My brain has been hibernating due to too much internet scrolling, but it has awakened with a bang, thanks to the discovery of an Adult Diaper Spa. Just linger on those three words. They are so incongruous and dissonant. And yet they are the portal to true insanity, not that I want to be judgemental or shaming in any way. I just had no idea!

I knew there were guys who liked wearing onesies, and I even remember looking at a website for adult size cribs. But this is a whole other thing.

This is not just a Diaper Spa, but also a Diaper Salon, Ageplay Spa, and Diaper B&B. It is run by Dr Murphy a neurodivergent M.D. who is also a “trauma-informed intimacy and relationship coach.” At the spa,

you can openly express yourself and partake of your favorite activities, meals, snacks, and nurturing. Activities range from playtime, story time, nap time, cuddle time, changing time, coloring, nursery rhymes, and sing-a-longs.

In the summer, you can play with your water wings and floaties poolside, picnic under the tree with your teddy bear, play marbles on the patio, or swing on the front porch swing and serve tea to your dollies on the porch. In the winter, we can make snow angels, build snowmen, drink hot cocoa from beneath clouds of whipped cream and sprinkles, and decorate gingerbread men or sugar cookies.

You get the idea. Who are these big babies? Are they the leaders of  government and industry? I have a feeling that these babies are mostly male, if I may be so binary. I think society already treats women like helpless babies, so it’s a less transgressive or appealing notion. I wonder if the spa offers spanking and scolding, or if that’s a different form of “play?”

The spa has everything a big baby needs, but you are welcome to bring your own blankie, stuffie, or onesie.  For $300 an hour, you get “a spa-like nursery experience for the little one inside of you, providing a warm, safe, and nurturing environment while you indulge in relaxation and self-care. Minimum session: 2 hours.” It’s $1,500 for a 24 hour Diaper sleep-over.

As I read this shit with an increasing sense of, ahem, wonder, I started to imagine being a cherished baby…I mean, it’s probably nice, right? I have no memories of my early childhood, except for my mom yelling and my sister torturing me. But by loving and caring for my own babies, I feel I’ve corrected that loss. While it’s awful to be an adult, it seems preferable to being infantilized, even by choice.

I guess it’s nice to indulge in your deepest fantasy, but aren’t some fantasies best left inside your head? Mine aren’t that interesting, and aren’t worth acting out in a pricey fake environment. Isn’t that what husbands are for?

Do they have fake farms or racetracks for people who like to do Pony Play? Uh-oh, I just googled it and they do! This place welcomes Ponies, Trainers, Handlers, Grooms, teams of Pony/Trainers and all those who love them.

I am open-minded enough to want everyone to be happy and sexually fulfilled, I just don’t want to find out about it.

Changing the subject, how many times have you seen a TV couple having urgent sex on the sink counter or standing up against a wall? It’s crazy! Now I groan each time I see this, and sometimes yell, “USE THE BED!” I watch so much TV now that I can tell what every character is about to do. I can often say the line before the actor does, which is simultaneously satisfying and disappointing.

Okay then. Thoughts or enraged complaints, anyone?

I admit I’m not a poetry lover. I don’t even like poetry. I like it better when it rhymes, like the Ancient Mariner. Sometimes I read the poetry in The New Yorker, and inevitably sneer or mutter “Jesus Christ.” I used to think it was a failure on my part, but now I’m comfortable with all of my biases.

I once had a job that involved stupid magazines with stupid ads for suckers, like devices to enlarge your breasts overnight. One of the ads was for a poetry contest, that was clearly a scam. It was something like “YOU TOO COULD BE A POET! ENTER THIS CONTEST AND WIN $10,000!”

I showed it to my young teenager and we decided to send in a poem to find out what the scam was. It was back in 1990, but I still remember laughing as we took turns composing it. Max was reading Stephen King at the time, who was a master of the idiotic mixed metaphor, and you can see the Stephen King influence throughout.

Sure enough, our poem won an Honorable Mention! and we could see it published in a nice anthology for only $49.95! We decided to pass. *If you want to try this too, go here.

Keeping in mind my disappreciation for poetry, I was excited to discover a poem by my husband’s ex-wife, my bête noire and the Anti-me. While I try to follow her monthly column in her community newspaper, somehow the poem escaped my attention until now. “Escaped my attention” is the kind of thing she would write, so I apologize, but she would have prefaced it with “hitherto.”

