The act of a woman opening her mouth with volume and assured force, often in complaint, is coded in our minds as ugly.

Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger

I’m so sick of all of it, and I know you are, too. I don’t know of any way to process it other than through words because I’m not the murderess type. I can think and then write out things like plucking out eyeballs or slicing off smirks and I’m talking fingers and hands. I don’t need tools, just my body or parts of it. They don’t need tools either, even though they do love the tools. The swords, the battering rams, the cannons, the guns, the bombs, the fighter jets. They’ve got parts of their bodies that can do the damage fists, fingers, dicks, and they use them all the time. And when they use their bodies to drug and rape a drunk girl for hours and hours and egg one another on and when they use their words to degrade and they stand around amongst each other and no one says anything at all? No one does anything at all? They might chuckle a tad uncomfortably when a “great comedian” makes some joke about the nasty smell of women’s vaginas They might stroll along with or even vote for one of them who boasts of grabbing them by the pussy because he can? They might fly a luxury plane filled with them. Their passengers are intent on visiting luxury islands to rape children and they know it. They. Them. Countless numbers of them exist in literature as heroes and countless want to be heroes (and, really, who doesn’t) and countless numbers of them want to protect their wives, their girlfriends, their mothers, their daughters. They say that, they aspire to that, their intentions may be that. It’s weird, though, because, very simply, very basically, they want to protect their wives, their girlfriends, their mothers, their daughters from — well — them. Their is no accountability for them because they do not hold each other accountable. I don’t want to sit across my table like I did today from a sixteen year old girl who tells me she knows of several of them who’ve “gotten away with it,” who are supported by the powers that be, whether those powers are parents, friends, institutions. I don’t want to hear not all of them. I don’t want to hear anything at all, actually. I don’t want to say it doesn’t surprise me.

I want to stay shocked and disgusted and angry. Furious.

I want to be very very ugly.

My father recently sent me an envelope with old photos in it and a few letters that I’d written to my mother and him when I was in college. I am fascinated by these iterations of my former self or — rather — my self, the same as now, I think. I don’t know what to do with it all, though. I absolutely do not want to archive them digitally because I love the way they look and feel in my hands. I am not ready to “let them go” as they’re not like clothes or jewelry or even books that once they’re out of sight, they’re out of mind. The photos and hand-written letters are like talismans to the past, to myself and to mystery.

Someone asked me to make a list of my top fifteen novels — the ones that easily came to mind because obviously there are many that I’ve forgotten, many that were favorites or blew me away when I read them but are elusive. Fish, darting through murk. So many novels, so much transporting — I honored these because of their insistence to be included, but I’m not sure I could even tell you what some of them are about, their plots and characters long gone even as who I was when I read them and how I felt while reading them are right there, right here, hold on a second, a conjuring. I added three formative short stories, too.

Top Fifteen Favorite Novels and Three Short Stories (in no particular order except the first, as it's always the first)

1.	To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2.	The Waves by Virginia Woolf
3.	Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4.	Middlemarch by George Eliot
5.	Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
6.	The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7.	Beloved by Toni Morrison
8.	The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett
9.	Half Magic by Edward Eager
10.	Machine Dreams by Jayne Ann Phillips
11.	Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
12.	The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
13.	The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
14.	A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
15.	Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
16.  "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
17.  "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed-Onk" by      Lorrie Moore
18.  "The Dead" by James Joyce

What I’m reading now:

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (I’ve enrolled in the brilliant Garth Greenwell’s Henry James course and will be reading nearly all of his writing this year!),

Voices of Thunder: Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century by Naomi Baker

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy

Lots and lots of poetry in another class called Poetry Craft Talks with poet Ellen Bass

What I’m reading with students (I teach in a school with a one-to-one model, and it’s honestly the best job I’ve ever had as I get to talk about books and poetry all day long with funny, brilliant and beautiful young people in middle and high school)

Jane Eyre (Bronte), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), The Things They Carried (O’Brien), Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies (Fawcett), My Side of the Mountain (George), No Country for Old Men (McCarthy), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson), Love Medicine (Erdrich), The Door (Szabo), In Cold Blood (Capote), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), and Just Kids (Smith)

Favorite bit of poetry that I heard today read by the poet himself

The world is inscribed
with beauty, at the cost
of atrocious pain, and springtime
breaking open is proof.

from "Hurt Opens" by Li-Young Lee, The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton & Co., 2024)

Reader, what’s up in your world? What are you reading or doing? How are you staying sane when everything in our country (if you’re American) is dumb when it isn’t terrifying? Have you seen the series Furious? I don’t think there’s a better word to describe a lot of our collective angst than furious, except maybe simmering. I’ve found another painting of the Annunication that I haven’t seen before. She’s ready, resigned.

Harpocrates (Ancient Greek: Ἁρποκράτης, Phoenician: 𐤇𐤓𐤐𐤊𐤓𐤈,^[1] romanized: ḥrpkrṭ, Coptic: ϩⲁⲣⲡⲟⲕⲣⲁⲧⲏⲥ harpokratēs) is the god of silence, secrets, and confidentiality, and a protector of reputations in the Hellenistic religion developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria (and also an embodiment of hope, according to Plutarch). (Wikipedia)

In the summer of 1985, when I was not yet 22 years old and just graduated from college, I went with two friends to Europe for a couple of months. We bought a Eurail pass for less than $200 and traveled with backpacks through Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy and France. I separated from my friends in Paris, and while they traveled back to the US, I stayed and traveled by myself for a few more weeks, making my way eventually to Spain to meet some high school friends. I spent the solo time along the coast of France in and out of cities and little towns I can barely remember now. I spoke to very few people and relished the silence in the little rooms where I stayed, even the silence in my head. I climbed the Dune du Pilat in the Arcachon Bay area of France and remember sliding through the sand, feeling weird and alone and quiet, like some kind of traveler in a Paul Bowles novel. I was impressionable, I guess, and naive in the same way I was as a very young girl, a self-described bookworm who’s just read Jane Eyre and yearns to live in an orphanage on the moors in England instead of a suburban street in New Jersey. You’re allowed to roll your eyes. After running down that enormous sand dune (the biggest in all of Europe) in my blue dress worn thin that I wore nearly every day that summer, washed out in the sinks of pensiones and hostels and Parisian garrets, I went to an art exhibition in nearby Bordeaux and saw, for the first time, the painting Silence by Symbolist painter Odilon Redon. I was so struck by that painting and the immediate and profound peace that enveloped me. I never forgot it, really.

