Month: September 2026

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Good news, guys! Donald Trump’s gonna give us five thousand dollars of our own money! What a magnanimous motherfucker. I haven’t seen generosity like this since the ATM gave me back my own fucking paycheck.

He just needs to find the money, get permission to spend the money, and have us reelect the people who could give him permission to spend the money right fucking now. Before they’ll help us pay our bills, we have to guarantee we’ll keep paying theirs.

So we have to give them the jobs they already have before they’ll do the jobs we’re already paying them to do. Try that at work. “I’ll finish stocking the yogurt when somebody guarantees my fucking pension, Brenda.”

And if they borrow it, we get to pay interest on our own fucking present. He gets his name on the check. We get our names on the debt. Somehow I’m financing Christmas and this son of a bitch gets to be Santa.

Congratulations! You’ve been preapproved to finance your own fucking bribe.

Welcome to the Publishers Clearing House of fucking Representatives.

He’s calling it the “Trump dividend.” Five grand if Republicans keep the House and Senate. The House and Senate they ALREADY FUCKING HAVE.

So why the fuck can’t they get moving on it NOW? Aren’t they in power NOW? They’ve got the White House, the House, and the Senate. What additional lever of fucking power are they waiting for? Do we need to run down to Home Depot and pick them up another fucking lever?

I’m sorry, did I miss the Schoolhouse Rock episode where the little singing bill sits on the Capitol steps refusing to budge until we guarantee his bosses another two years of government dental?

Do the smooth-brained, truck-nutted troglodytes have to elect them harder? Tattoo their names across their chests? Rename the cat Mike Johnson and the dog Donald Trump? Spend the next twelve years standing in the backyard in their bathrobes hollering, “Donald! Get your nose out of Mike’s asshole!”

Did they get the fucking trial version of Congress? What else do you need, you cash-catfishing, country-club cocktease? Does Mike Johnson need somebody to sign his folder?

And the five grand wasn’t the only pledge at this fucking direct-deposit tent revival. He promised them a check, they promised him their remaining cerebral function, and only ONE of those transactions required immediate payment.

This pompadoured potentate had them raise their right hands and pledge to HIM, “the greatest president in the history of the United States.” He even worked “cheat like hell like they do” into the voting pledge, because he couldn’t get through his own fucking loyalty oath without accusing Democrats of cheating.

And they call this rugged individualism. It’s a fucking cult, a star-spangled self-abasement seminar for these obsequious, oath-bleating, orange-idolizing ovines waiting for their dividend-dangling, deference-demanding Daddy to tell them what to say.

Baa, baa, bootlicker, have you any fucking shame?

Nobody ever asked me to swear a pledge of allegiance to Joe Biden, for fuck’s sake. Then again, I didn’t tattoo his face on my ass and turn a routine colonoscopy into a fucking presidential meet-and-greet.

Which brings me back to the five grand, because the electric company doesn’t accept a fucking oath of fealty. You can turn your entire ass into Mount Rushmore, but until the money clears, you’re still sitting in the damn dark.

Anybody can promise shit they never have to deliver. Hell, vote for me and I’ll give you a puppy, a unicorn, a hand job and a velvet painting of a sad clown with a goddamn poodle.

Don’t ask how. That’s second-term shit.

He said the economy’s doing “so well” that we’re ALL getting a payout. If it’s doing that fucking well, cough it up today, asshole. Why does my share of this magnificent prosperity have an election attached?

And how the fuck isn’t this socialism?

By THEIR definition. The one these flag-fondling, fiscal-purity fetishists drag out whenever somebody without a private jet needs help paying for a fucking root canal. One free school lunch and suddenly the cafeteria ladies are storming the Winter Palace with a tater-tot trebuchet.

Some exhausted woman needs help buying groceries and these holier-than-thou hemorrhoids want her employment history, her blood type, and a notarized explanation for the name-brand mustard. God forbid the indigent enjoy a condiment. You’ll eat your federally scrutinized sandwich dry, Deborah. This is America.

But put Trump’s name on the handout and the bootstraps brigade comes barreling down the aisle in paroxysms of panhandling. The Ayn Rand book club has turned into Supermarket Sweep, and Earl’s about to dislocate a shoulder getting to the fucking bonus ham.

What happened to personal responsibility, you sanctimonious, selective-socialism, subsidy-suckling sons of bitches? Did Karl Marx become a job creator when he learned to sign a check with a Sharpie? Does Das Kapital come in Realtree camouflage now?

