"There's a new prudery around death. We've moved it into hospital, behind screens, and no longer wear black markers to acknowledge its presence. It's become unmentionable."-

—- Sally Mann, writing about her photography of cadavers at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility. The Body Farm, as its known, is a 2 ½ acre wooded research facility, where corpses are studied in various conditions and environments to help further the science of forensics. The photos are from her 2003 book, What Remains.

I had this moment, reading Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, that I might want to donate my body to science after my leaving.

I was just going to be cremated anyway, is the thinking. Maybe my body could be useful in its next incarnation, something Roach hilariously calls a post-mortem career. I like the idea of doing something after death, type A until the end and all.

This means, of course, that no one will be taking my ashes out to Sydney harbor in a sweet little boat, where the captain serves espresso martinis and sausage rolls, and let’s my children say something profound and hilarious about me and my life. I imagine my family planning something like this. The tone might feel solemn enough to make people get a little moist at the edges of the eyes, but not enough to turn the mood sullen or despairing. No Poor Kim. No Taken too soon.

I think I want the last hurrah to be a party atmosphere. A kind of drunk Irish-singing, brown bar affair. With a few people who give a shit, standing around mocking me outrageously for all my weird and eccentric picadillos, regaling people with dumb stories about dumb shit I’ve done. And I’m saying this quite seriously: Please mock me in death. I am so here for it. Or I would be, if that were possible.

Then, in this fantasy, the kids would probably argue bitterly with each other over who gets to pitch mom into the harbor first - because being first is really really important in everthing we do here - before dumping the rest of my powdery bones into the water. Someone will defintitely be pissed. This is the way of siblings. Someone will say too much, something that they shouldn’t have said, and all hell could break loose. Then, off to a bar for drunk-singing, storytelling and mocking. Bonus points if someone reads my diary entries, or some of my old substack essays, out loud on a microphone.

Donating my body to science would also deprive my family of keeping me trapped in an urn, divided into sections and handed out to each child. A sort of drawing and quartering of what is left of me. That’s mom, one of them would say, and nod at the vessel on the fireplace mantel, which has been collecting a layer of sticky dust for years.

This is where I part ways with wanting to be housed in a vase. I’m terminally claustrophobic and I want to say I will be in death, too, although I know this is stupid. I don’t want to putrefy in a casket. I don’t want to be encased in ceramics. Stuck on a shelf. I also don’t want anyone to think they have to take me on adventures with them. Like I should be portable. Like my kids walking the Avenue des Champs-Élysées with their mom tucked into their elbow for one last walk together in Paris. Please don’t walk my ashes like a poodle.

Some people commission “bust urns” where a nipples-up sculpture of your likeness can sit on top of your jar of ashes. This denotes what is inside. Kim is in this jug! The bust also has the added benefit of eyes, which will stare back at your children, following them around the room at night, and generally freaking them out. This might actually be a good reason to do the bust. A super funny eternal joke on the family.

I don’t want to live I-Dream-of-Genie-style in a bottle, next to the cremated remains of all our dogs and cats, only to be discarded later anyway, as great-grands, and great-great-grands bawk at the idea of having this old timey person they’ve never met, cluttering up their shelves. Do we throw her away? Yes, eventually. The toilet or the trash heap will be my destiny anyway.

Better to be in the wind, I say.

Or, in the case of science, doing something.

Organ donorship feels more tidy and less chaotic than donating your bod to science. Civilized, if you will.

Her corneas helped a little boy see. Her heart just gave a new mom a chance to raise her baby. The benefits are immediate. The life of the dead person has brought better lives to other people. There is meaning, a reason for this person to have existed, to have given back in life and in death, and a way for them to continue on with the living while in death. It strikes me as completely satisfying that a mother who lost her child to leukemia can feel his heart beating in the chest of another child.

This is such a great post-mortem career.

What it seems you have to give up, with donating your body to science, is the kind of control we try to have in life. And this might be healthy. We have to give up the relatonship we have with our bodies. We have to come to terms with our bodies as carapaces. Our dependence on them as vessels, carrying us around. Our need, in life, to have our bodies treated well, like temples, revered for their properties and strengths. We feel our bodies are not separate. They are us. We feed them and nuture them and seek pleasure for them.

Younger gens live in a looksmaxxing culture that value physical appearance over everything else, and on the older end, we are being fed through a youth-obsessed anti-aging longevity grinder that wants our bodies looking and feeling impervious to aging and Nature. It can be a big stretch for folks, who after spending a lifetime pouring resources into your body, to hand it off to stangers to be blown up, shot, and unceremoniously mutiliated.

By and large, the dead aren't very talented...Roach says in Stiff, There is one thing dead people excel at. They're very good at handling pain.

Science is going to hurt and mutilate the bodies in its possession. It is going to treat them with irreverence. It won’t honor them at all. They are going to be hacked apart, cut up, dissected, putetrifing with maggots and blowflies in attendance, have procedures performed on them, end up hideously broken open. They will be limply strapped into vehicles, propped up with electrical tape, with researchers working aganst the clock to get the study done before the body starts moldering in the heat. The corpse will wear a diaper, it has to, because, as Roach writes: Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge...We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death.

And this means that bodies in science handle the pain and the indignities that humans couldn’t tolerate, in car crash experiments, in anatomy and surgical lessons for young doctors, in plastic surgery research, in fields where insect development is tracked prodigously so detectives can establish more accurate times of death in criminal cases. These bodies are often chopped up, one research institute gets the legs, another gets the head, one gets the brain, another the hands.

There are only about 20,000 whole body science donations every year. They mostly have to be set up in advance of illness, and even this is a hard club to get into. Die the wrong way, have too much trauma to the body, and the researchers won’t want you anyway.

There is rejection and gatekeeping, even in death.

And so there is the inevitable objectification and distancing from the body itself.

This is no longer Kim Foster the human with worries and ideas and people who love her, whom she loves. Instead, this is some old lady’s head. Someone might stop and wonder what life had been like for this lady-head, but probably not. Because the system is set up for distance.

Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of delusions and denials, Roach writes. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.

Still, there are cracks. For me, hands are hard, Roach quotes Canadian surgeon, Marilena Marignani, because you’re holding this disconnected hand, and it’s holding you back.

But what still holds people back from donating their bodies to science always seems to circle back to the lack of control. Someone donated their remains for science, a Reddit commenter wrote: The body was sold to the ATF, and they used it in a detonation of explosives to study the effects of the blast. The children learned about it later.

And then, the commenter added this, underscoring the need for post-mortem control: I hope to be cremated and buried at sea. I am relying on my children to make this happen. They don’t listen to me now. I doubt they will after I croak.

Death is, by definition, the loosening of all our controls and offering ourselves back to where we came. It is pure letting go. It is the most letting go we will ever do. We fool ourselves that death is neat, and leave the ugly stuff to the morticians who are suturing up our floppy anuses so they don’t leak poop during our viewing. Or the crematoriums, who keep the secrets of our body’s last moments, the charring, swelling, splitting that happens as soft tissue eviscerates, burning away everything but the exposed spinal column and clean white bone.

Sally Mann, the photographer of these photos, talks a bit about death after shooting at the Body Farm.

In a documentary about her life and work, Mann walks the corpses and touches them noting the bright orange on the heel of one transforming body. She touches it with a gloved hand and feels how the skin and the fluid under it undulate and move, how the skins on the bodies have formed alternative textures, like fabrics and leathers, as they change. How they occupy a new space that is not really living, but living differently. How they are not to be pitied. She uses words and phrases like organic, vital, skin-like fabric, mummified, undulating, moving. I love how she sees cadavers as works of jubilant and vivid natural art, decay and breaking down into parts as part of living.

I don’t care what they do to me, she says, looking out toward trees, leave me for the buzzards, let the little foxes eat me. Put me out there, and let me nourish those hickories. There’s not a lot of me, but there’s enough to probably support some earth process.

Unlike Mann, the journalist Roach takes a more funny and rational approach to cadavers. Her work is constantly juggling reverence for the living body with the discomfort of its post-mortem changes, which then translates into a kind of absurdity. Humor, and leaning into what we can’t dictate, is appealing. The corpse, for Roach, is the ultimate in the absurd.

Your limbs are floppy and uncooperative, she writes. Your mouth hangs open. Being dead is unsightly and stinky and embarrasssing, and there’s not a damn thing to be done about it.

What Roach and Mann, and their various takes on cadavers, has taught me is that planning our own memorials, our post-mortem jobs, obsessing about the particulars, is a fools errand. Those moments are for the living, whether they tell jokes about us, or sob relentlessly, or play music we didn’t choose, or make people come see us laying in a casket, with our buttholes properly sutured. That is for them.

What is for us, pre-cadaver, is to let go. To stop trying to control every outcome, to stop trying to exert our influence on the world, to consider that our time here is temporary and this is okay. To understand that we get no benefit or joy from trying to control what happens after. That leaving is not necessarily the worst thing.

It kind of doesn’t matter, to you personally, that your death fulfills a job. Or that science is advanced by what people learn using your body. It doesn’t matter to you personally, if you are composted in the woods au natural, or eaten alive by a tide pool of dungeoness crabs. Roach, afterall, writes that crabs apparently love eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs. But if you donate your body to science, it will most likely be used for dissection in anatomy labs, some 80% end up there, Roach tells us. A student could make fun of your bushy pubic hair, your flabby tummy, and there is nothing you can do about it and honestly, who cares anyway? Your dead, bushy pubs are friggin’ hilarious.

I toy with the idea of donating my body to science, but I also toy with the idea of including a brief letter of my history, of who I am, of who they will be working on. I will crack jokes about myself, in this letter. I will be witty, smart, and endearing. The meta-message will be that I matter and mattered to the world, a sign they should not waste me frivously. In the same way a pig from a pasture-raised local farm might be more mindfully processed and consumed, than a slab of plastic and styrofoam-wrapped pork-flesh in a supermarket. I’m the meat. The letter will ensure I’m treated like the pasture-raised special being that I am.

Still, I have to wonder: Why do I need them to see me as a person? As a whole human? Why does it matter to me that I’m more than a flesh bag? Or that I am used well? Can’t I exist without context? Can’t I suck at my post-mortem gig? Why do I have to work so hard to be special, even in death?

Roach, at the end of her book, reminds us that sometimes our wishes are a burden to the living. She recounts the story of her mother honoring her father’s no-frills wishes. He wanted to be cremated in a pine box with no memorial service. She honored these things, only to be inundated with criticism about not having a service for extended family and community. He was a public figure and the community needed to say goodbye, too. His ashes, stored in her closet for years, also felt wrong. They haunted her. It finally became too much and she had his remains buried, as per her Catholic beliefs. She was at peace. The needs of the living always trump the needs of the non-living.

Sometimes we have to let go, and let the living do right for themselves. Even if it isn’t the eternal rest we imagined.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

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END NOTES:

I want to say thank you to everyone who contributed to the GFM for our former foster daughter’s family. They moved into their new apartment, have paid their rent to September. It’s lovely. Lots of windows, light, terrace, even their own little laundry room inside the apartment, a necessity for four kids.

Dad doesn’t have a lot of financial guidance, so we decided what the kids needed most, prioritized those things, getting his car registered and insured, saving up weekly from his paycheck, so he isn’t ever short on rent, getting a real bank account and not using Cashapp for everything. It’s mind blowing how easy it is to get used to scrambling and never having calm. He feels the stable ground and he wants it to continue.

We talked about wealth as stability. That being rich is being able to fix your car when it breaks down, not having the finest, newsest, flashiest. We talked about things people do when money is scarce, like short-term thinking, and ways to combat that. We talked about getting out of the scarcity/poverty mindset, placing boundaries on problematic people that threaten to destabilize them, and why DV is never an option for solving disputes, because it’s a poverty mindset and this is how you lose your kids in the system and imperil their childhoods. We talked about buying a home in the future, and what he needs to do to make that happen. We talked about college for the kids, as former foster kids they will get full rides to Nevada colleges.

This is all new-ish territory for him, but he wants to do right for his kids. I’m very proud of dad. And he is beyond grateful to all of you. The kids are happy and so much more calm and settled that when they were in care. And dad is proud of himself. He took me around the apartment and proudly showed me how he is trying to make the kids feel special and loved. He has added cozy touches to make it feel like a home. He has them doing chores, makes them remove their shoes before going inside, cooks dinner for them most nights, and the apartment is spotless.

Last night I was at their house, and his mama cried in my arms with joy about your generous gifts. She lives in the same complex and is helping with babysitting. She tried to take in all the kids while they were in care, but she couldn’t afford to pay the bills and DFS pulled the kids. (Paying foster parents is less complicated than paying families to care for their own. Frustrating.)

I’ll continue to work with the family and support them, but wanted you to know how you all made this happen. Thank you. Truly. For the donations, the prayers, spreading the word. Thank you for caring about people. For taking a chance on on folks who often are left to flounder invisibly. This head start matters.

Anyway, you are the antidote to this shitty shitty world. You are light-bearers. I’m grateful for you all.

Edie, our 20-year-old, is home with us for a month before she leaves for a summer physics class at a university in England. I found her this morning, and every morning, curled into the couch, reading her favorite book. It’s a paper back, a dense, chunky thing, with tiny print. It’s dog-eared, well-read. She has this love for Walter Isaaacson and his biographies. She has re-read this particular book on Einstein: His Life and Universe about four times now. She has lugged this brick around the world. She has also read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Leonardo DaVinci.

When we moved to Vegas in 2014, I noticed a shift in how our children were educated. I don’t know if it’s largely about place or timing. Just that Lucy and Edie had attended a very progressive school in NYC called Central Park East II. Reading and writing were critical features of their education there, as was political protest (Occupy Wall Street, visits w/ Yoko Ono) and outdoor adventures (ice skating in Central Park.) That school fit us like a glove, and the friends we made there are still like extended family in our lives.

But in Las Vegas, I noticed a strange phenomenon. My kids were not reading books. Kids, in class, were asked to log onto computers, read a short article or essay, from the news or excerpted from longer work, and then given multiple choice questions about the piece they just read. The model is called HMH Into Reading / Into Literature, a program our Vegas school district uses as the core English Language Arts curriculum.

The view is that these targeted programs are better for language comprehension. They help kids figure out the “essential question” of a piece. The program supports kids whose first language is not English, by adding prompts in their first languages. The kids are able to read selections from a diverse array of titles, not just a few and ones chosen by a single teacher. And the student’s reading can be tracked.

The main purpose of this is to get better test scores. Not once, is any of this about finding your child curled up into a corner of the couch, devouring something that lights them on fire. Not once does a kid look up at you, turn her book over quietly in her lap, and say: This 73-year-old white dude is my favorite author ever and I can’t get enough.

I am not a luddite about most things. I don’t want to become the kind of person who gets too comfortable, who believes everything was better in the old days. I’m committed to embracing change and trying new things, bringing some friction into my life, and staying flexible and open. I am about the present and the future, while honoring, and reckoning with, the past.

This is the way forward with AI and all the impending changes we will face as we age. Adapt or die is the human condition, afterall.

But it’s hard to watch the obliteration of reading. The obliteration of the time for reading. The obliteration of the will to read. The obliteration of the habit. It’s also hard to watch the dismantling of the non-fiction writing world, because of the use of AI. In the lastest issue of New York Magazine, publishers are clearly struggling to fact check against AI, and authors are leaning too heavily on the tools, blurring the ideas of what is writing and who is the writer.

I feel like everyone is passing off AI work as their own and most of the time don’t say anything about it, said a senior nonfiction editor at a major publishing house in the New York Magazine piece.

Seeing Edie this morning, no devices, no sound, just the slant of morning light across her still body, and the quiet of a mostly sleeping house, reminded me of what we have lost. What I have lost. What I try to regain here by writing everything out by my own hand, like a writing luddite, a happy one.

In my early small town rural life, there were no bookstores. There was a newsroom with magazines and papers, and penny candy.

I read the books my mother read. I was never exposed to Judy Bloom’s books or any children’s books past board books. They probably would’ve seemed to tame anyway. None of what I read was age appropriate. I read every Stephen King I could, It, Pet Semetary, The Shining. I also loved horror writer, John Saul, whose book, Suffer The Children about a pissed off girl ghost who disappears children into a hole and watches them die, took over my mind for about a year. For years, I dreamed I would die in a hole surrounded by other smelly, decomposing bad kids.

There were the romance books, by Barbra Cartland. My next door neighbor, Julie, and I used to take the paperbacks out away from parents, and take turns reading racey passages to each other in the bwckyard swing. There were throbbing manhoods and pulsing mounds. Later, came the racey Palomino by Danielle Steele. Star came out around that time, too. All her books were like lessons in sophistication, wealth, romance, class consciousness and mobility, unbridled sex, at a time when all of this mattered culturally. It was the end of the 80’s and we were moving toward the Greed is Good 90’s, after all.

My mother’s small hallway shelf (she didn’t believe in keeping books) also had the book, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child (1977). Feral children held a special slot in the post-institutional zeitgeist of the late 70’s, early 80’s. People filled whole books with stories about how to care for feral children, and the miraculous workers who believed in them and nurtured them back into civilization.

I read my mother’s paperback of Alex Haley’s Roots. 900 pages of Kunta Kinte and his family across seven generations. Then the movie series came out on TV, I was not allowed to watch it. Like reading all 900 pages of a book detailing the horrors of what actual humans went through in enslavement at the hands of white overseers, wasn’t enough of a nightmare. I read Midnight Express after it was published in 1977, and later saw the movie in the theatre, about a college student who gets arrested in Istanbul for selling hash, and gets sent to a Turskish prison. I still am not able to visit Turkey.

My first feminist texts were not from Carol Gilligan or Bell Hooks. They were from Erma Bombeck. Her 1976, hilarious book, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and her 1978 If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? made me think I could write funny things, and that writing funny things could matter and be transgressive and transcendant.

When I think about reading and what it meant to me as a young person, it was that it felt like a rebellion. I’m not using that word lightly. Like someone blurting out an empty: Joy is an act of rebellion! I mean it literally. Reading back then wasn’t this obligation or thing we should do. When no one was watching, we made sense of the complicated world we couldn’t Google for answers.

The dark, terrifying stories helped make reality so much easier. And yet, there were so many things to fear. In the 80’s, our culture moved to hyper-consumerism, a rise of mall culture, suburbs of isolated utopias, that sheltered and protected some people, while excluding others. Our parents tried to be upwardly mobile. They chased affluence and markers of affluence. Moms and dads both worked, and had their own lives away from our houses, as we did away from them.

Rudimentary computers made early appearances, divorce ticked up and our families separated, grown kids started moving further away from families for college and their own careers, upward mobility felt like the only goal. AIDs was inexplicably killing people and we knew one episode of real sex could end our lives. Russia and the US were locked in a nuclear death grip that threatened to emusify us.

No matter what was happening in the real world though, there were always girls at prom drenched in pigs blood, vengeful girl ghosts, hot untouchable characters screwing and sucking, hotel caretakers devolving into psychosis, and people at risk of being tortured unjustly in foreign prisons. The extremes were comforting in the same way violent true-crime stories can comfort us today. At least, we haven’t been cut into pieces and left in the woods to be discovered by a dedicated cold case detective who will never quit the search for my decaying body.

At least, we aren’t trapped in an attic, for literal years, by our psychotic mother….

I started thinking about this when I noticed my fellow GenXers on Threads talking about what the book, Flowers In the Attic, did to our collective young selves.

The book, published in 1979, by VC Andrews, seemed to define us as young people in the 80’s. The plot is remarkable. About four siblings who are forced to live in their grandmother’s attic by their abusive religous zealot mother, who intermittently beats them with a cane. She explains their confinement by saying she is keeping them hidden to collect a family inhertitance that requires her to not have children. She says it will only be for a few months. But the kids are kept in the attic for years, moldering in isolation, starvation, boredom, and psychological regression.

A couple of the siblings fall in love with each other and there is some very hot sibling romance, longing, jealousy and sex. Eventually, the kids are given arsenic donuts by mom, in an attempt to get rid of them once and for all. One of the siblings dies from the poison donut, reframing what something as simple as a donut could mean for our mortality.

Weirdly, the book, which was supposed to be adult fiction, felt elemental to kids, while the culture underwent all kinds of societal havoc. Phil Donohue and Oprah put families on display on their afternoon TV shows, and much to my mother’s horror, blamed mothers for eveything! In fact, all of Flowers in the Attic is a critique of misguided, overbearing, narcisstic mothers, who were motivated by consumerism and wealth-building, and not so much the focus on their children. It’s also highly autobiographical, as the author Virginia (VC) Andrews, had a coercive relationship with her own mother, who cared little for her writing, criticisized her mercilessly, but also forcibly accompanied her on all her book tours, sitting next to her at the signing table. Their relationship was deeply complex and inter-dependent in some ugly ways that came out in her writing.

The novel and its sequels also recognized a deep and abiding fear that has shaped women of my generation, writes Tammy Oler in a 2014 article for Slate, the fear of turning into our mothers. As Cathy’s love and adoration of her mother, Corrine, turns into bitterness and anger in Flowers in the Attic, she becomes determined to get free of her family and be nothing like her mother. Yet through the decades that span the novels that follow, Cathy finds herself becoming more and more like Corrine.

The daughter, now a mother, sets up her children’s beds, in neat rows in her own attic, not once questioning her role in repeating this generational legacy, or that she even was part of one. The daughter fulfills the ultimate horror, and turns into her mother. It is the ultimate nightmare for GenX youth: Our childhoods rebelled against confinement. We had childhoods of escape. The freedom was the point. It was the focal point of our rebellion.

Years ago, the Freakonomics guys taught us a lesson in correlation and causality. They said that buying a bunch of books and putting them in a child’s room wouldn’t magically make them better readers, but when the house the child grows up in is filled with books, there is a better chance that reading matters to the household, and that these values will get passed to everyone. Our little house in Vegas is filled, stuffed even, with physical books. We have a Little Free Library in the front yard. Books are, for whatever reason or simply by luck, catching on with our kids in young adulthood.

Did our book shelves move the needle? Or our love of reading? Are they readers despite us? We won’t ever know for sure.

I’ve struggled to love audio books, the reader’s voice matters to me in weirdly picky ways. I’ve embraced the Kindle, particularly at night when David needs a completely dark house to sleep. I use physical books for research, mostly because I write in the margins. I remember where to find particular data, by remembering what I wrote in the margins. I haven’t been able to replicate that experience on the Kindle. Yet.

There are so many things I want to read these days, even as I find myself needing to carve out time, and be intentional about making it happen, even when sometimes I’d rather scroll and sink into a kind of oblivion. I’m off a lot of social media now. Mostly, because I’m over the lie that authors have to have gigantic social media footprints to sell books. Scrolling is a hot fudge sundae at midnight. We might deserve the mindless treacle for all our hard adulting, but it’s not going to feel good after. I want to feel good during and after, like I’m engaged in a quiet act of extreme defiance.

The rebellion of reading is being swept away, fully and completely, by the story. Lost in it. So lost it hangs over you for hours and days and clouds your mood, surfaces in dreams and in thoughts in the shower. It’s rebellion against the AI we didn’t ask for. The wars we didn’t ask for. The prison camps and data centers we didn’t ask for. The precarious economy we didn’t ask for. The political divides and estrangement of our families we didn’t ask for. The tech companies that game the systems to suck up our time and turn us into vapid, programmed, obeying, flesh bags. The oligarchs and billionaires who want to build their affluence on the backs of the working class. The elites who keep people poor and on the edge.

I want to defy it all through the simple act of picking up a book, and losing myself in the author’s world that is not written by a chat bot.

Because - and please mention this to Clavicular - the ROI on reading is prodigous.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

END NOTES:

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Thanks to everyone who heard the call for support and contributed to last week’s GoFundMe for my foster daughter’s family. They’re so appreciative. We are nearly at our goal and I will close it out and meet them at their new apartment to get them set for a few months. I’ll keep you posted from time to time on how they are doing. Thank you for keeping them in your thoughts, restacking, contributing and getting the word out. This community is the best. Thank you.

