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?

Years ago, when I was married to the wrong man, I fell madly in love with a guy who sold used books. He wasn’t my type, but he had a certain lanky, preppy appeal. We met when I wandered into his store in a run-down promenade. He was very attentive. He was especially pleased by my familiarity with John Barth. Later, he called me at home, although I hadn’t given him my phone number. It was on the check I wrote; it was a bold move on his part.

I liked bold moves. I agreed to meet him at the book store, and we sat down on a bench outside in the bright sunlight. He turned to me and moved some hair away from my eyes. “Tell me everything,”he said. It’s still the single most seductive line I’ve ever heard.

He really did want to know everything, so I told him. I was unhappily married, I was a weight-lifter, I liked to read. He asked me why my past relationships had failed, a surprise question. I had to think. Because I’m unlovable, I told him sadly.

His own life offered few clues about anything. He’d been in love once, with a girl he met in college. I guess she dumped him. He pronounced her name, Cecily, in a reverent tone. He was from a small town where people still talked about having “Jewish friends.”  His brother was some minor pro golfer. But he loved Elvis Costello, so that was something. And he had arctic blue eyes like a husky.

Somehow, I must have brought up the subject of herpes, which was considered a huge deal back then. He didn’t know anything about it, but now worried he might have it. He had a rash! Shit! I confided that I might be pregnant by an idiot from my gym. We felt as though the forces were against us, while at the same time, our meeting was Destiny.

I learned that if you want to fuck someone but can’t, things get highly charged in a hurry. We were miserable but we kissed like our lives depended on it. We waited for his test results. Meanwhile, I wasn’t pregnant.

He was witty and self-deprecating, with a deep sense of resentment about his shitty job and shitty prospects. Who knows what he really wanted. We were only 28 years old, but he acted like he’d already blown everything.

His herpes test came back negative. I was lying on the couch in his tiny apartment, with my feet in his lap. He had turned very serious. “Well, now we can deal with the literary aspects of this tragedy,” he said dramatically. Later on, I would give him a nickname: The Tragedy.

I wondered nervously what would happen if we had sex and it wasn’t good or I couldn’t come. “That won’t be a problem,” he said without a hint of arrogance. And it wasn’t. I taught him that menstruation wasn’t a hindrance. He taught me that he would never stop, unless I asked him to. Late one night, we went to the book shop and in the dark, we had sex by the paperback fiction.

The excuses I gave to my husband were ridiculous but he was willing to believe them. I didn’t feel guilty. I deserved to be happy. But I wasn’t. Adulterous sex is wonderful but coming back to real life is a grim business. I felt trapped and addicted to my lover. I still swooned when he touched me.

One day, The Tragedy told me over the phone that he was ending our affair. He had recently become a Christian. Sex with me was a sin, he realized, and he couldn’t go on as we were. It felt dirty, he said.

I drove around in a daze, feeling sure I was dreaming. How could someone turn on a dime? Isn’t dirty sex a good thing? I thought I could change his mind but he was firm. I went to the book shop to confront him and he was polite but cold.

It took me forever to find my footing again but eventually I did. I hated myself and vowed this would be my last affair. Time passed and I managed to conduct a platonic friendship with The Tragedy. He needed an assistant at the store and I jumped at the chance to work there.

For months, we worked together behind the counter, sharing our contempt for our customers and laughing at our private jokes. The whole time, I had to stop myself from putting my hands on him. One day I saw him in a huddle with a skanky girl who was missing a tooth and bought Harlequin Romance novels. I was badly shaken but had to suck it up. I acquired a huge book collection. I took home fairy tales to read to my child, oblivious to how much I’d shortchanged him.

Eventually, I split up with my husband. One day, either before or after, I can’t remember, I went to visit The Tragedy at his new apartment. Through the screen-door, I asked him what had happened between us. I still didn’t understand. It still felt like unfinished business.