I was looking at Sophie tonight, and it came back to me, that memory and that painting and that peace. She was sitting in her wheelchair, getting her breathing treatment. She was gazing into space, into me, through me and I felt this pang of what? Pain? Inadequacy? Guilt? I’ve been feeling all of these over the last months years decades last few days, am wracked in silence with what? Grief perhaps a haunting grief but who the hell knows. It keeps going doesn’t it? Life. Mine hers yours. Until it doesn’t. Always the silence, though, and the eyes.

Shush. Stop talking.

I read all of the following stuff on the internets, and you can certainly search it up as my students say, but Redon’s Silence refers to Harpocrates, the Greek form of the Egyptian Horus the Child who was the son of Isis and Osiris and was often depicted as a young boy with a finger held to his mouth. Greeks and Romans later interpreted it as a sign of silence and secrecy. Plutarch then gave Harpocrates a much deeper philosophical meaning, describing him as born premature and imperfect and suggesting that he represented humanity’s incomplete understanding of divine truths. His finger to his lips therefore symbolized the need for restraint and humility when speaking about the gods and their mysteries. I guess when speaking about mysteries beyond human understanding, humility is wiser than certainty?

Like always, it’s up to me to interpret these strange synchronicities and I have a kind of drifting ability to do so even as I recognize my lack. Isis oh Isis you’re a mystical child, what drives me to you is what drives me insane.

My mind tonight has filled with silence that painting those eyes Sophie’s eyes Sophie’s silence, holder of secrets and to others the embodiment of hope.

Hap comes from the Old Norse word for "good luck," which is also the source of happen and happy.

from Merriam Webster

I got out of work early this afternoon and drove to Santa Monica to see a movie. I thought I was going to see a screening of the Jane Campion film The Piano (that I loved when it first came out), but when I got to the theater, I discovered that I was at the wrong theater and would miss the movie if I left, so I decided to see Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m glad I did. The movie made me feel even more sober than I’ve been feeling. Sober and soft. That’s how I’ve been feeling of late. Sober and soft and not as strong as I used to be physically but actually stronger emotionally. Sober, soft, strong.

Last week I went to the beach one afternoon by myself and because the surf has been wild and the riptides super crazy, I only walked out to where the waves hit my ankles, maybe my calves, but when the water went back out, my feet sank down deeper and I wasn’t too steady. I stood there for a while, wondering at the waves, the glorious Pacific waves and their revolt, I suppose, from the imposition of the warming planet (imposed upon in turn by — well — us) and at some point I was knocked backward onto my butt and then flat on my back and then the wave basically beached me, head pointed toward the beach my body gathering what I later discovered was perhaps a bucket or so of sand even in the whirls of my ears. Funny, in that hysterical way. Whatever. It was scary not because I might have drowned but because I absolutely had no agency, no power over this wave, my physical body diminished over the years and soft, pushed/dragged up the sand like a toy. A toy beached whale.

Reading Lolita in Tehran dazed me. I can’t stop thinking about women, about women all over the world. I think about us every day, every moment, sometimes. I think about men, too, and I think about misogyny and I think about all the men and I think about not all men and I think about ripping out eyeballs and I think about the people who believe a man is in charge or at least someone who man is modeled after so — basically — man, god, God. Whatever.

Whenever a piece of mail comes from LA Care (Sophie’s MediCal provider) or SSI, my heart skips a beat. I’m always prepared, I think, for some kind of disaster, or not prepared but preparing. I think it’s coming and will I have any more fight in me when it’s come. We are conditioned to look on our dependents who have disabilities and depend on services and systems to stay alive as burdens. In this country you are conditioned to look on the disabled as if in getting, they are actually taking. It’s not like this everywhere but it is like this here, in America, terrible America.

What is happening?

What has been happening?

What is still happening?

What is always happening?

Happen

Hapless

Happy

Hap

Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked.

Luke 8:33, King James Bible

I don’t know if it’s the very confusing chapter titled “Circe” in James Joyce’s Ulysses (although all the chapters in the novel are confusing, to say the least) or the constant barrage of bullshit coming from Washington, D.C., but I keep thinking about the word swine tonight and that leads me to the word Legion: And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many (Mark 5 - King James Bible). That’s always been both a strangely exciting and entirely chilling sentence to me: My name is Legion: for we are many. I’m going to get lost here before I can type it (the fish swimming through my brain so fast that I can’t quite catch them), and there is something about the word swine (no offense to pigs) that captures just so beautifully the misogynist creeps that are running The Circus right now and hallucinatory stuff in the chapter “Circe” with hallucinatory shifts in power (Bloom moving from authority to submission, etc. etc.) but again, it’s elusive this novel, utterly elusive and more than half the time I do not know what the hell is going on but the language makes it all worthwhile and I keep going (we’re on Day 48 in Ulyssesin80). My mind’s eye, though, went right to the Biblical Gadarene story (is that the correct way to say it) and Bloom becoming a groveling pig and then I started thinking about Dear Leader and The Sausage In Charge of Bombs and Testosterone, and The Smug Fake Catholic, and The Double Macho-Named Chief Kidnapper of Brown People, and The Astonishingly Tepid Leader of The Spineless 218 and the Fog Horned Turtle Leader of the Evil 53 and The Pasty Snake-faced Dead-eyed Manipulator and the Fake Argentinian Skinny Man and of course The Sausage In Charge of Money and Rockets to Mars and they are Legion and they are certainly Many and wouldn’t it be lovely if the goddess Jesus were to do Her thing and said GO and they got a little too excited, a little too hysterical and too emotional and plunged en masse over the cliff into the wine dark sea?

And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.

²⁹ And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?

³⁰ And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.

³¹ So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

³² And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

Matthew 8:28-34, King James Bible

So Jesus didn’t destroy those 2000 pigs, you know. She just freed a man from demonic possession and allowed or invited or suffered the demons to enter a herd of pigs which were then driven to distraction or even hysteria and stampeded and then plunged to their deaths over a cliff. You could even say that Jesus freed the poor men from some kind of awful spiritual oppression.

A woman can dream. And yes I said yes I will Yes.