One more thing: I want to introduce you all to one of those awesome friends from Central Park East II in NYC. is a voice-over actor / audio book narrator and singer, and she is going to be adding her voice to my essays. If you don’t have the time, ability or head space to read, you can listen! I post on Thursdays, so Kate will be posting the audio versions on Fridays. Let’s all welcome Kate to the community!

Last year, we had the pleasure of welcoming a surprise bonus daughter into our lives.

We had closed out our foster care license years ago, but Lana needed a place to stay, so we informally opened as a kinship placement, and she came to live with us.

Lana was 16 then, 18 in July of this year. Lana had lived with her dad in Texas. But she missed her mom and wanted to see her. They took a trip to Vegas to visit mom and the rest of her siblings. Lana got unlucky; wrong place, wrong time. She saw up close how hard things had gotten for her mom and by extension her siblings. It’s really common for people in crisis to be so worried about judgment and shame for their situation that they feel they can’t reach out to family.

Mom had been living with the kids in a car. She wasn’t well. She was trying to hold it all together. Lana was present during an altercation with Lana’s 17-year-old brother, Titus and mom. Police were called, both son and mom were taken to jail.

First Two Placements.

Lana, her two sisters (14, 5) and brother (11) were taken into custody by DFS.

They lived in a place called Child Haven, which is a transitional institution to house kids who are not in foster homes or ready for reunification. Child Haven is both a blessing and a hell of its own, better than sleeping under a social worker’s desk, but still an institution and not even close to being a home.

What happened next is a foster care story that is unfortunately typical. Dad, known as Luc, had an old DV charge from a dispute with a girlfriend. Luc is a handsome guy and is almost never without a lady friend, but Lana was clear with me and the caseworkers that Dad was always good to the kids always provided, never spanked or was abusive. She was adamant that he was a good dad, and often felt exasperated that case workers didn’t see it that way. Luc has a full time job in Vegas selling timeshares at a major casino and has had that job for as long as I’ve known him. Luc is smart and articulate, an extrovert, lots of charisma. He made a solid impression with the judge. But he couldn’t take the kids until he completed courses and cleared his old DV charge.

The kids went to live with Luc’s mom, but she struggled to pay the light bill and the rent. The expectation, an unrealistic one, was that she could take on five extra kids and be able to provide for them with only minimal extra assistance from the state. That placement failed. This should not surpise anyone. We provide daily stipends for middle class foster families, but make the family of kids in crisis beg for scraps to make the placement work.

Third + Fourth Placements.

The kids then go to live with a former girlfriend of Luc’s. Her name is Mariana. She has a child with Luc, so the siblings enjoyed being all together. She didn’t have a lot, but she made it work. They were family. This placement worked for months, until Mariana let the kids go to Luc’s house for a cookout, without being there to chaperone them.

The social workers found this to be a serious gaffe, and without notice, pulled the kids. The kids all went back to Child Haven again. Their second stint in an institution.

Fifth Placement.

A school friend of one of Lana’s siblings told her mom, Stella, about the kids being in Child Haven and convinced her to go pick them up. She did. Stella lived in a two bedroom apartment with her pregnant adult daughter, and took in the youngest four of the kids, Lana and her youngest siblings.

This is when I became the kid’s CASA (Court-Appointed Special Advocate). I went to the house to visit. Lana was living in a curtained off kitchen nook that used to house the dining room table. She shared that nook with her youngest siblings, 11 and 5, while her 14 year old sister bunked in her friend’s room.

I helped as much as I could, as a new CASA, but Stella did not have any experience working with traumatized children, nor did she have a connection and previous history with the kids. She tried to do the right things, but she ended up nearly drowning herself. She was not in a place to find and access the services that might’ve helped them. There is a vigorous foster-kinship program here in Vegas, that supports kinship families, and they do wonderful work, but there are holes, and limitations to the amount of support they can offer.

There was too much uncertainty in the house, too many plastic bags of donated uncooked beans given as a means of support, it was too crowded, everyone was on top of each other, funds were low, stress was high. Stella kept trying to get me to fund the things they needed, but I could see it was a bottomless hole of need. I could feel the stress of it all, standing in the apartment.

Sixth + Seventh Placements

One night, I got a call that Lana has run away from Child Haven. I had no idea how she got there.

Turns out Stella, had been done with Lana’s “smart mouth.” Lana was a teen afterall, caged in a tiny house with a lot of people. They weren’t allowed to leave the house without supervision. Lana was also a kid who needed lots of time to process, lots of alone time to get her thoughts together. The house was a pressure cooker, and she lost it.

Stella told Lana she was taking her to see a counselor. This was a lie. And one that has stayed with Lana. She still holds onto the betrayal. Stella, instead, drove Lana to Child Haven, the institution, and dropped her off.

Lana ran away into the night. Gone.

Lana found her brother, Titus, and they cobbled together a couch-surfing housing program for themselves. They lived with other 19 and 20 year olds supported by one of their mothers, who got disability benefits, which paid for her apartment. She operated a kind of flop house where the kids formed a Lord of Flies community. They helped each other, fought with each, scammed people for money, shared food.

I visted Lana and Titus and took them to Olive Garden every week or so. I could see her falling apart under the weight of being homeless and rootless. Titus had lived this way his whole life, adapting and moving, and bobbing and weaving as life threw its curve balls at him and his mom. But Lana had lived with her Dad, and her life had been more stable. Lana had never been unhoused or had to manipulate people to get lunch. She started looking exhausted and checked out. I kept my eye on her.

Then, at one of our lunches, Titus mentioned that a boy in the neighborhood liked Lana. He insinuated that the boy needed to pay up to date her. This felt like a potential trafficking situation in-the-making. I took them both in for the weekend. Lana was so tired and out of it, she laid in bed and couldn’t budge. Titus picked a fist fight with our son, Raffi, and I drove him back to the flop house the first night at 3am.

“Am I leaving too?” Lana asked me.

I stopped being the kid’s CASA. Lana stayed with us for more than a year. The judge, ultimately, became fed up with this case, and its snail pace to reunification, and reunited the family with Luc.

Eighth, Ninth + Home.

Desi and I went last week to visit them.

We brought cases of food and supplies. Desi has missed Lana. When Lucy and Edie left for jobs and colleges, Lana filled a Big Sister hole that Desi deeply needed filling. They played Roblox together and Lana made her Buldock ramen. They made friendship bracelets and slime. Desi also loves Lana’s siblings, who spent a lot of time with us even though they landed in yet another foster home after Lana ran away. This was their eighth (Child Haven) and ninth (new foster home) placements.

But the visit at Lucs? It made my heart happy watching them all fall into the bed together in Luc’s weekly. playing gamea on their phone, arguing, joking, laughing, cuddling. Old times.

Luc and I moved the furniture around in his weekly, one bedroom for the five of them. Luc is sleeping on the couch. But they are making it work. They are happy together. I mentioned college to Lana and to her 15-year-old sister. I mentioned the girl’s college to Luc, and now I have him badgering them about college. Luc, found a stable year-lease apartment and is moving him and the kids in next week.

They are going to need extra support. Things might be hard but they are hard for them together, which is what counts.

What we know about poverty is that the income-level you are born often into determines where people end up as adults. Kids from high-income homes make higher incomes as adults, this is a fact. And, research tells us that family stability and income during the teens years, matter even more than in the earlier years.

A really important study about social capital and how it can be used, highlights how having people with resources, influence, and the ability to pick up a phone, can make a huge difference in the lives of people who are less stable and less economically successful.

For poor children, the New York Times reported in 2022, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found.

Every couple of years, as a way to turn some of my privileges and reach into some good for other people, I put together a GoFundMe for a person or family working their asses off to make a better life for themselves. Last time, it was Johnnie, in her 60’s, who lived in her apartment without problem for 12 years and then paid rent late ONCE (because Kroger pays a high hourly, but skimps on hours) and was evicted. The $6,000 this community raised allowed her to pre-pay several months rent so she could get an apartment with an eviction on her credit. She is housed, happy and doing great, all thanks to this community. That small amount of cash, raised in community, $10 and $20 a pop, changed her life.

I’m doing the same for Lana’s family. Luc’s rent in the new place will be $1500 a month. I’d like to, ideally, get them $6,000 to pay for three months of rent, and reserve $1500 for bedding, furniture and supplies for the kids rooms. A new start. David and I will be helping with food and groceries, and creating a pantry of supplies for them, because Luc likes to cook and fancies himself pretty solid in the kitchen. Lana has confirmed this. :)

If you would like to contribute to the GoFundMe, you can go here. If you are not able or do not want to contribute, no worries! No pressure. These are hard times. We have to care for ourselves first, or we will drown trying to save others.

There are other ways to help: You can 1) restack this essay and 2) share on your social media to connect people who might want to support. You can 3) pray for this family, 4) send good vibes and wishes out into the universe for them. And you can 5) leave words of love and encouragement here in comments, stories of your own experiences overcoming hard times, advice and counsel, so they know they have people in their corner.

A last note: One of the reasons I chose the afro-futuristic art of Alma Thomas, to accompany this essay, was that her work is an explosion of joy and vibrancy, just like these kids. Alma, who was born in 1891 and left this earth in 1978, defied all expectations and statistic, as people can and often do, and as I hope these kids can do.

As a Black artist, and the first graduate of Howard University’s newly-formed fine arts degree program, she was the first Black woman to have an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC, and her painting, Resurrection (1966), was the first by a Black artist to be part of the White House’s art collection, which happened during Barack Obama’s administration. She dared to make art about the universe, the vastness of space and the possiblities of going there. She equated the iberation of Black people, under Jim Crow, with the vastness and openness of that space. And yet, her goals for her art, remained grounded on earth:

People always want to cite me for my color paintings, she said in an interview, but I would much rather be remembered for helping to lay the foundation of children’s lives.

We need Alma’s joy and vision right now. Her committment to children. There are good things out there for people. We need to lay the foundation for children’s lives, whatever way we can.

Thank you, as always, for reading and if you are able, joining in this effort. xo Kim

David is in Noosa, Australia. With his dad, John, known to his grandkids as Poppy.

Yesterday, they threw John’s beloved wife’s ashes, a woman known to our kids as Granny Trish, from a boat into the Noosa River. The river, carrying the last bits of the physical Trish will flow through a series of waterways, feed into Lake Cootharaba, and then eventually pour itself into the South Pacific, where the sandy fragments of her bones will drift into the vastness of the South Seas and reform themselves into seabed and infinite organic purpose.

David sends a photo of him with Poppy to the family chat group. He is 87. Still handsome, but more frail, the plumpness missing from his cheeks, his hair thinner, and a harder silver, his mind more wandering and loose. David hates leaving him in his nursing home, more hospital than home. But Poppy enjoys being cared for, not cooking his own meals and doing errands by himself. We talk a bit about wanting to bring him to live with us, but we know that he will get better and more affordable (by far) care in Australia.

I wonder: Is this the last time David will see his dad? Is this the last visit?

I think about last things a lot.

Last things can be good: The last chemotherapy treatment. The last of an abusive relationship. The last of paying off student loans. The last of a long line we have to stand in. The last of feeling leaden with grief. The last days of an endless winter.

Or not as good: The last kid to leave the house, making everything quiet and empty. The last pregnancy. The last beach sunset with a friend before her sudden death. The last vacation before we are unable to travel anymore. The last time I saw my own parents before they died.

Life is a calendar of last things.

Parenting itself has been an endless supply of last things: The last time they slept in our bed. The last time they breastfed. The last time Lucy said keeks instead of cheeks. I lost my babies to toddlerhood. My school kids to tweendom. My teens to adulthood. Each time, there was a last time, and that last time felt like tiny, tiny deaths.

I remember this so vividly: Edie had started making up characters, improvising, and recording them for her Youtube channel. One of them, a character named Mary Eunice Blanchard, was a 10-year-old girl from the 1950’s. Mary Eunice found herself transported to the present, out of place, and curious, like an alien wandering on earth. She wore pink cat-eye glasses, a poodle skirt, and had a pug named Animal. (Our pug, Smudge, was always game). Mary Eunice’s distinct accent, her odd way of seeing the world, her awkward, time-warp narrations and perceptions. I looked forward to every incarnation. I got used to her being around.

One day, Edie filmed the last Mary Eunice video.

I don’t think she planned it. But she was done. She outgrew Mary Eunice. But I hadn’t. I’d come to love the little weirdo. I saw Mary Eunice as part of Edie’s alter-ego, a product of her innate creativity, a small glimpse into her art brain.

I liked having her be around. Maybe it would’ve been different had I known the last video was going to be the last?

In Catholicism, there are four official Last Things. And, because it’s Catholicism, the Four Last Things are the four hardest, un-fun things:

1. Death (not fun)

2. Judgment (time to pay up. oof, def not fun)

3. Heaven / eternal happiness (aspirational)

4. Hell / eternal punishment (realistic).

My biological mother was days away from dying of colon cancer, when she called my father to her bed. Not to confess. But to ensure he would keep their secret. About the baby they had and gave away (me).

By the end of the celebrations and funeral gatherings, however, the secret was out. What would’ve changed had she told her other adult children about their missing sibling? Why didn’t she want to set things right? Why did she choose in her last moments, to hold onto the lie?

It is, of course, everyone’s own choice to confess or hold onto our secrets. But last words in Western cultures are expected to be proclamations of great importance, the filling in of bottomless holes, the answer to questions, the transmission of great family truths, the solving of stubborn mysteries, the vetting of secrets.

I’m still broken that my mother took my existence to her grave. Did it hurt so much that speaking the words could break her a little, as well? No one, mostly me, will ever know.

The Talmud also likes a tightly-wrapped ending. It says: Make confession, for all who are sentenced to death make confession. The idea is to use confession as a way to come to resolution, even redemption.

This happens often enough: A woman riddled with cancer in 2022 confessed to her nurse in the ICU that her two children, now adults in their 50’s, were not her husbands. Their father was his best friend. In 2021, a 90-year-old man, finally told his family that he had another family in another city. He used business trips to go between them and had been doing so for decades.

Why did he feel the need to say it outloud? Had he always planned to tell them? Did he feel less burdened, absolved? Did knowing this truth help his two families? Were they friggin’ pissed? Would it have been better to take it to the grave? Are some secrets better left alone?

In 2024, a Japanese man dying of terminal cancer in hospital told nurses his name was actually Satoshi Kirishima, a terrorist who had evaded capture for nearly 50 years. His wanted posters were everywhere, and widely known to people in Japan. Was he unburdened? Had he planned to do this as his last act before dying? Did he want to get the last laugh? Keep the public talking about him?

A tough diagnosis can force us to confront our mortality, our last years and months. Our finite-ness. We can, and will, lament that our time has been cut short. There is never enough time. I’m personally pissed off that if I were just 30 years younger, I might benefit from all the longevity science going on now. Could I get a couple more healthy decades out of this ride? We are so afraid of confronting our last things.

Former Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has been on a podcast tour these past few months. He was diagnosed with a stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer. He reframes our mortality as a way to eliminate the lie that we are “centers of the universe.” Sasse believes our real power and purpose is centered on our families, loved ones, and communities. To service to others. And he reminds us that the process of dying, of experiencing all of our last things, is also part of the process of living.

When we see a patient who is actively dying, hospital gown, skin and bones, weakened by disease, unreconizeable to us, we might believe the best of them has already left us. That they are walking dead. They are failing. Their nursing home is God’s waiting room. They remind us of our own powerlessness and precariousness. Because it can, and will, infect us, too.

But Sasse believes that in dying, there is time for more last things. The good kind. Another afternoon coffee looking out over the Noosa River. Another look at the hot young resident looking at our scans. One last intimate conversation where you leave nothing on the table. Another beach sunset. One last fuck. One last vacation. One last time sleeping next to the warm slumbering bodies of our children. One last I love you. One last hug. One last _______________________ (fill in the blank). Sasse doesn’t run from the last things, he embraces them, counts them, is intentional about making more of them.

We aren’t gone until the last breath leaves our bodies. We live to the very very end. I highly recommend this conversation with Ben Sasse and Russ Douthat.

Of all the last things, last suppers, might be the most interesting to write about. The scholarship around last suppers is deep. The concept, originally, came from the Ancient Greeks. When a person was put to death, they didn’t want him pissed off and coming back over the River Styx to menace them as a Hungry Ghost. The Greeks fed the condemned to appease them and make them docile.

The Last Supper, the 15th century painting by Michelangelo, and also the orignal story, as described in the Gospels, is drenched in lastness. Jesus is leaving his disciples. He calls out his betrayer, forgives his betrayer, kicks off thousands of years of communion, and introduces the symbolism of the bread and the wine, as the body and the blood of Christ. It’s a lot. If the Last Supper were a dramatic thriller on Netflix, Jesus would be tying up all the plot lines in a single Emmy-winning dramatic monologue.

The Puritans in Massachusetts continued the traditions of Jesus’ last supper by making a giant communal feast when someone was to be executed. The idea was to break bread together, to take this last chance for atonement, for the prisoner and the community as a whole. With the idea being: Let us eat and drink now, for tomorrow we shall die. A phrase that pops up twice, in Isaiah 22:13 (Old Testament) and 1 Corinthians 15:32 (New Testament).

The large-format meal was a peace-offering between the brutal state execution machine, and the complicated humans who committed crimes.

The photos in this essay are of meals served to death row prisoners leading up to their executions. Their last meals. The photographer is New Zealander, Henry Hargreaves, who said this about what drew him to making this series called No Seconds:

I felt a sense of empathy for these people. Up until now they had generally been depicted by the state and through the media as bad people meeting their deserved end. Whereas now through this common denominator of food they became more than just a statistic and were strangely personalized. It made me curious about the entire justice system and how certain people are deemed bad enough to not walk the earth anymore and if this system is prone to any biases or mistakes.

This is as the puritans wanted it. To provide comfort at the end, for even the most heinous and anti-social among us, to bring us all, collectively, to the knees of mercy.

The last meals themselves mirror the people and their desires. Victor Feguere, condemned to be hung for kidnapping and murder, requested a single olive to symbolize world peace. He hoped the pit would grow a tree from his decaying body. A murderer named, James Smith ordered a plate of rhaeakunda dirt, a requirement to make reincarcation happen for himself through a Voodoo spell. It wasn’t on the approved foods list, and it was denied. And Thomas Grasso, who strangled an eldery woman and later an elderly man for their social security checks and purse change. His final words were: I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.

One particularly difficult last supper involved a mentally incapacitated death row inmate named Ricky Ray Rector, who ate his final meal, but “saved his pecan pie” for “later,” not fully understanding his own impending death. He had tried to commit suicide after shooting a police officer, but he took out his frontal lobe and lived.

Sometimes death row inmates forgo their meal. When we confine people, and remove their freedoms, they will always find their ways to resist. Food is a common tool of incarceration resistance. Lawrence Russell Brewer, of Jasper, Texas, was one of the white supremacists who dragged James Byrd, Jr, a Black man, down a dirt road for three miles, off the back of a pickup truck. Brewer asked for a large last supper: chicken fried steaks, burgers, BBQ and pizza. He refused to eat it. That act in 2011, ended last suppers for death row inmates in Texas, forever. There is always one asshole who ruins it for everyone else.

Brewer was an outlier though. The research tells us that inmates who believe themselves to be innocent decline their last meals at rates of almost three times as often, as those who confessed to their crimes. Making meal rejection at execution a sign of possible innocence and wrongful conviction.

I recently read an article about a chef who had a successeful restaurant career, and then went to cook for people in hospice. British chef, Spencer Richards, spoke about making the first ever birthday cake for a 93-year-old woman. Her first birthday cake was her last cake. He made Vietnamese street food for a dying 21-year-old who didn’t want anything on the standard menu. For Richards, the idea is to provide the meal that will bring the most joy and surprise, possibly fill in holes in experience. The last meal as a bucket list to check off.

Another hospice chef, Thomas Montgomery brings a different take, but one still focused on the experience of dying as an act of living: They (folks in hospice) don’t want complicated. They want to feel cared for. Mashed potatoes are soft, easy to eat…and they taste like home. It’s more than flavor, he says, it’s connection to life.

The last things often connect us back to the very best parts of life itself. And the very best things are often scarce and precious anyway, precious because of their scarcity. Last things, and potential last things like visiting your elderly father in another hemisphere, must be savored for this reason.

Before this last trip to Australia, I said to David the thing I always say to him when he goes on a trip. Make sure you come back.

I say it everytime he leaves on a trip. I started this when I was more insecure about our relationship, when we were new. When I worried he might meet a gorgeous dancer on one of his shows, or in the week he’d be gone, he might fall out of love with me. I know now he will come back home. But if I didn’t say Make sure you come back, I would feel 100% like I was dooming his plane to fall out of the sky. So I say it, every time.

Someday I will say it and it will be the last time. I will say it and he won’t come back, or it will be me who won’t be here when he does, or some other unpredictable iteration of our last thing. Maybe we will be prepared, maybe we won’t. I’ve always thought of David and I as infinite, the future unffurling in front of us, endlessly. The two of us impervious to time. We could waste time because there was so much of it. Then, we were 50. All of a sudden. Then our kids became adults. Then David had a heart attack.

Everything we do now is a potential last thing. And so it must all be savored.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Kim xo

Years ago, when David and I first fell in love, we cooked dinner together for his work friends and colleagues, and his brother and sister-in-law. He invited everyone over to our NYC studio apartment on 100th street, where David had quickly moved in without either of us really talking about it. Everything had been heating up quickly, the relationship was forming around us without us driving it. And this dinner was about meeting his people. Getting everyone around us up to speed.

I was nervous, of course, and wanted to make a good impression. I’m not entirely sure what we made for supper. But I remember we shucked oysters, and I remember being pissed at myself for convincing my fishmonger that it was just fine for me to handle the cleaning and shucking myself. Rookie mistake.

But the dinner went well enough and no one had to swallow sand from their oysters. We ate, laughed. I enjoyed their funny stories about David. They were all mostly Australians, like David, so I was soaking up all the jokes and the accents and the cultural differences. I cleared some supper dishes and popped into the kitchen to check on my pavlova.

Now, for those of you not familiar, pavlovas are iconic Australian desserts. Pavs have a meringue base made from whipped egg whites, sugar, a stabilizer like cornstarch or cream of tartar or an acid, like vinegar or lemon. The meringue is baked in a very low (and accurate) oven, convection (or fan-forced) ovens do best. What comes out (hopefully) is this glorious white mound, delicate and crispy on the outside and marshmallow-creamy inside.

When the pav cools, you can pile it up with fresh whipped cream, berries or stone fruits (passion fruit and lemon curds are my fav) and then, a topper, a little lemon zest for kick, or a few herb leaves like mint or thyme, maybe a handful of edible flowers like pansies or lavender to make it pretty, nuts like pistachios or hazelnuts for crunch, or even a rain of powdery confectioners sugar over the top.

This dish can be a fucking show stopper, and this is what I was going for.

I was also a newbie at entertaining, but paging through English cookbook author, Nigella Lawson’s 2001 baking cookbook, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, I had laying around, I found her Chocolate Raspberry Pavlova.

Her head notes read like porn, all sensual and horny:

You just cannot beat a pav in my book, and I glory in particular this dark beauty. The crisp and chewy chocolate meringue base, rich in cocoa and beaded nuggets of chopped plain chocolate, provides a sombre, almost purple-brown layer beneath the fat whiteness of the cream and matt, glowering crimson raspberries on top: it is a killer combination.

Nigella neglected to mention that the pav was an iconic Australian dessert, right up there with lamingtons, vanilla slices and anzac biscuits. I was clueless. Oblivious. Total newb. This meant that I was serving my guests something they had probably eaten tons of times, had grown up eating them in their moms kitchens, and had ingrained cultural memories of how they should look and taste like.

Nigella also didn’t mention in her horny head notes that pavs are persnickety little fuckers, and getting that meringue to grow into this majestic fat round with the perfect exterior and interior textures can be tricky, particularly for baking and entertaining novices like me.

After dinner, I cleared supper dishes, and headed into the kitchen to ready dessert. I had my cream and raspberries ready to go, and the little bits of dark chocolate I wanted to rain all over the top.

But the pav itself was a small crisis.

