Josephine Clofullia

My friend and I were discussing the weird stuff that happens when you are a woman and you reach a certain vintage. I’m sure there are similar things for men, but I am not a man, so I cannot speak to that.

One such weird thing is what I call the face blanket. This is when, as an older woman, you sprout fine peach fuzz on your face and pretend it has always been there, you just had no time to scrutinize your skin to see it. My friend told me no, that was not true. Our faces in youth used to be smooth and semi-perfect. The fine hair sprouts when your hormones start exiting the building and such.

She says she shaves the fine hair off her face. I haven’t done that, convincing myself that it has been there all along. I am considering it a kind, warm face blanket.

So I pluck those really thick, wiry hairs that sprout and seem to grow two inches overnight? I do. They really bug me, and I can feel them, and I want them gone. You probably don’t want to know about any of this personal stuff, but here it is. I pluck my beard hairs. If I let them go, maybe I could be in a seniors production of THE GREATEST SHOWMAN. Given my theater experiences in the last two years, though, I am inclined to think the The-ah-tah is through with me.

This is part of the invisibility piece. I’ve had three separate incidents over the past two years that have knocked me off my feet, theatrically. Let me elaborate so you can see why I feel invisible.

ONE: I was offered a fantastic lead role in a local production of a small theater I had supported for years. I was beyond excited to tackle something so fantastic, and the writing was wonderful. We went into rehearsals right after Thanksgiving, and we opened in early January. In case you don’t do theater, I can tell you this: this is a shit rehearsal window. Many days are off limits for holidays, and people are missing etc. I did nothing but work on memorizing my lines from Thanksgiving forward.

With this very small rehearsal window and 800 lines to memorize, I gave it everything I had. I felt like we were getting better at every rehearsal, but the director, who had a habit of berating all of the actors anyway, focused on me and how he did not like the way I was doing the part. Rather than ask me to step down, he bullied me to the point where I quit. It didn’t feel great. I asked if he could be supportive instead of yelling and stalking out of the theater at my hideous acting, but he did not.

Prior to that, I had agreed to take on the task of directing a play for a friend who had lost three directors on the project already. The show was to be presented at a local festival, and I was excited to direct again. I had a lot of ideas for the show, I felt that the cast was good, and for the first couple of weeks, things went well.

But as we got into it, the writer (who also starred in the show) told me she didn’t like what I was doing. She didn’t directly ask me to quit; she just kibbutzed every move I made and didn’t like how I was running rehearsals, I guess. She never really talked to me about. As things became more tense, I wrote here an email, suggesting that maybe she’d like to take over directing duties. I thought she might protest, but she didn’t. So, fired again.

And finally, prior to THAT, I had worked for a local theater festival for several years, doing PR and media contact. In the last year I worked for the group, I took on several producing roles as well, and really worked very hard to be sure the festival was well attended and that artists were taken care of. Within the first seven days of the ten day festival, we had made back our costs, which had not happened EVER. I felt so validated and good about my work.

My fatal flaw was that I questioned where all the grant money for the festival went. I dared to question why the director of the festival was absent from most tasks, and why he was paid $50k per year for not doing anything much. That hubris led to a phone call after the festival where the director told me they were having budget issues, and he’d have to cut my pay in half. So I quit.

The message I take from these experiences, and from my beard hair, is that I have come to a point in my life where I don’t allow people to treat me as invaluable. I used to allow it. I let people use me and always thought it was my problem if things were not working. I did not trust my worth.

I feel more at peace now with everything, although I also feel like all the things I used to love to do are now closed to me. I can write, but so far, nobody wants to read it. I can do theater, but I’ve been told by several people that I shouldn’t. I could do art, but why? There are about a million people better than I am at it.

I’m looking for direction in what to do next. All the things I thought I’d spend retirement doing appear to be closed to me. So again, I’m floating in this weird liminal space. I think part of this is also the ridiculous world surrounding us right now. Like many of you, I sort of want to scream and I sort of want to hide. I’m going to protests every week and doing what I can, but it all feels futile.

If you have any wisdom to impart on any of this, I’d love to hear it, even if it’s not complementary. Thanks.

Hey! So…if you are liking the story, please share with someone else who might like it. So far, I have had one agent request 50 pages, but the rest have either rejected me within 24 hours (impressive?) or ghosted me. This may be the only place you can end up reading this beast! And please comment if you feel so inclined. I love feedback.

Chapter Four

The first thing she noticed was the intense and unrelenting wind.

There was a total absence of sound, not like the roaring tornadoes she’d endured huddled in damp Ohio basements. It was silent, but it felt like it might blow her hair off her head.

Araqiel had not a hair out of place. The wind didn’t touch him. He strolled down a brick path under a canopy of violently swaying oaks and seemed to have an invisible bubble around him that deflected leaves and branches. Most of those hit Jiffy squarely in the face or glanced off an arm or leg, leaving bleeding cuts.

“So, this is where we start to get into the real meat of Hell,” he said over his shoulder, winking. “As I believe I showed you on the map, the whole arrangement is an assortment of rings. It’s interesting that rings play such a motif in human life, don’t you think? Kiss the Pope’s ring. Ring around the collar. Diamond rings, promise rings, wedding rings, three-ring circuses, ring-tailed lemurs. Lord of the Rings, my precioussssss Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash, Ring-A-Ding-Ding, Sinatra, of course.”

Jiffy focused on the back of his black-leather jacket, her arms crossed in front of her face. “Why isn’t there any sound?” She spit out a mouthful of dusty leaves.

“I have it muted. Want to hear it?” He snapped his fingers.

Twenty roaring freight trains assaulted her ears, so her hands automatically covered them, leaving her face totally available for lacerations. The sound made the wind seem stronger, so she bowed even lower, trying to be as small as possible. She ran into her guide’s elegant back.

“No touchies!” he yelped, plucking at his jacket. “Now I’ll have to have it dry cleaned.” Another snap and the dreadful sound was gone.

“Can you do anything about the wind?” Jiffy said, blinking tears away as the debris activated every allergy she ever had.

“That’s the fun part.” He giggled.

She kept her head down, eyes on that jacket, plodding along the brick path. Her arms were striped with bloody cuts and she was pretty sure she might be bald.

Jiffy felt like she’d been walking for hours, but time didn’t flow here the same way it did elsewhere. It flowed in the same way it did when you worked at a very shitty minimum wage job that required sustained periods of boredom laced with the occasional abusive customer looking for the kind of condoms your store just doesn’t carry.

“Do we have to walk wherever we’re going?” Her mouth filled with debris as she spoke.

“Are you tired?” Araqiel stopped so abruptly that she almost ran into his leather jacket again.

Jiffy almost said yes, but then realized that she wasn’t tired. Not at all.

“See? The laws that apply dirtside aren’t the same here. You’re not tired because you’re not exerting your physical body. But your brain is so used to equating physical exercise with tiredness, you just assumed. Isn’t that adorable?” He turned his head slightly so she could see his cattish eyes. “We’ve arrived at our destination, either way.”

He snapped his fingers; the wind ceased; a door appeared on the path, but it was totally unlike any other door Jiffy had seen. It was composed entirely of human bodies. Specifically, the sexual parts of human bodies — not dismembered or disgusting, just patched together seamlessly like a silicon sculpture of someone’s weirdest erotic fantasy.

She just stared at the monstrosity.

Araqiel coughed impatiently. “Well, let’s go, sweetheart.”

She gingerly approached the door. “Why…what…are there boobs on that door?”

“Americans are so hung up on reproduction and sexuality. Puritans. I knew they were going to be trouble from the get-go.”

“How do you open it?” She took another step closer and focused on a knobby, veined penis as big around as a barber pole. “Why have I seen that one before?”

“Probably a famous porn star. Some of them have freakish appendages, you know, and we all appreciate nature’s infinite variety. Regardless, just pull on the knocker.”

“The knocker being—”

“Exactly.”

Jiffy reached up, yanked the dick, and was transported inside.

Humidity smacked her like a jealous lover. What little hair she had left curled; every pore sweated. “Are we in a sauna?”

“That wouldn’t be on brand, would it?” Araqiel put an arm around her shoulder. He smelled of old leather and expensive aftershave, and, inexplicably, dog shit. “Here, take a load off.”

He shoved her onto a stone bench, smooth to the touch. Immediately her sore, worn ass welcome the heat, pretending it was a trendy hot stone massage. She thought Araqiel chuckled quietly, as if he knew what she was thinking.

“So, Ring Two,” he said, grandly gesturing to a 10-story gray stone grotto dripping with antebellum moss. Fireflies? Were those actual fireflies blinking faint green-yellow far above?

“This is kind of beautiful,” Jiffy said. Trickling streams of cool, clear water danced from granite face to oversized boulder and into a blue-green pool lit from below. A carved alabaster statue rose from the rear of the grotto — a woman with melonesque white breasts, supple arms stretched to the sky in an attitude of abject abandon. Jiffy felt aroused (and guilt-ridden) watching the water divide and flow down the slope of each glistening tit.

“I get the sense that you’re totally vibing with this Ring.” Araqiel sat next to her and gently took her hand in his. He kissed her palm, and where his lips pressed, a welt appeared.

“Ow,” Jiffy said as the welt grew and spread toward her fingers. “What did you do?”

“I want you to experience the full range of emotions here, and everywhere we visit. I’m giving you a tiny soupçon at each stop, a Whitman’s sampler, in your parlance.”

Jiffy was preoccupied with her hand; the welt was spreading. “What is happening here?”

Araqiel squinted at the sores. “Could be herpes. Possibly syphilis. Don’t lick it.”

“I wasn’t going to lick it. Why would I lick it?”

“You’d be surprised what gets licked here. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. I don’t know you well enough yet to judge.” Araqiel pulled an Old-Testament-looking shofar from thin air — this one was made of jet-black horn and twisted into impossible knots. He cleared his throat as if he were preparing to give an oratory address, then blew into the small opening of the horn.

A piercing squeal like a pig being slaughtered echoed around the stone grotto and Jiffy reflexively covered her ears, which let the welt on her palm jump to her scalp. “Jesus, this stuff burns and itches!” she yelled, trying to scratch her head without touching it.

Like a light switch being flicked on, throngs of beings appeared, stuffing every corner of the grotto like the giblets of Benjamin Franklin’s Christmas goose. “What is that smell?” Jiffy coughed.

“The rotting flesh of the lustful,” Araqiel said, smiling with satisfaction. “Reminds me of picnics back home.”

Jiffy’s welts had progressed to her face, but her eyes and nose were spared (she kind of wished they had been covered, to keep out the sights and the smells.) Butts and balls and tits and vaginas jiggled and wiggled and smooshed into her; since she hadn’t really populated any gyms in her time, she wouldn’t have known that the unique scent she inhaled against her will was a combination of yeast infections, bladder leaks, old jizz, bowling alley shoes, and the fish someone left in the microwave.

Araqiel blew on a little silver whistle. Two oxblood-red cherubs appeared, scowls perpetually etched on their cute little kissers. “This is Dingus and Dongle. They’re going to fly you around so you get a real bird’s eye view.”

“I’ve seen enough, really—” Jiffy’s words trailed off into a genuine scream of terror as the two little birdlings each grabbed a shoulder and hoisted her effortlessly into the air. Naked people writhed and moaned in every sexual position she’d ever seen or heard of, and some that seemed impossible. Thwack — a wet boob in the face. Squelch — somebody’s hairy butt flapped at her. Gross fluids seemed to comingle in the air and find her as if she were a gross-fluid magnet.

“You need to go on a diet, lady,” Dingus said.

“Don’t body shame the bitch,” Dongle said.

“You keep to your side, and I’ll keep to mine.” A sound like a very textured spitball flew behind her head, and the second cherub reacted with a squeak and a weakening of the grip of his talons.

“I’m gonna fall!” Jiffy wailed as her right side was released. Only Dingus kept a steel grip.

“You are going to get written up for that!” Dingus shrilled. “Fucking amateur.” He dodged naked bodies writhing in pleasure and agony against each other, grinding, slipping, sliding—

“Mmm…fresh,” someone whispered in her cherub-free ear.

###

The crowd had been cleared away by law enforcement (or trousered elephants), so Ellis stood at the brink of the sinkhole, wired for sound and image, a GoPro-type camera affixed to a bike helmet on his head, earbuds jammed into his hear holes. They’d replaced his torn button-down with a Boy George concert t-shirt. “I object to this shirt,” Ellis said. “I never liked Boy George.”

“There aren’t a lot of choices. It was this or Indigo Girls or a Trump 2020 shirt.” ZQ held his left arm firmly as he spoke. “I made an executive decision.”

The sinkhole yawned before him, dark and menacing. He couldn’t see the bottom. “I don’t want to go down there,” he whispered to ZQ.

“I know, honey,” the handsome man said, patting his shoulder. “It won’t be so bad. It’s not really what it looks like.”
Ellis’ face was an inch from ZQ’s. He could see the dark stubble and wanted to stroke it. “Have you been down there? How do you know it’s not what it looks like?”

“I have not.” ZQ turned to Mari, who held a video camera and was documenting the entire event. “Mari, has anyone actually been in one of these and come back out?”

Mari took her eye away from the viewfinder and frowned at him. “That question is irrelevant.”

“Not to me!” Ellis took a step toward Mari, but ZQ kept him firmly planted. “It’s really relevant to me!”

He heard Sislyak’s whiny voice in his ear. “Testing, testing…can you hear me, Subject 27?”

“Subject 27? I don’t even get to use my name? Have you guys ever watched a science fiction movie? You might as well call me red shirt!”

Sislyak cleared his throat. “Okay. Red Shirt, can you hear me?”

“Don’t call me Red Shirt! I’ll be doomed!”

“Make up your mind!” the bald man made a frustrated sound in his ear. “Is it Red Shirt or isn’t it?”

“It’s Ellis. My name is Ellis. Call me by my name.”

ZQ squeezed his arm. “I loved that song,” he whispered into Ellis’ ear.

“No, the song was Call Me By Your Name,” Ellis said, but his comment became a wail as ZQ nudged him ever so gently, sending him, with gravity’s blessing, into the abyss.

###

Held precariously aloft by one cherub, Jiffy wobbled and rotated like her grandma’s hummingbird suncatcher, except her trajectory kept changing due to the smackage of naked bodies against her.

The other red cherub caught up, grabbed her empty shoulder and she was righted. It wasn’t much better that way.

“You should be fired,” Dingus said.

“You should fuck off,” Dongle answered.

They flew her high above the mosh pit of lusty bodies to the alabaster statue. They planted her on one of the melon breasts, which was much bigger up close. She could easily sit on it without rolling off one side or the other. Streams of cool water trickled past her on either side, so she stuck her diseased palm into the water. Immediately, the welts retreated.

“Let me help you,” a whiskey-flavored feminine voice rang through her mind. The alabaster statue slowly dipped one hand into the diamond spray bouncing off the grotto rock, filled its hand with water, then poured it gently over Jiffy’s head as if she were being baptized. The welts disappeared.

Jiffy launched a tentative thought to see if the communication ran both ways. “I can hear you in my head.”

“Yes,” the husky velvet not-sound bathed her mind in gentleness.

“Who are you?” she thought at the statue.

“Who are you is a better question,” the voice replied.

Araqiel was suddenly hovering next to her, smacking the cherubs like horseflies with an oversized flyswatter. “No cheating!” he screamed violently. The soothing voice laughed in its throat, a purr more than a chuckle.

“Did you really think no one would notice?” the voice said, laughing.

Araqiel grabbed Jiffy, who desperately did not want to leave the cloud of soothing peace that the alabaster statue spread over her. The guide flew toward the top of the grotto, cleared the throng of humping bodies and the statue until they were alone in a cobweb-colored ether that obscured the scene below.

“No fraternizing,” Araqiel scolded. He snapped his fingers and Jiffy was floating, just as he was. It was a weird feeling, like going down a roller coaster slope but without the sense of speed. “You’re here on a special permit so the regular rules don’t apply to you. That’s why She thought she could fuck it all up.”

“Who’s she?” Jiffy tried to adjust herself to fit into the non-space, but she couldn’t get comfortable. Suddenly she longed for the comfort of her couch, her television, her box of chocolates. Ellis. Even her husband (ex), Paul. For a second, the gut punch of the loss of her marriage grabbed her solar plexus and wouldn’t let go. Her face felt as if it might cry, but no tears came.

Araqiel slapped her, hard, across the face. “Snap out of it. Don’t you know what’s at stake here?”

“No,” Jiffy said. “I really don’t. I kind of assumed I was dead, but it really doesn’t fit my idea of being dead at all. So, if you want to clue me in about why I’m here and what the hell is going on, maybe I can cooperate.”

“Cooperate.” Araqiel rolled the word on his tongue as if it were a novel new flavor. “Hm. Yes. That might work.” Chewing on his lower lip, he squinted, tilted his head and studied her. “Sure. Why not? I’ve never tried that.”

A sound like the chime of a cell phone emanated from his pocket. “Hold on.” He extricated a silver smart phone. “Yes?” He listened to someone talking on the other end. Jiffy wondered why he got better reception here than she did in her apartment.

While Araqiel argued with someone, Jiffy willed herself to spin a bit so she could look for the alabaster statue. Nothing but hazy cloud cover, like a Southern California June Gloom. Maybe she was in a mental hospital? That might explain the weird sensations and disjointed recollections. An accident? Maybe the fall into the sinkhole had left her in a coma, and she was on life support in some antiseptic recovery ward. Maybe this was all the product of traumatic brain injury, like football players who’d been tackled too many times.

“Certainly. When we arranged for this, you knew what the possibilities might be. And free will was your idea, not mine. You can’t renege on your contract or you’re no better than I am.” He ended the call with a satisfied smile.

“Can I just ask you—”

“No, you may not.” Araqiel grabbed her arm and looked her in the eye. “I am going to tell you what’s happening. You just listen.”

He snapped his fingers, and they were sitting in a spacious office, floor-to-ceiling windows offering a panoramic view of silver skyscrapers, wispy clouds, and the occasional bird. Araqiel had his back to her, and she was ensconced in a Herman Miller chair.

Araqiel now sported a slicked-back ponytail and a finely cut suit reminiscent of a Wall Street hedge fund manager who dabbled in trendy but irrelevant art on the side. He swiveled so he was facing her. “No doubt you have questions.”

“I do.”

“Well? What are they?” He tapped long fingers on the glass desktop.

Jiffy blinked. “I guess…where is this? Where am I? Am I dead? Am I in a coma?”

“That’s a lot of questions at once.” Araqiel stood and faced the pristine windows again, taking in the view of the unnamed city. “All of them fair questions. So, let me answer as many as I can.” He snapped his fingers and a laser pointer appeared. Something shimmered in the air next to him, not exactly something tangible, more like the waves you see from intense heat rising at a bonfire, or witch burning. But when he touched the place with the laser pointer, images appeared.

“Look here,” he said, directing the laser at the center of the shimmering panel. A 3-d avatar of herself appeared, rotating slowly like a vertical pig on a spit. She looked dumpy and ungroomed. Jiffy shrugged, telling herself that photos always add 10 pounds.

“This is you. A regular human being, nothing special.”

“Hey! I object to—”

Araqiel waved at her to be quiet. “Sure, sure, you’re all God’s creatures, he loves all the little children of the world, blah blah blah. We all know it’s bullshit. You’re basically ten dollars’ worth of chemicals stuffed into a sausage casing, electrified. With feelings. Great idea.” Sarcasm dripped from his comments.

He lasered the Jiffy avatar and it stopped turning. Thought bubbles appeared above its head. DEPRESSED, one proclaimed. NUMB, said another. SUICIDIAL. “So, you see, you had reached a critical combination of synapse-generated ‘emotions’ that left you stripped bare, at the precipice of epiphany.”

