It is a truth universally acknowledged, that if Trump is reelected, we will lose our fucking minds.

Four more years of this anxiety, fear, disgust, and helpless rage would not be endurable. The daily insults to our intelligence and to our very souls are not sustainable. So even though on the one hand we are convinced that sanity will prevail and Biden will win the election, on the other hand we now know that a large portion of voters is rooting for that stupid fat malevolent cunt to finish destroying what’s left of our democracy.

So! What will you do? I want to leave the US, and I’m thinking about what my choices are. Ireland, maybe? I have two friends who live in Ireland, so at least I would know someone. They’re still letting us in for some reason. It’s a beautiful place, and I wouldn’t have to learn a new language.

From Dublin, you can fly to France, where one could hopefully outstay one’s visa and just blend into the background of Paris.

The last (and only) time I went to Paris, I was 15 years old. My sister and I had acquired a pair of French boyfriends who were vacationing in London, where we spent our evenings at a disco bar in Earl’s Court.  I can still remember the jukebox there, which was always playing either “Lola” or “Band of Gold.” Anyway, we met these guys, Michel and Daniel, who wore striped sailor shirts and little scarves around their necks. They were adorable.

Soon, they invited us for a dirty weekend in Paris, and we showed up there with no idea of what to do or where to go. We found a cheap hotel where the proprietress yelled at us contemptuously in French but took our money, however resentfully. The next day, we went to Daniel’s house in the suburbs, where the guys were lolling around while the parents were away somewhere. We watched French TV and one of the guys put on a facial mask. We assumed this was a normal thing for cute French guys.

The guys were horrified to learn that my sister and I were both having our periods! Hahaha! They were beside themselves, blabbing hysterically about “le regle.” Eventually they calmed down and I think we spent a nice day with them. I really can’t remember anything else, but I have a packet of heartsick letters from Michele Girard, his actual name, proclaiming his love and calling me his little cabbage.

So anyway, France would be great and they have socialized medicine, so hopefully I could get my antidepressants, lipitor, ativan, and calcium. If it’s Ireland, I can get some of those bulky hand-knit sweaters, and eat scones and oatcakes and learn to drink Guinness.

Meanwhile, my sister just texted me, “ARE YOU LISTENING TO WILLIAM BARR?” in all caps, and even though I’m not, I can feel the revulsion rising in my chest. What a fucking fucker that fucking bastard is. Four more years of that bulldog warty face will kill me, and not in a good way.

Four more years of Jared and Ivanka, Chad Wolf and Peter Navarro, simpering Mike Pence and the rest of those motherfuckers, no no no no.

Think how much worse it can get! Or don’t, since it will raise your cortisol level, disrupting almost all your body’s processes and putting you at risk of anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, heart disease, sleep problems, weight gain, memory and concentration impairment.

Wait, you already have those symptoms? Me too! France or Ireland, cast your vote. Or submit another viable destination and I’ll meet you there in December.

I was going to comment on the creepy new interview with Soon Yi Previn, but after delving into her family history, I’m disgusted with all of the players, including that stupid Ronan, who wears blue contact lenses to look more like Frank Sinatra.

Fuck these awful people, especially Mia Farrow, who adopted Asian children like salted peanuts, even getting a congressman to change US adoption law to accommodate her colonialist agenda. Farrow has adopted ten children and given birth to four, married three powerful men who were old enough to be her father, and I think we can say it’s been a mess.

In her interview, Soon Yi makes it clear that she hates Mia, who adopted her from Korea when she was 5 years old. Mia is portrayed as an abusive lunatic. Luckily, Woody Allen came along and started taking an interest in Soon Yi when she was in the 11th grade and they began going to Knicks games together.

One day, Woody showed Soon Yi a Bergman movie (not making this up!) and then they kissed. One thing led to another, and you know, the heart wants what it wants.