It had fallen. Flat as a pancake. Instead of this proud, stand-up-straight lofty meringue, what I found was a dark brown gooey mess that had fallen onto itself into a muddy brick.

Fine. Fine. I’m nothing if not adaptable. I quickly re-grouped and resolved to call it a fudge brownie, pile it with cream, berries and throw some chocolate shards over the top, and get on with things. No one had to know. It could stay a cook’s secret. What happens in the kitchen stays in the kitchen, or some such thing.

But David and I were a new couple. We didn’t have the secret codes and signals that couples have when they’ve been together for years. Before I could stop him and fill him on my fudge brownie story, I heard him yell to the others: Kim made a pavlova for everyone! Come in and check it out! I heard people moving around. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! My new friends and family, the people I wanted to impress, gathered excitedly around my sad little flat pav.

Hmmmm, that’s not quite a pav, someone else chimed in from behind my left shoulder.

I wonder what happened?

Oh they can be so tricky…

I was crushed. Embarrassed. I didn’t have the cooking experience I would come to have later, after decades, where a misstep could be doctored or re-assembled into something else in the secrecy of the kitchen. Or that I could just come right out and admit the truth, laugh it off and make light of it. Well, I guess I fucked up dessert! Onwards!

But I wasn’t there yet in my cooking journey, or my life journey, or my relationship journey. I hadn’t quite settled into the more confident parts of myself. This would come with age and experience and maturity. But not yet. Instead, it felt like a grand humiliation.

But then…

Hey! someone chirped up. My mom makes a great Pav, let me call her!

It was midnight in NYC, but all across Australia it was the afternoon in Sydney, Noosa, Brisbane, Melbourne and Cairns. And one at a time, our guests called their mothers, who, over crackly 2004-ish era flip phone loud speakers, told us about cream of tartar, which overwhlemingly all the Aussie mothers used for their pavs, and had deep consequential theories about its necessity. Nigella’s recipe conspicuously omitted it, and this was clearly a cultural abomination. They suggested I use Donna Hay’s recipes instead. This was my first introduction to Australia’s very own Martha Stewart.

There were also deep discussions of the un-eveness of the heat in my rental’s oven, and the lack of fan-forced heat (convection). The moms gave us lessons about humidity, dryess, and perfect pav-making climates and seasons. The need for a very low oven heat setting that probably wasn’t even possible on my rental stove. I was told that when the pavlova sinks, like mine did, it’s called weeping. This felt apt.

They asked me whether I had used the super fine caster sugar (I did not) as this would help set up the structure of the merengue, and stabilize the egg whites. And then they instructed me not use too much cream of tartar, lest it take on a metallic taste. (Noted) Some of the moms heated their egg whites and superfine caster sugar in a bain-marie (double boiler) to dissolve the sugar before whipping.

Were the egg whites room temp? one of the moms asked, and sounded relieved that they were.

The mums, Aussie for moms, thought the idea of a “chocolate” pav was on a spectrum of somewhere between ridiculous to offensive. They stripped Nigella’s poor recipe down to its clean white bones. In a series of phone calls, the mums had managed to convince, not only me, but the room full of their children, that none of this was my fault, and that I had been undone by an English recipe writer who really didn’t know her ass from her pavlova. (Sorry Nigella, we still love your horny prose!)

That was how I met both David’s mum, Ann, in Sydney, and Trish, the wife of his father, John, in Noosa, on the sunshine coast. Along with the mums of friends and colleagues that I would come to sit next to at David’s shows, and on visits to Australia. It was memorable and warm. The perfect way to meet the women who would make up our extended family, and love on our kids, and women who I would come to love and appreciate for the way they extended themselves to me and invited me into their world.

Last week, we lost one of the last of these mums. Trish was 91. David’s dad’s wife. She lived a full beautiful life, with the full spectrum of experiences both wonderful and hard. She died loved, considered, and not alone. David will be there next week to be with his dad as they throw her ashes into the rivers around Noosa.

Losing these mums, one by one, over the years, some I know and loved well, and others I spent time with and have memories, others only that night on the phone, I’m presented with how much I appreciated them mothering me that night. I also think about how many of us younger women at the party are now mothers, and how we are doling out our own advice, counsel and support to our grown, and nearly grown kids, and their friends. I’m aware of the constant churn of the clock, the steady thrum of change in our lives, how we matter to people in the most minute, but still tangential ways, simply by mothering the people around us.

Sometimes the mother-child relationship can be difficult, complex, weighted down by old disgreements, disappointments, wounds, and failures. That relationship is primal, even when it isn’t good or good enough. Being estranged from your mother, for instance, is its own relationship. The absence never stops having an ache, and the ache, like it or not, the absence of her, becomes your mother.

And this is because mothers and their babies are all mixed up in each other. Mothers who’ve given birth have their baby’s fetal cells in their organs, skin and brain. We carry the cells of our babies around with us our whole lives. As toddlers, they are all over us, feet in faces, our heaving breasts feeding them, our warm chests and stomachs providing safety and comfort, legs sleeping intertwined with little, sharp-kneed, ever-moving appendages. They cling to us and feel its necessary to sit on our laps while we poop, because they cannot stand the idea of being untethered to us.

Later, they will thwart that closeness and leave, and we will cling to their fetal cells and photo albums, and wonder how it all went by so fast. Then, they come to us as adults, with their own ideas, beliefs and ways of being, and we try to love them right where they are, while remembering not to smother them with our love, the way they smothered us wih theirs. It’s so intertwined and ropey and intense. The mother-child relationship can always go off-the-road, or it can become the balm the family needs, and both of these happen, over and over, until we fucking die.

But the mums who mother us tangentially come without baggage. Without intensity and past hurts. They can meet us where we are, can more easily forgive us the history that got us here, and we can laugh when they are irritating or maddening, because we do not carry each others cells, we do not have the intensity, the history, there is no obligation. They are not mandated to be in our lives, or to even expose their greatest intimacies, or learn ours. They just show up and give what they can in the moment, and sometimes it’s so simple as to be profound.

My mother-in-law, Ann, loved for me to cook for her when we visited her in Sydney, even as my own mother critiqued my cooking. Ann’s appreciation mattered to me, deeply. When my body was unruly and recovering from back-to-back pregancies, my other mother-in-law, Trish became my personal shopper, taking me to boutiques and pulling clothes off racks that might make me feel beautiful again. This mattered to me, even as my own mother critiqued me for letting my body go. Trish reminded me of my beauty, when I thought it had disappeared forever.

The mums who are near us, but not mixed up in the debris of our living, are a salve. And they represent opportunities for mums embroiled in complicated relationships with their own children, to still be essential to other people’s children in the world, to still be able to mother. To save an evening, remind us to be ourselves, to love us right where we are, to guide us with oven temps and lessons on humidity, to step in when our own mothers are not able. They offer us something uncompromising and simple.

I hope that my adult daughters, out in the world, are able to find their mums, to fill in the gaps that I’ve evitably left, if not by fault then by distance. And to then return that favor decades from now, as mums and aunties to other people’s children, if they choose to. (Cue The Circle of Life from The Lion King.)

The mums remind us of the village. That we are not alone. That mothers and mothering can be found everywhere, in different doses and prescriptions, and that to be mothered at all is one of the great gifts of the universe.

Thank you, as always for reading. Kim xo

This weekend I read aloud a New York Times opinion piece in the car to David. Children in head phones lined the back seats. The April 2026 piece, Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential, written by Samuel Moyn, a 52-year-old professor of law and history at Yale, is one of the more aggressive takes on the classic boomers ruined everything narrative. But it’s not the only one by a long shot.

There’s Lyman Stone’s 2019 Atlantic piece of a similar name: The Boomers Ruined Everything: The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans, and culminates in another April 2026 piece: An Oligarchy of Old People How Elderly Americans amassed disproportionate wealth and power, by Idrees Kahloon, also in the Atlantic. There are probably a dozen think-pieces in between, and various books on offer making similar arguments.

Boomers, it appears, are at fault for everything that ails us. To my Boomer readers, I’m sitting here in my guilt-free cultural zeitgiest-bubble of Gen X, watching reruns of Heathers and Ferris Buehler, looking at you all as Moyn shouts: Look at what you got us into, Boomers!

Joking! I like a good generational essay when it collects our memories and cultural toushstones, and rifles through them for glory, redemption or critique. I’m less thrilled with painting everyone born before 1965 with the blame for, well, everything. Still Boomers seem to be getting a lions share of the pushback.

The big beef with Boomers, essentially, is that they went through a particularly government-subsidized period - white men and their families, after The New Deal - and reaped the benefits of that support and then started voting, like billionaires, to keep the wealth they had. They moved to the suburbs, worked on their lawns, saved for retirement, focused on consumerism and upward mobility. And got more and more politically conservative. They did not have a full panaoramic view of everything that was happening outside of their cul-de-sacs.

So, do people tend to get more conservative as they grow more economically flush? This is, in fact, a neurobiological reality. Research has proven that wealth inequality can drain empathy. The more money people have, the more disconnected they become from those in more dire situations, and the more they work to hold onto their wealth. The disconnection increases as wealth increases. While Elon Musk is getting some $56 million a week in government entitlements, a typical SNAP recipient is pulling in something like $80 a week. Not even in the same experiential ballpark.

And the way to become wealthy? Politicians of the 70s, 80s and 90s convinced people that hard work was synonymous with success and attaining the American Dream. Take Reagan: The American dream is.that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.”

Implied was the idea that God intended for some people to attain things, and if a person fulfilled that potential, it was because they and God made it happen. The system was about merit. The conceit was that we all started out on the same starting line and had the same advantages.

Boomers, Moyne and the opinion writers tell us, wanted to hold onto their wealth, and voted against the very policies that helped them attain it. They climbed Everest, used good decision-making and a solid work ethic to get to the top (not generous entitlements the rhetoric goes), only to then pull the rope ladder up behind them on the summit.

I’m not so sure.

Gerontonomia is a term coined, by political economist, Tim Vlandas. It’s a mouthful to say (try to say it 3x.) Where Gerontocracy is rule by older folks, Vlandas describes Gerontonomia as a situation where older voters dominate policy. They show up at the polls and vote, where many younger people do not. They vote to keep their wealth. They vote to keep inflation down, so as not to tap into their savings. They pritoritize pensions, social security, middle class entitlements, lowering property and school taxes, and prioritize healthcare. They like their home prices high, because that means a solid resale and better profits for transfering wealth and/or using those investments to pay for home health aides or nursing home care. These things, critics like Moyne say, tend to help Boomers alone, and not younger generations.

Are Boomers wealth-hoarders who are purposely impairing younger generations? Aren’t these the same people who gave us bra burning, civil rights, Act Up, birth control and Roe v Wade?

Let me just say this: Making it easy for people to vote should be everyone’s top concern. If it were up to President Kim (me, that’s me!) we’d have mandatory voting, like Australia has, and we’d make it exceptionally easy for people to vote. Where older folks have mostly settled into one address, and have established voter access, young people in the throes of estabishing themselves are moving and relocating more.

Young folks also tend to be collosally detached from the political system. I didn’t start solidly voting in midterms and presidential elections until I was in my late 20’s and I had worked in politics! Now, about 53% of young people see political activisim to be mostly online. Just because they are publicly political doesn’t mean they are voting.

Why is this happening? Well, young people are fucking busy. They have crazy schedules, small kids, school, work, insufficient balances in their checking accounts, less flexibility. It’s harder to be hustling to get your life together, than to actually have your life togther. They also feel, as a group, that politicians don’t care about them or their concerns. They will participate in galvanizing groups like #Metoo and #BlackLivesMatter, but are less likely to get involved in everyday political theatre, mostly because they have lives to live! Young people are busy becoming!

They also get that our votes often don’t count anyway. If you vote red in a blue state, or blue in a red state, you know this too. Your vote barely registers.

Again, if I were President Kim, I’d abolish (if I could) the electoral college, filibustering, and gerrymandering, so that every individual has one vote and that vote always counts, no matter what state you are in, or what politician it means elevating. I’d also make a year of service mandatory for all highschool grads, in areas of their choosing, so they can see how the world works, and how they fit into it. To get them out of their bubbles.

And as long as we are talking, President Kim would make a political science elective part of the highschool experience (Can we add home ec, please? So that food eating and cooking are baked into our educational system again?) where the teens have to be involved in their communities in some political project for a semester. The idea is to get young adults excited about candidates, and public service, and help them think about what they stand for, and what the people of their communities need most. The hope, of course, is that it’ll be harder to pull the ladder up after they get themselves settled.

So what about that? What is all this ladder pulling? I think what we are witnessing is more about brain science, and how we are wired as humans, than about selfishness or narrow-thinking. The more we know about brain science, the more we know that much of our decision-making isn’t under our control. It’s decided by genetics, hormones, biology, disease, hunger, environment, trauma and experience.

We are just imperfect vessels working through all this stuff.

The brain science theory that explains this best is called Social Identity Theory, a concept created by physchiatric researchers Henri Tajfel and John Turner, to explain why we are so tethered to being part of identity groups.

We are all very into our groups. When Trump voters support him without critique, and look past his flagrant corruption, illegal wars, potential pedophilia, and repulsive commentary about women’s bodies, they are saying that they want to continue to identify with the MAGA group, the camraderie, the tailgate picnics at rally’s, the cool merch, the short hand, the Trump dance, the belonging. If they aren’t MAGA, who are they? When a 30-year-old goes all in on her autism diagnosis, and wears it like an identity to explain every facet of her life, joins chat groups, writes an autism Substack, gets in online arguments with strangers, looks for, and anticipates out-groups who might desparage her or her people, she is saying that she loves what the in-group does for her self-identity. The group bolsters self-esteem, identity and provides a sense of belonging. If she wasn’t autistic, who would she be?

Humans LOVE this. Groups are powerful for the human brain.

We saw this happen in post WWI Germany leading up to the Holocaust. Germany was decimated economically, and young men were despairing, beaten down by economic sanctions, a cratering economy, and a feeling of brutal humiliation. Hitler, then leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, created boy’s youth groups, called Hitlerjugend (HJ). They started out a lot like our boy scouts. Boys went on adventures, competed in athletics, learned morals and values, developed friendships, camped out in forests, learned survivial skills, and basked in all manner of male camaraderie.

But over the course of a decade and through Hitler’s growing political power, the HJ experienced a subtle (at first) and (later) propulsive, vibe shift.

The HJ became mandatory for boys. Jews, the disabled and foreigners were isolated. The identity of the boys became stronger, as they betrayed family and friends for the sake of the in-group. Race relations played a vital role, and was linked irrevocably to the esteem of the in-group. One race was good, the others bad. One set of physical characteristics was good, the others bad. Play turned to military training. Camping became field operations, as boys were taught about guns and hand-to-hand combat. Masculinity was connected to the Reich and to being inside the group. It was common for HJ boys to brutalize and humiliate Jews in the streets to prove their strength, and to promote fear and compliance in the community.

The more the HJ ostracized out-group people, the more the in-group was able to identify even more powerfully. It gave them confidence and tethered them to a cause bigger than themselves. This made them ripe for committing the atrocities that followed. Günter Grass, a young German man, lamented his role in the HJ in his letters after the war. He wrote: What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no-one could alleviate it. Grass was only able to see the ramifications of his actions, and how he was manipulated, after all the details came out, when he could see the full expanse of the brutality and the genocide. The HJ, his in-group itself, occluded this from view.

The in-group can blind us to the truth of things, and can influence and change us as people, in stubbornly powerful and sometimes detrimental ways. Could this have been the experience of cul-de-sac Boomers in the 80’s who bought into Reagan’s false rhetoric about the grifting of the poor, and welfare queens draining American coffers?

Most times, how we feel about the out-group isn’t so pointed and specific. We don’t hate them, as much as we are indifferent to them. With in-group people, we have a designated spot in our brains that lights up when we interact with them. For the out-group folks? The brain offers nothing. They are “not us” and that’s the end.

This applies specifically to empathy. If someone in the in-group is going through hell, like say if Paul Pelosi is brutally attacked in his home, Dem supporters are sad, angry, outspoken. The feelings match others inside the group. There is connection in loss and mourning. But when Charlie Kirk was killed, there’s just not the same activation in the brain for liberals. We can’t drudge up the same emotional connection. Not because we don’t have empathy for his family and supporters, or because we think his death was somehow justified (It was not.) We just don’t have the brain apparatus to extend outselves the same way for the out-group.

We also have to handle our Gestalt Cortex, a section of the brain behind the ear that helps us figure out our reality, what’s happening and what’s not happening. It takes all the sounds, sights, inputs and environmental stumuli, and makes sense out of them.

Turns out, we have a lot of confidence that we are right. Scientists call this Naive Realism. This means that when people challenge our views about reality, we see these folks as flat-out wrong. We’re right and they don’t get it! We see this all over the internet as people fight and clap back at each other. It isn’t surprising then, that people in our in-groups tend to have similar neural pathways and activations. We collect people with similar Gestalt Cortexes.

I often tell people when I lecture, or speak at an event, to get out of their socio-economic bubbles. It’s the best advice I can give anyone, I think, because it informs how we see the world.

Our brains are built to empathize with individuals, not concepts, theories or white papers. A singular person’s experience can move us. This is why Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York has been so successful, and also why Steve Hartman’s On the Road, hasn’t gotten any less popular after three decades on the air. It’s also why my book, The Meth Lunches is story-based, about real people and their experiences, because people are activated more by stories, than stats.

It’s not surprising that Reagan was able to stoke Boomers fears about chronic welfare corruption by telling the story of one woman, Linda Taylor. In a 1976 campaign speech, Reagan criticized Taylor, who was definitely a thief, for bilking public assitance by maintaining “80 names, 30 addresses, and a tax-free income of $150,000.” The story was overblown and not factual, and it was used to unfairly cast suspicion on an entire group of people. But it had weight. It helped Reagan get elected. And it determined policy going forward for decades.

His story triggered people’s Gestalt Cortex, and it strengthened their in-group bonds, while distancing them from the out-group, in this case, poor, Black families.

We have a lot of older folks in the US. Just like Japan, Italy, Monaco, and Finland.

This is largely because of an increase in life expectancy, better medical practices and technologies, and a focus on longevity and health. In the car, after I read these pieces to David, he reminded me that legislating age limits for politicians is pointless, anyway. We are living in a time of great change. Medicine might soon be able to keep some of us alive and thriving well into our hundreds. If so, all of our ideas about the gerontocracy will shift anyway.

As for the low birth rates, well, can we blame young people? It’s ludicrously expensive to manage the cost of housing, childcare, and student loan debt. We haven’t done enough to support young people and young families making their way in the world. We haven’t set them up to want to add to their families. As Moyne writes in his New York Times piece: “..in the United States today, six to seven federal dollars go to seniors for every one that goes to children.”

I agree with Moyne that it’s in our collective best interests to financially help young families. It’s the one thing we can do to ensure that the next generation will turn into healthy and adjusted adults, who contribute to the growth and wellbeing of the nation and their local communities. supporting young people and young families, with resources and entitlements, is deeply patriotic.

But Moyne’s ideas also border on the alarmist. He wants to create mandatory retirement ages, force older people to downsize and sell their family home, to free up housing for younger people. He wants to make elders pay higher property taxes, and make young people’s votes weigh more. He wants to make older people transfer wealth to their kids long before they die.

This is overkill and weirdly punitive. We know that much of the wealth accumulated by our older folks is not going to be hoarded, but will support their children and grandchildren via intergenerational wealth transfers, assitance with housing, education and childcare. What we need is to use real stories of real people to encourage older voters to get behind policies and politicians that support young people, so that every generation behind us is stronger.

Of course, we know what will happen: Those young people will recieve more entitlements, grow older, build wealth, assets and stability, and will be enmeshed in their own in-groups, where they will be inclined to think about their own interests primarily. And wash and repeat. There is no fighting the brain science.

Economists and authors want us to believe that if Boomers had been more thoughtful humans, they could’ve predicted our political and economic quagmires and stopped them from happening. Maybe. But I think they give the human brain too much credit.

I’m not sure we have much control over anything,

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

__________________

END NOTES: Shout out to my daughter, Edie who read her undergrad history presentation to David and I, and taught me about the HJ in Germany, which I used for this piece. She wrote a 10-page paper on how the men of the HJ were both oppressors (of Jews) and oppressed (by Hitler). Fascinating stuff.

Something interesting happened when I took Lucy and Edie across New York state to look at colleges. On every visit, I noticed something that surprised me… Zines.

Not like one little place in the art department or only in super-bohemian liberal arts colleges. Everywhere. Tech schools to state schools to lauded privates. In campus libraries, in cafeterias, in racks in common areas and rathskellers. Racks and racks of hand-made paper topic-specific tiny magazines, with drawings and stickers and research and data mixed with revelations and history and personal stories.

They were these serious modes of creativity and communication. Beautifully laid out tomes about sex, astonomy, the history of menstruation, one documented a nature hike that they went on every weekend, photograpjy zines, laid out like museum books, a kind of Walt Whitman-esque diary that was part nature writing and wild plant journal. There were ones about tattoos and piercings and what they meant that philosophized about adornment and mutilation, what is one and what is the other. There was one about thrifting as a way to combat fast fashion, and this brought me to Liverpool artist, Lauren Yeats’ fast fashion zine and her zine work.

The young people crave what we had in abundance. They might not want to live in the 70’s, 80s and 90s - although I’ve heard from young people, including my children, that this was considerd a very cool time to be coming up - they want some of their digital connections, but also some of our experiences. They crave some anonymity in a world where they can make mistakes, or say the wrong thing, without the crush of the internet falling on them and shaming them.

They want the friction and slowness. To be nvolved in constructing something with paper and materials. They want to make zines with other zine makers, and share techniques and gossip, the same way older Korean women in small villages gathered together in a kimjang to make kimchi for everyone. Groups making things together have had such power in our history. And then they print the papers out on dusty copy machines, and fold them so it creates a booklet, and they physically bring it to buildings, and display them so people notice, and take them, and carry them around in their book bags.

They want it to be a project. They want to make it with their hands. They want to watch people pick up these little treasures and read them as they sit in the campus center. They are not looking for fame and virality or followers. They are looking for an intimate moment, a connection.

It is connective tissue. It is intentional and edifying and slow and real.

I’ve been thinking about this as a person who used to love the internet.

I mean I made some of my best friends and most supportive collleagues on here when Twitter was new and good. But now, even going on FB, IG, Threads, its all people posting dumb shit to bait people, and then other people spew vitriol and shame at them for not knowing the right answers, and then a whole lot of people come to watch the comments sections lose their minds. I came for the comments and I’m not disappointed is a common response. The project is to feel like a part of a group, a righteous group, a cooler group, while punishing and shaming others. The internet’s version of togetherness makes me want to take a cold shower.

When I was in college, new and naive, I used to take comfort that I lived in a civil enough time and place. At least I didn’t live through the inquisition. I would think. We have problems but we arent drawing and quartering people in the town square. But what we have now is only a bit different than watching starved lions eat slaves in the colleseum, and people bringing picnics to watch public hangings.

We aren’t better. And if we are, it’s by lengths of millimeters not miles

A recent scandal serves as an example.

A popular therapist named @TherapyJeff with a significant following, in the hundreds of thousands, said something that triggered a lot of people. I’m not going to get into the scandal itself, because I barely paid attention to the details. But the reaction was unmissable. It took over my feeds. The reaction was insane. People found out where he practices and called the state boards to have his license terminated, and just really intense vitriol about something that in a real life discussion would’ve been handled much differently.

A few days into the drama, someone posted this. It clarified things for me:

And, of course, it’s not just the internet’s fault. We are living in a time in which our leader is like the drunk daddy at our collective dinner table. We are the bewildered, exhausted children, drenched in chaos and focused on what daddy might do next.

I read this great piece on substack by about how in therapy language, Trump is called the Identified Patient. In dysfunctional families, there is usually one person who is the messiest and most chaotic. They are so tangibly destructive and outsized about it, that the family doesn’t have to look at themselves. Daddy sucks up all the air out of the room.