“The precipice of epiphany?” Jiffy’s forehead buzzed with an impending headache. “You mean the sinkhole?”

“Why are you all so focused on holes all the time?” Araqiel exploded angrily. “You boil everything down to the basest level, even for monkey puppets! I am constantly bewildered by— Oh, but you meant the portal, didn’t you? Sorry. Being in the lust grotto always makes me think too much like a primate.”

Jiffy glanced sneakily over her shoulder to see if there might be a door or even an air duct that she might be able to use as an escape. But then, where would she go?

Araqiel continued. “Here you are.” He pointed again to the slowly spinning avatar. “You…shall we say fell…into the portal. When a person such as yourself is on the verge of taking his or her own life and has contact with a portal (which isn’t very often), a celestial event is triggered. This mechanism, known as donum intuitu aeternitatis, or DIA for short, is… I don’t suppose you speak Latin, do you? How can I explain this so you’ll understand?”

Jiffy had stopped listening before he got to the Latin part. Her head was pounding, and her vision had started to blur. The rotating image of herself was fuzzy around the edges, and it wasn’t just the unflattering purple mohair sweater she was wearing on the screen.

“I honestly think I’m in a coma or something. This is all just something my mind has concocted to keep me occupied while my brain decides if it’s coming back or not.”

Araqiel stared at her, frowned, and then burst into thunderous laughter. Tears sprouted from his silver eyes. He dabbed them with a snow-white handkerchief he pulled from his breast pocket. “You all never cease to amaze. Kudos. I will give Her credit — she has an infinite imagination.”

“Not sure what you’re saying, but I do know that I must be unconscious.”

“You’re not, not in the way you think you are.” Araqiel wiped the floating Jiffy away with a swipe of his elegant hand. “Let’s start over. This is so hard, I do apologize. I’ve only had to do it one other time, and it was with Einstein, and he was much smarter than you are. Quick on the uptake.”

“Sorry I’m not as a smart as Albert Einstein,” Jiffy muttered.

“Not your fault, my dear, not your fault.” Araqiel rubbed his forehead, wracking his brain for some way to explain all of this to the woman who obviously had a limited capacity to understand. “Alright. What do you do with your free time?”

“I watch the news. I read. Watch movies.”

“Hm. So, is that, would you say, escapist? Trying to escape from your reality?”

“Escape? I don’t know. I like to know what’s happening in the world, so I watch the news. I guess reading, movies, TV…maybe those are escape. I just like stories. Stories are my life.”

Araqiel’s face lit up (because a literal lightbulb appeared over his head and popped to life with an intense amber glow) and he said “Aha! My Jove, I think I’ve got it!”

“Could I just go home? And is Ellis alright?”

“Home? Oh, not yet, dear. You’ve not even begun.” He paced the length of the windows, tapping on his folded arms. “Yes. Stories. You are all stories in the end, yes? Isn’t that what you say to each other?
“Only if you’re a big Doctor Who fan,” she said.

Araqiel snapped and again they were transported to a different locale. This time, it was night, and they were sitting in camp chairs around a crackling fire. Sparks rose into the night sky; stars winked above them. The glow of the flames highlighted Araqiel’s angular face, giving him the sinister air of a ghost-story-telling camp counselor who intended to murder all the teens in the janky cabin.

“This is better for storytelling.” He produced a very long stick upon which was skewered the fattest marshmallow Jiffy had ever seen. He roasted it over the fire, and when he turned it, it had eyes and a mouth, grimacing in pain as the exterior of the gooey treat browned and crackled.

“Help me,” the marshmallow squeaked as the flames licked at it.

“Too late!” Araqiel pulled the stick from the fire, plucked the screaming treat off and popped it into his mouth, chewing with sadistic pleasure.

Jiffy was still convinced she was dead or in a coma. None of this made any sense, from Anderson Cooper’s elevator to the tortured marshmallow. There really could be no other explanation, right? Only her own twisted mind could concoct scenarios where one minute, random naked people are fucking and the next she’s playing Girl Scout with the devil, watching it torture snack food that most likely wasn’t even really food. Marshmallows had always been suspect.

Araqiel sat up suddenly, rigid and offended. “I am certainly not ‘the devil’, I’ll have you know.”

“Can you read my mind? I guess that makes sense since I’ve created you out of nothing.” Jiffy gazed into the fire. “Maybe I should have been a writer.”

“You aren’t introspective enough to be a writer.” Araqiel put his elbows on his knees, rested his head on his hands, and smiled. “You’re just like the millionth shopper person who walks in at the right time on the right day.”

“But instead of balloons and free cookies I get this?”

“This is so much more than balloons and cookies. This is a peek behind the curtain. A look at the inner workings.”

“Inner workings? Of what?” Jiffy shifted uncomfortably in the camp chair.

“Of the universe. How the sausage gets made, so to speak.” Araqiel flicked a finger and generated more firefly sparks from the flames, watched them twirl and twist toward the midnight darkness. “You are one of very few humans throughout the history of your race who are privileged to see the Truth.”

Just a quick status update…I’m sending out queries for my novel to literary agents. I got a response that requested the first 50 pages! If you have a literary agent and you think they would like this book, let me know. Comments are welcome, as always.

Chapter Three

The glare of light outside the tavern was blinding. Jiffy covered her eyes, still feeling the powerful flush of the drink chasing itself through her bloodstream, and blindly careened into Araqiel’s sea-green velvet coat, which smelled of her grandfather’s special blend of pipe tobacco.

He pushed her gently away. “Now, now, pull yourself together, Jiffy.”

She inhaled sharply, and really had a good look at him. Silver skin, waistcoat cut in the Regency style, ivory lace cuffs, black suede breeches terminating in black buckled shoes like the pilgrims wore. A large emerald stone set in silver caught the light on his right index finger (was it a finger?) “What are you?”

Araqiel snapped his long fingers and a mahogany walking stick crowned with a silver demon’s head appeared. He tossed it up, caught it, and said “Ta-da!”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” An unmistakable nauseous panic started to rise into her throat, and she felt suddenly faint.

“That is quite enough of that, young lady.” Araqiel waved a hand over her, and the nausea passed immediately. “I guess you’d call me your tour guide, in a sense.”

“My brain is scrambled, isn’t it?” Jiffy blinked and took a step back. “Something happened…did I get hit by a car? Did that stupid homeless man slip me some kind of hallucinogenic drug?”

“You shouldn’t generalize about the homeless,” Araqiel said as he studied pointed, manicured nails. “Some of them are quite erudite. And they do not all use drugs. That’s the trouble with you people. I can’t understand how the L.A. made you so dense, and without any type of telepathic abilities. Just sloppy craftsmanship.”

“I am not from Los Angeles, if that’s your point.” She turned a looked toward the horizon. “Is that Anderson Cooper elevator somewhere? Can I get back to where I started?”

“L.A., as in Lord Above. That’s another thing. You all think everything is about you and your ridiculous planet and your congested rat-hole cities. Again, telepathy would’ve really made a difference. You’d have a greater understanding, as a species.”

“So, you’re not human?”

Araqiel’s face contorted into a pained, disgusted squint. “No need to insult me. Do I look even remotely human to you?”

“Your clothes,” Jiffy muttered.

“Oh, these old things? I only put these on to make you feel more at ease.” Araqiel snapped his fingers, and the Regency attire was replaced with tight black jeans, a leather jacket, sunglasses, and an Iggy Pop t-shirt. “Better?”

“See, that’s what I mean. I have to be unconscious or—compromised. You aren’t real. You’re in my mind.”

Araqiel arched his eyebrows (were they eyebrows?), tilted his head slightly, and made the face that pissed-off wives make when their husbands tell them they should lose some weight. “You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

“I really don’t.”

“Do you know where you are? Why you’re here?” Araqiel suddenly had a lit cigarette in his hand, and he blew a puff of blue smoke at Jiffy.

“At least in my world we’ve banned public smoking,” she said, coughing and waving the offensive swirls away from her face. “I’d think you could do it here. Wherever this is.”

Two overstuffed red armchairs appeared, and Jiffy was seated in one while Araqiel puffed from the other. “I think you need an adjustment,” he said, gesturing with the glowing end of the cig. “You’re still thinking like you’re above ground, but you’re not.”

“So, I am dead.”

Araqiel growled, frustrated. “You people! It’s always life or death with you, black and white. There is so much gray area. Look.” He leaned forward, palms resting on his knees. “You are not dead, but you are in what you’d call the—waiting room of death.” He snapped his fingers and produced a vintage Penthouse magazine. “Care for some reading material?”

Jiffy knew she’d gone crazy. No wonder, with her husband leaving for the Indian Cinderella, and all the bad news, and Ellis god-knows-where groping some random stranger—

“You are not crazy, either. You’re just traveling.” Araqiel vanished the magazine with the flick of a wrist, and produced an antique scroll tied with scarlet ribbon. When he pulled the satin bow, the scroll rolled out past his biker boots, and laid flat at Jiffy’s feet. “This is a map, of sorts. I can’t give it to you, but I can show you what it is you’re doing here.”

She studied the parchment, but little black dots kept moving all over it, like gnats on a rotted piece of fruit. “That map has fleas.”

“Those are just the souls who are housed in the various rings of Hell, so we know that everyone is present and accounted for. Sort of a GPS, in your parlance.”

“Various rings of Hell? Like, capital ‘H’ Hell?!” Jiffy leaned over to look more closely at the map, and indeed, the tiny dots did look vaguely like people. Little sparks of fire ignited here and there, and she heard teeny tiny screams. “But you said I’m not dead.”

“No, but you are incredibly stupid,” Araqiel said, snapping the map into the ether. “You’re going on a tour, and I am your tour guide.”

“I’m going on a tour? Of Hell?”

“As it were.”

The red velvet chair, soft and familiar, vanished and Jiffy landed on her ass in the dusty dirt. Araqiel stood before her.

Jiffy said, “I’d like to go home. I mean, I need to go home.”

Araqiel laughed. “I’m sure you would. It may be a while, sweetie. Enjoy the view.”

Jiffy felt panic rise in her chest. “What I’m saying is, this is all fascinating and probably a hallucination, right, but I’d like to wake up now, or leave, or go back to my normal life.”

Araqiel tapped his long nails on the desk. “But you were trying to end your life, weren’t you?”

Feeling called out, Jiffy felt her face go red. “No. You mean suicide? No. I’d never do that.”

The demon thing laughed. “But you did. You jumped willingly into that big, bad hole. Most people who do that either end up rescued, resuscitated, and rehabbed, or they end up dead. But here you are. Betwixt and between, as it were. The only way out is through.”

“I know you have incredible powers. You can just snap your fingers and put me back where I was.” Jiffy was bluffing but figured it might be worth a try.

“Incredible powers, check. Snapping fingers to put you right back into your miserable earthly plane, not so much. Even we have rules. So…” He sighed and stretched luxuriously. “You’re here until you get to the center of the Tootsie pop.”

“Can you just say what you mean instead of using candy metaphors?”

Araqiel’s pleasant face clouded and turned menacing. He leaned forward. “You want it spelled out for you? Fine. You’re here until you finish your tour. If by that time you’ve learned a lesson, the lesson, you may choose to go back, but not before. Clear enough?”

Jiffy glumly nodded. The pain was just beginning. “What’s the lesson?”

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” Araqiel said with a wicked grin.

The Zachary Quinto clone cop led Ellis to a nearby unmarked black van reminiscent of Liam Neeson movies.

“Am I going to be interrogated?” Ellis tried not to sound delighted.

“We just need some information,” ZQ said, opening the metal doors at the rear of the vehicle. Inside, a command center worthy of any respectable, low-budget spy thriller oozed tension. An older bald man with Harry Potter glasses and a thin gray mustache punched buttons at a console as a younger, darker woman, thin as a rail, prayed to a statue of what looked like a green elephant. With pants.

ZQ looked behind them to make sure no one followed, then hurried Ellis into the van and shut the doors.

The dim light and close quarters caused Ellis to blink rapidly to adjust. ZQ gently pushed him into a cushy office chair next to the elephant. “Tell us what you know.”

“What is the sinkhole?” The thin woman whirled, angry brown eyes wide with panic. “Why did she jump?”

“As I’ve said, she didn’t jump. We’d just bought rum. What is with the elephant?”

ZQ put his hand up to stop the woman in mid-slap as she tried to assault Ellis. “He doesn’t know, Mari, please control your temper.”

Mari replied, “This is Ganesha, a Hindu god.”

“Why is he in an unmarked police van?”

The bald man turned and removed the headphones. His pale gray mustache moved as he talked. “We use all methods at our disposal.”

“Methods for what, exactly?” Ellis stared up into ZQ’s cavernous nostrils. He fantasized about being sniffed aggressively.

Mari knelt uncomfortably close to the cushy chair and stared directly into Ellis’s eyes, her hands on his knees. “Sir, we are doing no less than plumbing the depths of the spiritual universe.”

“Plumbing? You think the sewer system collapsed or something?” Ellis continued to try and focus on ZQ’s sexy nose holes, but the woman was still there, intensely kneeling.

“Concentrate. Why did your friend end up in the sinkhole? Did she know what was down there?”

“Why? What’s down there? I mean, other than the sewer and dirt.”

Mari inhaled deeply, closed her eyes, and tried to gather her composure as Ganesha looked on, unperturbed. In whispered, measured tones she replied “Listen. Forget what you know.”

Ganesha coughed. “I’m sure that won’t be too hard.” His voice had the calming, baritone quality of old British cinema stars.

Ellis jumped at the sounds of the pachyderm’s voice. “Holy fuck. That elephant sounds like Peter O’Toole. From Lawrence of Arabia?”

“No editorial comments necessary.” ZQ frowned at the elephant. “We’re trying to get information.”

Ellis leaned into the back of the comfy chair, trying to put inches between himself and Mari. “I don’t know anything, really,” he said with a nervous laugh. “We just came down here to see the sinkhole. Something different. I never expected her to fall in. I think it was an accident.”

“There are no accidents, no coincidences,” Mari hissed, backing off with arms folded. She pointed an accusing finger at ZQ. “You brought him in. You need to get some information.”

“I could sit on him,” Ganesha offered as he started to shift his massive weight.

“Not necessary!” Ellis shouted. “I am absolutely willing to cooperate. I just don’t know what you want to know.”

The man with the dull grey mustache turned in his chair and cleared his throat in that way moms do when they’re tired of everyone else making a mess of things when they’ve known the answer all along. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said, shaking his head.

“Apparently not.” Mari swept her dark hair from her face and shot the gray-mustache man a withering look. “But please, Mr. Sislyak, enlighten us.”

Sislyak pushed his round glasses up and studied Ellis. “He’s working for the other side. Trickery is their stock in trade.”

“I’m not working for anybody!” Ellis exclaimed. “You can look at my bank account if you don’t believe me. I’m a wage slave at a marijuana dispensary.”

“I knew drugs were involved somehow,” Mari muttered.

“Ha! You owe me ten bucks,” Ganesha said. She sneered at him.

ZQ’s handsome face was suddenly inches from Ellis’ lips. “Look, friend. These people don’t care about you, but I do. I want you to get out of here and go on with your regular life. But we need some information, and we need it now.”

“Jesus, if I knew anything I would tell you.” Ellis said, sweat beads forming on his forehead. “I want to know what happened to Jiffy as much as you do.”

Sislyak slapped his hands together and uttered a high-pitched yelp. “I’ve got it! Genius!” He rummaged in a large black trunk and extricated a complex apparatus festooned with wires and electrode leads. “We wire him for sound and video and send him in after her.”

“I’m not going down that hole,” Ellis said, trying to get up. ZQ sat in his lap to keep him there, which temporarily froze the reasoning part of Ellis’ brain.

Sislyak was on him in a second, ripping Ellis’ shirt apart and fixing pads and wires to his hairless chest. “Hold still!”

ZQ dodged the wires but stayed put. “Can we just send him down there? He’s a civilian!”

“Stand him up,” the bald man commanded.

“Don’t I get a say in this?” Ellis squirmed as they wrapped the apparatus around him.

Ganesha snorted and waved his massive trunk. “Does anyone get a say in anything that happens? Wake up, meat balloon.”

Hey! Thanks a lot to those who read and commented on the first part of Chapter 1. I think I’m going to try to put these out on Sundays, although yesterday’s Sunday did not comply with my wishes, so here it is, Monday.

I’m going to paste in the last few paragraphs of the previous post to get you into where you left off. I’ve put the previous part in boldface types. If you like this/ don’t like this, let me know in the comments.

I really appreciate you reading and giving feedback. Querying feels like spitting into a hurricane.

JIFFY DOWN UNDER - Chapter 1, part 2

She shoved the cat off her lap. Fuck husbands, fuck cats, fuck living. All of this was a cruel waiting game for death. A Kafka-esque farce of suffering in all its varied shades and flavors. Dark, depressing, a black parade to the—

Ellis sat up as if electrified. “I know! I have an amazing idea! Let’s go see the sinkhole!”

“You mean, drive down there?”

“Yes!”

“What about parking?” She was really considering the annoyance of putting on clothes that didn’t fit and shoes that pinched. “I don’t want to.”

“You never want to do anything.” Ellis stood up, grabbed her wrist and pulled her up too. “No arguments. We’ll see the sinkhole, have some lunch, maybe go shopping. It’ll do you good. I think you need a change of scenery.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I’m not wearing a bra.”

“Who cares? Don’t wear a bra. I promise I’ll control my urge to jump your gigantic titties.”

“Snot.” She fake-slapped him on the shoulder and moved to find some clothes that didn’t make her feel like a stuffed sausage.

The sinkhole was situated near the waterfront, about three blocks inland, right next to a Nordstrom outlet store. Ellis found parking fairly easily, and within five minutes they’d walked to the site of interest.

Several other gawkers ringed the hole, gazing into the dark depths below. A few police officers also circled about to be sure no one did anything illegal. Yellow caution tape, the cover-your-ass fringe at all civil accidents, waved merrily in the breeze.

“I can’t even see the bottom,” a homeless-smelling man said as Jiffy and Ellis took their places in the circle of onlookers. “Can you see the bottom?”

Jiffy squinted. “Not sure. It does seem pretty deep. Has anyone gone in to check it out?”

“Nope.” The man sneezed and wiped his nose on his already-filthy sleeve. “Just the cops have been roamin’ around to be sure nobody goes in on accident.”

“I doubt they could stop that,” Ellis interjected. “I mean, if someone really wanted to go in.”

Jiffy gazed into the chasm. Black, black as a midnight in the middle of a moonless desert. Black as the yawning maw of a still, silent dragon. Black, empty, just like the place inside her where she used to keep love and longing and any kind of enjoyment of life.

Would throwing herself into this gaping chasm end the suffering? What was it the Buddhists said? Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Well, that’s some bullshit.

She thought about a lot of things at that moment. Politics. A world in chaos. Ugly sweaters. Her ex-husband and his perfect new wife. Peanut butter, that tasted so good but only made you fat.

The way every day felt when nothing felt good.

So, she ducked under the caution tape, and —

Darkness, complete darkness, is actually comprised of many colors. The human eye doesn’t see the subtleties, but they’re there. Black, of course, but also dark blue, purple, brown, deep dried-blood red. Behind the eyelids, little stars of silver punctuate the darkness like fireworks in a field.

On her back, Jiffy watched as those silver points of light that were really just rods or cones, or whatever helps you see, darted about like skittish fish in a pond. When she opened her eyes, the fish flitted away, and instead, she was treated to the extravagant banquet of the varied colors of darkness. She couldn’t see a damn thing.

“Hello?” she called out. The word echoed. Looking up, she could not see what she expected, a large gaping hole to the sky, lined with yellow tape and tiny people. Up was all darkness too.