I won’t pretend to “get” this poem; You don’t need to get it to enjoy it, right? But once I figured out its subject, I was inspired to write my own elegy:

Ode To The Tennessee 3

What fresh hell is this! Voting
To kick them out for
Protesting

Even the fat white lady knew how
Wrong
This was. Plus

The 2 young black guys
Are so hot!
Especially the Brother with
The earring and long hair

I even followed
Him
On Instagram.

I shared it with my friend M, a published novelist and hardcore fan of the Ex’s work, and he countered with this:

Tennessee 3 braving
and behaving
No
The guy with the Afro is the hotter of the 2

Whew! I’d hate to have to pick the winner here, but I would love to pick the winner of your entries! So, (YOU TOO COULD BE A POET!) please submit a poem about the Tennessee Three and the winner will get a nice certificate! If anyone out there is an artist, you can help design it.

Don’t be shy! There are no losers, only winners!

I decided to write about those awful Instagram ladies with silver hair, who expect a medal for going gray. They all have tons of followers who idolize them and eat up every positive, self-congratulating post about Loving Life, or practicing yoga. To me, these women seem interchangeable; they all have a silver mane that they constantly refer to, and they are all very thin if not emaciated.

So I googled “gray-haired women” to look for some images to copy. None of them excited me until I saw one who called herself a “Pro-aging Ambassador.” I never heard of this title and have no idea if there’s a million or if she’s the only one. And I don’t know what duties the ambassadorship entails. Does she travel the world giving speeches about the Wonders of Aging?  Does she chair committees?

I would like to adopt my own title: Anti-aging Ambassador. I will go around complaining about getting old (which I already do constantly, in an unofficial capacity.) I will persuade those silver foxes to wipe the smiles off their wrinkly faces.

Instead of “embracing the gray”, I will extol the glory of dyed hair. I will heartily mock the actresses who have suddenly embraced their gray. Jane Fonda, Andi McDowell, even Jennifer Aniston, apparently. They all look better with their hair dyed. Maybe they’re just too lazy to keep up the color, but let’s not act as though they cured cancer. Plus, you need to spend plenty of time to keep that silver looking soft and shiny instead of dull and coarse.

My sister has a friend who went gray a million years ago, before she was forty, and we always wondered what her problem was. Why did she just let her turn grey and straggly? Was she making a Statement? Was she saying, “I’ll show you, society, I don’t have to adhere to your beauty standards”? Her hair is still gray and we’ve decided she’s being passive-aggressive.

Being old truly sucks. There is nothing good about it. Nothing. All those platitudes that begin with, “The good thing about getting old is” are lies. “…you stop  caring about what people think of you!” “You are so much wiser!” “You know what really matters in life!”

Please. I am nearly seventy and still totally crushed if someone doesn’t like me. I don’t know anything about anything, and keep making the same mistakes. I’ve obviously learned that life is fraught with catastrophes, but I already assumed this as a teenager from reading Thomas Hardy novels. I have acquired no wisdom to pass on except “wear more shorts while you’re young!” I have opinions and policies but not wisdom. And I’m just as confused and mystified as I’ve always been. I have no idea what matters. I’d like to keep my eyesight and be able to wipe my own butt but otherwise I don’t know what ‘s important at this point when the key milestones of life have already passed.

Late adulthood is a time of deep reflection and introspection. If you are proud of the life that you have led, then you should feel a sense of peace. If, however, you are haunted by regrets and failures, you will likely experience despair and resentment.

According to Erikson, either ego-integrity or ego-despair characterizes the end of life for older adults. The virtue of this stage is wisdom.

Well, yes but no. Maybe it’s just my ego-despair talking, but the old people I know are all worried about diabetes and Alzheimer’s and health insurance. We can’t remember words and don’t like to crouch down to tie our shoes. Personally, I salt everything and eat lots of processed food but most of the old people I know are serious about their diet. We want either Botox or fillers and wish we could lose that roll of flab. When we watch TV and see someone for the first time in years, we scream “OH GOD, WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM/HER??” Maybe that last part is just me, but I doubt it.

For as long as you can ward off old age,  you should enjoy the use of your body and brain before they become a burden to you or someone else. Prepare for loneliness and a lack of purpose. Make sure you have all the cable channels and a good TV.

