This has been a distressing week. One of my daughter’s best friends suffered a heartbreaking tragedy: her younger brother, 24, died of vehicular heatstroke after he fell asleep in his car. No one can believe this beautiful, healthy young man is gone. Also my next-door neighbor’s daughter, who failed to get on the lung-transplant list, died because her lungs gave out, and this is the second child she’s lost. And yesterday my wife and I went to visit friends sitting shiva because they lost their father/father-in-law.
Also, of course, we all watched 10,000 replays of someone taking a shot at disgraced former President Donald Trump, a horrifying act of political violence that I feared would only help his campaign.* I don’t want anyone shooting at politicians. Period, non-negotiable. And the rally attendees who tragically lost their lives that day are two more heartbreaking, senseless deaths—just like all those we’ve lost over the past few years to school shootings and workplace shootings and concert shootings and church shootings and so on. Our nation has a terrible gun problem, and I wish anything that happened would ever make us do anything about it.
I compulsively consumed a ton of content in the days after the shooting, and these are my summary conclusions from all the news shows and news comedy shows and podcasts I took in:
We are all painfully divided these days into red vs. blue and right vs. left, but I believe our divisions are mostly an illusion. We Americans actually mostly agree on a lot of things.
A majority of us support abortion rights and other reproductive freedoms.
A majority of us want birth control and IVF to stay safe and legal.
A majority of us agree on common-sense background checks for gun purchasers.
A majority of us believe AR-15s are weapons of war that ordinary citizens don’t need to own.
A majority of us agree on support for Ukraine so Putin doesn’t take over the European continent.
A majority of us want the Israeli hostages to be returned and want Israel to stop indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinians by the tens of thousands.
But (aside from support for Israel, which is mysteriously bipartisan and almost unanimous, no matter what war crimes Israel commits), one side is holding us all hostage by refusing to allow any legislation on these matters to even be discussed.
Our Congress is gridlocked mostly because the right is insistent on pushing through their own agenda, even though it isn’t supported by the majority of Americans, even though their platform is extreme and they can only win by gerrymandering, rejecting people’s petitions, and relying on the electoral vote (created for slave holders to retain a voice) to squeak them into office.
If you’re someone who’s grateful about the Dobbs decision or only thinks some abortions are OK sometimes (and not an unlimited number of times to whoever wants them, because WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE?), and if that is a core issue to you, then I can see why you’re voting Republican. But the rest of you? I don’t get it. Why not vote for the people who want to get done what most of you want to get done?
Because we (me and these Republicans I’m imagining mostly want what I want) consume very different news content, I have a completely different view of the world. I don’t watch for hours at a time repetitive content meant to brainwash me, which Fox itself admitted in court last year was “lies and entertainment, not news.” I cannot imagine how afraid I’d feel if I watched repetitive segments that looked like news telling me that hordes of immigrants were coming for me.
But really, what’s an illegal immigrant ever done to any of you? Besides bus your tables, do your dishes, pull feathers from your chickens, and pick your produce? Nothing! A much higher percentage of home-bred Americans commit violent crimes every year than immigrants do; most immigrants are peaceful and hardworking. Our history of immigration is what makes this a powerful, diverse nation. Please, join me in embracing that truth and stop acting like backward assholes afraid of foreigners. This is being sold to you as the most important issue, but it’s a non-issue!
Beyond mindless doom scrolling, here’s some specific content I’ve consumed:
I’ve been consuming Heather Cox Richardson’s brilliant analyses of current events through a historical lens. She writes so clearly and brings so much context and background knowledge to every essay she shares. We are all lucky to have her explaining what is happening most every day, mostly for free. Subscribe to her Substack, Letters from an American, here.
I read the brilliantly written book North Woods by Daniel Mason, which turned out to be a series of loosely connected short stories more than a novel. The stories all take place on one particular patch of woods where a house and apple orchard are developed in Western Massachusetts and are connected by the message that people are driven by their base impulses: People disappoint, thrill, and kill one another over romance, jealousy, rage, and longing, while the natural world keeps growing up around them. The book spans three hundred years, and though I’m not usually a fan of loosely connected stories (think Olive Kitteridge), this one held me in thrall throughout.
I watched Hannah Gadsby’s new comedy special Something Special on Netflix with my wife. We both fell asleep on it despite it being funny and charming. Gadsby’s descriptions of how bad she is at meeting famous people and acting appropriately (because she’s an awkward Autistic) are especially hilarious. When Ellen DeGeneres brought her a gift of Bananagrams, she responded by saying, “Oh, I already have Bananagrams!” The bulk of the special is about her romantic happiness with her new wife, so she promises and delivers a brighter special than she’s done in the past.
