​My small world is filled with love, and so is my heart. I see it and feel it now. That science could define something most often understood figuratively still captivates and confuses me, especially when I look at what people do for “love” today. As citizens living in lower tax brackets begin feeling the consequences of Trump’s transactional facism, they’re squaring up to fight for and against his policies. If asked, I imagine each one of them would claim to do so out of love – of country, family, God, immigrants, civil rights, law and order, thy neighbor.

Only, “There is no fear in love.”

This shift towards softer subjects and away from a softer look is calculated and truthful. Instead of folding under the weight of their rapid fame like so many other next big things, Wet Leg sought to manage and grow into it on their own terms. The band officially expanded to a five-piece with Teasdale and co-founder Hester Chambers graduating Joshua Omead Mobaraki, Henry Holmes, and Ellis Durand from touring to full members. All of them share the weight of the band’s success along with songwriting credits on Moisturizer, a move that made sense as it built on bonds formed during the constant touring for their debut. There were other choices, too. As Teasdale crafted a bolder persona and moved front and center Chambers embraced her social anxiety and took a position upstage, often performing with her back to the crowd. ​

I was out for a walk around my neighborhood when I had a chance meeting with a former student. These unexpected encounters can be iffy. You hope it’s a student you connected with; one you liked and whose name you remember. And you hope the same goes for them; that you weren’t just some placeholder they had between more impactful adults. This young man was somewhere in-between, but only because the class he was in wasn’t really a class at all. Flint was in my advisory; which, in theory, was supposed to connect a group of mixed students to a trusted adult for the entirety of their high school experience, people they could anchor to as the other names and faces in their schedule changed from year to year. Our efforts to become a thriving little community were often thwarted, however, by the intrusively tedious administrative tasks that cut into our time. I would rush through ham-fisted slide decks about bullying and the dangers of vaping so we could have real discussions – sometimes about those topics or other less serious things. Free from such clunky interruptions, Flint and I easily fell into conversation after I came across him hunched over, looking intently at a colony of ants as they worked on a piece of discarded donut. 

This contemplative posture is consistent with the kid Flint was in advisory: quiet, observant. He’d think before he’d speak. Now, as college graduation waited for him on the other side of summer, I got the sense that he may have been fortune-telling before I interrupted: wondering as he stepped away from UMass and towards his future, what sort of ant he would be, what kind of crumbs he’d be working on. When I asked what he’d been up to he told me how, in between shifts at Whole Foods, he was filling his time with simple pleasures like reading and walks to the beach. Flint found discussing “what’s next” as engaging as one of those scripted advisory questions about his social media use. He was proud to be earning his psychology degree, but was unsure what he would do with it. Grad school is expensive, and “Things are so crazy right now,” he said, “it seems kinda pointless to think too much about the future.” While America sorts itself out, Flint will take some time. Swim in the ocean. Watch the ants.

​He wasn’t looking for advice, which was good because I had none. What do you say to a kid trying to live in a moment he is both excited and disillusioned by? I left Flint at the beach gate, and as I turned my music back on, this song from Chicago’s Lifeguard cut through my earbuds:

“It Will Get Worse” rolling over the credits of my visit with Flint was more than just an prescient needle-drop on our moment in time – from both the “Flint and me” and an existential standpoint. Asher Case, Isaac Lowenstein, and Kai Slater – who started making music together as Lifeguard on the heels of the pandemic – are just a year or two younger than Flint, who’s also the same age as my daughter. While not overtly political, their debut Ripped and Torn is a reflection of and reaction to the isolation that comes from the counterfeit connections people (particularly young people) are constantly plugged into, especially since COVID, ones Flint seemed intent on escaping by getting back to nature. The album is an analog answer to the digital gloss and shine of modern music; a deliberate homage to the seminal punk zine whose name it shares. While Lifeguard embraces bands like The Jam, who they covered on one of their early singles, Ripped and Torn isn’t the band’s attempt to “Make Music Great Again” by trading on nostalgia and complaining about how every other band sucks. It’s the product of three self-described “record dorks” trying to make great music – and succeeding. 