Our country is gathered around the table, and Daddy is throwing chairs. He is raging in the middle of the night about his grievances, popping off about his perceived enemies, fleecing the family of its cash and resources, stealing money out of the children’s piggy banks as they sleep. He can be petulant and punitive, We are stunned and reeling.

Amanda writes:

This fixation on the identified patient means we have precious little time, energy or desire left to do the most important work. To repair our relationships, build stronger, better institutions, fight corruption and plan for a very different future so that our children do not inherit the same tragedy.

Amanda goes on to say:

To break out of this trap, you start by acknowledging you are in it. Then you forcibly widen your view of the problem and the solution — and take countercultural action in your own corner of the world. I have seen this happen again and again in all kinds of high conflict, from political feuds to street violence, and it is the only way out.

I had this on my mind when David sent me several articles about artists, poets and writers who are starting mail clubs. Hand written letters to subscibers. postcards with doodles, poems, diary entrees, affirmations or full-blown art. One lady is a crossing guard, who is also a designer, started writing letters to people with daily observations on her job.

According to the Wall Street Journal: For $8 a month, she would send out an eight-page magazine with illustrations and observations from the intersection, her garage art studio and beyond. Within a few days, it had hundreds of thousands of views and 1,000 people signed up. When Hill paused subscription orders, her wait list quickly grew to 3,600.

We are DYING for the analog.

We want to feel the paper. Feel the anticipation of opening the mail box and find something that isn’t a bill waiting for us. We want to focus on one thing and not have our attention split. We want to be grounded in something, as a way to handle the onslaught of our phones, and media screaming at us to follow along. We want to get away from our dysfunctional daddy. We want to be calm and sane again.

On date night last week, David and I discussed this over non-alcoholic Guinness. I played with this idea, of sending a little suprise micro-essay to my paying subscribers as a little thank you and bonus. I miss writing the tiny essays that I used to on IG, a photo with a little thought essay. But would I be able to do it? Would it be too much effort? Would something I hand-made even be good? Would anyone want that? IWould I hate it? I wondered if I did that if people would want to write back? If we could share mail, ideas, advice, our projects? Would it create more community or hassle?

I also played with the idea of what we all could do for young people who might be sorely in need of some analog contact. I always feel like teens and elders need each other, young people give us spontaneity, energy and fresh ideas. We give them stories, our maturity and counsel. I know a young man who uses chat bots to parent himself, because his mother is embroiled in her addction.

I’m going to be doing some work with teens in juvie, it’s in the works, and I wondered if they might want letters from us? And if I could create a class every week for them, where they write people back. What if letter writing or journaling, or wiritng a tiny memoir on a postcard could give vulnerable kids a much-needed healthy conection? Would they want to make art, zines, and poems?

I don’t know. I just know that the analog is calling. And this is our jam. We are some of the last generations on earth who have the analog in our souls. We were born makers and creators.

The kids might call it #FrictionMaxxing, but we are the caretakers of the analog, its Kings and Queens. There is something here to brainstorm.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

END NOTES:

1. I found all these great zine covers while falling asleep after taking an edible last night. Usually, I’m focused on linking art and artists and giving credit, but apparently I was very stoned, and I have no idea where I found these or what creator did what. LOL. Apologies for not properly crediting. Won’t happen again.

2. Thank you guys for hilariously making “vacation dosing” a thing in comments on our last essay about testosterone and horniness. Going back to my doc about raising my dose. LOL

It was Saturday, date night, early-ish, around 6:30pm. Broad daylight in Vegas. We had an early date night at our favorite local, The Red Dwarf, a dark, punk, tiki bar, where we try to get in before the bands start and keep us from being able to talk at normal volumes.

The drive home was short. But I found myself possessed with a feeling so strong, so outside of myself, so achingly horny and deep, that I moved across the seat and slid my hand in between my husband’s legs as he drove. The next thing you know we were pulled over behind the loading dock of our neighborhood supermarket, Smith’s, because the kids were at home, and this was our only shot.

There was more of this that week. An episode behind a dumpster. And that time the kids were having school with their teacher, and I forced David to meet me in the bathroom to satisfy me on the floor.

“You cannot leave this bathroom until this is finished,” I said sternly.

He understood the assignment.

I felt like my old self again. Sexual. I had needs. I wanted to be touched and to touch. I ached for it. I felt fucking ALIVE. I reminded myself of a teenage boy who says dumb shit in the woods, pants unzipped, bottle of Boones Farm in one hand, like: If you don’t let me finish, my penis might fall off. My brain might explode!

I understood, in that moment, the sex-obsessed brains of teenage boys, and why they say such ridiculous things. And even though David and I have always had a great sex life; after labor, babies and perimenopause, that great longing dimmed some. I was into sex so much while we were doing it, but I no longer got crazy-horny during regular life. And I no longer demanded to be satisfied, because I was always kind of satisfied. Would there be a time when sex wouldn’t be a part of my life? This seemed unimaginable, and yet completely imaginable.

I knew I had lost something along the way. I was far away from that horny teen, who devoured Barbara Cartland romance novels as a teen, and was transported by throbbing manhoods and pulsing mounds, and later, in college, A. N. Roquelaure’s (aka Ann Rice’s) The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, feminist porn, light BSDM, a beaten up paperback with dog-eared pages bringing me back to my favorite explicit passages.

But the urgency was back. And man, how back it was!

And I missed it so much. I missed being desperate for it. I missed being sexually forward. I missed being led by pure physical desire. I wasn’t sure what was happening. But I damn sure wanted it to continue.

A story. 2004: I was dating David casually. I was still making up my mind about him, as he was about me. I was out for drinks with a guy, networking, not supposed to be a date. But he hit on me. (Of course). It was the usual depressing interaction. I was a freelancer looking for work, and what I get was an unwanted sex move. I was disgusted and excused myself to go to the ladies room.

I sat in the stall by myself and all I could think of was David. He was the comfort to the discomfort of my universe. All I wanted was to see him and be as close to him as I could.

Meet me at Dive Bar, Amsterdam and 96th, I said over my flip phone.

I made out with him, in a dark booth, like I was a ferocious starving lion eating his face. But when he went to the bar to get us drinks, I followed him. I couldn’t handle the distance, and I made out with him there, on barstools, where friars from Holy Name of Jesus, sat in a booth nearby nursing beers. I did not care who saw or what they thought. I was needy and demanding and lonely and I had found someone, and he was antidote to all these vapid come-ons, and I wanted him in ways that took me over. I was hot and young and confident and pissed off at dating and life and being alone and I wanted to pour myself into this guy and let him pour himself into me, until we formed one solid molten lava form, where each of us was indistinguishable from the other. We were FUCKING ALIVE.

He ended up back at my place and never left.

What stays with me is the urgency. I missed wanting sex and touch and intimacy so much you have to do it in a public restroom. I missed the reminder that I was alive and desirous and needy and maybe just a little crazy. I missed that somehow that urgency was connected to youth and I could no longer access it. That the radical changes my body has moved through in the last two decades, meant that urgency would never fully return.

And yet, here I was. I couldn’t quite pin point what was happening. But it was cool. So cool. This was going to be my new life going forward! This was going to be David’s life, what a lucky husband!

Then….this text exchange with my doctor.

David and I both take testosterone.

In the latest HHS and the USDA food guidelines chart, RFK has included a whole section about how diet supports testosterone production in men. A whole section! As if men were the only ones who required it. The guidelines highlight diets rich in healthy fats, zinc, and Vitamin D for men, to support testosterone production. No discussion of women’s health needs unless it’s connected to birth and reproduction.

But the reality is this: In women, testosterone is the “most abundant biologically active hormone, and has been historically and erroneously characterized as a ‘male hormone.’” In men, we know testosterone drives libido, helps with harder erections, increases bone density and muscle-building, and improves mood and cardio-vascular issues. In women, testosterone for peri, post and menopausal women increases sexual thoughts and libido, improves mood and energy, decreases brain fog, helps with focus and memory, and is a critical driver for improving bone density, a common issue for us ladies.

Testosterone is not FDA-approved for women. Of course. And is considered “off-label.” But studies in Europe have shown that declining testosterone in aging women has contributed to misdiagnoses in “mood and pain disorders, fatigue, anxiety, cognitive decline, musculoskeletal weakness, sexual dysfunction, and metabolic changes.”

How much of our pain, and issues around decline, are coming from low testosterone? Or wonky hormones in general? But because we live in a world that doesn’t care much about women’s health or our sexual pleasure, we are required to suffer through it? Even when the fix is easy and affordable?

I’m back to regular old, 60-year-old, post-menopausal woman desire now. I can wait to have sex at home. I’m in no danger of embarrassing the children with my public sex. When we are having sex, I do not demand my husband service me immediately.

This is probably a good thing, but also a little sad.

We know, from this 2024 Kinsey Institue report that Gen X and Gen Jones are winning the sex lottery, having more sexual experiences than Gen Z, who are struggling with connection and contact, Millenials, who are raising babies and caring for aging parents, and Boomers who are moving towards and past their 80s.

But still, the loss of sex drive can make you feel excluded from being human. You’ve had your time to reproduce and now your biology is finished with you, dilluting your most base and intense sexual desires. So much of our culture is primed with sex and nudity and desire and porn, the soft and hard types. We use sex to sell things. Influencers trade on it. Celebrities are making themselves bone thin with GLP-1s and getting mass blepharoplasties to defy the shifts of aging. To be removed from sex ,and the desires of our sexualities, is to be removed from the culture. From youth. From life. From humanness.

In so many ways, the need to feel horny is a need to cling to the life we created. To be fuckable. I’m desirous and I’m desired, so I’m still relevant as a human.

I’ve always thought of myself as a sexual person. A kind of existential reality that I inhabit. My sex was not separate from ME. We’ve certainly talked about it enough here. Many of you weighed in to essays on feeling sexy and hot as we age, on orgasms, on being fuckable, and about penises and masculinity. Sex is part of our identities. Our kinks and preferences and dislikes, who we love, and hang out with, these are wrapped up in our identities.

When we no longer desire to be intimate with another body, who are we? What happens to how we see ourselves?

I’m not a sexual person, turns out. I’m just a person with a lot of the right proportions of chemicals and hormones and tissue to make me a sexual person. My sexuality ebbs and flows, and is determined by forces other than me. My biochemistry decided my horniness, through the teen years, through dating, through preganancy, labor and delivery, through breastfeeding, through hardship and crisis, through stillness and comfort, through disease, wear-and-tear, recovery, and now after menopause.

I had nothing to do with it, even as I was sure I decided this for myself and wore it like a badge of honor. Even as it occupied a huge chunk of my youthful identity.

I’m back on the regular levels of hormones again. My clitoris survived and has not grown into a tiny throbbing manhood overnight. The only voice changing belongs to my 14-year-old son. Although, everytime I give myself the shot in my thigh, I’m tempted to maybe add a little more….????

But I don’t. Because I’m responsible, and I listen to my doctor.

I’m not my sex acts. And I think the rigor required to adapt to our changing bodies, probably pushes us toward better and more fulfilling sex anyway. We are intentional because we have to be. We are not lumbering teenage boys with hapless erections fumbling to get the job finished as best we can. We no longer have the luxury to throw ourselves into bed with someone, and think it will all just be effortless. The effort, the intentions, are what make it meaningful.

We did not survive this long not to be adapters. This can and does apply to sex while aging. We can shift. We are creative. We know how to have fun with non-compliant willies and stick-in-the-mud clits. We remember to bring the joy and the laughing. We can make fun of our dumb bodies, and sagging boobs, and flaccid penises, and the things they no longer do with agility. We work around these things. Our biochemical mis-fires are natural, and we see them and ride them out, trimming the surf as we go. We know intimacy and aren’t afraid of it. We are on a time limit, so we don’t waste it, worrying about perfection, or what we lost along the way.

It isn’t the sex act itself that connects us to our humanity, and to whatever youthfulness we still have, it is in the desirous pursuit of connection and intimacy with each other, however we can have it.

I miss the horniness. But I also don’t need to have sex in parking lots to be happy.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

My 19-year-old daughter is laying in the crook of my shoulder. She is bereft because I’m leaving tomorow. I’m equally sad and weepy. She and I seem to always feel the same thing. If Edie is bereft, than I am, too. This is how it is.

It’s the end of a week-long college tour across New York State. Lucy, (21) Edie and me in a rental Toyota careening through rainy, damp college towns hoping for academic and residential life epiphanies and the promise of ample scholarships, while sporatically showing up at the doorsteps of old college friends and family. My flight back to Vegas is going out tomorrow at 11am.

Edie dozes. She is here and not. Her head is a limp rock. I’m staring at the ceiling. I feel the cool Queens night blow in through the crack of the second floor, brownstone window. I’m jotting down notes with one hand on the computer. I’m trying to make this moment permanent and fixed. I want to capture it, clutch it in my fists. I’m a three-year-old that might accidently strangle her beloved butterfly with her huge and overbearing love.

This is one of the most beautiful nights of my life, I whisper into her hair and kiss her head.

I mean it. I thought these times of great intimacy with my children might’ve ended. I certainly never had this with my own mom, even though she might have ached for it deeply, had I let her have this. I wish I had let her have this. Edie chuckles and settles deeper into my shoulder. She falls asleep again, churns, and rolls over.

It is life-affirming to be handed the rare chance to climb into the bed of your grown adult, perfectly competent and independent daughter, and have her need you again. To feel the weight of her head, like a limp boulder, as if she were a needy toddler. To feel useful and incredibly vital in her world. It is, quite frankly, a moment to be boomarked and made indelible.

Even in the throes of some future-possible-dementia, will I hold onto this? Will it still exist if I forget it? What if no ones cares? What if Edie forgets? I write about it to get it all down, to fix this feeling to an aspect of the physical world. To make it real.

I’m one of those people whose best lived moments are not the big ones. The weddings, graduations, parties, vacations, and holidays. For those, I tend to be in curation mode. It’s work. Pleasant work. Crowded, busy, fulfilling, sometimes exciting work. Sometimes tireless. But the curation itself creates a separation from the connections that can be made. I mean, does anyone hosting Thanksgiving sit down for a bloody second to savor the moment? Rarely.

I prefer to fill myself with the little happenings. The times of awe and unexpected wonder that happen almost against our will. They stick. You end up re-telling them at parties, in intimate conversations with friends, reliving them during long walks, srawling them into your dirty, collapsing notebooks. But I write them down anyway. Memory is funny. What I remember is not quite in line with what I jot down in the immediacy of it all. But I accept all versions; fiction, non-fiction, a hybrid mix.

Let’s just say that’s how it happened? Lucy jokes, when she tells a story with a slightly altered, but better ending. Make the fish you caught bigger, I say. It’s better for the story. Better for the re-telling.

I will never forget when I finally, after years of longing, moved to NYC by myself. I was 27. I had never eaten sushi. I wore cowboy boots. But there I was, in my own, rented studio apartment on the 15th floor of a building on 100th street. I settled in and later, when it got dark, I caught a glimpse out the window. I had never really seen the city at night from my own window before.

This girl, from a small country town, population 2,760, with one forever-blinking stop light, was staring out across vast, seemingly endless city lights, buildings in the sky, thousands of little rectangles, lit yellow, people living their New York lives somewhere inside them. And I was one of them. I had my own yellow rectangle. I slid the window open and heard the hums, shouts and horns. Just like I imagined. Never quiet. never boring. The breeze was cool and crisp through the screen. I was electric and vibrating. I felt unfathomably rich. Like I had a say in the world. Like I was pure, trembling potential.

I wrote down that feeling. I read it again and again from an old journal. I wrote it down to make it as permanent and fixed as it can be. To help me remember when I can’t. To climb back into that feeling again. Maybe I’m a writer only because I have to have a way to make these little happenings real? To bear witness that they happen? To provide a permanent record of my love and my despair and my life? Maybe I collect everyday experiences in words, in case I lose them, like marbles and trinkets in the hidden boxes of my hippocampus?

And then I remember the things my mother treasured that went into the dumpster after she died. Who will need what I leave behind? Who will read about what we did here?

In the morning, Edie Ubers with me to JFK. A few last minutes together. We have two long hugs. One is not, seemingly, enough. I write this essay on the plane on the way home, window seat, lots of room. All the details I vomit into my notes. I want to remember last night. Every little sinew, smell and texture. Her head under my chin. The feel of being under the yolk-colored comforter we bought together to set up her room. Being needed. Valuable. Tethered to one of my favorite humans. Her comfort as she falls asleep. The way our bodies are remember the ease of being together. I’m the girl seeing the vastness of the city for the first time. I’m electric, even on this plane, even as I write.

I get a message, on airplane wifi, that a close family member has been diagnosed with stage four metastatic cancer. In his 50’s. Two teenagers, a wife, a whole life. It’s a rough cancer and a rough diagnosis. More messages. I feel the air escape my lungs, and for a couple seconds, I stop breathing. The involuntary mechanism doesn’t kick in. I will myself to inhale. This news frames the last lingering bits of goodness from being with Edie. They swell and swirl around each other, yin and yang-style. Stars churning.

To have one, we must accept the other. A stupid, but necessary non-fiction.

Nothing, and no one, is permanent and fixed. Not our memories. Not our stories. Not the people we love. Not ourselves. Not the computer program or the paper we write on. This may be the last time I get to hold my kid all night and comfort her while she comforts me. We may never do this again, or need to. The recording of it in memory and words, will be what is left. A small, ghosty souvenir of something vital that came and, like everything, went.

Even the stars in the sky are not fixed or permanent. We just want them to be.

Thank you, as always for reading. Kim xo

I can’t use airpods. Because I lose them.

They are wireless by design, like unleashed mischievous kittens. Always getting away from me. Usually just one. One is like under the bed with the dust bunnies, and one, still in my ear. One is under the car, the other somewhere back at the supermarket. One is in the case, the other under a log in a forest somewhere I’ve never been, rendering the whole set useless. I use the wired ones. The wired ones are not called airpods. They are called earpods. Much less cool. Much more practical.

But I also lose the earpods. Because having wires tethering them to each other doesn’t mean they are tethered to me in any way. The fact that they have wires, training wheels essentially, isn’t enough to keep them from disappearing. So I bought five of them. That’s like $100 worth of earpods. I have them in my bag, on the nightstand, in the car, in the kitchen. The idea is to pepper my life with enough earpods that I’ll have a set somewhere when I need them. I imagine a house with earpods in every room. The very definition of wealth. Warren Buffet might still live in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,500, but you know he has an ample supply of earpods stashed all over.

But this more complicated than you might think. My devices all have different ports. So, I don’t really have five earpods. No. I have three that are USB-C, one that is a stereo jack, and another that is a lightning cable. The one I need is eternally elusive. Always. I have the USB-C when I need the stereo jack, and the jack when I need the C. There is no way to fight back. This is life. If I accepted it, I’d be happier.

The USB-C is for my iphone. I bought three of those, because I thought my laptop used a C too. But the C port is wonky on the laptop, so I bought another set of earpods with a speaker jack for the lap top. Now I have a lot of Cs. And one device that uses them. I’m sure this will all even out by the end of my life.

The lightning earpods, though, are killing me. I refer to them as the little fuckers, because I no longer have a device that needs a lightning cable. These earpods are useless to me. A tiny, useless, art sculpture that decorates the inside of the nightstand. And yet, I can’t throw them away. Why? Because they work. If I throw away the lightning ones, someone in the family will inevitably need them. It will be an emergency, for sure. Someone will have tears in their eyes when they tell me how much they need earpods with a lightning connector. Right now. So I keep them. I wind them up into a tight, neat circle, tuck in the end, and carefully place them in the nightstand. Okay, that’s not true. I wind them up into a ball of haphazard knots, and cram them recklessly into the back of the nightstand, with all the empty, barely-used prescription bottles that will come in handy for storing medications the next time we travel.

Woah, mom, what happened to your earpods, my technologically-adept, 14-year-old son, Raffi, says when he sees the lightning earpods in a tangle. He mansplains how to care for my earpods. You should go easier on them. Take care of your stuff.

Thank you, son.

When I’m desperately searching for earpods to wear at night, though, I forget about the lightning ones. I want my earpods to be right there, ready to use. An arm away, at most. I’m in bed. I don’t want to leave my bed. I’m frustrated when I reach for them and they are not there. I’m warm and drowsy. The edible is kicking in. The pillows are cool. I do not want to stumble around the cold house searching for earpods. I forget and look in the nightstand. Yes! I’m excited. I see the white wires. I feel the tingle of delight. There they are! All is right with the world! But it’s a ruse. A joke. A mockery. It’s only the little fuckers. The uselesss lightning ones. I’m pissed. I promise myself I will throw away the lightning ones in the morning. But I won’t. I know I won’t. Rats in a maze have learned faster. I’m going to die with those useless lightning earpods wadded up in the back of my nightstand.

David is out-of-town on business. I have all my earpods in their various places, and then, predictably, they disappear. Poof. Obviously not my fault. It would be nice to blame David. But he can use actual ipods. He never loses them. Not even one of them. David does lose his eye masks though. He needs complete, stone-cold darkness when he sleeps. But his eye masks are mischievous kittens, too. They end up under the bed, in his luggage, in his carry-ons, his computer bags, smushed into the corner of the fitted sheet. He grumbles that he won’t be able to sleep if he can’t find his eye mask. I know if he doesn’t find an eye mask, I will have to lay in the pitch black, staring up at the ceiling until I go absolutely mad with my demented, ruminating thoughts. I secretly order him ten eye masks. This is the secret to a happy marriage, I think. I stash them all over the bedroom, the closet, his bags. I keep a couple in my nightstand, next to the wadded up lightning earpods and the empty prescription bottles. Just. In. Case.

So, David is flush with eye masks in London and I’m on my own here in Vegas. No earpods. I decide to raw dog it. Since David isn’t here, I can go without the earpods. I let the sounds, and the predictable cadence of Ezra Klein’s uptalk wash over me. You know the uptalk, the rising intonation he uses at the end of his clauses, a pattern of hesitations and staccato breaks, forming a rhymic, supple cadence of narration. Ezra is smooth, the antidote to insomnia.

I buy myself two more earpods the next day. One C. One with a stereo jack. Just. In. Case. There is abundance. Ezra would be pleased. Raffi runs out to the car as I pull in. He is excited. I found one of your earpods in the washing machine, he tells me. The earpods are completely clean. Thoroughly washed and spun. We check them. They work! It’s like the earpods have risen from the dead. Just in time for Easter. Hallelujah!

He tells me he has bad news. His face is glum. He opens his palm to reveal the remnants of earpods he found mangled and run-over under the tire of David’s Jeep. I can see the ripped out entrails of the ear pieces. I can throw these away. These little fuckers.

I don’t know how my earpods got in the driveway. Or the washing machine. Or how they disappear from the top of my night stand regularly. I don’t know how I can lose five earpods in a single day while noticing that they are absolutely everywhere around the house. I don’t know how earpods are, at once, inanimate and also mischievous kittens.

I mean, I’m a competent human being. It can’t be me, right?

Thank you, as always for reading. xo Kim

The evening is perfect by Vegas standards. Low 80’s, no breeze. It is dusk, golden hour. Our dogs are dozing in the cool grass, tied to the chain link. Okay, that’s not true. Lucy’s dog, a Rotweiler/Australian shepard mix, is hyper-as-hell and lunging at everything that walks or scooters by.

George was an impulse adoption, and not entirely the right breed for our family. Our daughter, Lucy (21), couldn’t leave him behind when she saw him at the Animal Foundation. We say that her taste in men and dogs are similar: They are handsome, big, sweet…and nuts. But Miley Cyrus is singing Flowers from the speakers inside of an old guy’s trunk, and my pug, Smudge, is desperate to climb into my lap, because the whole-ass grass area doesn’t allow him to be close enough to me, and George is melting down over the kids on scooters whizzing by. It’s all a business-as-usual, shit show.

That’s when I see her.

There is Ms. B pushing a hospital wheelchair filled with her latest belongings. On top, a fluffy dog bed for her constant companion, Princess, a white, yappy, disagreeable little thing that looks exactly like the last dog she had, named Princess, whose ashes are buried under the Tipu in our front yard. I had seen brief glimpses of her from my car over the last few months, pushing her chair around downtown Vegas. But we hadn’t had a chance to connect in awhile.

