I once worked on a TV show that necessitated the hiring of child actors. This was back when the majority of casting was still done in person. Since I happened to have written a particular episode featuring kids, I was sitting in on the kid-auditioning process.

As you might imagine, children are not doing, like, Austin-Butler-level character work at the age of six or seven. It’s a lot less “who can best use their instrument” than “who can limit the number of times they wander out of the room or just fully lie down and on the carpet making noises like a garbage truck” type thing.

Our casting director would begin by asking a few questions to put the kids at ease — you know, Do you have a dog?, Any siblings?, etc. Then, after they’d loosened up a little, they’d be asked them to repeat a line or two from their sides.

Most of the kids were then gently broomed out of the room by a parent, who sometimes would say something in a rush before they left, like “He just did an episode of ‘NCIS: Boston’ and they would have brought him back for a second, but his character was murdered by David Faustino, who played a male nanny who fell in love with him. Thank you so much for your time!”

A lot of these moments tend to run together in my memory, but there’s one child actor that I won’t forget.

After sweetly interacting with the casting director, reading her line, and being thanked for her time, a little girl with curtain bangs and eyes the size of toasters turned to us and said something that still sends chills down my spine.

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Not long ago, I recommended Bury Me Already, the new book by genius cartoonist and humorist Julia Wertz, on my Instagram stories. Julia’s diary comics are granularly clever and voluminously crude and hauntingly funny. And, solipsistically, she also used to be kind of a “New York City dirtbag” and now she is a (somewhat) emotionally renovated California mom. We also both gave birth to sons with “some health stuff” around the same unpleasantly historic time, the first three months of 2020, a fiscal quarter whose wild personal peaks and global lows her new book largely busies itself with.

A few days after I posted my recommendation, a friend of mine said, “Should I get this for my coworker who’s about to go on maternity leave with her first?” And I said, “Yes, but maybe tell her not to read it for like, six months.”

It’s not that I don’t think everyone can read and enjoy this book, but that parents probably shouldn’t be “too informed” before their first baby. Having a child is like one of those A24 movies people are always telling you to “go in not knowing anything about” (and twice as long and overpriced!!!! HA HA just kidding. I love you, A24, please give me money to write a movie about a woman who goes through a traumatic breakup and becomes sexually obsessed with a fire hydrant or something).

Anyhow, the book does not shy away from The Horrors when it comes to parenting, and that includes pregnancy loss, birth trauma, child peril… all stuff I generally probably would have scared the shit out of me before I went through it. (That’s why the book is good! You should buy it! )

And in that spirit…

Here are some parts of childbirth and rearing that I was unprepared for. Please note: these are not necessarily universal things, but ones based on my personal experience as a big idiot with a brain purchased from an Aldi. I experience levels of agita and overthinking entirely unjustified for someone of my relatively comfortable circumstances. Every day my body prepares for some kind of Hurt Locker situation when I am, in fact, going to Ralphs to buy a bottle of salad dressing. (To be fair, some Ralphs locations deserve this.)

When having a baby, you may find yourself...

... getting Preeclampsia.

What is it? Unclear. It’s one of those “cluster of mystery symptoms we didn’t tell you that you could have” type things that very little research has been done on because only one gender gets it (two guesses which).

Will you get it if you have a baby? Probably not. But, MAYBE? Some estimates say as many as 10% of women will experience it, and yet nobody tells you about it even though it can literally take you out. Hilarious! And the most fun part is, when you ask your physician what causes it, they go, “Well, don’t actually know.” Ha ha, it’s fun to be a woman; you get to see doctors shrug a lot.

When I was 36 weeks pregnant with my first, I went in for a routine checkup and my blood pressure was “uh oh” over “carnival game where you hit that thing with a big mallet.” My OB was like, “Hey great news, you’re having a baby! Like, in an hour.” I did not even have time to be frightened for my C-section. I have stood in line for concessions at AMC for less time than it took for me to give birth, and yes, I am a Stubs member.

Then I had to be on some kind of IV drip for 24 hours that made me feel like I was in the medical tent at Burning Man for drinking dirty well water. Let me just say this: if men got preeclampsia, they would sell preeclampsia-shooting laser guns on every street corner. (These laser guns would do nothing, but they would make really loud noises.)

... never experiencing labor, ever!

I had two more kids after my preeclampsia “whoopsie,” and my doctor is Mr. No Fun Zero Chill, so he would not even let me attempt a non-surgical birth after a caesarean. He also thinks I am a handful so I think he tries to spend as little time with me as possible. (This is LA, and he is also a big name-dropper, so he’ll say fun stuff like, “You know who never complained this much? Sharon Stone.*”)

Anyhow, because of this, I’ve never “been in labor,” or had so much as had a contraction. Birth for me has kind of been on par with a very uncomfortable haircut, both in that it is scheduled far in advance and that I try not to look at what is happening during. (Why does every salon mirror make you look like the bathtub hag from The Shining?)

Going through a relatively suffering-free birth process originally made me feel sort of bad, like I hadn’t suffered as much as women who labored for several hours, especially since many women are very proud of having done this. This is fine. You are allowed to feel proud about it! I am personally sort of over the moon to be Not Dead from a Uterine Hemorrhage, although nobody’s handing out medals for either of us.

... in the postpartum vortex of lamentation.

A few people sort of warned me about this one, yet I was still unprepared. For some people, there’s a moment not long after giving birth—like in the four-to-ten-day range—when some dastardly glandular alchemy takes place, and it manifests in the craziest involuntary extended weeping fit you’ve ever experienced.

As my husband will tell you, I’m “not a crier”—I don’t deal well with overt expressions of emotion in adults. I like to have one, manful, petite, tear-producing event a year in which to get out of all of my physical lamentation in one go.

HOWEVER. Childbirth is basically like that thing where you go to Burger King and mix eight different sodas into an undrinkable fizzy slurry that never actually tastes good and makes you feel insane, but it’s your brain just squirting 50 different hormones into the waxed paper cup of your fragile essence and making you feel insane.

My husband is a “big Pearl Jam fan” (I know! And yet, somehow, we’ve had enough sex to create three children???). I am ….not. Yet when he played our first child a Pearl Jam cover of “Don’t Be Shy” on his fourth day of life, I sobbed like a toddler at an Anne Taylor-Loft. Like, spittling and wailing, my friends! It was not a short or gentle cry! I wept for my baby, for myself, for Edward Jerome Vedder, and for the recondite, mysterious God that made us all.

Don’t be caught off guard by this one, kids; you’ll want a private place and a very tolerant and supportive partner. (Mine still laughs “tolerantly” and “supportively” at me whenever we hear a Cat Stevens song).

... wanting another baby even when yours is, like, 1 week old.

I have a (male) friend who told me he believes that the number of kids that seems “unmanageable” to you is usually one more child than you currently have. I also have a sister who reported that, seconds after the first time she finished pushing a child through her birth canal, her first thought was, “I want to do that again.” (I was there for the whole thing; my first thought was something closer to “what the fuck!?!?!!”).

That said, I had three kids in rapid succession mostly because I loved being a parent and I loved my children so much that I did not even make time to think practically about just keepin’ it going, like when you go bowling and you finish the game in like 20 minutes and you’re like, “Should we just keep going? Okay, Kevin, you go” and the whole thing just starts a whole other ten frames without much effort on anyone’s part. Like that.

However, after three, my doctor was like, “I’m going to tell you what I told Anne Hathaway*: you need to take a break,” and I’d sort of been pregnant for five straight years at that point so… I took it under advisement, and it ended up being the right “stopping point” for us.

... thinking a lot about that one woman with 19 kids.

Did I watch that reality show when it was on? No. For the seven years that it aired, I had at least one other thing available to me to do other than doing that. I don’t even know what her name is.

And yet, now that I have my own kids? I think of this woman from that show every single day. Even given the bottomless financial resources that stone-cold freaks on TLC always seem to have, I cannot fathom having enough time, space, and money for this many kids. I can barely keep up with the dining and lodging needs of three small children, let alone a dozen plus future sex criminals.

I have three small kids and my god, the grocery bills. Did you ever see that one episode of Hard Knocks where the player with a home pizza oven was having all of his teammates over for pizza night and he showed the amount of ingredients you need to feed the other players on the practice squad, and it was like 40 bags of flour? It was like this man was going on the Oregon Trail! That is what having three school age kids is like.

Money aside, I am a middle child, and I am especially sensitive to their inexhaustible needs born out of default neglect. My second does things like grab my sleeve and say, “Look, Mama! I washed and organized the entire utensil drawer! My hands hurt from scrubbing. Do you love me?” I mean!!!! Who would have time for 17 people doing that??? Not me!

... with a weird new brain.

This one is harder to explain. I mean, yes, obviously, the world reorients when you have a kid and you can actually physically feel yourself going from the center of the universe to some kind of orbiting planet around the new sun of your little baby. (Sorry, — big annual cry is probably coming up.)

But I mean that the way you form and execute thoughts might actually change. I have a friend who only now realizes that she doesn’t “think in sentences” like most people (apparently this is a real phenomenon), and describes her cognitive process as a kind of wordless visual dictionary.

I can only describe what happened to my usual process of thought as going from, like, a casual interior monologue of things like, Maybe I’ll hit a farmer’s market today to navigational system a sheepdog is born with. I barely have the words to describe this, but something very primal kicked in and even now that my children are all in school, I have the involuntary urge to count them several times a day to make sure that they are all there. This base urge to satisfy their needs supersedes all else, which is probably why I frequently “don’t get to the toilet on time.”

In high school, my friend Tony Dilansico tried to convince me that he was actually a better driver when he was baked, because under the influence of marijuana he began to see things as a pure grid of directives, “like RoboCop.” This is the closest thing I can compare it to, except that instead of helping me drive, it ruins girls’ trips and dinners out away from my family.

(I once went to Las Vegas with my friends to see one of the Jersey Shore castmates in a nude male revue, but the entire time a jacked Australian guy was twerking in my face, I was wondering, “I wonder if my four-year-old has had fruit today.”)

... and one final post-birth physical thing that NOBODY told me about that is so horrifying and gross that I will only tell you about it if you’re a woman and you email me, because it’s really that awful (and you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you).

There’s more too, but I’ll probably put those in another essay. Also, if their bellybutton stub doesn’t fall off right away it can stink up the entire house so badly people will think there is a body in it. Sorry!

*Actual celebrity names changed for HIPAA reasons but, you get it.

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This was fine with me -- for a small pug, he had enormous testicles the entire family found unsettling. But the clinic that was going to relieve him of them was all the way across town, and we were instructed to drop him off at five AM and await a text that would give us a thirty-minute window in which to pick him up in his significantly lighter, albeit woozy state.

The day of the big chop happened to coincide with two of my three human children coming down with whatever moist ailment was raging through our elementary school that week.

So when I got the message at 9 PM that night that said, “Pizza is ready to go home, please arrive before closing time” (9:30 PM, obviously) I sped across town with the aim of (gently) scooping him up before rushing back to my two feverish human charges as soon as I possibly could.

When I arrived at the vet, the only spot on the street that was open was at an electric vehicle charging station. Which was fine, because at the time I had a hybrid, so while I wasn’t going to plug it in (no time!), I was technically in an EV vehicle.

And besides, I figured, I’d only be there long enough to grab my groggy dog and his poor vacant scrotum. I was inside the vet clinic all of fifteen minutes, but when I returned, there was a note on my car.

“I need to charge my car to get to work

You are a selfish, thoughtless, ugly person.”

Well.

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It was a Talking Heads song called “Heaven,” and the lyrics repeated in ceaseless loop: “Heaven … Heaven is a place … A place where nothing … Nothing ever happens.”

Of course, I took this very personally.

Before I’d ever met my husband, I “knew” him as a writer and personality on several cheeky, coastally relevant blogs and publications. I was a deeply bored early-career desk potato during the peak of an era where he functioned as something of the internet’s asshole little* brother. He was sent interesting places to write interesting stories. He dated cool women, very publicly did drugs, and was once profiled in GQ where a professional photographer snapped him sitting on a toilet**. He wore a backwards hat to work most days. Basically, before me, he had a pretty good time.

And now, he seemed to be saying, he was in “a place” where “nothing ever happened???”

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Peronally? I love the Oscars, no matter what. When it’s Emmy season, I will absolutely participate in the exhausting dialogue about how awards are stupid and essentially contests over who runs the most expensive marketing campaign, but not in the greater January to March area. In that time, I become the guy I once saw proudly applying an “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” bumper sticker to the back of his orange Chevy Volt, thirty-six weekends after “There Will Be Blood” opened.

I get this from my mom, a stone-cold Oscar freak with big, excellent opinions she’d dispense at random throughout the show, such as “I never ‘got’ Ali McGraw. And now, where is she? Not here!” We used to watch the Big Show every year while massacring an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos, and at some point she would inevitably turn to me during someone’s wet and trembly speech and say, “That’s going to be you up there someday.”