​How the band go about their business is out of step with the moment in a way that – whether intentional or not – makes them subversive, maybe even more than Kneecap. They design all of the artwork for their records, posters, and merch themselves. It’s an aesthetic rooted in connection, and is the antithesis of shallow, made for Instagram moments like this:

It could be that things are getting worse for Trump; that, as his policies rip and tear at the fabric of our communities in ways that hurt everyone, he could finally be “running out of line, running out of time.” It’s both encouraging and disappointing that his mishandling of the Epstein files could be his undoing. Encouraging because anyone connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s horrible crimes deserves to be punished, be they named “Trump” or “Clinton” or “Smith.” Disappointing because so many of the moves Trump’s made as president – things that have reached farther and done more damage throughout the country and the world – were made with the gleeful approval of the people who now feel so betrayed by him. 

​And yet he goes on, waving shiny new distractions in front of us on a daily basis. As new polling shows that Trump is losing support around immigration, the issue he basically owes both of his terms to, and as he struggles to convince us that he’s not in the Epstein files, he’s doubled down, meddling in the branding strategy of two professional sports teams, and taking down Stephen Colbert before setting his sights on President Obama. So far, none of these distractions has taken Jeffrey Epstein’s name and Trump’s connection to it out of the news cycle. New photos and revelations continue to bubble up, but it’s unclear what impact this will have on a man immune to all kinds of political kryptonite, and if Trump falls, we’ll still have a government that works against our best interests.

Trump took office — twice — by convincing enough people that the discrepancy between the lives they had and the filtered fictions they saw on social media was real. Then he took the feeling of relative deprivation he created, convinced MAGA to blame others for it, and promised “I alone can fix it.” That explains the electorate’s inability to see the Biden economy for the success it was, and why a friend felt fine angrily demanding, “why should we put migrants up in hotels when my kids are barely making it?” I understand that I’m oversimplifying here. A lot of American’s suffered in Biden’s economy, but my friend’s children are “making it” by most objective measures. That they’re “barely” doing so is not because there’s not enough “great” to go around. It’s because too much of it goes to these people: ​

Saahil Desai, a senior editor at The Atlantic, recently documented his day getting flipped off and cursed out as he drove a rented Tesla Cybertruck – “America’s Most Hated Car” – around Washington D.C. 

Even before Tesla CEO Elon Musk became our DOGE-Lord and took chainsaws across the CPAC stage and to federal agencies, the Cybertruck was gonna be a tough sell in America. Here, consumers prefer trucks that are “Ford Tough,” or at least body on frame. NARTs like the Rivian R1T, my own Honda Ridgeline, and the Cybertruck are suspect because, while they can do a lot of truck stuff and have cup holders big enough to hold a Coors Banquet beer, nobody’s writing country songs about them.

The last thing I "hauled" in my "truck" was a beanbag chair. You can just make out my "Bird Nerd" sticker. The only people I know who own a Cybertruck validate their vehicle's incongruity: they mostly use it to haul around their kids. Unlike Kid Rock, or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ex-husband, and others who have bought Cybertrucks to “own the libs,” my friends got their truck well before Musk “took” office so they could meet the needs of their growing family while lowering their carbon footprint. They appreciate their truck’s innovative safety features, and how it can do things other trucks simply can’t. Once their electricity went out in a storm and they used the truck as a generator to power their home. For them, the Cybertruck is practical, eco-friendly, and just plain cool.

But since America has collectively entered the find out stage after fucking around with Trump again, this decidedly progressive family has been followed by dangerously aggressive drivers. They’ve had their vehicle vandalized, probably by people they have a lot in common with politically. The fact that some feel emboldened to criminally target people because they drive an electric truck while so many others see such harassment as sweet, sweet schadenfreude is completely on point in Trump’s America, where up is down and we’re at war with Canada over Greenland. Or is it Greenland over Panama? 

This bizarro administration pardoned the people who smeared human shit on the walls of the U.S. Capitol, then deported someone because she wrote an editorial damning genocide. A man who bragged about grabbing pussies with impunity; who has been found civilly liable for sexual assault, is attacking transgender people under the pretense of protecting women. An administration that thinks diversity initiatives elevate people to unearned positions of power has given cabinet positions to under-qualified sycophants who use nonsecure messaging apps to share sensitive war plans with reporters – then blame the reporters for reporting on it. Meanwhile, Musk and his posse of DOGE-bros have been treating federal agencies like piñatas, hitting out so indiscriminately that they compromised the safety of our nuclear arsenal and have planes falling from the sky, while Trump is fulfilling his promise to lower the price of groceries by using tariffs to raise the price of everything. 

MAGA conservatives are buying electric cars, while liberals are being ridiculed for owning them. 