David and I are at Baker Park on St Louis avenue, with Desi, our 10-year-old-daughter. She likes to play there with neighborhood friends some evenings. She can scooter to the park by herself, and we want her to do that for the confidence-building and the chance to be feral and unchaperoned, but a couple kids have been making fun of her for being adopted, so we are here, hovering protectively, ready to lecture and teach the little shitheads that made her cry.

Baker Park serves multiple nearby communities. It’s gated so babies can’t run out in the street. The soccer field behind the playground fills with kids and adults, and home-cook vendors, bearing foil hotel pans of asada for tacos, cups of esquite with plastic spoons, flats of Bubble Yum and sour Mexican candy, large jugs of juices, and skewers of fruit laced with Tajine.

The playground in front of the field, which functions as a water park in the summer, picks up the spill-over from the field. Moms mind their toddlers as they run the jungle of bars and spinny things, while their teens play in soccer leagues.

There’s this book I think of when I come to this park. The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America, by Stanford law professor, Michelle Wilde Anderson. It’s about these towns and small cities that get left for dead, along with the people in them. What folks living in these areas learned is that public money was often subject to grift and corruption, that they were never the decison-makers in their own communities. Getting funding wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

What moved the needles was showing up. Some of the most integral transformations in these forgotten places happened, because the people living there pitched in. In Stockton, California, for instance, Anderson tells us regular folks volunteered to coach intramural sports and staffed community centers. This gave kids and families reasons to be together, to form communities, to provide social support and good times. It gave people places to be. When a problem ocurred, there were residents on the ground, looking at ways to solve the issues, locally and immediately. The work they did was so successful that government funding flowed in to support their efforts. They decided what they needed and the government supported them. Not the other way around. This mattered.

Baker has this same locally-produced vibe. This isn’t one of the those destination parks in the outer suburbs. This is a work-horse park for the community. Sparsely populated on weekends and holidays, but thriving, jumping, swelling with families and stray children on weeknights.

On the sidewalk near the grass where we are sitting in foldable chairs (because David, is civilized about these things) there is a white-haired older gentleman. He has backed his car into a parking spot behind him, and opened the trunk. A huge sound system, with strobe lights, pounds out 80s and 90s classics. He has set up a card table, with a microphone for his DJ work. He is giving old school radio DJ. vibes. Everyone is here for it. I almost go to interview him for the newsletter, but he’s so damned happy spinning his tunes, I decide not to bug him.

Ms. B steers her wheelchair, which she uses as a cart, into the playground area. Desi sees her, too. She runs to her first for a hug. Then chases Princess around in the grass, even though I notice that Princess is finding this more annoying than fun.

The first time I met Ms. B it was during the pandemic. I had thrown together a community fridge and food pantry in our front yard. I ended up writing about her in my book, because she showed up often, not only to get supplies, but to wash dishes as we boxed up home-cooked food, to clean the fridge and tidy the rows of vegetables. Ms. B was a beautiful example of someone in crisis, and also there to help people in crisis. She was the embodiment of the urge people have to be useful to other people. She is physical proof that people aren’t simply takers. Everyone wants to be able to give.

It is clear that things for Ms. B had not changed much since the last time I saw her. She is still unable to hold thoughts together. Our conversations are mostly her looping together a constant stream of disparate happenings, and me listening and pretending it all makes sense. Her words are a cocktail of imagined and real fused together. There are people in her life who are full-on hallucinations. They come to her at night and do things to her. I have known them as long as I have known her. This time, she says, they dug under her finger nail with a needle, the thumb. It is cracked and blackened with hardened blood. She shows me.

They stuck needles into Princess, she tells me. These people are in a mafia, a Vegas mafia.

She is telling me about Korea now. The topics come hard and fast. You have to stay on top of it.

We always end up talking about Korea and her beloved family farm anyway. The brain is so funny. Ms. B gets very clear when she talks about Korea. And her father, whom she loved dearly. She was his only child. She knew the seasons, how to grow vegetables, how to process them into food, how to store them for the winter. She worked in the kitchen and in the fields. This is an agile place for her, Korean memories are the truest. But when her father got sick, he legally adopted a male cousin so he could bequeath the farm to him. Ms. B was heart-broken, but she knew it was coming. Women and girls were not able to inherit property in South Korea until the laws changed in 1991. But even now, families often give larger shares of estates to men. 50% of plaintiffs in inheritance lawsuits are Korean daughters. This is shifting, but slowly.

Uprooted and hurt, but excited for more freedom, Ms. B came to the United States. She had studied English on the farm, against her father’s wishes, just for this reason. It paid off. It had been her dream since she felt the farm slipping away from her. She said it was her dream then to come to America. To be free and make her own decisions.

Her family life in the United States is less clear. She got married here and had three children, sons. This period is confused when she speaks of it. I suspect there is hurt here. A sore spot. Awhile back she told me that a local organization had found one of her sons. He and his wife and children were coming to pick her up, she told me. They wanted her to live with them. I wanted it to be true. It made her happy. But I also wondered if she could even live with them? What would they think when she left their home and walked around their neighborhood picking up other people’s trash and repurposing it in their house? Or when she caught one of their guests in a converation that was really one long incoherent delusion about people sticking pins in her face? Maybe she had been too long on her own? Maybe she needed so much more than her family could give? And yet, I see how sweet Ms. B is with Desi and I wish her grandchildren could meet her.

Research tells us that South Koreans can experience a lot of shame around mental health diagnoses for themselves and their families, particularly severe mental illness and psychosis. They are 50% less likely, than other ethnic groups, to get help when they or family members are experiencing symptoms of mental disability. Traditional cultures that value, emotional control and social harmony, can really hold onto stigmas. Often families circle the wagons and handle family mental illness by keeping it a secret from everyone they know, which perpetuates the myths around mental illness. It also compounds the shame. More shame, more hiding. More hiding, more shame.

It doesn’t surprise me when her son never shows. I wonder if any of it was real? We never bring it up again.

Ms. B shows me a $20 bill she has tucked in her palm.

They gave me this, she says about the organization that she says holds her SSI check, but I don’t need any money.

I don’t know if they hold her check. Or if they even should hold her check. I secretly worry someone is taking advantage. But Ms. B says they keep it for her, so other folks on the street don’t steal it. And she says they help her get her diabetes meds. This $20 is not even something she needs.

I’ve never found Ms. B hungry. Or needing food. Or even asking for food. She is capable and strong. She is in her 70’s. Gray pixie cut. She lost her teeth ages ago. She doesn’t seem to miss them. She is almost always clean and if she isn’t clean, it means she is in some kind of crisis. She knows where to shower, where to eat, where to get safe, where to sleep, where to socialize. Her face is leathered, like all outdoor-seeking women in Nevada. The lack of water and moisture cures us like a side of beef, turns us into indefatigable rawhide. There is a beauty to it. Battle-born, the state motto, is also about our skin care. Ms. B is good at creating community around her, a shop owner lets her sleep behind his store, she has both housed and unhoused supports, and the police know her by name. She tells me about a cop who she flirts with. She describes giving him a hard time. You get this sense with Ms. B that her life is way more together than your own.

Ms. B does not have a roof. She will never take part in an examination of what retirement might mean, as we did a few weeks ago here. She will never think about the future, because everything that matters is right now. Perhaps there is a lesson in this for us.

I can see Ms. B at a kimjang, like in these photos. She has told me about them.

How she learned to make kimchi from other women in Korea, as a girl. How she makes it sometimes with her friend, Yuna, who has been unhoused, but is now stable in an apartment with her husband. Sometimes Ms. B goes there and they make kimchi together, or another favorite dish from home. But this time I forget to ask her, so I do not hear the news about Yuna.

What I try to imagine is a situation in which Ms. B can be housed. I imagine her at a community residence, permanent. It’s a building with lots of bedrooms and a few bathrooms that everyone shares. The building is in the heart of downtown, where most of the unhoused people are, so she has access to the social life and social capital she has created for herself. There is always a caseworker on duty, even sleeping there at night.

Ms. B, I imagine, helps the staff make dinner on her appointed dates. Other nights she washes dishes. She lines up with the other residents for her meds twice a day. A staff member lays them out for her, and supervises her taking them. There is pizza and a movie every Friday night in the common room. Bowling at the Orleans every month as a group. Taco Tuesday is a favorite. Caseworkers drive people to doctor appointments. I see her planting cabbages in the backyard behind the residence. She will tell the staff about how the soil sucks in Vegas, and how much better the soil is on her dad’s farm in Korea. Maybe she can teach the staff and the residents to make kimchi? Maybe she can have culturally appropriate experiences, as an older people with mental illness?

When she comes in from being out in the community all day, pushing her wheelchair and Princess around, her caseworker will gently remind her that she doesn’t have to hoard things anymore. Ms. B won’t listen though. It’s too ingrained. She will always feel the need to collect things, a common compulsion after the trauma incurred from decades of unhoused living. But her caseworkers will support her as much as they can. They will remind her over and over that she doesn’t have to build and rebuild her life, because her door has a lock and things will not be taken or moved.

Ms. B, in this imaginary community residence, can be one foot in the housed world and another in the street that is so familiar. She can be safe and free at the same time. She will have a roof, out of the elements. A simple thing. And some help, some community. Her SSI will pay the rent and board, along with aid and grants, and she will get a little cash to spend each week on personal items. She will probably need none of it. She will be rich.

Vegas doesn’t have these community residences, of course, with just the right amount of support for the most compliant and functional of our mentally ill neighbors. We may not even have a neighborhood that would allow such a residence to be built. As our dowtown neighborhoods have gentrified, and the houses have gotten more expensive, residents are less likely to allow community (or affordable) housing near them. A lot of people are still scared of mental illness. They do not want mentally ill people existing around their families. If Anderson’s book is to be believed, its locals who must make the changes first. And the government programs will follow the work we do.

Right now, there is no place for Ms. B to go that honors the free life she created for herself, the one she dreamed off while secretly learning English, the one she knew she could achieve here in America. As for us, I want us to imagine different kinds of housing and supports that will meet the needs of different kinds of people. Can we remember that everyone has dreams, even folks with mental illness? Folks without addresses? That we all need different things and cookie cutter solutions, simple answers to complex problems, will never meet everyone’s needs.

We might not feel comfortable having our elders sleeping on the sidewalk, in alleys and in doorways. But we gave them no choice. When you see them, you are also seeing the choices we have made for them. You are witnessing our values as a culture. Ms. B deserves better. We all do.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

Well, last week’s essay about the short film The Retiremen Plan really got everyone going! I love when a piece of art (film) hits, and lets us dig around for more meaning.

I’m still reading through some really insightful comments about what retirement can mean, and trying to respond to everyone with some thoughtfulness. I’ve been welling up reading the comments about parents who never got to enjoy their retirements, how many of you learned from their mistakes, and you’ve made me think about our relationship to work and what it means as we age.

So I thought we could sit with this idea of work for a minute.

What does work mean now at the stage of life we are in? How does work look different at 5? (Play as children’s work?) 17? 30? 45? 72?

I was reminded of the historian and political theorist, Hannah Arendt. She makes a distinction between work and labor. Work, for Arendt, is spirtually-aligned. It is the making of things that endure and support us. These things we make will last. They round out our legacies. They fill us spiritually, and give us practical things, like a home to live in and a car to drive. These made things keep us out of the chaos and relentlessness of Nature.

Work provides friction, the kind of savory and unsavory interactions with other humans that gets us out of bed in the morning, that make us sad and angry and delighted. Work forces interactions that make us feel alive. We work to create our own meaning. We are because we work at something.

The work we make, makes us.

Labor, for Arendt, is not as lofty as work.

It’s the grind. It leaves nothing behind. It’s the grunt work of the day, cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, changing diapers, paying bills, transporting children. It fulfills an immediate need and then disappears. What is generated from labor is consumed and then gone, and needs to be continually repeated to sustain living. I’d like us to pay the bills just once and be done, but no chance. LOL. Bill-paying is the grind that never leaves us, even when it’s on auto-pay.

When I think about these laborious, time-sucking tasks, it can feel like a waste of time. We can begrudge having to spend time on them. If we didn’t have to do the labor, we could focus on the work of life, we imagine. When I feel this way, I often go back to the work of Matthew Fox, the spirtual writer and Episcopal priest, who encourages people to enbrace labor as ritual. He writes in his book, The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for our Time, that our everyday labor can be re-framed from a burden to ritual.

Ritual is liturgy, Fox writes.

Liturgy, translated from the Greek, means the work of the people. In church this is worship, the ritualized spiritual work of the people. But at home, liturgy means we do the dishes, so we have clean plates to eat on. We wash the mirros so we can see ourselves in them. Our everyday work is ritual. A liturgy of our lives, each chore a short prayer. Cleaning the toilet is not simply cleaning the toilet, for Fox. The labor is a small part of the process of accomplishing our larger, more deeply-felt work.

Of course, there is a part of me who cries bullshit. I mean, no one wants to be stuck with the grunt chores. Cleaning dog poop off the backyard fake grass isn’t holy, is it? Cleaning leaves out of the gutters? Mopping up kid vomit? Reaching your bare-ass hand into the drain in the sink and scraping out all manner of rotting, moist food particles caught there? (I always thought my mom was so heroic for doing this. LOL)

Caregiving, especially, is full of deeply unfulfilling, spine-breaking labor. Lifting people from beds and wheelchairs, changing the diapers of people who raised us. But that labor contributes to the larger project of being present for people we’ve loved, sheparding them through their life stages. The work itself is lofty, even as it is supported by difficult, exhausting laboring.

Women tend to bear more of the labor than men. Poor folks more than the rich. Will AI and robots alleviate this labor? Who will we be if we are no longer tasked with these tiny, dumb, cruddy jobs? Will we be more productive in a consumerist world, like will we make more money? Or more deeply-felt, buoying work?

But it’s not just Fox and the Episcopalians. Even the ancients saw purpose in repetitive labor.

In the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese text that was written before Christ, there is a quote, perhaps a poem, about labor. Accomplish the great task, by a series of small acts. Cooking dinner for my family is labor (unpaid, potentially unappreciated, possibly rote, possibly unfulfilling, possibly time-consuming) but it’s part and parcel of the greater work of creating humans who are conscious, kind, empathic and have healthy relationships with their bodies and minds.

Take my son, Raffi (14). He has come to associate home-cooked food (as opposed to fast food) with something made with love. He even says it: Aw, you made this for me with your love. He will often ask me to make him food even if he can make it himself, because he wants me to love him by making something for him. Even though I don’t always want to get out a pan and make him a breakfast sandwich, and even though he can do it himself, (mostly he makes his own), I also know that doing it sometimes is a story I’m telling him about how much we love him. And about how worthy he is of being treated well. It’s about him learning to modulate his feelings when I can’t make him something. It’s about him learning to express gratitude when given things. About learning to receive-well, as well as, give-well.

These small pieces of inconvenient labor become a tool in our greater work of parenting him, so he can become a good and proper citizen of the world. He is on his way, we think.

Arendt, rightly, separates poverty labor from all the spirituality talk. There is no Godliness in laboring in a chicken slaughter house, in sub-par conditions, for sub-par wages, for subpar hours.

These kinds of labor come from our need to consume, consume, consume. We need people to work shitty-ass jobs, for crappy-ass pay, without adequate healthcare and supports, because we need to buy that dress from Shein, those cheap-ass chicken parts from Cargill.

Arendt says that, the poor are often trapped in their labor, having to work for basic survival. Never thriving. Never able to choose what work, and how, and when. Their labor is powerless, agency-less. They, Arendt believes, are stuck in a kind of poverty occupation that makes them have to focus on biological survival, moment to moment. Their whole lives are about necessity. They lose out on art, humanities, intellectualism, beauty, frivolity, and Nature because their lives are tied to the fight for survival.

And as a culture, we view the poor differently because they are knocked out of certain parts of community life. Charities, entitlement programs, and low-paying jobs provide the basics of survival, but the minute we find out poor people can use SNAP to buy Coke, all bets are off. They didn’t work hard enough to deserve them, is the thought.

Just this week, Republican Senator John Husted from Ohio proved this when he said: People living in poverty are just not very, um, experienced at navigating the real world.

But even people stuck in the day-to-day slog of labor, have their own bigger work to do, comprised of what they dream for their themselves (if they’re able), their families and their communities. They labor, not so they can spend every day of their lives on a beach smoking weed, to do nothing. They labor to have time to spend dreaming, on the beach while smoking weed, so they can get to the work they long to do. Just like the rest of us.

When I think about work as we age, I think of Arendt’s Vita Activa. A concept she wrote about in her seminal work, The Human Condition. The Vita Activa is on a level above, work, which is above, labor. This is our public selves, the one that interacts with other people. To have the Vita Activa, we have to be out of our private lives, speaking, acting upon other people, being seen and seeing others in public spaces.

The recent protests in Iran, where women came out into the streets to protest, and in an act of bold defiance, removed their head coverings, this is the Vita Activa. The people of Minneapolis and Vermont engage in the Vita Activa as they rally, and speak, and resist ICE in their neighborhoods. What else? Town Hall meetings. Every city planning session. Every neighborhood gathering where a person steps to the podium to have their voice heard, is the Vita Activa. The Civil Rights Movement. Occupy Wall Street. The Women’s March. Black Lives Matter. Stonewall. A Turning Point USA college tour. A Substack essay that lights people on fire. A flash mob. An art demonstration. A performance. A Tik Tok video. A sign that stops cars as they drive by. The Vita Activa is showing up as a volunteer and contributing years of experience to an effort that has nothing to do with consumption, and everything to do with shaping the world, and inspiring others to follow suit.

I’ll get a Meth Lunches review, every once in awhile, where someone reads a single chapter and decides I’m trying to be a savior, because I’m writing about what I’ve learned working in the community. But people who work in their communities understand the book. I started, in the first chapter, trying to “make a difference” and ended up getting a real life education about how we help and hinder people in crisis. I wanted to take readers on that journey with me, to inspire them to be better for our most vulnerable people.

To say it, to write it into the public, is the Vita Activa. To ignite chains of reaction in other humans is the point.

I’m speaking to my older readers now. Sixty and up:

There are those of us just trying to hold it all down, caught in the labor of it all. I see you. I see that you have bigger work to do. But for those of us with more freedom, more time, less obligations, more experience than our younger counterparts, we can be intentional about our labor and our work. We are primed for it.

1. We can reframe our everyday labor: We can take a shitty-ass chore we begrudge doing and see it as a step on the ladder for our bigger projects. We can get better at seeing “taking out the trash” as less of a burden, and more of a spiritual practice of life maintenance. It’s not always easy to do it, mind you, but that little reframe can make the burden lighter. Chores as spiritual practice. Errands as a thank you to ourselves and the life we created.

2. We can do work that matters. We can make art. Write and share our knowedge and experience. Sculpt. Design and construct a building, a shed, a figurine that a child can use to build a mossy fairyland in the garden. We can build a table that our children, and their children, will eat from for generations. We can sew a quilt in someone’s favorite colors and welcome the rejuvenating newness of a baby into our lives, with crocheted socks that will be passed down and treasured.

3. And if we are able, we might take it even a step further. Into the Vita Activa. Maybe our quilt is hanging in a museum with the words Fuck the Patriarchy embroidered into the fabric. Or maybe we can turn our writing into a book or a zine that gets sent to relatives, neighbors and community members. Or maybe we take our guitar and our protest songs out of the bedroom and show up at an open mic. Or upload a video to the Internet. Or take the words from our heads to the podiums and microphones of City Halls, Suburban Councils and Town Meetings. The more in the public we can be, the more we can inspire other people to do the same.

If you are over 60, a new world of work can be ahead of you. Work that feels good. Work that uses your skills, experience, courage and words. A life that is in the world and in the home. Even as the culture pays homage to youth and consumption, we are the ultimate offliners. The bespoke generations. We know the world before the internet. This is our wheelhouse. We are makers.

And we are poised to be game changers once again. Let’s go.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

What I noticed about my dad after he left the mill for the last time, was how light he was. He called me honey and sweetheart, generously, and often. He was huggier, affectionate, less moody and impatient. More playful.

My parents, like all the parents I knew in the 80’s and 90s, waited for their chance at retirement. To no longer have to plod through their 40-hour work weeks with painful, back-breaking or unfulfilling jobs that paid the bills and offered benefits and security, but offered little in terms of joy, satisfaction or fulfillment. When my dad was offered a package to early-retire, he grabbed it and never looked back. He had spent his whole life working for International Paper Company, from floor sweep to salaried boss.

I was out of the house by then. They took the package and built a smaller house for themselves in a little rural town nearby. Retirement for both of my parents was a long-sought goal, something they looked forward to. That said, parts of retirement were a shock, and required adjustment. It was a drop off a cliff.

I cannot take your father to a store, mom complained by telephone, as if she were talking about a toddler. He gets to puttering around the store and I can’t find him anywhere.

Mom was used to maximizing her time, having the days to establish her own routines. Do things her way. Never having to report to anyone. Or check in. Or look for her dawdling husband in Menswear. And she wasn’t prepared for the man who wondered if we should change peanut butter brands, after she had clearly mandated that for the last 40 years, we were a Jiffy Smooth family, not a Skippy Crunchy family.

They did what every person their age and socio-economic class were doing. They traveled, spent summers at their camp, played cards long into the evening with friends, next to over-poured highballs and a dish of chex mix next to their piles of poker chips. They ate out more, took weekenders to visit friends, entered ridiculous Halloween costume contests, and went on trips to Honolulu and Aruba with other couples.

Things were good until dad started showing signs of a genetic liver illness, that had taken or would soon take, all of his siblings. He died a year or so after mom started noticing early symptoms. She knew him so well, every inch and sinew of him after almost 50 years. She knew something was wrong before anyone else could see it. For my mother, retirement and all it’s possibilities ended when his life ended.

Retirement, just a short time ago, was the gift you received, near the end of your life, for doing all the right things. It was a kind of heaven, but here on earth. Work this shitty job, the pact goes, and someday you will get a pension and get to fish on the creek all day everyday. But the concept of retirement and what we think abotu it, has changed a lot across time.

In the 1900s to the 30s, there was no retirement, just uselessness. Older Americans worked until their bodies quit. Or they were fired for lack of productivity, which was legal and widely-practiced. Older people often lived with family, but many fell into abject poverty and homelessness. The Depression shined a light on the plight of our elders. Only half were able to keep themselves out of desperate levels of poverty.

The 40’s through the 60’s saw retirement take shape as a way to reward people for working hard and relentlessly throughout their lives. The heaven thing. Marketers hopped on board and coined this period, our Golden Years. This was a time meant for people to spend our childen’s inheritances, engage in hobbies, sports and travel. Live the life they couldn’t while raising families and doing shift work.

By the 60’s this formula started to give way to good-weather retirement communities, bringing older Americans in clusters to the sunbelt states, like Florida, California and Arizona. The idea of retiring became synonymous with extended vacation. The way to get the best out of our Golden Years was to 1) save our own money, 2) work a company job for life and collect a pension paid for by that company, and 3) receive a supplemental monthly government check, known as Social Security. This formula lasted well into the 90’s.

The late 90’s and early 2000s brought radical change. Corporate-funded pensions went by the wayside, while personal investing - paid for by the individual through IRAs and 401ks - became the norm. This meant people stopped working at a single company for the duration of their lives. There was no longer any reason. Older folks worked longer, lived longer and continued working well into their 60s and sometimes 70s.

Unlike earlier decades, some people loved their work, felt it was their passion, and wanted to continue. People stopped abruptly entering retirement and kind of eased off the gas. They picked up gig work - they had to - consulting, side hustles to supplement savings, investments and social security. The cliff edge of retirement softened into a kind of supple exit ramp that could be handled, and aclimated to, in dribs and drabs.

This is, of course, the idea of retirement for people with resources. Even minimal ones. We know that many older people are not able to count on a steady stream of income to provide for their daily needs, let alone their dreams. Just under 40% of all seniors today are 100% dependent on social security to live. No pensions, investments or the ability to do side gigs. But the film I want to watch with you, an oscar-nominated, animated short called The Retirement Plan, by John Kelly and narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, focuses on an average guy, average situation, average socio-economic status. Not rich, not poor. Ray, the main character, is everyone who is wanting to live their best lives.

