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.

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??

1. Demi Moore isn’t blaming Ashton Kutcher for the threesomes they had during their marriage but it was his idea, not that she’s blaming him.

2. Brad Pitt has realized that it’s not the roles that matter. What he really wants is to live an interesting life.

3. Tavi Gevinson picks at her face when she’s anxious and has let her assistant take care of her Instagram posts.

4. Rap artists with gang affiliations have to check in with the local gang when they arrive in a new city, or some bad shit will go down.

5. Demi Lovato wants you to accept her cellulite.

All these things are true, according to the Internet. I know them because I clicked on them. I clicked on them because at the time, each one seemed less stupid, pointless, or distressing than the other suggestions thrown up by my cellphone or the New York Times.

I’ve never clicked on anything about improving my habits at work or at home, about fitness or food, about what successful people do to manage their lives or about relationships. I’ve never clicked on anything to do with finances, careers, credit scores, parenting, or shortcuts to anything.

Every day, I’m confronted by a thousand ways to lose myself and avoid being present, so I’m learning to skip things that will make me go back to bed. It’s a process, okay? I still make mistakes. I just clicked on the thing about a grandparent in Florida who gave her disabled adult grandchild an overdose of something, because she was worried about dying and leaving him alone. There’s a whole website somewhere that lists the people who were killed this way, in order to honor their truncated lives. This is exactly the type of thing I am drawn to like a moth and must learn to ignore.

Who started the fucking Five Things lists? Why five? Is it because ten is too many for most people to handle? Five is a reasonable number, if there were things I wanted to know on the fly.

I don’t want to know five things though. I read stuff about philosophy, depression, addiction, autism, nursing homes, refugees, writers, murderers, artists, and Donald Trump. Ivanka, too. I want to know everything on these subjects. As little kids, my sister and I liked to dig deep holes at the beach, hoping to reach China. I still want to reach China, pretty much. The dream is alive.

Is there something I’m missing in my pursuit of knowledge and distraction? Let’s hear the five things you click on, or refuse to click.

When I think about the internet and how it has distorted the reality of day to day life, first I think about social media. Nothing matters unless it can be documented, or liked. Every  few hours, a gigantic wave of rage erupts on Twitter, all aimed at someone who crossed an invisible line with a thoughtless comment, or maybe an R. Kelly type figure who serves as a scapegoat for all the seething self-hatred that can never be examined or depleted, since it regenerates with every moment of inaction toward Facebook for selling your personal data and reminding you what you posted last year.

Next I think of all the time it has robbed from me, time I could spend doing anything offline, like clean the house or engage with a person face to face, not to mention generate my own thoughts. In the last two days, I have learned about Swedish preschools, rehab statistics, Japanese phonemes, Tucker Carlson’s misogyny, maternal infection and autism, restaurants that accommodate fat people, and the challenges faced by Uniqlo. This is just a small fraction of what I’ve consumed while sitting anxiously at my computer, wondering how I can find out everything about everything before it’s too late.

Do you do this? Maybe you don’t have the time, or if you do, you use it more constructively. Me, I don’t know how to discern what’s useful or important from garbage. I’m trying to resist the temptation to click on the worst crime stories, with some encouraging results. I did read about the little girl stuffed in a suitcase, and I read the comments on the mother’s fb page, calling her a piece of shit, etc. I already know not to click on the secrets of productive people or the truth about diets. That’s just instinctive knowledge. I’m not an idiot, after all. I’m just a person who has forgotten how to be present in my own life.

With all my desperate hunting and pecking online, I would have missed something noteworthy if it hadn’t been forwarded to me: the harrowing writing of Patricia Lockwood, who describes her own descent into internet lunacy, and it is terrifying. I don’t want to end up too immersed in online culture to find my way out. I’m not sure if there’s an antidote to the damage it’s done to my attention span and short-term memory.

Maybe blogging isn’t really writing or communicating. I’m not sure. I need to think it over.

Thoughts, anyone?

A few days ago, I was at the mall, drinking coffee and talking to a young woman I will call Mary. Mary had started the conversation, which I was enjoying, because who else wants to talk to me? She was 22, but looked much younger. She told me that she tries to look after her 12 year old sister, who is getting interested in boys and fashion.