But Soon Yi thought it was only a fling. Fucking mom’s boyfriend was probably meant to piss her off, not drive her insane. Next thing you know, the nude spreadeagled Polaroids, the accusations of molesting another Farrow daughter, and therapy for 4 year old Ronan, who either did or didn’t hate his daddy, who is either Woody or Frank Sinatra.

I’m telling you, these people are monsters. Soon Yi and Woody are the parents of two adopted daughters, who are now in their teens and endured a battery of “the best tennis lessons, piano, guitar, ballet classes, whatever.” Soon Yi will have to wait until they give their own interviews to hear the final verdict on her mothering skills.

Meanwhile, she spends her days doing Pilates, going to museums with her driver, and shopping for clothes.

Since the interview was published, Ronan and six other siblings released a statement defending their mother, and Dylan reminded people that Woody molested her. Ronan, coincidentally, is making a career out of outing molesters. It’s like in this family, you are either a Molester or Molestee. Or Frank Sinatra’s love child.

Yes, Woody Allen is a fucker and one I’ve never forgiven for having sex with Soon Yi. She appears to be a hateful spoiled creature who is frighteningly lacking in empathy and not sharp enough to keep her elderly husband away from their nubile daughters. Hello, Soon Yi? Remember that Bergman movie?

Click the links if you dare, and tell me if any of these people are not completely nuts.

Try to think of one person who would make a worse President.

There isn’t anyone.

Even Mitch McConnell, hateful prick that he is, could not do a worse job. He can probably speak in coherent sentences, at least. And he might know to be sad when people die. Or to not throw rolls of paper towels at them.

WHY???? Why do we need to endure this crap? Everyone knows he’s a clown, a senile dim bulb with no empathy or humanity.

In the fairy tale, a kid could announce, “The Emperor has no clothes!” and that would be that, game over. In real life, we have to wait for a tape of Trump in bed with Ivanka AND Jared before this nightmare is over.

Every fucking day with this moron.

I was so touched when three separate people sent me links to these stupid cowboy boot thongs. I thought, “Aww, how lovely, when people see grotesque shoes, they think of me!”

But when I read the text, I learned that the boots are the work of some smartass self-styled redneck who’s managed to make a splash on social media with his stupid faux product.

In other words, these boots are not found art like shoes that someone actually considered attractive and wearable. Instead, these fucking boot-things are ironic, get it?

We don’t need ironic ugly things, we’re already drowning in sincere ugly things! Fake ugly things bring no frisson of joy.

This guy’s Facebook page does not indicate what he intends to do with his new fame or whether we can expect other shoe-jokes in the future. But I can only hold him in contempt for intentionally fucking up a pair of boots, and for thinking he could design anything as innocently hideous as these ‘Open-toe Chrystal Boxer Booties’ by Giuseppe Zanotti.

Can someone explain why people pay attention to Jezebel? I know it’s supposed to be a staunchly feminist website but it’s just so godawful! I have already registered my disgust at its policy of auditioning its commenters. But the offenses keep piling up.

Now Jezebel is offering $10,000 to anyone who can provide the original unphotoshopped pictures of Vogue’s February covergirl, Lena Dunham. How many things are wrong with this stupid gambit for attention?

1. Why offer cash, turning their ‘quest for truth’ into a bounty-hunting exercise?
2. Why humiliate a woman they profess to admire?
3. Why claim “This is about Vogue, and what Vogue decides to do with a specific woman who has very publicly stated that she’s fine just the way she is, and the world needs to get on board with that. ” when that is so clearly a hypocritical lie?

It’s about page hits! But meanwhile, any claim to ‘feminism’ is surely negated by this mean fumble at pseudo-truth seeking.

Poor Lena. I don’t like her TV show but she doesn’t deserve this. DUH, the picture is photoshopped, they left out her fucking arm! Why don’t they choose a more traditional thin beauty-queen type to humiliate?

This is some kind of shaming situation, even if it’s just Vogue-shaming or Lena-shaming. Feminists are not supposed to approve of shaming! Recently, Jezebel engaged in some chola-shaming when they denounced Lana Del Rey for dressing like a home-girl. What fucking fuckers they are.