“{Sisterwolf},” he said, staring me straight in the eye, “I still find you fascinating. But I was never in love with you.” He was matter-of-fact, like he was giving a weather report. He didn’t blink. I turned and left, devastated. Sure enough, I was unlovable. And I was haunted by his words forever, it felt like, until I forgot all about him.

But what is the internet if not a place to look for trouble, and what are old flames if not embers to poke, out of curiosity, vengeance, or a desire to change history?

Last night I couldn’t think of Billy Holiday’s name when I heard one of her songs, and tonight I talked to my Keurig machine.

It won’t be long now, I’m thinking.

Observing one’s own senility as it progresses is probably a lot more fun than observing someone else’s. My trouble with names is the worst feature so far, but other words are now becoming elusive. Sometimes, in the middle of talking, I have to say “you know, the word that means the opposite of ___.” I find this pretty interesting, because it implies that words are stored along with their antonyms, or at least, in my brain they are.

I am also fascinated by my husband’s skill at retrieving names. He hates me to start a sentence with, “You know that guy in that thing whose name I can’t remember..” He has no patience with this but I keep telling him to get used to it. Soon, I will know nothing but old Dylan lyrics, as I have predicted here many times over the years. I’m great at playing music in my head, probably because there’s so little other cognitive action going on there.

I can’t follow Bosch any more. I have given up trying. I just concentrate on whatshisname’s cocked head and try to predict the dialogue. Every night when we watch TV, I can barely recall what happened in the previous episode. This might be the pot smoking or the late hour, or watching too many Netflix series at the same time, but it’s like, Didn’t that character die already? or “Do we know this guy or is he new”?

Do you believe that the more words you know, the more disturbing it will be to see them go? Maybe if you had a limited vocabulary, it wouldn’t be as frustrating to flail around in the black hole of your memory bank. Meanwhile, I am thrilled when someone uses words or phrases beyond the ones we all hear daily. My sister described walking in a sun-dappled field and I wanted to kiss her for being so descriptive. I’m still enjoying “contemporaneous,” as in “Jim Comey’s contemporaneous notes.”

What if senility lets me keep my old memories but not the words to communicate them? That will really suck. Wait. What happens to people who use sign language??? Oh my god. Do they just wiggle their fingers???

I intend to marvel at the process of losing my mind and to report my findings. If at some point I forget who I am, I’ll have my blog as a kind of dossier. I wonder what I will think of me.

Along these lines, or maybe not, today while we were out walking the dog, I asked my husband what he thinks is important in life besides hair. His answer was “manners.” I’m not sure if he was serious, but I agree that good manners are nice to see. Later, he came up with “food.” So now I have three things, or four when you add “love.”

What am I forgetting?

Twenty years on, I am still rattled by my husband’s fucking ex. Not only has she opened a tiki-themed restaurant too close to my neighborhood,  she has recently written the following:

“There was a time in my youth, those long gone halcyon days, when it seemed I spent a large part of my life in front of a camera. In the pursuit of an acting career it was standard operating procedure to continuously update and change the 8-by-10s that were the calling cards of all of us who tramped the mean streets of Los Angeles in constant and often futile rounds of meetings in the offices of agents, photographers, producers, directors and various unsavory characters.

“Perhaps in retrospect it is the smiling [photos] that fare the best, as I was innately happy, clear of eyes and had good teeth. For my fiftieth birthday and retired at that point, I pulled out all the old headshots and plastered them over a large wall at my parent’s house, creating a sort of gallery. They made a remarkable display and told a story of my own evolution, not to mention hairdos. The one topless shot, though artistically done and revealing but a modest bosom, shocked my brother. Frankly, I was rather proud to shock anyone.”

There was one thing that each photo had in common, one through-line, one essence captured. It was youth, my youth. And youth is hope. There it is, around the curve of my smiling lips, in the gleam of my eye, in the open expression.”

Jesus. Christ.

I brought up the subject of her uniquely annoying existence with my husband, who flipped out. Why can’t I be normal, he wants to know. It’s easy for him to talk about normal: My ex, though a cunt, stays quietly in his corner and doesn’t open restaurants or write about his modest bosom.

