Nov 8, 2025
Handkerchiefs, ties, an old man
on the street selling loose
freshly roasted nuts
from a bright blue cart.
Is there anything
lovelier?
I know—now—
it is only a matter
of days (if I am lucky)
until I, too, stand somewhere hoping
another human will stop
and find what I’m offering interesting.
*a fragment from poet Robin Coste Lewis’s Archive Of Desire, about whom you can read more (she is a former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Coste_Lewis
I once spent a good deal of my time hawking souvenirs, tee-shirts, cookbooks and other stuff on street corners and in theaters. I was in my twenties and early thirties, trying to and occasionally succeeding in getting work as an actress, and then – later on – in-between seeking, not knowing what was next, just trying to pay rent, cover my bills. I enjoyed it, as the introvert I am, being forced to interact with people but in a brief, friendly, commercial way, after the show, before the show – including, for a time, in-between tapings of The Emeril Legasse show in mid-town Manhattan. People watching in New YorkCity is a wonderful thing, and if you can get paid in the meantime, how fab!
Yesterday, while charging my car, I watched a man who looked to be in his early thirties rummage through several garbage cans, looking for deposit bottles and – perhaps – something to eat? He had a large backpack, and a bike for transport, and therefore was ‘better off’ than the homeless I often used to see in NYC. And, I don’t know that he was homeless. Still. How much could we, we the people, improve other human lives if we instituted universal basic income for all our citizens? I enjoyed my years of hawking and struggle, but I knew I had a soft place to fall, if I had to fall. Many are not so lucky, or so safe; many stand on corners looking for softness, kindness, a better place to lay their head. Many stand on corners wondering it they have any value, at all.
Nov 6, 2025
In my small rural area here is a mafia as I see it, but not the Sopranos kind (I only wish it were that interesting); rather it is a group of men – primarily boomers in their 70s – who all belong to AA. I call it the Ah Mafia, a group of like-minded peer boy-ohs who don’t drink, judge others who do (I have personally experienced the lash of their disapprobation), while somehow maintaining that smoking pot on a daily basis is not a problem with regard to their promise to sobriety.
These boomer boys are all tied to Bill W’s maxims, which I gotta admit are excellent, including as they do an acceptance of reality, as well as admitting your feelings, letting go, making amends, and more; however, imo, these old guys are a tad creepy. They are too much – in my view – up in their and other people’s business – and they spend way too much time around one another, creating a social scene that, at least to this observer is a tad incestuous; this is especially true as another AA rule they allow themselves to flout (along with smoking pot daily) is fcking where they ought not, as in directly within their recovery network, often with much younger, very vulnerable human females within the first months of their own sobriety process. Ick.
Several of these men gave up drinking in their late teens or early twenties, decades and decades ago. I said to one of them ages ago now, ‘Maybe you were just being young and dumb, and aren’t an alcoholic? But hey, whatever works, dude.’ And, I suppose I could have done the same, given up booze and joined AA, but I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic; I don’t even like the taste of most alcohol, and I really dislike beer. I was just a sad, lonely chick growing up in rural America, where getting drunk and behaving like an ass as an underage teen was a right of passage. Was? Still is, I believe. Not necessarily a good right of passage, by any means; that I survived adolescence and drunk driving is a testament to my teenaged ability to drive while drunk, a boatload of good luck, and a total lack of other drivers on country roads after dark.
I attended a dinner party with the Ah Mafia once; a neighbor – who gave up drinking at 24 – invited me. It was weird and gross. The energy in the room reminded me of a very tense, unhappy family dinner, the kind where everyone knows dad is screwing the neighbor’s wife, who is sitting across from mom, and whose husband is gay and sleeping with another man at the table. Ick. One of the Ahs spent much of the evening verbally abusing and humiliating his wife, who may or may not have also been in the Ahs, but I believe not. At one point, being who I am – I said to her, ‘Why the fuck do you stay with this asshole?’ I was not included in future gatherings, and that’s fine by me.
In general, I am tribe resistant. Groucho Marx said, ‘I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member,’ and that seems about right to me. As for the Ah Mafia? Oh brother. Recovery matters, and having a healthy social life is a marker of better health both physically and mentally. Still, the local ‘Family’ is, in my view, rather toxic. Luckily, I like a glass of wine or a margarita once in a while, ergo, I can’t join because I do drink, and when I do, I like it! Yay. I can handle one margarita. One glass of wine. Maybe two. 🙂
Oct 31, 2025
A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun
*TGIF and Happy Halloween. I went to a Halloween costume party last weekend as a raging female, which means I went as myself 😉 the above is from American poet W.S. Merwin, who, along with writing poetry, was an environmentalist who spent the latter half of his life in Hawaii, where he was reforesting a former pineapple plantation with native plants. Born in NYC, he spent much of his childhood in PA, where his love for nature was learned firsthand: “What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.” His wiki page is linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin
Oct 30, 2025
Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.
I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.