She sat up, feeling around her to obtain some context of where she had landed. The ground was spongy, not like a comfortable hybrid mattress, but more like the insulation in an attic. Feeling around her, she could grasp nothing except the foamy sponge-like stuff. It was a sensory deprivation cave: no sound, no light, no smell. This was frustrating since she had at least expected singing, as per the crazy homeless man’s testimony on television.

“Is anybody here?”

Silence.

A small zing of fear started to grow from behind her belly button, spreading outward. The realization that she was alone, in the dark, and no one could hear her scream brought to mind all the horrible movie tropes: aliens, poltergeists, demons, closet monsters, right-wing presidencies. Just as she was about to abandon hope, a faint hum sounded from below her feet.

The hum vibrated the foamy floor, got louder, and then a glimmer of golden light seemed to suffuse the area about three feet away. She crawled toward it instinctively.

A vacuum-sealed pop! hit the air and vanished immediately, sucked into the void of space, or time, or memory foam. Through a square-shaped hole that appeared in the floor, something rose up, shining. Jiffy’s jaw dropped in awe at this beautiful, bright thing — it was a box of some kind, burnished gold, with elaborate scrollwork molded into the frame. She inched closer.

Then she saw what it was: an elevator.

It stopped.

The doors slid soundlessly open, and a blast of breaking-news music issued from within, heavy on the trumpets. A tall, white-haired man with ice-blue eyes appeared.

“Jeffra Pembroke?” he asked in his neutral-accent baritone.

“Anderson Cooper?” Jiffy squeaked.

The television personality smiled slightly, bemused. “Not exactly. But come on in.”

Jiffy scrambled from the foam floor and darted into the elevator. In the amber interior light, she could get a good look at Anderson: he looked just as good up close as he did on TV. “Am I dead?” she asked. “And if I’m dead, are you dead too, Anderson Cooper? God, I hope not. Did you die covering the sinkhole?”

The man shook his head, laughing. “Hang on, hang on. I’m not really Anderson Cooper, first of all.”

“But you look just like him. You sound like him.” She took a cautious step forward and drew in a huge inhale through flared nostrils. “You even smell how I think he’d smell!”

“And how is that?”

“Bay Rum, tobacco, and spiced chai.”

He shrugged. “Okay, sure.”

Jiffy looked around at the interior of the elevator. There were no numbers to press, no controls, just tasteful striped wallpaper in muted tones of ivory and umber, with the same antiqued gold filigree decorating the edges. “This is not how I thought it would be, I have to tell you.” She touched the wall. It was soft, spongy, like the cave floor outside.

Anderson put a hand on her shoulder, which sent a buzz of intense desire through her sensible shoes. “This isn’t how you thought what would be, exactly?”

“Well, you know…uh…the end. Death.”

“Oh, you’re not dead. Sorry if I gave you that impression. Totally did not mean for that to— Well, I can see why you might think that, but…” He winced and ran his hand through his perfect white crop cut. “Wow. Okay. First thing, I’m not actually the Anderson Cooper you know.”

“Well, sure, he’s not dead, I think, but you are him in some sense, right?”

The man squinted his face in an un-Anderson-like way and made a noncommittal sound like the whine of a too-tight fan belt. “No, sorry. I could give you an autograph, though.”

Jiffy ignored this, realizing she had neither pen nor paper, nor purse. “Do you know where my purse is?” She patted her hips in search of the missing bag. “And my phone?”

“Oh, that won’t work in here anyway. No cell reception.”

“Figures.”

Anderson nodded sympathetically. “You seem remarkably calm considering the circumstances.”

“About that.” Jiffy crossed her arms and gave him her sternest shushy librarian face. “I need some answers. This is obviously not where I was a few minutes ago, and I’ve drawn the conclusion that I’m mostly likely unconscious. I fell, hit my head, and now I’m having some vivid hallucination, possibly due to oxygen deprivation or concussion. So, I guess what I’m asking is: is that what’s going on here?”

“Uh, no.” Anderson sighed deeply. “Here’s the thing—” Suddenly, he touched his ear as if receiving an urgent message from an unseen control room. “Uh huh…uh huh…okay.” He focused on a non-existent horizon. “Breaking news at this hour. We have confirmed reports of an unidentified human male peering into the sinkhole.”

“That’s my friend,” Jiffy offered.

“Sources suggest this man may be a terrorist. All levels are to go on high alert.” Sirens whined outside the elevator, as the panicked sound of militaristic marching boots somehow beat a tattoo on the spongy floor. Gunshots pinged and zipped and explosions assaulted her ears.

“Wait!” she screamed. “Why are you trying to kill him? He’s not a terrorist!”

“Sorry,” Anderson said seriously. “Nobody ever claims to be a terrorist.”

“Yes, they do! That’s kind of the point!”

The buzzing thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades hovered above her as Jiffy crouched on the floor, arms over her head, trying to block out the horrible sounds. And just as quickly, all fell silent.

“What the fuck was that about?” she whimpered at Anderson’s well-creased pants.

“When news breaks, we fix it.” Anderson gently took her elbow and helped her up. “So, where were we?”

“I have no idea. I’ve been trying to figure that out. You’re not helping. What happened to Ellis? My friend, the guy who was peering into the sinkhole?”

“That’s really none of my concern,” Anderson said matter-of-factly. “What is my concern is where you’re going to end up. That’s really what’s important.”

“Where I’m going to end up?” Jiffy felt a cold chill down her spine. “Can’t I end up back where I started?”
“Well maybe eventually, but of course, you wouldn’t still be you. For now, though, it’s imperative that I shuttle you to the correct arrondissement. And we can’t do that until we’ve gone through processing.”

Jiffy stood, smoothed her capris and decided to take this hallucination into her own hands. Because clearly, this was not real. None of it. She’d fallen, hit her head, and like Dorothy was whisked away by a tornado to Greater Downtown Oz, her mind had been airlifted to the loony bin.

“I need to return to the— where I fell in, you know— the edge of the sinkhole, please.”

Anderson leaned against the gleaming panels of the elevator and chuckled. “Well, all you have to do is click your Birkenstocks together three times and say, ‘there’s no place like Nome.’ Surely, you’ve seen enough movies to know that’s the mechanism for these things.”

“Did you say, ‘no place like Nome’? That’s Alaska. I don’t want to go to Alaska.”

“Then I guess you’re S.O.L., lady. Hang on.” He wrenched a huge lever, one of those brass old-fashioned things elevator operators in old movies used, and the golden box lurched nauseatingly to the side, rumbled a bit, and shot upward.

Jiffy grabbed desperately to a rail that had appeared behind her as the roar and rush of speed intensified, whooshing her flabby cheeks into waving flags of flesh. Involuntarily, a horrified burble issued from her lips, ascending in pitch as the elevator ascended upward.

“Stop screaming!” screamed Anderson Cooper. “It’s really distracting.”

This did not stop Jiffy from screaming.

Silence.

Gravity settled back over her like a familiar blanket, and she loosened her white knuckles from the rail. Her hands shook, and she felt hungry and nauseous at the same time.

“It has that effect on everyone,” Anderson assured her. He busily gathered up a gold-bordered folder (and where had that come from?), checked a few papers inside, checked what looked like a cell phone, pressed a few buttons on the phone, and then smiled at Jiffy with a reassuring twinkle. “Here we go.”

The door slid open, and the world outside was quite different from the place she had been: green, wild. The smell of cut grass and pine surrounded her, and a cooler breeze ruffled her shirt. “After you,” Anderson said, showing her the way with his manicured hand.

Bewildered, Jiffy stepped out of the golden box, and to her amazement, the dirt felt like dirt. The breeze was strong and lifted her hair from her neck. She turned to ask a question just in time to see the golden door close on Anderson’s smiling face, and then the elevator was gone. Just vanished.

She whirled in a circle, hoping she was just disoriented, but no, the thing was gone. So was Anderson Cooper. “Well, fuck-a-doodle,” she said, emphasizing the fricatives.

She was utterly alone in this green wood, which really did seem to be outside. Rolling white clouds dotted the sky above her, which seemed as limitless as the real one (real one? Which one was real? Was this the same sky?)

To keep herself company, she decided to talk out loud, something she did to ease her panic in awkward social situations. It never worked in crowds, but here, it might. “Let’s just be calm,” she told herself sternly. “Let’s just find an information booth or something, a white courtesy phone. Maybe a place to sit.”

She spotted a downed tree in a clearing within walking distance and that became her new mission: Get to the tree. Sit on the tree. You could count on a tree. But as she walked toward it, it seemed to move further away. “That’s not possible,” she assured herself. She kept walking.

After at least 10 minutes in what should have been a 30-second trek, she gave up on the tree. “I hope somebody turns you into Fifty Shades of Grey!” she yelled.

Discouraged, she plopped down in the dirt. “Ellis!!” she screamed as loudly as she could. No reply, just the creaking and cracking of tree limbs like old bones in the breeze.

Fear crept from her center, her creamy center, now I want a chocolate. “Stop it!” she scolded herself. “Eating is not going to solve this problem. Ellis!!!”

Ellis peered into what looked like a bottomless pit, the same pit where his best friend and asexual kinda-wife had disappeared into. “Jiffy!” he screamed into the black hole.

The homeless man in the plaid lumberjack shirt leaned over the caution tape. “Yeah, she’s a goner,” he said authoritatively. The crowd of scooter delivery people, shop owners, businessmen, and old women walking interchangeable dogs mumbled excitedly.

Ellis shoved him back and frantically looked for some type of law enforcement or emergency personnel. A yellow-coated Zachary Quinto-look-alike fireman peered into the chasm, a frown on his manly brow. Ellis immediately forgot (almost) about Jiffy. “Hey, you,” he said with his best come-hither purr.

“Yes, sir?” the fireman fixed ebony eyes on Ellis who momentarily forgot what he wanted to say.

“Uh…so, you’re a fireman?” Jesus, Ellis! Could you sound more desperate and ridiculous? “Sorry. I mean, I’m in shock, obviously. My best friend…my sister…just accidentally fell into that sinkhole.”

As crowds of bored onlookers do, they absorbed Ellis’ comment like insects with pheromones and transferred it through the mass of people and unto the news crews, who immediately jockeyed for a closer position to this Eyewitness.

Zachary Quinto (Ellis named him that mentally) put a strong arm around Ellis’ shoulders to shield him from the masses. “Let’s go over here, so we can talk,” said ZQ (Ellis shortened it, since they had now shared more than two sentences). He guided Ellis to a cordoned area full of exceptionally muscular firemen and police officers who mostly seemed to be standing around harrumphing and jotting things down into notebooks or iPads.

ZQ motioned for a very tall man in a suit to approach. “Lieutenant Stiltz, this is— what’s your name?”

“Lieutenant Stiltz? For real? Or is that your stage name?” Ellis blurted out before he could check himself. The tall man grimaced. “Oh, sorry. But do you do drag? You’d be so good— oh, sorry again. I have verbal diarrhea during a crisis.”

ZQ graciously ignored Ellis’ weird comments and spoke to Stiltz. “He says he knows the woman who jumped.”

“She didn’t jump!” Ellis proclaimed vehemently (something he’d always wanted to do). “It was totally accidental!”

The ubiquitous plaid-shirt vagrant somehow appeared at his elbow. “Nope, nope. She jumped. For sure.”

“Go away, you hobo!” Ellis swatted him with mincing girl-scout slaps. “You smell like dick cheese!”

“Takes one to know one,” the man muttered. “And my name’s Julius. I haven’t given up my dignity just because I’m housing-challenged.” He shuffled back through the throng of reporters who now swelled like a polyester wave upon the barrier, thrusting microphones and cameras toward Ellis as if he were Lady Gaga, JFK, and the ghost of Elvis all rolled into one.

“Sir,” ZQ talked loudly over the mob of reporters, “what can you tell us about your friend?”

Ellis, dazzled by the media attention, preened and smiled at the cameras. “She was—is—my very best friend and her name is Jif—Jeffra Pembroke. We came down here to see what the fuss was about, and she tripped, or maybe was pushed, into the hole.”

“How do you spell that? Jeffra?” ZQ was filling out a form on an iPad. He’d taken off his bulky yellow jacket, revealing a sweaty blue t-shirt which caused Ellis to nearly hyperventilate. “Do you know her date of birth?”

“October 8.” Ellis focused on the fireman. “Uh…I think it was 1965. Maybe. But she might be older than that. Or younger.”

ZQ nodded, jotting madly. “And was she despondent? Depressed? Would she have tried to take her own life?”

Ellis glanced into the maw quizzically. “I don’t think so. We had just bought rum.”

“Ellis!”

Her words echoed off the green hills and gently swaying trees.

Jiffy was not a fan of nature. Her earliest memories of the beauties of the outdoors had been poison ivy in her private areas (due to a dare her friend Lisa had casually hurled at her on a Girl Scout camping trip) and the subsequent embarrassment of asking the teen camp counselors what to do for the unbearable itch that could not be scratched. The teens, being teens, couldn’t stop giggling about it. Then it got around that Jiffy had an itch down there, which obviously meant she’d seen some action. Sexual action.

So, nature had betrayed her. It had betrayed her with parts that could itch but not be scratched. It had betrayed her with false friends and teen mentors who were supposed to be looking out for her best interest and nurturing the best in her girl-scout heart. It’s probably why she hated vegetables, when you really looked at it.

So being stranded in the wilderness, even in all its vast and verdant beauty, was like being left at an unattended Texas roadhouse gas station, dumped unceremoniously with no way out in any direction. But at least there would be a bathroom.

Jiffy considered: She had not felt the urge to pee since she arrived…and when had that been? Time didn’t seem to move in the conventional way here. She did a quick bladder check (something middle-aged women are quite astute about doing, especially if they know there isn’t a clean restroom within walking distance) and realized that no, she didn’t have to go. Weird. Good thing, though, since there were no signs of civilization anywhere. She could always go in the bushes, she reasoned, but that had never gone well before.

With a large sigh, she said, “Fuck it,” and started walking toward the horizon.

The light didn’t change. That was the first thing. Also, there were no birds, no animals, no sounds other than light winds shuddering the leaves and branches of the untrustworthy underbrush. It seemed perpetually to be midday. Not too hot, not too cold, a Goldilocks oasis filled with nothing but green trees and blue sky.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Jiffy muttered to herself. “Am I supposed to just wander around here for forty days and forty nights? Or just forty midafternoons? I don’t get this at all. If I’m high, it’s a really disappointing high.”

No answer. She kept trudging.

In order to stem the panic that threatened to rise from her belly like an acid wave, she started to recount Greek mythology. “Sisyphus was the guy who rolled the rock up the hill. It fell down, he pushed it back up, it fell down—” she made it a sort of song: trudge, up, trudge, down, trudge up, trudge down. Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Zeus, the paternal head of the Olympic mafioso. Caffeina, the goddess of coffee. Wait, no. That one wasn’t real. Thor, god of thunder. No, that was Norse. Chris Hemsworth. He was so delicious. And that accent…she imagined hearing it in her ear as he sweetly, softly asked her if he could clean her house. Okay, okay. Mars, the god of war— no, that was Ares. Mars in the Roman, Venus and Aphrodite— I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, your one desire— Chris Hemsworth without a shirt, with that little lower abdominal V that points like a flashing neon sign toward his most likely prodigious Australian outback—

The texture of the ground changed under her feet. Jiffy looked down and there was a flagstone path. Paths lead somewhere, don’t they? A path! Looking ahead, she couldn’t see where it went, but she absolutely did not care. She hoped Chris Hemsworth’s abs were at the end of it.

The flagstones curved around a storm-cloud gray boulder taller than a three-story house. The path ended at a quaint English pub. The weathered wooden sign, cadet blue lettered in antique gold, read The Virtuous Pagan, the letters arching around a carving of a deer’s antlers on the classic Celtic triskele. Jiffy exhaled audibly with relief. She’d never been so glad to see a pub in her entire life, and she really enjoyed drinking in pubs.

Squealing like a girl at Christmas, she scampered to the dark wood door bisected by wrought iron. She pulled with all her might on a three-foot black vertical handle terminating in a curlicue that looked like a kid sticking out its tongue. A familiar scent of stale beer and unwashed carpet slapped her in the face, and she liked it.

The door creaked shut dramatically behind her, leaving her to assess the dim room hazy with something like smoke…but she smelled no cigars or cigarettes. Pot? Probably not. That would be in heaven. Shadowy figures huddled on bar stools clumped around a polished brass bar and Jiffy could vaguely make out impossibly high shelves lit from behind with a ghostly green glow, shelves overstuffed with liquor bottles of all shapes and sizes.

There was a hum of conversation that stopped the second she walked in. She could feel all eyes on her. She felt her way forward, eyes gradually adjusting to the low light, and her belly found the brass bar first. What looked like a 6-foot-tall lizard wearing a red-striped bow tie and apron stood like a human, arms crossed as if he were impatient to take her drink order. It had enormous curled ram horns, and its eyes, set on either side of its scaly head, moved independent of each other.

“How did you get in here?” it asked, its voice raspy and strained. Jiffy detected a slight Long Island edge to the voice.

“Anderson Cooper dropped me off.” She folded her arms to mirror the lizard.

“Ah.” The lizard man unfolded his arms and picked a white bar towel up with one fierce-looking claw. Its long, forked tongue darted out quickly, smacking a fly in mid buzz. “Want a drink?”

“Jesus, yes,” Jiffy said, but immediately every being in the bar shouted “Jinx!” and made the sign of the cross, reversed. “Uh…rum?”

“What’s rum?” The chameleon-like eyes wandered in different directions.

“Uh. Whatever you’ve got, then.” A quick glance to her left revealed a tall pint glass filled with an amber liquid spilling a cascade of dry ice vapor onto the counter. “Whatever that is.”

“One Lucifer’s Asshole, coming up.” The barkeep grabbed a pint glass, poured from a tap, dropped two cubes of something in plop, plop, and handed Jiffy the beverage.

“Why is it called…uh… what you said?” She stared at the glass, expecting it to scream or sprout a tail or a churlish face with pointy horns.

Someone was suddenly at her right shoulder. In a smooth baritone, he said, “Because it’s cold as hell and you don’t want to put your mouth anywhere near it.”

The speaker was more than six feet tall. Jiffy assumed it was a man, because the voice was quite deep and resonant, with the suave assurance of a television anchor or Jaguar salesman. An aquiline nose and square jawline accented piercing silver eyes (silver eyes?) and plump, perfectly formed lips. Something quivered in Jiffy’s nether regions.

“Oh, sister, don’t bother,” the man said, waving a long-fingered, graceful hand at her as he slid onto a bar stool. “That would definitely be barking up the wrong tree.”

“Excuse me?”

“Of course, of course.” The long-fingered hand patted hers and she felt an electric shock. “Excused, of course. I’m sure it’s not quite what you were expecting, is it?”

“I honestly had no expectations.” Jiffy stared down at the smooth, cool hand, trying to identify what it felt like…not a human hand, certainly. More like snakeskin. Snakeskin framed by what looked like lace cuffs and a velvet smoking jacket.

“Move.” The tall person wiggled a finger imperceptibly at a squat, bearded, troll-like thing sitting on the bar stool to her left. The troll huffed crossly and jumped down, landing on the floor with a thud as the thin hand gestured for Jiffy to take the troll’s place on the bar stool. She gingerly hoisted herself up, parallel with the silver-snakeskin person. Although, weirdly, he wasn’t exactly sitting. He was floating in a sitting position.

“Can I ask you something?” Jiffy whispered.

“Of course.” The floating being snapped its long fingers and a stemmed crystal glass appeared in it, shining with a ruby liquid. He sipped and smiled delightedly. “Vintage. Nothing like it.” He turned his silver eyes to focus on Jiffy, which again made her ladyparts tingle uncomfortably. “Yes?”