Now look at you, standing under a DON’T TREAD ON ME flag, refreshing your banking app with the evangelical fervor of a man expecting Jesus to arrive by direct deposit.

“The government must never give people money.” Unless of course, the money can help Republicans keep getting government money for telling us the government must never give people money.

And these are the motherfuckers who call themselves the party of fiscal responsibility. The balanced-budget, belt-tightening, bean-counting bullshit brigade. They’d make Oliver Twist submit his fucking porridge request in triplicate.

Meanwhile, by August, nearly thirty percent of our entire outstanding national debt had accumulated during Donald Trump’s time in office. Roughly eleven-point-six TRILLION fucking dollars across his first term and this unfinished second one.

They’d convene a congressional inquisition over a poor woman’s premium paper towels while their bankruptcy-baptized fucking messiah treats a trillion dollars like he’s breaking a twenty.

But please, tell us more about the grandchildren. They’re always so concerned about leaving debt to the grandchildren. Until Grandpa needs another electoral ego massage, at which point apparently little Brayden can get a second fucking job.

The party of fiscal responsibility, my ass. These pauper-policing, plutocrat-petting deficit disciples are backing a promise with a trillion-dollar price tag to improve the customer reviews on their own shitty fucking performance.

And hold the fuck on. Weren’t we already getting five large from DOGE?

Elon, that chainsaw-brandishing, chest-thumping technofeudal twat and professional sperm spreader, tore through Washington while Trump floated sharing the savings. We got the chainsaw. We got the cuts. We did not get the fucking check.

I’ve received more actual cash from the washing machine.

The two-grand tariff rebates haven’t arrived either, which Stormy Daniels could’ve warned you is kind of his thing.

When The New York Times asked about it, this bronzer-brained, bloviating blowhard said, “I did do that? When did I do that?” Then he said the money would come later in the year.

Now the Geriatric Grift-of-the-Month Club is promising the sequel.

Wonderful. Another five thousand dollars I can’t spend. I’m almost not buying a fucking boat. I’ll name it Insufficient Funds and christen it with the champagne I didn’t order and can’t afford.

But don’t worry, because JD Vance, that oleaginous ottoman enthusiast, says tariffs could cover this trillion-dollar campaign coupon. The same import taxes we’re refunding by the fucking billions.

Even the Kohl’s cashier working through an edible understands a fucking return.

You can’t keep spending the receipt after you’ve given the money back. And even the tariffs we keep don’t magically become Donald Trump’s personal checking account. This hush-money Houdini wants to play sugar daddy with OUR credit card.

“Daddy bought you groceries!”

Daddy, that’s my fucking Discover card. You can’t pilfer my purse, buy me a pound of pastrami, and expect me to start calling you Big Poppa.

And why the fuck are we letting him near the purse in the first place? This Fozzie Bear with a four-foot tie bankrupted casinos.

Just fucking think about that. Think how hard you have to try to suck to bankrupt a casino. People walked in specifically to lose money, and he still managed to beat them to it.

Now this fiduciary fuckwit is promising five grand without an approved payment or a delivery date. At least the fucking Tooth Fairy tells you when to check the pillow. Nobody makes a six-year-old wait for his molar money until Pennsylvania demonstrates sufficient fealty.

But I’m supposed to sit here and clap like a trained seal because this slippery, spray-tanned, self-dealing, solipsistic snake-oil salesman has discovered that people who need money would enjoy receiving some?

Yes, Donald. I fucking KNOW people need money. We all need money. We need even more of it since your tantrum tariffs made the shit we were already struggling to afford more fucking expensive. You don’t get to slap a surcharge on surviving and then expect me to genuflect because you’ve waved a checkbook in the general direction of my overdraft.

I’d fucking love five thousand dollars. I’d love to replace my brakes without briefly considering whether Fred Flintstone had the right fucking idea. But I can be broke without volunteering to be bamboozled. Needing help with the bills doesn’t mean I’ve agreed to let this predatory, pomade-plastered prick use my financial anxiety to finish paying off his political mortgage.

And he’s counting on us needing that money badly enough to vote like it’s already in the fucking bank.

He doesn’t need to pay you before November.

He just needs you to believe him when he says he will.

But how fucking stupid do you have to be to fall for this shit?

Remember The Boy Who Cried Wolf? The intended audience still occasionally shits its pants, and even THEY grasp that you stop believing the fucking liar.

