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?

In a word, yes.

If you weren’t raised as a Jew, you have no standing to speak on this. As a Jew, I decide what is, and is not, antisemitic, just as POC will decide what is, and is not racism.

If you weren’t raised as a Jew, how dare you think you can be an arbiter of what is antisemitic? Notice that when a black person deems something/someone racist,  he/she is taken seriously, and his/her view is respected…at least by the progressive left.

But Jews everywhere, since October 7, are being gaslighted constantly with indignant cries of I’m not antisemitic, it’s Israel’s government that I can’t tolerant.

As we all should know, Israel is far from being the worst country for human rights.

Moving on to global humanitarian crises, DR Congo is the largest hunger emergency in the world, with over 25 million people struggling daily to simply get enough to eat.

The country hosts one of the largest displaced populations (including refugees) in the world – approximately 5.5 million. One in seven women nationwide experienced sexual violence before the age of 18, and the problem is even more severe in conflict-affected communities. However, in 2022, the number of people in need in DRC was significantly higher than the amount of people in need in Ukraine, yet the amount of funding secured was 74% lower.

Have you heard any demands to stop the violent conflicts there? The country is experiencing outbreaks of monkey pox, cholera, measles, floods and landslides.

And in Sudan? Seven months of conflict there have resulted in 9,000 deaths and 5.6 million forced to flee their homes. Where are progressives wearing the Jalabia in protest?

I bet none of your friends are going around enraged on behalf of the Congolese or Sudanese. Because the only people who matter are Palestinians, and their plight is the only one worth marching for. If Jews aren’t involved, no one cares.

Look at the map above. Note the size of Israel. Note that it’s surrounded by countries with lamentable human rights, countries where women are second class citizens and gays are at risk of prison and death. Teeny tiny Israel is the focus of the worlds dismay and disapproval….why?? Is it “because our taxes prop up their apartheid government”? The taxes argument is absurd. The US gives foreign aid to countries all over the world, some with governments that progressives surely wouldn’t want to support.

(Ukraine was the top recipient of aid in 2022, having received nearly $12 billion from the U.S. that year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.)

If you want to know the history of Israel, it’s easy to research. Historians and archaeologists agree that a Kingdom of Israel existed by ca. 900 BCE and that a Kingdom of Judah existed by ca. 700 BCE.  The Jews have been deported from their ancestral homeland by various empires, thousands of years before Palestine was invented by the British division of land formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire.

Let’s get back to now. “The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.” *

Progressives have fallen to this fiction like they once fell for Stalin and Hitler. But their beloved Palestinians had every chance to build a thriving state instead of voting to be ruled by Hamas. Jews worked hard and created Israel out of a desert. Palestinians could have done the same if they weren’t so focused on killing Jews. (White savior complex much?)

What about the charge that Zionism is racism?

Prior to 1948, Zionism was an aspiration—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, founded by Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century, to re-establish a Jewish nation as a solution to the antisemitism Jews faced in Europe. After 1948 until today, Zionism became a reality: a homeland not only to persecuted European Jews, but Jews from all over the globe, including Jews fleeing persecution from the Soviet Union, the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia, amongst others. Israel is one of the most diverse countries in the world with over half of its population being from Africa, India, and other areas of the Middle East. The vast majority of Jews around the world identify as Zionists, meaning they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish State in the historic Land of Israel.

Antisemitism has existed now for millennia, and the prevailing ideas about Jews running everything, about how “good” they have it, is just as stupid as the Elders of Zion.

As the saying goes, “Germany will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.” Jews are despised for being weak, and also when they fight back. Jews are somehow responsible for everything bad. Why? The term “Jew” at various times in history has been connected to both materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, eternal chosenness and unending accursedness.

Even the UN is rife with antisemitism. So is the Red Cross.

In closing, you intellectuals arguing about whether Jewish babies were actually beheaded or just burned alive need to get a fucking grip.

Jews are the indigenous people of Israel, their ancestral homeland. Deal with it. War isn’t genocide or ethnic cleansing. And apartheid does not apply to the state of Israel, as much as you love the word.