“Am I dead?”

There was a silent beat, and then every being in the tavern erupted into some semblance of laughter, which, when blended, most closely approximated ten lawnmowers being pushed by grumpy donkeys running over assorted plastic cry-baby dolls and squeaky dog toys.

The tall man wiped one eye, as if to dab a tear. “Darling, you are far from dead. What is your name again? Jiffy, is it?”

She nodded as the cacophony died down.

“Lord. Were you named after the popcorn or the cornbread mix?”

“It’s really Jeffra.”

“That’s almost as bad. Drink your drink, dear. We have a lot to talk about.”

“I thought you said it was…poisonous or something?” Jiffy eyed the glass, which still frothed with white vapor.

“Not poisonous, no. It has a kick, certainly, a piquant sort of jolt to the human brain, perhaps. But that might be just what you need to process this whole experience. Isn’t that what your psychiatrists call it? ‘Processing’? As if you’re a slice of imitation cheese. Really.” He made a distasteful grimace. “Psychology. Ridiculous. Oh, well, go on. Drink up.” He pushed the cup toward her with a slight twitch of his index finger.

The beverage, still shedding vaporous wisps, smelled delicious, like caramel wrapped in hot chocolate and roses, and Jiffy sipped gingerly at first. Then she downed the entire contents of the glass, ending with a gigantic burp and tiny poof of white smoke.

“Nicely done.” The very tall being smiled, his silver eyes twinkling. “Araqiel, at your service. Let’s have a look at you.” He tapped Jiffy’s shoulder and she straightened up, did a little ballerina turn on the stool, and immediately felt dizzy. “Hmm. Not quite what I was expecting, but I suppose you get what you get these days.”

Jiffy’s head pounded. A thousand tiny men with tiny silver hammers worked the inside of her skull into a smooth, reflective surface. The lingering flavor of roses and hot chocolate filled her mouth and nose, but she at once felt out of sync with everything and at one with everything.

“Such is the power of a well-mixed drink,” Araqiel chuckled, nodding to the goat-headed bartender. The drink slinger pointed with a hoof at a hand-made sign on ragged carboard that read ‘Tips Needed for Horn Reconstruction Surgery. Please Give!’ From a hidden pocket, Araqiel produced a coin, ancient, silver, and tossed it into the over-sized Bubbie’s pickle jar beneath the cardboard sign.

The ability to speak returned and Jiffy sputtered. “Is that drink going to kill me?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Araqiel answered. “We need to get going. Follow me.”

“Follow you? Where?” As she wiggled off the stool, Jiffy steadied herself on the bar counter. A barely audible yelp focused her attention on an oversized cockroach amidst the glasses and coasters.

“Watch where you put your big fat ham mitts, lady,” the cockroach squeaked at her. She thought it might have flipped her off, but it was hard to tell. “Tourists.”

“After you, my dear Jiffy,” Araqiel said, motioning toward the door with a sweep of his long, majestic arm.

But I do still want to keep doing a Substack, so I had a thought: I’m in the midst of querying agents for my newest novel, Jiffy Down Under, a process that falls between speed dating and Amish arranged marriages on the spectrum of disappointing things you have to do. In searching for an agent, it’s hard to find “the one,” so a lot of needles in haystacks turn out to be dull, rusty, or too sharp.

Because of that, I wondered if anyone would like to read this book, chunks at a time. That way, you could have something to read from me, and you’d have a chance to weigh in on the process and give real-time feedback on the novel itself before it ever hits actual print. When I was a kid, our local Lima newspaper published a Christmas story in installments in our newspaper, and I LIVED for the next installment. I thought maybe you would like that too.

Below is a mock up of a cover I made of the book, which clearly reflects my limited graphic design abilities.

Thank you to my unnamed friend for modeling a dejected academic in my cover art. I think you’ll agree that her house is perfect for this.

So, if I start posting chunks of my book and nobody reads it or nobody comments or nobody likes it, I’ll stop. If you DO find it interesting, please comment and let me know if segments should be longer, shorter, etc. This will really help me know which direction to go. And of course, if you read things you like or don’t like, let me know. I have skin as thick as a psoriatic rhinoceros. (I realize I had no real idea of how to spell ‘rhinoceros’ so I had to look it up. Did you know how to spell it?)

So, here you go. The first part of the first part of the soon-to-be-famous weirdo novel, Jiffy Down Under. This segment is about half of chapter 1.

Chapter 1 (first half)

From her spot curled up on the sofa, Jiffy Pembroke, a middle-aged librarian who had given up the battle for her midriff, watched the 24-hour news channels obsessively. Her husband of 22 years, Paul, saddened by her disconnection from the ‘real’ world of their domestic bliss, and her inability to be 33 again, was moving the last of his things to a brand-new Toyota Tundra outside in the driveway. “I think that’s about it?” It was a question rather than a statement.

“Hmm?” Through round, blue-framed glasses, she glued her eyes to the screen. It was Anderson Cooper. She had to watch everything he did.

“I said, I think I’ve got everything now.” She didn’t hear the sadness in Paul’s voice, although she did pick up a slight whiff of his clean-smelling aftershave. She would miss that. I guess I could just go buy a bottle and spritz it around, she thought. Would that be pathetic, or a creative solution to his absence?

Paul’s fiancée, Prishka, stood in front of her, blocking the screen. Tall, lanky, exotically Indian. “Jeffra,” she said kindly. “I hope things go well for you.” She patted Jiffy on the hand consolingly as Paul’s last crate of music equipment was dragged to the U-Haul by two underpaid college students.

“Thank you.” She tried to look around the woman’s narrow, blue-jeaned hips, but only saw one of Anderson Cooper’s ice-blue eyes. “I do appreciate that.” Prishka sighed and moved out of her field of vision.

Paul crouched down in front of her, careful not to block her view. He tenderly patted her mouse-colored, cotton-candy hair. “Jif, we’re going now.” Was he crying?

“Mmm.” She stared straight ahead, absently swatting his hand away. “I hope things go well for you.”

“Look at me.”

“Why?”

“Just...do it. Please. One last time.” His voice cracked.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, she thought. Fine. She swiveled her eyes from the television to her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s face. “Jesus, Paul, you have a mustache.”

“I’ve had this mustache for three months.”

“Really?” His eyes were bleary. The mustache looked like an unenthusiastic, sandy-grey caterpillar.

“Jif. I hope you get some help.” He covered her hand with his own. The warmth registered, but she felt nothing. “You know, it’s not how I wanted things to go.”

“That’s what you said.” A choking wave of emotion threatened to overspill the strained levies of numbness. They left, the door closed, the silence returned.

This Saturday, a cool California morning dotted with hummingbirds and low clouds, Jiffy was considering suicide, mostly as a concept rather than a choice. To no one in particular, she said aloud “I wouldn’t do it, you know. I just think it’s interesting.” Her research consisted of browsing websites devoted to methodology, and news stories about current and past events of suicide. The zookeeper from Singapore who let himself into the white tiger enclosure and provoked the animal with a broom seemed cruel (why involve an innocent animal?) and the man who racked up huge debt, tied a rope between his neck and a tree, and sped off in a brand-new convertible (top down) was creative and not a little disconcerting.

But there was the diabetes, the psoriasis, diverticulosis, the depression, the pain in her low back, the obesity (technically, and according to pencil-pusher insurance adjusters), all of which left her feeling like eating nothing but candy and drinking nothing but rum. And contemplating suicide, in the abstract, of course. Someone would identify her body if she did it, and she didn’t want to put that on anyone, even Paul.

Her cell phone chirped, the ring tone a theme song from her favorite BBC detective show, Sherlock. It was her partner in dissatisfaction, Ellis. “Is he gone?”

“Yes.” She picked a chewy caramel from a box of chocolates and popped it into her mouth. “They just left with the last of his stuff.”

“Was it awful?”

“Not so much.” She chewed, picking the pieces of sticky sweetness from the edges of her teeth. “She was horrible. He was annoying. Nothing new.”

Ellis sighed like a deflating balloon. “We have to celebrate. Where should we go? Proud Mary’s is open all day, and there are some darling baby gays who hang out there. I went out with one last night, as a matter of fact.”

“Mmmm.” The muted television scene of a huge sinkhole in the middle of the city had captured her attention. “Did you see the Sinkhole?”

“Huh?”

“Can you come over, Ellis?” She grabbed the TV remote, prepared to turn up the volume as soon as she hung up the phone.

“I guess. I’m not working today. Should I bring rum and snacks?”

“Yes. Get Bugles. See you when you get here.” She clicked the phone off and turned up the TV simultaneously.

An exotic woman in red (probably Indian, like Prishka) stood at the edge of the sinkhole, a microphone bobbing just below her perfect, heart-shaped face. “The sinkhole apparently appeared twenty minutes ago, in a busy intersection at Grand and 4th Avenue. City crews are en route to identify the source of the sinkhole, and to create a plan to repair the damage. Here with me now is Frank Bestie, a postal worker who was delivering mail when the phenomenon occurred.”

“Bestie?” Jiffy snorted. “What kind of a name is Bestie?”

The balding postal worker, socks held up with those elastic bands, looked like a startled raccoon who’d been caught routing through the trash. “I was just dropping off mail at this bank here, and I heard a really loud booming sound, and then singing.”

The woman with the microphone registered the singing comment a beat late. “Right, and then you—wait, singing? Did you say you heard singing?”

He nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am. Singing. Coming from that hole.”

The puzzled newscaster wasn’t sure quite where to go with that line of questioning, so she changed the subject. “Did you happen to notice if any cars or pedestrians fell into the hole?”

“I don’t think so. But I wasn’t looking right at it when it opened up. I heard the noise, then the singing, then I looked, and all I saw was this big, black cavern.”

“Was the so-called singing possibly coming from somewhere nearby, and you just thought it was coming from the sinkhole?”

“No, no. It was definitely coming from right in the middle of that portal.”

“Portal?” Reporter lady looked pretty worried now. Jiffy chuckled at her uneasiness and picked another chocolate out of the box. She hoped it would be nutless.

Raccoon mailman said “I know it’s not conventional thinking, but I believe this sinkhole is a portal. There is a lot of research to back me up on this, actually. Last year alone, there were several sinkholes that were confirmed portals. To hell.”

The news lady’s eyes grew wide, and Jiffy nearly choked on her chocolate buttercream. “Portal to hell!” She laughed, then quick keyed Ellis on her cell phone. “Ellis!”

“I’m on my way, Jesus.” Judging from the bumpy noises, he was already driving. “What is it? You want something besides Bugles? Dollar Store cheese?”

“No, I was calling because there is a guy on TV who says there is a sinkhole that is a portal to hell.”

“I thought that was your bathroom.”

“Fuck you. I can’t help it if I have IBS.” She grabbed a truffle. “I’m sensitive.”

“Yeah, ‘kay. So yes or no on the cheese?”

She mumbled affirmatively, then clicked the phone off so she could watch the squirming reporter and the postal worker-slash hell-portal expert do their dance of awkwardness.

Thirty minutes later, Ellis burst through the door in purple sweats and an untucked blue oxford shirt, dark sunglasses eclipsing the top half of his narrow face.

Jiffy glanced up as he wordlessly entered the kitchen. “Did you buzz your hair?”

“Summer cut with champagne blond tips,” he sang out as he filled a Tupperware with ice and set the glasses and rum bottle on a tray with a can of Coke. He whirled into the living room, set the tray down, fixed the drinks, and handed a tumbler to Jiffy, who took it gratefully. She hadn’t moved from her vantage point on the sofa, still enthralled with the news crews at the sinkhole. He plopped down beside her, spreading snacks and the Styrofoam try of questionable cheese on the table.

Jiffy studied his close-cropped blond-tipped brown hair and ran a hand over the fuzz. “Nice. Makes you look like Macaulay Culkin. Older Macaulay, obviously.”

“No need to be catty.” Ellis removed his sunglasses, tucked them in the shirt pocket, and raised his glass. “A toast. To freedom.”

Jiffy raised her thin eyebrows and smirked as they clinked glasses. “Sure. Freedom. Whoopee.” She tore open the Bugles bag and munched a giant handful of salty goodness. “What’s with that nasty cheese?”

“I told you. Dollar Store.” He pulled the plastic rap off the container and sniffed it. “Mmm. I don’t think it’s French.”

“Never get Dollar Store cheese. Or sushi.”

Ellis rolled his eyes and grabbed his glass. “So, what’s the scoop?”

She unmuted the TV. “Postal guy thinks the sinkhole is a portal to hell.”

“Ooh.” Ellis scanned the box of chocolates on the coffee table. “Are there any brown sugar ones?”

“Seriously? Those were the first to go.”

He sucked his teeth, smacking them loudly as he zeroed in on a nut cluster. “You never think of the needs of others.”

“I just went through major trauma. You could be a little more understanding.”

“I understand that you ate all the brown sugar buttercreams, so…”

Jiffy ignored the comment and gestured to the screen. “Look at this, though. When did people become so delusional? Portal to hell?”

“I thought that was the Macy’s menswear department.”

“I thought it was the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Best China Crab Shack.”

Ellis stretched his tall frame across the blue velvet-and-down cushions. “Your couch is a portal. To laziness.”

“I like to be comfortable.”

“Yeah, but this thing grabs you and doesn’t let go. Oh, well. Chin chin.” He drained the rum drink in one gulp.

Jiffy pondered the black emptiness of the sinkhole on the television screen, seen from above by way of an intrepid traffic helicopter pilot angling for investigative reporter status. “I wonder how close he’ll fly to it,” Jiffy said.

“You mean, you wonder if you could see inside, like see how far down it goes?” Ellis leaned forward, resisting the gravity of the couch. “From here, you can’t really see the bottom, can you?”

“Well, it is dark,” Jiffy answered doubtfully. She had thought the same thing, though; the gaping chasm seemed as dark and empty as her love life.

A blast of synthetic trumpets and a thumping drumbeat interrupted her pity party as Breaking News bled across the screen and blotted out the sinkhole. “We have breaking news at this hour,” the blonde Barbie-doll anchor said anxiously. She touched her earpiece, frowned, and blinked at the teleprompter in front of her.

“Jesus, everything is breaking news now,” Ellis griped, jiggling the ice in his glass. “President gets a hangnail. Uber driver gets lost in eternal loop on the cloverleaf.”

Jiffy shushed him so she could hear. “It might be important.” Ellis snorted as the blond woman read. “The President today announced plans to—” He grabbed the remote and switched the television off.

“Why did you do that?” Jiffy grabbed for the remote, but he kept it out of her reach.

“Enough of this doom and gloom nonsense. Anything that twit says will just push you further into a downward spiral,” Ellis said reasonably. “Now, honey. Let’s talk about the real breaking news. The real breaking-up news.”

“Fuck.” She slumped into the couch, dejected. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Of course, you don’t.” He poured more rum into his tumbler on the table, splashed Coke into it and swirled it with his finger. “But talk about it we must.”

“He came in, he brought her with him—”

“What’s her name? Pushcart? Pashmina?”
“Prishka.” She took a sip of rum. “He brought her, they took the rest of his stuff, they tried to talk to me, I ignored them. They left. End of story.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Ellis shook his head. “Not the end of story. You are terribly damaged.”

She sighed and stared at the black mirror of the television screen, where she saw a middle-aged woman with nothing to live for, and her gay boyfriend. “Maybe.” She turned to look at him. “Why don’t you move in with me? Then we could hang out all the time.”

He rolled his eyes. “We’ve talked about this, sugar. It just wouldn’t suit my...lifestyle.”

“I don’t care who you bring back here. I’m totally nonjudgmental.”

“I know that, Jif. It’s just that I’d feel weird about it.”

Like an insensitive 2 by 4, the reality of Paul’s leaving metaphorically hit Jiffy square in the forehead. She shakily put her drink down again. Hot tears rushed down her cheeks and she swatted them away.

“Oh, hon,” Ellis said softly. He put his free arm around her without spilling his drink. “I know he wasn’t even what you wanted, but you want something. It’s hard to let go of what you don’t want when it leaves you empty.”

She choked on snot and tears, nodding. “He…he…we haven’t had sex for, like, at least a year.”

Ellis nodded knowingly. “You didn’t want to, did you?”

“No,” she whispered. “But I didn’t not want to, either.”

He squeezed tightly. “Remember that time I was dating the doctor who looked like Neil Patrick Harris?”

“The one we called Doogie? What was his real name?”

“Randall.”

She nodded. “You were going to get married.”

“Right. But remember, the closer we got, the more scared I got. And you told me that being scared was a sign that I was doing something right. I absolutely have this vivid memory of us sitting by the river on a bench in the cold, and you told me I should fight that fear and just go for it. You were so much yourself at that moment, and I could see you so clearly. You were brave, and strong, and you just knew what was true. And I believed you.”

A cluster headache began to march across Jiffy’s forehead. “Yeah. I remember that.”

“So, I took him up to Antonio’s Restaurant, the rooftop bar, so we could have a sweeping view of the city lights at night, and it was perfectly clear. We could see all the constellations and the moon was just a fingernail, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Like a technicolor Doris Day movie.”

The headache had decided to conduct a parade through her cerebellum, and many very incompetent marching bands were participating, with extra tubas and stabby flag twirlers. “Doris Day movie. It was the perfect setting. I’ve heard this story —”

“Hush. I’m making a point. We were drinking champagne on the outside patio at the top of the restaurant, and I could just feel how right it was. You know, the feeling of being in phase with the universe, of being in exactly the right place at the right time with the right person.”

Jiffy leaned forward, hands on knees, as if she might puke. “El, I already know how the story ended. Why are you telling me again?”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “We’re there, bathed in starlight, drinking champagne, and the ring is in my pocket. All I have to do is get down on one knee, look up into his warm, brown eyes and say the words. And do you know what I did, Jiffy?”

“Yes, I actually do know—”

“I fucking choked. I drained the champagne glass, laughed in a carefree, Noel-Coward-comedy way, and said to him ‘Look at Orion’s belt!’ I mean. I just let the moment go by. I laughed it off.”

“And he broke it off the next week. And then he married a hot nurse from the Philippines a month after.” Jiffy nodded. “And you couldn’t return the ring.”

“And I couldn’t return the ring!” Ellis’ voice rang off the ceiling. “Nothing but regret from top to bottom. So why am I sharing this story right now in your hour of crisis?”

“No idea.” She plucked another chocolate and popped it into her mouth.

“Because you are at the same crossroads. You are at a pivotal moment in your life. So was I. I had a choice: I could fold up my tent and turn into a sad gay hermit gently graying as I watch Drag Race alone, or I could use it as a learning experience and go out into the world and find my real true love. I think you know what I chose.”

“You’re still single.”

“Exactly. I chose to become a hermit. I haven’t had sex with anyone whose last name I know for months.”

“I don’t think that fits the strict definition of a hermit—”

“My life, my rules. The point is, I haven’t made a real connection to another man since that happened. I’ve been terrified. I’ve been paralyzed. Stuck. Using our friendship as an anesthetic to numb the pain of disappointment.”

“Thank you?”

“And you are trying to go down that same road now, Jeffra Pembroke. And I will not allow it. I love you and I am not going to let you turn into the straight white female version of me.”

“Out of curiosity, what would that look like?” She frowned, debating on whether or not to snag another candy.

“Paul is gone. He’s not coming back. That train has left the station, but you have a choice to make. Are you going to just fold up your tent and watch the news all day, eat chocolate, get fatter, feel miserable, get diabetes, lose your feet, and become the saddest middle-aged woman in America? Or will you choose a different path?”

Spent from his speech, Ellis deflated like a Macy’s parade balloon after Thanksgiving, sinking into the spongy couch. “Chocolate.”

