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How Amazon Delivers Cold Grocery Items

All this for four ready-to-eat salads (they puree beautifully) and a bag of frozen cherries (ditto). I suppose it makes sense when you think about it; definitely cheaper and more environmentally friendly than dedicated ice packs. And you can drink them!

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That’s A Tough One

You Can Choose Only Three – 80s Movies

There were so many excellent films in the 80s.

I could easily select seventeen! But if I had to whittle it down to just three, probably Breakfast Club, Poltergeist, and Blade Runner.

And I know those are decidedly different answers than I would’ve offered up in 1990.

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And On The Subject Of Strong Women

I woke this morning from a rather strange dream. In this dream I had been out running errands with one of the partners of the small architectural firm I worked at for the majority of my tenure in San Francisco. I remember asking how he’d been doing—knowing somewhere in my subconscious that he’d been in a skilled nursing facility for years—and he replied that he was on a new medication that seemed to be helping. Helping with what specifically I have no idea, but he handed me a box of whatever it was and I noted suspiciously that it was unopened. We continued chatting and we realized we’d known each other 40 years, and thinking about it now in the light of day I realize how quickly time has passed. I’m now older than he was when I first went to work for the partners and I soberly realized that Jack—who was a year younger than my Dad—has probably long since shuffled off the planet onto his next adventure.

In the dream, when I realized how long we’d known each other, Jack laid down, convulsed a couple times, and was gone. It was then I woke up.

I lost touch with the family a few years after Ben and I moved to Denver. His wife and I were good friends and used to correspond at least yearly, but my letters finally went unanswered, and I realize that Lei too, is no doubt passed onto bigger and better rthings.

This got me thinking about all the strong women who have played such a big part in my life. I don’t have an older sisters but each of these women has in their own way stepped into that role whether or not they acknowledged it.

Lei was the second to fill the role. She was confidant, counselor, and pal-around buddy I loved spending time with. Our views on life, the universe, and everything (not to mention politics) were perfectly in sync. When I left San Francisco for the first time to return to Tucson, our correspondence was weekly, if not more often. She loved working with fonts, and whenever I ran across one I thought she’d like, I’d remotely help her install it into Windows and then the next letter I received would of course, be printed in that font.

The first woman to fill the role was my friend Kekku. We met back in ’85 when we were working for two different architectural firms that shared an office space. I call her my Finnish Firebrand, but she was—and still is—one of my closest and dearest friends who will not hesitate to call out my bullshit. When my second partner had to go to San Francisco for a weekend on business (well in advance of our actual relocation there about 18 months later) and she learned I’d never been there an couldn’t go with him due to financial constraints she said, “You’ve never been to San Francisco?! I’ll buy you a ticket.” And she did. Talk about setting my life course!

The woman who’s been occupying this role in my life most strongly since before I met Ben is Cindy, the “nurse friend” I often refer to. We met when I was working at Phoenix Baptist Hospital in the 00’s and apparently had a bit of a reputation for being, um…”challenging” for everyone in I.T.

I had no such issues and found her delightful.

We bonded almost immediately, and we’ve been there for each other through thick and thin for the last twenty years. Again, it’s odd to think that I’m now older than she was when we first met…

So yeah, I’m all for strong women in our lives. They’re needed more than we realize.

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Strong Women

I did not realize how badly I needed Rosie O’Donnell back on my television until she guest-hosted for Jimmy Kimmel and reminded me that one of the greatest weapons against a thin-skinned, tantrum-throwing, tyrant-cosplaying asshole like Donald Trump is to LAUGH RIGHT IN HIS FUCKING FACE.

Because Rosie O’Donnell is fucking FEARLESS, and Donald Trump absolutely cannot stand a woman he cannot frighten, flatten, flatter into submission, or otherwise force to genuflect before the wobbling orange wedding cake of his own self-importance.

He has been attacking this woman for TWENTY FUCKING YEARS, and that bloated, blubbery, butter-basted, blockheaded little bitch still hasn’t figured out that she is not afraid of him. He insults her. Threatens her. Obsesses over her. Drags her name out whenever the ancient grievance carousel inside his spectacularly stupid, sawdust-stuffed, synapse-starved skull starts wheezing around again, spewing the same petty, puerile, pissy little complaints he has been nursing since George W. Bush was president and people still had dedicated drawers for MapQuest directions.

