Having left off with a heartbroken post about Mother’s Day, I am back with more miserable reflections of the state of things, or more specifically the state of me, Sister Wolf.

Remember when I fell and broke my pelvis? Well, I have done it again! Hard to believe, I know, and yet there it is. This time I fell in my own home in a stupid fluke accident and landed on my bad leg with the hardware in it. The hardware was sturdy but my pelvis was not. The part that broke is the pubis ramus, a fucking bummer.

So I had to get an ambulance, and the EMT guys were sorry about taking me to the hospital, acting like they were delivering me to certain death from Coronavirus. I sobbed about dying but since I couldn’t stand up, I had no choice.

The hospital was great! There were no COVID patients there, and the nurses were lovely young women who chatted with me about everything and brought me extra coffee when I begged for it. At night, the ward was full of screaming and moaning, but not from me. One doctor talked to me for more than an hour about his life and aspirations. When I went home after 2 days, I missed all the companionship.

Twelve years ago when I broke my pelvis, some awful Russian cunt made it a project to mock my pain on her stupid blog, which I then parodied on a blog I devoted to mocking her back. Those were the days, eh?

So now I need to use a walker to get around my house, and I’m in nearly constant pain. I guess I could take this opportunity to become addicted to opiates, but nah, why bother? I have a nice physical therapist who keeps calling me ma’am. My poor husband has to help with everything, and I secretly wonder if he can distinguish me from his 103 year old mother. His mother has a better attitude, obviously.

Yesterday, my oxygen saturation was 94 %, not good. It connects me to the cultural inflection points of George Floyd ( I can’t breathe) and the pandemic (low oxygen is a symptom of COVID 19.)

I watched the funeral service in Houston today, and envied the solidarity of black families. My friend Romeo told me that this is because we’ve never allowed black people to have anything else. If this is true, I still envy those families. The love and the loyalty is so absent in my own family, a pill that grows more bitter the older I get. All the feuds and petty squabbles. Even when times are tough, my family is incapable of pulling together.

On top of everything, I found a hairdresser who is making house-calls, so she came over last week and spent four hours ruining my beautiful hair. She left me with some shit in my hair to rinse off in 15 minutes. If she’d stayed for it to dry, she would have heard my shriek of horror when I looked in the mirror to find a platinum fright wig where my beautiful highlights used to be.

Ha ha! Life is full of jokes, if only you have the sense of humor to enjoy them! I do enjoy them, up to a point, you know?

If you have time, pray to the gods of your understanding that my pelvis mends and I don’t die of Coronavirus before I get to have a last laugh at someone else’s expense, hopefully Trump’s.

Thanks in advance! xoxo

There are now an increasing number of stances you can take about being forced to stay home. The stances may be infinite for all I know, but let’s review the ones getting the most play.

There’s the Gratitude stance, which I personally find horrifying. This one is popular on Instagram, often with a stupid Buddhist-style image of a sunset and a silhouette of someone doing a yoga pose. It’s a sanctimonious sermon on how this pandemic can teach us to use the planet more gently, how we now have the opportunity to rethink our selfish ways, blah blah blah. It’s an awful slap in the face to anyone who is actually suffering. I refuse to be grateful for a pandemic. Fuck that idea and the horse it rode in on.

Then there’s the Scolding stance, another dreadful position that tries to make you feel bad for spending hours watching Netflix or staring at your phone. This one blames you for losing touch with your Inner Life and your creativity. What’s wrong with you! it gripes, You brainwashed consumer! Have you lost the ability to sit in a room and just be present? Please. As if.

Then there’s the Silver Lining stance. This is the one where you finally have the time to learn a new language, to read War and Peace, to finish that screenplay, to rearrange your living room, try out new recipes and to host zany get-togethers with your girlfriends on Zoom. It’s fun being home with free time! Let’s get busy!

There is also the Existential stance, and that’s the one I’ve chose for now, although it’s more accurate to say it’s chosen me. This is the one where you face down your dread, the continual dread of being alive but close to death. It’s the one where you realize your existence can be reduced to almost nothing, just eating and sleeping with some time-wasting stuff in between. You wonder why you bought all those clothes, all those stupid eye pencils and shoes and trinkets. Life is only about having someone to talk to, to hold you, and a decent bed to crawl into. Life is about waiting for something to happen but hoping it won’t be something awful or unbearable.

However, the last couple of weeks have brought some unexpectedly wonderful moments. I watched Jeopardy for the first time in probably twenty years, and one of the categories was “Otters.” I forgot the question, but it led to the revelation that otters hold hands while they sleep. This is the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard, and sure enough when I googled it, I found loads of pictures. I’m so glad to have discovered this, I can’t overstate the joy it has given me.

