After laying in bed, tossing and turning for an hour and the entirety of Jazz At The Pawnshop 3 failing to lull me back to sleep, I finally decided to just get up. Apparently both pups also needed to go out, so it was apparently meant to be. I heard Sophie in the kitchen attacking her empty bowl, so I also fed her. (Raffi had already gone back to bed.)
At this point I think I’m up for the day. But one of the nice things about retirement is I have nothing on my schedule today, so if I need a nap calls…
An explanation for the last week’s worth of very-Richard-Bach-Messiah’s-Handbook-style inspirational quotes from the author herself:
You are stardust that learned to overthink.
You are a walking, breathing impossibility, atoms that figured out how to fall in love, get anxious about font choices, and wonder if their email subject line was “too much”.
You’re hurtling through space on a rock that somehow grew trees and oceans and you and you’re still not sure your weirdness “fits”.
We treat creativity like it’s something to earn. Like there’s a prerequisite. A readiness level. Some imaginary threshold of “good enough” or “acceptable” we need to cross before we’re allowed to make something.
But you were literally forged in the death of a star. The iron in your blood is billions of years old. Your atoms have been recycling through the universe since before this planet existed. You are ancient material arranged into something that has never existed before and will never exist again.
The creative cost of waiting until you’re “ready” is collective. Every unmade thing is a map someone else can’t navigate by. Every unsaid thought is a conversation that never gets to happen. Every voice that sands itself down to fit is one less frequency in a world that desperately needs the full spectrum.
Creative Living exists because we believe creativity isn’t a hobby or a side quest or something you get back to when life calms down. It’s how you fully experience the absurdity of being alive.
It’s how impossible, stardust, skeleton-riding, dream-hallucinating, conscious-universe-folded-into-a-body humans like you make sense of the fact that you’re here at all.
This one—a player that was a total lost cause—is a surprise gift to be sent to my tech who repairs this shit for me. I think he’s the only one in my circle who can appreciate it.
James Cockrell has been arrested on 2nd degree child exploitation charges in South Carolina.
Following a child s*xual abuse materials investigation into Cockrell, authorities found a child living in a condemned home covered with rat feces and holes in the floor.
Cockrell’s X account is filled with posts idolizing Donald Trump, referring to him as “god.” Cockrell ironically calls for a p*dophile to be killed in another post.
Not a drag queen.
Not trans.
Not an immigrant.
Not Muslim.
✔️MAGA!
“and I hadda go through, and I still do, fake stories, fake polls … I saw one today. 40%. I’m not at 40%. I’m at— much higher. I mean I’d love to run against anybody. the real polls say ‘you’d kill everybody. wouldn’t even be close.’”
oh boo fucking hoo, you pathetic sad-sack. stuff a sock in it already.
go press that big red button on the Resolute Desk, and when Walt Nauta comes scampering in with your diet coke, tell him you need your diaper changed, pronto.
CNN’s Harren Enter: “Trump’s net approval rating. look at the pre-SOTU polls, the State of the Union. look at that — negative 27 points! my goodness gracious. Compare that to where he was in 2020, 2019, and 2017 — minus 10, way lower now. the bottom line is Donald Trump has never been weaker going into a State of the Union address, according our CNN polling than he is right now, and weaker by a considerable amount.”
Donny’s poll numbers are circling the drain right now because none of this shit is popular, and all of it is fucked up.
aside from the brain-dead cultists for whom Dear Leader can never ever do wrong, nobody voted for any of the fascist shit going on right now.
nobody voted for the historic and stately East Wing to be demolished so that Donny can replace it with some vulgar Epstein Dance Hall — and speaking of Donny’s dead pedo bestie, nobody voted for the continuing cover-up of a massive pedophile ring.
nobody voted for off-the-charts corruption and greed.
nobody voted for masked ICE thugs teargassing children, and murdering anyone who looks at them funny. nobody voted for innocent immigrants to be disappeared off the streets and shipped off to far-away slave-labor gulags.
nobody voted for our allies to be insulted and ignored, or for Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves, or for Greenland to be perpetually harassed, or for Venezuela to become a vassal state.
nobody voted for the price of everything continuing to skyrocket — especially when Donny promised bring all that shit down on Day One.