L’chaim for now.

All the commotion about Balenciaga’s new ad campaign with children is totally misplaced, besides being just stupid.

Where are the complaints about their awful pantaboots worn to death by Kim Kardashian??

Where is the outrage?

These fucking pantaboots are so egregious, and worn by KK, they are an abomination. They probably cost a million dollars, they make your feet look enormous, and how do you wash them? Everything about them is just aggressively awful.

And yet it’s the ads with little kids that has the entire internet going nuts with inflated umbrage and puritanical pearl-clutching. Balenciaga has been forced to issue several apologies for the ads, evidently confirming that they are inappropriate child porn, and vowing to implement a barrage of “safeguards” so this will never, ever happen again.

Where the outraged masses see bondage paraphernalia, I see classic old-school punk.

Look at this stupid bear, for example. It’s punk, not B&D! Jesus Christ, people of Earth. Get a grip.

Sometimes, pornography, or inappropriate images, is in the mind of the beholder. I think the kids in these ads are cute. They are not sexualized, in my opinion, and there is nothing seductive about them. But the furor is off the charts, rife with allusions to pedophilia and child trafficking.

I would like to have seen a fraction of this outrage in response to the children separated from their parents at the southern border. Children in cages weren’t as incendiary as these kids with teddy bears. Instead of aiming some well-deserved wrath at Kim K for her fucking pantaboots, the internet condemned her for being too slow to denounce the brand currently most associated with her. She finally expressed her concern, even though she dresses her young children in heavy gold chains that she hastens to label as “real.” Her tone was mild but dutifully sanctimonious

Not too long ago, I spent time with my friend’s two year old daughter, who was running around their living room naked. The adorable little girl was making hilarious faces at me, and I took a couple of picture with my phone. I showed a picture to a family member, who accused me of imposing child pornography on her. I was genuinely shocked; all I saw was the funny expression, without noticing the body parts. We had a heated argument, that ended up with both of us threatening to ask our therapists to weigh in on it.

Her therapist sided with her, while mine sided with me. I can guess where they’d stand on the stupid Balenciaga controversy. But me and my therapist would be right.

What do you and your therapist think??

I’m Glad My Mom Died is the title of a new memoir by a former child actress I’ve never heard of, and it’s a best seller. It has received more attention than any other recent book that’s not about Donald Trump, and the response to it seems uniformly favorable.

For all I know, Jeanette McCurdy is a good writer. But it’s the shocking title that seems to please reviewers most. How daring of her! Good for her! The book is a chronicle of abuse by a terrible, exploitative and seemingly mentally ill stage mother whose conduct sounds like something from a Grimms’ Fairy Tale.

But now the mom is safely dead from cancer and Jeanette is sharing her story of suffering and redemption all over the internet to hearty accolades, not least from others who hate their parents and share her bold sentiment. A piece in the Huffington Post reveals that “it’s not uncommon to feel that way.” Uh-oh.

Naturally, as a mother I find this chilling. As a mother estranged from an adult child, I can’t help feeling the title embodies my worst fears. I know my adult child wants nothing to do with me for reasons only he understands. I mean, I know I wasn’t perfect and I yelled a lot. And abuse is in the eye, and narrative, of the self-proclaimed abused party.

But it pains me to think that my death will actually be celebrated, you know? I guess it won’t matter since I won’t be around to be horrified.

Back when I learned about forums for adult children who hate their mothers, I had to stop looking at their posts when someone admitted to feeling no grief upon losing their parent. They weren’t exactly proud of their reaction, like Jeanette seems to be, but rather a little defensive. The other mommy-haters on the forum reassured the griefless adult child that they looked forward to the death of their parent and the relief it would bring.

Since I can only speak for myself, and my own narrative of my experience as both a mother and an adult child of a mother, I guess it’s not for me to judge these damaged victims of bad parents. But it seems like the title “I’m Glad My Mom Died” is somehow acceptable in today’s zeitgeist (sorry!) of proud victimhood and trauma survivors, whereas the title “I’m Glad My Daughter Died” would never be published, let alone applauded.