Also, in the same episode of Jeopardy, I was able to shout out a few questions before anyone hit the buzzer, a momentous burst of feeling intelligent that I haven’t experienced in ages. It reminded me of my mother, dying of cancer and watching Jeopardy in bed, crying out the word “Loyola!” in a weak but authoritative voice, and being correct.

As time passes, my stance may change. I wonder if I’m the only one who is mentally writing a will? In California, a handwritten will with your signature is legal and binding. I’ve already promised my tiger claw jewelry to my friend Marya and my footwear will go to Simone. Anyone want anything else? Now’s the time to speak up!

I didn’t believe it when I heard there was a person with only a head, who lived in a bowl. It reminded me of my favorite publication from many years ago, a parody of the National Enquirer that featured a “human Interest” story about a head that lived on a velvet pillow. In the tradition of such stories, the head, a little boy, was brave and spunky and loved sports. He was the ball, obviously.

Anyway, I learned about Rahma Haruna, a Nigerian teenager who lived in a plastic bowl. A photo of her went viral, and someone bought her family a wheelchair to transport the bowl around. Before that, she was carried into the village every day by her younger brother, to beg for alms.

The Girl in a Bowl story is so loaded with meaning and resonance that I hardly know where to begin but here we go.

Last night, a friend came over and we discussed our antidepressants, a first-world problem if ever there was one but nevertheless we struggle. My antidepressant has stopped working and the friend is on a new one, Lexipro. It provides a feeling of numbness, which is good, but it’s fucking with their ability to be creative, and has muted their sense of humor.

In my effort to be helpful, I said, “No, not true! You thought the girl in a bowl was funny and you laughed!” Further, I pointed out, not everyone would respond by laughing. It bespeaks a particular dark and perverse sense of humor, the kind that is natural to people like us, the kind we need to survive.

So my friend agreed. I didn’t go on to quote whoever it was who said that suicide is the failure of the sense of humor. I believe this to be true. It’s not always beneficial to blurt out, though.

Moving along, the Girl in a Bowl Story is an example of courage that is beyond our imagination. Not only that, but Rahma Haruna hoped to one day own a grocery store.

Just think about this. With all my limbs, I know I couldn’t run a grocery store. I can’t even put the groceries away efficiently. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, lazy and stupid as I am. I have only dreamed of doing nothing.

Self-worth, courage, dignity, stoicism, hope, faith, perseverance, what else does it take to live in a bowl? In pictures of Rahma, who died in 2016, she wears eye-shadow and sometimes a radiant smile. God bless this girl and her beautiful spirit, even though if there were a god, he’d owe her a huge apology.

I usually hate those quadriplegic people who want to climb Mt. Everest, and I blame them for trying to make the rest of us look bad. But this is not that. This is kind of sui generis, I feel. And it raises the question, can you find humor in tragedy without being a mean person? Is laughing antithetical to compassion? Can you mock something while being humbled by it?

I’m going to say yes, and not just to defend myself and my friend. It doesn’t quite fit here but nonetheless I will quote Oscar Wilde on Dickens. “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

He was talking about sentimentality but I think this applies to the horror of existence, to bearing up under difficult circumstances. You need to find the humor. For many of us, it is absolutely essential. I hope to suffer like Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, rather than Sylvia Plath, who had no idea how funny she would look with her legs sticking out of the oven.

I know you’re supposed to be horrified by school shootings, and I am, but from the first description of Nikolas Cruz, my heart went out to him.

No one is justified in shooting up a school. The actions aren’t justified, but they seem tragically predictable. Given his circumstances, I believe he is a victim of Florida’s gun laws, and the NRA. Without easy access to assault rifles, he would just be a lonely outcast, failed by his parents, his school district, and the local police department.

Here’s an interview with a neighbor:

“He had emotional problems and I believe he was diagnosed with autism,” Mr. Gold said of Nikolas Cruz. “He had trouble controlling his temper. He broke things. He would do that sometimes at our house when he lost his temper. But he was always very apologetic afterwards.”

“He would sometimes be hitting his head and covering his ears. One time, I sent him home because he was misbehaving at our house and he took a golf club and smashed one of my trailers.”

He said that Mr. Cruz at one point had gone to a school for students with special needs. “Kids were really picking on him and would gang up on him and beat him up a little,” Mr. Gold said. “They ostracized him. He didn’t have many friends.”