And thanks to a plurality of smooth-brained, mouth-breathing, troglodytic, self-sabotaging shidiots, Donald Trump ascended to the presidency of the United States TWICE and still couldn’t evict Rosie O’Donnell from the rent-controlled duplex she apparently occupies inside his frontal lobe.

And Rosie just keeps fucking laughing.

Which made it absolutely DELICIOUS when she looked directly into the camera during her opening monologue, referred to him not as President Trump, not even as Donald Trump, but as “Mango Mussolini,” gave this teeny cheerful wave and said:

“Hi. I know you’re watching.”

I almost fucking DIED.

Five words. One wave. A goddamn assassination by finger wiggle.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t even give the bastard his NAME. She just smiled into that lens with the exquisite serenity of a woman who knows EXACTLY where Donald Trump’s emotional prostate is located and gently pressed.

Hi, Mango Mussolini!

Because YOU KNOW HE WAS WATCHING.

You know that ambulatory sack of ego and edema was parked somewhere in front of a television, marinating in a bubbling vat of narcissistic injury, his tissue-paper ego disintegrating because the woman he has spent two decades trying to intimidate was CHEERFULLY WAVING AT HIM.

And the chef’s kiss is that she did it from JIMMY KIMMEL’S set, another person Trump has repeatedly tried to bully into submission who simply will not cow to him.

It was a gorgeous little layer cake of fuck-yous: Jimmy’s show, Rosie on his set, Trump hate-watching from wherever the hell he was, and she stared directly through the camera to let him know SHE KNEW.

Because ridicule is Donald Trump’s kryptonite.

This ruinously insecure, criticism-allergic crybaby can spend all day cosplaying Caesar and have his emotional ecosystem collapse because somebody made a joke about his hair. For a man pathologically obsessed with dominance, Donald Trump radiates the sexual confidence of a guy who spends forty-five minutes adjusting the lighting before presenting a Vienna sausage and asking, “Be honest, does this look huge from over there?”

And we’re supposed to regard THIS asshole as a terrifying authoritarian?

This pampered, powder-faced fraud who looks like he fell asleep face-first in a bowl of spaghetti, staggered upright, got shoved into wardrobe and was sent onstage at the Shawnee Playhouse for a summer-stock production of Il Duce: The Temu Years?

The guy lacquered in peach-toned stucco, teetering around in high heels, cinched into a corset, crowned with a wind-tortured thatch installation, and wrapped in a suit containing enough excess fabric to tarp a fucking pontoon boat?

That’s the terrifying tyrant?

That distended satsuma in orthopedic elevators?

That marmalade manatee with a necktie?

That preening, pouting, pancake-pasted parcel of presidential pique?

PLEASE.

The whole goddamn thing is a SHOW.

The flags. The gold. The scowling photographs. The military spectacle. The dictator poses. The chest-puffing, chin-jutting, cocktail-wiener-swinging stagecraft of supremacy, right down to that bizarre double-fisted jerk-and-twist “dance,” the only choreography the braces around his legs now seem to allow, pumping both fists beside his hips like Hando Calrissian simultaneously jerking off two imaginary MMA fighters.

It is pomp wrapped around pathology, a gaudy, gilded, gold-plated papier-mâché colostomy bag with the emotional load-bearing capacity of a motherfucking meringue.

He’s the end-cap-clearance, factory-reject, off-brand imitation Wizard of Oz toy your coupon-clipping granny found at a garage sale after somebody had already blowtorched the face and redrawn the features with a fucking Magic Marker, now frantically yanking levers behind a polyester curtain, coughing out machine smoke and booming threats through a busted amplifier while praying nobody wanders backstage and discovers that the Great and Powerful Whatever-the-Hell is actually an aggrieved carnival appliance salesman in a discount statesman costume having a nervous breakdown.

And Rosie is Toto.

She trots right over and YANKS.

There he is.

No legend. No majesty. No magnificent masculine mystique. Just a brittle, blustering, bouffant-bearing blowhard whose psychological stability can be knocked sideways by a monologue joke.

POINT AND FUCKING LAUGH.

And watching Rosie do exactly that was cathartic for me for reasons that reached much further back than Donald Trump, because long before that malignant mandarin-colored motherfucker became the human push notification none of us can swipe away, she meant comfort to me.

Being home sick when I was younger meant blankets, daytime television and The Rosie O’Donnell Show, this gloriously goofy explosion of Koosh balls, Broadway songs, giveaways, celebrity crushes and completely unembarrassed enthusiasm pouring through the television. She loved things LOUDLY. She would practically levitate when somebody she adored walked onto that set, and there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about watching a grown woman refuse to ration her happiness for fear of looking uncool.