Jiffy chose a vanilla buttercream and shoved it into his mouth.

“Do you know what happened to him? Doogie?”

Ellis chewed the chocolate, moving his jaw like a cow in exaggerated, circular motions. “I believe I read that he’s doing very well, living in Pago Pago or Bora Bora or Walla Walla. Point is, what are we going to do with you?”

Tears threatened to spill out again, so Jiffy coughed to cover it. “We didn’t even talk about him leaving. He told me. Just stood in front of the TV and told me one night before bed, and then he slept on the couch. He just ambushed me with it. What was I supposed to do?”

In truth, Paul had tried to talk to her, many times. The problem was that Jiffy was very good at ignoring things she didn’t want to hear, and the end of her marriage was not something she wanted to hear about.

“See, I never thought Paul was a great fit anyway.” Ellis stretched his long arms across the back of the sofa. “Nice guy, sure. Hard worker. But you’re a unicorn. You’re a chimera.”

“What is that? I always wondered. And how do you say it?”

“Shim-ear-ah? CHIM-er-a? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. No one says it anyway.”

“You just did.”

Ellis sighed, exasperated. “You always find a way to deflect any unpleasant conversation. Point is, Paul wasn’t extraordinary enough for someone like you. And that’s why it ultimately didn’t work out.”

“I think it was mostly that I never took off my sweatpants.”

“See? There you go again. Deflecting with your razor-sharp humor.”

Jiffy stretched and turned it into a chocolate grab, popping one more truffle into her mouth.

“We both need to get out there.” Ellis almost got off the couch. “But maybe not today.”

Jiffy took advantage of his ennui to grab the remote and turn on the TV again. They were still on about the huge hole downtown, which meant there wasn’t much else to talk about, no real news. Nothing to distract.

“I know you know I’m right about this. Maybe we need some time to grieve, though.” Ellis sighed. “Doogie was just kind of perfect, though. I think of him, probably way too much. The man who got away.”

“You would’ve hated being married to a doctor. I should know. Paul worked weird hours.”

“Paul was a plastic surgeon. It’s not like he operated on peoples’ hearts or anything.” Ellis sniffed in disapproval.

“Rhinoplasty can save lives.”

He shot her an eye roll. “Please. Don’t try and make him out to be a saint now that he’s gone. Nose jobs are optional.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s gone now, and he’s not coming back.” New tears threatened to spring forth and she willed them back. “I have to be an adult about it. I have to move forward. Right?”

“Right,” Ellis said, not sounding too convinced. “But what are you moving toward? That’s going to be the big question. For both of us, I guess.”

Jiffy didn’t like to think about that. What was ahead of her? A life of solitary meditation on America media and a fuck ton of chocolate? Shit. That was depressing. And work? Going back to the community college library, a gray and tattered popcorn-ceiling rectangle stuck somewhere in 1970, seemed both pointless and sad. Look for another job? Her stomach churned at the mere thought of starting over, looking at job descriptions, realizing she didn’t have the dazzle necessary to be a superstar in any field. Superstars got jobs. Fat, middle-aged divorced ladies got whatever might be left.

“I can read your face,” Ellis noted. “You’re going dark, really dark. We need to get out of here. Get a change of scene.”

“Do you have a spare 50k so we can vacation on the French Riviera?” Her cat, Mr. Cranks, jumped up in her lap, sending up a small cloud of ginger-cat fur that gravitated toward her clothes as if she were magnetic and the cat was made of iron filings. She rubbed his ears, and he tried to nip her hand.

She shoved the cat off her lap. Fuck husbands, fuck cats, fuck living. All of this was a cruel waiting game for death. A Kafka-esque farce of suffering in all its varied shades and flavors. Dark, depressing, a black parade to the—

Ellis sat up as if electrified. “I know! I have an amazing idea! Let’s go see the sinkhole!”

“You mean, drive down there?”

“Yes!”

“What about parking?” She was really considering the annoyance of putting on clothes that didn’t fit and shoes that pinched. “I don’t want to.”

“You never want to do anything.” Ellis stood up, grabbed her wrist and pulled her up too. “No arguments. We’ll see the sinkhole, have some lunch, maybe go shopping. It’ll do you good. I think you need a change of scenery.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I’m not wearing a bra.”

“Who cares? Don’t wear a bra. I promise I’ll control my urge to jump your gigantic titties.”

“Snot.” She fake-slapped him on the shoulder and moved to find some clothes that didn’t make her feel like a stuffed sausage.

There are many reasons for this. Mostly, like all of you, I’ve been worn down by the cruelty and abject disappointment in our federal government. It only seems to get worse every single day, and no one with any power seems to do anything to make it better. I know there are probably people in government doing something, but it stands in stark contrast to the videos of innocent people getting their faces blown off.

Like many of you, I have been protesting nearly every week since January of last year. It makes me feel less alone. Now, of course, it feels much more dangerous, but I’ll still do it.

I don’t think I’ll be writing much on Substack, so I’ve canceled all paid subscriptions. I can’t promise to be a presence here; what I have to say is absolutely not important to this moment. I have no insights on how to fight this. I have no secret information to share, or military insight, or stories of the Holocaust and 1930s Germany. So I feel like I have nothing much to add to our current conversation.

I am querying a new book, which feels a little like having a child in this environment: an act of abject hope. If I somehow find an agent and a publisher, I will certainly let you know.

Other than that, if you want to communicate, feel free to email me at preble books at g mail dot com.

I love you all, and I hope things get better. I know it’s hard to see how. But as crazy as it sounds, I still have hope.

This is a display I put together pre-Covid. I was high school librarian, which was the best job I ever had.

I grew up in Ohio, and my mother took us to the library frequently. It was my favorite thing to do. I would say it saved my life because reading saved my life.

I didn’t own my own book until I was about 1974, when I was 13. My mom’s sister, Aunt Eileen, sent me a boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, books she knew I would love. I think Aunt Eileen loved me so much because I was one of the few nieces and nephews (maybe the only one) who went absolutely nuts over books and writing. It was how I spent all my free time. I would sit on our covered porch and read my library books or sit at the desk in my room and write stories by hand in legal pads.

I even had several jobs in our local Lima, Ohio library. First I worked in research and was a glorified go-fer when people needed back issues of magazine from the basement. When I wasn’t fetching, I was shelving or reading back issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, or Omni (I miss you!) or Science Fiction Monthly. Later, I worked in the Childrens Department.

October 1984 Omni Magazine, which I’d love to read now. I don’t think they predicted anything close to what’s happened.

In reading the Chronicles of Narnia, which I re-read every few years or so, I knew that Christian mythos was embedded in the entire story. It could be read as simply a tale of adventures, or it could be read as Christian allegory, and both have value. I grew up Catholic, so I didn’t examine any of the religious themes at that time in my life, but lately, a lot of the things that are in that book have pinged in my brain.

First, the so-called Christians of the right-wing oligarch party are not Christians in any way that anyone would recognize. They favor cruelty and dehumanization, where Jesus embraced everyone and fed and healed people. I think it’s ironic that today’s brand of white christian nationalist decries all of these things and calls them ‘woke’.

I saw a post on social media from a woman who had taken a screenshot of some ‘woke’ books in her elementary daughter’s classroom. The books were guides to empathy and kindness. How anyone claiming to be Christian can reject empathy and kindness as negative qualities is living a lie they tell themselves.

Yeah, how dare we teach kids about being empathetic or kind? What are we, crazy socialists?

Back to Narnia, a place I’d very much love to live in. I used to sit in my upstairs cupboard for hours hoping that Aslan would appear and whisk me away. Aslan is a giant golden lion, a stand-in for Christ, who sacrifices himself for the good of all but comes back stronger than ever. I don’t care if you believe in Jesus or not, Aslan is a great character who is selfless and has a love for everyone, even the non-believers.

The last book in the series, The Last Battle, takes the protagonists (the Pevensey siblings) back to Narnia and a donkey named Puzzle puts on a lion skin and pretends to be Aslan. I don’t think he used orange makeup or fiber insulation for hair. Shift, a greedy ape who probably looked like Stephen Miller, becomes Puzzle’s dupe and spokesmonkey, profiting off the addled ass. Things progress and eventually, all the kind Narnians are either punished for defying this fake Aslan, or, in the case of Tirian (the descendent of the true kings of Narnia) are nailed to a tree for their ‘treason.’ Some do see the fake messiah and reject him, but they are ostracized by the Narnians who bought into the whole fake-donkey-Aslan thing.

A band of dwarves who live by the motto "'the dwarves are for the dwarves” enter a stable, waiting for the truth to reveal itself. When Aslan decides the corrupted Narnia cannot be saved, he transports all of the residents to a higher-plane version of Narnia, the true paradise. He includes everyone, even those who have done great evil, but here’s where I see the biggest parallel: the dwarves in the donkey shed cannot see paradise. They are living in filth and darkness and because they are unable to believe in even the possilibity of a better, more beautiful world, they cannot see it.

They are the “dwarves for the dwarves” and don’t believe anyone else, so even when their smelly stable is transported to paradise, it does not appear to them. They remain committed to their own truth, which is small, petty, insular, and violent, and full of shit. They were the perfect model of a modern conspiracy theory. They knew what they knew, and no amount of evidence would prove them wrong because they felt they knew what was true. Their stagnant beliefs and their inability for flexible thinking doomed them to eternity in a dark donkey shed full of filth.

This was the edition I got…in the glorious 1970s.

I read an impressive blog called A Pilgrim in Narnia written by Brenton Dickieson who, in writing about The Last Battle, said this: “At a much deeper level, conspiracy thinking enclaves, ideological thought turbines, unsearching skepticism, talk about “us” and “them”–“the dwarfs are for the dwarfs” is the cry in the text again and again–and all manners of dwarfish thinking lead to one basic reality: if we have shut our eyes to certain kinds of evidence we are in danger of becoming insensible to the truth.

And, it seems to me that from the text, there is a possibility that a loss of truth leads also the loss of a voice–and, indeed, the loss of what makes us human.”

Loss of what makes us human. I see this all around, in the senseless ICE detentions and deportations of people who are following legal procedure and going to immigration court, in the anti-Contitutional military takeovers (or attempts at takeovers…) of American cities, in the racist rhetoric and the flat-out evil smallness of Stephen Miller. The entire cabinet of the US government appears to be living in a dark donkey shed with a lying, shameless ape. They refuse or pretend not to see the truth.

I’ve waited for Aslan my whole life, and I can say that I have seen him in many people. My friends Melinda and Dave who are sponsoring poor children in a school in Tanzania; in the weekly protests of my fellow Californians who will not endorse the cruelty and abyssmal policy of the current administration; in the teachers and parents who stand in the hot sun to beg for signatures to recall school board members who voted to close the high school libraries, effectively banning books. And dammit, people are tired. Good people are tired.

But we have to move further up and further in. Keep going. Take a breath, take care of ourselves and each other, and walk toward the better future we see for ourselves and our children, and for society.

We cannot hide in the donkey shed and pretend it’s all okay. If we do, we get the world we have created. Lewis’ book ends with the destruction of corrupt Narnia, and the transporting of all those who believe into the paradise that awaits.

We can make it ourselves. Aslan is within all of us if we look past the donkey shed.

OOO baby do you know what that’s worth? OOOO heaven is a place on earth.

Points to anyone geeky enough to know what this graphic comes from!

I see a vision in my mind of a woman with a cloth held over her mouth, as if someone is chloroforming her but also saying “there, there. If you don’t fight it, it will be easier for you.”

I know this image represents how I sense the world right now. I feel immense rage about the state of our nation, and despite all the protesting locally I do, I feel as if those in power want me (and all women, specifically) to just relax and give in to the evils that are all around us. Giving in is so much easier. We’re going to win anyway, so save your energy. Don’t worry your pretty little head about the injustices of this country, this world, your neighborhood. Shh. Shh.

And to that I say: I bought pepper spray, a stun gun, and a little pink ring with a knife inside.

I am not by nature someone who likes conflict. I’d prefer to have a peaceful life free of drama, but I have noticed that drama finds me somehow. This has been true in my personal life where I collected (unknowingly) people whose needs were so great that no one could fulfill them, and I tried anyway. I suspect I exuded caregiver vibes and drew people to me who needed healing in one way or another. Some of those people, specifically my students, needed that help and healing, and grew from it and have given it back in return. Some people, usually masquerading as friends, have drawn from the well of healing and are never filled. I would let myself bleed energy for them until one day I realized that all that resulted was I was depleted, unable to care for anyone, including myself.

I am finished with that. I still consider myself a healing force, a fighter, a person who will stand up for injustice. I don’t have any illusion that what I can do will move the needle in a real, demonstrable way because I am only one middle-aged woman with bad eyesight and a janky knee and auto-immune disorders. My physical powers are pretty limited. I do, however, believe that all of us collectively represent a force mightier than the evil that currently runs the show. We together form a whole greater than the sum of our parts.

I frequently read social media posts from Canada, where loving Canadian citizens post support dog memes and moose memes and general encouragement to those of us in the US who are vocal in our opposition to the current reign of terror and incompetence. There are good people in every place in this world. Sometimes it is more challenging to tamp down fear and be brave, and sometimes it’s enough (and all you can do) to post funny, hopeful memes of Canadian Anti-Despair Dogs. We all do what we can.

I highly recommend you subscribe to the CANADA RESISTS Substack.

I am spending a lot of time in my writing space these days. It is where I receive back energy from all I have spent. I also seek out community in places where I know it will be received: protests, liberal churches, school board recall committees. But I know my energy must be preserved for writing and creativity, because those are my real contributions.

I am very determined to finish my next book, Jiffy Down Under, and I am sure it will be published and it will help people through this absurd time in our country’s history. I don’t say that out of hubris. I know in my soul that this book is a tool of healing even though it is not political, nor is it a self-help book, nor is it religious. It is a book that will comfort those of us whose souls cry out for solace. I have no idea how it is going to get out to the world, but it will.

I am nearing the end of it, and know how it will end (I think…things in writing often change when you sit down and actually do it). I am living in a dream state most days, feeling disconnected from so many things of this world. I am in the state of imago, my molecules immutable, waiting to become what they will be. The book is part of that, and I can no longer avoid finishing it.

I am “kicking against the pricks,” a biblical term that means fighting something that you cannot win. I have repurposed it to mean something else, though. When the apostle Luke wrote it in the book of Acts in the bible, he meant it as a message of futility. I mean it as a literal kicking against the pricks that surround us, and I don’t think I need to name names here.

I can’t say that I feel happy. I feel grounded. I feel focused. I feel finished with distractions and fear and other peoples’ drama.

I am on a journey, and open to all avenues.

LAST WEEK TONIGHT host John Oliver in an official HBO photo. He looks pretty friendly, huh?

THIS IS KIND OF LONG, BUT I ASSURE YOU, IT IS WORTH READING. EVERY WORD.

To tell you the John Oliver story, I first have to tell you why I put my not-so-cleverly -disguised email as a comment on his BlueSky account.

Since the Constitution went AWOL (courtesy of the Taco Supreme Court), I have been trying to find ways to channel my rage and despair, as I’m sure many of you have been also. Locally, I’m very involved in the recall of evangelical school board members who are trying very hard to decimate my local public high school system where I worked for decades.

To that end, I thought I’d take a chance and put a comment on John Oliver’s BlueSky account for Last Week Tonight, hoping it might catch his eye or the eye of whoever does his social media. Here’s what I posted as a comment on his last story before he took a summer hiatus:

So, I posted that and just figured nothing would happen. Imagine my surprise when I received an email a couple of weeks later! A reply from John Oliver! Yeah, right.

I read it, and thought “wow, it really sounds like him.” A colleague weighed in and was sure it was AI, but we tried to replicate the tone in Chat GPT and all of the attempts were laughable. None came close to mimicking his unique tone and word choice.

Maybe it WAS real? He is known for doing stories on things that appear small but are microcosms of larger problems like White Christian Nationalism trying to eliminate public education and ‘wokeness’.

This began a week-long adventure in a fantasy I will not soon forget. Am I disappointed? Yeah. Do I regret it? Not really.

I give you my entire email history with the supposed John Oliver. I guess my question for you is twofold: 1- would you have believed this? and 2) why would someone bother?

July 17, 2025

Dear Preble,

I saw your comment on one of my posts

First of all: WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. HELL.

You’re telling me that in East San Diego, a group of *evangelical district trustees* fired a teacher... then had him help *investigate his former boss*, whom they apparently described as — and I quote — a *“lesbian witch”* (which sounds less like a HR concern and more like the plot of a deeply confused Disney Channel Halloween special)... and then rehired that same man as “Chief of Staff” for a *generous \$187,000 salary*, only to fire him *again*?

That’s not school governance — that’s the plot of a mid-budget streaming series called **“Evangelical Thunderdome: Bureaucracy Edition.”** And I swear, if it didn’t involve taxpayer money and a genuinely deranged misuse of power, I’d almost respect the absurdity of it.

But here’s the thing: this isn’t just chaos. This is what happens when people treat school boards like crusade battlegrounds instead of institutions meant to *serve children*. It’s petty, it’s dangerous, and it’s aggressively performative in the way only people who yell “parental rights” while banning books can be.

And to fire someone, rehire them for almost *double*, and fire them *again*? That’s not leadership. That’s just expensive emotional whiplash.

Please, keep sending stories like this. Because the more light we shine on these people, the harder it is for them to keep hiding behind God while acting like cartoon villains with a school budget and a grudge.

Yours in disbelief,

John Oliver

July 18 (my reply)

Hi John Oliver!

Thank you so much for noticing my post. It made me as happy as a John Oliver Cake Bear. And yes, it is a really bad Evangelical Thunderdome.

There was another meeting last night in which the board actually VOTED to follow the Brown Act, California's open meeting law. You shouldn't have to vote to follow the law, although I know in Washington, they skip that step and just don't follow it.

They also have hired Elite Security for every meeting to be sure the community members don't get out of hand. Last night, they told us we had to stand outside the school grounds to do our rally and press conference, and we said, "Uh, no." I thought I'd have to deploy the silly string I brought, but thankfully the old and tired security people in the red jackets decided it wasn't worth it. So we had our rally, had our press conference, which I will link here:

There are so many video clips of their absurd board shenanigans, and I think the best is the San Diego Union-Tribune story where they requested, through PRR, the texts that the four horseshit men of the mediocre apocalypse sent to each other and to Jerry Hobbs, the disgraced former employee who won the lottery with a $186K bonus prize for witch hunting. Here's that story: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JLewtL8nx3HYITKcc4nO0CDRw7t18ZkX/view?usp=sharing

Not to mention that their former attorney (JW Howard, who worked with RFK Jr. presumably prior to the whale-head-on-the car incident) who hired the fired school teacher etc, paid for three 'ghost' candidates to run in the board elections to fool enough people into voting for them, I guess because they had attractive names like 'Marsha Christman". A holy Brady.

A lot of the press is compiled on our Recall website,

http://recallthetrustees.com

And on the district's website, you can see recordings of previous meetings if anyone on your staff can sit through them like we all have. https://vimeo.com/user19457081

If there's anything else I can do to connect you with sources, let me know.

Laura Preble

619 504-8902

July 21 (from J.O.)

Hi Laura Preble,

First of all, a John Oliver Cake Bear?? That might be the single most charming mental image I’ve had since I learned the Dutch word for “hagelslag” just means “sprinkles,” but sounds like something you’d scream during a bar fight.

Now, let’s talk about what you just casually dropped into my inbox like it wasn’t the plot of a deleted Veep episode written on ayahuasca:

The board voted to follow the law.

I’m sorry that’s like voting to stop robbing banks halfway through the getaway. That’s not governance, that’s parody.

Elite Security was brought in to stop parents from expressing opinions.