In fact, the character lines, the colors, music and narration are so minimal and subdued in this film, it’s easy enough to project yourself or almost anyone onto Ray. He has dreams and plans, like all of us. And he faces the realities of having those dreams.

Give it a watch and let’s discuss. I’d really like to hear what you think and what resonates and doesn’t.

The 2020’s have influenced and changed the entire notion of retirement and having a retirement plan.

It will only continue to evolve with AI. Longevity research and the burgeoning wellness culture. Plastic surgery isn’t just to hide lines and wrinkles, the obvious work, itself, is the look. The unnatural face is its own style, a kind of revolt against aging gracefully. Celebrities use GLP-1s to starve themselves, not just into thinner, healthier bodies, but into skin bags, with protruding knife-edge cheek and collar bones. You can’t just feel younger, you have to actively defy mortality by re-sculpting it with procedures, powders, practices and performances.

But Ray defies this. He watches magpies, tries to be good at meditation and yoga, tries to write poetry and perform it. These are small and intimate ventures. They almost feel quaint and old fashioned. None of his desires are about arguing with people online, or politics or performativity, or involve AI. There are no rockets to Mars, or attempts to leave behind a building that bears his name. His desires are modest and vital. He is building out the interiority of the self.

Before it disappears.

Life is the search for meaning, not the meaning itself, Ray is telling us. The heroism and the humanity are in the attempts we make.

Like Ray, I’m searching for myself in this stage of life. The use of line repetition in this movie, reflects these struggles. It’s so brilliant.

I will clean up my desk top…

I will finish all those books I started….

I will learn the names of trees…

I will swim every morning…

I will be so present…. Ray says. So aggressively present.

He has intentions and goals and lists. I have intentions and goals and lists. There are things he wants to try on. There are things I want to try on. But then life happens. Ray seeks out companionship with a dog. When that is too much, a cat. Then finds he can only handle a turtle or a terrapin. But there he is, learning new things about terrapins.

The adventure makes Ray. Ray doesn’t make the adventure.

I will see a play. Ray says, and then amends this thought, as he leaves the play early. I will see if I like plays.

I will get into camping, Rays says, and the next scene is Ray screaming from a wildly flapping tent during a wind storm. No! Camping is horrible!

I will paraglide, Ray tells us, resolutely. But we see he has a walker, that he has aged. He is weaker. I will not paraglide.

I intend on taking Tai Chi. I intend to pick up the guitar, and play again. I intend to read more books. I intend to have people over for dinner a couple times a week. I intend to be more present for my friends and neighbors. I intend to respond to everyone’s comments, with vitality and intimacy, every week in this newsletter. I intent to write a ton of op-eds. I intend to have a lot of opinions worth sharing. I intend to write a new book. I intend to teach university classes. I intend to walk the Camino Santiago with David. I intend to continue writing here for years for anyone who wants to read along. I intend to lean into my husband and our kids, and their friends, their partners, kids and pets, when (if) they have them. To give them the best of me. And yes, to be so aggressively present. I intend to take magic mushroms and have wild, clumsy, old-people sex with my husband in the desert. But with a safe, sober person somewhere nearby so we don’t end up naked and dead in an epsiode of Dateline. I intend to laugh until I cry, often.

I won’t do all these things. And I will do things that I haven’t even imagined. I will do some of these things successfully sometimes, and then stop being able to do them at all. There will be heartbreak and glee. Disappointment and frustration. I will start things and stop. I will lose interest. I will get excited and bored and excited again. I will learn better what fits me and what doesn’t. I will not have enough time, because there could never be enough time. There will always be things out of reach. I will learn to accept it, somehow, while always yearning for more. My retirement plan is to never retire from life or living.

Until I fucking die.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

NOTE: I’d love to hear what you think of the film, and what you think about what retirement and retirment plans mean to you. There’s a lot to think about in this film.

Our relationship happens mostly at The Pass.

Jack is my neighbor on the kitchen side of our house. Jack lives in the casita in the backyard next door. Casitas are the small backyard cottages common in this little 1940’s-era settlement called Huntridge. We are in downtown East, Las Vegas Nevada, five minutes off the North End of the iconic Strip. A10-minute brisk walk to the antics of Fremont Street and its only market, known as Murder Mart, complete with its own IG channel. We are just down the road, and underneath the whirling pinwheel of The Strat. A casino so tall and kinetic, we tell our children that if they are lost, they can look for the Strat to help them find their way home.

T, Jack’s daughter, also lives next door. In the main house. She is a school teacher by day and a casino cocktail waitress on the weekends. Casinos are the life blood for people here, the way out and forward. Her work at the casino put her through graduate school. It bought her house, and the ability to have her parents retire in the casita.

Jack, and his wife Kim, aren’t my peers. Jack is a Vietnam vet, so more like my Dad or favorite uncle. And T is a decade or so younger than me. Our lives didn’t perfectly slot. When I had little kids, T didn’t have them at all. Now she has her daughter, LJ, who is five, and my youngest kids are growing into teens. Neighbors come to mean things to each other by their proximity, not how effortlessly they slot into schedules, hobbies and preferences. You are a good neighbor, not as a main player, but in the in-betweens, in the cracks of life. Neighbors and neighborhoods are our living playlists, our murals, our fabrics.

When we moved to Vegas from NYC, we bought the shitty house on our street, an excellent deal, with the leafy front-yard tree, that we would end up cutting down anyhow, because it had a tree disease. The house on the living room side was home to Matt. We were his neighbors for a decade. I wrote about his murder, and how we watched him slowly slide away from the world. I knew more about my neighbor, Matt - about what he ate, what ailed him, how he spent his time, how much bourbon he drank and pot he smoked, and when he stopped cleaning his house - than his own family. More than his friends, who disappeared one by one, as he slipped out of their grasp. But neighbors stay constant.

Because proximity. There is no choice.

Proximity means knowing people on a level of everydayness. You hear their kids melting down. You see them looking like shit, recovering from plastic surgery, or in their underpants moving lawn chairs around. They let out an exaggerated fart in their backyard and you pretend not to hear it. You know they smoke pot in the backyard every night. Or they have taken up ax throwing underneath their olive tree. You hear them fight with their mother on the phone. You see how they live everyday. How they handle tricky things.

They also see us for who we are. Sometimes, they hold our lives as a kind of secret that they keep for us. Sometimes they stand at the wall in their yards, or over their fences, or through our windows, and tell us things they can’t tell anyone else, just because we happen to be there - proximity - at the very moment they need to say it out loud to someone. You can tell the world on social media that you are happy as hell, and your life is a perfect mirage, but you can’t lie to your neighbors, not really. They know. They live with you.

A few years after they moved in, I walked down the side porch. Saw Jack on his patio. How’s Kim? I yelled over the wall, cheerfully. She had breast cancer and she had looked thinner lately. More frail.

She’s gone, Jack said.

I looked through the wood slats on top of the cement wall to see my neighbors bearing the loss of the most important person in their lives. Between the slats, he told me how she left them. Jack is tough. Bushy mustache. Clean leather for skin. Full head of silver hair. Vietnam stickers on his truck. Walked just slightly bow-legged, like he might live in a Western. A fully locked and stocked gun cabinet. An unapologetic chain smoker. He built a separate casita for his tools and building supplies. He is a gifted builder and contractor. He reminded me of my dad. And since my dad passed, I found a comfort having Jack next door.

Our relationship shifted ever so slightly after Kim died. I didn’t feel like I was pulling him away from something anymore. T had a full life of work and child raising and school. He was always up to meet me at the pass, a small square window cut into the slats for the community cats. Huntridge loves its feral, and outdoor cats. Lots of neighbors put out food, water and shelter for them. The Pass was designed so the cats could walk the walls, come in and out, hide in the vines, move around the neighborhood. In the summer, I put out cold water and ice packs. Our walls don’t just make good neighbors, they make a highway system and refuge for the night time prowlers and the day time nappers.

The pass became the place where I left plates of lamb and potatoes when T was away and wanted to make sure he ate. Jack put leftover wood scraps from his projects in the pass, free wood for our fires. Jack came to the pass to tell me when LJ was born. I stored T’s extra breast milk in my big freezer when they ran out of room. When he got meds from the VA and wasn’t around to pick them up, I sent Raffi over to get them. We left them in the pass. When they weren’t off to Disney with LJ, they popped in for the holidays. Living next door, made proximity a solid holiday draw. Hot pot for Christmas, Yakitori Thanksgiving, hot dogs in the street with Indian Rez fire works, on July 4th.

We were good neighbors to each other, respectful. When we built the wood slats to give more privacy to them and us, we consulted with Jack on the build. When our orange jubilee hung heavy against his truck, he asked if he could cut them before doing it. We had the wild house and I was always woried about it spilling onto them. Our kids and chickens and turkeys, foster kids in and out, all kinds of noise and bother, might’ve triggered another neighbor. Jack took it in stride.

“You sure that rooster crowing every morning isn’t driving you crazy?“ I asked him at the pass. “I’m up crowing before that rooster is” he snapped back.

When a water pipe busted, while David was traveling, and our yard filled with rushing water, Jack not only noticed before me, but threw some tools into the pass and fixed it. When I found my father’s Marine Corp casket flag in my mother’s effects, I knew I didn’t have the kind of house and storage to keep it safe. I called Jack to the pass. He had a Vietnam buddy who flew the flags of deceased veterans. I handed my father’s perfectly folded casket flag through the pass into Jacks hands. I never saw it again, but I know wherever it is, it went to the right hands.

We are blessed with our neighbors. The young couple, with the two kids, across the street have let me borrow salt, blessed us with extra flats of bacon and homemade gumbo, and shown up with their happy kids for nearly every holiday and celebration. Again location. There’s the Eygptian author who takes walks with his small daughter and smiles and waves when he walks by. The journalist down the street who has been a constant friend and colleague. We watch each other’s dogs when we go out-of-town. The Guatemalans down the street who helped me care for, and stock the fridge and pantry during the pandemic. When Lucy was learning to drive, and hit their son’s car, they let us pay cash for the repairs, instead of hitting her insurance. There’s the neighbor who lost her daughter to a drunk driver and now raises her severly disabled grandaughter, and the single woman across the street who took in her pregnant sister and her two toddlers, while she escaped a terrifying domestic violence situation. The neighbors report to a text chain about any suspicious cars that might be parked on the street. There’s the older gentlemen, who admitted he was lonely, even though he lived with his daughter, so we invite him to everything now. I can’t remember his name, and I’m sure he doesn’t know mine. There’s Jim, kitty corner to us who I know two things about: 1) he works nights and 2) he keeps an eye on the street. But I also know now, that if you knock on his door at 2am, he will help you carry a dying man into a truck so he can get to the hospital.

The intimacy of being a neighbor isn’t based on knowing someone’s favorite food or color, or what TV show they are watching religously, who they voted for, or the date of their birthday. It lies, instead, in being in proximity. To know someone who is their most themselves, simply because they are home, and you are too.

Jack has lung cancer. A month ago, he and T found out it was terminal, advanced. Everywhere in his organs and bones, his spine. This week, he’s been living with feet in two worlds, still here among the living and yet, leaving. T thought she had more time. She had radiation appointments on the calendar. She was still making long trips to the banks and various agencies to transfer this and that, to order things he needed. She was preparing for the end and hadn’t quite realized it had already arrived.

On Monday, she left LJ with Jack in the casita for a quick appointment that turned lengthy. I went over. Jack could only speak in a whisper. She said he had been restless lately, pulling out his oxygen tube. Unable to sleep. He stopped eating. Signs of dying she didn’t want to see. I could see it, how close he was to leaving. I had the distance. He’s not my dad. He’s my neighbor. Close in proximity, but not in all the other family ways.

LJ, a talkative, expressive kid, told me this story about how Jack, her Papa fell in love with her Grandma Kim, and her Grandma already had a baby and that baby was her Mommy, T.

Papa asked Mommy if he could be her daddy and Mommy said yes, she wanted him to be her daddy so much, and that’s how they got each other, she explained to me, very seriously.

Oh, that’s the two of them, T said later, smiling, when I mentioned her daughter’s sweet story. He must’ve told her that story. I’ve never mentioned it to her. They have their own thing.

The night Jack died, Tuesday, T came and asked me to watch LJ. It was after midnight, LJ was asleep in the casita. While Tonna got herself ready to leave with Jack, and while we waited for Jim, across the street, to come help us move him into the truck, I got to be with Jack in his wheelchair in the drive way for a few quiet minutes alone. I thought he might fall out of the chair, so I stood behind him, my hands on both his shoulders. I had taken an edible before T came and got me. It kicked in. I was calm and mellow. Younger me would’ve felt the need to say something to Jack. To fill the space. But there was nothing to say.

It was a cool, post-midnight morning. Air tepid and pleasant. Spring in Vegas. I listened to his breath. It reminded me of when my dad was dying, the way his breath rasped, his chest fell up and down, then stopped. Nothing for the longest time, then started again. Those last few minutes were church.

Jack died in his truck, next to his daughter, on the way to the VA.

I’ve been thinking about that period of dying where you are still here and also mostly gone.

I wonder if it’s like the hypnagogic space, those minutes where you are still awake, but also falling into sleep. I love that period. High, viewing slo-mo ideas in my head. I write things, like a ticker, that never make it to paper or screen. My ideas are so good and then dissolve away. Like art that has to be destroyed. I love being here and not here. I wonder if there are moments like that while dying? I wonder if it’s hallucinegenic bliss, or pain and discomfort? All of it? Just like life itself?

Jack had an undeniably good life, even though I knew such a small part of it. I think I remember him telling me once he had other children that were no longer in his life. Maybe from a first marriage? I really knew so little about him, while also knowing so much of what made him Jack.

The neighbor relationship is a weird shape-shifter. It becomes what it needs to be. Like the in-between-ness of hypnagogia, the inbetweenenss of active dying, neighbors are close and not close, one foot in, one foot out.

In the driveway, when I had my hands on his shoulders, I thought about what a gift this guy had been to us and how I wanted to celebrate a good life, well-lived, instead of being sad for the few more years he didn’t get. I plan to do that a lot for Jack. No pity. No tears. No Poor Jack. Because that betrays the intense generosity that he brought into public and private life everyday. Jack lived every hour, every minute with as much bull-headed joy and rigor and love as possible, without proselytizing about it, or hosting a pocast about it, or telling everyone what he’s done. He just showed the fuck up, over and over. In the in-betweens, the cracks of life.

Give your neighbors a little love today. Tell ‘em it’s for Jack.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

_____________

I think what bothers me the most is that I’m no longer agile.

I don’t mean physically agile. I could decide to run a marathon. I could put in the time and effort and train for it and make it happen. I don’t mean mentally agile. ADHD drugs and HRT have given me my brain back, mostly. I feel better professionally, more than I ever have. More confident in my abilities, able to weave concepts together, in ways I couldn’t 20 years ago, or even five years ago. I also don’t mean culturally agile. I stay on top of music, books, art, humanities, even pop culture that doesn’t belong to me.

We still have Gen Z (Raffi) and Gen Alpha (Desi) kids at home, so I’m reasonably up on the latest developments in language. Phrases like, I’m not trynna... have come to dominate, as in I’m not trynna make my own snack, mom. I know how to not glaze people (to compliment someone in a way that is a little too much). That some people have rizz (flirtatious charisma, as in: I only have rizz with my husband). That the skull emoji 💀is cooler than using the AOL-era LOL (laughing so hard you are dead, thus the skull). I also know that if you ate something it means you excelled at it (as in: She ate that meeting and left nothing but crumbs).

The phrase Main Character Energy (MCE) which I’m co-opting for this essay, is a phrase that was born out of TikTok, from the young people. It means what you’d expect: That you are a protagonist in your own life. That you take care of yourself, eat well, sleep well, focus on self-care, mental health, set good boundaries in relationships. MCE is a turning inward, being accountable when you fuck up, moving confidently in the world. Just being. When done well, MCE is quietly empowering. But go a little too far over the edge and it can feel deperately look-at-meeeeeeeee and too consciously-striving. Sometimes MCE is cool, sometimes it’s just nicely-dressed narcissicism.

The agility I’m talking about is really about what Main Character Energy idea has meant to me throughout the various stages of my life. I had MCE as a child, common enough for an only child. And in the two decades where I was single, building a career and a writing habit, and figuring it out on my own. Def MCE, for better or worse. And when I met David, and we fell stupidly in love, this was our building a life together. We collaborated on our version of MCE. And then we had Lucy and Edie, and we were the center of their worlds, and they the center of ours. MCE everywhere.

Being a sudden, older-than-usual parent (I was 39 and 41) to two kids, spaced closely together meant that I was so MCE that I couldn’t take a shower without Edie laying on the bathroom floor screaming because I chose “not smelling” over her sense of security. Or Lucy wanting me to be in her classroom whenever possible, chaperoning, volunteering, hosting parties, sleepovers, picking up everyone’s kids after school on Fridays and taking fifteen 8-year-olds trekking through Central Park for cart dogs and park hijinks. MCE.

But as close as David and I are to our kids, as often as we speak to Lucy and Edie, often multiple times a day by Facetime, even though we are intertwined in each other’s lives, even though they still need us to help them get started on their lives, even though the strong bonds we’ve tried to create with them are still in play, it is so obvious to me that I’m not the Main Character in the lives of my adult children anymore.

This is as it should be. It’s what we, and they, worked for - independence. Competence. But sometimes it hits me, like grief itself, as a forceful smack across the face. Which it did, a bit, this weekend. We took a family trip to Venice Beach, in California, to help Lucy celebrate her 21st birthday.

David and I drove out with Raffi and Desi in the car. Got the airbnb set up on Thursday. Lucy’s lifelong friend, Nakamae, drove in overnight. Edie flew in from NYC, and Lucy flew in from her job in Minneapolis. We brought Lucy’s dog, George, and the family pug, Smudge. (The car ride was insane, but Venice relaxes rules about dogs on the beach in the winter, which makes it dog heaven.)

I picked Lucy up at the airport. LAX is always chock-a-block traffic, precarious lane changing, missed exit signs. I wasn’t in the right lane coming out of the airport, and she rolled her eyes and made a snarky comment about my driving.💀She’s not wrong, exactly. I am a notoriously spastic, uncoordinated driver. If someone gets in a fender bender in the family, it’s usually me. If someone from another vehicle is honking angrily, it’s probably because of one of my jerky, last minute lane changes.

This is not the kind of thing David experiences, btw. He is airport dad, maker of reservations, planner of trips and adventures. He planned, for months, his trip with Lucy and Edie to climb Killimajaro over Christmas break, which was a logistical ganutlet and required procuring all kinds of gear, and maintaining excel spreadsheets to track the details. He is competent in all manner of things. He can produce shows and our lives. He can be in a place once and remember how to get around, like he has been there forever. He knows which lane to be in, how to weave in and out without anyone honking or giving us the finger. He can do crazy voodoo, like spot the exit long before we get there.

My gifts for the family are much more abstract. While David pushed the kids out of their safety, challenging them in an adventurous life of travel with his shows, I was folding them in, making life hospitable, safe and comfy, wherever we were. I’m the one who taught them about sex after Lucy and Edie found a book of ancient Japanese wood carvings, sculpted into the figures of the kama sutra, in our hotel room at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Vegas. We found the girls under the bed, looking at the pictures and giggling.

I made Christmases for them on the road, grilled shrimp for Aussie Christmas on the beach at Tamarama and whole deep-fried Snapper, swimming in chili sauce. I made them search for Easter eggs in hotel lobbies. I took them around Edinburgh to watch the buskers perform in the streets, so they could spend the rest of the evening in our rental, making up their own routines. I watched them run wild with the other backstage kids at show after show, country after country, taking over the theatre as if they owned it, and made them read books while rehearsals bustled on around them.

When we were still visitors to Vegas, I made up a game to to keep the girls occupied. Everytime we saw a sign that featured the chef, Gordon Ramsey, we all had to immediately stop, no matter who was around, and jump up and down three times in a row. Gordon Ramsey’s face is everywhere in Vegas. We jumped a lot.

It was Lucy and I who fell into fits of laughter so intense we couldn’t breathe, over the smallest, stupidest things. And with Edie, it was our car rides to her contortion practices, where we made secret trips to Dunkin Donuts for ice coffees, talked through her anxieties, sang Queen songs at the top of our lungs with the windows rolled down.

I made them their favorite foods, introduced them to Hong Kong noodles and beef tendon curry. I let them cook anything they wanted, covering my kitchen, its cracks and crevices, and their bodies, in flour dust and mashed up strawberries. All of it mattered. I had a hand in who they became, of course.

But a lot of how I showed my love for them feels like it can’t be translated to their adulthood. Adulthood is about being out in the world, and my gig has always been about what happens inside the home, wherever home might be.

David’s skills translate easily. He is helping them literally navigate the world with his feats of organization, color-coded into spreadsheets that get everyone where they are going. He is helping them be in the world more fully, and with more cool experiences. My Main Character Energy is wrapped up in what cozy blankets to get them for Christmas, and how to reverse a bad day with hugs and home-made lamb empanadas. These things matter, but they matter less so than they did a few years ago.

On this trip, it was me who bought the complicated wooden puzzle machine gun that Raffi spent all weekend assembling in the Airbnb. Not because I’m so generous, but because I knew he would get agitated following the family around on adventures. And if he was agitated, Desi would be agitated and melt down. The trip would turn to hell. I knew a challenging project that culminated in a weapon would make him happy and fulfilled. He had a great weekend, between his bae blades and his machine gun, almost never leaving the apartment. Sometimes he’d ask me to hang with him there. I grabbed my Kindle to read or my journal to scribble in, while he built.

Lucy and Edie are changing, moving away from me. This is as it should be. Different cities. Meeting different people. Different ideas and views. They are becoming their own people. This makes me incredibly happy for them, for us, even as I know our lives are changing. Even as I know our centrality in their lives will diminish as they become more firmly planted in the world.

In the car with Edie in LA, she admonished me for worrying about Lucy protesting in Minneapolis. I asked Lucy not to protest, I admit. I didn’t even like her working in Minneapolis on David’s show.

This didn’t sit well with Edie.

What if I wanted to protest in NYC? she retorted.

They are shooting people in Minneapolis, I said.

We are adults, Mom.…We don’t need your permission.

Fair. But it stung.

There was a time when I had all the control. I mattered in ways huge and tiny. Everyone’s world rotated on my axis. I was one of the two main characters of their show. Sometimes it was too much. I was MCE all the time, and wanted, needed, a break. Now, I’m a day player. Still on set, but vastly less integral. I’m not choreographing moments, I’m pining for them, hoping they let me in to some of the good tea (gossip) or let me weigh in on some of the weird characters they’ve met through dating apps. I worry that every time they come home, they might be more strangers to me than the daughters I always knew.

This happened to my mother and I. There came a time when she knew so little of her daughter in the world that the stories she told people about me, with great pride, seemed to not be about me at all. The stories were what she had left. But I was in the wind.

How do I not let history repeat itself? Do I even have a say?

What the girls have is their siblings. And this is good for all of us, because honestly, I don’t want to be out til 2 am getting drunk and watching a Doors cover band. Lucy had Edie for that this weekend. But Lucy did ask me to hit a dive bar with her. At a respectable 9pm. 💀 It was beautifully grimy and the bathroom stalls were covered in graffiti, the floors were sticky and the bar crowd was four deep off the bar. Some old guys (my age) with guitars played Zeppelin, while the Mongols, motorcycles parked outside, played games of pool.

Pure heaven. For both of us.

I told her how I still have the muscle memory of heading up to the stage, whispering a song title and a key to the guitar player, grabbing a mike and sitting in with the house band for a set. I feel like I could do it, in my bones. The way you feel like you can still do a cartwheel, even though you know you’d land on your face. Anyway, I’d rather drink a long neck with my newly adult daughter and let her be the star.

21 was a good birthday. For all of us. I can be a day player and be happy, I think. It’s just going to take a minute to get me there.