You shidiots finished it and demanded an investigation into who was funding the sheep.

He’s buying your loyalty on layaway, and you’re making the fucking payments.

And if you’re dumb enough, gullible enough, enough of a pudding-brained, promise-gobbling patsy to believe he’s going to deliver on this latest dangled fucking carrot after more than a dozen promises just like it that he suddenly doesn’t even fucking remember making, then you deserve to get fucking fleeced.

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Midcentury Compact

Other than the windows on the exterior rendering not matching up with the actual floor plan…

The kitchen needs work, moving the door to the carport if necessary to the other side of the “food bar” so cabinets can be run the lenth of that wall. The entry hall is also unnecessarily long and dark, but I don’t know what could be done other than putting a glass panel front door in place.

Obviously some changes have been made…

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During a brief moment during the COVID lockdowns, humanity unintentionally ran one of the largest environmental experiments in modern history.

With cars parked, flights cancelled and factories operating at reduced capacity, global daily CO₂ emissions fell by about 17% at their peak in April 2020. Road transport alone dropped by roughly 36%, making it the largest contributor to that sudden decline. 

The change was visible from space too. Satellites observed dramatic reductions in nitrogen dioxide pollution over many major cities and industrial regions. The air genuinely became cleaner in many places, although pollutants such as fine particulate matter did not fall everywhere because weather, dust and other natural sources still played a major role. 

But Earth didn’t suddenly “heal” in a few months. Atmospheric CO₂ continued increasing because humanity was still emitting billions of tonnes, just at a slower rate. Once economies reopened, emissions rapidly moved back toward previous levels. Across all of 2020, global CO₂ emissions ended up roughly 6% lower than in 2019. 

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson. We don’t need permanent lockdowns to protect the planet. What those months demonstrated was how strongly transportation, energy production and industry influence the environment when their activity changes at a global scale.

The challenge is achieving those reductions deliberately through cleaner electricity, efficient cities, better public transport and low-carbon technology rather than through a global emergency.

For a few months, we saw how quickly some forms of pollution can respond when human activity changes. The planet didn’t heal overnight, but it showed us that our actions really can be large enough to change what satellites see from space.

[source]

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Don’t Worry John. We’re ALL There.

A blurred woman holding her head
Photo by Windah Limbai on Unsplash

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

That thought runs through my head more than I’d like to admit these days.

As someone who has navigated the past three decades with a mental illness, I’ve gotten used to the crushing despair that visits from time to time, sometimes staying for a few bleak moments before departing as quickly as it came, other times moving in for weeks or even months, derailing recent progress and swallowing up my tenuous joy.

I have endured the darkest nights of the soul, and I’ve passed through protracted seasons of utter hopelessness.

Yet, as difficult as those times have been, they were always the exception; brief or extended detours from an otherwise manageable and often even enjoyable existence. I could usually be certain that, despite their ferocity, these internal storms would eventually pass and a gentler, more stable state would settle in.

I’m not sure I can say that anymore. 

In fact, if I set aside the weight of others’ personal and professional expectations of me, the facades of competence I work incredibly hard to maintain, and the worries of judgement, disappointment (or worse, pity) that may or may not come, I gotta say there’s a twenty-four-seven sh*t show going on inside my head.

A pervasive, insidious, and increasingly loud sense of dread is pretty much ubiquitous now. 

It sits alongside me in traffic as I think about my neighbors abducted from their workplaces and children lying under rubble half a world away. 

It hovers over my shoulder as I am hit again and again by an unrelenting flood of suffering flickering wildly through the screen in the palm of my hand that I can’t seem to put down. 

It sits like a massive stone upon my chest at night, as I inventory the nightmares of the day, and wait for sleep to come, knowing it will likely not be restful.

It greets me in the morning with a sudden jolt of panic, the second I happen upon the horrors du jour curated by powerful people who seemingly cannot be stopped.

I do my best to beat those stubborn black thoughts into submission or at least soften their jagged edges with the well-worn stockpile of coping strategies I’ve used and endlessly recommend to others: meditation, therapy, prayer, volunteering, exercise, nature, travel, fasting, medication, journaling, community, touching grass. 

Yet, if I’m honest, these have become an exercise in diminishing returns, rarely offering more than a short respite from the feeling that things in my head are not improving anytime soon.