Dear Governor Newsom,

I urgently ask you to take immediate action to preserve access to non-intoxicating, full-spectrum therapeutic hemp products for the millions of Californians who rely on them every day. For some, these products have been life-changing. For others, they have been life-saving. I support the Emergency Provision proposed to you by the Coalition for Access Now.

This is not simply a regulatory issue. It is a public health crisis in the making.

Without immediate action, families across California stand to lose access to products they depend on for seizure and pain management, daily functioning, independence, and quality of life. And the consequences will not end at our state’s borders. California has long set the standard for public policy. If access to therapeutic hemp is lost in California, it may become a blueprint for restrictions across the country and, ultimately, at the federal level. Millions of families are watching.

For countless patients and caregivers, therapeutic hemp was not the first option. It was the option they found after everything else had failed.

Parents exhausted every treatment. Veterans searched for relief. Seniors looked for a way to maintain their independence. Individuals living with chronic illness and disability spent years seeking solutions. Many finally found something that worked. These families should not be overlooked, and they should not become unintended casualties of efforts aimed at addressing intoxicating products.

Today, they are afraid.

They are afraid of losing therapies they rely on. Afraid of being forced backward after years of progress. Afraid that their voices are being drowned out by a conversation that does not reflect their reality. Afraid they may have to move away from their home state.

We respectfully ask that consumers who rely on therapeutic hemp stop being lumped together with the adult-use marijuana and the intoxicating hemp market.

These products are fundamentally different. The people who rely on them are different. And the purpose they serve is different.

Many Californians are being told to seek alternatives at licensed cannabis dispensaries. But that is not a real solution. The non-intoxicating therapeutic hemp products these families rely upon are not available in dispensaries because they are not the products dispensaries are designed to sell.

Nor are these consumers taking business away from California's regulated cannabis market. They are not choosing between therapeutic hemp and marijuana. They are choosing therapeutic hemp because it is what works for them. Preserving access to these products does not undermine state cannabis revenue - it protects a vulnerable population with unique needs that are not being met elsewhere.

There is a simple solution we are asking you to consider. California can protect consumers, uphold rigorous testing and labeling standards, prevent youth access, and crack down on intoxicating products without cutting off access to non-intoxicating therapeutic hemp products.

Governor Newsom, this moment calls for leadership. And, your compassion. We believe this was an unintended consequence.

You have the opportunity to prevent a public health crisis before it begins, to protect millions of Californians, and to send a message that families who have finally found relief will not be forgotten.

I respectfully urge you to provide immediate emergency relief and enforcement discretion while pursuing a long-term legislative and regulatory solution that preserves access to non-intoxicating, full-spectrum therapeutic hemp products.

These Californians have fought hard enough. They should not have to fight for access to the products that help them live healthier, safer, more independent lives in a state they call home.

Why This Matters

Millions of Californians rely on therapeutic hemp products for seizure management, pain management, daily functioning, independence, and quality of life. For many families, these products were not the first option, they were the option that worked when everything else failed.

Recent changes in California law have eliminated access to these products, creating what many families fear is a public health crisis in the making. Californians living with chronic illnesses and disabilities are worried about losing products they depend on every day.

For some, these products have been life-changing. For others, they have been life-saving.

What We’re Asking Governor Newsom to Do

We support the Emergency Provision proposed by the Coalition for Access Now, which would:

• Preserve access to non-intoxicating therapeutic hemp products while long-term solutions are developed

• Provide immediate emergency relief and enforcement discretion

• Maintain strong consumer protections, testing, labeling, and youth safeguards

• Distinguish therapeutic hemp products from intoxicating marijuana and intoxicating hemp products

Take Action

If you are a California resident, add your name to the letter calling on Governor Newsom to act now. Click above to do so! And please share with as many people as you can!

Thank you for your help my fellow Californians! For everyone else, this is going to happen across the country by November 1st. Stay posted for opportunities to help change this dumb rule.

I’ve got something to say here, and it’s not so pretty. I don’t know if you’ve heard about what’s happening in this old country of ours, but it ain’t good for the disabled, among others. My tiny little mother mind™ can’t think about it properly, but I’ve assembled some words from those who can. First, I’ll quote from Public Hostage Public Ransom: Inside Institutional America, a non-fiction book written by William Bronston, M.D., an activist physician who exposed the atrocities of Willowbrook, an institution for intellectual and physically disabled human beings on Staten Island, New York.

There’s this:

Chapter One: Social Control Origins

“Lillian’s family visited her in Willowbrook twice a month. Her grandmother, a great, stout woman of obvious strength, always had the most terrible look on her face when she visited. It was like she was just arriving at the scene of a severe auto accident searching for her loved one and terrified at what she would find…

“Lillian alternately crouched near a wall or lay heaped asleep on the stone floor or dashed about the ward menacing everybody like a great wingless bird. Always alone, moaning, drifting here and there searching for something—broken lips, disfigured nose, matted hair, bare feet, coarse institution pullover dress protruding from below the white canvas and brass-ringed restraint.”

and there’s this:

Chapter Seven: People Become Things – Mass Reduction

We live in a cultural system where things are more highly valued than people. Vitality is gauged by what we possess: home, auto, clothes, family, friends, TV, knowledge, money. We are conditioned to experience our own value by owning things or having the capacity to acquire things. If we have a life, a dynamic, it has been interpreted as this capacity to consume and surround ourselves with objects.

It is an ordeal to refrain from consuming things, let alone to experience ourselves and our relations with other people as basically powerful and productive. It is no wonder that, in a world where things are king and people are the go-betweens, people are easily experienced and interpreted as things, statistics, numbers.

Some things have more apparent social value than others, and so some people have more value. Those people who can retain an image of individuality--a name, a special identity—can temporarily escape being reduced to subhuman status. But once the reduction of that identity is begun, an image of being less than human is fashioned, and the rush toward disappearance into a bunch of things gains momentum.

In order for the institution to carry on its operation, it is vital that the individual be submerged and become nameless, without identity. The alchemy of dehumanization from person to thing occurs.

I won’t waste your time here giving you the whole shebang of Willowbrook. You can look it up on the world wide webs and read about it. Probably one of the most important things to remember is that Willowbrook permanently closed in 1987 — yes, in the latter 20th century — and was a significant catalyst for the modern disability rights movement as well as a shift in how society acknowledges and supports people with developmental disabilities.