Little did we both know that I would be doing something even greater -- writing dumb jokes about the people on stage in a newsletter that makes me dozens of dollars a month. So, without further delay… “Enjoy” some of my “thoughts” on this year’s Oscar “contenders.”

blue moon: I’ve been on a real journey with Ethan Hawke. In my youth I found him to be kind of annoying in that “hot guy who wants to be a smart guy” way (if I ever run a country, modernizing Shakespeare will be punishable by death). But, in my dotage, I find we’ve both mellowed, and I now find him to be a delightful presence, on and off the screen. This particular film is an enjoyable collection of just the parts of “Midnight in Paris” where someone walks in and goes, “The name’s, Ernie… Ernie Hemingway.” Although, I have to say, for a town positively milling with cokeheads, we still don’t make a ton of “nuanced” movies about people in the throes of addiction. With the exception of “Jesus’s Son,” which you should watch if you’re craving a Denis Johnson adaptation and are on the fence about seeing “Train Dreams.” If so: damn, what a specific feeling you’re feeling. Life is a rich pageant, isn’t it?

hamnet: “In their time, the names ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were virtually interchangeable.” Sorry, no. What? What the fuck? I’m not buying it. And what’s more, I will never get over the suggestion that I do buy it. “Oh btw, before we start this movie you must accept that there was a time when the names Greg and Grog were the same name so if you died and your dad wrote a play called ‘Damn I Miss u Grog’ it was about you.” Belief unsuspended, possibly forever.

song sung blue: This movie is like if in the middle of one of the Mamma Mia! movies, people just started killing each other with machetes. A film truly more fucked up than anything the “Triangle of Sadness” guy thinks he can make. Having said that, I must say with zero irony, Kate Hudson should 100% win for this, she is low-key one of the 11 people who can do comedy and drama at an elite level. She is the Shohei Otani of people with a signature hairdo.

marty supreme: Everybody who’s mad about this guy, name ten operas. lol just kidding I don’t care what Timothee Chalamet said, can you imagine? I liked this one, but only because I’m like a enormous kitty cat in that I genuinely love watching people play ping pong.

one battle after another: I saw this way, way after everybody else in a free union screening full of the industry’s Oldest and Most Coughing People. Afterward there was a Q&A with the director and Paul “Thomas” Anderson said that the story is largely about how every generation fails to fix the world, and so we have to pass the baton on to the next one. “So I’m off the hook? That’s sick,” I said to myself, through my tears about what a good dad Leonardo DiCaprio will make when he’s 85 and his vas deferens collpases from age, allowing for a spontaneous vasectomy reversal in the middle of sex with a 23-year-old who is NOT a model, because modeling is no longer a viable career, having been taken over by sex Waymos.

F1 - hahahahahahahahaha. Okay, one thing I can say about this movie: there’s a character named Smolinski in it!!!! There has never been another character with my last name in a movie, ever. This guy is some kind of hot-headed Polish tire expert, which would normally not be great for us, culturally, except that this movie is largely about tires. If you’re on a date with a “cinephile” and they surprise you with a question about how you feel about the movie “F1,” you can just stroke your chin and say, “Well, it’s largely about tires.” Then go buy some condoms, because you’re in.

train dreams & weapons: Why am I doing these together? Because I have kids. And when there’s some sort of locomotive in whatever picture is playing at my Rialto, it sends me running out of the theater in a panic because I can’t distinguish film from reality and I think I am going to be run over. What I’m saying is, I can’t watch movies where bad things happen to kids, and I always ask my friends if there’s child peril in something so I know not to see it. I knew from the very poster for “Weapons” that it was going to be “not for me,” and when I asked my one friend about “Train Dreams” he said “Wellllllllll…” in a kind of high-pitched voice. So, I read the script for these two movies instead (you can do the same here), and therefore am not qualified to say anything about them. Other than, I don’t think any movie where someone sleeps on a “pallet” or is implied-eaten off camera is going to be one I’m rooting for with my mouth full of sugar, unbleached enriched flour, alkali-processed cocoa and palm oil (the primary ingredients in Double Stuf Oreos).

sentimental value - The biggest jump scare of the year is in this movie — when the house got renovated, I gasped like I’d been hit by a weighted blanket thrown out of a speeding car. Do not watch if you follow any of those Instagram accounts called “I Love Vintage Bathroom Tile” or anything. Otherwise, pretty good.

sinners - I heard Ryan Coogler interviewed on Amy Poehler’s podcast, and ran around for like a full week after telling everybody about how RC’s now-wife secretly saved up to buy him Final Draft while they were in college together so he could write his first screenplay with the proper formatting, and how that act motivated him to write prolifically since that day, to make her selfless investment in him worth it. In college I also vowed that I would write a screenplay before I graduated. I did not. But I did once put an empty 12-pack of Genessee Cream Ale on my head like a hat, and some leftover adhesive ripped all of the eyelashes off of my right eye.

the secret agent - I could write anything here. You haven’t seen this movie. Neither have I! That said, “The Secret Agent” is about a guy who breaks into a stuffed animal factory because he’s running away from his past, and instead, finds a new best friend, a talking bear named Secrety.

frankenstein - thanks, but we already have a “hot” frankenstein. his name is Booberry.

bugonia - I was at Descanso Gardens for their Christmas light show thing one year, and I went to a little pop-up concession stand to get my kids cocoa. The woman working there said, “Wow, I thought you were Emma Stone for a second,” and I replied, “Wow, thank you,” and then she explained that I do not actually look like Emma Stone, and further more, that she was “a little high.” That woman is my hero, forever and ever. I have not seen “Bugonia.”

Sorry for writing this. HAPPY OSCARS!

I should preface this by saying that, while I am not terribly generous of spirit otherwise, I do think that most of the time when we think others are being willfully offensive, they’re just desperate to make small talk. As a gold-star idiot who has put my foot so far into my own mouth that I’ve tasted knee, I wish we’d all be a little more forgiving* of the fact that in even the most lightly trying situations, the poor, overwrought human nervous system simply defaults to a kind of limited language model line of questioning. Emphasis “limited.”

(As a side note: I don’t get mad when people in Los Angeles default, as they famously do, to banalities about the weather or an exhaustive list of what roads they took to our coffee meeting… mostly because I want the right to do the same. What do you all want us to talk about, anyway? The Magna Carta? Middlemarch?! It’s a miracle that we’re hauling our crispy microplastic brains out of our protein-popcorn-crumb-filled bedsheets just to dissociate at each other all day. Let’s all cut one another a break if we can’t come up with anything better for the CVS cashier than “Rainy out there!” )

Okay, back to me and my personal grievances. When you’re a woman over 30, you often get asked if you have kids, but for me, it’s the follow-up question, “How old are they?” that shoots me and people I’ve never met before right to a place of deeply unerotic, mouth-puckering, nose-wrinkling discomfort.

This is because, during these few particular months, my children’s ages are consecutive. Right now, they are six, seven, and eight years old.

I realize this is fairly unusual, but it makes people’s eyes spin around in their heads like ping pong balls in a bingo hopper, and steam comes shooting out of their ears. I’ve heard every iteration of remark that means “How often were you and your husband doing intercourse? Did you go to work? Who was watching the other children while you two were humping yourselves into oblivion?” Then there’s the inevitable mention of “Irish twins,” a quaint, hilariously ethnically rude phrase that has somehow survived a century of whipsawing cultural sensitivity.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this happens at least once a week during the spring months — in part because my children are very loud and occasionally disruptive in public in a way that prompts others to demand their biographical information.

That my children are present sometimes seems to be no impediment to anyone — from Jersey Mike’s sandwichistas to pediatric dermatologists — to declare, “Wow, you and ‘Dad’ were busy!”

Because I am from the Midwest and have issues with overapologizing — not to mention creating and enforcing boundaries — rather than letting these comments pass, I sometimes feel that I must explain myself.

I’ve thankfully gotten to the point that I no longer say things like, “No, no, we weren’t having that much sex,” or “Yes, I know, the third one was such a shock I dropped the test into a shag rug and had to cut it out with nail clippers and still got pee everywhere and had to throw the rug out, but the sanitaiton department wouldn’t take it for weeks so I called them up and yelled at them in my second-trimester and they only got it because I was crying,” etc.

For a while, when the kids were still VERY little, I tried to come up with some sort of sly retort, the kind syndicated newspaper advice columnists were always advocating for in the 1990s, that indicates that I’m delighted with my life and you’re the creepy horndog for looking at my toddlers and immediately imagining me getting my back blown out, non-stop.

But, as it happens, I’ve been overexplaining it since the beginning — I got pregnant after dating someone for only a few weeks.

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I don’t consider myself unfriendly, per se, but long before my brief time as a New Yorker, I adopted the city’s approach to strangers: I’ll gladly help you out if you’re being actively killed, but otherwise, you and I are none of each other’s business.

I’ve always fallen somewhere between “a little shy around new people” and “pants-pissing social anxiety” -- in my younger years, I could fake being “outgoing” if I had roughly a soup pot’s worth of alcohol and some kind of stimulant, but in general, I’m awkward and sweaty with new people and strangers. Because of this, I’ve always enjoyed the solitude that travel and transit afford -- when you are between places you’re supposed to be, you can just take the time to think, and the polite thing to do is keep to yourself. I’m also someone who has always generally enjoyed silence and alone time (which, needless to say, has been rough on me as a parent, but that’s another essay). It’s when you’re expected to be friendly that I get sweaty and ridiculous — I once stopped going to a small mom-and-pop grocery store that was a block from my house and had incredible produce in favor of one that had to be driven to and whose tomatoes tasted like wet feet, because the manager at the “good” place greeted me by name every time I saw him and I couldn’t remember his, and after months, it was too late to ask.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook too much, but moving around a lot and changing schools often as a kid had made me extra wary of people I didn’t know -- I was nearsighted, bad at gym, and had a bone deformity, all things children were famously chill about in the 1990s. If I’d become a misanthrope by nine, I felt it was justified and hard-won.

So, in high school, when my older sister was in a school play and couldn’t drive me home after classes, I immediately took to public transportation, in that riders all pretended mutually that the people inches to the left of us or sometimes partially in our laps do not in fact exist. In Cleveland, we have a kind of B-minus light rail system that runs from downtown to some of the suburbs -- think of a trolley without the looks or personality -- and for a couple of quarters, I could get from high school to my house in about twenty minutes among my fellow sophisticated commuters, sharing a genial silence as North East Ohio flashed brownly by.

Until one day, when a boy about my age boarded. He wasn’t bad looking; in fact, he was one of the first in a specific subsection of people who would be attractive to me until they prove that they are interested and available. He was on the smaller side, in a huge North Face jacket through which a tie peeked out at the collar. There were many seats for him to choose from, but he sat down directly across from me.

Now, I don’t want to be controversial, but I don’t think introversion and extraversion exist as two distinct and exciting personality types so much as “ways every alive person feels at some point.” I understand the contemporary urge to align ourselves with any available subgenres of mental illness as an organizing social principle or thing to put on a couch pillow. But, not liking to be at parties where you don’t know anyone does not make you some sort of rarefied Victorian invalid or emotional protected class. Canceling plans at the last minute because your “social battery” is “drained?” In my day, we called that “being a big fucking flake.” However, in whatever construct-y way pure extraversion is real, this kid was it.

“So where do you go to school?” he asked, as if we’d already been in the middle of talking, leading me to do the classic, Are you talking to me? look around that gives you a brief time to assess whether you’re about to be annoyed or murdered with a shoe.

I told him I went to the public high school in my suburb, in my most inviting-zero-follow-up voice. He nodded, and I figured that would be the end of that, since I certainly wasn’t going to return volley, but as I would soon learn, he was the kind of conversationalist who sees “replying” as wholly optional, if not at cross-purposes with his particular talking style.

“I go to [X],” he said, naming one of the private, all-boys schools nearer to downtown, then he leaned forward. “I heard your school is dangerous.” And he went on to say something about kids having to go through metal detectors, which was a tedious “60 Minutes”-concern of old people at the time, who maybe shouldn’t have spent the entirety of the 1960s emotionally dysregulating our parents if they didn’t want their grandchildren to listen to Ween and carry pocket knives.

“It’s not,” I rolled my eyes, and decided to take out a book, which was absolute amateur hour -- the type of guy who talks to you unbidden on a train LOVES a book, because it gives them a handy topic to bother you about.

“A reader, huh,” he said, then he whispered conspiratorially, “Did you know Shakespeare was gay?”

Boys like this were always trying to convince you of some dusty old piece of historical apocrypha that a “cool” teacher convinced them was true -- like that Pepsi used to be mostly heroin or that the vibrator was invented by doctors to calm down Eleanor Roosevelt. A good 90% of the time, it was just that some historical figure was secretly homosexual. Paul Revere? Gay. Gandhi? Gay. Napoleon? Un gay.

Luckily, this couldn’t go on for much longer, because I was only two or three stops from the school, but before I left, this boy insisted on getting my name and telling me his, which we’ll say was Danny. And from then on, I saw Danny. So much Danny. I don’t know how he managed to be in the same railcar as me, but there indeed he was, every time I got on, ready with zero introduction or lead-in to disgorge an arsenal of unprompted urban myths and vaguely insulting breakdowns of current events, usually about how public schools were essentially depraved urban gulags overstuffed with illiterate teen larcenists.

