Elon, here is your list!

Dear you, or should I say, dear child Elon Musk:

You demand a list of our accomplishments this week. I may not be a civil servant, but I am a citizen, a citizen from the blue side of the aisle.  Therefore, I must justify to your DOGE-ness how I have earned my right to exist under your regime.  Fine. Here we go:

Accomplishments as a blue citizen in your newly twisted world:

1. I stood strong during the entrapment and debasement of Ukraine in my oval office last Friday. The hillbilly VP and our spray-tan president berated a leader fighting for his nation's lives, freedom. I will not abandon them. I stood/stand with Ukraine.

2. I resisted the urge to slap the faces of the Trump voters in my zip code who are (still) complaining about the high cost of groceries while advocating tariffs and worker firings.

3. I quickly deleted emails sent by my senator Rick Scott praising the glorious carnage caused by his beloved Lord Donald.

4. I consumed multiple cocktails mixed with NOT Russian vodka.

5. I renewed by membership with the ACLU.

6. I continued to attempt to sell my condo on THE GULF OF MEXICO, tragically entertaining and rejecting offers from your like-minded "fuck these old people" friends.

7. I rose above all your noise and remained healthy as hell.

8. I took my aging car for repairs to a "non-dealership" entity who fixed him up for a reasonable, non-Musky price. I resisted the pressure to buy a Tesla.

9. I enjoyed the informative and entertaining programming on NPR, every day, every hour, as if it was the last airing.

10. I kept my head while all around me were losing theirs.

11. I loved and pampered my feline pet, who is (undebatable fact) superior to most humans checking into my condo complex during this early spring break.

12. I walked past the condo building to the north of me that is openly hosting a crowd of underage teenage boys and smiled, saying to the MAGA-capped child screaming on the balcony of unit 12D "I have the county sheriff on speed dial". (He ran.)

13.I resisted everything irrational and anti-democratic.

14. I watched the Oscars and loved the show, notably its reminders that culture unifies and trash, in the end, will be washed away.

15. I read several fabulous books you would find subversive. And they were from the public library. (Something else you intend to kill.)

There is your list, darling Elon.

Yes, I know history. I know democracies fall. And I also know it is your intention to take ours down.  However, I also want you to understand that millions and millions and millions of Americans (the brightest, the sexiest, the smartest, the sweetest) resist your efforts.  Take your best shot. We will #resist.

That is my list! Hope it meets your expectations.

Love,

Joyce 

Old Age Is No Place for Sissies.

Dear you,

Amen to that, Ms. Davis. Try these actions as a sassy senior in our flailing America:

Fly without fear - Today, another crash landing, this time in Toronto; surviving these all too frequent events is hard enough for a youngish CrossFit type; try to crawl out of that wreckage with blurry eyes, stiff joints, and a cat-carrier strapped across your chest.

Talk to the average Joe or Joanne in your neighborhood - come on, I dare you, have an informative chat with someone who gets their news from YouTube videos, the massive and expanding population who have never read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or, hell, even The New York Post cover to cover.

Sell a condo in Florida - The blistering HOA fees and assessments make you a target for every twenty-something dreaming of building an Airbnb empire, "she's dying anyway, she'll take what she can get".

Buy a home in Florida - Good luck with that, no matter what your age is; the above mentioned Airbnb blood-suckers got there first.

Be an American citizen - Even Canada is booing us at hockey games.

Buy a tasteful swimsuit - Nothing exists unless you want to wear something designed by and for teenage internet influencers.

Study geography - Wait, what do you mean the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America and Greenland is now Red, White, and Blue land?

Seek classic French perfume in my zip code - Salesperson at the local ULTA beauty doesn't know what Shalimar is, but she recommends a bottle of something called "Juicy Lap-dance" that her boyfriend loves.

Celebrate Presidents' Day with sincerity - Really, after all these decades of sane (relatively) leaders, you want me to celebrate the reign of Trump?

All that? I got it. We got it.

We ain't sissies.

Bring it on.

Love,

Joyce

The War on Acronyms and Life as We Knew It

 

Dear you,

The first month of 2025 ends, a wild ride already. Our reinstated president wields power, but some pushback has stalled some of his worst efforts.  However, note I write "some". While we do what we can to resist, the strange just rolls and rolls. Weather: see shot above of snowfall covering my pool in Seagrove Beach. Yes, global warming causes extremes like this. Snow in the Panhandle of Florida. Crimes: mass roundups of undocumented peoples, many, many we know to have no criminal records. Perhaps a shoplifting charge. This, in America.  Woes: recent air disaster at the DC airport and lost souls. Yes, the leader of what was once a free world took a few minutes to act sad (while sporting the white eye rings of the recently spray-tanned or bed-tanned) before he launched into an attack on democrats, blaming DEI for the disaster.