And far from some nebulous, undefined source, I can precisely pinpoint the authors of my despair:

It’s the unthinkable cruelty that appears to be contagious.
It’s the seemingly inexhaustible capacity some have for hurting fellow humans.
It’s the apparent apathy of so many others.
It’s the brokenness of systems that seem beyond repair.
It’s what feels like the irreparable relational fractures that have been revealed.
It’s the burning of the planet, the disregard for the vulnerable, and the mockery of empathy.
It’s the realization that no one is coming to save us and we may not even be willing to save ourselves.

These are quantifiable, tangible realities; or at least they point to those things. This isn’t some negative mindset that positive thinking will magically remedy. I can’t manifest my way out of it or speak it out of existence. This is terrifyingly real, and knowing that actually helps a bit. It’s a comfort to realize this is not all in my head.

Look, there are things I know to be true about the hell we are all living through right now:

I know that I am not responsible for carrying all of it. 
I know I can only stay in the small space of my agency. 
I know that there are tens of millions of people working tirelessly to push back against the same darkness I am.
I know that all evil empires fall, that every malevolent regime is temporary, that things are never as black and white as they might feel.

I can know all of these things with great certainty, and still feel like the sky is falling.

I’m still functioning, still doing my work, still making plans, still finding moments of joy, still stepping into the trenches of the fight, still creating, still endeavoring to “live well as the greatest resistance”, but there remains the lingering grief over how much has been lost and the sad realization that we didn’t have to be here.

I think feeling that is less a sickness and more a sign of humanity.

Please hear me: this is not a cry for help, an invitation of sympathy, or a solicitation for solutions; maybe more a plea for solidarity.

It’s the difficult admission of a far-from-ideal mental state that I wish I didn’t find myself in, in the hope that I’m not the only one whose head is a scary and disorienting place right now.

Maybe you might encounter these words and suddenly recognize the symptoms of a lingering sorrow that you haven’t been able to shake, a fear that does not relent, and a rest that does not come.

Maybe if we all admit how not well we are, that will be the healing we need to keep going for one more day.

Is your head a mess these days, friends, or is it just me?

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it’s a well-known fact that Little Donny Fuckface is a quadrice-indicted twice-impeached once-convicted popular-vote-losing adderall-huffing dead-pedo-bestie-schmoozing East-Wing-destroying insurrection-leading ear-diapering testimony-ducking judge-threatening lawyer-ignoring debate-avoiding witness-tampering crypto-scamming disabled-veteran-dishonoring inheritance-squandering rube-fleecing clown-makeup-smearing language-mangling sneaker-hawking serial-sexual-predating draft-dodging casino-bankrupting butler-bullying daughter-perving hush-money-paying real-estate-swindling bone-spur-faking ketchup-hurling justice-obstructing classified-war-plan-thieving golf-cheating stock-manipulating weather-map-defacing war-criminal-pardoning horse-paste-promoting paper-towel-flinging race-baiting tax-evading evidence-destroying charity-defrauding money-laundering diaper-filling 34-count 80-year-old fluorescent-tangerine narcoleptic fart factory. we know this.

but do you know what else Donny is? a sweaty, festering pest-hole of megalomaniacal shit, that’s what.

“please raise your right hand. ‘I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe. that I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do. they never— there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care.’”

fuck off, bro. this is America. I’m not pledging anything to some malevolent burst trash-bag of personality defects.

seriously, who the fuck does this fucking fuck think he is? 

easy question, easy answer: Donny thinks he’s God’s gift to the world. he’s that fucked in the head.

let’s be crystal clear about one thing: Donny is not God’s gift to anything. he’s a very naughty boy. now go away.

but do you know who else thinks they’re the center of the universe? infants. they have no conception of the world all around them. they care about one thing only: that there’s a tit in their face to feed on, when they need one. doesn’t that sound exactly like Dear Leader?

Donny functions on the same level as a week-old baby whose brain is still half pudding. he’s never evolved past the me-centric worldview of a diaper-shitting newborn.

and why should he evolve? he’s got an entire political party willing to shove their tit in his face. did you hear them in that video clip above, dutifully repeating his ferkakta pledge to cheat in the midterms? what in the actual fuck?

now feast your incredulous eyes on this. here’s an actual video that got played on the Jumbotron, just before Donny’s speech last night.