And for fucksake, commit to the upkeep of your hair and don’t believe it when your partner or children say you look great with gray hair. They’re just threatened by your lingering attractiveness, such as it is. I may be senile but my hair is glorious! I pay a fortune to color and tame it but it’s worth every penny. To paraphrase Yeats,

only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

You can let yourself go, I mean embrace your gray, if you must, but bury me blonde. Or cremate me blonde. Whatever.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a long piece about an awful socialite nobody’s ever heard of and called her “The New Queen of L.A.” One of the descriptive terms applied to her that I enjoyed was:  Ms. Staudinger is a voracious content consumer.

In the same conversation, she’ll recommend a documentary on music in 1971, a book on Los Angeles in 1974 and a TikTok she saw about brain vibrations.

Whoever she is, there were 650 comments complaining about her lack of appeal and importance. But I now refer to myself as a voracious content consumer, because I can’t stop trying to consume “content” in the hope that I will become a better person once I know everything about everything.

This compulsive consumption takes up nearly all my waking hours. I subscribe to fifty thousand newsletters covering politics, art, pop culture, psychology, books, even one from a Christian Ministry for its philosophical essays. I have to read all of them or at least scan them. I get the NYT online, and I have to read all the breaking news, then I have to decide which features to read: the Op-Eds, the heartbreaking human interest pieces, the latest celebrity-adjacent suicide, the film reviews, the health tips, the latest tech, the bemused shit about Those Kids and Their TikTok, and more. Basically, everything but sports. Thank god I hate sports.

Then I have to open all the email from shopping sites that promise to help me look like a French It-Girl. Then I have to scroll through Instagram before googling Pete Davidson.

I still worry that I’m missing  something important. It makes me anxious. But I haven’t been able to stop or even cut back in this stupid endeavor. My brain is filled with information that I don’t have time to process or make use of.

And it stops me from writing! I can’t tell if the stuff I’m dwelling on is interesting to anyone but me. And I don’t want to regurgitate the accepted wisdom of the day. Because we live in “an Attention Economy” according to a billion think-pieces.

Here’s what is foremost in my mind though:

How long will Donald Trump be tormenting us with his existence?
Why won’t Gym Jordan wear a jacket?
Are they kidding about Hunter Biden’s fucking laptop?
Why does Elon Musk want the whole world to hate him?
Is Morpheus8 better than Softwave?
Is silicone really that bad for your hair?
Why aren’t religious people concerned about who made god?
Why did Jane Aldridge marry that creepy gay guy?
Why do we take antidepressants when they’re only slightly more effective than placebos?
Why do people now say “If I’m being honest” instead of “to be honest” ?
Why is everybody writing about the crisis facing men and boys?*
Can we value any experience without documenting it?
Why can’t we explain the persistence of antisemitism?*
Why are people still impressed by luxury brands?
What happens when young people aspire to be Influencers instead of astronauts?
Why can’t we ever get enough of Jeffrey Dahmer?

* I plan to write about these topics because they continue to fascinate me, as soon as I stop voraciously consuming more content. Do you think I should bother? Let me know.

Meanwhile, I’m compiling a file of all-new stupendously egregious denim! Stand by for that too.

We were watching a true crime drama about a gullible family who let a pedophile into their midst like inviting a fox to a hen-house, and my husband was exasperated. “Oh please, no one is that stupid,” he complained. I started to defend the family, saying that ultra-religious people in a small town might actually be that naive. Privately, I wondered if he was right; maybe the story was exaggerated for dramatic effect.

Later, we watched part 2 of The Vow, a documentary series about a cult whose leader made women get branded. The members of the cult were people with money, relatively sophisticated people with jobs in Hollywood or tech or marketing. I couldn’t believe how stupid they were to buy into this guy’s shit, when he is so clearly a manipulative little conman.

The next day, I read something about Trump supporters and then it hit me: People are SO FUCKING STUPID! I mean, the level and scope of stupidity all around us is just staggering.

Were people always this stupid? Did they just hide it better? Are we so desperate for a guru or daddy or deity to guide us that we’ll surrender all logic and critical thinking?

I’m at the point where if someone doesn’t despise Donald Trump, I don’t want to waste time on them. They’re too stupid. Recently, two acquaintances have explained to me that they don’t really hate Trump because “They’re all the same.” They elaborated by stating that all politicians are corrupt, blah blah blah. So they’re telling me that a cold is like Ebola? Where is the sense of proportion or discernment?