Some things are just awful and they stay awful. Some things fall away in the stark awareness of what really matters.  I am waiting for the ex-wife to move from the first category into the second.

Remember The Nose War?

Well, now it’s a fork.

There’s a fork on the bookcase by the front door, and it’s been there for at least a week. Maybe two weeks. My teenager asked me about it, without implying that he might be willing to take it back to the kitchen. I told him that I didn’t know what it was doing on the bookcase, but I wasn’t going to move it, either. He understood.

Now it has taken the place of The Nose. My husband has obviously seen the fork, since nothing escapes his eagle eye (especially things that are kitchen-related.)

We’ll see what happens.

Do any of you play these childish games with your partner? If not, you’re really missing out on the true essence of marriage.

Godammit, I told you so!.

I can’t stand Arnold and I have never figured out why people believe he is anything other than a big stupid moron. The myth that Arnold is “actually very smart” is just preposterous! Fuck!

Way back in another lifetime, I lifted weights in the gym where Arnold worked out every morning. He was a loudmouthed bully who had a coterie of middle aged halfwits that followed him around and laughed at his stupid jokes. Arnold was an arrogant cunt who bothered women with comments like “I’d like to see you with your panties off!”

He’s what my mom would call a “lowlife.” We’ll never know why Maria Shriver married him and thus gave him a legitimacy that led to his political career, which in turn has left California in fiscal shambles.

Maybe the Kennedy women have a deep-seated need to be humiliated by powerful men. Whatever. I feel bad for Maria and her children, but WHAT THE FUCK WAS SHE THINKING?!?

Thoughts, rants, crap about how “personal lives are nobody’s business?”

Last night, the sons were both out for the evening and we had the house to ourselves.

My husband turned on the Jimmy Fallon Show, which was showing clips from the forthcoming documentary about the making of Exile on Main Street. We are both card-carrying lifelong fans of the Rolling Stones, and children of the 60s, so it was a real treat for us.

As we watched grainy images of their ramshackle mansion in the south of France, where the Stones fled to escape taxes in the UK, I was reminded of Gram Parsons. In a documentary about Gram Parsons, his time with Keith Richards in France is recounted at length by a narrator who notes that in the end, the Stones got tired of Gram and sent him packing when they decided to go on tour. For a time though, Keith and Gram were musical soulmates and spent all their time together, singing and playing guitar.

I said aloud: “Poor Gram, the Stones chewed him up and spit him out.”

Mr. SW took issue with this and said: “Listen, you can’t blame the Stones for what happened to Gram Parsons.”

Me: “Yeah but I’m just saying, when Keith got through picking his brain they booted him out.”

(Now, I realize that no one gives a shit about any of this. But bear with me.)

Mr. SW started acting like the Stones’ defense attorney. I in turn became Gram’s attorney. We traded increasingly tense arguments on our clients’ behalf. At some point I exclaimed, “Hey, I love the Stones, I love Keith, he’s my fucking style icon, I’m just saying that it probably hurt to be treated that way! I’m not saying that it made him go kill himself in Joshua Tree for god-sake!”

The show ended and Mr. SW invited me to follow him to the bedroom.

We lay on the new Sears Deluxe Firm Pillowtop bed and the argument continued.

Mr. SW:  “Oh poor little Gram, trust fund kid….”

Me:  “Oh god, why bring his trust fund into it! That’s not his fault! Look at Mick Jagger, he was upper middle class…”

Mr. SW:  “No he wasn’t, his father was a gym teacher!”

Me:  “FINE, he was middle class, firmly middle class!”

Mr. SW:  “Then don’t say upper middle.”

Me:  “Well, you don’t have to get nasty. You said trust fund in a nasty way. It hurt my feelings.”

Mr. SW : “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m just saying that you can’t blame the Stones, Gram was big boy, he knew what he was doing.”

Finally, I started to cry.