I’ll repeat this: “In order for the institution to carry on its operation, it is vital that the individual be submerged and become nameless, without identity. The alchemy of dehumanization from person to thing occurs.”

I’m sure most of you know that Dear Leader and his band of freaks have largely dismantled big operations of the Department of Education. This month, the administration announced that responsibility for special education oversight would be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, while education-related civil rights enforcement would move to the Department of Justice. Those “in charge” of this sorry ass country say they continue to “streamline the government.” Those who really know argue that special education is fundamentally an educational issue and should remain under the Department of Education. They worry expertise and accountability could be weakened.(AP News)

Given all of these shenanigans and the utterances of one of the leading freaks whom I wrote about a while back here, I don’t think I’m histrionic to suspect that the goal ultimately is to re-institutionalize disabled persons and do it in a way that gives the usual grifters some profit. Now the law currently protects the rights of the disabled but, hey, we know how closely the law is followed by these people. The legal protections that have kept disabled Americans out of institutions are under attack. By the way, it’s all in Project 2025.

Here’s activist Judith Dayal:

In a memorandum issued by the Office of Legal Counsel, the Trump regime rejected the longstanding interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act that has guided disability rights enforcement for decades. The memo argues that the ADA does not require states to provide services in the most integrated setting appropriate for people with disabilities and challenges the legal framework that emerged from the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C.

That decision was one of the most important disability rights victories in modern American history. The Court recognized that unnecessary institutionalization can itself be a form of discrimination. The principle was straightforward. Disabled people should not be isolated from their communities simply because it is easier, more convenient, or more familiar for governments to place them elsewhere.

…

The history of eugenics is often discussed as though it belonged to Nazi Germany, but the truth is far more uncomfortable. At its core, eugenics was built on the belief that some human beings were more valuable than others and that society could be improved by preventing certain groups from existing, reproducing, or fully participating in public life. Long before the Nazis came to power, the United States was one of the world’s leading proponents of eugenic policies. Disabled people became some of its primary targets, alongside racial minorities, immigrants and others whom eugenicists viewed as threats to their vision of society. American states sterilized tens of thousands of disabled people, people with mental illnesses, people labeled “feeble-minded,” and others deemed socially undesirable. In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously declared, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The consequences were devastating. Disabled Americans were taken from their families and placed in institutions where many spent years or even decades isolated from the outside world. Some were subjected to neglect, abuse, involuntary medical procedures, forced sterilization, and experimental treatments that caused lasting harm. Entire lives were shaped by the belief that disability was something to be controlled, hidden, or eliminated rather than understood and accommodated.

…

The danger is not that America suddenly wakes up tomorrow and finds concentration camps filled with disabled people. The danger is that societies become accustomed to viewing certain groups as problems to be solved rather than people whose rights must be protected.The danger is that legal safeguards are weakened while rhetoric grows harsher. The danger is that exclusion becomes easier, isolation becomes more acceptable, and government power expands precisely where vulnerable people have the fewest resources to defend themselves.

Every era that embraced eugenic thinking began with the same mistake. It stopped seeing certain people as human beings with equal value and started seeing them as burdens, costs, obstacles, and problems to be solved.

This is all so devastatingly familiar.

This is all so exhausting.

This is all such bullshit.

What can we do? What can you do? Well, you can:

• Contact your U.S. Representative and Senators.

• Contact state legislators.

• Attend school board meetings.

• Submit public comments when regulations are proposed.

• Support organizations that advocate for disability rights.

• Watch the documentary Crip Camp and learn how the laws became laws.

Some major advocacy groups include:

• The Arc

• Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates

• National Disability Rights Network

• Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund

If you’re still here, I appreciate you reading all of this. Even though it’s about education literally, it’s about literally everything else.

Read this.

Disability rights are civil rights.

This country’s gone mad, hasn’t it? Made mad been mad gone mad all mad. Mad as in insane but not the good kind. Mad absurd. Living in an SNL skit or Gulliver’s Travels while others live under bombs. Piles of dead children. What’s it like in your part of the world?

I’m reading something beautiful and marvelous. The word marvelous. I’ve found a group online that reads James Joyce’s Ulysses in 80 days. Here’s the link if you want to join. Perhaps mad but joycean mad. Here’s something beautiful and marvelous:

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking by the Muglins.

Or this:

“Oomb, alwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway.

I’ve never read Ulysses — have tried several times but this group and the very neat way someone has organized the website and the schedule and the comments is seductive, really. The audio version that I listen to (Irish accents!) while I read is great. I also have a remarkable illustrated edition that is so heavy I can barely hold it in my lap, but if I rest it on the dining room table, I can read it while I listen. Do I know what’s going on? Not exactly, but I love the language. I let it wash over me.

What do you think his cataractic planets are? So many astronomical allusions. Or illusions. Grateful to be pulled into a text quite literally and live in it.

I saw an aerial view of a blue whale just under the surface of the ocean right down the coast a bit. How can we complain when such a creature is swimming nearby? Or maybe we can complain but why bother when such a creature is swimming nearby. The word ripple. She looked effortless weightless and blue in blue. The spiracle at the top of the head through which she breathes air. I’d like to draw a spiracle right here, or maybe even a spiral. Something endless and endlessly beautiful.

What else is there to tell you? Do you need anything but Joyce’s cataractic planets and my blue whales? Shall I rant about the Claw in front of the House, the beast who lives inside and his blue bruised hands, his grift and graft? The young finish high school and wait on university yet. Yet. The children of the Palisades whose schools burnt down last year make moving speeches. The head of the department of war continues his relentless scouring of Black people and women from his ranks, his limbs sausages packed into a smug blue suit. A nasty man. People wear crosses as jewelry. The skies are hazy then blue, the June gloom. My eyes are heavy and dry and paradoxically water and leak. I dab at them with a tissue and peer at my peering, the tiny red veins behind which is a globe of sorts, a planet, an orb. I did have cataracts, but were they cataractic?

wayawayawayawayawayaway

Do you hear that echo?

I wish sometimes that Sophie could talk.