It’s not a Tribal thing; it’s not that I only like people with my politics or opinions. It’s just the stupidity. Make it stop!

I have started following the Kanye West debacle, because as in most debacles, it’s hard to look away. Actually, in this case I am constantly refreshing my google to see if I missed anything. I know you’re thinking, Ha ha, look how stupid YOU are! But I will only admit to an immature fascination with spectacle. And crazy people.

I am pleased to say that now even Anna Wintour is done with him. Today, he said that denouncing him only proves his point about Jews controlling everything, an old antisemitic canard he has evidently stumbled upon in his mania.

I am so fascinated by Kanye’s meltdown that I’ve started following an account on Instagram that covers everything he says or does. I’ve seen all the video clips that were edited out of his recent interviews, and he is one angry dude operating on some kind of messianic delusion, burning all his bridges as fast as he can.

The real stupidity here lies in the comments from his fans. The more antisemitic and aggrieved he is, the fiercer is their support. He speaks the truth! He’s the only one brave enough to call it out! Watch out, the Jews gonna kill him! Every millionth comment, someone will express  dismay. I praised one of these people for trying to explain antisemitism, and I received this reaction: “You’re an OLD cat lady who will die alone!” (LOL, I hate cats.)  She turned out to be a white lady who keeps showing her pregnant belly and her flock of Aryan looking kids. At least she’s open minded enough to stick up for a deranged Rap icon.

Drowning in stupidity, I have turned to Middlemarch, which I read as an 18 year old stoner. It was great then but even better now, because I’m more appreciative of the narrator’s stinging wit. Thank god I can still read, when I’m not watching crime TV or scrolling on my phone. Mostly, I am trying to navigate through the daily ennui of being an old cat lady who will die alone, so writing this has been cathartic.

How are you surviving the stupidity? Confessions or helpful hints? Let’s hear from you!

I know I should have seen it coming but let’s call me a hopeless romantic, or just a dope. When Pete talked about wanting to be a father, I heard wedding bells (and calls to available surrogates.) But then…you know the rest.

I need to know why! And who dumped who. Let Pete be the dumper, if you’re listening Jesus! How can they turn on a dime like that? Did something happen in Australia? Did Pete’s BDE fail him, or did Kim suddenly realize that he’s white?

When their thing was first reported, I was amazed by the incongruity just like everyone else. What the hell? I thought. But as it continued, I began furiously projecting. Kim must be smarter than we thought, if Pete likes her. In our narrative of Pete, he’s too smart and sensitive to waste his time on an idiot. She would have to have real substance as a human being, right? This meant that Kim Kardashian is not what she appears to be, e.g. an insufferable narcissist and plastic surgery addict!

And given Kim’s imagined ability to have any man, this meant that Pete is not only a great fuck but also a dynamic paragon of manliness. Plus, she introduced him to the kids!

I found myself daydreaming about Kim and Pete. Mostly it was hazy soft porn. I tried to imagine Pete’s frail physique juxtaposed with Kim’s gigantic mounds of silicone. On the one hand, ew. But on the other hand, I really wanted to visualize how it would work. I think this could be called mental fan-fiction.

I studied every picture of them to parse their body language. Their hand-holding was so cute! Their goofy selfies! Their trips to exotic beaches!

I was googling Kim-and-Pete several times a day. I couldn’t get enough. It as like a Novella only with higher stakes. And here’s the worst thing of all: I watched the Kardashian show for the whole season, eager for news about the budding love affair and for hints that Kim was not an idiot. My husband humored me and watched it too. We agreed that Kendall was painfully stupid but he thought Kourtney was even stupider. It’s a tough call, I guess.

At least I won’t have to watch any more of that crap. No more of their giant nothing-colored living rooms and staged heart-to-heart confidences. No more reminding my husband of how much Kylie has done to her face and how much weight Khloe has lost. No more of those nude lipsticked fish-pouts!

But when I woke up and heard about the break-up, I was devastated. I am not making this up; I was stunned and heartbroken. Could it be a mistake? Maybe so, because we didn’t hear it firsthand from Kim or Pete.