Because nothing screams “we’re here for the kids” like hiring a security force to protect a public school board from the public. The Roman Empire didn’t collapse this hard.

You were told to stand off school grounds to rally.

The fact that you brought silly string just in case makes you a hero. The fact that you didn’t need it because the security guards were too tired to care? That makes you a legend.

Text messages between the “Four Horseshit Men of the Mediocre Apocalypse” and a disgraced former employee who got paid six figures to chase lesbian witches.

That sentence alone could be an Emmy-winning season arc. Also, thank you for the link. I’ve read it twice and I still can’t believe it didn’t end with someone getting sued by both the ACLU and Hogwarts.

Ghost candidates?

I had to pause. They literally used fake names in a board election? What is this, Scooby-Doo for fascists?

So yes, I would very much like to:

Keep following this.

Point researchers (or interns we like slightly less) to the meeting archive.

Highlight the Recall the Trustees site, brilliant name, by the way; catchy, clear, and one court filing away from its own merch line.

And if you'd be willing to speak directly, whether on or off camera, someone from the show (hypothetically, or emotionally still me) should absolutely reach out.

Also: if you ever do use the silly string, please film it in landscape mode. Just in case we need it in a montage titled “Democracy’s Last Stand... But With Party Supplies.”

You’re doing amazing, necessary work. They’re scared, and they should be. That’s what happens when good people call bullshit publicly, relentlessly, and occasionally with brightly colored aerosol.

With deepest admiration and just enough rage,

John Oliver

July 21, 2025 (from me)

Hi John ( if I may now call you John)

We all desperately want you to interview Dr. Gary Woods, the board president. He has a white lab coat that he wears for all photo ops, but he is a doctor of theology. He has the IQ of a moldy potato.

He also started a school called Equip Bible Institute which is affiliated with one of the mega churches here. My very favorite thing from EBI is the Woods Mathematical/Logical Formula, which I will include here because it shows the sincere mountain of delusion under which this troll dwells. https://ww2.shadowmountain.org/Content/HtmlImages/Public/Documents/General/EBI/EBI%20English/Woods%20Logical-Mathematical%20Formulas%20for%20Students%20and%20Teachers%20-%202009.pdf

Oh, and John Howard, the attorney who paid for the ghost candidates ( I believe they are real people, but they did not campaign or run) ? He used to work with RFJ Jr. I mean, I’m a writer, but this stuff would never fly as fiction.

Anyone you’d like to interview in our group is happy to help. And San Diego is much nicer right now than New York, if that’s where you are.

Laura Preble

PS - are you really you? Because I dropped the Cake Bear in there to see if it was really you. You featured it on your show!

See what I did there? I put in a little Easter Egg to see if it really WAS John Oliver, because surely he would remember the Cake Bear segment, right? If you want to see the whole thing, here is the link:

July 22, 2025 7:13 am (J.O. reply)

Hi Laura,

I appreciate your message and the information you’ve shared. I do think it would be best for us to speak in person, as I’m currently limited by some encryption issues on my devices I wasn’t able to view the link you sent.

If you have any documents or details related to this issue, it would be helpful to compile those ahead of time so we can go over everything clearly when we meet.

To coordinate the meeting, you'll just need to go through the team that handles my schedule they’ll make sure everything is arranged properly.

Lastly, if there’s still any uncertainty about my identity, I’d encourage us to clear that up now. I want to make sure we move forward with mutual trust and clarity.

Thanks again,

John Oliver

July 22, 7:20 am (me)

I’m sure it’s you. (I was not really sure at all.)

I’d love to speak with one of your team.My number is 619 504-8902.

Laura

July 23, 5:53

Good day, Laura Preble,

I completely understand the importance of trust, and I want to assure you that you have no reason to doubt my sincerity. I’m more than willing to provide any form of verification you require within reason, of course. (Though I draw the line at interpretive dance. Let’s not make this weird.)

That said, please understand that my time is somewhat limited, which may affect how promptly I can respond.

Could you kindly let me know what specific verification you’d like? Also, out of curiosity, have you shared any details of our communication with anyone else?

Looking forward to your reply (eventually, probably while standing in a queue somewhere).

Warm regards,

John Oliver

July 23 6:12 am

Good day, Laura Preble,

I hope you’re well, and not currently battling any red-jacketed security guards or ghost candidates.

I’ve really appreciated your messages and would like to continue the conversation more privately. Here’s my **Signal account**:

https://signal.me/#eu/bCWYmFVH43K7T20kPmEZkRMZ8JKJcvByTFPQbw3ODp8OpLIC1T5IfYEwPhTzcr7e

it's encrypted, secure, and slightly less chaotic than my inbox.

I’d like us to build some trust and understanding before we meet in person, especially given the wild situation we’re navigating.

Looking forward to hearing from you there.

Best,

John Oliver

July 23, 2025 7 am (from me)

I’m sure it’s you.

I’d love to speak with one of your team.My number is 619 504-8902.

Laura

July 23, 2025 9:20 am (me)

I don’t have Signal - could someone from your office call me?

July 23, 9:46am

Good day Laura Preble,

There is no formal reason why the call will be initiated, this is why I have to build a mutual bond of friendship with you before this call is made.

Can you download the signal app for us to continue to communicate?

Thank You.

July 23 (me)

I can’t download signal. I might end up bombing someone.

July 23 10:45 am (me)

Guess I should’ve listened to my cake bear instincts, huh? I’m not sure what the long con is here, but kudos to you or your AI algorithm because I truly believed you were THE John Oliver. I’d love to know what you get out of this, though. Satisfaction? A shakedown? I was a teacher. If it’s a shakedown, all I can offer you is year-old Otis Spunkmeyer muffins from a WASC in-inservice or a $5 Starbucks gift card from the raffle for teacher appreciation day.

Yours in disbelief

Laura

July 23, 2025 10:45 am (from me )

Thank you for your reply. I so, so want to believe it’s you, of course. I would never ask anyone to dance interpretively, because that’s just cruel.

If you could ask your management team at Avalon to verify that this, indeed, you, that would be helpful. Or, if you could have someone call me to let me know they actually work for the show (maybe one of your least likable interns) and give me some assurances, that would be great too.

I know you’re very busy this week, since you come back on Sunday (yay!) I will definitely be watching, as I do every time you have a show.

I’m very wary of links, of course, because there are so many people who find so many ways to impersonate and scam people (I’m not saying you are doing that, of course.) So, you can understand my wariness to link to an unknown signal email.

JULY 24

If you’d like to keep collaborating, great. If not, I get it. No hard feelings. But for the record: Cake Bear would’ve trusted me. Probably.

Yours in mutual disbelief,

John Oliver

So, that’s the end. What do you think? I’d love your theories. I had a blast sending these back and forth with whoever it was. But WHY would they spend that much time/energy just to get me to link to a Signal account? I’d love to hear what you think.

Standing on the deck of the Perlan museum, with all the clouds.

Have you lately wanted to either run away or hide in your house?

I’ve felt that way. My husband and I split the difference and traveled to another country where things weren’t insane: Iceland.

Iceland is probably the country that the current cankle-in-chief thinks is Greenland because it’s actually green and not icy. A lot of Americans are traveling there right now, because it’s not part of Europe and it feels safer, more remote; it is, in fact, at least an 11-hour flight from California, so it does feel like you’ve escaped to the other side of the world. The temperature is delightfully cool (45-55 degrees Fahrenheit) and often drizzly, with over-stuffed pillows of clouds filling the expansive skies.

I love to travel, although more and more I absolutely hate to fly. That’s fodder for another essay, though, so I won’t go into the crazy absurdities we encountered on this particular journey. But we did fly to Reykjavik, took a tour around the island, and ended up back in Reykjavik, the country’s capital and biggest city. I want to talk about some things I learned on our trip, and they are not travel tips. They are life tips.

There were at least three rainbow roads that we saw in Iceland. No Mario.

Most of the towns in Iceland are quite small. Reykjavik, the capital, is by far the largest with a population of around 132,000, so that gives you an idea of scale. San Diego, where we live, has a population of about 1.4 million people, so more than the entire population of Iceland (about 400,000). This makes the pace quite a bit slower than life in the US, which was wonderful. The air is clean, the water is clean, there is almost no homelessness, and the people seem incredibly happy. They all speak English, because they are taught it starting in kindergarten, so it was easy to get around and ask questions.

My first lesson in Iceland was learning how it feels to be in a place that aligns with nature rather than fights it. The people of Iceland certainly have a lot they could fight: active volcanoes, avalanches in higher elevations, weather, cold, months of uninterrupted darkness. But in all cases, they have found inventive ways to adapt that we in the US seem unable to achieve. (I will say that since Iceland is so small, it is much easier for them to make decisions for the entire country. The US is basically 50-plus individual countries who all want to do things their way, which is our strength and our weakness.)

Inside the Perlan museum, where they have constructed an ice cave from actual glacial ice. And at the end, you get to play Game of Thrones.

When the volcano nearest a populated area became active after hundreds of years, Icelanders engineered a wall to hold the lava away from populated areas and tourist attractions like the Blue Lagoon. They evacuated entire small towns just in case. For the most part, these anti-lava measures work, though, so they’ve learned to live with it. They’ve also laid down geothermal conduit under the entire city of Reykjavik to heat the homes, sidewalks, streets and shops in winter. It’s a unique solution that most of us can’t do, but how clever!

In higher elevations, they have engineered avalanche fences to be sure unexpected snow doesn’t bury a town. And to lessen auto traffic, they have reliable, efficient public transportation in Reykjavik as well as pedestrian zones where walking is the way to get around. Cars do not reign supreme in Iceland; people walk, ride bikes, or snowmobiles in winter. Most cars are electric; there is clearly a wide infrastructure for electric cars, even in small towns.

Second lesson: boot corrupt politicians. In 2018, Iceland had a thing called the Klaustur Affair. Klaustur was a Reykjavik bar where several politicians were hanging out, and someone recorded them making misogynistic remarks. When it was made public, there were massive protests, and the politicians apologized publicly or were forced out of office. (Can you imagine? Misogynistic remarks!) Earlier, in 2009, there was an enormous financial crisis where all 3 major privately funded banks in the country defaulted. This ended with the country taking control of all of the banks, insuring Icelander’s deposits, and stabilizing the country over several years. There was a severe economic depression, the worst in the world when adjusting for size of the country. But they recovered because they saw that taking care of the people would mean new growth.

The small town of Seydisfjordur.

Instead, in the US, we bail out private banks when they get too greedy or invest badly. Our tax dollars keep them afloat in order to grow the wealth of people who are already too wealthy. As we’re seeing in our current government, taking care of the people here is the last priority. In Iceland, it is the first priority.

Djúpivogur,, and its wondrous eggs. There is one for every type of nesting bird type in the town.

The third lesson I learned happened in the smallest of towns, Djúpivogur, a fishing town on the eastern edge of the country. One of the highlights of this town is a display of polished granite eggs. They are very proud of the eggs, and they have become a tourist attraction (kind of). With our guide, who teaches school during the year, we hiked around the town, visiting a tiny rock shop where the man who is passionate about all things stone showed us his fine collection of polished geodes and told stories of how he and his brother managed to haul giant rock down the mountain. Opening them was clearly like a Christmas present to them; they never knew what would be inside. I asked if he ever opened a rock and got nothing, and he said that’s usually what happened.

The Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat, Reyjkavik. These people have a great sense of humor.

Our guide told us about a saying in Iceland that is spelled “Þetta reddast” but is pronounced more or less like this: “thet-a-red-dust”. It means “things will work out okay”. It’s a little bit like the more American (and more depressing, in my opinion) “it is what it is” but it has a tinge more hope. The teacher-guide told us that since so many natural disasters happen in Iceland, people have learned to just go with the flow. They also have the sense that their community will support them, and that whatever happens, everything will eventually be alright. My mom used to say “this too shall pass,” which I say to myself every morning when I wake up and find out that some people are not dead yet.

Lupines grow everywhere in Iceland.

I did roam around Reykjavic looking for a charm to rid a person of large orange pests, but they didn’t have anything that would really work, so I settled on some gorgeous runes. I draw one or two every day and lately, the one I pull out of the bag has consistently been ‘joy’. I’m hoping that means “everything will work out” and I practice saying that Icelandic phrase every day.

My runes! And below, some bonus pictures….

There is so much random art in Iceland. Here I am trying not to become Meow Mix.

This Reykjavik church had a stained glass window of a curiously athletic baby Jesus.

Tale as old as time.

The first and only CBD store in Iceland. Cannabis is not legal there, but CBD is. Trust the Californians to find the ONLY kind-of weed store in the land.

I just found this photo absurdly appropriate.

I had a conversation with someone this past weekend who believes, with all her heart, that we are in the ‘End Times.’

This woman is quite intelligent, and an active community dynamo. We have a common cause: fighting the rampant spread of short-term vacation rentals in our unincorporated part of San Diego County. This has become a real problem for many of us, since San Diego County has ZERO restrictions, codes, guidelines, or licensing for these rentals. The city of San Diego has instituted stricter controls over this, but the county has not, so investors have flocked to what once was a very quiet community and purchased real estate and turned these places into party mansions. The one behind my house goes for $12,000 for a three-day stay in peak season.

So how did we get from fighting abusive short-term rentals to talking about the apocalypse?

I mentioned that I was also working on a school board recall in our community because four of the five members of the local high school board were decimating public schools here. At first the board claimed it was for budgeting reasons, although the numbers did not back that up. They said the district needed to ‘plan for future students.’ When many of us mentioned that there are CURRENT students who also need decent schools, we were ignored.

Four of the five school board members have, over the past two years, cut an entire department of teachers who were teaching tech to students in all nine schools; cut all nine district librarian positions; cut two counseling positions at every high school, leaving the remaining counselors with a higher caseload than the 500 students each counselor currently has. They raised the class size to 38, which, with averaging, will in reality be more like 40 or 42 students per core class. With 53-minute periods in most schools, that amounts to less than two minutes per student per class.

But back to the End of the World.

All dystopian disasters end with the cruel mutilation of dolls.

My friend, whom I haven’t yet met in person, questioned my comments about the school board. “Are you sure they aren’t telling the truth?” she texted. I replied that the four members of the board admitted it’s not about money. (A fifth board member, not in this particular gang of four, is baffled by the math and actions of the other four). “They say it’s about restructuring,’ I replied, “but they have no plan. The fifth board member even said he hasn’t seen any plans either.”

What I hadn’t mentioned is that all of this gang of four are affiliated with evangelical churches. None of the four have had kids in public school. They all either teach or tutor in private Christian school settings. That, of itself, is fine. My problem is that they are actively tanking a public school system, and I think it is because they are trying to destroy public schools.

We’ve seen this play out at the national level already. Gutting the Dept. of Education is the current administration’s way of kneecapping state and local districts, yanking money away from special education, and threatening the withholding of funds if people keep teaching real history and the reading of books they deem ‘inappropriate’. I did not go into any of this with my new compatriot; by a few of her comments, I thought she may even go to church with some of these board members.

You KNOW it’s not like this.

When I told her some of the details of the school board recall, she said that she had no children, but all of her friends home school their kids because public schools are so awful. I questioned how they home school high school kids when they get to higher-level subject content, and she said they just figure it out. I suppose some students can do it this way, if they’re smart and can find the resources. But I then mentioned that there are a lot of students in public school whose parents cannot afford to home school them or send them to private schools.

I explained how public schools were designed to offer equal opportunity to all kids, regardless of economic status. She had empathy for this and agreed that vouchers for private schools would undoubtedly hurt those students who come from poor families, or whose parents are working too many jobs to homeschool their kids. But as usual, when I bring this up, the real point becomes clear: we have changed from being people who want a better way for everyone to people who want a better way for only our own tribe.

I can sympathize with this. I was a public-school teacher for more than 30 years, so I know first-hand the challenges of public schools. I’ve also seen a steady erosion over those years of support for public schools. Teachers’ unions are demonized. (She did bring up that she thought the teachers’ union was driving all this division.) The right wing loves to depict unions as greedy suckers of resources, but I have found that to be far from the truth. Teachers are still underpaid compared to people in other fields with comparable education. And if you don’t think they work very hard, go to a high school and work for a day in a classroom.

The constant threat of gun violence is terrifying. I have been through numerous lockdowns at high schools, and there were two active shootings in high schools near the one where I worked (Santana and Granite Hills are the two schools where active shootings took place. I worked at West Hills at the time, and we were situated directly between those two schools and kept wondering when it would be our turn.) No amount of terrifying lockdown drills will help if a person with an automatic rifle wants to kill you. And receiving a Home Depot orange bucket to use as a toilet in emergencies really does not make you feel safe.

So, I get why people feel afraid. But rather than regulate guns and fund schools, the right-wing evangelical answer seems to be to kill public schools and funnel all that money into private Christian schools where every kid can be instructed in the ‘real’ truth of the end times and Jesus and the Bible. And that is fucking terrifying.

This woman with whom I’m fighting the short-term vacation rental fight is a good person. I can tell by how she talks and by her passion for making the community better. But when she quoted me a verse from the bible (one that I had never heard, actually), I had a stark realization. People in the mega evangelical churches don’t care about the rest of society because they think we’re a lost cause. If we don’t believe in Jesus and the End Times, we aren’t going to be saved anyway, no matter what happens.

And when I connected those dots, I realized that this is the avenue on which the administration proudly struts. I’m sure my friend has a deep faith that is very real to her, but the Orange Menace does not. He knows a group of suckers when he sees one, though, so using the religious right to further his financial aims makes total sense. There’s no zealot like a religious zealot, and since all of their actions are based on disprovable beliefs, they cannot be swayed.

Thoughts and prayers and forget about ‘other people’.

So, the real answer is this: screw everybody else. So what if Medicaid is cut? Those people probably aren’t Christians. So what if old people don’t get Social Security? If they belong to a church they’ll be taken care of. If they don’t, then they should probably just die and go to hell. Kids at schools? They need to be sheltered from woke ideology like caring for others, learning about other peoples’ belief systems and religions, learning real history rather than the literally white-washed crap the far right would have us believe. They are literally erasing real history from websites, books, and red-state schools.

All this seems counterintuitive to me. I was raised Catholic, and my dad spent most of his life helping the poor, opening soup kitchens, food pantries, clothing stores. But today’s evangelical Christians seem to have gone in a different direction than the one Jesus laid out. They seem more like NIMBY followers who say they have empathy for everyone else, but not at the cost of supporting a fair and equitable society.

Like the president, it’s all about them, their kids, their religion. Screw everybody else, because the End Times are here.

I think if Jesus does come back, he’s gonna be pissed.

I want to confess something. I read cards.

I’m not talking about poker, or even Tarot. I use a deck called W.I.T.C.H., Woman In Total Control of Herself, created by Angi Sullins. This is most closely described as an Oracle deck, I guess, but for me, it is kind of magical because on any given day if I pull cards from it, they answer my questions about myself.

Yesterday I was sitting on my couch, crying to my husband about the state of the world and the state of anxiety, confusion, and fear I find myself marinating in. I know that this is not good for me, and I know that compulsively scrolling through social media (even Bluesky) is not healthy. I am doing it anyway, almost to the point where I’m not doing anything else. So I marched myself into my office today and after arguing with my laptop (which, I like to think, is angry because I have been so far away from my creative work), I pulled out my deck.

And what do you know? When I asked, as I usually do, “what do I need to know right now?” I pulled three cards that answered my question and made me look at the entire political situation in a whole new light. So is the value of silence and going to the core of the soul.

The first card was called Goddess of Grace. This card speaks of giving grace to those who transgress, and to yourself. It describes a ritual of bringing the offender to a communal fire, and listing off all the good and valuable things they have done first, to remind them of who they are in their purest nature. Then the offender is offered compassion. They must make amends for their transgressions, but they are offered forgiveness first and foremost, and reminded of their sanctity. What a model of correction this is. Imagine if this worked in the ‘real’ world, and if all beings were treated with this level of love and kindness.