I deactivated my Instagram this past weekend because I’ve had enough, at least for right now. My friends’ beautiful writing or art or crafting or even comedy just isn’t enough to overcome the constant barrage of ads and talking talking talking. Even though I didn’t do a lot of it, the scrolling through everything — whether beautiful or ugly — has really made a dent in my reading, in my daily creative practice, etc. etc. I intend to do some art myself in lieu of scrolling and will certainly pick up the reading pace. I finished a weird novel called First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Next of Kin, a wild memoir by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, and The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard. I’ve been listening to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Oh, William, as I drive around the shitty, and I’m in the middle of Ben Lerner’s Transcription. I’m also doing a slow read of Homer’s The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson (and I’m taking a discussion class online with her!). Finally, I’m reading aloud to Sophie from The Wind in the Willows. That book is remarkably good, and I highly recommend it!

I don’t know why this came up, but I was telling a colleague at work today about an experience I had about a million years ago, when Sophie was 18 years old, and we were driving home from USC Keck Neurology, and after my friend walked out of my room, I went to the dark recesses of my old blog and found it pretty quickly by typing chain into the search bar. This was a pretty typical day in a long chain of days back then. It was 2013, about a year before cannabis medicine when Sophie’s seizures were just out-of-control, and whenever I read something from those days, I honestly can’t remember how we did it. I don’t know if there’s anyone reading this substack anymore that can relate, but we did do it, and in fact are still doing it (with dramatically fewer seizures) and so will you. Some days letting go feels like a free fall, though, and if I think about the bottom, I’d probably miss the view.

On about hour five of seizures, neurologists, and waiting rooms, I felt a tail, trailing behind me, when I lifted, or heaved, Sophie up onto an adult examining table this afternoon to change her diaper. She had already had so many seizures. I was stifling bereft. This has got to stop, I might have thought or said aloud. I can't do this anymore. I felt the tail, its scales the years, too many years. I drag it. Later, still more seizures and back in the car, I heard on the radio that traffic was backed up on the 101 North because of some obstruction in the middle of the highway. I'm not sure what the problem is, Kayjon Cermak of KCRW said, her voice attractive, lilting into laughter. Oh, Kayjon, you save us with your tales of road rage and obstruction, mattresses and ladders fallen off of trucks, fistfights on the side of the road, looky-loos. Oh, yes, here it is. There appears to be a large chain in the street, Kayjon elaborated, Watch out for that around Normandie. My car crept onward, north, while Sophie seized. My lips were tight closed, a trail, a tail behind me of years of doing this. I started at the sound of a police whistle and focused on an officer on a motorcycle, weaving in front of me, back and forth between cars, getting us to slow down from 10 miles an hour to 5 and then 0 and then we were stopped, in a line. The motorcycle was directly in front of my car. He climbed down off it, brown pants, the knee-high black shiny boots, the mirrored sunglasses, the bow-legs. He held his hand out, palm facing us. Stop. I think asshole, I see you and we're already stopped in the middle of the 101, where the hell else would we go? I imagine the perhaps tens of thousands of cars behind me, a tail, a trail of metal and stifled bereft. I am not making this up. The policeman turned around and stepped toward the middle of the highway, reached down and pulled up a long coiled chain in his black gloved policeman hands. He heaved it up and hauled it over and just before he reached the side of the road, he threw it, the chain, this metal tail, over the guardrail and into the brown highway brush. He was made for that moment, I decided, and was dressed for the part. When he was done, he turned to us, the front cars, gave us the signal to proceed and climbed onto his machine and took off. The beast moved forward. No gangs to bang or bust or pillaged villages to rescue, no girls in distress or crimes of passion. He could drag a chain, a tail, from the middle of the road and let it go. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

The new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a magnificent, albeit strange concrete edifice with remarkable views of our city, seen through the curtains which are made of sputter plated chrome textiles and they have a metallic sheen but are still so sheer and they cast shimmering shadows on the wall, on a giant Matisse, at the golden hour. They protect the art from the sun’s harsh rays. At night, the city glows through them. The word gossamer. The museum is just around the corner from my house, and I look forward to spending many hours there, hopefully with Sophie because the rooms are large and the hallways wide and there’s a certain gray peace to it all. I have taken Sophie to the Greek and Roman galleries in the old LACMA where everything is hushed and the statues have smooth eyes that have seen centuries. I have taken her to the Met in New York when we lived there, to the Museum of Natural History where we sat, dwarfed, under the blue whale. She was a baby and I was young and everything lay in front of us.

But my skin once soft is now taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.
And my heart is weighed down and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.

Sappho

How many hours have I spent in this house, wandering around its minute square footage, in and out of Sophie’s bedroom for twenty-five years? Tonight I lay on Sophie’s bed and watched a movie about an octopus while Sophie slept. She sleeps under a drifting whale and now a chandelier made by a Polish folk artist — pajaki — made of paper and straw, pompoms made of colored yarn. I bought it for her at Christmas, and I’ve only now hung it in her room over the small gray recliner in the corner where the nurses sit. I’ve been so down of late for all the reasons that everyone is down, this terrible goddamn country, but I’ve also felt an old fear of inadequacy, of never doing enough, a fear that Sophie’s life is ever smaller but I haven’t the energy to make it bigger. A blanket of fear, smothered. When the movie was over, I left the television on so I could suction Sophie one more time in the blue light and then connect the cool mist machine. She barely stirred even as she coughed up the secretions and I placed the mask over the trach and turned it on. It’s so loud. I hate these machines, these noises, these drugs, these everything. I moved one slim ankle from its perch on top of the other. I covered her with a soft, white blanket. I thought of those curtains at the museum. The word gossamer. Sophie, something fragile and light. I thought of Donne’s not yet a breach, but an expansion/Like gold to airy thinness beat. This world this room. I felt this extraordinary love and it filled the room and for a moment I was filled up too.

I haven’t been able to speak in any meaningful way here or anywhere, really, given what’s going on in our world, but I did, like you, look on in awe at those four beautiful humans returning from the dark side of the moon in a splash in the blue of the Pacific, just two hours away from my bungalow on Orange. Today, I spent some time with a tree, a Montezuma Cypress. I stood under its sinews and looked up and up where it branched, it reached up and out, and I leaned on it and listened to it speak through my palms, our life lines together, it supporting me, supporting us all, I think, ever since it grew, a sapling in a clearing with ancient sacred springs where the Tongva settled. I’m out of sorts, irritable and worried, a litany of complaints small and large, my sense of humor elusive. This weekend, though, I spent hours driving the east and west sides of this beautiful city, wandering around gardens — humble gardens rich with native plants, words like chaparral, water harvesting, swales, rain gardens, western sycamore, toyons. Yellow and orange poppies everywhere. The theme of this year’s tour was ‘Habitats That Heal,” and in someone’s description of their garden — “a living tribute to the restorative power of native plants for our ecosystems, our communities, and our own well-being.”

