I am sitting in the dining area at Fairway—a sort of greenhouse overlooking the Red Hook harbor—and I am trying not to cry. Correction: I am crying, but quietly, the way grown New Yorkers process very private emotions in the very public spaces where we spend most of our days.
I am feeling like yesterday’s lunch, which is ironic because I just polished off an enormous breakfast.
All around me waves are rising like Joni’s cold blue steel. It makes me feel held, these busy waters mirroring Joni. It also makes me feel lonely because only the world at large, strangers to whom I feel close, hold me right now.
This is Pisces season at its hardest.
Which is true, but also a cop-out, because this is just a hard time all around. This is Democrats-feasting-on-each-other-while-evil-oligarch-runs-us-into-the-ground time. This is virus time, frighteningly warm-winter time.
February’s last gasp is brutal. So is that of patriarchy.
And, yeah, I’m talking about the white supremacist capitalistic cockocratic dinosaurs poisoning our government, environment, media, fun. This is the longest dying gasp in history, and it’s killing us all.
All around my sorrow swims fury in these gloriously choppy waters. A fury on behalf of menopausal, perimenopausal, reproductive-age–damn it, all people who identify in any way as women. Also a fury toward the women who’ve swallowed so much shit they now feed it to others.
The fury I feel every time Warren’s “electability” is debated by the same couchside demographers who look the other way as her white male contenders scowl, browbeat, lie, fumigate, generally behave unlikeably. Just the body language of the debates makes me apoplectic. (It also rings more than a few bells in my professional life.)
The fury I felt last month when the architect next door fixed my armoire for a pound of flesh– swigging my wine for two hours while complaining about the wife he’d just left, bragging about the blue pills he takes to fuck women half our age. (It goes without saying his very decent ex is our age.)
Waggling his eyebrows as he said, “You must have been hot when you were young.” Continue Reading →