I heard that in your neighborhood are gangs that drive around with their lights off and if you flash your lights at them, they’ll make you be the leader of the gang, and then you have to be in charge of the gang’s snack every week?

I heard that in public school, if they catch you praying, they make you watch PBS until you don’t believe in god anymore. Speaking of PBS, Jim Henson died of AIDS.

Also, did you know Mother Theresa was gay?

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of Cleveland winters could keep him from his chit chat, like Terry Gross with frosted tips and slightly less self-awareness. It seemed like there was nothing to do about this daily trial. Until, one day, a strange, golden opportunity arose: I got a haircut.

I should specify, this was also a time when I was fully obsessed with the television program “The X-Files,” including writing fan fiction, poring over episode guides, and dissecting each episode on online message boards with other people who had never had sex. If you’re thinking, Hm, sounds like you weren’t really in a position to reject anyone socially, you’re correct. I mention “The X-Files” because I’d been begging my mother to let me transform my shoulder-length, Purina brown hair into coppery, face-framing wisps like actress and harbinger of my nascent bisexual awakening, Gillian Anderson, and my mom had finally agreed, despite the expense and clear cross purposes with my shiny bagel of a face and medicine ball-sized head.

My mother’s colorist at the Cleveland Galleria took one look at my olive Greek complexion and said, “I’m sorry. You’re just not a redhead.” Until then, I was not aware that hairdressers had the right of refusal. But after a little convincing on my part (tears), he agreed to compromise on a light “auburn,” and I left the salon with a trapezoidal newscaster’s bob in the color of purplish brown favored by Batman villains and elderly female shut-ins.

I did not look like Dana Scully. But I did look different. Enough people said something like “Wow, I didn’t even recognize you” (derogatory, as we say now), that the little flame of an idea began to grow inside me, and as soon as the train approached the platform that day, I knew with sickening certainty what I was going to do.

I sat down at the opposite end of the car as Danny, who never met a hint he couldn’t fend violently off. He scooted down until he was next to me, and whistled at my hair.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he asked, with his characteristic pleasantness. I pretended not to hear him. Then, after he repeated my name a few times and waved a hand in my face, I made my move.

“Oh,” I said. “You must have me confused with my twin sister.”

For once, Danny seemed to acknowledge that I’d responded, although he didn’t look like he’d quite ingested it, so of course, I had to double down.

“I am an identical twin,” I said, trying to summon my actual, non-twin sister’s flair for the theater that put me in this wretched situation to begin with. “I can see how you’d be confused, but my name is Erin. My twin, Julieanne, takes this train too, but she has brown hair. I am a wholly different person.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I am not and was not a good actor. But I was desperate, and the idea that identical teenaged twins might have different haircuts but the same backpack and pair of Chuck Taylors that they’d drawn David Duchovny on seemed like what we in the TV industry call “refrigerator logic.” I couldn’t take another day of being badgered about whether, as a public school kid, I’d decided to pledge the Crips or Bloods yet, or if I knew that Hitler invented R&B. It was utterly unbelievable, except that this was a kid who believed that Mountain Dew made your sperm swim backward, so it was maybe worth a shot.

Regardless, it didn’t work. Danny’s face darkened. Somehow, after everything, I’d never actually just told him I didn’t want to talk. Yet here I was doing it now, in the most cowardly way possible. I could feel that I’d crossed some sort of crucial moral line -- he may have been obnoxious and intrusive, but I was a liar. And in a reversal that defied belief, HE took out something to read (not a book, no -- couldn’t be Danny -- but one of those period-specific magazines dedicated to calling women “hotties” and exalting the flavor of bacon that we used to hilariously believe represented the worst masculinity had on offer).

And with that, he proceeded to ignore me.

I should have felt free, but instead, I felt the full weight of his judgment, and more than that, the true spitefulness of what I’d done. Anybody could tell after looking at Daniel and his Aztec-printed fleece jester hat and male-fupa-enhancing school uniform pants and my burgundy nightmare haircut that we were more alike, socially, than I’d been willing to admit. And, as a person who’d gone through long periods of friendlessness, not counting the fictional FBI agents I spent my weekends with, shouldn’t I have been the first to offer him a bare minimum of civility? How terrible is it really, to talk to another person for a few minutes every day, even if they’re a little bit annoying? Wasn’t it Jimmy Carter, or somebody equally nice and morally superior, who said that the cost of community is inconvenience?

From then on, I felt the black heft of Danny’s coldness every day, until, at last, the school play ended and my older sister could drive me home once more. But every time I saw my old train stop or had trouble sleeping at night, I’d see the look on his apple-cheeked, still-boyish face, when I’d attempted to fool him in the dopiest way possible. Confusion, disgust, and perhaps worst of all, hurt.

Two years later, I went to prom as the date of a boy from another school. It was one of those group hangs where you were only nominally someone’s “date” -- my escort and I weren’t interested in each other romantically. In the intervening time, I’d adjusted to high school life somewhat. I’d also grown enormous breasts, gotten a more flattering haircut, and secured a tentative spot in a large friend group who preferred leaving the house to smoke weed in each other’s garages to ranking members of the writing staff of a spooky primetime soap on the FOX network, so I was now sometimes invited to things like prom.

I saw Danny almost instantly when we walked into the decorated gym. The little trap door keeping my stomach in place gave way. I hadn’t known what grade he was in, but this was a small school -- he had to know my date and our prom group. What would he say to them? Would he expose my essential badness to my new friends? I spent all of the seated dinner with sweat making dark donuts on the corset of my Jessica McClintock princess dress. Then it was time to dance, and I found myself nearly back to back on the floor with Danny.

He looked pretty much the same as he had the last time I’d seen him, except that he was wearing suspenders and a top hat, like Mr. Peanut, and one of those “fun” cummerbunds with a loud pattern of colors and shapes. He didn’t notice me at first, because he was busy doing the “worm,” but I couldn’t stand the tension, and decided I would be the first to say “hi.” So I did. Even if it was too little too late, the least I could do now was to be friendly.

Maybe he’d been drinking that night, or maybe it was the smoke machine and the dimness of the gym, but his face was a complete blank -- there was zero recognition in his eyes, and he just sort of nodded at me before he went back to dancing.

As he pop-locked enthusiastically away with some startled girl — probably regaling her with statistics about how many substitute teachers in the public school system have criminal records — I realized that while my dismissal of him might remain a shameful dark mark in my past, maybe I was the one who hadn’t ultimately registered to him. Maybe he was just the kind of person who talked to everybody, who simply chose goodwill over hostility when given the opportunity, even if the rest of the world didn’t reflect this neighborliness back to him.

I worried that I would always be one of those people who cannot naturally commune with others with pleasure and ease. I would never be the kind who just instinctively waves the other driver across the intersection even when it’s not their turn, who has a smile for every toll booth operator or grocery bag checker and fellow commuter, who makes lasting friendships with their seatmates on airplanes instead of pretending like the people around me are invisible in the name of protecting my own peace.

Or maybe he just genuinely didn’t recognize me — after all, I had just gotten bangs.

My husband and kids and I used to live on the border of one of these highsy-lowsy situations, and a lot of “solicitors” would mistakenly wander on to our side (the cheaper one) looking for rich people. They’d knock on our door, looking for the willing moneyed, to sign some petition against affordable housing, to secure a vote for some anti-affordable-housing candidate, or to find someone who reviled the poor to join their religion.

Most often, the people who knocked on our door were sales reps, the worst of whom were from solar panel companies. Of course, I get that everybody needs to work, and that it takes more grit than I have to do what they do -- work on commission, risk violent confrontation, wear polo shirts in the “true spring” color palette. But these particular fellows were rarely carried away on the gentle wind of a polite “No thank you.” They were — in a word that probably meant something very different to their supervisors — aggressive.

Two years into living in that neighborhood, I began to tell the “solar guys” who mashed the doorbell (over which I’d taped a “don’t, for the love of Christ, ring” sign) things like, “Gosh, I’d love to consider alternative energy. When I’m out of prison, where I’m going again because I can’t stop doing vehicular manslaughter when I’m mad. I’ll just take a brochure.”

Sometimes, if my younger son had been napping when they rang, I was not as nice. As long as we’ve been together, my husband has maintained what you’d call a robust spiritual practice. He reads a lot of books with titles like Radical Kindness and Letting Go of What You Can’t Control and How Buddhism Can Make You Less of a Classist Monster Even If It Can’t Help Your Bitch Wife. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with a person who’s trying actively to better themselves, all the time, but it really keeps you from acting insane to strangers who mildly inconvenience you. I thought, “Okay, fine. Perhaps I could try to be kinder to these sales gentlemen who bang ceaselessly on the door the minute I enter in the shower.” That didn’t work, so I tried something else.

“This isn’t house isn’t even ours,” I started hissing to anyone who knocked, and this seemed to be the magic hiss. In fact, I recommend admitting that you aren’t a homeowner to anyone looking to get census takers, fringe mayoral candidates, and other people with clipboards off their stoop.

It also happened to be true — the house wasn’t ours. We were, and are, renters. Before leasing that place where I’d hung my home-made lunatic doorbell sign, we’d briefly owned a house, with a mortgage and frighteningly expensive fire insurance and all the delightful attendant problems of vile private proprietorship. It was on the smaller side, and yardless, so we sold it during the pandemic, thinking we’d rent a place big enough for the three kids to play and have outdoor space, and then eventually we’d buy something again when things “settled down.” But then, as you may have heard, they didn’t— the bottom fell out of the entertainment industry at the same time as real estate and rental prices in LA began to inconveniently skyrocket. We’re currently living in our third rental since 2020.

I don’t mind this. I moved a lot as a kid. There’s only one time I can really think of when home ownership felt like being granted passage to a special kingdom of achievement and adulthood: the time when my father, for a short time, owned his dream house.

When I was very young, a relative of my dad’s died and left him a small, surprise sum of money. This is the kind of exciting thing that usually only happens in YA novels or in limited television series with terrible wigs. Unfortunately, since it happened to my father, it will almost certainly never happen to me, as “good” unlikely plot points tend to skip a generation.

My parents, at the time, were a law student and a school teacher. Neither came from a family with an ounce of generational wealth, unless you count the 6 closets full of hoarded two-ply toilet paper that were violently apportioned between me and my ten cousins, when our grandmother passed in 2013. (Let me know when you’re ready for that riveting tale of one dynasty’s asset division, HBO.)

My father took the relatively petite windfall and set to work constructing a kind of ‘80s Dad Barbie Dream house. As I would hear him repeat as he chose finishes and finials, he preferred a “contemporary” look. In 1988, that meant teal cedar siding, pale wood cupboards blasted with halogen track lighting, and — from wall-to-mauve-painted-wall — nubbly carpet the salesman referred to as “prismatic berber.” My dad proudly showed my sister and me how the fibers glittered a raw-meat purple when the sun hit just right. It looked like the drywalled corner of heaven where Patrick Bateman might settle down with Paula Poundstone.

My dad loved it.

When I had friends over, I’d show off our amenities like a salesman in a showroom. Note please, the mini hibachi in the middle of the kitchen island, where my parents cooked all manner of period delights-- shrimp scampi, portobello mushroom burgers, pasta with a risque amount of fruit in it. My room had a built-in trundle bed, and there was a Jacuzzi in the primary suite (“Jacuzzi is a brand, remember. Anything else is just a hot tub.” - Dad).

Til then, our family had been renters, but I was too young to think about whether building this house meant we’d leapfrogged a social class or two. The line back then, when kids would ask parents if they were “rich” or “poor,” was always “We’re comfortable,” a nonsense deferral that could indicate either vast stockpiles of cash or mere days til a loan shark started taking toes.

The development where the house sat was all “middle-class” families, but there was a kind of blithe sense of temporary abundance in the air -- new people were always showing up, trucks full of big sheets of pink insulation were always arriving and excavators were always showing up to dig fresh muddy foundations. I first kissed a neighbor kid in the skeletal wood frame of a new home whose occupants I never ended up meeting. This boy’s stepdad was obsessed with the maintenance of their brand new home and yard-- their daily housekeeper was four feet tall and had rubber blocks on the pedals of her Camaro; she used to put out little pie pans full of beer to keep slugs from the roses, which made the whole neighborhood smell like flowers and warm booze on hot days.

When my parents split up, my mom and sister and I became renters again, in an apartment complex that was full of single parents. The mother and son nextdoor to us had a king-sized waterbed she’d taken in her divorce, which filled an entire room of their tiny, brown-carpeted apartment. Once, I stayed over with them, so my mom could clerk for a judge or work one of the jobs she took on in order to afford an attached 2-bedroom unit while paying for a graduate degree. Before bed, the neighbor-mom made Tombstone pizza and warned me in a whisper, “The waterbed makes Marc pee sometimes. Just wake me up when it happens.” From there, my mother and father each moved house two more times, when I was seven, eight, nine, and ten.

