Feb 13, 2026
I dare you. It is the work of a lifetime, both to know and to love oneself, or the work of several, if you believe in that whole thing; I go back and forth on the question of reincarnation, the recycling of souls and energy. I have also gone back and forth on the work of knowing myself, recognizing my strengths and weaknesses as well as my essential needs (independence, for one); struggling to love it (me) all regardless of the real pain a few of my essential temperamental, psychological, and intellectual quirks, characteristics, must-haves, and needs are. Such it is to be a human.
As Carl Jung put it, “To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question – whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.”
I especially love this quote because while I have had many relationships over the years with romantic partners, I have never wanted that locked in, defined as a couple, committed forever mirroring I see in so many partner arrangements/relationships around me. My friends? Now these individuals are mirroring me all the time, but not in a manner – knock wood (and at least as far as I am concerned) – that’s got anyone locked in (for those in the back: INDEPENDENCE).
Loving yourself matters, warts and all. I have often felt, walking around in this world observing people, that a few too many are living inside delusional states, pretending they’re still 16 or 25 when they’re clearly not; my sticking to 39* is no joke, or rather, it’s no delusion, and a complete joke, mean to amuse my most important audience: me. How many times was I told when I was younger that I was stuck up, conceited, full of myself – when in truth I was deeply insecure and hanging on by a thread? Many. Girls, especially, are told to be humble, to be modest not only in dress but in putting themselves forward. It’s fcking ridiculous.
Love yourself.
This thought – from Andrea Dykstra – seems essential: “In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.” I would only add, you cannot hate the experiences, the places, the times, and everything else that made you who and what you are – including your choices, mistakes, successes, failures – the whole lot. Acceptance is key, as I would never, ever recommend you love or even like those whose harm shaped you, but I do suggest acceptance – and time – are key. Accept it, use it, make fire out of it creatively or otherwise, celebrate it, let it go, don’t take it – especially your mistakes – personally, and try – omg, try to find the humor in it all, because believe me, it’s there.
Feb 12, 2026
From the interweb and a person identifying themselves as ‘Ragnar Blackwolf’, putting a current ‘issue’ in a different, 100% accurate frame:
Hypothetically if someone was accused of having sex with goats by over 30 different people and regularly denied it, but also dropped very public hints about how much he liked to have sex with goats for decades, and ran a goat pageant to find the best looking goats, and was best friends with someone who got convicted of fucking goats and trafficking goats to friends all over the world who also liked to fuck goats, and his name was in the classified goat fucker chronicles 5,000 times, and he wished other goat fuckers well in prison, what do you think the odds are that person is also a goat fucker?
Our current POTUS is a goat fucker. Our current POTUS – along with many, many other powerful, wealthy, and connected to one another as well as insulated by one another (mostly) white men – is a sexual predator, an abuser and user of women and girls – someone who believes women are less than – and he is a protector and defender of his disgusting class.
A partial list ~ N.B. ~ No Trans Men or Women will be found below, to my knowledge, and the vast, overwhelming majority of those named in connection to Epstein and allegations of sexual abuse and trafficking are white men:
Casey Wasserman, Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, The Donald, Elon Musk, Ehud Barak, Howard Lutnick, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Miroslav Lajcak, Sergey Brin, Steve Bannon, Steven Tisch, Peter Attia, Jack Horner, Joscha Bach, Tom Barrack, Leon Black, Leon Botstein, Noam Chomsky, David Copperfield, Andrew Farkas, Joe Gibbs, Josh Harris, Jimmie Johnson, Brad Karp. Bobba Kotnick, Lawrence Krauss, Peter and Baron Mandelson, Martin Nowak, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Alan Dershowitz, Christopher Poole, Pusha T, Marc Rowan, Josh Ramo, Brett Ratner (the director of the recent flop/joke/propaganda film, Melania), Jes Staley, Peter Thiel, Robert Trivers, Brian Vickers, Michael Waltrip, Lex Wexner (is anyone surprised that a Victoria’s Secret exec. was a friend and co-conspirator of Epstein?), Michael Wolff and of course Harvey Weinstein.
