31 May 2020: The country burns

I am in my backyard getting spectacularly drunk. I have worked my ass off today, largely to process the burning, quaking fire I feel inside every time I look at the news. America is burning, and our “president” and his people are useless, loathsome, abhorrent, vile, deplorable specks of toxic mold gleefully, ignorantly throwing fuel on the pyre of our country.

I am so thankful to all the people marching for justice, despite enormous threats to their own safety. The NY and Minneapolis police departments are OUT OF CONTROL. Protect and serve, my ass. If you haven’t watched footage from MN and NY from the weekend, gird yourselves, sit down, and tune in.

I implore you to listen. LISTEN. Don’t make it about you. Don’t make equivalencies. Just listen. And then figure out how you can do something to make change.

If you need a lighter moment, I offer you this two-legged cat who is a despair antidote.

29 May 2020: Required watching

I wish that watching this monologue by Trevor Noah was required of every American. Please spend 19 minutes listening to, thinking about, and considering this brilliant, painful, searing piece.

24 May 2020: Daily

If you are remotely prone to worry, catastrophic thinking, or are one millimeter beyond rather than shy of complete terror over the state of America now and as relates to this fall’s election, I cannot in good faith advise you to watch The Plot Against America, the six-part series based on Philip Roth’s eponymous novel. The book was published in 2004. It could almost literally be about our current march to the November 2020 election. Gripping, tense, terrifying, and everything is on the line.

I’m sure you saw the swarms at the Lake of the Ozarks water park from this weekend in Missouri. Perhaps you’ve also read about the surge in cases of Covid-19 since Texas reopened. Or seen the news that more than 40% of Republicans think Bill Gates will use a Covid-19 vaccine to implant a location-tracker in recipients. THAT is all the real plot against America. Grotesque ignorance perpetrated by a horribly anti-Democratic, venal, corrupt “government.”

Do these same people care about the front page of today’s NYTimes? U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss.

Do those Republicans, those crowing “pro-lifers” care at all?

Hillary was right. About pretty much everything.

And Trump golfs. At your expense. At our expense.

I feel like I have failed in some fashion as I’ve let all activism go since starting to shelter in place on March 13. Suddenly, my world feels so small, so constricted. It seems all I can do to feed and parent and tend my three boys each day, every day, much less myself, and my closest friends and family. But please know that if we don’t protect our right to vote, freely and securely, we will lose this country in November. I will do everything I can. I hope you will too.

In the meantime, Tom and I celebrated our 16th anniversary on Friday, today we re-roofed our shed, the one we’ve been refurbishing, and the boys and I helped a neighbor set up her new raised bed (they dumped 30 bags of soil and compost in the frame!). Then we did expressive art with old fence posts: how do each of us feel during this pandemic?

Jack’s “Czech hedgehog” which was incredibly well conceived and explained.

Mine

And some pretties, for some zen: fresh collards from my garden; an Eden rose; a coming Calla lily.