Is it because it’s reasonable to hate your mom but not your daughter? What about “I’m Glad My Dog Died” or even “I’m Glad My Neighbor Died’? None of these work, do they?

My guess is it’s because the Awful Mother is now a staple of our cultural landscape, from Carrie to Mommy Dearest and beyond.

Mother’s can’t win, is my feeling. The best of us are still not good enough, although Donald Winnicott disagrees. (More about the concept of the good-enough mother here.) Our mistakes engender bitter resentments that time cannot eradicate for many. But it’s my belief that whatever you do as a parent will be wrong. All you can do is try your hardest to make the best decisions you can, to get help if you see you’re fucking up, and to love your kids unconditionally.

I’ve come to forgive my mother for her shortcomings and her bad behavior with the awareness that she was a complicated person shaped by her own difficult childhood. I’m not glad she died; I’m screwed up but I’m not heartless.

Jennette McCurdy tells an interviewer somewhat self-righteously that she’s “done the work” to earn the right to her title. Whatever that means. Is she sorry she was born? I’d like to ask her that. Because she owes her existence to her mother, which is not nothing.

And now she’s making a fortune by speaking Her Truth about her mother. She also complains in the book about her Nickelodeon co-star Ariana Grande’s greater success, which could lead to another brave best seller if Ariana could only die.

Just kidding! You do you, mommy haters.

Thoughts and insults, anyone?

* Giaquinto di Corrado Bottega, Medea, 1752, Hinton Ampner National Trust

After violently coughing for a week, I broke a rib, specifically rib #5, which an x-ray revealed to be “minimally displaced.” This means, not broken in pieces but not a neat crack either. It is extremely painful, because it hurts with each breath. When you cough, it’s like being stabbed in the chest with an ice-pick. I had to sleep sitting up at first, because it was worse lying down. Obviously there are a million worse things but still, it is awful in its own right.

This constant pain and misery have reminded me acutely of  A Voice Through a Cloud, one of the best books I’ve ever read, an autobiographical novel about a young man whose bicycle accident destroys his health, and led to the author’s early death. The novel beings in the hospital, where the narrator regains consciousness in terrible, unspeakable pain.

Over the years since first reading it, I’ve come to think of my accidents and illnesses as a Voice Through a Cloud, meaning the sense of isolation you feel when in pain. You’re not really you anymore, you have entered a new consciousness as unlike reality as an acid trip. All your sensations are distorted, food is different, the sheets feel different, other people are shadowy figures who live outside your membrane of suffering.

This has gone on too long but it takes at least six weeks for a bone to mend and sometimes longer. Let this be a lesson to you to get enough calcium!

My brain has been altered throughout this ordeal, focused primarily on How long can I stand this, and Why doesn’t anything help, even opiates.

When I’ve been able to think outside the rib pain, my thoughts have turned to deep philosophical questions interrupted by the need to check on Kim and Pete. They are more real to me than my family at this point, and their relationship more momentous and consequential than any other. I mean, all the tattoos, the dinner dates, the threats from Kanye, the impossibility of their whole coupledom, the thought of him dealing with her enormous fake ass…

I’ve been mentally and spiritually haunted by a friend’s angry statement that she doesn’t want to hear about Ukraine because the world didn’t care about the war in Syria. I believe this is a stance of the far left, the wokity woke, who resent the privilege of the white, European Ukrainians. When I said, But what about those poor women evacuated from the maternity hospital only to be killed in the theater they took shelter in, my friend sneered, They don’t even have maternity hospitals in Syria!

I keep compulsively reviewing this, trying to figure out if one of us is just nuts. I am trying to focus on East Africa, which is facing a terrible famine that will only get worse. At least we can all agree on the heartbreaking unfairness of this, except for a guy in a NYT comment thread who insists that it’s Africa’s fault for not controlling its population.

