A friend posted on Facebook that she was all stirred up by politics and fear and made herself go out and mingle with people. It was so reassuring, both the admission and the action. Also I felt a little jealous that I wasn’t there, so triple win on this post!

Because I, as well, am all fucked up about the news. I am very afraid of losing this election in November and I do feel like our team isn’t leading with its best foot forward. I’ve emailed my federal electeds and asked them to talk to the president about his legacy and how that legacy might be affected by LOSING THE ELECTION. I’m going to email Schumer after I post this again, to say good job. Keep on. What else to do? Try to see people in the outside world while doing a job and while freaking out about the world.

Freaking out about the world eats up a lot of my spare time. It looks like zoning out with my phone, just in case you needed a visual. But my mind is very active. Also Calvin’s covid cancelled all my plans and kind of froze me on making more, so I’ve had extra time for freaking out. I am trying to rein it in by doing things I like to do, like see people and eat food with them. So I do have plans now, but very few.

Just so you know where I am.

So let’s ground ourselves with Maggie updates

Sweet, sweet relief from the hell of the world crumpling up around us. Maggie!

So, after the hosings.. quiet, until 5 AM Monday morning, when the cops came and asked if there was a woman, 5 foot 4 (my height… hmm) who was a danger to herself. Did she have a baseball bat?

Calvin assured them that no, that was untrue. We were asleep and the neighbor was crazy and mean.

Does the NYPD know about spread sheets?

Have they no records of stuff that has happened in the past? I mean, it’s groundhog day with these ding-dongs, every single time. Do people use computers in law enforcement? Would AI help? HOLY HELL! This is exactly what AI might be helpful with!

Back to Maggie: The cops came again around 10:30 and I missed them. Calvin told them something and they went away. I’m going to declare that was the end of a wave of crazy.

Today she stealthily gave me the finger as I walked into the house

Yes, she did. I said, “stupid little bitch.” It was the best I could do, plus the stealth bird made me laugh. I briefly considered flipping her off back but that was just derivative.

I feel her watch as I hang my laundry

Oh, she’s watching. I am quite laundry proud, you know. And Maggie is too. She has criticized my laundry-hanging skills before. She has this whole thing with not draping the clothes but pinning them from the top. You use a lot of clothespins that way and I don’t like it. I also fear the clothes will fall off the line more easily when pinned that way.

A shirt of mine fell this week and Maggie has it. I think one of her aides brought it in, but now it is gone. I am sad. I liked that shirt.

Back to Maggie: she has criticized my clothes hanging for my draping technique. I’d like it on the record that I considered the options and I think my way is best. You doubt my rationale? Well, consider my deep roots in laundry lines. I am someone who hung her laundry my whole entire adolescence, and again when I moved into this house 17 years ago.

We didn’t have a clothes dryer until I was in high school. That meant we hung laundry outside unless it was freezing, and then we hung it in the basement. When I got to high school I did some fancy laundry footwork that will not describe here, right now, in order to make sure I had clean clothes, and if anyone gave me a ride home and saw the laundry hanging through the garage windows, I died inside.

All the kids in my coal-mining town had dryers! It was considered tacky to hang up clothes and yet I did it all the time. Even the super-trashy kids just went to the laundromat. But not us because we were the half-assed hippies who lived in a mostly-normal house but with no dishwasher and no dryer.

Just to clarify. The true hippie kids were all friends with each other. But we were not and I don’t know why. My parents didn’t smoke pot, for one thing, and they were workaholics. They may not have been the easiest to get along with.

So my brother and I were trying to fit into the town world, and we had clothes drying on lines in our garage. That was not a good thing. [NOTE: In my town the cars never came inside the garage. Are other places like that?]

I lived Hillbilly Elegy and it was far more interesting than what Mr. Vance described

Though I missed the meth/opioids era. I lived Hillbilly Elegy: The Redneck Eighties (working title! don’t worry! we can workshop it!). I was an outsider (Jew, city kid, reader, fast talker) among the proto-Trumpers. I mean, I feel like I should understand these Trumpers, but I have very few insights.

The kids I knew were mean and they do all have father issues but I still like chatting with most of them. Not all. There’s one kid, who did grow up to be such a Trumper, whom I would run away from if I saw him today. The wonderful thing is that apparently everyone I went to school with is also afraid of this guy too. When they tried to organize a reunion, people said, I don’t want to come if he is there.”

That’s what I loved about my town: it was so small that we all secretly knew the guy was a psychopath and a beast. Then again, it was so small there was no escape. Still, I love the data underlying the shared understanding. My graduating class was about 35, so you really could talk to a significant bunch and get a pretty solid fact. I feel like 35 people (and there are more who loathed him too) disliking and fearing a person and many of them sharing it with each other is good thing. A kind thing. We should know when we’re being messed with by an asshole for no reason.

So that guy is a HUGE Trumper.

But I can’t explain the other non-sociopaths, except that we all played nice with this nasty fucking guy. I went to boarding school to get away from that guy. Everyone else stayed. So maybe that’s how to describe the Trumpers. You know he’s evil but you just go along with it.

Okay, let’s move on. I started with laundry and wandered off here, imagining myself as JD Vance. If Maggie knew I felt competitive with JD Vance, that would be fantastic.

Getting back to the laundry issue

I know my laundry down to my core essence, down to the 14-year-old girl who finally had contacts and finally had boys talk to her and I was going to fight like hell to look just like all the super Christian girls, who were super Christian even if they were kind of … I need a better vocabulary. Even if they were playing up to really gross slightly older boys. I want to use “trashy” and “slutty.” Those are the words I would have used then and it accurately sums up the behavior. But now, years later, I can’t imagine that behavior not coming from some terrible situation, and I don’t want to heap more shame by saying slutty.

My point is that even those girls were super Christian! The boys did not ever address religion but all the girls talked Jesus all the time.

I do wander!

I did laundry to keep the evil eyes of Christian bitches off me. I did laundry so I fit in seamlessly and actually didn’t stand out. Boys actually did not care what you wore.

So from that foundational laundry doing, I shake my fist at Maggie and cry: My laundry is IMPECCABLE.