“why— why would you do this? and they walk in— nobody even asks for— like, you have an identification? do you have an ID? um— [long pause] it’s so crazy. you know, the Mayor of New York, and he’s a very nice person, I, I met him. his ideology is not, not too good. but uhhhh— we’re having a massive snowstorm right now, and I’ve heard that he’s asked people to come out and help shovel the snow. okay, so you get a shovel and you start shoveling. what? what the hell, you’re not gonna help too much, but you help— [points to a woman in the audience] hello, darling, how are you? [points again] no, right behind you. look. my friend, right? are you okay? yes, you. are you okay? are you okay? [long pause] good. good. are your eyes okay? I gave her money to get her eyes fixed. lotta money, to get her eyes fixed. that doctor ripped me off, but that’s okay.”
holy shit. what in the actual fuck did we just listen to?
my dear sweet lord. it was just last week that the entire media ecosystem dogpiled AOC, because she paused and said ‘um’ in the middle of an answer — but Donny somehow gets an endless series of free passes to shit out incoherent nonsense on a daily basis. nobody in the press blinks, nobody says boo. it’s fucking maddening.
“I mean, I just abroad for the last 10 days or so and I was watching other people’s TV and other people’s leaders. And when you do that and then you come back and you watch our TV and our leaders it takes some adjustment, right? Like, that person that we were just watching, he does not seem well, in any sense.”
“I realize if you watch it day after day after day, it kind of maybe seems normal, but when you contrast it to people who can actually finish sentences and people who can stay on the topic and people who are perhaps sharing the same reality as you, it is really striking. I mean, that guy — just abstracting from the fact that he’s the president of the United States — he does not … He just doesn’t look well.”
Snyder gets it right: President Pudding Cup is not well — physically or mentally. and as much as we try to remind ourselves that none of this is normal, we can’t help but become inured to it.
when Donny blithers on about “I can use Licenses to do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” he’s giving away the game. tariffs were never about responsible or coherent economic policy. they were about having a hammer with with to punish the shit out of any country that pissed him off.
Jesus wept. Donny can’t just let the US Olympic hockey team enjoy their own victory. he has to horn in and pretend he had something to do with it. how weak. how sad. how small and petty.
did you vote for that? I didn’t.
here’s your Zero of the Day: it’s Judge Aileen Cannon, up to her usual fuckery.
Cannon is so easy to loathe. amateurish, dumb as shit, and totally in the tank for Donny Convict, she’s less a judge and more a member of Donny’s own legal team.
Judge Fangirl took some time off from scrawling ‘Mrs. Aileen Trump’ over and over on the covers of all her notebooks to commit an evil.
“Breaking: The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has permanently blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the classified documents case — saying releasing the report would be unfair to Trump and his co-defendants.”
when Cannon says the releasing the report would be ‘unfair’ to Donny, she gives away her game.
Melanie D’Arrigo, can you please explain to the nice people why that is?
“Blocking the release of a report on potential crimes committed by Trump and his co-defendants because it would be ‘unfair’ to them, is admitting that the report contains compelling evidence of crimes committed by them.”
exactly. Donny is guilty as fuck, and everyone knows it — even Judge Fangirl.
and now, here’s your Hero of the Day: whistleblower Ryan Schwank.
“on my first day, I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution, by entering homes without a judicial warrant. for the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program, cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program. classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officers’ authority. for example, they ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force. this means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable. the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force. our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well, that they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life-or-death situations. yet in the name churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests the we need to know that cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job. all to satisfy an administration demanding that they train thousands of new officers before the end of the year.”
brave man.
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.
Was this a conscious design decision? I know in the past I’ve designed (desert houses) with extremely thick exterior walls for their insulating properties. Just curious as to what was going through the designer’s mind.
I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. Things feel off. Things don’t work the way we’ve come to accept as normal and expected. Whether that’s our institutions, our devices, or—dare I say—our bodies (TBH, the latter may be colored by my own experiences over the past year). The simplest tasks are glitching. Trying to get anything accomplished through customer service anywhere is a lesson in frustration. Nothing is working the way it should.
I have a theory.
Judging from the prevalence of YouTube videos on the subject, as is the case with many older people I find myself waking up almost every night like clockwork around 3 am. Sometimes I can fall right back asleep; other times—like this morning—not so much. My mind starts wandering.
I know I’m not the only one—again, because I spend too much time on YouTube—that everything just feels off. In fact, I will go so far as reality itself has felt off since I watched those planes slam into the Twin Towers on the morning news that fateful day in 2001 as I was getting ready for work—although nowhere near as much as it has over the past five or six years.