Then, I wondered whether anyone can have a philosophy or value system that is entirely rational and not an outcome of one’s own psychology and, ahem, personal issues. Just think about that. Do I hate capitalism become I’m not rich and I hate the rich (which I do)? Do I think truth is important because the liars in my family have betrayed me so often? Do my white friends who see racist micro-aggressions everywhere feel guilty or an unconscious need to subscribe to all tenets of the progressive left? Does my half-brother, a staunch determinist, just dread the notion of having free will?

These are the rambling preoccupations of an altered consciousness, plus the worry that the internet has ruined life as we knew it without any off-ramp.

Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through a Cloud on the other hand is a masterpiece that I can’t recommend highly enough. The astounding intelligence of it’s author proves that pain can be an impetus to art in the right hands (rather than a drive to see what Kim and Pete are up to.) It is a work of genius that raises a faint hope for humanity and will elevate your soul at least temporarily while the world careens toward oblivion.

If you can read this, you’re a better man than me, because when I google this site I get a blank page, a warning, or some Japanese text.

I had malware removed but still. I have spent countless hours on the phone with real and robotic tech support. One guy yesterday told me his life story including his height and weight. You’ll be glad to know he bought a high-end Nikon camera for a fraction of its worth! Yay, him!

I have received lists of problems with this website, few of which make any sense to me as a civilian and not a coder.

I NEED A GOD DAMN CODER!

If you are a web developer or know a good one, please hook me up, to put me out of my misery. I can’t take any more frustration. Helplessness is bad for the human organs and nervous system. My cortisone is at a deadly level.

Hell is not other people, it is WordPress.

Oh good, I just uploaded this picture of me in the emergency room last month, admiring my socks, only to see that all my images have disappeared!

Wait, they’re back. Whew.

Please either help me or kill me, your choice.

I’ve always had a Thing for crazy twins, so the recent deaths of Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff turned out to be a goldmine (for me if not for them.) The twin brothers, who are famous pop culture figures in France, died withing 6 days of each other after falling ill with Covid in December.

They refused Covid vaccinations but denied being afraid of them, much like they denied having plastic surgery, even though they turned their faces into giant surreal puppet masks. What kills me is that they were originally good looking men who must have lost their minds together in a classic case of folie à deux.

The twins became famous in the late 70s as the presenters of the hit science show “Temps X”(described as a cross between Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Mr. Wizard.) They appeared in wacky silver space suits but this was child’s play, in terms of the antics to come.

Over the years, they received dubious doctoral degrees and published academic papers that explained the state of the universe just before the Big Bang. When their work was derided as gibberish, they sued several scientists and magazines for libel.

You will have to google them to get the full story, but if you don’t love them you have a heart of stone. I wish I could know everything about them. One of them had several children, so we’ll see how that works out.

The Bogdanoff Twins reminded me of my favorite twins of all time, Frida and Greta Chaplin. I used to be obsessed with them and I may just be ready to revisit that obsession.

Frida and Greta became famous in the 80s, when they went on trial for stalking a truck driver. They walked and spoke in unison, dressed alike, and most poignantly, says a neighbor, “They even hoovered together.”

Their story is tragic at first glance, but maybe their companionship was a blessing that most of us will never understand. They dressed by looking at each other instead of a mirror! They died thirteen years apart, which must have been an ordeal for the surviving twin, but they were eventually buried one on top of the other in a double cemetery plot.

This is how I want to be buried with my husband! I think I got him to agree to this although we haven’t discussed who goes on top.

Finally, there are Flo and Kay, who I wrote about in 2009 and ended that post by calling Dick Clark a cunt, a statement I stand by today. Flo and Kay are autistic savants, and it may sound condescendingly ableist to call them special but they really are amazing. Enjoy this documentary about them! You’ll be happy to know that they are still with us and doing well. If anything bad ever happens to them, I hope they are together until the last moment…like me and my husband, in our double plot, with me on top, because I weigh less.

News of the crazy new restrictions to abortion rights in Texas has triggered memories of the abortion I had at seventeen. I’d been living in London for a little over a year and I was deep into a relationship with a 21 year old student. I don’t remember what I was doing for birth control, but it obviously didn’t work.