While nearly all the gardens I toured were small and beautiful places of meticulous care in equal balance with wild abandon, I think my favorite place was Kuruvungna, a place that in the nearly thirty years I’ve lived here, I’d never seen.

Kuruvungna — meaning “a place where we are in the sun” — is a designated Sacred and Historic Site by the California Native American Heritage Commission. Nestled within the West Los Angeles landscape, Kuruvungna is a living village where fresh water still flows from natural springs that have sustained the Gabrielino-Tongva people for thousands of years…Visitors are invited to experience the sound of spring water that nourishes the scent of sage and yerba mansa, and to feel the deep sense of continuity that connects past, present and future in this sacred landscape.

from the 2026 Native Plant Garden Tour guidebook of the Theodore Payne Foundation

Reader, I hope that you are doing well wherever you are. It’s strange and awful being led around by so many little men causing so much destruction and despair, so much stupidity and corruption and meanness. While the little men’s bombs fall on our children our brothers our sisters on the other side of the world, I am aware of this almost ludicrous position, to be standing on land that was nurtured by and stolen from indigenous people, to be placing my hand on the gnarly bark of an ancient tree, to be spoken to and comforted, to feel her grace and force, to remain rooted to this same earth, this same world.

Listen to it.

Here’s a poem.

Mother and Child
by Louise Glück

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.
Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.
Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.
Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.
And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.
Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn
to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.
Now it’s your turn to be driven;
you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?
Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;
it is your turn to address it, to go back asking
what am I for? What am I for?

1. On March 8th Sophie turned 31, the age I was when I gave birth to her. Yeah, wow, well. How lucky we are to have her. Who would I be without her?

2. I filled out the yearly survey by our Regional Center that asks questions about the quality of life of our family member with disabilities. I do this dutifully because I’ve always loved a survey, and this year, like every year, I stopped at the question Does your family member have friends other than caregivers and family? my please fill in the dots with a black pen pen poised over the circle for NO. I filled in that circle no going outside the lines.

3. I bought three bunches of tulips from Trader Joe’s the other day because I couldn’t decide on whether to get the white with pale purple stripes, the hot pink pointy-edged frilly ones or the palest pink ones. Many purchases these days are why nots?, sort of resignations, bets against something imminent, disaster and and perhaps that’s irresponsible or not perhaps but actually is irresponsible but absurdity wins every single time and let’s face the fact that tulips are quite wonderfully absurd.

4. Even though each day has its share of beauty, it’s also some new version of hellscape — the horror of dead children scattered all over the Middle East, killed by Israeli and American bombs, the cheers of the bloodthirsty, the triumphant warmongers, the religious justifications, the ever-elusive redacted Epstein files of pedophiles and abusers, the sickening number of powerful men their stupid, adolescent emails with all the typos and cliches and vile comments and trading of dumb jokes repulsive enough but, really, are we surprised that the men remain just out there, some “punished” but most not, the exhausting news of Chavez and his rapes and assaults and

this

is

not

a

thought

this

is

a

vine

of

anger

growing

out of

twisting up

from dirt

bent

on

blossom

instead

5. Other thoughts: all the books yet to be read! All the poetry yet to be read!

6. What I am reading now:

   The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny — fantastic, a real Novel that I’ve just finished

   The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard, the first book of the Cazalet Chronicles,

   Stoner by John Williams

7. and what I’m reading next:

   Whale Fall: A Novel by Elizabeth O’Connor

   The Witch: A Novel by Marie NDiaye

   Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy

8. Here’s a poem, one of my favorites by the great Wallace Stevens, and I truly believe that re-reading a forgotten poem is a boundless pleasure and privilege.

The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

There’s tension now nearly all the time between trying to live and simultaneously be a citizen of a country that is hell bent and determined to burn everything down, to kill children, to bomb other countries, to take down fishermen who might be drug runners but maybe not, to protect pedophiles, to bomb more countries, to listen to, align itself with and supply arms and bombs to yet another country whose far-right citizenry cries victim and acts with impunity, razes an entire land and murders tens of thousands of people, primarily children yet fully intent on building up the land to make it another playground for the rich the land of milk and honey and now wreaks havoc in other parts of the globe, the Orwellian admonition that War Makes Peace, all with no end in sight, stoked by the Christian nationalists who find camaraderie with the Zionists and some kind of warped expectation of Armageddon, so why not — burn it all down? The head of the Department of War the man who might as well be a sausage stuffed into a suit believes, too, that Jesus is coming, and he’s coming to a particular bit of land in the middle of the great big world, but he — Jesus — is also everywhere, all at once, even in the mouth of a young white man running for office in Texas and we’re supposed to like him, to think that he’s “the good Christian.” I’m done with these people. The men the Christians, the Jews the Muslims the Democrats the Republicans the billionaires the pedophiles the people who support all of the above. The patriarchy. I’m done, I guess, with America with #terribleAmerica #dumbAmerica #violentAmerica #vapidAmerica #rottentothecoreAmerica. Yet, I am supposed to try to live. To be grateful that I’m on the other side of the bombs, that I don’t live in one of those countries whose leaders throw homosexuals from buildings, who make their women cover every inch of their bodies who walk behind their men who say they are modest but who are, actually, bloodthirsty. To look for joy. To not be a downer to family and friends who are as intent on living despite because what else are they supposed to do? I guess I’m a socialist or a Marxist or a crazy leftist a peacenik an iconoclast. We do what we can. We live in a country where we’re told to take care of our families. I’m looking at the moon right now, high in the sky and shining fierce through the winter branches of trees into my dining room where Sophie’s breathing treatment vapor drifts around the room the constant buzzing of machines the in and out of the saints who help us help her to live. I sat at a bar this evening with my son and one of his friends. I ordered a margarita, a crispy shrimp taco and a crispy fish taco. The bartender wore a shirt that said Make Tacos Not War. We looked through the window of the bar and watched a man pull his beat-up truck to the side of Melrose, a pick-up that was piled high with mattresses, so high that they were shifting and tipping and the man was adjusting the mattresses, pulling ropes and pushing those things and it looked so precarious but he must have figured it out because eventually he got back in the truck and pulled out into traffic.

