So, Darling Ones,

I had a tiny rage meltdown today.

When I checked the mail this afternoon there was the usual printed spam, the electric bill, a package containing 300 teeny, tiny phallic-looking stitch markers, and a letter/offer/advertisement addressed to my mom.

An advertisement from a monument company addressed to my mom but sent to my house.

I went from having a so-so day to incandescent rage in about thirteen seconds.

I’m still pretty salty about how expensive newspaper obituaries are. For the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obituaries are $12.80 a line. Each line is something like 30-35 characters. Adding a photo is anywhere from $89 to $230. My dad’s tiny obituary was $320. We kept it pretty short and didn’t include a picture because he hated having his picture taken and would 100% haunt my ass if I included one.

So not only does the newspaper rob you blind in the middle of the worst time of your life, they promptly sell your information to other morbid money grubbers. The newspaper obit is the only way that company would have been able to put my mom’s name with my address.

I AM FURIOUS. I need everyone to be as furious about this stupid, inconsequential thing as I am.

I’m lucky I have this to be mad about otherwise I’d be super bummed about the 300 eensy, teensy phallic-shaped safety pins.

Stitch markers are one of the things I forgot to mention when I was listing all the things I need. The project I’m working on needs a lot of stitch markers. I bought a bunch if plastic, non-phallic ones when I first started the project. But I need more. So I bought the phallic-looking ones because they looked bigger. I did not read the fine print. My dad just died, I cannot be responsible for details.

When I opened the package today I was disappointed to see I got the stitch markers for ants apparently. I recognize that my hands are larger than the average woman’s, but so am I! For my size (6’5″) my hands and feet are kinda petite. I dated men shorter than I am who wore bigger shoes than I do (men’s size 12).

In other grief updates, yesterday sucked ass. I couldn’t manage to do anything but lay on the couch and read Dan Chaon novels (I finished Sleep Walking and immediately started Ill Will). When BFK texted me to ask how I was doing I sobbed.

Today, aside from the fury, has been better. I got to hyper-focus on making charts for a client brochure while listening to music. It was nice and distracting. This same client also dropped off 5.5 pounds of chocolate at my house. I’m not even exaggerating.

So if you need teeny phallic safety pins or some chocolate, I can hook you up.

Saltily yours,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

I slept in this morning because there’s been some stuff going on and I’m tired. I woke up in 1972. Fuck.

As you know, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. So not only did I wake up in 1972 now we live in the United States of Forced Birth & Gun Violence. I don’t know if the depths of my despair can get any deeper.

For months now I’ve been talking about how I have zero hope things will get better. I do not believe any form of government on any level in the USFB&GV (formerly known as the USA) will do anything to stop suffering. Instead, they are hellbent on making things worse. I know the cruelty is the point.

When my sisters were here a few weeks ago, we listened to Matthew McConaughey’s remarks at the White House regarding the Uvalde massacre. As McConaughey talked about the coroners staying up all night to try to identify the bodies of little kids, I burst into noisy sobs.

“I can’t take the unending cruelty. This country inflicts so much pain on everyone. Everyone.”

It’s so fucking hard, Darling Ones. How do we keep doing this?

This dumpster nation makes things worse and worse on a near daily basis. Things are so bad in the grande scheme it makes trying to deal with our tiny, individual tragedies impossible. Where do you focus your sorrow and your anger when everything is awful all the time everywhere?

As I am typing this I got a text from MN Governor Tim Walz asking me to donate money in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. It’s fury on top of horror on top of sorrow over here. The worst kind of sandwich.

I was hopeless before I woke up this morning in 1972, and now I need a new word for that.

And now, because the cruelty is never-ending, I need to go work. I need to build stupid little websites and write stupid little copy so I can pay to continue living in a country that doesn’t think I’m capable of making decisions regarding what happens inside my own body. I need to do the work to earn the money because we cannot for one single second take time off to acknowledge our own humanity and how fucking broken everything is.

Your favorite fury (Allecto, unceasing in anger),
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

It’s no secret there’s a deep river of venomous rage running just below my skin. Frankly, the fact that I don’t breath fire or have snakes for hair surprises me on the regular. The filter between the rage and world outside of my skin grows ever thinner as the world continues to burn.

The rage filter was pretty thick until the 2016 election and things went really downhill from there for obvious and relentless reasons. Some people who have spoken to me face to face over the course of my life might disagree with this, but they’re wrong. A lot of people mistake my passion for rage, and trust me even though they sometimes sound the same they are very, very different.

For the past week or so it’s taken a lot of work to keep my rage at bay. This task would be much easier if I could open my mouth and unleash a horde of angry wasps upon the world, but I cannot. Instead, I bite my tongue about everything, which isn’t so great for me, but pretty good for anyone who happens to accidentally prick my ire.

This is a kind of maturity. Instead of making people feel shitty for being annoying or willfully obtuse or pompous or whatever else they might do that does not please me in the moment, I keep my mouth shut, or more accurately, my fingers still. This is zero percent fun, but being a bitch who randomly makes people feel shitty for stupid things is negative eight percent fun. So, math.

To be transparent, a lot of this rage is irrational and misdirected. It’s born of feeling frustrated and helpless (see: Being a Human in 2022), the dregs of winter and the ennui it brings.