I remember bring surprised, but pleased. I think I thought it was romantic to be a teenage mother, and it awakened my urge to nurture. As an unloved kid, I harbored the fantasy of a loving mother-child bond. At first the boyfriend adjusted to the idea of fatherhood and said he was up for it. But then he changed his mind. I had to have an abortion, or we were through.

I called my mom in California, and asked her if I could move back in with her and have the baby. She whined, “Can’t you get him to marry you?” She wasn’t up for it either. So the boyfriend  arranged an abortion with his family doctor, and I went to have the procedure in a daze, courtesy of the National Health system. You know the phrase “railroaded into” something? I was railroaded into the abortion.

I awoke from the anesthesia in a recovery room, next to a few other girls in hospital beds. The boyfriend came to visit me later in the day, and sat on my bed. But he couldn’t stop ogling the girl next to me, who wore some kind of sexy baby doll pajamas. I struggled miserably to get his attention. He informed me that a guy we knew had overdosed and died.

Fifty years later, I recall my hurt feelings as if it were yesterday. Why do our painful moments have to cling like this, to be etched so deeply that they can come to life in a flash? Why don’t our happy moments flood our brains like the bad ones? When my Mexican-American mother-in-law was 103 years old, she still recalled the little girl who called her a “beaner” in elementary school, and told me the story again and again.

I am staunchly pro-choice like any normal person, but it occurs to me that at 17, I didn’t have a choice. No one offered me one. I didn’t have the money to take care of myself, and my boyfriend threatened to leave me. I think I should have had a choice, even though I was not equipped for motherhood. It still bothers me.

Many years later, I was unhappily married and having an affair with an amiable stoner who was good at sex and had a lot of free time. I was horrified to find my self pregnant, evidently still a moron about birth control. Having the stoner’s baby was unthinkable. I had a young child at home. And my husband would find out about the affair.

So I went to have an abortion from a doctor who asked me when I showed up, “What’s the matter with you? You look depressed.” Afterwards, I had to get home before my husband returned from work. To my furious contempt, he never noticed that I lied on the couch all evening, barely able to contain my “discomfort” as they say in the medical trade. What a fucking dope. He was the same guy who railroaded me when I was seventeen.

That second time, I was very depressed but not in any doubt about the decision I’d made. I wouldn’t want to imagine a world where I would be forced to have that stoner’s baby. It’s just unthinkable.

Girls and women should have real choices  about whether or not to get pregnant and whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy. It should be their decision alone to make. Ideally, no one would be as stupid or lax about birth control as I was, but things happen. Fetuses aren’t babies and seeds aren’t trees. If the pro-life people would adopt all the world’s unwanted children, disabled or starving or orphaned, then we might take them seriously.

As it is, we all know that the unborn are way more important to them than the born.

Girls, my best advice is to find a means of birth control you can live with, keep some Plan B handy, and stay away from guys who won’t have your back in your worst moments. Wait, also remember to vote sane people into office, or you end up with Gregg Abbot, Kristy “I’m Batshit Crazy” Noem, and Ron DeSantis, who in a better world would all have been aborted before or after the sixth week.

If you have a story you want to share, step right up. xo

A zoo in Antwerp has asked a woman to stop visiting the chimpanzee she claims to be in love with, in the hope of forcing the chimp to engage with his own species.

Alice Timmermans has been seeing, I mean visiting, the chimp for four years, standing outside his enclosure and exchanging air kisses with him. She says they are in a relationship, and who are we to argue with her? Zoo authorities say the relationship is turning the chimp into an outcast among his peers, who are starting to avoid him.

Alice has taken to social media to protest the zoo’s ban, insisting that the chimp loves her and characterizing their relationship as an affair. The 39 year old chimp has lived at the zoo for thirty years, after his owner surrendered him for “behavior issues.”

Listen, chimpanzees only have a lifespan of around 40 years. WHY CAN’T THEY LET HIM BE HAPPY??

Let him have a private enclosure where he and Alice can continue dating. They may be ready to take the relationship to the next level; it’s been four years, after all. Why this speciesism, Antwerp Zoo? Should we start a Move On petition for Alice and Chita the chimp?? Or a GoFundMe to pay for her to file a lawsuit? The heart wants what it fucking wants, don’t forget, as if we could.