DEI. Diversity, equity and inclusion agendas not only shredded but now absurdly blamed for accidents. And there are other acronyms the right is all fired up about. They passionately act to erase FEMA, FDA, FDIC, CRT, etc. The list goes on.  All they need to do is drop an "enemy" acronym on the plates of their hungry supporters and oh, how they eat it up. Truth matters not, neither do beauty or poetic longings for what was good as well as what is possible. The change we are living is, no matter how much we gird ourselves with stoic acceptance, feeling quite unacceptable. Something feels very, very wrong.

Contemporary novelist, story-teller, professional nurse, Jeanne Ray's narrator/protagonist of Eat Cake reflects on ruptures and rumbles in her life, shifting tides of the not-expected, and counsels herself about wishing for "previous perfection".  She realizes: "Life was not a static experience.  We should not expect things to remain the same." 

Absolutely.  But it is hard when what leaves us, that sometimes precious sameness, is so good, so sweet, and perhaps so forever gone. Gone, a decent and dignified chief executive. Gone, a rational and humane conservative class. Gone, a fairly predictable climate. Gone, debates about sane policy decisions; instead we have a war on acronyms.

What letter clusters will they come for next? TGIF (thank god it's Friday), YOLO (you only live once), STFU (shut the fuck up), or WWJD (what would Jesus do?)? Even the latter irks them, considering all his lessons of mercy, forgiveness, his stands against greed and lies.

Here we are, in the worst kind of non-static situation. But we can still hope. And never give up (NGU). 

I end with that acronym, NGU. 

Ever present and woke, Joyce

PS - don't let the bastards grind you down.

Reading 2024 . . .

Dear you,

Christmas night, 2024. The day here, in Seagrove Beach, Florida, has been lovely, warmish, peaceful, clear. The local smooth jazz radio channel provided a soundtrack for this holiday. The selections aired surprised me, not typical in sound, tone, or interpretation.  Imagine a Dave Brubeck version of "Away in a Manger"; that I did not actually hear, but you get my point. Interesting, arousing, uplifting. I did my holiday thing atypically too in terms of food choices and activities. I fried up corned beef hash for brunch, sided it with a huge chunk of cranberry sauce. For supper, I enjoyed perfect albacore tuna with crunchy lettuce on toast. Ice cream with chocolate sauce await for later. Now? I feel rushed, like time is ticking, these precious hours, precious days. So much to say about the passing year. So much to testify to, like George Plimpton doing participatory journalism. Ah, yes, Plimpton. My actual/physical experience the past year has been informed by the whispers (or screams) of writers like him .  They are in my head. Here are the voices in my head from 2024:

Michael Cunningham - Day

Jonathan Franzen - The Discomfort Zone and Crossroads

Kristi Coulter - Exit Interview

Bruce Schneier - A Hacker's Mind

Ashley Poson - The Seven Year Slip

Adam Grant - Hidden Potential

Stacey D'Erasmo - The Complicities and The Sky Below

Brian Klaas -Fluke

Anna Quindlen - Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

Rowan Beaird - The Divorcees

Laurie Frankel - Family, Family

Tracy K. Smith - Ordinary Light 

Richard Todd - The Thing Itself

Cheryl Stray - Tiny Beautiful Things

Pressfield - The War of Art

Catherine Newman - Sandwich

Amanda Montell - The Age of Magical Overthinking

Dan Morain - Kamala's Way

Bill Maher - What This Comedian Said Will Shock You

Zadie Smith - Intimations

Elin Hilderbrand - Swan Song, Golden Girl, and Hotel Nantucket

Kristen Miller - Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

Ann Patchett - Tom Lake, Run, Commonwealth, and These Precious Days

Joan Didion - Let Me Tell You What I Mean

George Plimpton - The Man in the Flying Armchair & Other Excursions & Observations

What do think about that collection? Do you see, do you intuit, some kind of overarching theme or message? Are those choices, gratefully pulled from my local library shelves, motivated by particular questions or hungers? Some titles are explicit in terms of why they called me (tiny beautiful things, run, a story of Kamala), but others? Who knows. I know that I enjoyed them all and was/am "stretched" by what these authors put on pages.