“on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

holy shit, they literally cast Dear Leader as God’s gift to the universe. 

they’re not being sarcastic. they actually believe this twaddle. remember, the whole purpose of this ‘Republican midterm convention’ wasn’t to promote Republican candidates. they gave the briefest lip service to the dipshits who are actually running in races this year. this ‘midterm convention’ was just an Emotional Support Tit, shoved into Dear Leader’s face so he could spend two days feeding off uncritical adoration.

that’s because the GOP is no longer a functioning political party. it’s now just some fucked-up cult whose prime directive is to make a colicky piss-baby feel good about himself.

I mean, at this point they’re not even pretending to be anything other than a cult.

CBS News reporter Ed O’Keefe: “is Vance your guy in 2028?”

MAGA: “my guy is who Donald Trump endorses.” 

O’Keefe: “so it’s up to him to tell you?”

MAGA: “that’s exactly right…. people call us a cult. I don’t care.”

the entire Republican Party has lost its way — and I haven’t a clue how it finds a way back. they’re just too far gone at this point.

Preznit Fuckwit has run the GOP straight into the ground, just like he ran six casinos straight into the ground.

everything Donny touches, dies.

you would think that two days of maximum adoration would have put Dear Leader in a good mood — but you’d be wrong. Donny is too broken-inside to ever actually be happy. there’s not enough money, power, or attention the in world to satisfy him.

so of course this thin-skinned, eternally-unsatisfied shithead had to take it out on his favorite target — the nearest woman reporter.

reporter: “on the checks, we have $40 trillion in debt. if your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?”

Donny: “I’m doing it as a reward for people having to put up for five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden.”

reporter: “you also offered tariff refund checks—”

Donny: “not you.”

reporter: “you also—”

Donny: “NOT YOU! hey— NOT YOU.”

reporter: “—”

Donny: “your network and you, you’re the worst.”

Jesus H. Fuck, did you see the way this abusive sack of shit lunges at the reporter, and gets right in her face? who does that?

once again, Donny abuses a woman reporter. notice that he never pulls this shit on a man. he’s too cowardly. but if it’s a woman asking him a tough question? she’s a pig. she’s a bitch. she’s dumb. ‘NOT YOU!’

this is probably as a good place as any to note that my What The Fuck Is Wrong With You Challenge™ is now in its 2,355th day.

“…an amazing testament to the kind of man— ah— gha— mzzzzzzzbzt—[screen goes black]”

oh noes! United States First Failson Cokey McSniffle’s touching tribute to the misshapen garden gnome got all glitched to shit, too. so sad!

“he could go from fundraising, you know, making calls to zzZZZZckkkkk bububububillionaire to glrrRRRRRrr—”

try not to laugh. 

oh, fuck it — laugh all you want. never stop mocking the shit out of these incompetent ass-clowns who couldn’t find their own dick with both hands and a flashlight.

folks, the date has been set for the fourth No Kings Day of Action: October 17, 2026.

Donny fucking hates No Kings. it ruins his day to be reminded that hundreds of millions of people all across the world hate his guts.

let’s ruin Donny’s day. let’s make No Kings Four the largest one yet. go here to find or host an event.

Wonkette’s Rebecca Schoenkopf, can you step in here for a moment, and show us how it’s done?

fuck you, you fucking fuck — now that’s a message we can all get behind.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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So many of John’s thoughts mirror my own. I’ve highlghted those that especially resonate with me.

a couple of tall buildings sitting next to each other
Photo by In Memory of Yan Ji on Unsplash

Horrible days don’t usually start out as horrible days.

As we woke up, made breakfast, walked the dog, got the kids off to school, went to work, or did whatever we did most Thursday mornings here in America, September 11th, 2001, was just another ordinary Tuesday to us… until it wasn’t.

Soon, all hell would break loose, and we would face one of the most catastrophic days in our history.

For those who didn’t live through it, there’s no way to accurately describe the immediate existential free fall: the urgency, the chaos, and the abject terror of those first moments and the hours that followed.

Nothing felt secure.
No place felt safe.
No one was immune to the shaking.
No one was insulated from the grieving.
Everyone was shaken to their core.

So many memories are burned into my brain about those first days: unthinkable images of carnage I’ll never get out of my head, paralyzing waves of fear I’d never experienced, a leaden heaviness that I have rarely felt since.

But I remember more about that time too: I remember America being its best self.

I remember the fierce flood of goodness that arrived almost instantaneously.
I remember people’s staggering courage.
I remember their incomprehensible selflessness.
I remember a unity that transcended politics.
I remember a kindness that bridged religious traditions.
I remember a defiant, expansive love standing stridently in the face of the hatred of a few.
I remember humanity showing itself in breathtaking ways.