“High strangeness” is the only way I can describe it. Yes, life eventually returned to normal—and for a few brief months our country was united in a way I now doubt we’ll ever see again. But then Republicans got a war hard-on and Bush invaded Iraq (even though it had nothing to do with the attacks) and things started unraveling.
This morning, while laying awake listening to Ben breathe beside me, I envisioned reality as a meticulously maintained Jenga tower; a tower representing our shared reality.
Bear with me here. This is kind of in the weeds and I’m not sure I can adequately convey it in words.
This tower of our shared reality is composed of blocks made of 8+ billion smaller towers representing our individual lives. When we die the small gaps left in the structure from our individual towers disappearing are replaced by new towers of those who follow after us. The big, life-altering events we each experience individually can be represented by blocks being knocked out of our personal towers. It’s never enough to bring down the entire fabric of reality, but these events definitely affect our personal realities, forcing us to change. (see: cancer, etc.)
But something happened in 2001. Something came along and knocked out several rows wholesale making everything unbalanced. The tower started listing.
When it descended that golden escalator in 2015, more critical rows were knocked out. The tower started leaning dangerously and it’s only gotten worse over the past decade. That’s this feeling of everything being off. Because it is.
COVID, 2020. Another block pushed—although not immeidately out of the tower. Somehow this managed to give our collective reality an opportunity to reset. But then, BAM! It was knocked out as well and it was back to business as usual. The tower was beginning to look like a certain monument in Pisa, Italy.
I fear all it’s going to take is one more event, one more loss of a row of blocks and…
I don’t know about y’all, but I keep feeling like this is just around the corner.
You are a conscious universe folded into a temporary body for approximately 80-90 years—4,000 weeks—and you’ve spent some of them worrying that your email was too long.
That your voice was too much.
That your ideas weren’t ready.
My love, you’re a MIRACLE that physics cannot fully explain.
You are not untouchable, and you cannot keep hiding behind the presidency. Your crimes cannot be ignored any longer, and the world will not look away. You were a part of Jeffrey Epstein’s circle, walking alongside a predator, and in doing so you revealed the predator you have been all your life. You protected each other for so long and you now continue to shield countless powerful people who know the truth. The world knows it. The victims know it. You are a perverted, disgusting, vile, and corrupt asshole, a moral disgrace who has embarrassed the entire world, betrayed every standard of decency, and left a trail of destruction and humiliation that touches everyone unlucky enough to have crossed your path.
Decades of sexual abuse trail you, and a jury has already found you liable. Your own words and actions leave no doubt: you are not misunderstood, you are dangerous, and you have no regard for anyone you harm. You survive by lying, deflecting, and weaponizing every accusation, turning every consequence into fuel for your rallies while ignoring the suffering of every victim.
Your presidency will not keep protecting you. Justice will reach you. Evidence does not bend to fear, and no amount of power or influence can shield you from accountability. Power can delay justice, but it cannot stop it. You will face it, and you will answer for everything.
I had a lovely phone conversation today with a very polite young chap who said he was calling from Microsoft.
“Hello, sir, how are you doing today?”
“I’m very well, thank you for asking. And how are you? More importantly… WHO are you?”
“Sir, my name is Gupta, and I’m calling from Microsoft.”
“Microsoft, eh? Is that a city in India somewhere? How’s the weather today — hot, or is it monsoon season? I’ve seen those National Geographic documentaries… that’s some serious rain!”
“No, sir, the weather is very good. I am calling from MICROSOFT — the computer company — Mr. Bill Gates’ company. We have found a serious problem with your computer…”
“REALLY? My computer? Well, that’s very worrying…”
“Yes, sir, it could become catastrophic for your files, your passwords, even your internet banking! But don’t worry — I can fix it for you…”
“No,” I interrupted, “it’s worrying because… I don’t actually HAVE a computer.”
Silence.
“You don’t, sir?”
“I don’t, Gupta. No computer.”
“Ahhh… then it must be your laptop.”
“Gupta.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I don’t have one.”
“An iPad?”
“Nope.”
“A tablet?”
“Nope. None of those.”
Pause.
“As a matter of fact, Gupta… I don’t even have a telephone.”
A few seconds of tense silence. Then he says, “Ah, sir… now you are lying to me!”