Meanwhile, in Loango National Park, chimpanzees in the wild have started attacking gorillas, behavior that anthropologists have never seen before. Until now, interaction between the two species has been peaceful, even playful on occasion. But these chimps formed coalitions and attacked the gorillas, killing the infants who were separated from their mothers. Fuckers! What is their goddamn problem? Are they mad because they want affairs with attractive humans? Are they sick of being discussed in the media? Can’t we all get along??

Maybe we can.

A lion sanctuary in Harrismith, South Africa, is placing visitors inside Plexiglas cages stationed at the center of the lions’ lair, granting animal enthusiasts a palm-to-paw encounter with their menagerie of 77 rescued big cats.

Tourists are locked inside a “professional photography cage” for 45 minutes, paying around $150 for the chance to snap close-range pictures of the lions as they claw at the enclosure’s acrylic walls. The [cage] is regularly checked by an engineer to ensure it can safely carry the weight (up to 570 pounds) should a lion jump on top of it. And the round breathing holes in the plexiglass cage are “totally safe.”

Hahaha! Totally safe, famous last words.

Isn’t it too binary to have “people” and “animals”? Some people are barely human, and some animals are good people: witness my dog, Boris. Maybe we should reconsider who to fear and who to love.

Or maybe those lions should get together and crush that plastic cage, eat the tourists, and start dating chimps, but not the ones in Loango National Park. Those fuckers are way out of order.

If you’ve ever been a child or a parent, you’re well acquainted with the aggrieved outcry, “But that’s not fair!” I was already a seasoned mother the first time I heard another mother smugly reply to her kid, “Well, life isn’t fair!” It was upsetting. Why does anyone think that’s a good lesson to teach??

I mean, duh, life isn’t fair, as we found out for the billionth time on Saturday. It’s so fucking unfair that they won’t find that cunt guilty as charged. It’s unfair that he gets to get away with so much corruption and inhumanity when everyone else has to suffer.

So much unfairness, but why shouldn’t we let children strive to practice and expect fairness? Just because we can’t have it doesn’t mean it’s not an honorable value. Fairness is a universal concept and ideal. It’s hardwired into us. “Studies have shown” that even chimps understand fairness. There’s some experiment with bananas that illustrates this but I’m too stoned to remember the details.

Children just have an innate understanding of fairness, and it isn’t our job to turn them into cynics.

I may just be pathologically immature in still being shocked when things aren’t fair. I can’t seem to accept the unfairness of it all. I still whine, “So unfair!” at least once a day. I always say it when our Netflix won’t load, because it’s NOT FAIR.

If you expect everything to be unfair, though, you’ll start to think it doesn’t matter. You’ll be like a Republican senator! And no one wants that.

Here’s an example: My mother-in-law is 104 and not happy. She can’t see or walk or do anything but on she goes. It’s so not fair!

Likewise, I am unable to be with either of my sons, and surely that’s unfair. The universe is indifferent to fairness. But people have certain primal instincts that operate without logic.

I want things to be fair against all odds, and I want you to want that too. If you have kids and haven’t yet assured them that life isn’t fair, I hope you won’t.

Going back to my mother-in-law (because I’m that stoned) I can’t understand why people react to her age with, How wonderful! or Bless her heart! There is nothing wonderful about such advanced old age, despite that French Nun who insists on living to 117. It’s led to my husband and I affirming a wish to die before everything craps out. My husband once said he’d be ready at around 75, but of course he’s extended it a few years.

Have you Boomers come to a decision about old age? Have you settled upon a reasonable expiration date? I just read a quote by Nabokov, about a disliked writer who had lived to an advanced and “entirely unnecessary” old age, and I laughed out loud. 117 and even 104 fit into that category. Bless everyone’s heart.

For me, ten more years might be enough. I’d like to die with my hair and teeth, let alone a functioning bladder. I think that would be more than fair.

You?

(c) Diane Arbus