Me:  “I love Gram Parsons and now he’s dead and so don’t be mean to him!”

Mr. SW:  “I’m not being mean to him, I’m just saying the Stones didn’t kill him.”
~

The evening ended harmoniously. I hope the subject never comes up again. But Mr. SW has pre-ordered the reissued Exile on Main Street. Maybe we should renew our marriage vows before it arrives.

Two weeks after I turned fourteen, I hit the road with my boyfriend. A day or two earlier, my mom had issued an ultimatum: Either I stop seeing him, or she would call the police. I had brought him home to meet her, and the sight of a scruffy bearded 26 year old man, assuring her that he was serious about me, must have been horrifying.

I was filled with excitement when he suggested that we run away together. He was a Pied Piper figure on the Sunset Strip, with plenty of followers eager to help in our getaway. In no time, we had fake IDs and a guy to drive us to San Fransisco. Our birth certificates belonged to an 18 year old girl named Debbie and some guy named Warren. For the next few weeks, we had to call each other Warren and Debbie, names I still hate to this day.

I stopped at a phone booth to call my sister. I told her I was leaving, and I’d be back in four years. She was furious and threatened to tell our mother. When I said she could have my over-the-knee boots, she backed down, clearly surprised by her good fortune.

For some reason, I wasn’t wearing my contact lenses. It was annoying but I guess I resigned myself to being blind. It was already after midnight and our first stop was Tijuana, to get married. He must have wanted to make an honest woman of me. I remember waking up some guy in a shack who didn’t speak much English. My bridal attire was one of my every day outfits: an awful brown satin dress that looked like a civil war costume, and bare feet.

From Mexico we went to San Francisco, our driver’s original destination. He let us off near a Goodwill thrift store, where I bought a black velvet opera coat for fifty cents. The plan was to dress like a “straight” person, but I had to rebel. It was a reflex or an instinct; it was all I ever did. My husband went to a barber who cut his long hair and shaved off his beard. I was stunned by how unattractive he looked without the hair and beard, but it was too late. I was stuck with him.

I was reading some crap about Michelle Obama’s style vs Carla Bruni’s, when I was stopped short by this photo. The woman in green makes Carla Bruni look like a PTA lady, doesn’t she?

Shiekha Moza is married to the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, one of the wealthiest royals in the Middle East. She is the mother of seven children, and has worked to reform the status of woman in her country. A UNESCO special envoy for education, she has made public education a priority and given Academics a new role in crafting Qatar’s new democracy.

She is often dressed in custom Dior, and no matter how many pictures you look at, she is always impeccably groomed and absolutely stunning. The only problem is, she is married to this guy:

I’m thinking, Tom and Katie, multiplied by a thousand.

Could you do it, ladies? Or put another way, which deal would be easier to turn down, Katie’s or Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned’s?

When you’ve been in a relationship for years and years, you need to make an effort to have fun.

Here’s a game I just made up, called The Nose War:

There’s a little rubber nose on my kitchen floor, just to the left of the fridge. It’s been there for around 10 days. I don’t know how it got there, I only know that I bought it in a little packet of rubber body-parts from Borders, at least a year ago. They were creepy but cute, and cost around two bucks.

(I put a quarter next to the nose for size comparison.)

Anyway, the nose is in plain sight, but NO ONE WILL PICK IT UP!

It occurred to me that it would be fun to see how long it stays there. In other words, I’ve decided to leave it there as a test for my husband, who normally hastens to tell me what’s wrong in the kitchen. Then, it occurred to me that my husband must be leaving it there on purpose, too, to test ME! He’s probably thinking, I’ll see how long that slob leaves that nose on the floor, and eventually I’ll draw her attention to it and say “Look what a lazy slob you are, this has been on the floor for — days, bla bla bla!”

I’ve pointed out the nose to my kid, who said “I was wondering why that was there,” and I told him I was conducting a test. But I like how he had no intention of picking it up, either. The apple doesn’t   fall far from the tree, eh?

God, marriage is fun.