*a poem by Tony Hoagland, whose wiki page is linked here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoagland
Another of Hoagland’s poems (he died in 2018), The Change created a bit of controversy, I found out by reading more about him. What, I wonder – do you make of it? It’s also from his 2003 collection What Narcissism Means To Me. Personally, I think he encapsulates the moment of realization and change (long overdue) quite well, 5 years prior to Obama’s election, when the new presidential dummy he mentions is Bush 2. Still, with every breakthrough and change we have backlash like the one we’re living through now. Sigh. What simple, innocent times they were. Maybe?
The Change
The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.
Sometimes I think that nothing really changes—
The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.
But remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes
some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite—
We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,
putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,
and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn’t help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips
and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,
hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.
There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,
and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there
in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes
as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure
and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.
And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing
and in fact, everything had already changed—
Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,
and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.
Oct 29, 2025
Never heard of her. Him? Her. Born in 1936 into French colonial Algeria, Assia was a novelist, documentary filmmaker, and feminist trailblazer whose work gave voice to the women native to her country. The first North African woman elected to the French Academy, she wrote over twenty books; she also worked as a translator, including her own novels, which were read all over the globe. And, yeah, I never heard of her. She died in 2015, and was often mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender – but how often does the accepted canon include female voices, let alone those of north African origin? Not often enough.
Her first novel was published in 1957; her last in 2008. You can read more about Djebar at the wiki link below. The first quote below is what caught my interest, and led me down the rabbit hole of who dat?! There is ever enough time for the books and films and humans I long to read, and know. But. There is time – at least enough to run down a few rabbits.
In Djebar own words:
“I write to shatter the silence that surrounds the lives of women like a prison.”
“How shall I find the strength to tear off my veil unless I have to use it to bandage the running sore nearby from which words exude?”
“Writing in a foreign language* – has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.” (*French)
“Speaking of oneself in a language other than that of the elders is indeed to unveil oneself, not only to emerge from childhood but to leave it, never to return. Such incidental unveiling is tantamount to stripping oneself naked, as the demotic Arabic dialect emphasizes. But this stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conquerer (who for more than a century could lay his hands on everything save women’s bodies), this stripping naked takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. When the body is not embalmed by ritual lamentations, it is like a scarecrow decked in rags and tatters. The battle-cries of our ancestors, unhorsed in long-forgotten combats, re-echo across the years; accompanied by the dirges of the mourning-women who watched them die.”
“Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.”
“But my sole ambition in writing is constantly to travel to fresh pastures and replenish my water skins with an inexhaustible silence.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assia_Djebar
Oct 28, 2025
File under Worth Noting: The USA is on the CIVICUS Monitor watchlist, added in March 2025 due to what the organization described as a decline in civic freedoms under the Trump administration. This was in response to actions that the group stated could “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.
The watchlist includes countries with faltering civic freedoms.
Reasons for inclusion: The CIVICUS Monitor cited actions such as restrictions on peaceful protests, executive orders perceived as undermining democratic norms, and restructuring of federal agencies like USAID.
Civic freedom rating: The USA’s civic freedom rating was downgraded to “narrowed” as a result of these actions. As of July 2025, the watchlist also included Kenya, El Salvador, Indonesia, Serbia, and Turkey.
Watching the East Wing of the White House being demolished was different from watching the events of January 6th, the ‘love fest’ also inspired by Orange Moosilini, but it felt similarly: a hollow in the pit of my stomach, a sadness, bemusement, worry, anxiety, fear battling it out with hope that we – the majority of us – will prevail and defeat this drip, drip, drip of madness.
And yes, I did think, well, he has a point about tents and big events – except, do it the right way, with permits and historical features preserved, with input from someone other than within the golden bubble. And, this thought also occurred to me: I live in a place where, on a regular basis, I attend weddings and anniversary parties in tents all the time. Holding big events outside is a relatable, American thing. How often is a ballroom really required? Ask Charles Rex, maybe, before trashing the beauty of a century-plus old building that does not belong to you, you fcking narcissitic nightmare?
The shutdown continues. Russell Vought and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and Jerome David and other vicious white male minions are running the show, or so it seems, and the offer of $130 million from ‘a friend’ of the current POTUS to pay US service personnel is but a minor blip on the news, despite it coming to $100 per individual, and being wholly illegal. FFS. Are we watching the end of the American Empire? The American experiment?
Mike Johnson refuses to swear in a duly elected rep from New Mexico. The ‘Department of War’ is amassing troops and ships in the Caribbean, where more boats have been blown up as if killing people were a video game, a sport, without any justification other than vague claims of drug trafficking. We might invade a sovereign nation, Venezuela, because – oil? Because – drugs? Because communism or socialism or both? Fentanyl – by the way – does not come from Venezuela; it’s ingredients originate in China, is produced and cooked (?) in Mexico, from whence it gets into the U.S. Also, historically, the best way to unite the people of any nation is for another, bigger and more powerful country to invade militarily – but hey, what do I know?
Let’s hope we don’t, all, find out. I am hardly one to wave the flag or wear it, but I do love this complex mess of a place, the US of A; I want the grand, bold, challenging experiment in diverse democracy to continue – for a least another 250 years. Holding my breath. Letting go.