A mantra soon rose in those days: “Never forget.”

I suppose that meant different things to different people:
For some it was a declaration to remember the people who died and the lives that were squandered and the legacy they had left.
For some it was a prayer to the heavens, a commitment to live fully from a place of benevolence.
For some it was a condemnation of any hatred born out of bigotry.
For some it was a patriotic pledge of love of country.
For some it was a promise not to lose sight of all they had seen and experienced, about how beautiful people can be.

As I look at this version of America twenty-five years later, it seems as though we’ve all broken our promises, whether to God or country or the fallen or survivors or ourselves.

We’ve forgotten all that we learned on that horrible day in September.

We’ve forgotten how dependent we are on one another, how connected we all are, how tethered to each other’s lives we are, despite the surface differences or the myth of our separation.

We’ve forgotten that in the end, a life in front of us in peril is a life that deserves our attention, a life we’re charged with saving.

We’ve forgotten how difficult and painful a path every person is walking, and how pointless it is to try and make that path more difficult and painful for them.

We’ve forgotten how fragile and fleeting and priceless this life is, and how wasteful it is to spend a moment of it with contempt for strangers.

This is why the grief feels amplified on this September 11th: because of all the promises we’ve broken and all the forgetting we’ve done.

And, worse, today it feels as though for far too many Americans, the words “Never Forget” are now simply thinly veiled expressions of blind hatred of entire people groups, based on a violence they had nothing to do with and gave no approval of. It has simply become a rallying cry for those who seek an excuse to dehumanize their neighbors, for people harboring the same senseless ugliness that authored the nightmare to begin with.

That’s why our forgetting is such a tragedy: we squandered the lessons we could have learned.

September 11th, 2001 was a nightmare for us as a nation, but we woke up that day too.
We saw ourselves clearly.
We saw through the walls and the barriers of created divisions, past the chasms and gaps of surface difference.
We stopped the petty bullshit of partisanism, tribalism, and territorialism, and we realized our oneness.
We caught a glimpse of what America can be when it finds unity in diversity.

That’s what I wish we would have never forgotten in the years since that horrible day in September.

That day we learned to cherish life; to love people fully, to live with open-handed gratitude, to recognize the value of every human being, to move quickly toward someone in pain, to not withhold compassion, to see the best in people, to care for one another as our own.

May we not need another horrible day to remember that again, America.

Never forget who and what we could still be.

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I Don’t Care For The Exterior Treatment, But I Rather Like The Floor Plan (With A Few Caveats)

I’d turn the existing Pantry into a Breakfast Room. Some of my fondest memories of childhood revolve around eating my bowl of cereal (usually corn flakes with sugar sprinkled on top, doused with half-and-half) in the breakfast room of my grandparents’ house in western Massachusetts. The closet between the Kitchen and the Service room could easily be turned into a pantry. I also think the cubbies and the fireplace in the Library need to go. There’s no place to put a desk unless you want it floating in the middle of the room.

I’d also have to sort out that rabbit warren of spaces just to the left of the staircase on the second floor. It seems odd that you’d have to pass through the door to the Master Suite in order to access the second bathroom since there is already a dedicated bathroom in the suite.

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Morning With Pussy

Pussy Tourette – In Hi-Fi (1993) & Who Does She Think She Is? (1995)

Whatever happened to Pussy Tourette? An extensive internet search comes up with precious little. The most comprehensive thing I found was via grokpedia (including her real name, Mark Cliser, who, through further searching I learned is now 63 years old). Seems the last thing she released was EP1 in 2007—now only available for download via iTunes. There isn’t any physical media available for this release.

These albums prompt so many good memories of my life in SF during the 90s, including my return to The City in ’98 as I was winding my way through Oakland, just before I crossed the Bay Bridge.

I remember how scandalous the lyrics were considered at the time. Now you hear much worse on a daily basis.

And while you’re at it, GET OFF MY LAWN!

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This Was The Day The Timeline Slipped A Cog And Threw Us Onto The Timeline From Hell Where We Now Find Ourselves

Of all the lies Donald Trump, that fact-fucking, grief-grafting, tragedy-jacking, bullshit-belching, pathological, sociopathic shitheel, has sluiced through that puckered little piss hole, his lies about September 11 are the ones that fucking get me the most.

Every time.

I wish they didn’t. After all these years of deceit and delusion and relentless daily derangement, you would think I could roll my eyes and move on.