I’m always interested in young people who have grown up with social media. I wonder how it affects their lives, or if they even think of the internet as something separate from their lives. So I asked her if she spent a lot of time scrolling through shit on her phone, like I do. She seemed at once casually grown up and sweetly naive.

I started going on about how sad I was for young people, who would never know innocence, who would see hundreds or thousands of naked bodies and sex acts before they ever had a relationship. I deplored the lack of mystery that is now a fact of life for young people. I asked her if this worried her, and she said, Not really.

Then, because it’s one of my favorite stories, I told her about the time my kid brought a new friend home for a play-date, and they disappeared into his room. They were probably around 13 at the time, and my kid was already a prodigious coder.  After around three hours, the friend’s mom called to see how things were going. She then advised me to supervise the kids’ computer use, because her son had recently been caught looking at bestiality.

The punchline of the story is me going, “WHAT??? YOU’RE TELLING ME NOW, AFTER THREE HOURS?”

So I finished my story, expecting Mary to laugh. Instead, she looked confused, and said. “What’s  bestiality?”

Shit, I thought, oh no! I didn’t think I could just say, Never mind, now that I’d said the word. So, very sadly, I explained, “It’s when people have sex with animals.” Her eyes bugged out and her hands flew up to her face. “But how would they do that?”

Suddenly, my husband appeared, as we had planned to meet outside the coffee bar. Overcome with guilt and relief, I blurted out, “Hi honey, this is Mary. I’ve just destroyed her innocence!” Mary laughed but I still felt mortified.

As my husband and I walked to the car, he joked about me picking up kids at the mall. I told him that in fact, she had picked me up. Then I remembered reading that the men who get caught having sex with horses always blame it on the horse. “The horse came on to me, it wasn’t my idea!”

Just kill me.

When I stopped writing for Popdust a few weeks ago, I never thought I would lose interest in celebrities.

Having to write about them every day involved a total immersion in their real and made-up antics. I labored over the Daily Mail, looking for some news or photos I could spin into a post. I refused to just copy something that had already been posted somewhere else. Even though my writing and the website itself were garbage, I took a pathetic pride in being original.

I became an expert on Kim and Kanye.

My husband had to ask me several times when we were out walking to stop talking about Kanye. I found it hard not to share the contents of my knowledge base. I thought about Kylie and Khloe and Madonna and Gwyneth even when I was off the clock.  I started checking in on them several times a day, worried about missing something.

I followed Rumer Willis on Twitter, and tried to decode her tweets to her sister, whatshername.

Now, I am blissfully unaware of Rumer’s musings, and I don’t know where Kylie stands with Tyga.

Without any deliberate detox plan, I quit celebrities, just like that!

It feels like a miracle. No longer preoccupied with celebrities, I haven’t become more productive and I haven’t developed a new interest, but at least I don’t talk about Kanye. I think it’s a win.

On the other hand, I may have a lot more free-floating rage and hatred. But I will need it for our Insane Clown President. 

In fact, given Matt Taibbi‘s brilliant nickname for Donald Trump, it would be wonderfully fitting if Insane Clown Posse and a few thousand juggalos could perform at the inauguration! Please, universe, make this happen.

Where once I could rant about Taylor Swift with the passion of a crazed zealot, now I have no idea what she’s up to, and I wonder how I could once get so worked up about her.

Maybe it’s the emergence of actual villains that has drained my hatred for celebrities, or maybe familiarity really does breed contempt. Getting some distance from Kim Kardashian’s ass has helped me to refocus on my own ass,  such as it is.

If you fear that you are a hopeless celebrity addict, take it from me, you can live without them. Step 1 is to renounce the Daily Mail, and if I could do it, so can you. Then, move away from your computer and start thinking about your ass.

*photo by Juggalo4U

I think I know the answer! Because I’m on the brink of one!

Haven’t you always wondered what people meant by the outmoded term “nervous breakdown”? I used to picture someone in a padded cell, just lying on a bed, maybe trembling, probably unable to speak, disheveled, with vacant eyes.