“I had a feeling of transparency in words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them; to foretell them as if they had developed what one is already feeling,”

Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”

That quote just hit me right in the chest. It is exactly what I feel right now, and it propelled me to come here to peck out some words of my own. I haven’t been around these parts in nearly a month, but don’t ask me why because you probably already know —

a speck of malaise 
a general rage 
at what’s going on 
in the world. 

What is everybody doing? Reading and teaching are keeping me sane, so I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading. If you have any questions about any of these titles, leave a comment, and I’ll try to answer.

For my own solitary pleasure:

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Guiffre

We Are Green And Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Firestorm by Jacob Soboroff

Hiding in Plain Sight by Sarah Kendzior

They Knew by Sarah Kendzior

Strangers by Belle Burden

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

What I’ve been reading with my students:

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Good Enough by Paula Yoo

This Was Our Pact by Ryan Andrews

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume

Various Gothic short stories, poetry

I teach English Literature to middle and high school students at a private school. Our school has a one-to-one model, and I love my job with all my heart. Our students are neurotypical or have mild learning disabilities. Some have mental health challenges. Some have been bullied at typical schools or want something more. Some are transgender and some are non-binary. The middle schoolers are typically awkward, and the high schoolers are — well — high schoolers. Some are on the autism spectrum, many are incredible artists and athletes and musicians, and nearly all have had negative experiences in a traditional school setting or just need the flexibility and extra attention. All are delightful. It’s a model that I think every child should have, and while I sometimes feel guilty that I’m not teaching in a public school, I love the people I work with (it’s honestly an extended family and damn, they’re all so sweet and funny) and the students I teach. It’s a dream of a job because I get to talk about literature and poetry all day long, in addition to railing against ChatGPT. I hope, always, to impart some of my passion for story, for books, for classic literature and for those writers whose voices have not been heard or sung nearly enough. I guess my special strength is an ability to curate books to the individual child. I’ve had several students tell me that the book we chose together was the first one they’d enjoyed in their life, and I can’t tell you how much that makes my heart sing. Most of all, these kids teach me — how to be patient, how to still love the world, and how to be a person of integrity, no matter what.

What else? Sophie is in a relatively stable place although I plunge into the darkest despair regularly, and I have to learn all over again to remain in the present, to release the pain, to lie on my back and stare at the ceiling when it all gets to be too much. Everything passes, the good and the bad.

I’m not going to say anything about the American clusterfuck but tear it and them all down. Whatever it takes, I’m here for it. I can use my voice and my body to protest, to write and work for change; I can help to hold up my community; I can donate food and money. I can rage.

I had long conversations this morning with both of my sons. We talked about what will happen, what we are prepared to do. I maintain that especially as white persons, we must use our bodies, our voices, our words to resist and protest and be prepared to lose everything, including our bodies, our voices and our words, in service to our neighbors and fellow humans.

Poet Langston Hughes said in 1935 that “fascism for the Negro is not a new thing.”

My friend and writing mentor, Lidia Yuknavitch, posted this on her social media today under a photo of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Aliya Rahman, and the little boy who was kidnapped and detained:

Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Shot point-blank effing dead by ICE. For standing up. Aliya Rahman yanked from her car. Children used as bait, kidnapped. The government is terrorizing and rounding up your neighbors. Murdering and injuring protesters. Micro and macro. Enabling genocidal violence globally. Find a place near you where you can join the resistance and be of service to your community. We need all of us when they come for any of us. Healers and cooks and fighters and artists and tech and survival and transportation and communication and organization. Safe Havens and food and mobility. Resist. Help each other. Immigrants are us. BIPOC are us. We are the rest of each other. Solidarity with Minneapolis and anywhere the big NOPE is blooming.

Things you can do and resources to help:

1. Call your representatives in Congress every single day, no matter if they’re Democrats or Republicans. This link makes it very very simple. You know what to say.

2. Contact organizations in your area that actually do direct representation of immigrants and volunteer or donate to them. Donating to the large orgs (RAICES, ACLU) is great but local orgs need that attention and funding too!

3. Help Minnesotans right now here.

4. Find actions relevant to you. Start here.

5. Join your local Indivisible.org group today.

6. Join a mutual aid group in your community. Be like Minnesotans.

7. This is a hard one, but talk to your loved ones, your neighbors or others that you know support this regime. Come to terms with their participation and insist on consequences. I don’t know what that means for you, but now’s the time.

If you have links or direct needs, please leave them in the comments. It feels impossible and it’s really scary, but we can do it together.

I’ve been dithering around wanting to write about an exchange I had at a Christmas party with a person I hadn’t seen in probably years who said to me that they never saw me in my social media, in my writing, in my online presence but rather only Sophie and they wanted to see more of me and I didn’t know what to say but I know I smiled weakly and filed the comment away as another thing that people say and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was humiliation because what writer doesn’t fear they’re boring or their story is boring or they’ve been writing the same thing over and over and revealing nothing but that story and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was irritability at the condescension, that my mind really is that tiny little mother mind™ and as much as I try to unsnarl my identity entwined with my daughter’s, it shows up and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second it was amused in the way that only those of us understand, the amusement born of the absurd, the laugh that coils up and out of the very darkest recesses of one’s body and mind and it’s not anger that I feel but for a split second I felt despair at the possible truth of it but I know that I continued to smile weakly even as my breath lapped at the person’s face, hot, my breath, so hot that the person’s face began to melt and eventually puddled at my feet. Now this, this is me, I replied.

Yesterday, we saw a woman shot in the face three times* by a masked brute of a man with masked men fully militarized around him, a masked agent of the State who was protecting himself from being run over. The State lied about the man who shot the woman in the face. The State murdered a woman and blamed the woman. I think it’s ok to say it, to write it, to read it even if it’s an old story, a story told over and over. Fuck the State. Justice for poet and mother Renee Nicole Good.

Write it. Say it. Over and over.

* I corrected the statement that Good was shot four times. She was actually shot three times.

The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine publishes a beautiful literary journal called the Examined Life Journal, and I just received issue #13. I am honored to be included in this issue with a short piece of prose titled “Dragon Mother.” You can buy the journal on the Behemoth’s website as it isn’t available in independent bookstores (I don’t think). There are some gorgeous essays, poetry and fiction in it — plus, “literary” and “medicine” coupled is a good thing, don’t you think? Here’s the link.