Nikolas was adopted at 2 years old. His father died when he was six.  As a child, “Nikolas was moody, prone to an explosive temper and at times seemed to delight in antagonizing others.” People began to avoid him. In school, kids started calling him crazy. He played with his fingers and talked to himself. As he grew older, his mother often called the cops to reprimand him for his outbursts.

Let me stop here and say, HELLO, SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS? HOW ABOUT SOME INTERVENTION? HOW ABOUT SOME BEHAVIORISTS? HOW ABOUT SOME SOCIAL SKILLS CLASSES? HOW ABOUT A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST AND SOME MEDICATION FOR ANXIETY OR MOOD SWINGS?

Instead, Nikolas went to a nice, wonderful, gigantic high school where he could be shunned and act out with weird talk about knives and weapons. The nice wonderful school expelled him because he just wasn’t right in the head. Here’s what a student at the nice school said about Nikolas:

“He was definitely not accepted at our school socially. People saw him as someone who was different than the normal people at our school,” Parodie added.

Douglas High has a place students call “the Emo Gazebo,” he said. “That’s where all the kids that are considered weird or not accepted sat. Kids at the Emo Gazebo didn’t even accept him there. He was just an outcast… He didn’t have any friends.”

“Most kids ignored him at school. They pushed him off to the side as if he was garbage. He screamed in class one time. He was upset and just started yelling at the teacher. The teacher was trying to help him and he just took it the wrong way,” Parodie continued.

Meanwhile, his Instagram is full of guns and weapons. Right in the open for all to see. He is obsessed with them. He comments on someone’s video that he wants to be a “professional school shooter.” He uses his real name!

In November, his mom suddenly died of pneumonia, leaving him alone with no support system. A sympathetic family takes him in. But he is devastated by the loss of his mom, and very depressed.

You know what happened next. Now he’s on suicide watch. His lawyer says he is remorseful and distraught.

I have known families with troubled kids, kids who have conduct disorders along with autism, kids who flip out and can’t manage their impulses. Often, thee kids are sent to residential schools for intensive therapy. And often, they can move back home, more in control and aware of boundaries and consequences.

A few years ago, I had a new neighbor, who had just divorced a very famous movie director. She confided that their son was at a residential school due to his violent outbursts. She loved her boy but was afraid of him. His diagnosis was autism, but he may have been bi-polar as well. Time passed and I saw the kid at the Oscars with his famous dad, looking nicely groomed and very happy.

Poor Nikolas didn’t have a famous rich dad. That’s his crime.

The rest is on the fucking NRA and their flunkies in congress. Thoughts and prayers to those bastards.

How can you watch Susan Bro speak about her daughter without tearing up? What a magnificent woman and mother.

On July 31, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry lost her only son to a drug overdose, but she is back at work, fighting for DACA.

And earlier today, I read about a mother who started a foundation to distribute naloxone to drug addicts after her twenty year old son died of a heroin overdose.

These mothers are everything I’m not. They have pulled themselves together to do something good in the world. They are memorializing their children with so much courage and fortitude!

All I’ve done is cry and wail and sleep and try to distract myself. I feel like grief is the defining aspect of my entire existence, even though I don’t want that to be true.

Maybe it’s not too late for me to be productive. Who knows. I am skeptical, given my laziness, which is legendary.

What I do is sleep with his stuffed animals and wear his hair in a locket and go around feeling lost. But I did write to Mayor Barry and she wrote me back. I wanted to tell her that it would never be okay but it would get easier. Her son had the sweetest face, and his name was Max.

If you didn’t hear Susan Bro talk about her daughter Heather, here she is.  On the one hand we have Trump, a disgraceful amoral piece of shit, and on the other hand we have a ordinary woman exhibiting the best of humanity on one of the worst days of her life.

Let’s thank her for giving us hope, and for being a light in the wilderness of 2017.

When did it become a human right to broadcast yourself around the world in real time? If it’s not a right, then let’s admit that humanity is not capable of using this technology responsibly.

You may love the feeling of being a superstar when you go on Facebook Live to talk about your pet peeves or your make-up tips, but the value of that doesn’t come close to the harm generated by live-streamed suicide, torture and murder.

The murder in Cleveland on Sunday was blown up into a huge news story because it was posted on Facebook, whereas brutal, senseless murders take place across America every single day. The most notable thing about the event is that it remained on Facebook for several hours.

I don’ t want to see live murders on Facebook, and I don’t want you to see them either. I don’t want to see torture or rape on Facebook, and I don’t want you to see them either. It is not your right to see these activities. These events are traumatic. It is possible to be traumatized over and over, not just once. Trauma doesn’t work that way.

The fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhhol predicted did not refer to live-streaming your stupid life to your cyber-friends. No one could have predicted that it would come to this, that people would mediate every experience and thought through their cellphone. Life is OUT THERE, not in your phone or on Facebook.

But young people who have grown up with the internet are increasingly unable to conduct their lives offline. Everything that matters to them involves their wi-fi connection. And when they are overwhelmed and suicidal, they turn to Facebook Live.

Facebook acknowledges that live-streamed suicide is a problem, but they aren’t willing to give out numbers. There are at least 7 known cases since Facebook went live last year. Mark Zuckerberg pledged to find new ways to tackle this in a recent letter to Facebook users:

“There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live streamed — that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner.”

Suicide has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years. Suicide is devastating for the people who witness it, and could encourage others who are struggling to attempt it, too, says Dan Romer, research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

But Facebook has its own suicide ‘researcher’, who insists that

“…cutting off the stream too early removes the chance of someone being able to reach out and provide help. In this way, Live becomes a lifeline. It opens up the opportunity for people to reach out for support and for people to give support at this time that’s critically important.”

God, what self-serving fuckers. They will never give an inch, because their stated mission is that everyone will do everything via their platform: chat, shop, argue, order pizza, make friends, kill yourself and maybe each other.

There are reasons why people want to carry out momentous acts in front of a public audience, and none of those reasons are healthy. The urge to watch these acts might be attributed to “human nature” but human nature is changing. Kids didn’t use to make videos of gang rapes for the amusement of their friends. Kids used to feel horrified by things that are horrifying. Desensitization is a real thing.

Facebook is criminal in its practices, as we all know. Selling data, promoting fake news,  discouraging face to face contact, and broadcasting rape, torture and violent death…it is the fucking devil.

The less you participate, the less power it will have to drag humanity down to zero.

Today we were waiting in line at our neighborhood Pollo Loco and the line wasn’t moving. I saw that the guy giving his order at the cash register was gesticulating impatiently.

Something was up. The guy was raising his voice but we couldn’t make out his words. I turned to my husband and said, “I hope we don’t get shot here, but I can actually think of worse places.”

I was thinking of CVS, where I happened to be during a very mild earthquake. I remember how glad I was not to spend my last moments in a CVS, crushed by products.

The guy at the front finally paid the cashier. We heard him explain that his jaw waas wired shut and he wanted to have his chicken shredded.

He moved aside to the salsa bar, where an older guy said something. The young guy, who was very tall and thin, said “I was shot in the face.”

Trying to compute this information, I heard the older say “blah blah blah small caliber?”

Men! If they’re not getting shot in the face, they want to talk about guns!

I could hear the older guy making suggestions, like getting “Ensure” for the protein and drinking soup. He seemed genuinely concerned. Now I had to walk past them and at that moment, the young guy pulled out his phone to show a picture of his x-ray – a skull with something passing right through the mouth.

I blurted out, “I’m so sorry!” and the guy turned to me. Now I could see how young he was, probably around 20. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

He blushed and smiled. I saw a flash of smashed up teeth and metal. The older guy said, “Me too.”

We found a table and I felt shaken by the encounter. Witnessing simple human kindness is  always so moving to me. It is nearly unbearable, in fact. I thought of how painful life is for so many people, all the suffering in the world and how hard it is to let yourself care or to stop from caring too much. I wished I could give the face-guy a blender. I wished people could stop killing Syrian children. I wished the loved ones I have lost would come back.

Suddenly there was a commotion at the counter. The face-guy was angry and wanted a refund. I guess they hadn’t shredded his chicken. He stormed out empty handed.

I went to get some salsa and saw the Korean manager yelling at the Mexican cashier. He was gong on about the refund, ranting about how it would throw everything off. He could not have cared less about a guy getting shot in the face.

I’m not sure what my point is here. But I’ll say this: If a guy gets shot in the face, he deserves some goddamn shredded chicken.

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You know how people always want to find the silver lining of an awful situation, like “The Gift Of Cancer”?

In that spirit, I’ve figured out how to make the most of the Disney World Alligator Tragedy, or DRAT for short.

They cut open five alligators while looking for the missing toddler, only to find out later that he wasn’t eaten.

Instead of wasting those alligators, how about a limited edition Disney World Commemorative Bag?

The beautiful hand-crafted bags, made of genuine Orlando alligator skin, will be numbered  and embossed with the Disney World logo, and will feature a resin baby-head clasp modeled on a classic Kewpie Doll.

The DRAT Bag will come with a certificate of authenticity,  and 5% of the purchase price will go to PETA.

It’s a win-win.

Show how much you care by investing in this gorgeous bag! Because hashtag PrayForOrlando won’t help anyone, human or animal.