When it became clear that Trump would not only reclaim the presidency, but that there would be no checks to balance his hateful agenda – Republicans held the House, took the Senate, and already owned the Supreme Court thanks to Trump 1.0 – I listened to IDLES. A lot. I found my footing in their music, and embraced it as part of the soundtrack of the dystopian film we’re now living in. For example, I know that so many on the right, if they heard the views and beliefs spilling out of my race-traitorous, trans-supporting, NART driving white mouth, would see me as “dirty, rotten, filthy scum.” I was probably listening to “Never Fight a Man with a Perm” when I read Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about businesses needing more masculine energy. “Danny Nedelko” plainly states how I feel about people who are coming to America for a better life: “my blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant.” But IDLES is to punk what my Ridgeline is to trucks. They have an aggressive presence and sound, and their live shows come complete with mosh pits, crowd surfing, and frontman Joe Talbot’s spitting and strutting on stage. Yet they describe their music as “hard rock for pussies,” and if you were to only take them at first listen, it’d be easy to confuse the band for something they’re not. In “Clampdown” The Clash told us how “anger can be power,” and IDLES does make angry music. But anger isn’t what centers IDLES. Instead “LOVE IS THE FING!” 

The love that’s weaponized in IDLES’ music flows from the same spring that fed MLK’s Beloved Community. It’s the love that Che Guevara identified as the compass of any true revolutionary. It’s why IDLES songs are class conscious and queer affirming. They challenge the toxically masculine and embrace femininity as a force and source of strength. These songs and their overtly socio-political themes would be flatly inauthentic, maybe even cartoonish, if they didn’t share space with deeply personal songs about struggle and loss, like “June” which is about Talbot’s stillborn daughter. Both Talbot and guitarist Lee Kiernan have struggled with addiction, which is reflected in songs like “Meds” and “Crawl.” They're a band that somehow manages to be powerful and political and sensitive and infinitely relatable all at once. As Carolina Permuy wrote in 2021, “(IDLES’) music holds the intensity that punches a listener in the face but emotionally helps them find and reflect on their own identity.” That’s what makes “Grace” the first of my “Songs that Meet the Moment.” 

“Grace” is the seventh track on TANGK, IDLES’ fifth and latest full-length release. On the surface, “Grace” could be mistaken for the Ridgeline of IDLES’ catalogue to date. It’s a bit softer, maybe more obviously “pop” than any of the other downbeat songs that the band have recorded. Mark Bowen – the band’s “guitarist and sound architect” – told Brooklyn Vegan that “Grace,” “was probably the song that there was the most debate about in the studio. It was the hardest one to write because I think we weren’t too sure about it… That stuff is so hard to write without it sounding super cheesy. I have so much deference for your Coldplay, your The National, people that write that kind of music.” Sensing how “that kind of music” required “that kind of video,” the band recruited Coldplay’s Chris Martin to help them realize an idea that Talbot says came to him in a dream. With Martin’s blessing and assistance, IDLES recreated the iconic clip for Coldplay’s “Yellow,” with Martin walking along a rainswept beach “singing” the words to “Grace.” 

As incongruous – there’s that word again – as “Grace” seems to be when measured against the rest of IDLES’ output, as Callum MacHattie noted in Far Out Magazine, TANGK – and by extension, “Grace” – is a logical continuation of what’s come before: “(IDLES) have always been a band that encouraged a sense of community, and in their early works, they established that by creating the soundtrack to a cultural revolution. But now, on ‘Grace’, their fearless leader looks over at the congregation, asking them to extend their arms and accept him as one of their own.” In other words, “Grace” is a real mother-fucking truck of an IDLES song.

In “Danny Nedelko” IDLES tells us how “Fear leads to panic / Panic leads to pain / Pain leads to anger / Anger leads to hate.” Turning fear into panic into pain into anger into hate into votes was part of Trump’s motivational playbook from the beginning of his political career, but he didn’t invent it. Today’s cat-eating Haitian immigrant and the trans woman lurking in the bathroom waiting to pounce on your daughter are just recycled versions of the lecherous Jew and the leering, lustful Negro. They’re made up jump-scare material designed to keep us looking for monsters in closets and under beds and in classrooms while the people who conjured them abuse our trust and take our social security. Now, in our anger at Trump and his cronies or handlers or millenarian cultists turning America into a Christian Nationalist Kleptocracy, we’re using the same playbook to hit back. 