Jezebel is more dead to me than ever.

My memory of hearing the Velvet Underground for the first time is indelible in every detail. I had just moved to London and I was sixteen and up for anything. I was smoking hash with some guys I’d just met, sitting around stoned in their dark attic flat, when someone put on “Sister Ray.” I was transported to another dimension,  thrilling and unspeakably depraved.

I loved the Velvet Underground. By the time Max was in high school, he loved them too.

But in the last 15 years, I have come to hate Lou Reed, so his death left me cold. Big deal, is my feeling; he wasted a liver that should have gone to someone younger. Expressing my antipathy to Lou Reed on Facebook brought me new enemies and inflamed old ones. I guess that’s what Facebook is all about.

The problem, for me, is that Lou Reed was a willing and eager role model for young musicians who admired his stance as a flagrant dope-loving junkie, whose love-songs to dope make Keith Richard look like a Catholic schoolgirl. For those drawn to the dark side, Lou was a formidable siren. He made heroin synonymous with coolness.

I know you can’t blame artists for the actions of their followers. Marilyn Manson was rightly annoyed when people blamed him for the Columbine shootings. Gangsta rap might offend you, but it doesn’t turn law-abiding kids into gangsters.

Still, young people are vulnerable. They are searching for an ‘identity’ as they struggle to break away from their parents’ dominion. And a rock star who glamorizes intravenous drug use is a real problem. The worst thing Madonna’s fans could do was to go around looking like a slut. And they did. But fucking Lou Reed has lured kids into hospitals, Hep C and early graves.

I wish he had wised up early and had cautioned people not to romanticize heroin. Even William Burroughs described addiction as a gruesome nightmare of endless need and decaying flesh. But not Lou. For the last ten years at least, Lou Reed has appeared all over the place, blathering drunkenly about how important he is, or how important his friends are. Just a few months ago, I heard him blabbing about his friends Marina Abramovich, Yoko, Anthony Hegarty (who he kept calling ‘Ant’) and on and on. He was an asshole.

Max didn’t live long enough to see what an asshole Lou Reed was. He learned that heroin was a rocky path without glamour or romance, but then it was too late.

Lou Reed didn’t persuade me to use a needle, but maybe if I’d been a boy with a guitar things would have been different. If I was god, I’d go back and erase Lou Reed. I would also make sure that people knew about depression in children, so it couldn’t go on unchecked. I would trade the entire musical output of Lou Reed for the two kids I met in rehab who died from an overdose.

Fuck you Lou, and the horse you rode in on.

After days of watching death and mayhem in real time on TV, I have a question:

Aren’t the owners of the disastrous Texas fertilizer plant every bit as guilty as a terrorist bomber?

“West Fertilizer Co is a retail facility that blends fertilizer and sells anhydrous ammonia and other chemical products to local farmers. It stored 270 tons of ‘extremely hazardous’ ammonium nitrate, according to a report filed by the company with the state government.  The plant was last inspected for safety in 2011, according to a Risk Management Plan filed with the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

“The company, which has fewer than 10 employees, had provided no contingency plan to the EPA for a major explosion or fire at the site. It told the EPA in 2011 that a typical emergency scenario at the facility that holds anhydrous ammonia could result in a small release in gas form.

“The EPA fined the firm $2,300 in 2006 for failing to implement a risk management plan. The plant’s owner could not be reached for comment.”

Why would you have a fifty unit apartment building right next to this place, not to mention a nursing home? And what is a $2,300 fine to a profitable company? Now there are a bunch of dead fire fighters and streets of houses reduced to smoldering ruins.

But wait: The West plant is one of thousands of sites across rural America that stores and sells hazardous materials such as chemicals and fertilizer for agricultural use. Many are near residences and schools.

I find these companies guilty! I find the EPA guilty! Their disregard for human life makes them worse than terrorists, who are usually driven by a spiritual belief system or perverted moral code other than financial profit.

Thoughts, arguments, insults, anyone?