I’m not naïve, and I know that this is not how our current world works. We live in a world of punishment and pain and cruelty, especially at this moment. But the Goddess of Grace invites us to remember that there are other ways of doing things. And while I cannot fix the transgressions of hundreds of thousands of people who voted for the current Orange Menace, no matter how much I offer kindness, I can offer that to myself.

Kindness to myself looks like putting down my phone. It looks like ignoring the hundreds of people who offer to decode every little twitch of the current administration. It looks like spending time in nature, petting my dogs, noticing the things that are still beautiful and serene in this world. I don’t do this enough, and I am vowing to do it more, more, more.

The second card was the Phoenix. We all know what this is: a bird that emerges from the fire with a new form, rising to what will be. Again, this reminds me of our current situation; currently, it feels awful and it IS awful. Terrible things are being done in the name of our country, and I know I am not alone in feeling shame, disgust, and sadness. However, this has to happen for anything new to grow.

The United States has been broken for a long time, maybe since it began. We were built on the backs of slaves, and on the theft of the land. How could it not twist into an unrecognizable, misshapen monster? It feels to us that we’ve been here forever, but this country is unbelievably young, even when compared to other countries. Europe, Asia, Africa…all have more ancient civilizations that eventually fell and were remade.

Our lifespan is so comically short when you look at the long, long history of humans on Earth. We may not live through this current moment, but humanity will. The Phoenix asks us to look at the long, long road, not the short path we are on. It’s so hard to do this right now, I know. I wake up with a knot in my stomach every day. I’m worried for myself, for my children, for my former students, for all my friends and family. But what if, over the long haul, this upheaval transforms humanity into something better? Isn’t that worth discomfort?

I am, starting today, embracing this discomfort. I am embracing the not knowing. I will falter, and I will forget, but I hope I am strong enough to come back to myself when I slip.

Then I pulled the Psyche card.

Psyche speaks of the caterpillar and butterfly. The caterpillar literally dissolves in the chrysalis and turns into something called imago cells. These are not a caterpillar anymore, but they are also not yet a butterfly. The cells are coded with the image of what this goo will become, but the final form is not yet realized.

I feel very much like goo. Maybe you do too.

When I took the time to stop scrolling, go inward, and really look at myself, I felt a calm. I felt imago cells humming beneath what I used to be. I feel more brave and less afraid. I am reminded of my Self. I am imago.

There is a blueprint for change in my cells, in your cells, in the cells of every living thing. We evolve and change in nature, but as far as we know, only humans have the ability to picture the past and the future in the way that we do. This is a pitfall and a blessing. As soon as we let go of what we knew (what was) and embrace what we do not know (the future), the spinning stops. The rumination stops. The spiraling into social media doomscrolling stops (at least temporarily, but I am really going to try and make that permanent.)

This was exactly what I needed to hear today. I know it may sound woo-woo to you, and it may sounds crazy, and it may sound New Age-y in a way that you find distasteful, but for me, it helped me find my center again.

We are re-forming. We are trans-forming. We are imago.

What will we be next?

I haven’t written here for a bit, mostly because I’ve been occupied trying to keep my head from exploding. Being smart people (you’re reading this, after all), you may be experiencing these same symptoms of Being Intelligent in the Time of Stupid.

Here are the symptoms of BITS:

1. An intense need to read every single shred of information in order to be well informed.

2. An intense need to NOT read every single shred of information in order to pretend it’s all okay.

3. Rage and fear bubbling under the surface of your kind-of normal life like lava under a volcano.

4. An instinct to dig a big hole in your yard, throw in a pillow, blanket, several good books, and some snacks, cover it with something that allows light in but keeps bugs and rain out, and just stay there for three years.

5. An equally strong instinct to get out there, find others who believe in kindness, love, and the Constitution, and form community with them.

   

   Actual pin I actually wore to one of many political rallies.

I’m guessing a lot of you are experiencing BITS, at least sometimes. I find that the busier I am at positive things, the less I think about the DC Disaster (a great wrestling name should Tangelo Shitgibbon ever take up MMA sports) and the better I feel. But you can’t stay busy all the time, or at least I cannot. So let’s discuss those two chunks of time: the busy time and the down time

Busy Time:

My busy time has been occupied with the following: political activities at a local level and art. For political activities, which I believe every person in America should be doing right now in whatever way they can, I limit my focus to local events and causes. For example, I go weekly to a local protest against our do-nothing Congressweasel, Darrell Issa.

I encourage you to find a community where you live that will lift you up. This could be a book group, a church, a community center, a food bank, a choir, whatever works for you. Being in a group of other people with a positive goal is soul-nourishing. I am currently in a book group, a church, a choir, a theater show, a women’s group, a school board recall effort, an online writing class, and political action groups where I live.

This is not a time to go it alone. I am an introvert, and I love alone time, but I am finding a lot of community fills me up (and makes me tired, but it’s a side effect I’m willing to live with). Find your people!!

Even small interactions can boost your mood. I met a guy at the grocery store who was wearing an awesome tshirt that read LORD OF THE LIES with the Orange One’s silhouette on it, and I told him I loved it. He grinned and gave me a movie prop $100 bill stamped with BEN SAYS FUCK DJT. Benjamin Franklin, that is.

As you can see, I have a vintage Bernie shirt as well as a very loud Emotional Support Chicken named Kenneth Franklin Candycorn.

Down Time:

It’s so tempting to let fear or loathing take the wheel and drive you into a brick wall. Just ponder on any one of about a million things that are going wrong right now in the world, and those two feelings wash over everything like vomit waves. However, when I find myself in that mode, and without the energy to have Busy Time, I have found that a few things actually help me manage.

1. Get out into nature. This can be going into your backyard, to a park, a wild area near your house, a botanical garden, whatever. It can be petting your dogs. It can be hiking up a hill. Focus on the trees especially. Most of the trees you see have been there for generations. They have somehow managed to live unbothered by the stupid shit humans do, mostly. I find it soothing to know that when my time on Earth is over, there will most likely be trees there to keep carrying on in their wooden serenity.

2. Focus on pets. Pets are of-the-moment creatures. If you have pets that are cuddleable, even better. I have two dogs and a cat. They can all tell when I am overwhelmed, and they literally mob me to make me feel better. Griffin, my male dog, will put his nose between me and my phone if he thinks I’ve been on it for too long. All I have to do is go upstairs to my bedroom, and both dogs will take their positions on either side of me (or on top of my tummy if it’s really bad) and they will make be live in the present. The cat just yells for tuna, his way of showing that he cares. If you do not have pets, I’m sure you can go to a park and borrow a dog for a few minutes. Always ask dog owners if you may pet their dogs, but usually they say yes.

3. Listen to music or soothing tones. Music can dump dopamine into your brain. I heard Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, say this the other day on the Stephen Colbert show. He’s done all kinds of studies and measurements on this, but I’ll bet that if you love music, you already know this. It reminds you that there are people in the world who create art by sound, and who leave a legacy of beauty and grace in it for us to enjoy. I prefer Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, traditional jazz, or zydeco. I cannot be in a foul mood if there is zydeco music playing. Bonus points for dancing.

4. Escape into reading, movies, TV shows, or games. I do this probably more than I should. I LOVE a good story. I just finished reading WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS by Kelly Barnhill, and now I desperately want to be a dragon. Even if you don’t love fantasy novels, this one may appeal to you because it’s historical fiction combined with fantasy. There was a mass dragoning of women in the 1950s, according to Barnhill’s book, because women just could not take the bullshit anymore and their rage transformed them into the most powerful creatures on the planet. I think you can see why I liked it. I’ve also developed a pretty obsessive relationship with Yahtzee with Buddies, but it does take my mind off the chaos. I do think it’s a bit rigged, but I play anyway.

5. Physical movement. This is excellent. I wish I did it. I have some pathological aversion to exercise. I am trying to work on that, but my brain is very good at finding way to avoid it.

6. Phone a friend. I have several email pen pals and people I talk to or text almost every day — these don’t include my immediate family because I see them all the time. But other people who really understand me, who get it, who don’t care that I show my vulnerable, teary, snot-ravaged self in times of distress. I only have about six of these friends, but wow. That is a lot. I am very lucky.

   I can’t make my article stop making items in this list, so I’ll stop for now. I’d love to hear from you…what are you doing to cope with BITS?

   ---

As part of my attempt to retain my mental health while the world devolves into a deranged Alice in Wonderland parody, I signed up to take a class with author Rachel Yoder. You may know her from her novel NIGHTBITCH, and the subsequent film starring Amy Adams. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I highly encourage you to do both, especially if you are a woman artist or creative who has kids.

There are four sessions total in this class, and I’ve attended two, with two to go. It’s been two hours a week that I get to listen to other women discuss readings about mothering, and writing about mothering. It’s intense, and I’m tired when it’s over, but it fills my soul.

I wanted to share two things I’ve written for this class, and if you feel so moved, give me some feedback on them.

In the first week, we read the excellent essay titled Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, and we were encouraged to write our own version of that topic. Read Jocelyn’s essay; it’s brilliant in its form and content.

I feel like I look like this now.

We were asked to write something in a similar pattern to Jocelyn’s piece, something that resonated with us ‘ahead of the apocalypse’, so this is what I created:

LIVING WITH YOUNG AUTISTIC ADULTS AHEAD OF THE APOCALYPSE

· In terms of your young adult, almost nothing is worth fighting about.

Your childhood and young adulthood experiences are almost irrelevant to what’s going on right now. Telling your YA how it was in your day is not only useless, it’s counterproductive. Rules, sure. Pick your hard and fast rules (one or two). Leave the rest. No one dies if the dishes stay in the sink another day.

· The world is not what it was when you were a young adult.

Human beings rarely hire people anymore; it’s all done online to faceless portals. AI screens the apps. Showing up in person is what we USED to do, but no more. There are exceptions but understand how the world looks to our YA people. It looks faceless and frightening to especially those with disabilities or anything that will make them a target of the present administration (AKA, anyone except white straight Christian males).

· More kindness and grace are needed for the foreseeable future.

This is a good rule for all the time, but things are going to get pretty awful in the coming days, weeks, months, years. You’ve probably had a fairly good life and comparing your YA person’s life with your young adult life is useless. When they are sad, scared, confused, or paranoid, let them know you love them and we’re all in this together. Show kindness to the world; I buy candy for my grocery checkers. Compliment peoples’ clothes if they’re cool. Show your YA that small interactions between regular people still happen and most people are good.

· Anger is usually fear.

When a YA comes blasting at you with speeches, remind yourself that you probably made speeches to your parents too. They weren’t about existential crises, though, probably. Anger usually masks fear, so understand that. Try to reframe anger as fear and it suddenly seems a lot less ‘disrespectful.’

· Fear can be paralyzing.

Any YA can feel intimidated by this current world climate. Many are afraid of a variety of things: nuclear war, climate collapse, food shortages, money, friends (or themselves) being detained by ICE and deported, LGBTQ identities being targeted AGAIN, women being targeted AGAIN, immigrants being targeted AGAIN, the disabled being targeted AGAIN. It’s pretty new stuff to them even though we have all been aware of it for decades. They may just want to hide in the house, so let them hide if that’s what they need to do. Many were born as 9/11, school shootings, endless wars, Covid, and incivility have been the norm.

· Retreating into an online safe space is a totally understandable reaction to the madness around us. Let them share things with you even if you find them incredibly boring.

If I hadn’t lived a pretty great life already, I’d be tempted to hide online. It’s much more controllable. You may be one of the few In Real Life (IRL) people they see. Let them share stuff with you when they want to. Make the time. Let them talk.

· Encourage engagement with the outside world but don’t force it.

Trips to the store. Trips to the park. Walks. Whatever they will do. Don’t complain about how much they smell. Don’t nag them about bathing. Don’t bitch about the condition of their room. Just be with them and try to make it a pleasant interaction.

· Let the inevitable rants burn themselves out and don’t take anything personally.

You may be blamed for this mess even though it’s not your fault. You should have moved to Canada in 2016. You should have built them a house in the backyard like they asked. You should have adopted their mentally ill friend because then they’d always have company. You should buy the food they like, but not THAT cheese. That’s what they liked LAST WEEK. Why aren’t you paying attention? Why are you using ice when you KNOW they need it? Why must you ALWAYS argue?

Yeah. It’s fucking annoying. Let them rant even though they are wrong and possibly ridiculous. Listen. Reflect when possible. Do what you can and don’t do what you can’t.

FINALLY…are they alive? Reasonably healthy? Fed? Have a safe place to sleep? Are they loved? Are they avoiding hard drugs (weed does not count)? Are they laughing sometimes? Not dead, in jail, overdosed or harmful to others? You’re good. Be okay with this admittedly low bar that 20 years ago would NOT have been even remotely acceptable to you, the high-achieving parent.

And wait. Change happens, sometimes painfully, often slowly. Destruction is much easier than creation, but creation always wins.

I hope.

Here is the second thing I wrote, in response to a live prompt during class. We were to write a list about something we’d experienced.

List of Sensations During an Active Shooter Drill

The sound of the klaxon – the rush of adrenaline at the active shooter drill as children who pretend to be adults scatter to classrooms. The dark library, cold, unscrubbed floor of the back room – mingled little girl sweet perfume and too much Axe and the hair cream and the bag of burgers uneaten. Listening for footsteps. Listening for gunshots. Listening to breathing, in out in out in out. Someone sniffs. Someone coughs. Shadow on the blinds that don’t quite close. The feeling of being prey.

I’ll write more observations about the class after I’ve processed all of it. I think I’ve met some great women writers and we may form a writing group. At the least, we have some mutual support.

Comments? Observations? Would you have your own list ‘ahead of the apocalypse’? Let me know.

My early writing attempts were constantly derailed by pie and shame.

I think all writers of fiction embed their work with their own experiences. Of course they do…that’s how we know what we know. Our experiences shape our points of view and allow us to observe what we see as truths.

My current dilemma is this: What do you do when your stories intersect with other peoples’ stories, especially children or spouses? Should a writer try to shelter those personal relationships, or be true and authentic and write what they really feel? This is the first time I’ve ever come up against this to the degree I am currently.

This is because I have written a screenplay called ASHLAND. It’s the story of two women, Cassie and Miranda, who each have an autistic son. Since I do happen to have one of those, my dialogue and plot points are rooted in real life; it’s not an imitation of my real life, but the things I wrote have been prompted by my experience of my own life in parenting as well as what I’ve seen in other households and in my former job as a high school teacher and librarian.

But if my son or husband saw ASHLAND, I’m sure they would feel like I’m calling them out. That wasn’t my intention; the story is fiction. It may be my fantasy, I suppose. In it, the two friends are failed by their respective male spouses. One has died (I mean, not his fault, but still…abandonment). One leaves the household to take a job in another town, largely because he cannot or does not want to handle the difficulties of raising a son with neuro challenges.

My own REAL life has echoes of this. My husband, who is an exceptionally good man, has had moments where he was afraid of our son (those early puberty years suck) and he had backed off a lot on the parenting stuff, partly because he was afraid and partly because he just didn’t know what the hell to do. I get that. I didn’t know what to do either, but I had a lot of experience in teaching and working with teenagers, so a lot of it fell to me. I am not saying that as a criticism of him; neither of us knew how to deal with the circumstances. I don’t think anyone is prepared for that when they are gifted a neurodivergent child.

My lovely husband has OCD, and it is exacerbated by too much to do and too many responsibilities. He will also take almost any gig that is offered, because his favorite thing in the world is to play his instruments, and he is exceptional at that. It does mean that he books himself for far too many things in a space of time (the gigs come when they come…every musician or artist will understand this). My son, 22, is creative and hilarious, and also prone to being overwhelmed; he also does not want to spend time on cleaning his room or doing laundry, because he has many more interesting things to do. I freely admit that I am a meth raccoon when it comes to housework. I do try my best, but I never live up to the standards my husband would like because like my son, there are many more interesting things to do than mop the kitchen floor every night. Combine that with the pandemic, the precarious political circumstances of the last decade, and all of us living in the house together with various standards of hygiene and cleanliness, and you have a recipe for discontent.

Feels a little like this.

All of this is rich fodder for a writer. Conflict is the engine that drives fiction! Personal relationships are the cogs in the fiery wheel of creation! But how much of that can I share in my writing? Is everything fair game? I experienced it, so I should be able to write about it, yes? Sounds simple unless you’re living with people who might show up in your work. I had a shirt once (given to me by my thoughtful husband) that read ‘Be careful..anything you say or do may end up in my novel’ and this is more true than most people know. I think most writers are compulsive eavesdroppers and observers. Sometimes I desperately want to record my arguments with my husband or son because the dialogue is JUST SO GOOD
but I don’t. I have a good memory, though.

So back to my screenplay, ASHLAND. While it was a script on my laptop, no big deal. I could write whatever I wanted. Then my friend Sarah at Riot Productions read it and really wanted to do a staged reading of a portion of it (too long for a full reading, I think), and I agreed, excited to hear it read by other actors. Here’s the problem: ASHLAND is, in a way, my fantasy of what I’d like my life to be and that reality would be very painful to my husband. The portrayal of the two boys in the script may feel too close to the bone to my son.

In the screenplay, the two women are fed up with the lack of support from their hsubands (one is dead, remember, so we can’t really blame him) and the boys’ respective schools. The husbands are not villains; they are human beings. The women move the two boys to Ashland, Oregon to live as a found family. One of the women writes a book about parenting the two boys, and it becomes a best seller (unfortunately, this is a fiction too). The boys realize it’s about them, and they are greatly offended, and they steal a credit card and run away. That’s oversimplifying it, but that’s the gist.

My best friend and me in Scotland, being weird.

This has not happened in my life, but my best friend and I have talked about it. She is divorced and has raised her kiddo (now 26) on her own for the last eight or so years. We get along great and have often thought that some day we would love to just live out our old lady days together as friends. And we have made many pilgrimages to Ashland, Oregon, because we love the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the general hippie winery college vibe of the town. And I still love my husband and my home. Both things can be true.

What are your thoughts? How much of a writer’s life should be fair game for fiction?

Imagine me as a cyberterrorist.

With my band of six college-aged noobs, I bust into an Olive Garden in the middle of Washington, DC. I’m pretty sure there is NOT an Olive Garden there, but this is a hypothetical, so roll with it.

My band of under-educated baby-thugs break into this hypothetical Olive Garden during working hours. The manager tries to stop us, but we tell them that Olive Garden central has called on the to-go line and has fired all of them. In fact, this mythical Olive Garden god-on-high fires all the employees who are trying to stop us. Except they can’t just randomly fire people for no reason, right? Labor laws, due process, all that?

We won’t leave the Olive Garden, and we start just eating endless breadsticks, taunting the hungry customers and the workers alike. We fear nothing, for we are arseholes who care not for the law or for what is right. We hack into the Olive Garden system, scrape the money out of it, redistribute it to our own company, and then tell everyone to fuck right off.

An olive garden. No trademark needed, for it is just a garden of olive trees.

If this really happened, the manager of the Olive Garden would most likely get on the phone to local police, and they’d show up, and they’d arrest us for cybercrime. I mean, we have hacked into a sensitive system of data, credit card numbers, and the stats on who eats the most on the endless pasta bowl. So we are cuffed, processed, thrown in the drunk tank with breadsticks still in our pockets.

The FBI gets involved, because this is cross-state crime since there are many Olive Gardens in the country. Why did we think we could just waltz in and hack the system? Oh. Some guy just said it was cool.