We’re casting yesterday’s environmentalists as today’s Nazis because of the cars they bought back before Elon did his Sieg Heil at the inauguration. We want to force buyers' remorse on Trump voters, too - especially now that they’re learning how, for Trump, there’s no difference between them and the people he made them afraid of. There’s Skylar Holden, the Montana cattle rancher who went viral on TikTok after he described how the administration he voted for abruptly froze key grant funds Holden needed to keep his farm alive. Robert McCabe lost his job with the IRS after he voted for Trump. His position was one of 7,000 DOGE eliminated in February. He’s joined in the deepening pool of regret by recovering self-described “MAGA Junkie” Jennifer Piggott, whose job with the Bureau of Fiscal Service also fell under DOGE’s chainsaw. If the Trump Administration winds up deporting Bradley Bartell’s wife, who is currently in an ICE detention center, back to Peru, Bartell says he’s likely to join her. If he does, he may not be able to vote for Trump again, should the president figure out a way to run in 2028. These people, and others whose similar stories come to light with each move this administration makes against their best interests, are met with the kind of derision and ridicule Desai got when he drove that rented Cybertruck to the D.C. Farmer’s Market.

Trump is able to do what he’s doing because he stoked people’s fear and anger and then capitalized on it. Before his victory left me tongue tied and flat footed, I thought Biden and then Harris needed to step off the high road and get a little dirty, and I still feel that way to some degree. I’m just not sure what dirty should look like under the glaring light of this administration’s hubris. Are 25 hour speeches from the senate floor effective? Do mass marches move needles? We did these things before, and they couldn’t keep the sun from setting on the MAGA movement.

Right now, there are two kinds of Trump voters: they’re those who are gonna keep blindly hoping for that invite to Mar-a-Lago and those who are gonna find out the hard way that it’s never coming. And when they do; when they join those Trump voters who’ve realized that not only was it never raining, but that the man who loves talking about windmills and water pressure was pissing on their backs the whole time, we can’t celebrate their soiling. We have to hold our noses and hand them some towels. 

Given that Trump is pushing policies that will make it difficult to vote our way out of this fucking mess, I can see why someone might take strength from tailgating a Tesla, and telling its driver to “fuck off,” or from shouting “I TOLD YOU SO” in the comments section of a story about disillusioned Venezualan Trump supporters. But at the end of the day, there really is a fine line between “us” and “them” – particularly in the eyes of those in charge of us and them. We’ve seen what fear and panic and pain and anger lead to. I think, like so many people who came before me who were smarter and had to fight harder, I want to see where grace, forgiveness, freudenfreude, and love goes. Because whatever making a difference for Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk and Abrego Garcia and Marcy Rheintgen looks like, we’re going to need Holden and McCabe and Piggott and Bartell next to us to do it. There’s a very real chance they may not want to be there, but the stakes are too high not to offer them space; the margins are too slim. ​

How can anyone interested in drawing a valid conclusion about anything, anything at all these days, do so when time is scarce, media is polarized, and the truth is often secondary to “owning the libs” or stupid-shaming the “MAGAts?” My social media feed is clogged with more shit than a Golden Corral toilet on Taco Bowl Tuesday, and I can’t seem to find a kernel of truth in it. Take a complex, high stakes issue like the gender of rodents, for instance. Recently, President Trump revealed to the world that our government spent 8 million dollars to make mice transgender. “This is real!” he said. 

Only it’s not. It turns out he was confusing “transgender” with “transgenic,” which are two totally different things! The leftwing mediasphere roared at his stupidity only to walk back the laugh-track a few days later when it was confirmed that, while no one was making mice transgender, government money was indeed being used to fund studies investigating the impact a lot of things might have on transgender people. And sometimes even mice were involved (though I don’t believe any of them used bathrooms that did not align with their sex assigned at birth). See! The Telegraph crowed, Trump was right. Only he wasn’t. At least not completely. But CNN was wrong, too. Kinda.

Trying to see the forest through the fake plastic trees in our post-truth world is complicated. We’re surrounded by “zombie facts;” assertions that live on as truth even after their veracity has been debunked. It’s a term coined, as far as I can tell, by Leslie Patton in an article she wrote for Bloomberg News about the impact an oft-quoted study had on the kitchen utensil industry. In late October The Atlantic told its readers to “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula” because such utensils contain dangerously high levels of harmful chemicals. Only they don’t. 