This year, my own family and I are moving yet again -- our lease is up, and we don’t want to commit to reupping for two more years. I don’t mind -- I’m used to hopping around, and it’s nice to have a real reason to be on Zillow at one AM instead of malingering there, like someone in the parking lot of a strip club.

If -- like my husband -- you think there’s a pathology to my moving this much in adulthood, you could be right. Perhaps I see where we live as a thing I can control when other parts of life are in disorder. He grew up in one house his parents owned, and would prefer the comfort and stability of a fixed family home. My youngest complains that he wants to live in a place where he has “memories.” (If you don’t have little kids, they’re always saying maudlin stuff like this. I blame the sundry cartoon dogs of Disney+.)

My kids ask me to avoid driving by places we’ve lived, but it doesn’t cause me the same pain. Even places we brought babies home from the hospital, or living rooms where I can still see the spots where we set up our Christmas tree. Maybe there’s something very mega wrong with me, or maybe I prefer the illusion of freedom that comes with knowing we can “pick up and go someplace.” My feeling is, home is wherever we are, and maybe it’s a place with a better stove, or a picture window, or a neighbor who didn’t accidentally see my butt that one time my sweatpants got caught on the recycling bin.

If I feel any longing, it’s for the greater ease with which people used to save up for a place or a city they liked, and just stay there, money or inventory being less of an obstacle. People my age speak of a time when buying a house in or near certain cities wasn’t “beyond reach,” although of course, there were plenty of people thirty years ago for whom it was never within reach. It does seem like there are more renters than ever where we live, and more people leaving altogether.

Not long ago, while messing around on Zillow one night, I decided to see how much houses cost in the part of Ohio where I was born, and saw that my Dad’s dream house was for sale. I clicked through the photo gallery, wondering if I would feel anything, if I’d associate that specific house with some emotion, like the feeling of an unexpected bonanza in a life with few surprises, or a more globally: a rare, sweet moment in time of real ductility for families trying to climb the ladder alongside their neighbors, who were busy digging their own dangeous pits and designing their own heinous cabinetry.

Unsurprisingly, the house looks dated and shopworn. The hibachi is still there, perhaps ready for some phantom Reaganite chef to blacken a swordfish on it, with a side of baby vegetables. The house has had a few owners over the years, and the newest price seemed absurdly high to me, especially given that one of the bathrooms was redesigned with a kind of faux southwestern, chili pepper motif. It’s not what I would choose, but, then again, it’s not my house.

One of these gone-forever things was my most popular post on a women’s website known for its sexual candor and intense personal essays. My contribution? A recipe for cabbage soup.

It was published there one long-ago January, during the drowsy stretch of post-holiday indolence when everyone is back on work computers, but still feeling a little logy from charcuterie and “oh just one” cigarettes. I wrote the post about a “cleansing” soup after a celebratory season in which I’d skeletized an entire seventeen-inch plastic Christmas tree made out of Ferrero Rocher chocolate candies (and washed it down with 800 bottles of Trader Jean’s Côtes du Rhône). I was twenty-eight, and pretty much the only thing I did well at the time was the soup.

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I chose to write to a local newspaper plant that produced a lot of smoke, causing me to suspect that it was polluting the local river. I can’t explain this choice, other than to point out that, like many people born in the greater Akron area, I was not much fun until I left the state and discovered stimulants and alcohol (at which point I became TOO fun, but, that’s another newsletter).

By the end of the school year, my fellow students began to receive their responses. When my more interesting classmates began to gleefully wave their glossy signed Ryne Sandberg and Barbara Bush headshots in the sweet spring air, I realized I might have made a tactical error, especially when my reply from the newspaper plant came. What I’d referred to in my scoldy note as “smoke” was actually steam, and the company’s splenetic spokesman invited me to visit their factory (in what now strikes me as a bit of a catty reply to a child), on the next date that the state EPA made their regular compliance visit.

As is my fashion, I took the absolute wrong lesson from this, and was delighted by the idea that you could compel a company or newspaper or late-1980s sort-of-luminary to reply to any Ohio nobody with a stamp, as if we were actual people.

Over the course of the next several years, I wrote to National Geographic, Highlights, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, TIME, Consumer Reports, People, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, and more. Sometimes I was ignored, but I usually got replies and even had my letters published a few times (look for my name in the front pages of Entertainment Weekly following their deeply unjust pan of “The X-Files” movie).

I mostly stopped doing this once I began working in journalism, out of some combination of job-grubbing and concern over ethical purity. As an adult, and sometimes writer and maker of Stuff myself, I’ve redirected my ire to swearing at AI chatbots on food delivery apps.

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There was not only zero chemistry between us then, but we also did not instantly “like” one another.

I often joke with him that we’re what would have happened if Emilio Estefez had gotten Ally Sheedy pregnant in an inadvisable sequel to “The Breakfast Club.” I was a one-time teen playwright and poetry magazine stalwart who favored that shade of box-dye black that turned your hair the color of the Old Navy logo. He played high school football, was on something called “prom court” (sp?), and thinks any problem — professional stagnation, Lyme Disease, seasonal depression, war — can be solved with goblet squats.

We are two people who — on paper — have very, very little in common, the least insurmountable of which is that I cannot do a goblet squat. (And do not want to.)

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Like all millennials with zero generational wealth, I am erotically obsessed with real estate. AJ, then my still-fairly newish boyfriend, was used to hearing me burble on about parquet floors and original tile and crown molding with the same enthusiasm and consideration for the interest of my audience as a four-year-old recounting the entire plot of “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”

I hadn’t really thought seriously about pulling the trigger on anything until one day, when I was doing my usual deluded fantasizing about home ownership, and saw the listing.

“Danzig’s house,” I gasped, like somebody waking from a dream in a stupid scary movie. “It’s for sale.”

And there was an open house scheduled for that week. An open house! At Glenn Danzig’s!

If you live in LA, you know the place I’m talking about: a morose grey pile on a block of Franklin Avenue near the House of Pies diner that looks like… well, like it belongs to Glenn Danzig.

If, for some reason, you don’t know who that is (hi, Mom! thanks for subscribing!): Glenn Danzig is the frontman of The Misfits, a pioneering horror punk band from the late seventies and early eighties. The Misfits’ short, poppy, catchy tunes cover such topics as drinking blood, killing babies, killing moms, raping moms, creatures raping your face, androids, and more. My personal favorite lyric? “An omelet of disease awaits your noontime meal.” I mean, Mary Oliver could never. Even if you don’t know Danzig’s music, you’ve probably seen the band’s inescapable Crimson Ghost logo, which has appeared on the bumper stickers of some of America’s ex-iest boyfriends.

Danzig himself is known for being what you might call “kind of an intense guy” — picture, if you will, a milk-white topless He-Man doll sporting mesh pants and Gal Gadot’s hair. I remember reading an old interview with him in Spin magazine where he said the R word maybe nine times and threatened to beat up the makers of Guitar Hero. Danzig never, ever wears a shirt, and definitely does not seem like he might get along with members of an HOA.

I’d lived in LA once before, in my very early 20s before leaving to pursue a writing career in New York, and I’d dated a musician who played Static Age on repeat and was determined to find a way to get inside the house — Danzig had reportedly stopped living there years earlier, and the property had been empty for years. My ex wondered how tough it might be to get a look inside and see if any of Glenn’s shit was still there, a plan I sensibly refused to entertain, because I had a bright future in online journalism to think about. I haven’t talked to that ex-boyfriend in years; we broke up and he almost immediately got married to a woman in a non-legally binding ceremony that involved a shaman pouring two different colors of sand into a big jar.

But now? It was my chance to do what my ex had threatened to do after too many Fireball shots at Ye Rustic Inn. But, like, legally, and in the presence of a licensed realtor.

If the idea of Glenn Danzig having a realtor is funny to you, let me just say: yes. The open house was on a Saturday in the summer of 2017; and the listing was near enough to our apartment that we could walk over with our baby son. He was just under two months old, the absolute perfect age to visit the abandoned home of an Italian-American satanist.

The property is surrounded by a wrought iron fence and an imposing gate studded with a sunburst of pointy-looking arrows. In the front dormer windows, the horizontal blinds have been broken on one side for years, giving it a crazed, pirate-y look. The foliage is overgrown, the shingles are sloughing off. That said, it’s in one of the nicest areas of Los Angeles, just down the street from restaurants where you might take your parents to maybe catch a glimpse of Matt Rogers eating a frisee salad. The property is expensive, and you can tell from the outside that not much has been touched. In short, there was potential for it to have potential.

I do not like new construction, or renovations of nearly any kind; those little rectangular backsplash tiles that have become synonymous with affordable real estate fill me with a kind of nameless dread. I think people who see “stainless steel appliances and granite countertops” as a positive should be sent to re-education camps run by septugenarian homosexual vintage furniture dealers. I would gladly vote outside my party for any gubernatorial candidate who ran on a platform of making it a crime to install grey hardwood flooring in the state of California, and I would rather breathe benzene directly from a bag than own an electric stove. Like Glenn Danzig, I have many strong opinions.

When we approached the front door of the house, a harried-looking realtor was having a harried-looking phone conversation. We were a little surprised (okay, extremely disappointed) to see that he was just a regular-looking broker guy and wasn’t wearing like, a hooded crushed velvet cape or winged eyeliner and warning us to turn back or he’d rape our faces with a diseased omelet.

Instead, he set a hand on our stroller. “You’re not going to want to take that inside.”

“The baby?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “The stroller. The wheels will get stuck. The carpet is very wet.”

“Why is the carpet wet?” asked AJ sensibly.

“We don’t know,” said the realtor, who then returned to his upsetting phone call for the duration of the time we were inside the house. Which was — let me tell you — twenty-ish minutes of pure mall goth euphoria.

Danzig’s place looks less like a home and more like a Universal Studios attraction. I would say it is so spooky and dilapidated as to seem art-directed, but that would indicate a level of care that could not apply to a structure where your feet sink into the floor, as though it were made of flan, on the other side of which was surely the mouth of hell.

Everything inside was black — black walls, black furniture. Black wires connected to nothing hung from the ceiling like party streamers. The carpet was very wet and very black. Every appliance in the bathroom was black and looked like it had never known the gentle touch of a cleaning cloth or toilet wand. On top of the (black) fridge in the kitchen was a single box of Count Chocula cereal.

We were too enraptured to take a single cell phone photograph, but I did carry our baby up the stairs so he could see out the famous front window. In that bedroom, or whatever it was, where I was finally able to the other side of the view that’s so indelible from outside the gates, I had an overwhelming urge to fix the blinds that had been hanging askew for at least a decade. But the idea of even gently pulling on the cord felt like taking a withered hand from the tomb of a mummy.

Outside the house, there was an enormous, overgrown yard filled with bricks and a back “recording studio” that the realtor warned us against getting too close to the structure lest it fall on us. We poked around then took one last spin around the house, our shoes squelching on the black carpet. When the sun shone through the broken blinds, I’m pretty sure you could see clusters of lead paint wafting in the kitty-litter scented air like snowflakes. AJ nodded solemnly and put a hand on my arm.

“I think we should buy it,” he said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed, blowing off a layer of chunky grey dust off that had settled on baby’s head during the walk-through.

A few more people had shown up, and the realtor had assumed the terrified air of a nervous kid whose house had been commandeered for a keg party by his bully older brother while their parents were out of town.

“Please don’t touch anything!” he yelled. “The owner is very … particular.”

The asking price hadn’t been posted in the listing, but, come on. How much could this place cost? Again, it was 2017, when mold and vaguely grave-shaped heaps in the backyard were still considered “barriers to entry” for most homebuyers.

“The owner is unwilling to make any concessions or repairs,” the realtor told me, as my then-boyfriend walked the baby over to examine a pile of broken wood with nails sticking out. I’ve heard some people won’t even take a baby on a plane at that age he was then. “Also,” added the realtor, “He’s not entertaining any offers under a million dollars.” We did not buy the house — I’m not sure anyone did. According to Zillow, it was last sold in 1989, for $275,002.

AJ and I got married a year or so after we saw that house— we’ve had two more kids. Our oldest son, now eight, has a favorite t-shirt with The Misfits’ logo on the front.

We eventually did buy an old house, but we sold it during the pandemic, and now we’re back to renting again. Like a lot of people who live in a major metropolis and work in media during what feel like its dark, Danzigian death throes, I don’t know when we’ll be in the position to buy again, if ever. The real estate market in Los Angeles exploded in the years after that open house, to the point where a million dollars for a heap of haunted mesothelioma near Little Dom’s seems like a pretty incredible deal. I don’t mind renting, although I still refuse to live anywhere built after 1940 that doesn’t look like it’s housed a small cult or seen at least one murder-suicide.

My husband and I drive by Danzig’s house all the time, and we still talk about the open house a lot, in a way that’s equally wistful for that time in the market as that time in our lives. We were just a new couple with a new baby, the future felt far away and anything seemed possible. I think about what we could have done with a little paint, a few industrial fans, some new window treatments… That room where you swear you can still see a skeletal hand separating the blinds to bedamn the passers-by from its unholy den could have been our bedroom. If I remember it right, it was definitely wide enough for a king bedframe. We could have made it work.