__________________

END NOTES:

If you’d like to read more of our parenting and family travel pieces, I wrote about eating our way, as a family, through Munich, Bavaria, Salzburg, Málaga, Seville. On being Anti-Tourists, in Mexico City with Special Needs Kids. About Living La Pura Vida in Costa Rica with the family. About not having anyone to cook for when the girls left home. And, this piece on parental estrangment.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

There is a specific scene in Silence of the Lambs that I made my older daughter’s, Lucy and Edie, watch when they approached teenager-hood.

The scene takes place in a deserted parking lot, at night. A man, Jame Gumb, who turns out to be serial butcher, Buffalo Bill, is wearing a (fake) cast on his arm. He is struggling to wedge an unwieldy couch into a van. He drops it, cusses, gets frustrated. A young woman, Catherine Martin, is walking home with groceries. She is nearly home. She feels safe. She is in her own parking lot. This is her space. But it’s not an accident he is there. We, the audience, know better. We saw him there with his weird-ass night vision goggles scoping her out her. Waiting for the right time.

We know what’s going to happen. Catherine doesn’t. The couch ruckus makes Catherine stop. She sees he is struggling, and quickly assesses her surroundings. She sets down her groceries and grabs one end of the couch. He grabs the other. They struggle with it, but manuevers it, so she has to back her end into the belly of the van and he pushes from his end. Finally, the couch is in.

Catherine is in, too. Trapped. She never makes it home.

There are a couple of important moments here: The moment Catherine surveys her surroundings and makes the decision to help Jame, and the split second she allows him to turn the couch around, so she has to back into the van, pinning herself inside and making herself vulnerable.

In each split second, she has to make decisions about her safety. I always wondered in every little minute of her decision-making what her gut was telling her.

This is where an instinctive reaction, known colloquially as a gut feeling, takes over. A sudden sense that something is wrong or right about a person, situation, or choice. There is no logical brain here, it’s strictly feeling. It is, I’ve found, one of the best forms of self-defense. To simply be aware of what you feel. I wanted to teach my girls to listen to and believe their intuition.

These intuitive choices, of course, set into motion other consequences I hadn’t yet considered: What does it mean if your gut keeps you from helping someone else? Or you prioritize your sense of safety over other people’s needs or safety? Or what if your sense of safety is not accurate and you are hypersensitive about things that aren’t dangerous? What if you are told things are dangerous that aren’t by family, friends, churches, governments, culture or media? What if what you are afraid of is not dangerous to you at all, but you believe it anyway, what happens then? What if, your safety comes at the expense of others?

This played out, in real time, during COVID. Many of us felt that safety meant staying home, pulling kids from school, socializing only in small groups with tracked exposures, taking the vaccine and wearing masks. Other people felt that school shut downs, masking mandates and vaccine requirements were inappropriate asks, that these “safety measures” might not make us safer, might be more dangerous, and represented government overeach that compromised people’s civil rights.

These folks felt safety was used as a weapon.

The example of Jame and Catherine is fairly clear cut. One is a clear predator and one is a clear victim. We, as the audience, have access to his dark intentions. Simple. But change Jame’s race to Black and keep Catherine white, and a whole bunch of new information gets factored in. Like the lynching of Black men during Jim Crow for speaking to or engaging with white women in everyday life. Some 25% of all lynchings - which were meant to create terror to keep Black people compliant, submissive and in line - were false accusations of Black men interacting with white women. This includes, whistling at them, talking to them, or looking at them.

This is partly why the name Karen and the act of being a Karen became part of the lexicon.

White women are absolutely imperiled by the aggression of men, we also benefit from proximity to white male power and often leverage it. Our exaggerated or strongly held fears for our own safety can create peril for Black men, who are often perceived as dangerous by walking around in the world.

In 2025, a white woman accused her Black neighbor of “making her feel unsafe” by simply parking his car in his own driveway. When she was told he lived there, she said: '“I don’t believe it.” In 2024, a Black man was accused of attempting to rape and kidnap a white woman in a parking lot, only to be exonerated after it was proven she made it up. In 2022, a white woman accused a Black man of robbing a home. Turns out he lived there. In 2000, a Black man birdwatching in Central Park was reported for “threatening the life” of a white woman, and “attemped to assault her” when video evidence revealed otherwise. He now has a birdwatching TV show on National Geographic.

The biggest education about safety came for me as a foster parent. To do the job correctly, it meant caring for the family and not just the child. And that family can sometimes be highly imperfect, and their problems intimidating, even scary. Foster parents, trapped in middle class bubbles, often don’t feel safe around the co-morbidities of poverty. People’s lives can feel so foreign as to be a danger.

One of the sibling groups we took in had a mom who really struggled with mental illness and poor mood regulation. The poverty they experienced made her medication regime scattered and not effective.

“I never talk to mom,” the previous foster mom told me, referring to the children’s mother, as a way to prepare me for visitations. “I’m afraid of her. She yells at people, she’s out of control. I stay in the foster parent room whenever we have visits.”

This mom violated foster mom’s sense of safety. Foster mom was a middle-class, Christian woman whose husband worked at a mega-church and she was a stay-at-home mom. Her world was small, delightful, stable and protected. Everything was neat and ordered. Having lunch with a person who raged and held bizarre opinions was not on her dance card.

One of the things that happens in foster care is that the system is set up so that foster parents are considered the good parents, while biological parents have to be bad. Jame and Catherine. These dichotomies make us feel safe. We play roles.

Weirdly, when I met mom, something about her high-volume anger, reminded me of my own mother. Someone who was hurt and hid all that vulnerability and pain underneath the rage. I used the same stealth techniques to melt this mom, as I did to melt my mom’s unruliness. I figured, from experience, this mom was mush underneath all the bravado.

It took a lot of time, but she started talking. I listened. I kept calm when she ranted. I got frustrated sometimes. She made the same mistakes over and over, digging into unhealthy practices, two steps forward, four steps back. She dated men who beat her and then lied to police so she would go to jail, not them. Left jobs she needed to keep. Screamed at people who could’ve helped her. Hustled men for rent money. Got fucked up by the men she hustled for money. She could never quite right herself. Or stay in an apartment or keep a cell phone or even make most of the visitations with her kids. Even as she failed her kids she loved them. And they loved her.

But she was never dangerous and I was never unsafe.

Foster mom would never have been in any danger either. Her desire to sequester herself out of fear was exaggerated, and yet, it’s her right to set those guidelines for herself, to listen to her own gut, to decide for herself what she could and couldn’t handle. But by hiding herself away, she disconnected herself from a mother who needed support, and who wanted to be connected to her children, by text messages, updates and photos.

We make choices. One person’s safety is another person’s danger.

One of the questions I used to get often at readings and events around The Meth Lunches was how I let our kids interact with people who came to our food pantry during the pandemic. My son, who was then 10, was close to Becca, a Mexican trans woman, perpetually unhoused and in active meth addiction. She came by daily for supplies, to borrow David’s bike tools. I was always around the kids, but I also listened to my gut. I sensed that Becca wouldn’t hurt him. They worked on their bikes in the driveway. Upside down, wheels in the air, exchanging tools and tinkering with chains and derailers. Raffi used to run in and get special snacks to share with Becca.

One night, Becca was doused with gasoline and set on fire by her street boyfriend. She came to our door, charred and broken. She got out with the clothes she wore. I had never seen her in so much despair. Raffi made her a sandwich, a soda and some cookies. He sat with her while she cried about her terrible life, and then made a bed for her in the back of our Jeep. She stayed for a couple nights.

Safety by proximity. A little less for us, a little more for Becca.

Our undertsanding of what it means to be safe matters now, because safety is being used by our government, as a weapon. Our government is telling people they aren’t safe.

There is Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that has dabbled in sex trafficking, stealing money from ATMs using malware, and extorting and kidnapping people. In early 2025, Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said that this group was a“foreign arm of the Venezuelan government” that has “invaded our country.” Trump himself said that TdA had “invaded and conquered” cities.

How many of us have been terrorized by gang members last year?

The year before?

In 2024, the government knew of just 100 confirmed TdA members in the country. But the Trump administration in 2025 claims to had arrested 2,600 people with “afilliations” to the gang. The goal of “eradicating terrorist groups” is to engage our sense of safety. To make us afraid, so we will distrust immigrants and Venezuelans.

There is no difference between worrying about TdA and worrying that Haitians will eat our cats in Springfield, Ohio. Or that Somali immigrants in Minnesota, who Trump says comes from “barely a country,” will steal our money with fake daycares, because they are “garbage.” If we blame Somalis then we won’t blame billionaires and oligarchs, and corrupt presidents and politicians, for their indifference to our suffering, to our senses of safety. If we blame Mexican and immigrant workers for taking American jobs, we are blaming the wrong people. We are engaged in the pursuit of a safety that doesn’t exist.

We are told we have to “secure the border” and “restore the rule of law” and this means we need federal officers in our cities, hurling poison gas, grabbing families out of their homes and vehicles, tazing protestors, shooting them dead, even as they try to convince us they are “domestic terrorists” who deserved to be killed for just being there. We are supposed to feel safer, but it also feels the opposite of safe, and every video out of Minneapolis, has proven that.

Politicians want “harsher penalties” and “more armed police” to tamp down crime, but we know that crime is solved by better education, better family support, better commmunity-minded programs, government entitlements, more housing options, better work opportunities, comprehensive and afforable health care. The death penalty and masked agents disappearing people, doesn’t make anyone safer, or steer people away from committing crime.

Fear is a powerful motivator.

It is purposeful. It keeps our brains in fight or flight. It is paralyzing. That we stay in the foster parent room, sequestered away, while we listen to our gut. When they send in federal agents or the fucking army to seize ballot boxes this November, will that make us more safe?

Safety as mirage, as tom foolery, as deceit, as authoritarian tool.

It’s been a decade and a half since I talked the girls through my lessons from Silence of the Lambs. They have solid gut feelings they rely on. They have to, a woman who works for David was assaulted this week by a group of men in Central Park. In the middle of afternoon. Broad daylight, middle of the week. And then, there are the reminders of the Epstein files, forcing us to question what safety can be, when left in the hands of powerful men. I don’t blame anyone who listens to their gut. The world is fuck-all.

But we also have to ask ourselves to move outside of some of the things that scare us. To fight. To be heard. To be cover for other people. To live dangerously, as safely as we can. To stretch outside of things that keep us comfortable. To help the stranger with the couch, without backing ourselves into the van. To find that path that feels dangerous enough. And safe enough.

This will be the thing that sets us free, even if it terrifies us to do it.

_________________

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

Putting off my planned essay for a late Wednesday night dispatch. (Again!). Probably should just write this in my journal. But I’m fond of you all. I’ve come to love writing to you.

Maybe it helps me. Or you. Or someone you know?

_____________________

Our 10-year old, Desi, has autism (with a PDA profile). Many of you know that. But knowing that little thing is not knowing much. Because autism means different things for different folks. For us it means that the onset of puberty, we were told, has brought back the epic meltdowns of toddlerhood. Only now the stakes are much higher.

Books pulled off of shelves - our home is filled with books and book shelves, a blessing and a curse, turns out - tables cleared, chairs thrown, cupboards opened and emptied, every piece of her clothing pulled out and thrown on the floor. She hits, kicks, spits, bites. Sheets off the bed, pillows on the floor. Daily now. Ear splitting rage. Adrenaline spikes. Cortisol spikes. Loss of her words. Animal sounds. Angry kitten. Raging bear. Pissed off cougar. She has what she calls her autism sweatshirt with words like yes and no on the sleeves and little kittens on the chest, to point to, to communicate. But in the storm, it is too late to access logic.

She is in some place that even she cannot tell me about.

And I’ve asked. After. Under her favorite blanket. Scratching her head, I ask her. What does it feel like? She is blank, it’s all blank. Just anger, she says and then meows like a kitty. With Raffi, who also came to us from foster care too, he had so much rage and anger, trauma from all that time in different homes and institutions, poverty and hunger. But he wanted to talk through it. He wanted to know about himself. He is an excavator. He has to know why he was triggered, how he could do things differently. He employs his own coping strategies now as a 14-year-old. He gets angry - who doesn’t? - mostly about food. Someone ate my teriyaki noodles, he shouts. They are mine! You bought them for me! He stomps around, pissed for a bit. Raises his voice. Obsesses about teriyaki and why these noodles are so good as a snack. Why they are his. Why this sucks. But he settles himself. Allows us to help settle him. He knows the source, can work through it mostly for himself. His prefrontal cortex developed more last year, I suspect, and he is settling into a new kind of growth and maturity. It’s beautiful to watch him.

As I wrote in the The Meth Lunches, hunger lasts a lifetime. It will always stay with him. Whoever loves him will have to leave extra food in the bottom of the pot - just in case - so he knows he is loved and safe, that there is abundance.

He will be okay. He will be okay.

Tonight, I noticed the rumble.

I didn’t make up the term. Rumble stage is a thing in meltdown. It’s the rumble before the storm. It was over Desi’s need for candy. Dopamine. Novelty. Sugar. She demanded we take her to get a treat when she had already had a chocolate chip cookie with M&Ms, from Panera, an hour before.

I thought we might get through the day without a meltdown. Gentle parenting all day. Meeting all her needs. Quiet at home. No loud noises. No school that day. No arguing with her brother. The neighbor boys, a pack of five, didn’t get her to come out scootering with them, and overwwhelm her. No stress I could see. Still, the rumble.

Sometimes David can break the storm by taking her out of the house on a side quest. To the gas station for a treat. Boba from the Hawaiian shop. Not this time, we told her. It was late. We had settled in. 9pm. Couch, laptops, and Alone streaming.

Her prefrontal cortex powers down. No reasoning. No emotional regulation. Just the blaze of her amygdala. Fear. Rage. Overwhelm. The storms are coming everyday now, even the calm days. I have bruises. David reminds me this is a panic attack. A reminder to both of us, really. To stay calm. To check ourselves. We have to maintain, even as she rages, or everything just gets worse. This is hard, believe me. David is better at it. He has a way with her. Firm, but loving. She hucks a glass of sharpies at my head. All of my work is strewn across the floor of the bedroom. It takes everything I have not to say something that will rip through her and break her.

If I did, would she remember? Is she hearing us? Taking us in? What the hell is this like for her?

The storm, the worst of it, lasts about 30 minutes. Manageable. Clean up the house. David in the bedroom. Me, the living room. She folds herself into her giant hoodie at the end of the couch. She screeches like an alley cat. But softer now. Then, whimpers.

I am, I admit, afraid for her future. For who will care for her in adulthood when we arent here, and who will judge her? Abandon her? I worry about how diminished her life might be. I see so much of her sweet mother in her. A mother who couldn’t control her emotions either - Autism/PDA has a 90% rate of inheritability - self-medicated with heroin, and OD’d at 27. How many undiagnosed autistic people are self-medicating? On the street? Would diagnosis and treatment have saved her? Allowed her to parent her babies, who she loved more than anything?

What will become of my sweet, howling, angry kitten?

It’s over now. She is sniffling, wiping tears. David brings her a boba he made for her. A peace offering. She is making animal sounds inside her hoodie. Still a ball on the end of the couch. She pops her feet onto David’s lap, even though she won’t look at him. End-stage storm. He takes her feet and rubs them.

The artist, Yangdzom Lama wrote about her meltdowns:

After every meltdown, that energy—uncomfortably coursing through my veins—would die down eventually. Then exhaustion and shame would creep in. Following that particular meltdown in university, I hid myself away and cried, wondering what was wrong with me. It was scary to experience, and it must have been scary for others to witness. -

There is shame in being out of control. Shame in not being able to tamp down the darkest side of ourselves? Don’t we hate a lack of control more than almost anything? Does Desi feel the shame, too? I don’t know how to ask her without making her feel that way. Lodging it in her brain. Making it real. I let her be.

David and I are still thrumming though. A hot wire runs through us, top to bottom. The rumble is ours now. We settle the house for the night in silence. Later, she will finish the Panera mac and cheese in the fridge. With a fork that she has to choose herself, because all forks are not the same. Panera mac is of the few foods she will eat - but only from the restaurant, not the retail Panera mac in the supermarket - besides salmon sushi. This week, that is. Her ability to tolerate foods, textures, tastes and smells shifts weekly, monthly. She will hand the empty carton to David. She will snuggle up in between us in bed. She will ask me to scratch her head.

I will. For as long as she needs.

It’s like the meltdown cleanses her. She’s chattering now, even as David and I are slipping towards sleep. She talks from subject to subject. Excited, happy. Talking about her special needs gymnastics class. She didn’t like the regular class. They made her go upside down too much. They made her do cartwheels over and over. She hated it. She left early. The special needs class was just right, she said. She loves her teacher, Jill. She lets her wear pajamas in class. She cannot wait to go this week.

I love you, she says. We say it back. We mean it in ways we never could’ve imagined.

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Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

It’s Wednesday night. This newsletter goes out in the morning.

Usually I’d be long into the essay writing process by now. Clear about my purpose and filling in the blanks here and there, making edits, doing a little last minute research. I promised myself that I would not write a story this week that hurts to read, that argues a point, or takes a hard position, or dives into the intricacies of our political pain. I wanted to find the light.

I need the light, honestly.

I’ve been finishing an op-ed about the ways in which we Americans have a long relationship with separating families. My head is inside the piece. And it’s bleak in there. It’s not an immigration story exactly, although immigration is a part of it. It’s about our long history of separating families in many different forms, through enslavement, deportation, incarceration, child welfare removal, displacement, internment. It’s about how easy and how harmful it is to pull people apart. Valuing some types of families, and not others. It’s about who gets to stay together and why others do not. And why this is about power and control.

But something has been happening: The more research I do, the more I realize how depraved we humans can be. We’re animals, I’ve decided. Literally, of course, and in all the other ways. We have not evolved or become more caring or more graceful in how we live and how we treat each other. We are the same shitty people we were 100 years ago. And 100 before that. We have learned little. I’m gutted by it.

That’s where I am. I had nothing to write. Nothing to give you. And this is where I thought it might end. A blank page. An apology for not pulling it together. There is always next week!

And then an old friend dropped in for a visit.

It was a short visit. But the kind where two people do not speak for a couple years with any depth, and then the minute they see each other it’s as if they had never been apart. These are my favorite friendships. I have a few of those. (Some of you are probably reading this - Love you!)

Messeret lives in NYC now. Her grown daughter lives there, too. She was back in Vegas to settle some business with her old apartment. A mom and her two teenage kids, a friend of a friend, had unofficially sublet her old apartment. They have been paying on time and caring for the apartment, but the money they sent Messert to cover the rent registers as a form of income, even though it isn’t. That rent payment kept messing with Messeret’s finances and taxes. She came back to Vegas to help them move out of the apartment and help settle her apartment affairs.

The woman subletting, Jahlani, has an eviction in her rental history and confessed to Messeret that she was unsure where she could find a stable and safe apartment for her kids and cats. The laws here in Nevada favor landlords. One missed payment can land you out on your ass, with the sherriff at your door asking you to gather your belongings.

I can’t let them be homeless, Messeret told me.

This is not your problem, I said to her. My heart was hard.

We sat at the dining room table. I had made a ruby-colored vegetable soup. I packed it into lunch boxes, with rice and a salad for her, as we talked. Desi and Raffi were excited to see her, and receive the gifts she brought them. They grabbed her attention whenever they could. They grew up with her caring for them as their aunt. Often, she was elbow to elbow with me in the kitchen, kids under our feet. When I ran the pantry during the pandemic, she and I cooked for families in the neighborhood. Often it was her food, tibs, shiro wat, takil gomen, and kitfo that nourished them. She brought me berbere from Addis Ababa. Messeret will not cook with berbere from anywhere, but home.

This is not your problem, I said again. Let her figure out her own life.

Her face let me know that Jahlani and her children were not going to be homeless. I was a fool.

I felt protective of her. Messeret is one of the most open-hearted people. She could easily imperil herself to save someone else. It’s not a wound, or a lack of self-esteem. It’s more cultural, more deeply embedded in her person. She is simply built in a certain kind of way that generates care for others. She is Ethiopian, from Addis Ababa. Came here as a young woman to work for a family. She has lived only for her daughter, Ayana, to support and protect her in the world. She teaches young children at a school in Manhattan. This is a woman who has washed the feet of her uncles to show them respect as they died. She has survived, and left, a violent husband in a deeply patriarchal culture. He left scars both visible and invisible. She has loved and babied not only our kids, but also our foster kids. The more troubled and difficult the child, the more she poured herself into them.

Her name Messeret in Amharic means foundation.

We spent the next half hour sketching out a plan so that Jahlani and her kids could stay in the apartment, in a way that would not impact Messeret’s balance sheet, and would work for her longtime landlord. I packed her dinner into a bag and grabbed the keys to take her to where she was staying. Desi and Raffi clamored into the seats, and fought the whole way, trying to be next to her, help her, grab any piece of her they could. Their excitement made them obnoxious to be around, and I texted David that this was the car ride from hell. Messeret just let them be. No judgment. No stress. She loves them just as they are.

When there was a moment of quiet in the car, she reminded me of the meal we ate with her brother, Dejen and sister-in-law, Amhara, and their daughter, who stayed with Messeret when they first came to the United States. Amhara prepared coffee in a ritual, with an altar built on green and yellow mats, on the kitchen floor. She brought out the most beautiful plates and matching cups, decorated with bold and colorful patterns at the rims. These were prized pieces, carted lovingly across an ocean, ready for a new life. It reminded me of the way our mothers and grandmothers fawned over their gold leaf-flecked china in their mirrored dining room cabinets, in ways that now seem silly to American millenials and Gen Zers.

It was 8 oclock at night and I was about to drink coffee, as dark as coal in a cup. In Ethiopia, to refuse food and coffee is to refuse love. I mentally planned to stay awake all night, and possibly the next morning.

Gursha came up in conversation. Maybe I brought it up, because Messeret is as American now as she is Ethiopian. I wondered how people who hadn’t yet assimilated felt about the practice. Dejen and Amhara had been in the States only a few weeks.

Then, Dejen did something unexpected.

He got up from the table with a bit of rib meat and lentils tucked into a folded piece of injera in his fingers. He put a soft hand on her collar bone. He gave his wife gursha. She was caught off guard. They had not done gursha for each other in some time. But she took the bite in her mouth. She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. Amhara was nearly giddy. Their eyes met, just briefly. Dejen smiled back at her. Messeret translated from Amharic that Amhara felt an unexpected rush of love from her husband giving her gursha.

You don’t give gursha once and stop. It’s in the social contract that you keep giving gursha until you get to The Fight. Take this. No, you keep it. Take it! It’s playful, and maybe a little disruptive, even borderline aggressive. You want to give your love and have it received. But the fun is in the friction. You want it given back to you. And given again. There is joy in watching the person release to you. Also anxiety. It is both loving and simultaneously, uncomfortable.

An old Amharic wisdom says: Gursha ena feker siyaschenik naw, which means Gursha, like love, comes with a bit of discomfort. You cannot have intimacy without vulnerability, and so, gursha feels a little like the tiny terrors that accompany falling deeply in love. With losing all control. With submitting. People are in your face, literally.

Gursha can be sex. And it is used this way in Amharic. A man who is going too fast in bed might be told: Don’t give me gursha fast . . . don’t give me too much gursha. Gursha can be a cartridge in the mouth. Like a gun. Like a bullet. Like a penis.

Think about the wedding cake moment. A bride and groom feeding each other cake can be so many things; playful, intimate, sweet. But there is a moment where anything can happen, where the giver has more control, where they can take advantage, where they can shove the cake in the bride’s mouth, or vice-versa, and it is either a moment of laughter and fun, sweet and gentle, or potential insult and injury. In gursha, there is intuition, knowing your partner and what they like and don’t. There is knowledge of the people you are feeding.

To feed and be fed is is a game of chance and love with another human.

Gursha is something that can not be reproduced on a social media platform. It is life, lived. It is small. It is intimate. It is private and public, secretive and flamboyant. It means something. It lingers. It isn’t even remotely about the food. And I needed to remember it tonight.

I needed to remember that if you can avoid ruining somone’s life by taking their housing, you should do that - avoid it. Find the work around. Make the extra effort. This is the kind of love that will save us.

