Hola Darling Ones,
Well, we made it to 2026 and it’s been a real kick in the crotch, hasn’t it?
On January first I started using this neck & chest firming cream before bed each night because I’m well past my prime.
I have/had a ridiculous amount of creams, potions, and unguents from good ol’2020 when I had more money than sense. I’ve been making my way through them over the past year or so. Most of them are crap because I look exactly the same no matter what I smear on my face.
The package on the cream claims, “97% had firmer skin in just two weeks.” That’s why I started using it on the first, because I’d be able to remember two weeks from the first.
But then monsters decided to up their cruelty and now my state is occupied my hostile forces and so last night as I was spreading the goo on my neck, I said into the mirror, “this is crap. My skin isn’t firmer!”
When I climbed into bed I realized we were only ten days into 2026. Yowza that cream’s got four more days to give me the neck of a 20-year-old.
As for 2026? I don’t know. . . it’s hard out there for a human.
Since I use humor as a defense mechanism and to hide from my feelings, I joked the other day about how I missed the pre-Rodney King 90s when white people like me could live in ignorant bliss about the murderous police and the violence they inflict on people because they feel like it.
The joke did not make me feel better, but I tried.
Can a person even feel better right now? Since the murder of Renee Nicole Good I’ve been quiet. I don’t have any words to help or heal, and no desire to add to the echo chamber that gets more performative with each atrocity. Between the woke scolds* and the creative-types patting themselves on the back for continuing to art as an act of resistance I’m a little more misanthropic than usual.
One of my goals this year is to write more (this has been my goal every year of my entire life), and that gets tougher as the US falls further into fascism. I do not want to write about politics and current events. There are smarter people that are better at that. I want to write about frivolity. I want to compare and contrast the use of sleep in the lyrics of Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in Snow” and Amanda Shires’ “Nobody’s Girl.”
However, that feels not just frivolous but unserious and disrespectful at this moment in time. I’m a generic Allen Ginsburg, “America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?”
Not even close to figuring it out,
Jodi
I think if you don’t remember the beauty and the love and the humor and the little things, you know, pay attention to them and write about them and photograph them and just make sure to observe them, then, well, what the fuck’s the point, right? gotta remember to have a good time in this dastardly world.