Listen, I’m not a complete idiot*. I mostly wanted to shift the burden of saying no to someone else. And, in my defense, when I was in elementary school, there were Saturday morning kids’ versions of “Rambo” (a movie that features a speech where a sobbing Vietnam vet with PTSD played by Sylvester Stallone vividly describes seeing one of his friends explode) and “Police Academy” (a movie where a cop getting his head stuck in a horse’s anus is one of the tamer events).

And, as many kids who grew up before the advent of that little noise your car will make until everybody has a seatbelt on, PG-13 was a relatively new invention, and a lot of our parents let us watch a lot of what they remembered vaguely liking when they saw it in 1978.

When I was a kid, I was treated to both ends of the content spectrum, because I participated in one of the great bygone seasonal traditions of the American 1990s: summer with dad.

If you did not have this experience, let me briefly describe for you the nature of Summer With Dad: usually, long days of being put outside in the heat with only a single popsicle for hydration (this was before we knew you were supposed to give children water), capped off by an afternoon of watching syndicated television or rented Blockbuster videos. Entertainment was often taken in front of some kind of foul bachelor dinner: hand-burnt steak, or leathery chicken nuggets and a foamy taupe brownie microwaved to a uniform goo in a plastic tray. There was lots of carryout pizza (90s dad LOVED a carryout pizza, a cost-saving measure that also allowed them dad to flirt with whoever was working behind the counter.)

After one or two wildly unsupervised summers where my sister and I were left to entertain ourselves with a variety of charming, retro threats to our lives (rickety hammocks, creek parasites, desolate bike paths that were like Amazon Prime for kidnappers), my dad remarried.

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The summer before last, I was between jobs and my children were going to day camp. A period of unemployment is not too alarming or unusual in my line of work; TV writing often involves long (increasingly longer) periods of uselessness between fitful spurts of contract employment.

Often during these periods, when I am supposed to be working on writing new things and generating new ideas, I instead go to seed a little. I eat revolting convenience foods, like hard-boiled eggs from a bag, I stop washing my hair and start wearing the kind of pants that don’t have a fly or even a tag in the back, because they’re so shapeless it ultimately doesn’t matter how you put them on. Pants that, in their lack of structure, mirror your sad, eggy days.

My husband suggested I find something to do that wasn’t work or rattling darkly around the house like a premenstrual ghost. He had the gall to suggest I join a running club, or sign up for some kind of “class” at a “gym.”

Now, I know a lot of people enjoy this kind of thing, but to me, exerting myself physically in a choreographed fashion, accompanied by four to thirty strangers and the music of Taylor Swift, is not “restorative.” It is what happens to you in hell if you steal from a food bank.

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Compounding my usual jobless moldering was the fact that I’d also recently tried unsuccessfully to sell two television shows, and had a series of dispiriting meetings with television executives who seemed, at best, a little down in the dummps themselves, and at worst, to actively wish that they were living another life, one in which they were someone else entirely, and I was dead.

Now, I’m very used to getting no’s or shrugs or blank stares, or seeing the reflection of Instagram stories flit by in the spectacles of the people I’m in a Zoom with. But I had a particularly demoralizing encounter after I’d soft-pitched an idea I’d been thinking about after talking to a friend who’d recently returned from six months at a remote research station at the South Pole.

He’d described it a little bit like spending a year on Mars; remote and inhospitable, packed with charming weirdos and social turmoil. There were scientists and government grunts, there were PhDs who took jobs as garbage men and toilet cleaners for the privilege of experiencing stultifying isolation and genital numbing cold. People with anxiety or other common neurological issues were discouraged from participation because it was sometimes hard to get medication, so many people lied about having neurological conditions and went anyway.

I thought it seemed like a good place to set a thirty minute sitcom, and, with my friend’s blessing, fashioned what I thought was an interesting story that was totally different from my friend’s experience and more of a “broadcast or streaming” version of that. The next time I was in a meeting with a television executive, I casually mentioned the idea, adding in for good measure a “puzzle box” element and a “workplace” element and a family/hangout/YA element.

I expected her, if not to lean in with interest, to at least nod in acknowledgment and say something like “Oh, cool” or “Fun” if she wasn’t interested.

But she didn’t. “Yeah, sorry,” she said, shaking her head to rouse herself, as if she’d just eaten a big turkey dinner. “It’s just, we’re kinda doing that idea already.”

I was surprised by this. “Even the part with the bisexual love triangle? And, the smuggled tortoise? And the French fur trapper?”

“Yeah, pretty much that exact thing,” she replied. I tried to push through my surprise, and asked her, as you’re supposed to at this point, what types of ideas she and her coworkers were looking for, then.

“Hm” she said. “The only advice I can give you, in this market, is to try to think of something really bold that nobody has ever done before.”

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If it’s true that there are only seven basic stories, there must be even fewer funny stories. So, as a comedy writer, you can never be too steamed that someone has gotten to one before you. Most modern humor is rooted in the idea that human beings experience a fairly limited number of circumstances: we go to airports, give and receive bad blowjobs, have periods, hate our wives, love our wives, cheat on our wives, get new wives, cheat on those wives, etc. Seeing that someone has beaten you to an idea is simply part of the job, much in the way being kicked in the face must be for someone in the UFC.

This is maybe why I took this executive’s response particularly personally. Because, I know. I know! I know we live in an age drained of frontiers artistic and natural. I know we founder helplessly in a void of human wonder as dumb little robots vie to rob us of our remaining vivid experiences. I KNOW. So, oh, you’ve heard an idea like this one before? YOU DON’T SAY. And I should come up with a new one instead?

I mentioned this phrasing “thing of something that nobody has ever done before” outrage to a TV writer friend, and he said, “There were actually TWO competing Antarctica rom coms in like, 2016 or 2017. And then a few before that, I think, too? Maybe four or five, total. Give or take.”

I said, probably a little too crisply, “I think you’re missing the point.” I felt sometimes that I’d long gotten past the point of coming up with ideas that I loved, that felt clever or imaginative, and had settled for ones that I thought I could sell based on their ability to keep a 67-year-old dad from shutting off the television for an extra 23 minutes after Thursday night football, instead of going into the computer room to masturbate.

“And not for nothing,” I added, “Antarctica is a large continent. This was set in the South Pole. It’s a distinct geographic location.” My friend gave me a sad look that said, “Maybe you should join an exercise class.” I realized, not for the first time, that I was experiencing “sour grapes” and or what’s also commonly known as “being a bitter old bitch.”

My husband likes to go to jiu-jitsu when he gets like this. He has a studio on Melrose that he loves that smells like feet, where he relieves tension by having big sweaty men in courduroy pajamas give him rug burn on his eyes. He’s always trying to get me to go and “find my version of that.” I’ve been waiting my whole life to find the group athletic pursuit that doesn’t make me feel like I’m in that Stephen King novel where tweens get shot to death for walking too slow, and I was afraid I was finally going to have to do it this time. I just didn’t like who I was, or where I was headed (“a bitch” and “Big Huge Bitchville,” respectively).

Thankfully, that’s when I found the lake.

How do I describe it? There isn’t a good way to do it justice — it was a sprawling, manmade reservoir in a public park about thirty minutes out of central Los Angeles, and it was perfect. For the bargain price of $5 handed to a bored teen at an entrance booth, you were rewarded with blissfully deserted parking lot and placid miniature beach. The entire thing was maybe the size of a Target parking lot, surrounded by trees and chicken-milanese-colored hills.

A few times, I caught an adorable little dump truck hauling in more sand, but otherwise, there was little noise that didn’t come from the few animals or human beings who’d come to cool off.

I was never totally alone, of course, but it was sparsely attended enough to feel unsullied by the metropolitan masses nearby. A few handfuls of couples or families came by to swim and eat containers of cubed watermelon, but the beach was roomy enough that anyone could shake our blanket of sand or speak at a gentle volume without it reaching anyone else. There was a generous section of the water roped off for swimmers, with ample room beyond for a small number of paddle boats and kayaks that glided serenely around the periphery. Sanderlings and wading birds hopped up from the bank and close enough to human visitors that I could see the beads of water on their tertial feathers, and hawks cruised above in lazy circuits.

Every day I’d bring a falsa blanket and two cans of coconut Lacroix that would get progressively warmer until it started to taste pleasantly of suntan lotion, and a rolled-up New Yorker that was mostly for show. I’d mostly just lie there and think, and when it got too hot, I’d swim laps, trying half-heartedly to keep my head above the water, because, at peace or not, my brain will always return to an article I once read in Southern Living, about brain-eating amoebas lurking in bodies of still water. You just don’t forget that kind of thing.

I went to the lake as often as I could and swam as much as I could. Maybe this, the solitude, the gelid embrace of manmade waves in the hopefully organism-low lake water, was what I needed to neutralize my hostility and disappointment with the world. To do my thinking — or not thinking — in the quiet.

And quiet it was, mostly. There were a couple of young lifeguards who sat in a rickety tower, but one liked to paddle out on a surfboard and float toward the middle of the cordoned-off swimming area, casually watching little kids bob in their floaties near the concrete shallows, or giving his whistle a languid toot if lap swimmers got too close to the stanchions. I’d look at that sunburnt kid lolling around in the big fake lake and think to myself, Now there’s an honest gig. There, I forgot about work, and rejection, and rejection at work. I only felt the hot sand in my ass crack and heard the cry of whatever bird had flown above with a mouthful of funnel cake from the nearby Six Flags.

And, like many a middle-aged overeducated idiot before me, I began to think of the lake as a place I’d personally unearthed for my private pleasure. Yes, it appeared on maps and had salaried employees, and there were already a handful of other people milling around and enjoying it on any given day, but no one I knew seemed to be aware of it. I felt the thrill of discovery, like Amundsen at the South Pole, or Shackleton at a totally distinct part of Antarctica, because again, it is a large land mass, and, with a little imagination, you could almost set two, equally good television comedies there.

One day I found myself, as usual, one of only a few visitors to the little beach, but one of them was a family of four who had a huge picnic of tupperware foods spread out near the shore. The father, or who I assumed to be the father, waded along the shoreline drinking a beer and humming the chorus part of “I Gotta Feeling” on repeat. When he walked by me, he smiled and said, “Good afternoon. How’s your day?” It’s a testament to the power of this lake that I was neither annoyed by the music or this intrusion into my 500th attempt to begin a Curtis Sittenfeld short story in the magazine before getting too sun-dumb to read.

“Pretty nice. You?” I replied.

The man was well-tanned, wore wraparound shades and had a tattoo of barbed wire that encircled his ribcage, just above a large, ombre belly. “Man, it’s my day off,” he said, with a little whistle of contentment. “I got a cold beer, and I’m at the beach. Life doesn’t get no better than this.”

Indeed, it did not. Was it a dinky manmade lake with a crappy little fake beach? Yes, it was. But it was a little slice of paradise, where no one knew if I was unemployed and slowly having a nervous breakdown or just, you know, a woman in the middle of a weekday on a dirty yoga blanket, pretending to read a magazine. And of course, it couldn’t last. The thrill of stumbling upon relatively unspoiled nature commingled with the irrepressible need for validation in a personal validation desert. One Wednesday, I posted a photo of my magazine and piping hot soda against the clear, shimmering water at the peak of a late-summer heatwave.

Where is this? and Where are you?! friends messaged, a level of interaction I normally wouldn’t get if I’d uploaded a Reel of myself in a trunk with tape over my mouth. Of course it did — I’d posted an accessible body of cold water, and it was hot. I wrestled with the urge to keep my “discovery” private, but ultimately, the spirit of generosity and illusory arousal of being first won out — I slipped the name of the park to a few friends. I know that nothing is mine, I know that the window for me to astonish the world is closing. My kids were starting school soon, and I wouldn’t be able to make it to the lake again that summer anyway.

I’m not completely delusional — I know that I had nothing to do with the two-dozen cars that appeared when I returned the next summer. The pastoral little parking lot where I’d once effortlessly founded a conifer-cooled space was packed and noisy, and that lake itself was aboil with rafts and those innertubes shaped like hamburgers and swans at popular at cloying airbnbs in insipid desert tourist towns. When I lay down my blanket to read as I had in many a peaceful afternoon past, a couple with torsos full of flash tattoos blasted a song from a portable speaker with the kind of thrumming beat and breakup-inspired lyrics that you might hear in a group exercise class in metropolitan Los Angeles. The wind blew sand from their blanket to mine, and an empty Erewhon smoothie cup rolled by in recrimination.

I know, there are very few original ideas. They are as few so peaceful and unpeopled that you can actually forget the world that exists beyond the surrounding pines — even if one of the trees is a cellphone tower poorly disguised to look like a tree. The world seems full of people eager to reject you and all too happy to take your little spot on the beach under the pine-tree-cell-phone-tower so they can play TikToks of Chris Fleming bits at top volume while shouting to their friend about how they “frankly disagree that there are too many podcasts.” There is no place to hide from other people, or yourself.