In other news, I’ve seen two excellent movies in the last few weeks and highly recommend both. One is Hamnet, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s sublime book from 2020, and the other is Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film that’s just plain gorgeous. I’m in the middle of the series Cemetary Road that stars Emma Thompson — who doesn’t love Emma Thompson — but had to stop watching the Claire Danes series The Beast in Me when one of the characters beats someone’s head in with a gun and a grimace. You’re welcome. I just finished the unputdownable novel Flashlight by Susan Choi and am in the middle of St. Augustine’s Confessions under the brilliant tutelage of writer Garth Greenwell. The backlog is growing, but I’m most excited about Patti Smith’s new memoir Bread of Angels. I’ll keep you posted.

It’s a beautiful winter day in Los Angeles — yes, we have winter (43 degrees this morning) — and my house is filled with boxes of Christmas stuff. I’m watching the million or so little birds in our birdbath right outside the dining room window (despite my beloved partners being one of the most accomplished bird photographers in California, I still don’t remember names) and feeling unusually content this morning. I’d love to know what you’re thinking about these days, what you’re reading and watching and doing to cope with the clusterfu*^kery that is our country.

When I got home tonight from work, even though it was just after five, it was already dark. I turned off my radio when another numbingly facile Republican refused to answer some questions and spouted a lot of — well — bullshit. There was a pile of boxes outside my house, most of them supplies for Sophie, but there were two things that I’d ordered: a huge box of organic California dates and a small box of assorted caramels (my god the Earl Grey ones are sublime) from a small business. Both treats for me, following the delicious box of artisan chocolates I’d ordered some weeks ago from an artist. I dole each of those out and rarely share. Am I self-indulgent? Why, yes, I am. Do I go on regular trips overnight? No, I do not. Have I taken a vacation since 2019? No, I have not. So, dates, caramels, chocolates. I’ll buy some for you, though. Just let me know.

I spoke with my first artificial intelligence assistant tonight at CVS, and if there’s anything more frustrating than a robotic automated pharmacy prescription voice, it’s an AI voice. However smooth and silky and real, she couldn’t pronounce the name of ONFI (ON-FEE) and got mixed up so I got mixed up and we had a bit of a clusterfuck together that caused me to shout the words prescription! Onfi! and ultimately necessitated me hanging up on her and calling back. Things went smoothly after that, and now I’m waiting for the follow-up text that will necessitate my intervention with a human at the CVS or a doctor (the real doctor, Nice Neurologist). Everything feels so dumb.

Every day, all day, I deal with students using AI, and if I wanted to, I would tell you my thoughts about it all, but I wouldn’t be able to stop. I miss the brains of old, our brains of old and wish I could somehow pack these new young brains, these brains whose architecture is changing, with ballast — something sound and real and slow. I wish I could pack these brains with flowers unfurling before they (the brains) fuse forever, the tender bones closing over anxiety and overstimulation and mindless clicking and scrolling and sending. The voices of AI. Even the word resonant such a beautiful word ruined by robots.

I miss my Norton Anthology of English, my grammar book, my dictionary and thesaurus, an index in the back, wondering whether something was accidentally forgotten in the index because I just can’t find it, putting things in alphabetical order on shelves and looking for things, slowly, in a card catalog. Some of my fellow teachers, decades younger than I, are trying to deal with what I, an oldster, call cheating, and they call the future, are using more paper with their students who report that they like it. They like the feeling of the mind, connected to the hand, connected to the pencil or pen, connected to the paper that sits open on the table. It feels good, they say. It helps me be calm.

What I’m reading:

The Confessions of St. Augustine

Bread of Angels by Patti Smith

Flashlight by Susan Choi

What I’ve read recently:

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert

Flesh by David Szalay

Emma by Jane Austen

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Every morning, when I open the door of the building where I work and walk into the faux-marbled lobby, it’s only a few steps before a bug skitters across my path. It’s about an inch and flat, a scale with a hundred tiny feet. I believe it’s the same bug about as much as I’m the same person stepping through the same doorway into the same lobby of the same building. I’m never startled when I see it; in fact, I look down at the floor at the very moment that it scrambles toward the baseboard. After you, I want to say (in very tiny script). Step, skitter, pause. The day opens, a crack in time, a pulse. I think about naming the bug. I think about lives that meet and miss. That guy with the square jaw, walking his bike, who crossed my path every Monday and Wednesday as I walked to Dey Hall on the campus of UNC in the 80s. The ex-boyfriends and lovers and husbands. Maybe we both died last week and nobody told us, I think. Maybe this is heaven, I whisper to the bug. More likely, the waiting room, he suggests. It’s the second to last day of October, I whisper. We’re nearly ten months in with this ray-geme at the helm. He disappears into the marble. I’ll see him Monday. Same doorway into the same lobby of the same building. It’ll be the same bug about as much as I’ll be the same person. I’ll be a crone with fingers that itch to claw out some eyes.

I had one of those thingys hanging on my door this morning that generally advertises something like lawn care or house painting or handyman. I’m not sure when the earnest folks who peddle corporate religion managed to slip it on there, but it was shiny and of high quality paper stock. HEY GOD! was written down the front like this:

H

E

Y

G

O

D

!

It was from Saddleback Church Los Angeles, letting me know that they or it (the church) will be at the El Rey Theatre (in my neighborhood) from 10 am -11:30 am on October 19th, in the two thousandth twenty fifth year of our lord. On the back of the card it says Got Questions for God? Join us as we discover the real answers God gives.

I ripped it off the door and looked up through the glorious Chinese flame tree that towers over my house, it’s rosy paper-thin seed capsules clustered everywhere under the blue blue sky, and I screamed,

I DO HAVE QUESTIONS FOR GOD!

GOD! I HAVE QUESTIONS FOR YOU!

Why did You take Jane Goodall and Diane Keaton from us?

Why did You leave you-know-who and the Dummy Patrol here instead?

Why did You give kings crowns and pretend to favor humility?

Why did You let humans invent both nukes and hashtags — was that an experiment in competing annihilations?

Why did You give us leaders who campaign on hope but govern like auditors of despair?

Why make the universe infinite and my patience so very very finite?

Why give us Republicans when plagues were already working?

Why did You give humans a conscience if You were just going to reward the shameless and stupid?

God?

God?

God?