The researchers who conducted the study The Atlantic (and many other news organizations) cited made a crucial mathematical error that overstated the levels of these chemicals. Even after this error became public, Patton reported, consumers still turned towards other materials. This obviously hurt the black plastic spatula business, and  companies like OXO, one of the largest purveyors of these products. That’s because all that initial reportage continued to proliferate, even as the original study’s revised figures led some to question its conclusions. As recently as February 7th, Wirecutter was encouraging people to find other ways to flip their pancakes.

So how can a consumer keep zombie facts from eating their valuable brain space when it comes to kitchenware, and what does kitchenware have to do with making mice gender dysphoric? Answers: err on the side of caution (there are some really nice silicon utensils out there), and everything. 

Sorta.

Most conservatives (and even a few liberals) are really worried — like black plastic spatula worried — that trans people will ruin women’s sports. Some feminists even feel that “transgender” is a lie spread by an “anti-woman hate movement” created by narcissistic men colluding with “Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma.” So hide your wives and daughters, because trans people are, apparently, coming for them. ​

It’s not just trans women, either. I mean, what about the poor bro who lost his spot to Iszac Henig, the trans man who beat Lia Thomas, a trans woman at Penn’s last home meet, before Iszac transitioned and began swimming for the Yale men’s team? 

Back to the mice — if anything, Trump underestimated the amount of taxpayer dollars being spent on gender affirming care. There have been NIH studies about how stress causes hair loss. The organization has used taxpayer dollars to study menopause. There are active on studies on erectile dysfunction looking for participants. These are bad! Right? 

No. They aren’t. 

Why would a man who once spent $70,000 on hairstyling in order to appear more virile call out money spent studying gender affirming care? It’s because it was spent on trans people. I doubt Trump thought about trans people at all until he saw how polarizing they could be; how he could manipulate their presence; and, by extension, their wellbeing, to further his own aims. 

Just as Hitler managed to rally an unreasonably large portion of the German public against a group of their fellow citizens — a group that, like transgender Americans today — comprised less than one percent of the total population, Trump recognizes the amount of mileage he can get out of demonizing as distraction. Perhaps the most impressive thing he’s done since returning to office is uniting people on both sides of the aisle against Caitlyn Jenner, who is hated by the right for being transgender and loathed by the left for being a Trump supporter. 

While some on the left, like potential 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsome, are open to exploring the impact the minuscule number of trans athletes may have on the podium prospects of their non-trans competitors (NCAA President Charlie Baker recently testified that only 10 of the 500,000 college athletes are trans), the zombie facts masquerading as truths about trans Americans have two undeniable consequences. They take our eyes off more potentially impactful policies that deal with real threats, like how Trump’s administration stands to weaken gun laws, despite there being far more guns in this country (400-500 million) than trans people (1.6 million). If you truly believe “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” rest assured that not many of those people pulling triggers are trans, regardless of how triggering their presence in the next stall over may be to you. Plus, I’m pretty certain that more high school athletes have had their careers ended by bullets than by volleyballs. Just to be sure, I did try Googling a few variations of “trans people committing crimes” and only got results on how trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than their cis-gendered peers. That’s the real danger of letting aspersions about transgender mice stand. Cisgender people like me are far more dangerous to trans people than they are to us.

And trans people are us. Trans Americans are Americans, full stop, whose bodies are entitled to the same level of affirmation as Meghan Trainor’s boobs, Kristi Noem’s nose, David Beckham’s hair, Matt Gaetz’s eyebrows, and Donald Trump’s complexion. All of the medical procedures and products these people may or may not have had and used went through numerous tests and trials (some involving mice, and some getting government funding) to determine their safety so that people — no matter their pronoun preference — could see someone in the mirror who more closely aligned with the best version of themselves. 

That’s all trans people want.

Now, either because of indifference, cynicism, fear, or outright hatred, that’s becoming more and more difficult. They stand to be even less safe than they already aren’t. 

And that’s the truth.

Transgender people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Hear and support trans voices here:

• “How Trans Teens Are Dealing With Trump 2.0, In Their Own Words” by Anya Kamenetz 
• “Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Young People” from The Trevor Project
• ”Understanding the Transgender Community from Human Rights Campaign
• Transgender Resources from GLAAD

“I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”

I made this declaration, on a dare, to my wife’s mom and stepfather. Our relationship was in its infancy, but I had already met Fran and Paul, and was pretty confident about what I could and could not get away with. Had it been our first meeting, I probably would’ve passed on that dare, but I felt pretty sure my “confession” would get an awkward laugh, or maybe a dismissive look at worst. I got one of each. A confused laugh came from the eternally easy-going Paul, while Fran shot me a playfully dismissive look. After helping Cecily pick her chin up off the table, dinner seamlessly continued.