There have been so few consequences to being connected to Epstein, but, and, however – there are still at least 3 million more documents which, by law, must be released. Oh no, Hunter Biden had a few nudes on his laptop!! Of himself. Not a nice guy but these goat fuckers are on a whole other level. I feel for their wives and daughters, those who have them – and for Melinda Gates, who, it’s been written after being extrapolated from the files, was possibly going to be covertly administered an antibiotic by her philandering then-husband in order to assist him in keeping his extracurricular activities secret. WTAF?
And can we stop using ‘extracurricular’ as a way to describe what goat fuckers get up to? It’s not band. Or tennis. Or debate club. Grrrrrr…..
Feb 11, 2026
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
*Langston Hughes, and perfection. It’s Black History month and I am once again struggling to find the right words for my February progressive opinion column, which was due Monday. I had it narrowed down to two versions, both celebrating – or at least marking – the 50th anniversary of BHM. One is rather incendiary, the other more sedate. Both are good. It’s astonishing how much time it takes for me to write a mere 800 words on a given subject – I confess I even had a third non-BHM column I’ve been working on for weeks – because, to me at least, it matters. I don’t know that I am changing hearts and minds, or even making anyone think, but hell if I ain’t gonna try!! If you wonder which one I sent in, well, then, you’re gonna have to wait. Patience is a virtue, y’all!
Feb 10, 2026
“A good friend is a connection to life – a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.” – Lois Wyse
Without my friends, who would I be? A lesser woman, for sure, a lonelier one also. Good friends, people with whom you share book recommendations, and laughs and fears, and moments big and small – memories – are gold. The ones who stay around, accepting who you are, that is. The ones you keep around.
Like family, friendships can be complicated and fraught. We change, we move away, we marry someone who decides, nah, I don’t like this or that friend. We choose. We prioritize and reprioritize. We cull the herd. We change the narrative to suit our choices. We meet new people and the lights come on once more; the herd is expanded. There is joy in Mudville.
Still, losing friends however it happens can sting. No one, not one person, said adulting was easy.
I prefer a very small herd, one that expands naturally, as the children and the children’s spouses become close friends too. A true delight.
“There is nothing better in the world than a friend, unless it is a friend with chocolate.” – Linda Grayson
Friends with whom one can appreciate the same things – like chocolate (dark, please), and especially laugh at the same things, are vitally important. We are all made of crooked timber, said Alexander McCall Smith, and ain’t that the truth (he was paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, by the way); acceptance in friendships is also key. Building relationships over time take patience, generosity, kindness, authenticity, diplomacy, and consistency. The friends who show up time and again to laugh or cry are the best of them.
“Awards become corroded. Friends gather no dust.” —Jesse Owens.
Cicero, in his essay Laelius de Amicitia argues many points with regard to what makes for good friendships; one point he makes is that good friends are those who are not only helpful and sympathetic in times of trouble, but also and essentially joyous at times of success, as that is where the rubber of true friendship meets the road.
Celebrating someone else’s triumphs reveals more, is a more challenging test of friendship, he is saying, than being kind during the dark nights we all experience. I had a friend who revealed after almost a decade of close ties that she was unable to be anything other than threatened and jealous – poisonously so – when I was doing well. It shocked and saddened me; our bond did not survive. It could not. A lack of generosity – the best souls are generous ones – is a deal breaker.
“Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families” – Tennessee Williams
Some people travel and vacate with their siblings. Huh?! Some people spend every day working with, dining with, hanging with – you name it – their siblings and/or parental units. No thank you. Fond as I am of my siblings (not that fond, TBH, though I love and wish them well) I much prefer the friends I have made along the way. My path has, frankly, been unconventional; around family I find I am required to fit into a box not of my choosing. This bad fit, which I have refused to accommodate for years now, has led to necessary clashes. Why would I, why would anyone, want that?
Drama Shield, Activate!!
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel” – Shakespeare’s Hamlet
There are friends who were acquaintances in other years, other lifetimes, who become golden friends to laugh with later on in life. We have so much in common; we have many differences. Still, we make it work, yet it doesn’t feel like work, because there is ease, there are shared values, there is a thread that has been unbroken all these years because life just works that way. Sometimes.