When you were sick and miserable on the couch, she felt like company.

There was safety in that show, a little daytime sanctuary connected in my memory to a kinder stretch of life when television could simply entertain you instead of informing you that democracy had just been stuffed into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental before breakfast.

So seeing THAT woman all these years later hit me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. The world changed. She changed. I changed. But there she was, still carrying that enormous capacity for delight, except now it belonged to a woman who has spent two decades being targeted by a vengeance-addled, vanity-engorged bully and still refuses to give that son of a bitch one drop of the fear he keeps trying to squeeze out of her.

I fucking LOVE that.

Maybe because I understand the mechanism.

I had plenty of bullies growing up, and children can be exquisitely efficient little sadists when they discover something that gets a reaction. They find the sore spot, jam a finger into it and WATCH YOUR FACE. Their cruelty isn’t complete until they see the flinch.

So I learned to sabotage the whole damn setup.

If somebody was going to make fun of me, I could let everybody laugh AT me, or I could grab the joke before it landed, improve the motherfucker and make everybody laugh WITH me.

So I became funnier than the little asshole coming for me.

You found something embarrassing about me? Congratulations, cupcake. Give me thirty seconds and I’ll make it funnier than you ever could.

And it worked like a charm, because the instant everyone starts laughing WITH the person you intended to humiliate, you’ve lost control of the room. Your weapon has been confiscated, your cruelty grenade turns out to be a party popper, and now people are looking at YOU.

Bullies hate that.

So do despots, dictators, demagogues, dime-store Duces and every puffed-up, power-drunk prick who depends upon everyone treating him like an eight-foot marble monument instead of a mortal asshole with gastrointestinal problems.

Bullies need your humiliation. Despots need your deference. Dictators need their mythology.

Humor is a goddamn crowbar jammed underneath all three.

Ridicule doesn’t make dangerous people harmless. These people are dangerous because they possess actual authority.

But we do not have to lend them OUR awe.

We don’t have to become unpaid extras in their shitty little tyranny pageant. We don’t have to gasp when the smoke machine starts or applaud the costume, and we sure as hell don’t have to help some vain, voluble, volume-discount despot inflate himself into some towering object of reverence when he keeps landing somewhere between county-fair hypnotist and divorced casino magician whose tiger got repossessed.

For a man so ravenous for submission, Donald Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time pleading with the universe to reassure him that he is bigger, tougher, richer, taller, harder, smarter, hotter, more feared, more virile, more magnificent than every other swinging mammal on Earth, while lumbering around with an ass that appears to have entered the room several seconds before the rest of him and may require its own tugboat escort.

The flags get more gigantic. The gilt gets more garish. The threats get more theatrical. The trousers descend farther toward the floor as though hems themselves have entered witness protection. Every inch of the performance screams BEHOLD MY POWER while the performer looks like a bloated birthday clown who got into a fistfight with a spray-tan booth, lost, and then demanded everyone call him Daddy.

That is the fucking charade.

And mockery is how you puncture it.

Strip away the props. Expose the fraud. Make the emperor stand there in his fucking Spanx, stretched to structural failure around that swollen, sloshing sack of octogenarian suet.

Then LAUGH.

Laugh loudly. Laugh publicly. Laugh without permission.

Mock him. Puncture the pomposity. Remind the world that underneath all the presidential pageantry, authoritarian affectation, belligerent bluster and tough-guy theater is someone who cannot fucking bear the sound of people laughing at him.

Because the emperor needs you admiring the robes.

The counterfeit wizard needs you watching the smoke.

The bully needs to know he hurt you.

Don’t give them a fucking thing.

Keep laughing. Keep pointing. Keep humiliating these pompous pricks until every last inch of manufactured menace collapses into the pathetic punchline it always was.

And Rosie?

Keep.

Fucking.

Waving.

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Does anyone else sit with an almost subconscious belief that yes, this nightmare will end—and then, for years to come, information will be uncovered about what was happening in and around this administration for over a decade and it will be more horrifying and unhinged than anything we can imagine?

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group of people in red cap and blue jacket
Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

Ignorance is not a compelling argument at this point.

We’ve all heard the theories for the last ten years: people still supporting Donald Trump are unwitting victims of the partisan media and Evangelical alternate reality that they’ve been raised in and are still captives of. They’re continually surrounded
by fake news and endless conspiracy, and so they aren’t bad people; they just aren’t seeing what we are seeing, and we need all to be more understanding.