I never can.

This one gets under my skin, behind my ribs, into that place where anger and grief are so fucking tangled I don’t know which I’m feeling first.

Because it’s 9/11.

And I can’t make myself be numb to that.

Because like so many of us, I lived through it, and it’s fucking personal.

It remains one of the darkest days of my life, and even now, twenty-five years later, sitting here trying to reach backward and retrieve what it felt like to inhabit those first impossible hours in real time, I come up empty in exactly the place I came up empty then.

I remember being breathless. Untethered from any sense of reality I had ever known, staring at towers I had grown up marveling at, those immense silver monoliths teeming with the small, sacred, staggering ordinariness of an average Tuesday: elevators rising, phones ringing, coffee cooling beside keyboards, restaurant kitchens clattering, somebody bitching about a meeting, somebody making lunch plans, somebody kissing someone goodbye without knowing they had just spoken the last unremarkable sentence of their life.

All those private little universes humming along behind all that steel and glass, every floor crowded with errands and appetites and aggravations and people who fully expected to be somewhere else by dinner.

And then they weren’t.

People I loved worked there.

People I knew worked there.

Then I watched those towers burn and buckle and accordion into themselves with thousands of people still in them, saw paper drift with this almost obscene delicacy through that crystalline September blue, saw two familiar pieces of my horizon become smoke and pulverized steel and absence while my brain kept rejecting what my eyes had absorbed.

I have never found a word big enough to hold it.

The sky stayed.

The people didn’t.

All across this country, we stood wherever that morning had stranded us, gathered around televisions, hovering beside landlines, calling and calling and calling, trying to comprehend something so monstrous, so far outside the architecture of anything we understood that there was nothing to do but stare at the wound it had opened in the world.

We were all asking: How could this happen? What do we do now?

Donald Trump asked a different question:

How do I make myself the fucking hero of this?

That same afternoon, while Manhattan choked on ash, while people walked north wearing powdered pieces of an office, a desk, a human being in their hair, Trump called WWOR-TV and talked about 40 Wall Street. His building. Now the tallest downtown, he bragged. It wasn’t, but that didn’t matter to him.

Three thousand people had just been murdered and this necrotic narcissist heard a real-estate opportunity ka-chinging beneath the sirens.

Two days later, he turned up in front of cameras. Where exactly? Who the fuck knows. Near enough to the smoking pile to get attention. Firefighters slept against concrete, too exhausted to find somewhere softer. Search dogs kept working until their paws bled. The cameras recorded that—the bodies giving out, the terrible, stubborn effort to find somebody who still had a breath left. All that footage from the most photographed square mile on the planet. And in that vast, unbearable record of what it took to be useful in the ruins, where is one fucking frame of Donald Trump moving so much as a pebble?

Not. One.

If he had moved ONE GODDAMN BRICK, that brick would have a provenance more thoroughly documented than the Crown Jewels. Mar-a-Lago would hang a fifty-foot oil painting of Trump heaving an I-beam across his shoulders while a bald eagle cries into the Hudson.

Not one photograph exists. Not a shred of evidence for any of it — not the hundreds of men he says he sent, not the rubble he says he moved, not one minute of him lifting a finger for anybody. None of it happened. It has never stopped him from saying it happened.

He said it again on Fox last week. And then today, somehow, inexplicably, he made it worse. Days before we honor the fallen, twenty-five years after 9/11, he came up with something new.

Now there were two firemen. Big strong guys, shockingly. They grabbed him under the arms — got to get you out of here — and they lifted him up and started running with him.

Running with him.

Give me a fucking break.

Every time he tells it he gets braver and the men who save him get bigger, and now this man who has never lifted anything heavier than a nine iron is being carried out of the smoke like a wounded general while actual firefighters were going the other way and not coming back.

Come the fuck on.

I know by now that nothing should surprise me, but what guts me most is the gobsmacking contempt embedded in all of it, the breathtaking callousness, cruelty, predatory indifference and psychic frigidity of this malevolent, melon-hued megalomaniac toward the people who never needed to embroider themselves into the story because they were already inside it, breathing it, bleeding into it, carrying it home.

It went into them: concrete, pulverized glass, asbestos, benzene, human remains, an entire vertical city ground into poisonous gray particulate that slipped into the lungs of people too busy searching for other human beings to wonder what the air might cost them. September 11 did not stop taking lives when the towers fell. Coughs became scans, scans became biopsies, and men and women who had walked into hell looking for strangers discovered that hell had hitched a ride home inside their bodies.