As 2025 approaches and our nation is tilting somewhere uncertain, I am concerned about access to the things I read in 2024.  Will public libraries be deleted, deemed as unnecessary expenses? Will contemplative works that examine the darker side of our nature be purged, forbidden?  Will our new "library" shelves only feature books about selling real estate, cryptocurrency brilliance, and fairy tales about the good old white/faux-Christian days? I cannot imagine that is possible or even probable. However, being the "participatory journalist" I am here in zip code 32459, it occurs to me it could be possible, probable.

What say I to that, what say you?  Easy answer: hell no. The lights (in our minds, our spirits) will not go out in 2025.

They (see the listed authors, among many others) have said too much, said too many truths with efficiency and artistry, to be erased or silenced in terms of legacy/influence. 

2024 ends. 2025 begins. What is my point? Please, support your local libraries, your academic institutions, your journalists, your neighbor who chalks poetry on your shared driveway, whatever. Support the voicing of experience and dreaming.

#Resist

Love,

Joyce 

AI and Brain Rot!

 Dear you,

Oxford Dictionary declared brain rot to be the word of the year. Bingo. All around us, we hear pointless chatter on social media sites like Meta/Facebook (still proud to say I never joined that sad gang), and deal with the increasing power of AI and its shadowy creators, those who choose what we can access, know, and even imagine.

Ah, the reductionist wisdom of AI, notably via a general Google search. Insert this:  the world is at war and I am watching football.  The machine, AI Overview, responds: "If the world is at war and you are watching football, it would be considered a stark contrast, implying a sense of detachment or denial from the serious reality of the situation, as if you are choosing to actively ignore the ongoing conflict and prioritize a seemingly trivial activity like watching a game."

Good lord, these AI responses are idiotic. Of course this is a "stark contrast" and of course the games contrasted to bloody warfare are even less than trivial.  But the machine misses the point.  For example, now, somewhere in Gaza or Ukraine or Syria, a mother is making a sock puppet "sing" to her troubled child.  It is a game. It is a moment of lightness meant to not merely distract but to lift the spirit of the sad child. This mother knows joy is necessary; it can save us; it can give us a spark of energy needed to carry on, to face the next barrage. And, in softer (much softer) conditions here, in my world, I watch the powerful play of athletes and am lifted, enjoying the joy of play.  This helps me prepare for and face the next cognitive-dissonance inducing event. 

Hear the above?  Only authentic intelligence (or whatever it is I possess), not artificial intelligence, can process that thought and offer that interpretation, that flesh and blood understanding. We who know this, who already see the idiocy of many forms of revered AI, might be judged as neo-luddites.  Hell no. We choose to use technology, it is useful, but we never, ever, want technology to use us.

Local note of applicability:  At this past weekend's condo owner's meeting, a typical angry white man commented that my request for a de-encryption box for my Smart TV made me a "dinosaur".  Hilarious.  We are paying for basic cable, why not have access to it?  Stream away and pay even more money? Now that is foolish.  We should be resilient, able to access legacy news, CSPAN, PBS, and those aforementioned sporting events, even when the (OMG!) wifi goes down. It is also notable that this same critic whined about how when our internet failed his door/ring camera went out and his renters couldn't stream TV. Imagine that. He and his unfortunate guests face a sort of extinction I won't.  I have access to wifi via a secondary mode, basic cable TV will often be up when wifi is down, and I can tune into the joy of radio, NPR or smooth jazz, or even drop in this thing called a CD (compact disc for those who forgot) and hear that spark of joy only music brings.

I am "social distancing" and expanding my communication/information access options to avoid catching brain rot. Oh, and yes, do not forget that precious thing called the public library. So many avenues still available, so many ways to make sure the powerful play goes on.

Resilience!  My word of this year, and the next, and the next . . .

Love,

Joyce

Lord of the dance and the deer . . .

 Dear you,

Thanksgiving, 2024. I am here, still. To celebrate this holiday of gratitude and indulgence, in my own divergent way, I did not cook the typical turkey but purchased Thai takeout.  I went to the Thai Elephant, a good restaurant housed in a a declining strip mall on highway 98, a bit west of my Seagrove Beach home, and ordered delicious Pad Thai and Red Curry Rice and Chicken. While waiting for that order, I strolled around the neighboring businesses and saw this a few doors down:

Oh my, even the art of dance and its glorious Dionysian essence must be sanctioned by religious approval.  In this part of the world, that means dancing for the "lord". They refer to the Galilean, who I imagine might not be cool with his teachings being used, misused, abused, as tools for subjection and strangulation. I am glad local students are moving to the beat of something, anything. But please, can these controlling theocrats just get their hands off things they know nothing about, things like art, literature, the essential joy of life in the body?