We’re a decade into this madness. This just isn’t acceptable anymore.

There isn’t a sufficient excuse for being an adult so sheltered from facts and so truth-deprived that you can’t see Trump’s complete sociopathy and you can’t discern the existential threat he and his party are to this nation.

His supporters aren’t being asked to dig beneath some complex, brilliantly crafted ruse perpetrated by Conservative media and religious conglomerates working in concert. If you can read Trump’s own social media feed or listen to the bile he spews in front of the cameras at female reporters and political opponents, and not be fully disgusted to the point of vomiting, you aren’t a reasonable human being. Either that, or you are willingly choosing to engage in wild intellectual and theological gymnastics to avoid a reality that makes you uncomfortable, intentionally avoiding some really vile stuff that he and his collaborators aren’t even attempting to conceal anymore.

I’m fully convinced that nearly everyone still supporting Donald Trump knows he is a reprehensible human being and guilty of high crimes against this nation, but they simply can’t admit to themselves or anyone else they made a mistake, and so they are doubling down again and again.

They’re not stupid; they’re just willing to let America die on the altar of their pride, which may be far worse.

Being an adult means being responsible for ferreting out what is real and what isn’t, and for making good decisions with the available information. This is what we demand from our children, isn’t it? We only let their ignorance be an excuse for so long, and then we remove that option because we expect them to be smarter than that at some point. And if we realize that they are smart enough to know better, then it becomes an indictment of their character.

If grown men and women aren’t willing or able to sift information and choose wisely because of their media choices or their circle of friends or their mental effort, the
net result is the same: they are enabling and protecting reprehensible behavior that places people in great danger.

If Fox News creates your reality, you’re going to be hateful toward lots of people. You’re going to be afraid of Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, refugees—and on and on and on. And if you’ve been on the planet for a few decades, you should have developed the critical thinking not to allow a network that brokers in fantasy and fiction to be your baseline for truth. That’s a youproblem.

If The Religious Right defines for you what it means to be a Christian, your Christianity is going to look nothing like the actual teachings of Christ. It’s going to be an angry, violent thing devoid of compassion and gentleness. That isn’t your preacher’s fault, and it isn’t Franklin Graham’s fault, and it isn’t the Devil’s fault. As a thinking Christian who supposedly reads the words of Jesus and reflects on them regularly—you should see through this sham in a hot minute and soundly reject it.

If the brazen, unapologetic racism and xenophobia and misogyny on display right now is too subtle for your sensibilities, and if Nazis marching through town squares, supremacist politicians, and election interference fall beneath your radar, you either intentionally have your head in the sand or it isn’t on straight to begin with—and either is a problem.

Many of my white Evangelical friends supporting Trump aren’t as much stupid or unaware as they are cowardly. They held their noses in 2016, voted in anger or haste or error, and then quickly got out of the politics business, choosing to escape the consequences of their decision on other people. So Newsmax and the Conservative Christian Church have become convenient places of sanctuary for people with privilege wanting to hide from the results of their vote.

Again, they aren’t ignorant of reality; they just are opting out of it altogether. If it is stupidity, the affliction is highly selective, extremely localized, and very convenient. And if that’s the case, are we supposed to expect in year eleven or twelve they’re going finally have a magical epiphany and part with him?

It’s time we stopped giving adult human beings the benefit of the doubt, simply because we think they’re not smart enough not to be fooled by religious shysters, fake news peddlers, and political snake oil salesmen. If that is true, then they’re also not smart or mentally available enough to be presented with objective data or compelling arguments and to filter them responsibly. They are, practically speaking, unreachable with rational measures.

I’m tired of having to treat people like children when they aren’t capable or willing to see what even a child can see, what my children can see. They know hatred and bullying without needing to read a think piece or do online research or unpack layers of religion and history.

I’m over justifying bigotry and racism and the horrible stuff happening in the country, and giving people who perpetuate it a pass because they supposedly don’t realize they’re supporting a monster—when most of the watching world seems to get it.

In a time when information is available at our fingertips and when conversation and study and exploration are limitless, I’m through excusing supposed adults for not being able to make a decision that is based in reality, simply because they’re in some hateful, self-righteous, nationalistic bubble. That’s their fault, not ours.

I don’t hate these people, but I’m also not going to coddle them and encourage their ignorance anymore because lots of people are damaged when that happens.

Sooner or later we adults all have to own our supposed stupidity–and choose to be wiser

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