I will find somewhere else; I will come up with new ideas. But, surely, in this I’m not alone — surely everyone has experienced this vainglorious, humbling little loss of finding out you aren’t first and won’t be last. Surely everyone has their own version of having a sleepy woman tell them their idea is old and they are stupid for having it. Perhaps the unfeeling, heedless world has also stolen something of yours, taken a joke, an idea for a new kind of mop, a signature outfit, the plot of a novel, a movie, a melody, a karaoke song, or even a lake, from you.

I do this in a somewhat overly-stern voice that makes me sound like Sally Field in the opening scenes of Mrs. Doubtfire. You know, when the screenwriters are trying to justify her desire to divorce her fun-loving husband and wrench him from his loving kids. I do this because my children are still pretty young, and I need plenty of time to assemble outfits to their insane specifications.

My husband will point out that I also need plenty of time to blow on my own getup, which is usually some very 2010-Internet-humor, pandering idiot joke costume made solely to impress my 600-ish Instagram followers and get a couple of likes. And you know what? He’s right. Life is short, pleasures are few. I’ll dine out for a long time on the chuckles I got from the two people passing out candy who had the cultural literacy to recognize me as “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup.”

Thankfully, my younger son and daughter had finally landed on their couple’s costume: Dorothy and Toto. I was delighted by this timeless and relatively low-lift choice, and still don’t know why I took this happy opportunity to point out that Toto — or rather, the dog who played him — is buried not far from our home.

I guess I’d assumed that a five- and seven-year old would just put it together that a dog who was in a movie in 1939 might not have survived to watch Task. But my daughter instantly started bawling — big, racking, full-body wails. I tried to reassure them that Toto had lived a good, long life … unless, like many actors of his time, he’d been a cigarette smoker. After a few hours, she calmed down a little, enough to ask with swollen eyes, “But Dorothy is still alive, right?”

Not long after, my dad came to visit from Ohio, where I’m from. My dad is 71, but he still works. He was a public school teacher, then a real estate agent, then briefly, a blackjack dealer, when the Caesar’s Entertainment company opened up a casino in Cleveland. During his visits to his grandchildren in California, he still spends a good deal of the time on his phone, talking jittery buyers through the escrow process. He rarely sits down, still uses the old Bowflex in his basement, and prefers the kind of lunches a sexually-active career gal in the 1980s might have eaten (iceberg, carrot shreds, fat-free French dressing). In short, he is in good shape.

During this visit, my dad kept wanting to show me some scraped portions on his arms and legs from a fall he’d taken a few days ago, while he’d gone hiking with my sister and her girls. I didn’t really take a good look at it or try to assess how hurt he was. We’re kind of weird and Midwestern and we don’t believe that adults should cry unless an Amazon truck falls on them. But my dad really seemed to want to talk about his spill and the resulting bruises and abrasions, especially which parts were still oozing and inflamed. Once during his stay, when we were all watching football and eating donuts, he kept asking me to check and see if I thought his ankles were different sizes.

It’s possible that he was just casting around for something to talk to me about; he tries to ignore politics, and he and my stepmother haven’t seen a movie in theaters since there were ashtrays built into the chair arms, so it’s not like we could have a rousing argument about art or politics. It’s also possible that he was trying to impress on me, in his way, the seriousness of his fall. To let me know that he was now a person who fell. And maybe I was overly dismissive. After all, this was a guy who was taking my son to the batting cages, partially so he could hit around a little himself. He is, again, as fit as you’d want to be at his age. He’d been a college athlete and could still catch a running pass.

On the car ride home from the batting cages with my dad and husband and kids, they started talking about Halloween, which is when the subject of Toto came up again. I have no idea why, but I suddenly thought that it might be a good idea for all of us to “go to see Toto,” right then and there.

Hollywood Forever, the cemetery where his little doggy grave stands, is famous for its many celebrities. It’s sandwiched in a central part of LA between the Paramount Lot, where I worked for many years, and a bunch of muffler shops. I’ve been enough that I remembered that Toto is right next to Mickey Rooney, who is now, sadly and utterly unbelievably, neighbor to Anne Heche. Civilian Los Angeles citizens are still buried here, too, alongside ledgers that date back to the 19th century. The headstones range from humble and worn to huge and opulent, like the life-sized effigy that marks the grave of Anton Yelchin, which never fails to hurt my heart.

Oddly enough, everybody in my family was game for a trip to the cemetery. It was a beautiful fall day, the place was just beginning to decorate for its annual Dia de Muertos celebration. At Toto’s marker, my daughter noticed several stones resting on the top. I explained the Jewish tradition of placing them on headstones, as a symbol that the decedent has not been forgotten.

She wanted to find a stone to add, so we walked around, remarking as you do when you’re in a graveyard “for fun” on remarkable statuary or hilarious last names (God bless you and thank you, the apparently very many people called Buttz — may your family line go on forever). Tame peacocks stroll the grounds of Hollywood Forever; we saw a beautiful hen that looked like a massive, sexy white turkey.

My daughter found a handsome stone and returned to Toto’s grave to put in next to his little statue, which is when she burst into tears all over again. She asked me if it was true that she would never get to meet Toto, “not ever.” I said I honestly didn’t know, and she cried all the way back to the car and all the way home, and even into dinner.

I love that particular cemetery, without whimsical goth-adult preciousness or ironic remove. In what other final resting place for Armenian men with motorcycle-shaped graves can you see people filming TikToks in slutty Jack Skellington costumes, as we did that day? Where else would it not be “a little gauche?” At Hollywood Forever, slutty Jack Skellingtons are not just tolerated, they are welcome. On summer nights, you can buy a ticket to see a classic movie projected onto the side of a crypt while you have a picnic. Say what you will about my town, but here, you can watch Jaws while sitting on David Lynch, whose plot is festooned with cigarettes and takeout coffees and photographs of Naomi Watts. During one long walk around the grounds, I went into the titanic mausoleum and encountered an elderly woman sitting alone next to an open niche with a portable television — she told me she and her husband were watching “Montel Williams” together.

I think of it as a place everybody might enjoy, although I once asked my 80-year-old mother-in-law if she might like to see it when she was in town. “Why the hell would I want to do that?” she replied, as if I’d asked, “Say, Pat. Apropos of nothing, what color do you think is prettiest for an urn, and how much do you weigh?”

But my father enjoyed it. In addition to his many other trades, he once actually dug graves with an excavator as a summer job. I hadn’t remembered that about him until til I asked him if it was morbid to be there. I was thinking of my mother-in-law, and of his fall, and okay, of that Joyce Carroll Oates tweet about skeletons.

I think about being dead when I’m at Hollywood Forever, but in an ambient, peaceful way. I think the chic thing to do, death-wise, is to move away from things like funeral home viewings and open caskets, but this place makes you want a good old-fashioned grave-y grave. It would be nice for my kids to have a picnic on me, or for Japanese influencers to stomp over my bones on their way to do rap squats on the tomb of Bugsy Siegel. A cemetery where real people gather to visit and mourn their dead but where Angeleno dads can go to see My Morning Jacket and drink canned wine? To me, that’s as good as getting a pet fish for reckoning with the idea that all things must go.

I suspect there will be more tears for Toto on Halloween. And I’ll be prepared, because I’ll be dressed as Liza Minnelli. Specifically, the time she went on QVC to sell bracelets and everybody thought she was kind of drunk. I’ll pose for with my daughter, who will be dressed as Liza’s mom, Judy… who is, incidentally, buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery. Then I’ll put the picture on Instagram. Please don’t forget to “like” it.

Larry— the head of a day camp where I was dropping off my other, older boy for the day— looked like one of those guys you’d see on the local news in the 1980s, saying something like, “Yeah, I seen my neighbor digging a lotta lady-sized holes in his back yard, but I never thought nothin’ about it.”

But my five-year-old was not at all put off by Larry’s leathery suntan or tobacco-y smell. “This is Jesus!” he beamed, holding up a battered crucifix. “Do you want to know more about him?”

“Wow,” said Larry.

My eight-year-old put his face in his hands, knowing where this was going.

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Earlier this summer, there was a flurry of essays about what you ought to do with your children during the school break, should you inconveniently have both kids and the need to work. These essays — like most about parenting — were varying degrees of hostile, and featured totally irreconcilable theses:

- Everyone sends their kids to camp, now. It is very expensive, but you will have to pay for it, like it or not.

- Do not send your kids to camp! It is too expensive. Find something for them to do in your home while unsupervised that isn’t an iPad or television. (We don’t know what, though.)

- Let your kids have as much TV and iPad time as you need to, and don’t feel guilty about it. That’s probably what they’d be doing at one of those expensive “camps,” anyway!

- The only “screen” your kids should experience this summer is the screen door hitting them on the ass as you shove them outside, yelling, “Read a book, fuckfaces!”

- Quit your job and devote yourself full-time to teaching your children to bead.

- Maybe if you ignore your children, they will go away?

As a household with three kids and two working parents with unpredictable incomes, we selected some combination of the above. Our daughter (age six) would intermittently go to a “dance camp” that charged us more than our monthly auto payment for showing her “Moana 2” on a loop during the nearly-useless hours of 9:45 and 1:25 PM (this somehow also required us to buy a very specific and costly new leotard). Our older son (age eight) would go to a “reasonably-priced” day camp recommended by a colleague, who’d described it as “a real throwback to the ‘80s.” (I initially thought that he’d meant that because he’d be outside all day, but quickly realized he’d also meant it in the “The counselors area all on a work-release program” and the “Say, is this place insured?” kind of way.)

This left zero dollars for our youngest child, which meant he’d be staying home with my husband and me. We’re lucky in that he’s an unusually self-contained little boy: he likes crafts, drawing, and setting up elaborate “battles” between his seventeen Marvel figures, who are all missing various appendages.

But, there’s only so long he can do this, and so, YouTube Kids came into the picture.

Judge me all you’d like. But, at the time, I had a job that necessitated being on Zoom for eight-plus hours a day, and my husband was always writing or talking loudly on the phone or locked away in a home-recording studio. There’s only so much creative play a rising kindergartener can do before he starts to harass you. I needed blocks of 20 minutes or more where no one wandered over asking for apple juice or a purple marker or for me to relitigate my work-life balance so I could read him a book or, God forbid, take him outside.

No — it was YouTube, or let him play with the stove. I’d already put on as many parental controls as possible on the app. My kids know they’re not supposed to watch any “unboxings” or “hauls,” game play sludge, or anything featuring live human kids or creepy adults. (That is, not unless they want to hear one of my trying, deeply hypocritical anti-consumerist rants.) I’d attempted to individually block disagreeable content and creators (see you in hell, Ryan’s World), but I couldn’t keep up with the sludge-hose of it. So I tried setting the “age limit” as low as it could go and the other restrictions as high they could, as a stopgap. This left… Jesus.

Or, more specifically, Christian cartoons. I didn’t realize this until our son started asking us a series of suspiciously Bible-themed questions. These began with confusing inquiries about someone named Abraham, progressed to catchy tunes about Noah, and culminated in What is a Leper? Had we heard the Good News? and, Will we be prepared when Jesus returns?

At first, we’d sort of benevolently ignored the Bible talk, because if you have kids, you know that one day it’s Jesus but the next day it’s probably going to be Garfield or Sonic or Elsa. My husband and I can mark time by whatever primary-colored Dreamworks IP has currently brainwashed our kids, so some conglomerate can somehow sell me more Capri Sun.

Then, by strange coincidence, our Jesus-loving son found a crucifix in the yard of our rental home. He started carrying it around like a security blanket and presenting it to other people for inspection. In 2025, in L.A., a little kid holding up a cross and demanding, “This is Jesus. Do you know him? Because he loves you!” raises more than an eyebrow or two.

My husband and I weren’t sure what we ought to do here, if anything. We’d sort of gently talked to our kids about religion on the odd occasion it came up, but we hadn’t offered them any particular spiritual guidance. (Unless you count saying yard-sign stuff like “we believe in being kind to others and sharing what we have,” or when I tell them that “Daddy is cranky because he hasn’t meditated today” in order to let my husband know he’s being a pill.)

We eventually just asked our son what he liked so much about Jesus, and unfortunately, this person who routinely walks around with Frosted Flakes in his Spiderman brief underwear was able to give us a well-reasoned and persuasive answer. He liked that Jesus was kind, that he shared everything he had, that he helped sick people and even hugged them when other people were afraid to. That he loved everybody, and that when someone was mean to Jesus, he would just be even nicer.

And yes, I know. I know everything that could possibly “go kinda bad” by letting my kid play fast and loose with digital babysitters and the devotional ministrations of FaithKidzTV or what have you. I know what that show “Adolescence” was trying to tell parents about letting our kids cavort on the demon Internet while we vape and browse Feeld and write Letterboxd reviews.

I grant you: Jesus is not equivalent to say, Shrek. There is not a segment of Lightning McQueen fans whose ardor for “Cars 2” inspires them to menace gay people. Adherents to Gaby’s Dollhouse have never sheltered pedophiles or imprisoned Irish teenagers while selling off their babies (that we know of).