Seventeen years later, this moment has become part of the iconography of my story with Cecily; evidence of my ability to charm her conservative parents and her no-nonsense mother in particular. I wasn’t coming out that day, or during any other moment I made that statement before or since. I was being cheeky. 
I know better than to say that sentence again. Gender dysphoria isn’t something a privileged, cis white male should casually claim if it isn’t true, especially while people are under attack, simply because they want to live and love authentically. 

My provocative juxtaposition of those words against my decidedly masculine 6’3” frame has an ennobling, if misguided, origin story. I started using this phrase in my early twenties as an act of rebellion. It was a riskless repudiation of the kind of Christianity I practiced as a teen; the kind that othered gay people straight to hell. Making this claim was also a “fuck you” to my stepfather John, who delighted in trying to quash anything about me that struck him as effeminate. “Someday, Tommy,” he would say if he saw me helping my mother in the kitchen, “you’re gonna make someone a good wife.”

I’ve reached the point in my autobiographical project where John is the focus, and I’m having a difficult time detangling who I am from who he was and how he carried himself. This is because I see shadows of him in me. On the surface and the whole, he and I have always been very different. What we have in common; though, what my first marriage could not survive, is our need for the world to be a certain way, along with an ability to make everyone else miserable when the world invariably fails to comply. I can be thankful that I’m nowhere near as bad as I used to be with this – even as I own just how bad I was – but every so often John pops up and taps me on my shoulder, or whispers in my ear, and I worry about something like money.

​Writing about John has me thinking about labels and expectations, and how living happily gets muddied by social constructs we disguise as biological imperatives and/or spiritual truths. I am pretty sure that if John is out there breathing still, he doesn’t understand the assignment. He’s probably in full agreement with J.D. Vance, Harrison Butker, and others who hated Barbie and think the world is going to fall off its axis if we all shit in the same toilets, or if a woman becomes president. I’d guess he’s still miserable, too. 

John was an archetypal “emotional parent,” the most infantile of Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s four types of emotionally immature parents. According to Gibson, emotional parents, “react to small upsets like the end of the world and tend to rely on external factors, like other people or intoxicants to soothe and stabilize them.” That was John. Once I left for school with my bed unmade, and came home to a ransacked room. One of his trademarks was to come home from work, and throw off his clothes piece by piece on his way to his room to change (jacket here, tie there, trousers over there, and so on). Then he’d come out and explode over how messy the house was.

Ultimately, John was the real victim of role confusion. Society told him he needed a family; that he needed to be the head of said family, which meant acting a certain way. He was so woefully ill-equipped for the job, and he knew it. But, like my mother, he tried. He got a pretty wife, a house, a nice car, and a dog. John got those things, but still felt empty. As much as I want to hate him, I have to acknowledge that he kept me fed and clothed for nearly a decade – no easy task given the way I ate as a teenager. Plus, I’m not sure he wanted any of the things he worked so hard to get but treated so poorly.

John didn’t really know what he was doing when he married my mom and took on her kids. I think he felt empty and depressed, so he reached for what society said was supposed to make a man happy and complete. Wanting a family, a nice home, a good job – none of these things are “bad” in and of themselves. Neither is cake decorating, or wearing make-up. It’s when these things become proscribed and gendered that they become troubling, and when people use them to gatekeep – that’s just dangerous. Cooking meals for my wife should not be off-limits to me because I have a penis. Not having children and loving cats does not mean you can’t be relied on to make good decisions for the children in your community.

When John couldn’t beat and berate us into the sort of family that would make him happy, he turned to porn, and then cocaine, and then to other women. If he ever possessed a kernel of self-worth, he either didn’t know it or believe it. Having met his parents, either scenario is plausible – but we all would’ve been so much better off if he hadn’t pinned his happiness on us, and measured us against the arbitrary standards he saw on TV growing up (only his version of “Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver” was “Patty, you have to do something about your kids.”).