Our newly empowered theocrats cannot let anything be because they are on a mission, a mission that demands change, a movement away from the progressive trends of the past few decades. Their change is our loss. I am experiencing loss, losing what I knew, know, what I expected to be here every day: individual liberty, freedom of the press, the primacy of facts over fearful speculation, dance/workout sessions NOT designed to save my soul. But here I am, here we are. Their desired change is happening. So, how to be resilient while they enjoy dominance? Psychology Today, in  a recent post, discusses resilience as something not steely but bendable. One should, by degrees, adapt and bounce back.  They suggest that we: Dance! "Exercise is itself a stressor, prompting release of cortisol. Courtesy of negative feedback loops in the HPA, the more cortisol released by exercise, the less released by psychosocial stress... Walking works. So does running and bicycling. But if you really want resilience, turn up the music and dance." Thanks, Psychology Today! I do dance, daily. But what are we to do when they become the literal lords of the dance? What won't they fuck with? And as for turning up the music, don't get me started on their approved selections of dance tracks.

On the drive home after that Thai pickup and the lordly-dance-school discovery, I passed a dead doe lying in the median of Highway 98.  She had been hit by a careless driver and managed to make it to a patch of green grass between the east and west bound lanes to die. There she was. Evidence of what we do here, we, the lord-loving, car-enslaved idiots who know exactly what we do but seek to pray it away. Or dance it away. In the name of the lord. 

It is Thanksgiving night, 2024, and I am grateful for so much. I am grateful for knowing I, hugely flawed and far from saintly, I am right to be saddened by the dead deer on Highway 98.  I am right to be saddened by the indoctrinated dancers at the lordly strip-mall site too. Both/all are innocents, victimized by something I don't comprehend. I am grateful that comprehension is something I am not built for.

So, on this holiday of gratitude, I thank that deer for her brief and beautiful life. I thank the dancers in those weird strip-mall classes who really feel it and will, in time, get the fuck out of this truly god-forsaken zone.

Still here, still learning, still grateful. Still dancing in a most ungodly fashion.

Love,

Joyce

Democratic Experiment

Dear you,

A hell of a time to be an American.  I identify with this: "Dozens of monkeys escape from US research lab." Run, babies, run. They are used for experimentation.  We are now  subject to experimentation too. Our mad-scientist-captor is a big MAGA blob called the Trump regime 2.0.  Our Republic has always been an experiment in democracy. Now, the majority of us who voted in the recent presidential election decided that the experiment needs tweaking, it needs a strong man and a team of oligarchs to straighten things out. Like those beautiful monkeys imprisoned and used for experiments, acceptable losses for someone's twisted idea of a greater good, we too should run. Only a week after Trump's win, we are informed of the following:

Elon Musk and Vivek W. will handle the economy, the structure of governance, through a brand new thing called the department of economic efficiency. My oh my.  Musk. We know his intentions. Musk’s Twitter/X is the Blueprint for a MAGA Government. Fire everyone. Turn it into a personal political weapon. Let chaos reign. Don't get me started on their love of cryptocurrency and what that will mean for the US dollar and banking.

Matt Gaetz is Trump's nominee for Attorney General. Gee, since the new GOP controlled senate will allow recess appointments and wouldn't object even if Matt had to endure a confirmation process, I think we know what this means.  He is loathed by so many in the GOP, but hey, who cares?  What the new autocrat says goes.  They will turn their heads and kiss the ring.  This is Trump's test for the GOP senate: stand with me no matter how absurd my choices are.  Disagree? You will pay. 

Mike Huckabee is the ambassador to Israel. Mike, the guy who thinks Palestine should not exist.  The far right Christian dude who offers lip service to Netanyahu because he sees Israel as a part of the ultimate "second coming" plan. The great nation of Israel is just a useful tool, part of Mike's dream narrative of the return of his wildly fictional savior. Meanwhile, the starving children in Gaza . . . 

I refuse to even mention the names of the other barbarians who will now be in charge of national security, defense, and for the love of god, that man who will choreograph the "mass deportation" horrors to come.  They shall remain nameless.

America just voted itself into a cage of fear, inhumanity, and devolution - backwards and downwards we go. Many, millions of us, are not having it.  We reject the cage. 

Tennessee Williams:  A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.

Never, never, never give up! Shake the bars. And if necessary, run baby run.

Love,

Joyce