My son may have liked the story about a guy who you could just slap and slap forever who would just keep letting you slap him, but… But I don’t know how I could sensibly not consider the upsides of what he did like about Jesus. If you have a young kid you can imagine how refreshing it is to hear him talk about how we ought to give away our last piece of bread to the hungry, instead of asking you to buy the plastic Hulk with Harrison Ford’s face so he can smash him into the Hulk with Mark Ruffalo’s face.

A lot of people who grew up in some form of Christianity, only to subsequently leave it, often like to talk about “the historical Jesus” or missing “the good parts” of the church. My husband and I were both raised Catholic and have gone through phases of belief and agnosticism and atheism, but now comfortably espouse something between capital-G God and a benevolent, loving universe that wants us to give money to NPR. I don’t know many people my age who can recall having a reasonable talk about God with their parents growing up. I’m sure many can, probably people who grew up in Oregon or in one of those ideal situations like having two lesbian moms with MFAs. So we may be coming at this from a disadvantage. But, whatever aversions we have to organized religion, the values he and I are trying to instill in our kids do have a surprising amount of overlap with the ones you see in those ads for Jesus they run during professional football games. Nobody in our circle of friends, despite their relative diversity of faith, had any good advice to offer us about our son and his newfound interest in God other than, “Hm. Maybe you should send him to one of those day camps.”

Did we take away the dirt-covered artifact our son had miraculously unearthed from a flowerbed, or at the very least, stop exposing him to animated religious agitprop? No, he was having a good time, and we had meetings.

And when he smiled up at Larry, brandishing his Jesus, Larry smiled back. “Well, I’m Jewish,” Larry said, “but I used to have hair like Jesus. ” Then he trotted off, probably to get my older son a Zyn and a Monster Energy or whatever they served the eight-year-olds for breakfast. (This is what you get from a day camp in LA for anything under $1500 a week.)

There are inscrutabilities about God and religion that my five-year-old is not ready to dig into, and ones I guess I am not. But now, he is five. I tell myself we have time. (Which, parenting-wise, is the ultimate in “comforting lies you tell yourself so you don’t succumb to existential despair.”) Right now, all of our kids are back in school, and my littlest is talking less about Christ now that we’ve mothballed his devices. It’s hard to say if Jesus will ever come back to our house. We’ll see — the Muppets are kind of all the rage with him right now, and I’ll take the break. As a spiritual foundation, you could do worse.

I realize I’m letting myself off the hook again, here. But there are just fewer hard conversations about Rowlf.

“So. What kind of breasts do you want?" asked my doctor, a cosmetic surgeon in his fifties with a son who wanted to get into comedy.

I had an answer prepared, and I was ready to haggle. (And then probably capitulate, because I am a pushover.) I'd pestered enough women who'd already had breast reductions to know that you rarely got what size you really wanted, in the end. Plenty of friends and acquaintances with enormous breasts had drifted off into anesthesia on the day of their procedure, dreaming of their new lives with vigorous little cupcakes, and had instead woken with only slightly less enormous breasts.

Sometimes they knew how much would be removed ahead of time, and sometimes their surgeons had made a game-time decision that anything under a DD cup “didn’t look proportional." Sometimes insurance wouldn't cover dreadful-sounding upgrades like "nipple correction.” But I’d almost never heard of women getting as much reduced as they’d like. A friend who was disappointed with her reduction told me that male surgeons who grew up during the era of the “Porky’s” films simply can't wrap their heads around anyone actually choosing small breasts.

After many, many years of deliberation, I’d decided to have my own huge breasts made medically less huge. I’d scheduled this consultation months before I gave birth to my third child, and I was, at long last, there in the office of the plastic surgeon. In my experience, the most unflattering lighting-and-mirror situations tend to be at hair salons where the stylists are all hot, and in hotel rooms where you’re having sex with someone new. But this guy’s intake room blew every one of those out of the water. I’ve never seen my breasts look so lopsided and defeated, like they ought to be leaning on a single crutch wrapped in old rags. I didn’t want to go for half measures, here. I didn’t want to do this again.

"What are the constraints?" I asked.

"Let's start with your wildest dreams,” replied my doctor. "And then maybe we'll meet somewhere in the middle."

"I want the breasts of 21-year-old French girl," I said. He poked the side of my naked breast with a gloved finger. It sank in up to the knuckle.

"I can do that," he said.

Here is what I wish someone had told me before he did.

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I use the past tense here because, although I am still married, my husband no longer lets me do this. In fact, I am pretty much banned from talking to him about movies. He instituted this rule after declaring that not only did I have too many opinions about movies, I had too many opinions about movies I had not seen. (Guilty!)

There was a time in my life when my thoughts “on culture,” if not good or interesting, were at least informed. I was frequently free on weekdays (because of the nature of my job) and frequently single (because of the nature of my personality), and so I’d often go to the theater by myself to see things I was only nominally interested in. I was all alone at an early-morning screening of “Blue is the Warmest Color” when a guy came in 30 minutes late, sat in the same row as me, ate an ENORMOUS sausage sandwich, and left. I watched a couple in their fifties dry-hump through most of “Austenland.” At a late-night showing of “Oculus,” I saw another woman open up and subsequently spill a Tupperware container full of soup. The movies were often very good, too.

Then I became a parent and something sad would happen on “Thomas the Tank Engine,” and my husband would ask, “Why are you crying?” And I’d say, “Percy got water in his smoke stack.” And he’d say, “And you’re crying?” And I’d say, “Not because of that!!!!” But it was. Perhaps the part of my brain that enjoyed the sensation of peril without consequences that comes from movies — especially ones with suspense, fear, dread, etc — has receded post-children (real peril, real fear, real dread). Now, no matter how pretend the jeopardy, something deep within me automatically says, “What if that was your kid getting zapped off a TRON cyber-bike by Jared Leto?”

That said? I’m not ready to give up the “movie lover” part of my personality. First of all it’s like, one of the safest personalities to have. Secondly, I do want to be “part of the cultural conversation,” because, as the Victorians said, being “left out” is the cousin of death. So now when my normal friends are like, “Can we talk about ‘Weapons’?!” I’ll be like, “Yes!” And I’ll run quickly off to read the Wikipedia page. This is how I now consume scary and scary-adjacent movies. I read the “Plot” section, and then I go to the Rotten Tomatoes page (to form my opinion about the movie I haven’t seen), and if I really want to know more, I’ll go ask my doctor (Reddit) to explain the ending.

I concede that if I had written a movie, I would be aghast at someone experiencing it this way (if it can even be called that). It’s like eating the plate and telling people you had the sandwich. But, here’s the thing: I actually do go to the movie theater all the time, probably more than most people. Almost every weekend a month, sometimes twice a weekend. If more people went “to the cinema,” as often as I do, the business would boom, the form would thrive, David Zazlav would be able to buy so many vests.

Unfortunately, the movies I see with this robust frequency are children’s films. So, they’re not anything I can really talk about in a way that impresses cool adults. Until now. So I’d like to do a diaristic, semi-rated rundown of some works that the average cinephile might not have seen in the past year or two…because they are for four- to nine-year-olds.

Thank you, and sorry.

Migration

Okay, this one isn’t so bad. It was written by Mike White, which is cool, even though like all animated movies, this probably got 300 rewrites by the team of 37-year-old soulless balding guys named Sean who haven’t read a book in seven years. And while it’s not “The Grave of the Fireflies,” there’s much less farting in it than in the usual Illumination film. Unfortunately, Mike White’s vegetarian agenda is in heavy evidence, and you will have to explain Peking duck to your kids. Finally, a thing you will quickly realize about kids' movies is that Awkwafina is in almost all of them. Often as an animal, very often as a bird. She’s in this. As a bird. When you get right down to it, this movie is 89 minutes long, which is a real upside for me. So, three stars. Congrats, “Migration.”

Kung Fu Panda 4

I like the Kung Fu Panda, as a rule. I saw the third movie in the franchise first and was pleasantly surprised to find out he has gay dads who are a goose and a bear. When I watched the rest of the films, I was disappointed to find out that the goose and bear are just friends who seem to share custody of the Kung Fu Panda. Which is less fun, dramaturgically, definitely less interesting, sexually. As pieces of entertainment, the Kung Fu Panda films just sort of pass through you, like a piece of accidentally swallowed gum. Akwafina is in this, as some sort of fox. Run time is 98 minutes, which is pushing it. Four and a half stars (half a star detracted for non-gay dads).

IF

This is a movie about a twelve-year-old girl who has a bunch of imaginary friends. First of all? That’s too old. Second of all, there is no second of all. What’s going on here, guys? Even the most sheltered modern 12-year-olds I know are not dancing around with a big purple Steve Carell, unless they’ve put extra Kratom in their vape. Awkfina is in this, as well.

Inside Out 2

A rare non-appearance from Awkwafina. In fact, Disney didn’t even pony up for some of the original actors from the first “Inside Out.” Yet, I think this ended up being like the highest-grossing movie of the year, which is crazy, because I cannot tell you what it is about. I think a bisexual hockey teenager? However, the run time: 96 minutes, so I’m forced to award it three glittering stars.

The Garfield Movie

This almost totally dispenses with the long lore of the Monday-hating, rude ‘tude cat we know, and turns into a weird meditation about whether or not you can forgive a father who wasn’t around for your childhood. Why? Were children clamoring for a more emotionally complex tale than Jon hitting on the sexy vet while she body shames Garfield? Also there are two cows in this who are really horny and can’t stop fucking? Not a joke! Awkafina is in not in this. However, Snoop Dogg is.

Harold and the Purple Crayon

Here’s a pun this movie would like: I “drew the line” at seeing this one.

A Minecraft Movie

Jack Black used to sing songs about double-teaming women with his friend, and I once saw a movie where he disabled a security alarm with his penis. Sometimes just seeing Jack Black can bring me back to 2006ish and that dusty corner of the mind’s palace. Unfortunately, this movie is an hour and forty-one minutes long, so I’m forced to subtract goodwill points. Two stars, and that’s being generous.

Elio

I need to preface this by saying I once took a bus to Washington DC to march on the Capitol Mall in protest of DOMA. My kids go to a school where they call their teachers by their first names and don’t have gym. I’m not what you’d call “right-leaning.” That said, if such a thing as “virtue signaling” exists, “Elio” is like a weak toot on a virtue kazoo. It’s like they were in the middle of making the movie when CNN called Arizona for Trump and someone ran and yelled “HARD PIVOT!!!!!” but didn’t tell them to what. I also don’t know why every Pixar character now looks like they just had their wisdom teeth out. Even Carl from “Up” had a jawline.

Lilo & Stitch

You know when you go to the optometrist and they blow air into your eyeball? I would rather do that for an hour and forty-eight minutes than ever deal with Stitch and his bullshit again. Zero stars.

Paddington in Peru

Dudes in their thirties with no kids love to tell you how good the “Paddington” movies are. And you know what? They’re not wrong. This third entry felt a little vestigial, but the cast is great and none of the characters is constantly screaming. One time, I briefly dated a British person, and I casually mentioned that Ben Whishaw was hot, and he was like, “Well, he’s gay.” And I was like, “What does that have to do with anything!?” I didn’t actually say that, though, because I didn’t yet feel comfortable enough expressing my feelings in romantic relationships. Three stars.

Dog Man

Before they achieved a kind of terrible parity, non-Disney animated films really tried to win over parents by offering themselves as a less saccharine antidote. Usually, this meant blasting a novelty pop song to advance the plot, usually in lieu of interesting action or intelligent dialogue. If there is any piece of music that — thematically and culturally — approaches “The Thong Song,” you can bet it’s going right into the next “Secret Life of Pets” film. If you’re thinking, “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” imagine having a colonoscopy in which your doctor suddenly starts blasting Megan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” before whispering, “This is for YOU. This is what grownups like.” Anyhow, Dog Man has Pete Davidson in it, but blessedly restricts itself to a lone Miley Cyrus song from a couple years ago. Two point two stars.

Despicable Me 4

Like any sensible adult, I fantasize about Bob, Kevin, Stuart, and friends coming to life so I can punt them individually into the ocean. I am a pacifist, against war and violence in all its forms. I don’t even believe in hunting if you’re going to eat what you kill or whatever. But I would absolutely slaughter a Minion given half a chance. Bare hands. Looking into its eyes. That said, this movie is a mere 81 minutes, making it the best children’s film of the year. Maybe in YEARS. Five stars.

The Bad Guys 2

The Bad Guys movies are pretty pleasant! The scripts move at a clip, the animation is innovative, the colors are in a kind of soft, autumnal palette. While there is some fart humor, it’s usually at Marc Maron’s expense. If you have to see a kids’ movie, you could do worse than a “The Bad Guys.” I do have sort of a crush on the cartoon wolf in this that I’m not ready to talk about, as I am between therapists. Awkwafina is in this.

-THE END-

A quick programming note: I am turning paid subscriptions on. Thank you.

My husband did not want to take his hat off because we’d been in a rush that morning, and his hair was matted from sleep. I did not want to take mine off because it was sort of covering up the case of pinkeye I have in both eyes (courtesy of my other son, who started his new school two weeks ago). So, we went in.