Maybe you’ve had more than enough of the gorilla story. If so, I fault your limited imagination.

There is so much here! It’s a story so rich in metaphor and allegory and philosophical questions about parenthood, ethics, and humanity.

Just sticking to the facts, it is awful. Let me quote an essay in The Guardian by Ian Redmond:

Harambe is a KiSwahili word meaning “pull together” – a good name for a gorilla because gorillas live in stable family groups and they do look out for one another. Over the past 40 years I have had the good fortune to spend hundreds of hours in the company of gorillas in their natural habitat. Most of them were habituated – that is, used to, human observers with an understanding of gorilla etiquette – but misunderstandings sometimes occur. I have been charged by a nervous female who thought I was too close to a member of her group, a blackback (adolescent) male who I was filming feeding; I have been walloped and bowled over by boisterous blackbacks, treating me just like one of the family, and on occasion, been on the receiving end of defensive silverbacks giving their awe-inspiring screaming charge. But I’ve never been hurt by a gorilla.

Well, that makes me feel sad. This makes me feel sadder:

Clearly if a silverback wanted to kill a child, he could do so in an instant. But he didn’t. It would seem that the danger was more to do with whether the boy might bang his head on a rock while being dragged.

There were other possible outcomes. In two other incidents where children have fallen into zoo gorilla enclosures (Jersey in 1986 and Chicago in 1996) neither the gorillas nor the children died. It is cogent to examine the specifics of each case before drawing conclusions about this one.

Redmond suggests interventions other than killing the gorilla, like distracting him with his favorite food. And he doesn’t have a word of criticism for the boy’s mother.

Here’s a question though. Why didn’t the mother jump in to save her child? It was only a 15 foot drop. What’s her fucking problem? I haven’t been put to the test personally, and I have been stupid enough to take my eyes off my young children. But I have no doubt that I’d do more than stand there and yell, “Mommy’s here!”

On the other hand, how many random kids is one majestic gorilla worth?

I say random because I don’t include my own kids. Just being hypothetical here. An innocent gorilla, born into captivity with no choices at all. A member of an endangered species whose lifespan should be 35 to 40 years, killed because some bitch thinks the zoo is a playground for toddlers.

I don’t know what would satisfy my distress about the gorilla. I have seen a gorilla in captivity and even that is distressing beyond words.

Let’s move along into metaphor.

Are we not all gorillas in captivity? We’re stuck here, minding our own business, trying to make the most of our situations, and some happenstance that is not of our making comes along to freak us out or confuse us and no one asks us how we want to proceed.

Maybe some of us are zookeepers, acting in fear without empathy.

Or maybe we’re impulsive, selfish little kids, fucking shit up for others because we want a little thrill.

Or – and here I’m probably revealing too much – maybe we’re all stupid fat mothers who can’t protect our kids because we’re just not equipped for the job.

To support one of the charities helping protect gorillas in Africa visit www.4apes.com and click on gorilla. And visit Gorilla Doctors.

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Carol Coronado, 30, stabbed her three young children to death and then got into bed with them. The children ranged in age from 2 1/2 to 2 months old. That is red flag number one.

Earlier that morning, Carol had called her mother to say she was ‘going crazy.’ Red flag number two.

Carol’s mother was at work so she called Carol’s sister-in-law, Sandra, and asked her to give Carol a call. Sandra, whose brother Rudy Coronado is Carol’s husband, now reports that Carol denied anything was wrong, but did admit to being exhausted. Sandra could hear babies crying in the background, but that was not unusual. She quotes Carol as saying, “Just tell your brother to calm down.”  Red flags #3, #4, and #5.

Rudy’s mother arrived in the afternoon, while Rudy was outside working on his car. She emerged from the house screaming that the children were dead. She had called 911. Police came and led Carol out of the house, naked under a blanket and covered with blood. She was covered with stab wounds, most of them superficial.

Now, this next part is key:

Carol Coronado, who was taking classes on the Internet, stayed at home with the children while her husband went out early each day to sell car parts at the Alpine Village swap meets.

She kept a cluttered home, which triggered some discord with her husband.

“I believe that was their main issue,” the sister-in-law said. “My brother wanted the house clean for his girls. He wanted to come home to a home-cooked meal.” ~ (my italics) Daily Breeze, Larry Altman

Here is the house, described as a former workshop or converted garage. I’ll take the liberty of calling it a shithole.

I’m thinking, Andrea Yates. I’m thinking too many babies, postpartum depression, trapped in a shithole, demanding husband, desperation,  no way out.

What are you thinking?