I needed to remember that letting your heart harden because you saw or experienced injustice, only creates more injustice. Try not to let it.

I needed to remember that one of the gifts of immigration is that we, as Americans, also assimilate into the cultures of the people who come here.+++ They are not just changed by us. We are changed by them, too. This is the American project that is our birthright.

Lastly, I neededed to remember that there is no light without darkness, no living without challenge, no love without discomfort. That to love our country again, and ourselves as Americans, we have to make peace with our ugly histories, heal our personal anxieties and fears (so we aren’t projecting them willy-nilly onto other folks). And to feed people, and endure the discomfort of letting people feed us, in return.

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BACK END NOTES:

+++ My position: We should have strong, humane and well-run border laws and execution, and expeditious paths to citizenship for people who meet the criteria.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

FRONT END NOTE: David and I do not often fight, like get pissed and refuse to speak to each other. But last week we got into a doozie over the new food guidelines inverted pyramid. LOL. Yeah, ridiculous. So I felt compelled to write about them.

During the writing this week, I got a little obsessed looking at different country’s food guidelines, the shapes they choose for the diagram, the colors and patterns, what they include or leave out, what the guidelines say about our culture and our eating. Fascinating.

Feel free to disagree with anything here, but you know, let’s not stop speaking to each other. LOL. (David and I are fine now obvs.) Also, behold the slides I made in Canva of food guides from around the world. They are pretty amateur, but they led me down a fun rabbit hole.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

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Ultra-Processed Foods.

The first week in January, RFK, HHS and the USDA, introduced a new food guidelines chart that significantly changes how the government wants us to eat. One of the strengths of the new chart is that it recommends eliminating "highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet…including “sugar-sweetened beverages.”

Great start.

Unlike yogurt, pickles, canned tuna, and cheese, which are “processed” foods, because some preparation is required to to turn ingredients into these food products, UPFs are different. They are loaded with industrial chemicals, like emulsifiers, artificial colors, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, flavor enhancers, and preservatives.

Pretty much all the research on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) comes to the same conclusion: UPFs contribute to chronic cardiovascular illness, like heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression and anxiety, cancers of the colon and breast, and shortened lives, both in quality and expectancy. UPFs have played a pivotal role in our diet, because they are cheap, mass produced, widely available, require little human effort to make, can be eaten with minimal cooking tools, and are mostly shelf-stable. They are given out in schools, churches, community events and food banks, school district cafeterias, jails, purchased in every supermarket, dollar store and gas station. UPFs hook consumers in with chemicals designed to make human bodies crave more (think cigarettes + nictoine). Add elite, celebrity-driven, marketing machines, 24-7 internet access, targeted algorithms, peer pressure, and brands can quickly feel like a trusted friend. They set the taste preferences of children in the crib.

So how did we get so much food with chemicals?

The FDA over the past few decades has been lax. The agency has a vague designation for some foods, known as Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). The FDA has let Big Food companies (Nestlé, Pepsi, Coke, Kraft-Heinz, Post, Unilever, etc.) slide products through under this designation. Big Food loves this. It allows them to add chemicals without approvals from anyone in the government.

When there is oversight by congress or the FDA, these food companies have powerful lobbies to block and postpone regulations and legislation. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have compared Big Food to Big Tobacco specifically, because they use similar fraudulent tactics to bypass the health and well-being of citizens. This includes funding compromised/false science, creating and adding addictive chemicals to trap users, and purposefully flooding food banks and schools with shitty foods to target kids and poor people.

Our government further contributes to the proliferation of shitty food, by providing subsidies to farmers to produce monocrops of corn, soy, wheat, and rice, instead of actual vegetables and human-edible crops. Because these products are subsidized by the government, they are good for the farmer (the government is paying them, essentially, to farm. This is an entitlement, like SNAP). And good for Big Food companies, who buy the corn, rice, soy and wheat and turn it into high-fructose corn syrup, modified starches, and refined flours. These become the building blocks for their processed snacks, sodas, and prepared meals.

We can blame regular folks for choosing UPFs when they shop at the grocery store, but most of us are unaware the corporate forces around shaping our diets. How much choice do we really have? For RFKs food guidelines to make any difference at all, he will have to take on Big Food in real and disrupting ways, that change our food system radically.

What would this even look like? Can RFK even execute a plan, if there was one? Details are not his strength….

Fermented Foods

Fermented foods have been added to the US food guidelines for the first time ever and reflect the globilization of our food knowledge.

Also a great start.

Fermented foods like kimchi, miso, sauerkraut, and crème fraîche, are now being lauded here for their digestive health benefits. Countries like Japan, France, Sweden and Korea have long understood the value of fermented foods for diversifying the gut biome. Better late than never.

Menopause.

There is no mention in the new food guidelines for people in peri/menopause. The text goes from “Recommendations: Lacating Women” to “Older Adults.” A miss.

Women have specific requirements for this stage. In their 40’s and older women require more protein to combat bone and muscle loss (25-30g per meal helps preserve muscle mass), plus Calcium/Vitamin D, Iron supplements, particularly for post-menopsausal women and their slowing metabolism, fiber for digestion support, and omega-3s to manage the symptoms of hormonal shifts.

To be fair, menopausal women have never been mentioned in US food guidelines, outside of the “older adults” category. Only the country of Lebanon specifcially addresses the needs of peri, menopausal and post-menopsausal women in theirs.

This is fascinating when you consider that, for the first time in the history of the US guidelines, RFK has included a whole section about how diet supports testosterone production in men. A whole section. The guidelines highlight diets rich in healthy fats, zinc, and Vitamin D for men, to support testosterone production. Women’s specific issues continue to be rendered invisible in health systems at home and across the globe, unless they are connected to birth.

Protein + Fats.

Ah, the Protein Wars. The number of Americans trying to get more protein into their diets, according to The New York Times, has jumped 13 percent since 2019. But not just any protein. New York Magazine just published: How Veganism Got Cooked: Plant-based Eating was Supposed to be the Future. When Meat came Roaring Back. And in 2025, Kim Severson wrote for The New York Times: Meat Is Back, on Plates and in Politics. Meat is hot again.

Some research is suggesting that a whopping 98 percent of households are buying meat now, and 73 percent consider it a healthy choice, up 10 percent since 2020. RFK has recommended that Americans eat up to twice as much protein as previously advised in our guidelines, a phemenon which specifically encourages eating animal-based proteins, leaning in on red meats (beef, pork, lamb, veal, goat, and venison), full-fat dairy (whole milk, whole yogurt, whole cheese), and animal fats in cooking (beef tallow, butter).

David had a heart attack in 2001, and since then, we’ve cut back significantly on red meat, because of its well-researched associations with cardio-vascular disease. This is partly what makes the inclusion of more animal-products so controversial with experts. Red meat has been found to TRIPLE a gut chemical known to compromise heart health.

The environmental implications of increasing our meat consumption are also alarming for the environment. RFK knows this because he wrote about it in a blurb for the 2005 book: The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply. Kennedy wrote:

The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.

We know that consuming more meat as a nation will continue to devastate the environment, increase livestock feed lots and factory farms, create more underpaid and dangerous labor for meat industry workers, and require hundreds of millions of additional acres of agricultural land to support the increase.

Why the change of heart for RFK?

It’s probably worth mentioning that seven of the nine reviewers of the food guidelines are employed or have been employed by Big Meat (National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Texas Beef Council, National Pork Board), Big Dairy (National Dairy Council, Global Dairy Platform, Dutch Dairy Association) and Big Food (General Mills, Danon). Marion Nestle, molecular biologist, nutritionist, and public health advocate out of New York University, sees this over-focus on protein, specifically animal proteins, as another marketing tool for Big Food to create more “protein-fortifed junk foods” rather than solve a health crisis for the population.

Looking at how the review board is stacked, it’s hard not to imagine this bias plays a significant role.

Milk + Masculinity.

Milk has been the subject of big discussions in science for the last two decades, at least, and different research tell us how complicated the issues are. RFK’s guidelines want us to sub in whole milk for the less fatty 2% and skim milks. The confusion comes in the details of the plan.

“The new dietary guidelines promote more foods that are high in saturated fat, Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told the Atlantic, “but they retain the old recommendation to limit daily saturated-fat intake.”

This means, if someone drank the recommended three daily servings of full-fat dairy, it would be “pretty close to impossible” according to Dow, to stay within the recommended limit.

What every expert seems to agree on is that milk, whole or otherwise, is probably not going to make or break someone’s health, disease trajectory or weight. What makes the discussions so critical is that the dairy industry is a $780 billion a year behemoth. When President Obama’s USDA required schools to offer low-fat milk, kids didn’t like it as much, and drank less. The dairy industry was incensed over lost market share. Trumps campaign and administration have received millions of dollars from the agri-dairy industry through conservative pacs.

Still, whole milk holds a very powerful nostalgia that fits into the MAGA movement and its desire to return to “simpler times.” The administration promoted memes of President Trump dressed as a 1950’s millk man, delivering glass bottles to our stoops every morning.

For MAGA, meat, full-fat dairy and cooking with tallow and meat fats represent the “full-on-ness” of masculinity. The same way the Department of Defense is now the Department of War. The way Hegseth wants to remove women from combat roles. Remove trans-women from service altogether. Target Black male soliders by going after grooming regulations that impact them alone. The way MAGA men wear their shirts too small to show off their biceps, representing a kind of “muscular leadership” and “warrior culture” where men need to be strong to combat the implied dangers in the world.

The idea is full-throttle masculinity, full throttle-whiteness, full-throttle nostalgia for things that never actually existed. Soy milk is fake milk, like fake news. Steaks are real, but protein sources like legumes, beans, tempeh, tofu, soybeans, nutritional yeast, and vegetables, like spinach, collards and broccoli, are feminist, hippy, leftist, and woke.

Real men have tiny shirts and big muscles, carry guns, and drink whole milk.

Design.

I loved looking at all the international guidelines. The shapes, the foods, the way each country cared (and didn’t care) to emphasize different components, how we view health and nutrition with such diversity.

The writer and designer Debbie Millman wrote her thoughts about the new US food guidelines design and said this:

Where MyPlate (our last set of guidlelines under Obama) flattened hierarchy to emphasize balance, the pyramid reasserts hierarchy without adequate explanation, increasing cognitive load rather than reducing it.

Millman isn’t wrong. Without sections to visually mark off how much meat compared to veg, compared to starches, the new pyramid feels jumbled and not instructive. It asks questions and doesn’t answer them. The slogan might be “Eat Real Food” (Great, I love it.) but the point is to be able to look at the guidelines and understand how to eat better without reading the whole 90-page book.

RFK’s guide, unfortunately, is muddled and chaotic. Like the man.

Brazil.

Brazil, has what is considered to be the best food guidelines in the world.

It’s not even a guide with a specific shape. It’s more of a vibe. Their guidelines go deep into the social aspects of eating and cooking together, by asking people to enjoy and endeavor to like the process of turning ingredients into dinner. The idea is to promote happiness and ritual and the social joys of being together, getting outdoors and physical together.

The focus isn’t beating a disease. It breaks food down into the amount they have been processed; natural/minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed. This helps people undertsand what is good for them and what isn’t. ”Real Food” starts to become obvious. The message in Brazil is clear: Big Food companies are not valued above people.

If you read most food guidelines, they are about beating down obesity and diseases. Our guidelines do this as well. This makes eating feel punitive. Brazil wants their people to embrace cooking and eating as a lifetsyle change that is about personal and family fulfillment.

At the end of rhe day, what RFK probably doesn’t realize is that what people cook is almost always determined by their housing. If you live without air conditioning, have roaches and vermin, don’t have pots and pans in your weekly hotel, spend too much on rent and have no money left for groceries, these things determine what people practically can do in their kitchens.

What I hope is that Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, can set aside her “thousands of meal simulations” and speak to real Americans about what is and isn’t possible economically at their dinner tables and kitchens. They don’t want to hear they can feed their kids three meals a day on $15 when the most SNAP pays for a single person per month is about $10 per day, with an average of $6 a day.

I hope RFK has a plan for how these new meat-heavy guidelines will roll out in school districts across the country. Will the federal government provide extra funding to revamp Las Vegas’ district kitchen now that they are no longer allowed to buy prepared foods (buritos, egg sandwiches, etc) from vendors and reheat them on site? Could this be the moment we get real food, homecooked in the 5th largest school district in the country? Will the federal government pay for kitchens in actual schools to be re-fitted for all kinds of cooking again? Will there be educational programs to help get kids on board with eating real food, taking their time, socializing over food, getting to cook it and feel connected to it? Will the federal government be paying for that?

Does “Eat Real Foods” apply to people in jail? Institutions? Who deserves real food? People who haven’t make mistakes? People who aren’t poor? Or just the upper classes who can easily afford to have their hired help throw a couple more steaks in the cart?

RFK didn’t invent something new here. You can get beef tallow at Walmart right next to the duck fat. And liberals buy whole milk, too. As a woman with ostepenia, a precursor to osteoporosis, I do eat more protein then I have in the past from a variety of sources. I cook with beef tallow, chicken and duck fat, pork lard, olive and avocado oils because they make food taste good. David drinks his protein shakes, but we limit the meats. Lentils rule.

This doesn’t feel unmanageable to me. But this diet recommendation isn’t for everyone and what we need from the director of HHS, is a common diet that can work for all Americans.

This is a story about Horace and Pat.

They came up into adulthood as Roosevelt’s New Deal officially ended this country’s time in war, and gave white people a leg up and out of generational poverty.+++ This had to feel miraculous after two world wars and a catastrophic depression. Horace was born rural poor, one of six siblings. They hunted and farmed to put food on the table. His father was a carpenter. Pat was small city poor. Her father owned an insurance business until his drinking drove it into the ground. Out of a precarious alcoholic childhood, all she longed for was control.

This period offered much in the way of safety nets that people never really had before. This where we see investments in new public works jobs that paid decently, social security for the old, unemployment benefits, federally-insured bank accounts, investments in infrastructure like parks, dams and schools, pensions, retirement accounts, Christmas clubs to save for the holidays, and long-term loans (for whites) that made home ownership less risky and manageable for regular folks.

Horace and Pat met in highschool. They fell madly in love. They married. They saved their money - they were good wth money - and bought a small house. Horace fought in Korea with the Marines. Pat worked in the payroll department at the local shirt factory. She made the mortgage payments and tended to the house. Horace, home from service, went to work at International Paper Company, a paper mill that made glossy papers for magazines, like Playboy. He started sweeping floors and driving trucks. He joined the union. Eventually, through the years, he worked himself into upper management, without a highschool diploma.

Eventually, after a long painful wait, they had a child. They bought a bigger house in a small country town closer to the mill and with better schools. Horace had his father’s carpentry skills and was able to do all kinds of home improvements on his own, including, later building their retirement house.

They sent their daughter to public school. Pat used green stamps and coupons. Horace was a volunteer fireman. Pat had a Brownie troop. They were frugal, but were generous when they could be. They were, like almost everyone from that town, shirt off their back people. They had money in a passport savings account, and invested in the safety of bonds, IRAs and CDs. New cars (not too flashy or foreign) every few years, a public sign of upward mobility.

Pat was a solid cook, but she didn’t care for the European fanciness of Julia Child. She couldn’t have procured the ingredients in her small town anyway. And Julia offended her blue collar sensibilities. Pat didn’t want to be tied to the kitchen. The times were changing and women had birth control and abortion. They had their own lives and aspirations. There was talk of liberation and a push to make the ERA law. (The Equal Rights Amendment is STILL not part of the constitution) By the 80’s she was using prepared ingredients, TV dinners and sugary cereals. Chocolate pop tarts were considered a perfectly fine breakfast.

When Horace’s garden was hitting it’s stride in July and August, there were warm tomatoes and white ears of corn. Lettuce sandwiches with mayo on Wonder Bread. In hunting season, deer carcasses hung in the garage, and meat was shared through Horace’s hunting club. There were always guns in the house, carefully locked away. But Horace abandoned the NRA when the organization stopped being about sport and became radicalized around semi-automatic rifles.

They took vacations, mostly in cross-country car trips, and had a travel trailer they could retreat to on the weekends and the summer. The camper sat on the bank of a river. They had cocktail hour at 4pm everyday there, with other adults on the river. Cheese and Ritz crackers, high ball glasses with Canadian Club and ginger ale. They sent their daughter to college. They proudly paid for it so she didn’t graduate with debt. She was the second child in the family to go to college, the first girl. They were proud.

Along with Black is Beautiful slogans, TV commericals about bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan, and Billy Jean King kicking the shit out of Bobby Riggs on the tennis court, the most enlightened people were expected to treat everyone the same, like a Coca-Cola commercial. Gay people were mostly closeted and off the hetero radar. No one asked why the French teacher, Mr, Bartholomew lived alone and never married. There were few charities outside of the Red Cross, because almost everyone in Horace and Pat’s small town, with its single blinking stop light, all had the same stuff, socio-economically. More or less. And everyone fed everyone else’s kids anyway.

Poverty, and its otherness, was a long ways away, reserved for UNICEF orphans, after-school specials, far-away inner cities, and the local mountain people, an outpost called Allentown, written about in the New York Times back in the 90’s. Multiple generations of Allens lived mostly without elctricity and water, deep in the woods. They stay to themselves, Horace often said. They never hurt nobody. They take care of each other. Horace mingled effortlessly with country folk and his more educated bosses at the mill, a skill required for upward mobility.

Horace and Pat exceeded their goals and dreams.

The expectation was that their child would do better than they did, and that her children (if she had them, and why wouldn’t she?) would continue to prosper in ways that seemed limitless and ever-expanding. The feeling of the 60’s and 70’s, moving into the 80’s was that a kind of utopia had been created. Yet, Horace and Pat were still blue collar in how they looked at life. They had proximity to poverty. They had kin still stuck in mobile homes and persistent, dysfunctional crisis - drinking away paychecks, popping their wives in the mouth, cheating with the girl at the lumberyard, needing to borrow money, doing a night in the drunk tank after a bar fight. Horace and Pat knew that what got them to this secure place was solely of their own making.

Horace and Pat were guided in life by one particular saying: Lie down with dogs, get fleas. The difference between them and people who weren’t doing well was that they had 1) worked extremely hard and made good choices, and 2) they never ever ever rocked the boat. Pat and Horace never had a traffic ticket, never owed money (except for their first mortgage), never paid a bill late, or put things on lay-away, bought something they couldn’t afford, never cheated on their taxes. When they had an opportunity for Horace to leave the mill, to take over a successful business building homes, they turned it down. They wanted a weekly paycheck, pension and the security.

They never laid down with dogs. They never got fleas.

They had escaped poverty, and like their neighbors with nicely painted houses and tasteful holiday decorations, they wanted it to stay that way. No fleas. Horace and Pat, and many others of this period, had what author Barbara Ehrenreich described as a Fear of Falling out of the middle class.

The implications for this are with us today.

In her book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989, Pantheon), Ehrenreich writes that this mid-century middle class - albeit largely blue collar in vibe and sensibility and aways with a chip on their proverbial shoulders - created a bubble of perceived abundance. Horace and Pat, and their neighbors, set their sights on being more like wealthier people than the poverty they came from. Pat and Horace started socializing more with Horace’s superiors at the mill.

This socio-economic comfort helped produce a consumerist culture that was hoping to deplete people of their disposable cash and help them chase affluence. Movie theaters, malls and department stores popped up, along with highway systems that connected rural to urban, suburb to city. Pat went shopping to cure the boredom. Retail therapy, as a concept, was born.

Suburbanization, Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling, probably more than any other single factor, hid the poor from view.

By the time Reagan came into office in the 80’s, there was a full-scale war on poor people. The middle class was invested in staying in their bubbles of abundance. They abandoned liberalism for conservatism. Horace and Pat bought everything Reagan had to sell. They had gotten where they were because they took individual responsibility not because they benefitted from a system that supported them, through entitlements and safety nets. They, like Reagan, believed welfare programs baby-ed people, discouraged them from hard work, and created dependency that made the poor seem like immature, petulant children who needed austerity and consequences to get their lives together.

Liberalism was a bad word. Common sense, a nod to the working class and a slam against the college-educated, management class, was in vogue. Reagan deemed college a vehicle for social unrest. In California, as Governor, he slashed financial aid and increased tuition. Rush Limbaugh was syndicated nationally by 1988 and Bill O’Reilly was on Fox News. This is the point where many of us lost our elders.

As president, Reagan attempted to cut social security and increase the retirement age (not popular). He cut Medicaid, food stamps, employment training programs, and financial aid to college students. He cut taxes for the rich. By the time Clinton took office in 1992, even Democrats wanted to curtail entitlements. Clinton authored the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996, which he believed ended welfare as we know it.

More and more, Horace and Pat were convinced they controlled their own destiny, that everyone had the same start, the same free will, the same bootstraps by which they could pull themselves up, that anyone could do anything if they just worked really really hard.

If they never got fleas, it was because they never laid down with dogs.

I started thinking about the dogs and fleas talk a lot this week after the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minnesota. I heard it over and over in various forms online. If she wasn’t there protesting, she wouldn’t have gotten shot. If people don’t want to get shot, then they shouldn’t resist.

These statements, of course, can be manipulated to show their true foolishness. If you had cooked me the dinner I wanted, I wouldn’t have had to punch you in the face. If women just did what they were told, they wouldn’t get raped.

But it also belies a more ingrained cultural and capitalistic belief that permissiveness, a term Ehrenreich uses often in her book, is okay for some people, like tech founders and the billionaire class, because they are producing, creating, innovating and disrupting. They can take chances, do shady things, hang out with pedophiles, be pedophiles, behave badly, cheat on their partners, avoid rules, work around laws, employ shady ethics, and gain pardons and passes for poor and illegal behavior.

They are allowed to lay down with dogs. They won’t suffer the consequences.

Permissiveness is not acceptable for everyone though.

Immigrants who cross the border illegally are not allowed permissiveness. They enter as criminals. They are called rapists. They are dangerous. The worst of the worst. They do not deserve due process. They deserve to be plucked off the streets by masked gangs of men. Their existence is messy and worthy of harrassment. They have earned CECOT, and whatever their fate may be.

Fleas.

Permissiveness is not okay for the poor, mentally ill and disabled, whose lives are complicated and inexplicable to most of us. They are eating lobster tails on America’s dime. This includes the working poor who should be able to do what Horace and Pat did two generations ago. Didn’t Horace work his way up from sweeping floors? Except we pulled the ladder up from behind people years ago.

Fleas.

Permissiveness is not for Black and brown people, whose parents and grandparents most-likely missed out on the benefits of The New Deal, but are often punished and criticized for not achieving more. Their experiences happen outside of white experiences. They are not allowed the same kinds of leniency.

Fleas.

Permissiveness is not for protestors who see extreme government overreach and want to protect their neighbors, their schools and their communities from ill-prepared, armed, masked men. They are at fault for anything that happens because they show up. Because they are using their constitutionally-protected voices. Of course, some protestors get permission, like the ones that showed up armed on January 6th.

Fleas.

Horace and Pat have both passed on. They wouldn’t recognize the world these days. But that’s just the superficial world, our onlineness, AI, all of us bumping up against each other on social media. In reality, things are less hidden now. The corruption is out there. The poverty is out there. The billionaires are out there. The lawlessness is visible and oh so public. The hate is out there. But so is the bravery, the dissent, and the rebellion. There are no suburban and small town utopias to make us docile and complacent. All we have is our hell-raising to make sure that next time, we leave no one behind.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Kim

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END NOTES:

Happy to be back with all of you. A few notes from the text:

+++ Black and brown people were left behind in the New Deal. This was by design, according to the Rockerfeller Foundation: Black and brown workers across the country were systematically excluded from key programs like Social Security, protections afforded under the National Labor Relations Act, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration, the last two, which promoted racial covenants and other instruments of segregation by refusing home loans for black and brown families.

If you’re interested, I suggest reading this 2014 piece by Ta Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations in the Atlantic, about the mid-century racist housing policies that kept Black and brown people from participating in socio-economic mobility. It really helped me understand how generational wealth and poverty matter.