John would never claim to be a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. He would be more likely to say something about how he and lesbians can agree on at least one thing. You can probably figure out the punchline. I’ll be writing more about John in the coming weeks because he is me; or, more accurately, I was him, or – something like that. He is the part of my story that comes after “Strays,” and telling that story has helped me unravel and frame a happier, healthier me. No, I am not a man trapped in a lesbian’s body, I’m also not the man John wanted me to be, or tried to be himself. I love to cook, I cry at Jane Austin films, and I listen to Chappell Roan. And, dammit, I am a good wife.

writing is a swordfish desperate for catch and release
its rostrum dipped in ink not
mightier than but equal

to college drowning in small pools filled with shimmering fry 
searching for open oceans from
which to speak and stand 

on ecstasy at Coachella with thirsty holograms swimming 
through smoke and sweat like Pac
twelve years dead and gone 

and live on stage

waiting for the next universe

Ashe Supply Co. was a cafe and roastery just steps from the Siren, but it was closed during our visit as a result of COVID. We ended up at Madcap Coffee just around the corner. Madcap is based in Grand Rapids. It opened its Detroit location roughly a year before the pandemic hit, and it seems to be surviving, even though business was light when we stopped in on Friday morning. These dueling coffee roasters within easy walking distance of one another, and the many murals we passed moving between them says something about the level of gentrification in downtown Detroit. Indeed, a quick Google search shows at least seven coffee roasters (not just shops) within the Detroit metro area. Hipsters love coffee and street art! We took our coffee back to the hotel and texted the valet to bring our car about. The concierge at the Siren told us it would be easier to drive to the museum than it would be to try and catch a bus. As we waited for the car to come, we noticed an older couple trying to cram an awful lot of stuff into their Prius, including coolers, sleeping bags, and other camping gear. We got to chatting, and I learned that they were on a road trip, and that they didn’t want to leave things they obviously wouldn’t need at the hotel (like a camp stove) in their car at the garage because, “Well… You know…” Didn’t they get the memo? Detroit was hip and safe now. Couldn’t they smell the coffee?

We had a short window at the museum as hours were reduced due to COVID. Cecily was an art history major, and when we go to a museum, we GO to the museum, taking it all in, and there was a lot to see at the DIA. The museum features a broad range of work from highly influential artists, including Rodin, Rembrandt, Belini, Matisse, Van Gogh (including some iconic portraits), Warhol, Monet, Degas, Munch, Kandinsky, Cezanne, and Wiley. It literally has something for everyone. We started our visit by learning about Robert Blackburn and Modern American Printmaking. Blackburn was an artist and teacher whose presence served to bridge the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, and it was fascinating to learn about and celebrate the evolution of the man and his work. We would eventually move through the rest of the building as if on roller skates, making sure to hit the proverbial highlights. 

Because we didn’t know if or when we’d be back again, we took our time with Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals. Rivera considered these frescos to be his masterpiece. I think they rival -- or at least parallel -- the Sistine Chapel (yes, I said it). Like much of the museum's vast collection, Rivera was lured to the city by Ford money, having been commissioned by Edsel Ford at the behest of museum director William Valentiner. The avowed communist and Henry Ford, the founder of industrial capitalism, had one thing in common: the belief in the God-like ability of technology to transform and transcend. Spanning 27 panels across four massive walls in the museum's Garden Courtyard, Rivera crafted scenes that would marvel and confound. He created a condensed, yet technically accurate ode to the work performed by workers at Ford's massive River Rouge plant, even depicting tourists who would come to the plant to see vehicles snake through its two-mile long assembly line. He praised the promise of a brotherhood of man united around industry while craftily acknowledging the commodification and exploitation of this labor under the watchful eye of an engineer whose visage is said to be a combination of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Industry's, and therefore humanity's potential for good or bad is seen in opposing panels on the North Wall dedicated to chemistry. The left corner sees the industrial manufacture of chemical weapons, while a beatific (and controversial) baby receives life-saving vaccines on the wall's right side.

My words or the pictures I took can't do Rivera's work justice, and the following video flattens its grandeur while giving you a sense of what Rivera accomplished. It's included here just to tease you. For a more comprehensive study of the murals, the cosmology Rivera created with them, and the controversy they generated, get your hands on Linda Bank Downs' Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals . Then go to Detroit, stand in that courtyard, talk to a docent, and breath it all deeply down.