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.” —Virginia Woolf
Feb 9, 2026
*I don’t care about football, and I don’t watch the Super Bowl. I haven’t done for decades and decades, largely because that one channel we got when I was a kid was football, football, football and – as far as I could tell – it was the same damned game being played week after week after boring ass week. Plus, even if the guys were hot – I couldn’t see them, covered up in all that gear, not really, although I could get a good glimpse of their butts in formation, which wasn’t enough, not for this girl, especially as another guys face was right there in it. So, no thanks – although on occasion I will seek out the commercials the following week if there’s a lot of buzz. This essay, however, I thought was spot on, and why not copy and share?
The phenomenon of tribalism in the U.S., of having ‘a team’ you root for – has always left me cold, but a whole lot of us care about this sport, and these tribes so… here we are, arguing over who gets to entertain during a break in the boring ass action? Ooook! Sigh. Michael Jochum, by the way, is a jazz drummer and backup musician. Alright, dude!
Bad Bunny and the Great American Meltdown – by Michael Jochum
I didn’t know much about Bad Bunny until recently. I’m old, I’m tired, and the Grammys tend to feel like a corporate hostage situation. But credit where it’s due: the man is a gentleman, an artist with spine, and, most importantly, someone who understands that silence in the face of cruelty is complicity. His unapologetic stance against ICE’s lawless deportations and the casual erasure of due process matters. A lot.
So the fact that Bad Bunny has been chosen to perform the Super Bowl halftime show feels less like a booking decision and more like a cultural stress test. And judging by the early howling from the usual corners, the test is already breaking them.
If there’s any justice left in this country, poetic, karmic, divine, take your pick, I sincerely hope Bad Bunny struts onto that halftime stage in a full-length gown that sends conservative group chats into cardiac arrest. I hope he waves the Puerto Rican flag like it’s the Second Coming, refuses to utter a single damn word of English, not even a polite “hi,” and delivers fifteen minutes of pure, unbothered Spanish. No apologies. No subtitles. Just rhythm, defiance, and cultural truth.
And I hope Fox News spontaneously combusts in real time.
Because nothing terrifies self-styled “patriots” more than a brown man who is wildly successful, beautifully androgynous, politically awake, and utterly uninterested in kissing the ring. The MAGA cult doesn’t hate him because of his music. They hate him because he exists on his own terms. Autonomy is the real threat. They worship “freedom” until someone else exercises it, whether that’s freedom of expression, freedom of religion, or the radical freedom to speak in a language they don’t control.
They’re already sharpening the knives. Spanish lyrics are suddenly “divisive.” Gender-fluid fashion is somehow a national emergency. And, as always, someone inevitably questions his legal status, as if Puerto Ricans haven’t been U.S. citizens for more than a century.
Facts, of course, are optional accessories in the MAGA wardrobe.
Bad Bunny’s activism is what really rattles them. He’s been outspoken about ICE brutality, deportations without due process, and the casual cruelty inflicted on immigrant communities. He doesn’t wrap it in euphemisms or patriotic cosplay. He says what he means, and he means it. That kind of clarity is dangerous in a culture built on denial.
And yes, right on cue, Kristi Noem, the patron saint of cruelty and dead dogs, has reportedly floated the idea of an ICE “presence” at the Super Bowl. Because nothing says “land of the free” like threatening brown fans at a football game. Her translation of “law-abiding Americans” remains unchanged: white, obedient, and grateful for the boot.
Trump, meanwhile, is said to be “not weighing in,” which is MAGA-speak for sulking somewhere, hoarding ketchup packets, and counting how many times his name comes up. The man who spent years calling the NFL unpatriotic now gets to watch a Puerto Rican global icon command the world’s attention without asking his permission.
Karma is nothing if not efficient.
This was never about music. It’s about control, over culture, bodies, language, and who gets to claim Americanness. They don’t love this country; they want to own it, the way a bored child clutches a toy they no longer enjoy but refuse to share.
I hope Bad Bunny walks onto that field like a living act of resistance.
I hope he sings every note in Spanish, waves that flag high, and gives not one inch to the people who mistake cruelty for strength and ignorance for virtue.
Let Fox News hosts rupture blood vessels trying to translate his lyrics. Let ICE threats ring hollow. Let Trump stew in silence, wondering how a kid from Vega Baja managed to capture the world without ever bowing.
Bad Bunny doesn’t need their approval. He already has something they’ll never understand: authenticity. Truth without permission. Power without cruelty.
And in a country that worships domination and punishes conscience, someone who refuses to bow is the most dangerous thing of all.
And the most necessary.
