The club leader says “she is just a little bit ugly, which makes her cute.” Which is… not inaccurate.

There is a dog in my house! Her name is Eleanor and she is a thirteen month old yellow lab in training to be a particular kind of service dog. Not gonna specify which kind because I don’t want to appear to be speaking on behalf of the excellent org to which she belongs.

Getting qualified to raise dogs like Eleanor is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and have trained to do since the pandemic. I’ve had temporary dogs but I am now Eleanor’s primary handler.

It is an awesome responsibility and, being me, I’ve already had anxiety dreams about it. She’s a good girl whose worst crimes are a bit of pulling on the leash and some surprise bork-bork-borking when Charlie came home from college with Hazel the emotional support cat in tow. (Alice and Thimble have already judged Eleanor and found her wanting.)

Still I fret. The group leaders like to say “you won’t break the puppy” but what if I somehow do? What if I’m the first raiser to have her dog abducted by aliens or indoctrinated by Fox News? Charlie said, “no one’s expecting you to be perfect at this the first time,” and I said, “I am.”

She has enormous paws and hilariously expressive eyebrows. She likes licking things, meeting new people and curling up on my foot.

corporate strength has always come from transmuting the threat of force into softer trade.

I wanted to be the kind of woman people didn’t leave.

Jeremy: Why are they sitting next to a bank of candles? Why is their table in the middle and everyone else’s around the edges?

Jo: Have you never been to a restaurant where you are the main character?

my only job now, in all the world, is to not destroy my kids, and in turn, teach them not to destroy others

I wish I had spoken when it mattered

Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.

She had the terrible sinking feeling that whatever was going wrong right now, it was her fault somehow: that she hadn’t been smart enough or good enough.

Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.

Repeating patterns, the mistakes of yr parents, running but not getting very far. Not as far as you wanted but maybe farther than you think.

treaties are for settlers, too.

I’m sad she’s dead, for the usual human and parasocial reasons.

I’m genuinely curious if also worried about what comes next.

And I’m angry, I am so so angry, about the British empire.

As a white Australian I exist because of what Britain saw as surplus population it could send to administer its stolen wealth. The ways in which my life was predetermined, the ways in which I was raised and educated to be a colonial bureaucrat, were callous and calculating and fundamentally genocidal, and have left me traumatized.

The thing about Elizabeth. The thing! That I managed to grope towards just now, is that she was a human sacrifice to empire. She had no choice and no escape. She had to do her duty.

And she did her duty flawlessly. She was incredible at it. A genuinely awe-inspiring triumph of will.

And she shouldn’t have done that. For two reasons. One (the most important) is because the Empire is a death cult that murdered millions on her watch. The other is that her performance of that duty is and always will be forced on the rest of us as the standard we will inevitably fail to meet.

I admire her. But I will not seek to emulate her. Her indulgence of powerful men and her racism were ruinous even in her immediate family, and catastrophic for the world. What she did so amazingly well is a thing that should never have been done.

Which loops back to sorrow. Those glimpses of the woman she could’ve been: the 18yo ambulance driver, the rider galloping her own racehorse.

What a fucking waste and betrayal of all her strength and integrity, to pour it out in the service of maintaining a corrupt status quo.

What a waste of mine.

The nuclear family is a construct that both renders affairs of the family unit private and makes labor forces more “flexible.” Economists say frictionless.

I didn’t know how a child was supposed to grieve, and no one told me.

From Barcelona through Chris’s community in Vidalia and over the Pyrenees to Villerouge-la-Cremade, and back again. Cathar castles and Montserrat and the Med.

Even more beautiful: from San Francisco to Redding and up and over the Cascade Range and along the Rogue River Valley to Reed College in Portland. The State of Jefferson, the high desert where my wild horse Lenny was born.

I’m more interested in solidarity, even if I don’t quite yet know myself what I mean by it, just the feeling I get from it—the startling, quenching relief of it; the force of its surprise, like being loved.

who’d have thought that explosion of joy would end five years later in the most absurd butchery . . .

At my high school there was a sign that said: “The world belongs to those who read.” That’s a lie, I thought, a lie, a lie, a lie.

she copies down sentences that tell one how to live, which have the undeniable weight of truth because they come from books