Intermezzo was a movie starring Ingrid Bergman, and of course it’s a musical term. Now it’s also a drug for people who wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve seen ads for Intermezzo at least ten times tonight while watching TV. In the last week, I must have seen the ad 100 times. I almost know the side effects by heart. (In depressed patients, there is a risk of suicide. Not suicidal ideation, but suicide.)

You might also drive, eat or engage in “other activities” while not fully awake, without remembering the event the next day. Other abnormal behaviors include aggression, confusion, hallucinations and agitation. Common side effects are headaches, nausea and fatigue.

Is it worth all this shit for a few hours of drugged sleep? It is right to market Intermezzo as a brand new drug when it’s just Ambien at a lower dose?  Why this deluge of  TV commercials? I can answer the last question:

“Facing lower-than-expected demand for sleep drug Intermezzo, Purdue Pharma and Transcept Pharmaceuticals are broadening the commercial strategy to include DTC and a larger selling force.

Intermezzo is a sublingual version of Sanofi’s blockbuster insomnia pill Ambien (zolpidem). But the new formulation, approved in November 2011 and introduced earlier this year, has had a lethargic launch. Hence, the firms are rolling out a $29-million DTC ad campaign and, for the first time, tapping into Purdue’s analgesics sales force of 525 reps to call on PCPs and retail pharmacies. Another 90 contract reps will detail specialists.

“There are a few ads for Lunesta out there, but the market has been fairly quiet,” said Transcept president/CEO Glenn Oclassen on a conference call this morning. “So we get to take fullest possible advantage of that and believe this level of expenditure will be sufficient to get the impact being sought.” (more here)

Oh no, the ad is playing again RIGHT NOW! Unbelievable.  I won’t be happy about this until the lawsuits start rolling in.

One of my few pleasures in life has been cruelly eradicated by the fuckers at Shopbop. They have completely changed their format, replacing our favorite models with a bunch of Nobodies and removing the boxes that separated the images.

Where is Starving Girl and Sad Redhead Girl?!? There are a few token picture of Goony Bird, but they have airbrushed her distinctive tummy deformity and you can see that her heart just isn’t in it.

This is a real slap in the face after all my devotion.  Aside from the matter of my personal distress, I think this is a terrible business decision. They have broken the unique bond between viewer and model that made shopbop such a joy.  There is no one to connect with now, no subtext, and god knows the merchandise is awful on its own.

Fuckers! Idiots! I was so mad that I started a petition on change.org but decided that perhaps it’s not a human rights issue after all. It’s more of a consumer betrayal, I guess.

Can anyone suggest a shopping website offering a perverse joy on the level of the sadly departed original Shopbop?

Tonight I watched a news story about the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC), a residential facility for autistic and other children with behavioral problems. It is known as a school of last resort and has a controversial history.

Whatever the fuck they’re doing there, they admit to using “Level III Aversives” (i.e. electric shocks) to “treat” children with a variety of disabilities including attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a  New York State Department of Education report — emotional problems, and criminal and abuse histories.

The “school” collects almost $250,000 per student from city and state taxes. A film of a frantic autistic teenager being subjected to 31 rounds of electric shocks is available here. It is disturbing, so be warned!

Among efforts to stop JRC from abusing its residents is a report by Disability Rights International filed with Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, charging that the severe pain and suffering being inflicted on children violates the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

JRC published a reply to this report on its website. Here is the best part and by “best” I mean most breathtakingly stupid and repugnant.

“Under state and federal law, non-disabled individuals have the right to choose aversive therapy to treat behavioral problems such as smoking and drinking. Preventing disabled persons from the opportunity to avail themselves of aversive therapy for their own behavior problems, would be an invidious discrimination against disabled persons.”

I know three mothers whose teenagers had to spend time in  residential  facilities after too many violent incidents. These mothers love their kids and want them to learn self control. I know how hard things can get. But torturing children is immoral under any circumstance. Torturing children with  disabilities  is a crime and a sin.