This was one of just a few of small indignities we’ve experienced while having school-aged children. Here are a few more:

- After a near unbroken streak of non-participation, my husband volunteered to help with the Fall Carnival out of guilt and almost immediately smashed his body into a charity “wishing well,” which was full of water, and subsequently flooded the rest of the carnival area. Later, when one of the moms bought breakfast sandwiches for the volunteers, one was not allocated for him.

- My youngest son somehow lost one shoe and sock on the way to preschool, and his parents did not have time to go back home to retrieve a spare pair before they both had to be at work. That week, a terse email went out from the school that “children need to be fully dressed, including shoes.” This happened again to that same child at our other son’s Winter Festival, which took place in rare-for-Los-Angeles, 40-degree weather. Our older children did not want to go home, so we put a mitten on his tiny foot, which did not work very well, and he fell over, several times.

- A strange note went home to parents in our daughter’s first-grade class asking us to make sure our children had eaten breakfast and were being given enough food to take with them each day, because some of them had resorted to stealing food from their classmates, and other parents were complaining about it. I joked at pickup that the culprit couldn’t be my daughter, since we pack her two enormous, adult-size lunches every day, and her teacher looked me square in the eyes and said, “It is your daughter. Please feed her more.”

The one thing I hate about sending them off to school each year is knowing that I cannot save them from things like this, the random abject embarrassment that comes from interacting with others outside of the home. No one will escape twelve-plus years of schooling without a grand repast of humiliations to be remembered forever and replayed every night before sleep or at random in the middle of the Dallas airport. (You cannot escape indignity by being home-schooled either -- the moment you leave the house, people will laugh at you for something, like saying your grandma is your best friend, or not knowing what “gyatt” means).

I once told a therapist that while I get intellectually that no one is sitting around thinking about the stupid things I said or did once, I struggled miserably with the idea in practice. People have “their own things going on?” Not everyone is “going to like me?”Sorry, I reject that. I know people generally can’t be everyone’s cup of tea but I know that, I, specifically, really cannot be everyone’s cup of tea, because I am annoying and an idiot. However, I will never not want to be a universally likeable kind of tea, a tea so hot that everybody wants to fuck it. Sadly, my therapist was not on board, and moreover, did not buy the idea that I am more annoying or have humiliated myself significantly more than other people have. “Have you heard of a website called XO Jane?” I asked.

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She ignored this and told me to “Name four people who everybody thinks are cool,” she said, which was supposed to be one of those therapist “gotchas,” but, I instead, I immediately named four people. Actually, more than four. I really do think there are lots of people everybody likes and thinks are cool. I bet you can name a few now. But she got visibly exasperated and said, “Don’t you think that there’s a kind of narcissism in needing to be liked by everybody?” It is one thing not to be liked by the cool parents at school; it is another entirely to realize your own therapist is probably going to tell her husband about how annoying you were today.

As of this writing, my youngest is officially a kindergartener, and my kids are now officially all “in school.” This is scary to me for many reasons, and one of the many gifts I’m trying to send them off with is that of not caring too much. I say “too much” because it would be disingenuous to say I don’t care at all. As you will hear of many women in their 40s who write essays, I definitely care much less than I used to. I once went on a weekend trip with a guy I’d just started seeing, and exclusively used the lobby bathroom instead of the shared toilet in our hotel room, and was so nervous about my snoring that I stayed up all night, every night, until one day at breakfast in a nice restaurant, I was so tired I farted. I was heartbroken when he dumped me a few weeks later, which I’m sure in his mind was “just enough time so she doesn’t think it was the breakfast fart.”

But one of the things about being older is that your emotional life naturally reorganizes around other things, like, say, terror of death. You can focus less on whether or not you go to enough dinner parties or have been wearing the wrong jeans for someone in your age bracket, and more on the fact that you’re now closer to 70 than 14. If you really think about that fact over and over, say, until your heart rate actually increases, and the moment you tripped and fell at the farmer’s market and your whole left breast came out of your romper will really recede into the distance.

I do not believe in parenting advice of any stripe. I equate “thinking you’re doing a good job as a parent to the degree that you feel you can help to others” with “thinking you’d be good enough at being in charge of the country to the degree that you’d run for President.” (Both of these types of people belong in that prison where they put the Joker.)

But, I do wish I’d somehow “skipped the line” with the caring less thing, because I did dedicate a lot of my twenties and thirties to this more useless form of fretting and ruminating. So much energy went into people thinking I was medium-sexy or had an impressive job, or just that I wasn’t totally unsexy or had an unimpressive job. Ultimately, trying to control the narrative about my own coolness is like trying to throw a football: I cannot do it.

As a parent, I notice that I go out of my way to point out to my kids when I’m failing or not living up to some basic human standard. For me this means doing things like screaming “I KNOW!” when they point out that I’ve run a red light, being noticeably bad with money, trying out a never-ending variety of haircuts and colors despite a very limited range of “what works” for my skin tone and octagonal face shape, keeping the house in a state of cleanliness that invokes one of those trash planets from the “Star Wars” franchise, etc.

I have no idea if this is helpful to my children or not, yet. For now, I’m sure it just makes them embarrassed by me as I was of myself when I was their age. But if I can take some of the pressure off them to be faultless and likeable, now or in the future, then I’m happy to lead, example by mortifying example. Sometimes I’ll be at the dentist with my adorable six-year-old and she’ll say something like “Why don’t you ever get your teeth cleaned, Mommy?” right in front of the hygienist, which is among the ten most judgmental professions. And, of course, I’ll be tempted to lie or remind her that I had my teeth cleaned three short years ago. But I’ll try to opt for the truth, for both of us and tell her the truth: that Mommy is afraid of the dentist, and maybe owes him a $35 copay and is too ashamed to call his office and settle up because the receptionist is a really handsome Italian gay guy who could model but for some reason is a dental office receptionist instead, probably so he can be frosty to the people who go a long time between cleanings and forget their copays.

So, to my children, I say this: embarrassment is inevitable. It may feel bad when you fall down in gym during an inexplicable unit on frisbee golf and that the fall makes your shirt go over your head, or when you mispronounce “epitome” in ninth grade and everybody laughs at you even though they only know how to pronounce it beccause of a popular Weezer song, and you just changed schools and you don’t know who Weezer is because the cool girls at your old school listened to Vanessa Williams like a bunch of 50-year-old office managers. It may take you a long time to make friends in your new class. I am not saying it won’t. But maybe you’ll think about it less when you come home to your filthy house, and to your messy mom with her beige teeth while she’s on the phone with Living Spaces because she burned a hole in it trying to put wart remover on your dad’s foot. Also, they’re both wearing the same hat. We are sorry about that, kids. We love you. Welcome back to school.

If you’re already wondering, “What kind of asshole uses the horn in non-life threatening situations?” I’m not here to convert you. I know it’s noise pollution, and childish, and rude, and yet I continue to get disproportionately angry with strangers who are texting when they should be realizing that the light is green. And so I take my very dumb revenge, via honk. When I’m overwrought, I don’t scream at my kids or pick fights with my husband — that all gets saved for the car, when I’m by myself, with no one else to hear me but God and my upholstery. On a given day, I range from "grouchy dad in a movie set in the 1950s" to "PMDD Jerry Seinfeld." You know -- "When did they start putting these dumb adhesive bands on bananas? They come naturally bunched!" et cetera. And for whatever reason, I'm at my worst in the car.

When I shared this with a therapist I was seeing at the time, she offered a number of “helpful suggestions.” (I’d recently made the switch from a tough-love therapist to the kind who just sides with you on everything for an extra $150.) Her suggestions were based on actual anger management guidance for people even more irritable than I am, people who have been brought up on charges for real-deal rage incidents. One strategy is — seriously — saying the words “beep beep" instead of using your horn. Another is trying to express your feelings without involving or engaging the other person (i.e. yelling “I am upset that you didn’t use your turn signal, because I am late for work!” to yourself, instead of at someone who might get out of their car and slap you). I appreciate these non-violent solutions, and yet I also must urge you to picture the angriest person you know, like, I don’t know, my cousin who got reprimanded at his UPS delivery job for listening to Korn too loudly, or NFL offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey. Whoever that is for you, imagine them, please, gently shouting “Beep beep” to him or herself after almost being t-boned by a 20-something who zoned out while trying to open a third Celsius in a Dodge Challenger.

Not long after I got that therapist’s advice and totally failed to apply it, something exciting happened.

I was en route to school with my kids, late as usual, stuck on a narrow stretch of Franklin Avenue, when a private waste management truck parked at a forty-five-degree angle in the center of the road. Two gentlemen in coveralls leisurely exited the truck and began negotiating an enormous dumpster from the parking lot of a nearby shopping center, so that they might empty it into their trash truck. When I say “leisurely,” I mean that they were so jolly and unhurried that they seemed like they were in some kind of ambulatory book club, maybe one that was just dying to talk about “All Fours” with a couple of canned rosés, rather than two idiots blithely blocking both lanes of rush-hour traffic.

With each passing moment, I could actually see the people in the cars around me going from the usual city-dweller “Can you believe this?” to throwing up their hands in despair and shaking them, like actors in a local production of "Les Miserables.”

Two full cycles of the stoplight passed without traffic moving in either direction, as our unbothered heroes wheeled the dumpster in a zig-zag pattern around the shopping center parking lot, still chatting amiably about, I don’t know, the latest season of the “The Morning Show,” or whatever. And here's where things got good: the door to a dingy little white hatchback a few cars ahead of me opened up, and out popped a muscly short guy.

And he was mad.

You may not have seen this particular guy before, but you’ve seen a “this guy” before. You know: the type who looks like he’s sculpted out of ground turkey, or has a bad photorealistic tattoo of a toddler on his forearm. The type of who gets into it with the hostess at Outback Steakhouse because he saw an elderly couple who came in after him get seated before him. The type of guy who wears tank tops in winter, because he’s built like a shaved Lorax on HGH.

This “this guy” yelled something at the two waste disposal gentlemen, and when they ignored or didn’t hear him, he spun around with great purpose... and headed for his trunk.

My kids leaned forward in their car seats (they're five, six, and seven — ages pediatricians frequently cite as a child's most blood-lustful). I could see other stuck drivers doing the same, although with a little more concern for the actual violence that might be about to unfold in front of us. I could tell we were all picturing being on that evening’s edition of KTLA news, wearing a bewildered expression, as we told a Juvedermed anchor named Kirk about how we’d just seen a human head explode on impact with a tire jack, before Kirk threw back to the studio for a story about how the Shamrock Shake is back at McDonald’s.

There was a collective clench as The Guy’s beefy little torso disappeared into his tiny little car, where he rooted around angrily for something. We looked from him back to the two oblivious dumpster wranglers, who seemed to be moving with even less urgency than before, pushing the big container onto the truck's hydraulic lift in the placid, half-attentive way you push might a toddler in a baby swing. All despite the fact that they were maybe about to be publicly super- murdered.

A tense moment later, the muscly guy emerged, holding an absolutely enormous bullhorn.

Well, now we could all relax. Now, the real fun started.

"ATTENTION JERKOFFS! MOVE YOUR FUCKIN TRUCK! I'M TALKING TO YOU, PIN DICKS! I’M TALKING TO YOU, FUCKNUTS! MOVE YOUR DUMB ASS BEFORE I PUT MY FOOT UP YOUR ASS HOLES!”

I don't know whether he was an off-duty fireman, or a parade organizer, or a hostage negotiator or what. Maybe he had the bullhorn just to yell at people in traffic! It didn't matter. He said “ass holes,” like it was two separate words, and he said it loud. This went on for some time — in a true feat of poetry, or improvisation, he never repeated the same florid insult twice.

Of course, everybody started applauding and hooting. And honking! But honking in that fun, jovial way that happens when your team wins the World Series. The garbage twins seemed to notice us all for the first time, and more importantly, they began to hustle. That small angry hotdog of man had performed an every day, big city miracle: the two garbage men moved their garbage truck, the cars advanced, and my children made it to school armed with a couple (several) brand new words.

As for me... Well, hero or not, I wasn’t cheering as loud as everybody else (definitely not as loud as my five-year-old, who was still holding out hope that somebody might get a good whack with the bullhorn). I was busy worrying, fretting, being afraid, of the anger. In the bullhorn guy, in everybody in the other cars, but also in me. I want to be the kind of citizen and mother who keeps a cool head, who can stay grounded and helpful through the inconvenient and the scary and the infuriating. I wish I was a person and parent with great reserves of fortitude and patience in a way that stabilizes and comforts other people in times when we’re all frightened and inconvenienced and furious. We need those people, the peaceful ones who wait for things to pass and know that they will. I wish I was, but I’m afraid I’m not. And now, I’ve never been more not.

Not long after the dumpster excitement, I went back to my “tough love” therapist, who told me that my nice therapist had given me dumb advice. (This therapist-on-therapist beef alone was worth the price of eating two co-pays.) My tough-love therapist said that as long as I wasn't hurting anybody, it was fine to be angry. Normal, even. “Better to punch a pillow than kick the dog,” she said, and explained: trying to not be angry was impossible— it’s what you do with the feeling that matters. Then she probably said something unintentionally cutting about my hair.

Beep, beep.