For example here’s a short list of things that have enraged me today: the book I was reading being too much like a few books I’ve read recently; people tweeting “read this thread*;” the misogyny in 80s hair metal (more on this later); lunch; a chirping brand-fucking-new smoke detector at 2:30 a.m.; the CDC COVID guidelines & the anxiety they’re producing in people; ALLL the Russia stuff; and ding-a-lings who filter the fuck out of their selfies so they look like Barbie dolls as if we believe for one goddamn second that they have pore-less skin with no lines.

Because there is so much to be angry about and I’m trying not to be a bitch, my rage needs somewhere to go at night. It has chosen my dreams. For the past three or four nights I’ve had a recurring dream about being stalked, a scary inside the house I need to move kind of stalking. Sometimes the stalker is a man I don’t know, and couldn’t name. Sometimes it’s someone I know but who is definitely not stalking me. All of the times I am INFURIATED at the audacity of the man to do this to me. In the dreams I frequently go after the stalker like I’m gonna fight him and have to be held back (randomly by my cousin Greg, my dad, my BFK, etc.). Last night the stalker bought me a puppy because he decided we were moving in together and then took the puppy away and left me a really mean note for not letting him move in.

In all the dreams I start out scared and end up furious. I don’t know what else it could be besides my rage finding a way to escape.

Despite all my rage I will not quote a Smashing Pumpkins song,
Jodi

 
*As Ellen Willis is my witness I’m never gonna read a motherfucking twitter thread as long as I live. Please, just get a goddamn blog already. I BEG YOU.

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Hello Darling Ones,

I have some weird, vague beef with Dave Grohl of rock & roll superstar mega fame. If you don’t know who that is, I’m not going to explain it you can skip this one. The information will not be on the final.

Why do I have weird, vague beef with Dave Grohl? I don’t know. It’s something I cannot elucidate. His universal belovedness is, as the youth say, sus to me. Because I am curious I dove into the his memoir The Storyteller yesterday.

I admit I have a huge bias against memoirs written by male musicians because the ones I’ve read are frequently really, really boring (see: Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, and Bob Mould). However, I super loved both Willie Nelson & Jeff Tweedy’s memoirs, so why not give ol’ Grohl a shot?

Darling Ones, it was really charming and funny right up to the point where it pissed me off.

Surprisingly, I was only merely annoyed over the lack of female musicians mentioned. I come to expect this from men because men do not value art made by women. I’m at the point in the book where Kurt Cobain has died and thus far Grohl has mentioned (by my count) seven female musicians/bands with women in them.

Seven.

And of the seven female musicians he mentions one is Whitney Houston and he uses her in a shitty joke about how Kurt Cobain’s pre-Nevermind apartment was so derelict it was like, “Whitney Houston’s bathroom turned upside down.”

Fuck you, Dave Grohl. That is not funny. It’s too soon. It will always be too soon to make that kind of fucking insensitive, rude, purposeless unfunny joke. You’d think a guy whose bandmate died from his addictions would be a little more sensitive. The book didn’t need this joke. These was the third comparison of things Cobain’s cruddy apartment was like. How easy would it have been to leave it out?

Frankly, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard more about this “joke.” I told myself I was being too sensitive, that my love for Whitney Houston won’t allow me to see this clearly. I thought maybe I was hangry or tired. I ate a cookie and tried to take a nap, but I was too pissed off to sleep.

This is a shitty joke that perfectly illustrates the casual cruelty of men. Of course I am furious.

This is the exact reason why when men point out they have daughters and therefore are feminists, actual feminists everywhere roll there eyes and clench their fists. Grohl has three daughters. He opens the book about how the music is in their DNA and he still can’t be assed to mention more than seven women thus far in his book. I cannot even count how many dudes/bands he mentions, but off the top of my head without looking: Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bad Brains, Black Flag, The Stooges, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Deep Purple, Naked Raygun, MC5, Nine Inch Nails, Bruce Springsteen.

Excuse me while I rage barf for 100 years.

Angrily yours,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

Now that I’m back I need to get this first shitty post out of my system so I can get back to providing you with the slightly unhinged, occasionally thought-provoking, and mildly entertaining content you’ve come to expect from I Will Dare dot com.

For the record, I never consider what I produce on this website “content.” Barf. I think of it as a writing.

I trust you all survived the holiday unscathed. I almost did. I managed to cut the tip of my left index finger which is making typing super annoying. I also had a small tiff with Sister #2 on Thanksgiving night that I can’t seem to stop thinking about.

My family has this long-running joke about how awful it is to stay at Supergenius HQ and how everything is going to affect my Yelp review. I started this joke a long time ago and I’m regretting it.

This is amusing for a day or two. But after three days of hearing about how there’s too many plants, how it’s too dark, how the Internet was kind of wonky, how there’s Diet Coke instead of Diet Pepsi, how they have to make a second pot of coffee, it gets to be a bit much. It doesn’t help that it’s three against one.

When I woke up from a short nap after Thanksgiving dinner, Sister #2 jumped right on me with how loud I snored. I told her I needed her to back off a little. I explained that as my energy waned my sensitivity increased and the “jokes” were getting to me. She responded by saying sorry and then giving me the silent treatment for the rest of the night.

So that was fun and hasn’t at all given me a shit ton of anxiety about Christmas.

Up to that point, however, we had a pretty good week. The highlight was probably when Sister #2 and I serenaded Sister #4 with an a cappella version of Jeremey Messersmith’s “Ghost.” because of her ability to burn bridges even if she’s standing on them.

Ok. We’re back on the horse now,
Jodi

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