I listened to the podcast The Daily’s long interview with Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, and predictor of the fall of our democracy and the rise of fascism because of how isolated we are all becoming from one another. Join clubs, that’s his answer. The pandemic obviously didn’t help us all become any less isolated…
I listened on Libro.fm to the first seven chapters of a funny, new book, All Fours by Miranda July because that’s the novel being offered for an online book club by the Substack The Matriarchy Report, which I joined because … books! You can read the book-club conversation about the first seven chapters here. I am finding the main character not especially likeable and sad, but I appreciate the author’s willingness to have her character do and say things we don’t usually talk about, like masturbation, inappropriate fantasies, wanting to get away from our children.
I saw that Jason Mraz, who had previously come out as bisexual, has now come out as gay. (If you’re not sure who he is, here’s a song of his:
Hearing this news reminded me of the mistake I made in telling my son that men can’t be bisexual, that if they say they are they are bi, they’re really just gay, a mistake I lived to regret. (You can read my essay on how toxic masculinity and homophobia helped kill my son here.) So let’s not draw any false conclusions from Jason’s individual progression from bi to gay; I’m sure there are some real bi men out there.
I do a yoga session every day with Find What Feels Good, Adrienne’s paid subscription service, which is a daily content consumption I haven’t mentioned prior to today. I committed to doing daily yoga after my son died nearly eight years ago to give myself one reason to have to get out of bed every day, and I was very grateful at the time that Yoga with Adrienne videos were available free on Youtube. Hundreds of her yoga videos are still there, and she kicks off every new year with a 30-day yoga challenge, which she also offers free to all. I’m happy I’m now able to support her FWFG app with an annual subscription. Yoga ended my yearslong back pain (I wish I’d understood sooner what a little daily stretching could do for me) and has been nearly life-saving in helping me build a healthy habit of centering myself in my body every day.
I took two writing workshops offered by the hosts of the Writing Class Radio podcast, one joined by my writing friend Elaine and one by my writing friend Rona, and both were excellent. In one of them, one of the hosts, Allison Langer, recommended another workshop, which I took today: “Unputdownable: How to Write and Pitch Essays that Don’t Suck.” The workshop was hosted by Juliane Bergmann, who has a Substack for writers called Unmentionables that I cannot afford to join ($110 a year),
but I’m sure it’s worth every penny, as today’s workshop was super well-organized and chock full of useful material about how to create personal essays from good stories. Her guest speaker was the queer editor of Huff Post Personal, Noah Michelson, and he was a generous, funny, encouraging speaker. He shared his own powerful essay with us, and he totally has the chops.
Here are some of my takeaways from all these workshops on what makes a great essay:
Be willing to be vulnerable.
Write direct sensory details.
Personal essays need a gripping story that the writer tells to make a larger point.
There must be clear stakes: why this story? Why now? Why are you the one to tell it?
“Every great story is about a five-second moment of your life…a singular moment of transformation and realization.” — quote from storyteller Matthew Dicks as quoted by Julianne.
And “To write a good essay, write something you don’t want to admit to others. To write a great essay, write something you don’t want to admit to yourself.” (A great quote from longtime cancer survivor and incredible writer and soul Suleika Jaouad, whose wonderful, creative Substack I also follow and recommend.
Writing is creation. Editing is destruction. Keep ‘em separate. (Writing by hand can help with this.)
I read Roxane Gay’s Audacity newsletter, which she puts out every week with links to all the latest news she finds compelling. This led me to the New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the Century, as compiled from lists provided by writers, celebrities, and politicians. Here’s my tally, below, of what I read and want to read from this list. (If you pull up the list yourself, you can get your own tally here.)
I started the audiobook of one of the novels from this list, Pulitzer Prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, about a couple of young Jewish guys who become early comic-book artists in New York City.
(I started the audiobook on Scribd because I mistakenly thought it said two hours but it actually said 20 hours, so the joke’s on me. I’m already super engaged by the story, though, which takes place on the Lower East Side of New York in the early ‘30s, so makes me think of my grandmother living there at that time in her poor, all-Jewish neighborhood with its fruit and pickle vendors pushing carts in the street.
Finally, I read about horrible-mother-of-the-year award-winner Alice Munro, a celebrated Canadian writer known for her sharply perceptive short stories. Her youngest was sexually abused by Munro’s husband, stepfather to her three daughters, when the child was 9 years old. When the now-grown daughter finally told her mother what had happened, more than a decade had passed since the abuse occurred. The stepfather agreed he’d molested her but said she seduced him, WHEN SHE WAS 9, yet Nobel-Prize winning Alice Munro stayed with him. Some time later, the daughter pressed charges and there was no question he was guilty. The daughter had receipts including letters he’d written about how the abuse was all the little girl’s fault, so he went to jail, but still Munro stood by him. She wasn’t allowed to see her grandchildren if she brought him, but she complained that this was inconvenient, so the daughter finally cut her off. (Most estrangements are bullshit, but this is an actual good reason to cut off one’s mother.) Munro died this past May. What a shame this all came out right after she died instead of while she would have been forced to answer for herself.
Thank you for sharing the link to the essay about your son. It was something I needed to read. I'm so sorry for your loss and for this world we've made that is toxic for so many of our young men.