Now I’ve accepted that it’s over, and my hurt has turned to resentment. I feel cheated and duped. First I thought it was selfish of them to take away our only moments of respite from anxiety and global catastrophe. Now I’m wondering if the whole entire thing was a publicity stunt. So was it?? A friend believes it was a publicity stunt AND they also slept together. Whatever.

Now that Pete is history, clarity has returned and I see that Kim is indeed a big ho who can’t take her eyes off herself for a single minute and will do anything to hold the world’s interest. How dare she wear Marilyn’s dress! May she put on all the weight she’s lost and then some. May she take a fall down some stairs in those stupid stiletto heeled shoe-pants. God I hate her. I’m going to unfollow her on Instagram as soon as I wind this up.

I hope Pete can start dating someone twenty years younger than Kim whose butt doesn’t need a wheelbarrow to carry it and who doesn’t need hair extensions. I will forgive Pete for this slip-up because he is chronically depressed, genuinely funny, and because of that big dick. JUST KIDDING about the dick, of course, because a big brain is way more exciting, right ladies?

All we need to do now is predict Kim and Pete’s next love interests. Thoughts??

Not long ago, I saw my own thigh in the sunlight though my bathroom window and I screamed. EW! Whose leg is that? I thought. I’m not kidding; that was my actual thought. I guess I expected to see my thigh as it exists in my memory. Not the world’s best thigh, but not a dry crepe-y one with no muscle tone. Today as I walked my dog, wearing cut off jeans because of the awful, muggy heat, I looked down and saw it again. Truly an old thigh, commensurate with my age but no less disappointing and even shocking.

You think this is stupid and shallow but just wait. You too will experience this cognitive dissonance unless you go blind, in which case you’ll have a while different set of problems. Since I rarely look at my own body in bright sunlight, I had no idea this was happening. A person I know who inspects every inch of her body and face every single day and exfoliates with a stiff vegetable brush will never be taken by surprise.

But keeping shit from falling apart is just too time consuming. It already takes me forever to get ready for bed, and my beauty routine is practically non-existent. Have  you guys seem Kim Kardashian’s new skincare line with nine (or 12?) products that she says are essential to use together in a certain order? Forget the cost. The time spent at your sink would move bedtime to around 4:am. No, Kim, don’t make me!

So being an old bag leaves you very few choices of how to visualize and project your image to yourself and the world. On one end of the spectrum is Paulina Porizkova, who at 57 never stops bitching about how the male gaze won’t acknowledge her aging appeal while shoving her remarkably well-preserved body in our face nonstop on Instagram.

Paulina rose to fame at just 18 years old as the first Central European woman to be on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Almost 40 years later, Paulina said she still feels sexy and hated society’s obsession with looking youthful. Despite still feeling confident though, the mother-of-two said younger men haven’t been interested in her.

daring to look her age!

Haha Paulina, you hate the obsession with looking youthful? I guess all the bikini shots are just something you do for fun.

She said: “I am now completely invisible.“I walk into a party, I try to flirt with guys and they will just walk away from me mid-sentence to pursue someone 20 years younger.”

God, just shut up Paulina and fuck off. Eat some sandwiches. If you want to hear more of this faux insecurity, check out her Instagram.

At the other end is Bridget Fonda, who has evidently rejected all efforts at looking young and attractive. When I first saw a recent picture of her, I didn’t believe it. It could not be her. Even though regular non-celebrities look old and fat when they’re old and fat, Bridget Fonda’s transformation is just startling. She is unrecognizable.

then and now

I felt sort of betrayed by Bridget. I should have admired her courage to stop pursuing a narrowly defined ideal of female beauty. Maybe she’s trying to live the opposite existence of her aunt Jane, whose face is now a clownish travesty

Somewhere in between these two extremes is a healthy outlook on aging. I just can’t find it.

It’s not the male gaze that bothers me. It’s my own gaze in the cruel morning light of my bathroom. I’m going to get some under eye filler and then go around pretending that I’d never get any filler, just like J. Lo and everyone else.

And I’ll stop wearing cut offs or just remember to not look down. Aging is so horrible! I just googled the insulting term “aging gracefully” and found a list of tips. I’m not going to follow any of them, because of my PDA, but you can if you want to.

Thoughts, ladies and gays?

Boris

It has been a long and dismal few months. Our wonderful dog, Boris, passed away with cancer at 14 years old. Our whole world went dark. I realized that yet again I have lost a treasured part of my identity: Boris’s mom.