Did the guy have the authority to allow this hack into our personal information and sauce preference? Did he check with the Olive Garden board of directors or human resources, or the Olive Garden security team before instructing us to just hack that system? No. But we felt like doing it, so it’s cool. We have a giant Cybertruck that doubles as a villain’s lair, so we are obviously cooler than you.

Not since the Edsel have people judged drivers of a car to be a special brand of asshole. Sorry if you bought it before the coup, but you should have known.

Yeah, so, I’d still be in jail. All of my six little ratlets would be in jail. I would have committed cyber crime.

So why has no one arrested Elon Mush and his band of merry pranksters? Why are they being given MY personal data and access to the US Treasury? This is surely a crime, and there must be someone who has the authority to arrest these mugs. They were not elected. They were not even vetted in the Senate, and the department they supposedly work for does not officially exist.

I am trying so hard not to pay attention to every single stupid thing that has happened in the last six months…I mean, two weeks. But I didn’t like this guy from the beginning, and I didn’t like his stupid broke-ass Delorean public-toilet-looking trucks or his stupid little electric cars that go vroom. These are not qualifications for fucking with everybody’s social security, money WE ALL PAID INTO THE SYSTEM WHILE WE ACTUALLY WORKED JOBS THAT WERE USEFUL AND NOT JUST STUPID JOBS PICKING OUR NOSES AND DOING KETAMINE. I’d also have been fired for both of those things in my teaching jobs.

Amy Adams, a brilliant actress, looking like she might just hypothetically rip your throat out.

I am feeling this uncontrollable rage that reminds me of the absolutely brilliant novel and movie, NIGHTBITCH by Rachel Yoder. If you haven’t watched it on Hulu, you really must. In short, it’s about a woman who is so depressed and dispirited by being the responsible parent who sacrifices her art to raise a child that she actually starts to mutate into a gorgeous, furry dog that looks like a cross between a husky and an Australian cattle dog. Is it real or is it an hallucination? It does not fucking matter. I am using the word fucking all the time now, which is proof of my rage.

Why this scenario with the Musk-rat reminds me of NIGHTBITCH is because the main character (a nameless ‘mother’) finds herself in situations where she goes wild. She growls. She snarls. She grabs a hamburger off someone’s table and eats it in giant, messy gobs before running out of a fancy restaurant where Kale Salad is an entrée. Blech.

She finds her wild. She finds her inner she wolf. She finds her rage at being discounted, invisible, an afterthought. She does not stand for the bullshittery.

Not an Irish Wolfhound, but to be honest, this would be more my speed anyway.

I am so close to becoming an Irish Wolfhound, you have no idea. I feel like ripping off all my clothes and running naked through a field of cybertrucks, squatting on every single one of them. I would like to find some wild muskrats and crack their skulls and shake them in my sharp teeth until they pull apart like rag dolls. Hypothetically. This is magical realism, a real literary genre that does not advocate real-world violence, but is symbolic of internal rage at being helpless in the face of the patriarchy.

I highly recommend watching NIGHTBITCH, especially if you are a woman in a rage. If you are a man, you can watch it too, and you will probably enjoy it in a different way. I know how long it takes to get a movie made, and I do not know if Rachel Yoder knew that she would tap into this primal rage amongst middle aged women (and maybe also younger women and older women, and maybe even men) with this novel and movie.

But for me, it is emblematic of what I’m feeling right now. And I hypothetically would like to sink my canines into some very rare South African muskrat right about now. Symbolically, of course.

What are you hungry for?

Cleopatra, John William Waterhouse.

I told a friend recently, “I’ll have to tell you some time about how I stopped being enmeshed with people who take and do not give, or those who tear down instead of build up. I was a habitual saver of people and Queen of Third Chances. No more.”

This may sound harsh to you, maybe even cruel or unsympathetic. Let me explain why it is not.

I was raised by a wonderful set of Midwestern parents who instilled in me the value of service and of helping others. My mom and dad practiced their values clearly; he started a soup kitchen, a food pantry, a thrift shop in my small home town of Lima, Ohio. People called our house at all hours asking for money to pay a gas bill or phone bill from the church St. Vincent de Paul society, which my dad spearheaded. I am forever thankful for their example.

My mom, Therese, on the left…Great Grandma Madge and Grandmother Cleo, and my dad, Richard, with a look on his face that I often have in social situations: puzzlement and discomfort.

Well into my 30s and 40s, I embraced this to the point where I found myself desperately wishing to have a minor traffic accident where I could rest in a hospital for awhile. Even then, I didn’t understand how my need to help people was depleting me so much that I was on my way to disability. I became a public high school teacher, a job where I felt I could help a good number of people in a real way. I cared…a lot. And I worked in schools where the students had great needs, greater needs than one person could fulfill, but I did my best. I did help a lot of them, I know, and I am very privileged to call many of them friends today.

The kids never wore me out. (Okay, to be honest, sometimes they did…but political and educational reforms wore me out in a far worse way). As I worked my way through my education career, every year seemed to bring more and more ridiculous ‘reforms’ until finally, right before the COVID pandemic, I put in my retirement papers. I had transitioned into being a high school librarian at that point, which was the best job in the world for a few years. I absolutely loved it…until it was decided that I would also be in charge of the 2,000 chromebook laptops, one of which was assigned to every student. This task sucked all the time and joy away from being a librarian.

I put in my retirement papers in December 2019, planning to leave in June 2020 after finding a great replacement for myself. School just stopped in March of that year, and that was the end of my education career.

COVID gave me a lot of time to reflect on my life and my patterns. With the help of an amazing IFS (Inter Family Systems) therapist, I slowly unraveled all the behaviors and beliefs that were keeping me a prisoner in the practice of saving people. When I confronted my own reasons for being an eternal hero, I realized several important things about helping others.

1. Nobody can save anybody else. If the person in question is unable or unwilling to do the work necessary to move forward or grow, no amount of hand wringing or assistance will change their circumstances, and you’ll be worn out like a tired washrag.

2. You can save yourself. That tired old metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask before putting one on anyone else is apt. In order to save yourself, you have to have enough energy, time, and oxygen to do it.

3. People addicted to helping are often avoiding their own lives. Rather than confront what I wanted or needed, it was so much easier to focus on someone else’s crazy life.

4. Don’t keep giving time, energy, or money to any group or person who doesn’t appreciate you and/or takes advantage of you. This is very hard for me. Often, the groups or people who need help have very worthwhile causes, or conditions that they cannot overcome on their own. Help them find resources. Help them see what they may need to address. But let them do the fixing.

5. It’s hard to say no. At least for me, this is true, but it becomes less true the longer I practice setting boundaries and weighing relationships for their purpose and reciprocity. And of course, there are times in life where one person needs more than the other person in a relationship. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about almost constant need from another person or group that you are asked or required to supply with no thought to your own needs or desires.

I firmly believe that we are here on Earth to learn lessons. Mine apparently was the lesson of “don’t be a codependent dope” because I’ve had it over and over and over again. I’ll probably trip up and be there again. Awareness is a huge part of the answer. I now know what to look for in theses situations, and it’s helped me to say no with love.

I am no longer the Queen of Third Chances.

Saying no with love is hard. I am not talking about disappearing or ghosting someone, I’m talking about actually talking to them or writing them a letter explaining why you need to be less involved in their life. I did that in three different instances this past year, and it was difficult and I know it resulted in some hurt feelings. Oddly, the weird political landscape of the past decade and the world-shaking climate and pandemic news pushed me toward this mindset. I don’t know if I would have figured it out without those outsized events.

Not sure where I found this, but it’s from 2020 and it’s only become more relevant since then. See Elon Musk batting off the poor people trying to get into the boat?

As we move forward next week toward an unseeable horizon, I’ve implemented the same policies when it comes to the Appendix Administration (useless and full of poison; see previous post). I will not give it my time and attention because it does not deserve it. No one knows what the future holds. I am avoiding speculation on what happens next because truly, it’s all guessing. Some people may have better guesses than others, so I do read trusted sources for information, but I take the info and move on. I do not dwell on it. I read, put it in a box, put it on my mental porch, and move on to things that will nurture me or give me joy. This is an active pursuit. It takes conscious effort.

In terms of next week’s bitter cold Monday, I prefer to focus on the fact that it is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and he famously praised peaceful resistance and strength in community. So I am concentrating on those things: a community of people I know and love and trust, institutions I respect that treat me with respect, and a focus on creating and culling unncecessary items from my worldly possessions.

Love is stronger than hate. Hate is louder, brasher, more energetic, but love has a power that wins out ultimately. The arc of history shows this to be true but that arc is long and I may not see the end of that rainbow in my lifetime. Rather than hoping for a future, I am creating a present that feeds my soul, as much as I can.

That’s not to say that I won’t fight. I will. Wherever I can take a direct action or affect the events that touch my life, I absolutely will do it. I don’t know what that will look like, but I am not afraid. Fear is the engine that drives lack and distrust and hard-heartedness, and I have no interest in that.

I’ve crowned myself the Queen of Necessary Action.

This is not the Carousel of Outrage, but these horses look pretty crazed.

Tensions are high in many places because of politics, natural disasters, rhetorical bullshitery, and other acts of humans. Like all my friends, I see the incoming Appendix Administration* (see bottom of column for definition) as an existential threat to humanity. As goes the US, so goes the world, is my thinking, and we seem solidly to be in the jet stream of the last flush of the cosmic toilet.

However, I cannot live there. I need to be functional, maybe even a beacon of light and hope, in the dark days ahead. I’m not presuming to think that what I do or think matters that much to almost anyone; I do think that I can exert influence over myself and my immediate surroundings. So is born my current philosophy of survival: What Is In Front of My Eyes, or WIIFOME.

Here’s how it works: when my brain becomes overwhelmed thinking of all the things that are awful that I cannot influence let alone control, I stop myself. I pull the emergency brake on my brain. “Look at what is in front of your eyes,” my mind whispers to me, which feels kind of creepy but I know its intentions are pure.

So, I look at what is in front of my eyes. My giant orange Siberian forest cat, Harry. My two pups, Cocoa Bean and Griffin. The swaying old eucalyptus trees in my yard. The remnants of roses from the late fall bloom here in Southern California. I listen to the wind chimes on my patio, chosen specifically for their sometimes dissonant but pleasant sounds.

From left: Griffin, tiger, Cocoa Bean (not pictured: Harry the Giant Cat)

I go to my upstairs bedroom which I call my Treehouse because I can see the tops of the Aleppo pine and the Eucalyptus and palm trees outside the windows. If it’s dark enough, I turn on my Aurora light, a stupendously cheap contraption that shines a multicolored sheen of color across my white ceiling. It’s not the real thing, but then again, it is. I turn on my little Bluetooth speaker and listen to Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Laura Nyro, Loreena McKennitt, whatever feels most calming at that moment.

Enjoy eleven seconds of my Aurora video from the Treehouse:

I try to keep other people out of my WIIFOME because my brand of clearing my mind depends on sensory details and not much else. People always bring with them thoughts and wishes and expectations and jokes and going into the bathroom at the exact time I want to. They complicate this very simple process for me, so although I dearly love my husband and my spawn, I do not include them in this exercise when I do it. I can still observe and enjoy them, but they are not part of what I’m doing in that moment.

Not one of my owls, but similar…he looks surprised by my lack of owl accent

I go outside at night and find the moon. I look for patterns in its face. I listen to three Great Horned Owls having a lengthy and emotional conversation between three giant pines. I sometimes try to add a comment, but then they go silent. I guess my accent isn’t very good.

I focus on very small things that I barely noticed when my life was busy and full of political drama. The pattern in the tablecloth that reminds me of France. The feel of perfectly brushed flannel sheets against my legs. Slippers that keep my feet warm but are also cushy and like walking on marshmallows. Sipping fresh coffee and savoring the curling steam, the smell, the first sip, rolling it around on my tongue and finding the caramel aftertaste. Even the rough edge of my favorite mug where it broke and I glued it back together. My index finger touches glassy, rough, glassy, rough. It reads “I love the smell of coffee in the morning and the sound of no one talking to me while I drink it.”

You may say that I am simplifying my life to a granular degree and you would be right. This is not usually my style; I am a life-long worrier and digger of details, so focusing on minutiae is not my general approach to life. However, this new world and new life we are entering into is not regular. It’s not normal. It’s potentially dangerous and frightening and existentially nihilistic, if that’s even a word combo. I have tried nihilism on for size, and I found it full of holes. The holes were full of nothing. (Is your mind blown right there? I’m not sure if that was profound or stupid. It’s a fine line.)

I am not ignoring what is going on, though. I dip into a few trusted news sources twice a day, like a dragonfly skimming a pond. I have a rough outline of what is happening. Then I fly out and let it go unless there is an action I can take. That last part is very important to my model: UNLESS THERE IS AN ACTION I CAN TAKE. To restate, I am aware of the news and what is happening, but unless there is a direct action I can take, I am not going to dwell on the details of these horrendous events. I’ve done that for the last six or ten or million years and it hs only made me feel ill and has kept me from experiencing joy in my present life.

As I just said, I process, eject, and fly on unless there is an action I can take. These could be sending letters, calling Congress, giving money, boosting a social media post that needs boosting, maybe even going in person to a protest event or community service event. I will do, and have been doing, those things. Some of my trusted news sources are The Contrarian (a new endeavor with Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen) Meidas News Network by Ben Meisalas and also the Substack writing of E. Jean Carroll, Joyce Vance, Mary Trump, Angry Staffer on Patreon and Adam Kinzinger’s bipartisan Defending Democracy podcast . Rachel Maddow is back on MSNBC every day for the first 100 days of sturm und drang but I have been consistently disappointed in most cable news programs, so I am looking elsewhere for my unfiltered info, dipping in occasionally on PBS or the BBC or Reuters.

I have exited the outrage carousel because I think outrage is the ammunition of the moment.

Otherwise, I am in my soothing bubble of comfort, because when the time comes for action, and I’m guessing it will, I want to be whole and healed so I can do my best. It is a clarifying thing, this crucible of ugliness, and I need to be able to withstand what chaos may come by strengthening my mind, body, and spirit in the present.

*Appendix administration: Many have called the incoming cadre of clowns ARSEHOLES. I am not British but I prefer the British mode of cussing. Anyway, an arsehole is useful and has a purpose. An Appendix, though, is useless and full of poison. Therefore, I will henceforward refer to the incoming group of incompetent evildoers as the Appendix Administration.

Happy New Year?

I mean, it seems weird to say that. We all know (or don’t know, which is scarier) that 2025 will be chock full of interesting times. It kind of reminds me of a Star Trek episode where some alien species reads your minds and produces the thing you fear most. So whatever you do, don’t think about me having several million dollars.

This is from Star Trek Voyager (The Thaw), from a species called the Viorsa. The critter reads minds and produces the humans’ darkest fears while they are in stasis. Fun fact: this character, The Clown, was played by Michael McKean of Spinal Tap and Lenny and Squiggy fame. Would love to see The Clown sing Sex Farm.

Anyway…all that aside, I am approaching the new year with a new-found ability to wall myself off from bad news to concentrate on only the things I see in front of my own eyes. I still keep track of the most important things in politics, but no longer watch news because I do not want to see the butt-ugly face of Tangelo Shitgibbon on my TV.

So, my question to you is this, and I’m asking even those of you who read and don’t comment to weigh in if at all possible.

Question: Going forward, what should be the focus of this Substack?

HELP ME, OBI-WAN. I have a worn-out brain!

I’ve mostly been writing about whatever sparks an idea, but maybe I need to be more focused. Here are some ideas, but if you have one, please speak up.

1. Keep doing random posts on whatever floats through my brain transom.

2. Focus on parenting or co-living with people with mental illness/autism.

3. Focus on specifically issues that affect middle-aged or older women (and maybe men too.)

4. Joy-inducing things I see in front of my own eyes.

5. Something else for which my comments would be useful.

I do not want to write about writing because it seems like every other person on Substack does that. It’s one of the things I know a lot about but what can I add to the conversation about writing? Not much, probably.

If you have any ideas, please comment!! I really need to figure out what I’m doing and I need collective brain power to make it happen. (I typed that as brian power at first, so if you are a Brian, I doubly need your help!)

THANKS IN ADVANCE. I look forward to reading your comments. PLEASE!!

Immigrants waiting to be processed at Ellis Island.

Let me just say, being born at this particular time in American history was really brave of you. You got it all: political upheaval and social unrest, pandemics, climate crises, inflation, the devolution of civility, and TikTok. God, I’m sorry.

But I’m not here to say ‘oh, boo hoo, life dealt you a bad hand.’ Nope. Neither of us was dealt a bad hand. We are living in the most advanced time in medical history. Think of how relatively fast the COVID vaccine became a thing. When the so-called Spanish Flu happened in the early 1900s, people had to sort of wait around for literally years before venturing outside without risking their lives.

We have any information instantly available at our fingertips. When I was your age (oh no! I’m talking in old speak!) I had to go to the library to find out any tidbit of information I wanted to know. Today, you have any questions about literally anything in the entire world and beyond, it takes about half a second and you have annotated sources lined up waiting for your to dig as deep as you like in your pajamas.

Despite all the outside crap, those two things are pretty impressive.

Also, though, I want you to know something really important about yourself. I know that since I moved to California, leaving my family in Ohio, you haven’t felt very connected to your past or your relatives. I have some information that might surprise you, and I hope will give you some confidence in yourself.

Poor Dog, Sioux, 1978

Both your dad and I come from immigrants, which almost everyone in America does. The only people who do not come from immigrants are the native American tribes, and the Europeans stole their land and never gave it back. This is a sad and unfortunate fact, because I think our way of life would be much better for everyone if they had been able to formulate a government based on taking care of each other rather than amassing wealth.

Every president we’ve ever had can trace his or her — oh, wait, never mind about the her — roots to another country. John F. Kennedy’s people came from Ireland. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, fifth cousins, share a family line from the Dutch and French. Dwight Eisenhower, German. Your people, too, came from other places. Your dad’s family came from Germany (Opa’s family) and my parents’ families both came from Ireland in the 1700s.

I tell you this to let you know that the blood and bone in your body came from these people. Traveling far from everything they knew, these people boarded ships and sailed for weeks and weeks with very few possessions and probably less food, pooping out of the backs of scooners and eating hard tack (basically a really hard cracker).

I’ve been able to trace my ancestors back to County Antrim and County Down, both sides moving to America sometime in the 1700s. Dad’s grandmother moved to the United States in 1928 with her son, who was only 2. Her husband came later, which means that she traveled from Germany to Ellis Island in New York with a toddler. You would have to be really strong to do that.

You used to have swear you were not a polygamist, but everything else was okay. This is your great-grandmother’s form when she emigrated. And at the end SO HELP ME GOD was printed, which seems kind of like a pinky promise, and not binding.

I tell you this so you understand what you are literally made of. You get the best and the not as great from all of us, and we are all imperfect humans. But these people also gifted you with talents in music and writing, visual arts, humor, and witty banter as well as the very annoying gift of being able to argue about absolutely anything.

The stubbornness you have was earned. Our people had to be stubborn to shoot off into the unknown (literally…remember there was no internet and very few ways to get information about your destination). You come from people who took those adventures. Who braved the weather and the hunger and the mental anguish of traveling (okay, to be fair, there was no TSA then, but still…I think it’s more comfortable and definitely faster today).

You great-grandmother probably came over to America in a ship just like this one.

When you even consider that you are not capable or smart or resourceful or able — that is simply not true. It cannot be true, because all of your cells are the cells of adventurers and the curious and the people who were terrified and still said ‘do it anyway’. I know the past…uh…ten years?...have been among the most difficult in my lifetime. It’s been half of your lifetime. That earns you some sympathy — and you will get through this time. You have a steel core running through you that you don’t even know exists.

We will be fine. You will be fine.

America will be fine.