Dear Reader,
Behind me, my daughter is watching Taylor’s Eras Tour for the fourth time, and my dog has an ear infection, but she’s not a regular dog, she’s a monster dog, so I can’t make a normal appointment for her, I have to make a special appointment where they sedate her and it costs hundreds of dollars and 24 hours of her being dopey from the drugs, and we just went through all that a few months ago with the tooth thing, and I hate it, it’s so frustrating, so I’ve spent the last few days trying, again, to desensitize her to things I hold in my hand near her face but, like, she wasn’t having it (she doesn’t want to bite me but she doesn’t not want to bite me) so I had to tell her—
Taylor is singing All Too Well. We all have an All Too Well, don’t we? We do.
I had to tell my dog that she’ll have to suffer, and I’m sorry and it sucks and it makes me sad and makes me feel like a failure but anyway—I asked the vet to throw in a nail trim since she’ll be under anyway.
Have you ever seen Death Becomes Her? There’s a scene where Goldie Hawn is in a group therapy session and they’re all like, what do you want to talk about today? She’s wringing a tissue or something and she says, “I want to talk about Madeline,” and everyone in the room starts screaming, and that is me right now, I want to talk about the debate, and maybe now you’re all screaming.
I didn’t watch it. Didn’t plan to watch it. I was sure I’d catch years of highlights, and the last debate was stupid and took months off my life, so I thought hey, I’m going to sit at my computer and write my little sad story about love, lust, betrayal, and suicide within a group of high school friends but within seconds, my group chat blew up, and I went to Twitter to see what was going on, and if Twitter was a real place, like, people would have been swallowing pills and throwing rope up on the rafters and jumping, but oh, not me, I am a child of divorce, and I grew up with an alcoholic father, and my mother taught me to survive by soothing the rage-filled man I later called my stepfather by being upbeat and happy because upbeat and happy makes the rage go. Go give that crazy man yelling at you a hug why don’t you?!
Yeah, so Twitter was beaching itself, and I was like, deep breaths all, deep breaths—deep breaths and then I did catch a clip of Biden talking and I was like fuck me, fuck us, fuck this, fuck it all, what the fuck, holy fuck, but then I was like, deep breaths everyone else, deep, deep breaths, and then I spent, oh, I don’t know, the next 24 hours getting eye disease from not blinking and refreshing Twitter and BlueSky and stupid Threads and, like, at one point I ended up seeing a clip of Adam Kinzinger (who is a Republican who I think worked for Bush but I hate Bush) who was all fired up and defending Biden and taking down a Trump person (an attorney, maybe) and so then I went over to Adam’s Twitter to see what he was doing and then, I don’t know, maybe three hours later, I was like, wait, am I attracted to Adam Kinzinger? We both grew up in Illinois. We are the same age, so we probably have a lot of the same 80s kid in Illinois vibes. I know him all too well. I kid! Actually, I think I was just happy to hear the fight in his voice and then it all hit me, like, people want to hear the fight. Me too! I want to hear the fight! I didn’t hear the fight! I heard the darkness. I heard hospice in the other room having a hushed conversation with the family. But then Biden went to Waffle House and that was good, right? I kept seeing that he did a dap? What does that mean? Anyone? Young people? And then he went to North Carolina and was yelling and animated? And someone either in the video itself or over the video dubbed in Tubthumping? And then the Pod Save America guys got dragged, and what the fuck Claire McCaskill, and what the fuck for all of it, and yes, it’s a valid conversation to have if he’s the best one, because if that was a one off, fine, but it might not have been a one off, but shouldn’t we have had that a year ago and now it’s too late, but, hear me out, what if the replacement for Biden was indeed Adam Kinzinger have we considered that, maybe we should, just saying, just putting it out there, and this is all to say I’d vote for an actual corpse over Trump or a third party or no one at all, and I should get some rest before the Supreme Court drops that immunity decision on Monday, because I’m trying to write a novel before…before whatever happens, happens…and hey, the good news is I’m finally reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which is very very good but, how do you say, not uplifting, oh BUT I was delighted in all possible ways that one of my students’ final projects this summer was an exploration of toxic relationship modeling in pop culture including BookTok.
Yours in WTF,
(I’m fine!)
(I think.)
Stephanie
(Hahahaha tubthumping!) Also: Goddess help us.
My own PS here is that Adam Kinzinger did not work for Bush. He was a US House Rep. I knew that part. I knew he was part of the J6 committee, but I thought for some reason he always worked for Bush. Nevermind then!