With the new silence in our house, we began to contemplate getting another dog. No dog could replace Boris, the sweetest most soulful Australian Shepherd. But I’ve had four dogs in my adult life and loved each one for their unique qualities. So we started looking.

We hoped for another Aussie. For one thing, they are just beautiful, and because we are shallow, we enjoyed the compliments each time we went out with Boris. We also loved the intelligence and loyalty of herding dogs.

We searched adoption pages and found Pepper, a 4 year old Aussie who was described as adventurous, smart, loving, great on walks and in the car. We drove for 90 minutes to meet her at the home of a rescue lady who had 20 dogs inside her sprawling ranch house. Sorry for writing “sprawling ranch house” but I’m in a hurry to get through this story.

Pepper jumped on us and seemed pretty wild but we were assured that she was just excited. We paid $600 for Pepper and signed a contract.

Driving home, Pepper barked and struggled to get into the front seat all the way home.

Once home, Pepper bounced off the walls. She was happy to jump on the couch for affectionate petting, but impossible to control. The next day, she was even wilder. She was supposed to know some commands but wouldn’t acknowledge any. She was an ordeal to walk. She started giving me hard, unblinking looks. She jumped over me on the couch, nearly knocking me over. She attacked her dog-bed, dragging  it around the house and growling.

So we called the rescue lady and said we couldn’t deal with Pepper. On the drive back, Pepper kept jumping on my thighs in her effort to get into the front seat. and we were rear ended by an SUV. The rescue lady could barely restrain Pepper when she took the leash. We felt giddy with relief when we drove off to Starbucks, the bruises blooming on my thighs.

Next, we got Zoey, who was extremely loving but would not stop grabbing our legs and fiercely humping us. Zoey could bark for hours, literally, without a break. She started chewing up the dog-bed. The humping got more aggressive. Luckily, this rescue girl wanted us to spend a couple of days with Zoey to see if we were a good fit. A nice wealthy family came to meet Zoey at our house, and drove off with her, hoping for the best. May god be with them.

We continued our search and contacted the owners of two dogs they needed to “rehome”: Roxy, who was described as lovable and gentle but not good with dominant dogs. And Kora, a 4 year old mini Aussie who was described as sweet and happy to lie around all day.

On a Saturday, we met Roxy in a park with her owners. They were a young couple who had raised Roxie and were now expecting a second child. They didn’t have the time to “give her the attention” she needed. They told us how she barked at animals on TV, including the Charmin cartoon bear! How adorable, we thought.

Tired of this yet? Me too! Roxy was great in the car. Back home, she humped us even more aggressively that Zoey. She jumped on us and vigorously humped our legs. She jumped on the couch and thrust her butt in my face. She became hysterical when a dog barked on TV, and clawed at the screen.

Nevertheless, we kept our appointment to meet Kora, the mini, which was love at first sight. I couldn’t believe she was real! I rubbed her tummy and marveled at her cuteness. She sat in my lap like a baby on the drive home. I was and still am ready to marry her.

Kora, my betrothed

But then. I walked with Kora into the kitchen to give her a dog treat. Roxy barrelled into the room, snatched away the treat and attacked Kora. The panicked squealing and angry growling was terrifying. I managed to separate them with my foot and checked to see if Kora was hurt.  She seemed okay but wouldn’t eat for the next day and a half.

Now our TV screen was ruined and we had to sleep with Kora in our bed to protect her. I texted Roxy’s owners after 2 days of this and said that “aggressive” wasn’t the same as “gentle.” The girl wrote, “Nonetheless, we have said our goodbye’s and are not taking her back.”

Now we are up to date. The two dogs are okay together but have to be fed in separate rooms and Kora can’t have any treats or toys. We are still sleeping with Kora and afraid to leave them alone together, so we can’t go out.

Roxy and Kora

We have contacted a million adoption places but no one will foster a dog who needs to be an only dog. Who can blame them? A lady who was excited to meet Roxy changed her mind when I informed her about Roxy’s “resource guarding.” I sought to rehome Roxy on a neighborhood Facebook page, where everyone scolded and lectured me for not “doing my research on Aussies” etc etc. Their grammar was terrible.

No one wants this fucking dog and neither do I. I have come to hate this poor innocent dog whose owner fucked her up by not socializing her early on. I can’t help it. I just hate her.

