue media) is acting like whether he lives or dies is none of our business, and barely theirs.

Look, I doubt he’s gone any time soon. I’m sure they’ll pump him full of orphan’s tears or whatever as long as possible. But it’s either bad enough that no one’s talking, or it doesn’t matter enough for anyone to feel like they have to talk.

That deal I was talking about? NOT TO SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT I wonder if, beyond the ego-wound of losing the last election, this entire downfall of America was a handshake between an already-dying old man who needed to keep his secrets secret, and a dozen different (evil) agendas crammed into an Amazon.com trenchcoat, who all knew that as long as the meth-camper crashed directly into the White House, it didn’t matter whether the driver lived. They weren’t going camping anyway. They never considered any of those problems up top, or any problems at all. They just wanted to get together with their internet buddies and steal everything, hurt some people, and have a go at forcing a future even they don’t want, but fancy they’d enjoy watching from afar.

And you know, much like those gay woke vaccines , now that I type it out, that doesn’t even seem like much of a leap.

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I know, I know. I’m so sorry, guys.

It’s been a real fuckwit of a summer, and between no childcare, a novel deadline, home repair catastrophes, and a bunch of life drama, I've done an insanely bad job with the whole regular upddating thing.

BUT!

The novel is DONE. School has STARTED. The house is STILL STANDING. And peace has returned to my little world. I mean, except for the entire lake of flaming sewage that is my nation and many, many parts of the world. EXCEPT FOR THAT HA HA THINGS ARE FINE.

So this is just a note to let you know I’m not dead (awkward unpleasant proofs of life are SO HOT RIGHT NOW), and I’ll be actually corralling my shit and not letting things slide slowly into the sea so much from now on, starting with a new piece here tomorrow, and every two weeks after that.

AFTER ALL, IT’S ALL STILL FUCKING GARBAGE OUT THERE, ISN’T IT?

See you on the flipside, faithful Garbagetowners. Thanks for sticking around.

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