I knew people who died that morning. I knew others who died because of that morning. Around here, everybody knew somebody.

My roommate had worked at Windows on the World. So had my boyfriend at the time. Friends of friends, people from firehouses, a friend’s husband, a face you recognized from the train.

For weeks afterward, the cars sat in the commuter lots exactly where they had been left. Rows of them. Coffee calcifying in cup holders. A cardigan slumped across a passenger seat because the office got cold. Parking permits dangling from rearview mirrors. All those small, mundane keepsakes of a life in motion suddenly unbearable, because the hands that left them there were never coming back for them.

Nothing inside those cars knew the world had ended for someone.

That is grief. The ordinary becoming sacred. Milk in the refrigerator. A dog cocking its head at every familiar engine. A voicemail nobody deletes because there is breath in it. A fucking Tuesday that never got to finish.

And Donald Trump reached into that. Forced himself into it, the way he forces himself onto women, because intrusion is his native language, because nothing is allowed to remain outside the radius of his appetite, because every wound, every loss, every grave seems to present itself to him as one more opening through which he can shove some swollen little fantasy of his own importance.

He scavenges catastrophe, siphons courage, strip-mines sorrow, fingers through bereavement for anything bright enough to steal, then crams the whole blood-slick bundle through the distended sausage casing of his self-regard until somebody else’s heroism comes squirming out the other end stamped TRUMP, shrink-wrapped and ready for resale.

He is a sociopath. He has no regard for human life or human suffering. Where empathy should live in a person, there is only an empty elevator shaft, the doors sliding open onto cold black nothing, no car, no cables, no bottom, just a lightless plummet through all the floors of human feeling that were never fucking built.

He is a sadistic, self-fellating sack of shit who feeds on grief. He lied about our dead while families were still dialing phones, still searching hospitals, still saying missing because dead was a word too monstrous to let into the room.

And he is lying about them now, a quarter-century later, while their names are still being read aloud.

The responders earned their place with blood and breath and broken bodies and years they never got back. The dead paid for theirs with everything.

Donald Trump does not get to shoplift valor from either of them.

This week, families will gather again at Ground Zero and read the names for hours, each one opening onto an entire life that goes on existing in the people left behind: keys turning in the door at six o’clock, a laugh unmistakable across a crowded room, perfume lingering in the collar of a coat, pipe tobacco ghosting the lining of a jacket, handwriting slanting across a grocery list nobody can quite bring themselves to throw away, the warm hollow on one side of a bed, the throwaway last sentence someone has carried ever since because nobody knew it was going to be the last.

That day belongs to the people who died in those attacks and the people September 11 kept killing long after the skyline cleared. To the ones who never came home and the ones who ran toward the smoke. To the families who learned how absence can inhabit a house, settle into drawers and closets and holidays, change the shape of a dinner table and the sound of a room. To the people who remain, who gather every year to lift those names into the September air so the dead are not reduced to a number, a photograph, a date carved into stone.

I don’t expect a creature capable of such abject, unabashed depravity to understand what it means to mourn, what it means to remember, what it means to be humbled, what it means to honor any of them.

I just wish he would get the fuck out of the way while the rest of us do.

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And Another Dinosaur Braying At The Incoming Asteroid

Councilwoman Vickie Paladino is demanding that Mayor Zohran Mamdani “not show his face” at New York City’s 9/11 ceremony, insisting that he does not belong on that “sacred ground.”

But let’s remember the basic facts.

When 9/11 happened, Rudy Giuliani was the Republican mayor of New York, George Pataki was the Republican governor, and George W. Bush was the Republican president. The attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda—not by any American political party or child.

Zohran Mamdani was nine years old.

Paladino is obviously not literally claiming that a nine-year-old caused 9/11. But portraying New York’s first Muslim mayor as somehow unworthy of standing at the memorial raises a troubling question: why should a Muslim American have to repeatedly prove his loyalty before being allowed to mourn alongside fellow New Yorkers?

Mamdani moved to New York at age seven. He has designated September 11 as a Day of Remembrance and Service and said he will attend the ceremony to honor the victims, their families, and the first responders who sacrificed everything.

Paladino does not speak for “the people.” Mamdani is the city’s elected mayor—and Muslim New Yorkers have every right to stand at Ground Zero, remember the victims, and mourn with their fellow Americans.

[source]

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