Walking Kora in the neighborhood yesterday, I stopped and chatted with a new neighbor. She weighs around 250 pounds, displayed in a tiny sundress despite her advanced age. She told me about her popularity with men, “because I’m sexy.”

Because I’m Sexy will haunt me forever. Who says stuff like that?? Because I’m a monster, I’m planning to take Roxy to an animal shelter, still wearing the original owner’s  dog-tags. Let them pick her up or explain that they’ve already said their goodbyes.

Don’t be mad at me for being consumed with Amber and Johnny; Tik Tok videos with the hashtag #JusticForJohnny have been viewed 8.3 billion times! Americans have googled Amber Heard four times more than google searches for abortion or the Supreme Court.

It could be serving as a needed escape from the reality of our politics, Covid, inflation, and bla bla bla. But I think it’s just a universal drama that most of us can relate to. Most of us have had at least one destructive relationship under out belts. Most of us have wanted to have sex with Johnny Depp at one time or another. Most of us love courtroom conflicts. And most of us pride ourselves on our ability to spot a liar.

And Amber is lying her head off, right??

Yesterday I read a preachy essay about how the backlash against Amber is misogynistic. There are a few of these essays making the rounds. If you don’t believe Amber Heard, you are dooming abuse victims to silence or worse.

But I disagree. I think it’s because this particular woman seems so awful and nuts. My favorite quote of all time is the former friend who described her as a sociopathic show pony. Try saying it out loud. It’s just a wonderful phrase! I could not love it more. And I feel it is apt, after watching her antics in court. The continual head bobbing and barrage of theatrical expressions are truly bonkers.

Further, I’ve decided that her “lip cut” is a cold sore, and her bruises are the result of botox injections. Don’t ask me about my research or you’ll know how immersed I am in this crap.

If you listen to their taped arguments – and who tapes arguments besides my sister??- you can hear her goading him, using weird baby voices or laughing demonically. Johnny seems to maintain a tired and pissed off tone, even though his acting skills are a million times superior, while she tries everything under the sun to manipulate him.

I don’t believe the bottle incident because whose pum pum can accommodate a fucking whiskey bottle for fucksake? Without having to go to the hospital for surgery afterwards? Her crazy email after this pretend incident says she wants to rip him apart and devour him. Which cannot follow a rape by a whiskey bottle, in my world or anyone else’s.

And also, what about her hairdos? Jesus Christ with those hairdos. The farm-girl braiding, the fluffy loose buns, the fake disheveledness. I’ll admit I’m jealous of her tailored designer suits and the way she buttons her shirt collars. But the fucking water bottle…no.

Her intake of mushrooms and MDMA do not reflect the anti-drug stance she insists on having, and her use of Elon Musk suggests a fetish for powerful men. There is nothing sympathetic about this woman, no matter how you regard Johnny Depp. I kind of want to kick her myself.

Worst of all is her flagrant lie about donating the $7 million divorce settlement, which I knew was a lie back when she first announced it. Because I can spot a liar a mile off. It is one of my superpowers, like finding thrift store treasures and critiquing bad writing.

Okay then. Thoughts?

A Pat Benatar song came on the car radio the other day and I was instantly reminded of a blog post I wrote years ago about antinatalism.

Antinatalism is the belief that it’s morally wrong to have children. Why is it wrong? Because “life is harm” and because the unborn is unable to give consent.

On the face of it, this argument is just nuts. I mean, it’s unconscious knowledge that this is nuts. By unconscious knowledge, I mean instinctual knowledge. We may also find it self-evident that a person who believes that “life is harm” is a deeply unhappy person.

But in trying to refresh my memory on the lunacy of antinatalism, I came across an essay that tries to refute the idea that antinatalism is a philosophy borne of depression. Yeah, well, some depressed people may see things more realistically than an incurable optimist, but it’s inherent in the illness to see the world in distorted ways that only therapy or meds can modify. (The most well-known proponent of antinatalism is a guy who insists on strict privacy about his private life so that we can’t extrapolate anything from his history or psychological make-up. Hint: He is miserable.)

Anyway, Pat Benatar caused me to go back and read the post from 2008, and just as I recall, the comments are hilarious. Comment threads like these have kept me writing here for a million years, and while they don’t occur very often, they are pure joy. I hope you will go read that post and then laugh your heads off at the comments.

And I hope you will be moved to comment here, so we can laugh some more.