While Rivera's murals frame and fix Detroit's former glory in plaster, another exhibit at the museum unintentionally channels the city's demise. Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020 showcases the auto industry's creativity and innovation, and highlights the interplay between making art and making automobiles. The show features 12 iconic concept and production models from various Detroit auto makers, 36 works on paper highlighting the design process, and 7 pieces of artwork inspired by cars. As Cecily and I moved through the exhibit, we noticed a turning point where the designers reached for past glory by creating newer versions of classic models, like Ford's 2002 GT concept and its 2017 GT. This "drawing from the past," while, "looking to the future" continues to celebrate an industry that essentially abandoned the city it helped build, and in that abandonment ensured Detroit's fall from the hilltop. Continued labor unrest at the River Rouge plant was one of the reasons Ford Motor Co. decentralized its production process; which, over time, saw factories move further west and farther south. What remains of the industry and the city as a whole is a culture that, like the hotel we stayed at, screams the past into the face of a tumultuous present and an uncertain future. It is urban planning propelled by irony. The fact that we ended our final full day in Detroit at Cliff Bell's, a jazz club first opened in 1935, listening to another Diego Rivera -- this one an award winning saxophonist and composer -- was both wonderful and sadly fitting.

Car culture was perfected in California but it was born in Detroit, just as soul music was born in the Delta but perfected at 2648 West Grand Boulevard a few miles away from the Siren. Everything that made America great in that red, MAGA hat wearing sense could be seen in Motor City. During World War II Detroit was “The Arsenal of Democracy,” serving as the armorer for the Greatest Generation in its battle against Fascism and Imperialism. It also produced racism and redlining; redistricting and riots. The brotherhood the mural-making Rivera hoped industry would birth never emerged when this city was young and formidable. A place with the potential to be eternal became a punchline -- a dangerous city marked by disarray, damage, and disrepair. Detroit was largest US city ever to file for bankruptcy, and is America's most segregated. It was rightfully accused of violating human rights by the United Nations. 40% of the streetlights don't work, there are over 70,000 abandoned homes, and 25,000 vacant lots. I doubt we would let this happen to a city that has given us so much if it wasn't nearly 80% black. 

It’s hard for me to write about Ted Lasso. So many others have delivered skillfully written think pieces detailing what’s right or wrong about the show, like how it serves as a balm for what’s ailing a COVID-ravaged and divided America, or how it reinforces the power of Ted’s white male privilege and fails to amplify LGBTQIA voices. Such articles make my words feel small and redundant, especially since I first tuned in to the show for less lofty reasons. The idea of a folksy yet clueless American football coach rubbing up against English football culture just seemed like a good laugh. I remembered the original promos Jason Sudeikis shot for NBC when they inked the US broadcast rights to the English Premier League in 2013. The mammoth potential to send up two very different but equally ridiculous versions of “football” culture stayed with Sudeikis and seemed too good to not flesh out. ​

Later we learn that Ted’s tenacious optimism stems from losing his father to depression and suicide. He is determined not to quit -- on his players, his marriage, his friends, or his life. Like Ted, many of the characters can trace their struggles to the universal need to define ourselves against and apart from our parents, or to be the people they hope us to become. Getting star player Jamie Tartt (“doo-dooo-do-do-do-doo”) to play the sort of football that puts the team’s success ahead of his own glory is another arc directly related to fatherhood. Jamie’s father James stands as Dick Dastardly to Ted’s Peter Perfect, and in coaching Jamie to “make the extra pass” Ted is really asking Jamie to disobey his father. Owner Rebecca Whelton’s need to tear down the team her ex-husband loves so much can be seen not only as an attack against his unfaithfulness, but also against her father’s infidelity and her mother’s acceptance of it. Nate Shelley’s rise from bullied kitman to a (somewhat) confident coach only happens when he ditches the humble, unassuming persona crafted by his parents and bluntly calls out Richmond players. He completes his arc towards villainy in this season's finale when he confronts Ted and rejects the Lasso Way. He moves on to Rupert as a role model because for Nate, "the ones who love us least are the ones we die to please." Sam Obisanya puts his role on the team in jeopardy after a text from his father pointing out a sponsor’s role in Nigerian corruption and environmental exploitation inspires Sam to protest. Roy Kent, whose signature lines are “Fuuuuuuck” and a cross between a grunt and a growl, lovingly stands as a surrogate father to his niece Phoebe. He comes to realize that his professional life after football carries little meaning unless he is passing his knowledge of the game on to younger players. It is Roy, Jamie’s foil in season 1, who steps in to comfort Jamie when Tartt’s anger at his father boils over into violence. In all of these examples the show is not just comedically sending up sports culture, but critically inverting the masculine expectations of that culture; and, by extension, fatherhood itself.