I’ve even wished I could have a nervous breakdown, because then someone would take care of everything while I just drooled quietly in a nice sanitarium somewhere.

And then at some point in my life, I decided that I was out of luck, I just couldn’t break down even if I longed for it, it just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’m not the type, I would explain bitterly when discussing someone else’s mental hospital experience.

Well, I have news to report. After enough days of struggling with my website and talking to IT guys who all sound slightly stoned and none too bright, after listening to all these Richards and Darrens and Ethans giving conflicting theories and reasons why things should be working now or not working now, I am a mess.

The sense of powerless multiplied by anxiety and frustration is truly debilitating.

The only relief came in the form of Lauren, an angel who knows all about WordPress blogs and so much more I can’t begin to tell you. She knows about Juggalos, for fucksake. She knows about everything, believe me.

So she agreed to bring my blog back from the Invisible White Screen of Death.

Meanwhile, perhaps sniffing out my anxiety all the way from Arizona  (or tipped off by the IT guys at Bluehost) my web security service, SiteLock, alerts me that I have some malware that urgently needs to be removed. If I don’t remove it, Google will hate me, everyone will hate me and my whole world will end.

However, despite having paid $500 for a year of their security service, they want $300 to remove the malware.

Now, the best/worst part of this is a person names “Sean” at SiteLock. Sean will come out of the gate yelling at you like an angry husband you dared to question about his poker buddies.

Sean seethes with contempt for your ignorance and rage for your audacity in bringing up that $500. He compares the extraction of malware to surgery. Actual surgery. He tells you how careless you’ve been in using plug-ins.  And Sean never backs down. He is aggression personified.

Sean seems like the devil Himself.

But that’s because you have yet to encounter STEVEN, in billing.

When I saw a few moments of the Cancer Dance video on the evening news, I was dismayed. The news people smiled and exchanged platitudes about courage and healing. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, they mused, if people everywhere were inspired by the dancing mastectomy patient to face cancer with such joy?

If you’re reading this and you have cancer, and you like the dancing, please forgive me for my bad attitude.

I just feel that it’s one more way to pressure people into masking their trauma and fear and grief. BE HAPPY! Find a silver lining! Things could be worse! Be thankful for the ‘lesson’ of cancer or death!

Our culture offers nothing for the grief-stricken. We just want them to keep quiet or go away. What if some women insisted on wearing black mourning clothes to her mastectomy, to say goodbye to her breasts? That video would not go viral.

I will never be “over” my loss and I will always grieve. I accept that but no one else does, except for the parents I see on online forums, who express their anguish and desperation to strangers who have Been There. Online People can be remarkably patient and compassionate. Real Life people get sick of your morose demeanor. They get sick of hearing you ask with complete sincerity, “Why doesn’t so-and-so just kill themself?” They are upset by your negativity. And they feel helpless in the face of such intractable sadness.

A couple of nights ago, I chatted online with a total stranger who seemed really smart and really nice. I told her my story and asked what to do about facing or avoiding my dark constant companion, as I think of it.

She asked a few questions and then told me that grief was noble. She advised me to look for people I could help, and to honor my son however I could.  Her words were a huge comfort.

I’m going to just feel noble instead of hating myself for being sad. I’m not going to dance and act happy, because I’m not a model of courage and positivism. And If I find out I have cancer, I’m going to make a big fuss and take to my bed.  I wish America were like Africa, with shaman elders to dance around and perform some rituals for us who have lost our children or breasts or limbs or sanity.

At least there are wise strangers out there in cyberspace.

Has everybody already discovered the Askinator game? The Wolf household can’t stop playing it. Think of any character, real or fictive, and the Askinator Genie will guess the answer. So far, it has correctly guessed Ignatious P. Reilly, the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, god, Madame Bovary, Borat, Marianne Faithfull, my mother-in-law and our dog.

I have seen this dress by Alexander Wang EVERYWHERE in the last few days, and even though it’s beyond my means and spoiled-by-association re Erin Wasson, I have coveted it. Blue sequins = heaven.

But one look at Goony Bird wearing it and I’m over it! She’s ruined it for me.

Thank you, Goony Bird!   Go here for more of her distinctive posing.