Post-(insert here)

I cannot write.

Everything feels urgent. I make lists on napkins and Post-Its. I call strangers on Facebook RACIST, all-caps. I do two minutes worth of squats and pray for roller derby. I start podcasts about shitty new-old movies on Amazon. 

The film, "Regarding Henry," is Harrison Ford at his best-worst. Annette Bening cries in every scene she shares with him. The early 90's comic-drama-fish-out-of-water narrative struggles to find its tone and genre in the way early 90's films do. Mike Nichols must have been so proud of the ending shot, wherein the family is whole once more, striding away from a church in the fall, their Beagle pup skipping underfoot. I think they stole the soundtrack from Twin Peaks; maybe this film is actually a horror movie. The moral of the story: wealthy, detached, cruel, white male lawyers, can only find their humanity by being shot in the head and the heart. 

I feel poor on time and cash, rich in sleep, ideas, disjointed motivation. 

I feel white and helpless and so fucking sad. 

My heart beats Trump, Trump, Trump. The sky has been blue most days this summer. My neighbors got a puppy and he is pure. His name is Apollo. Soon he will top 100 pounds. 

My own puppies cuddle exceedingly well. Meryl has learned to spoon. Buster tolerates more and more petting. This stranger on Facebook says I'm stupid and a bully and I wonder if the jobs I apply for will think I'm too radical to work with because I don't hesitate to call RACIST like I sees it.

I kinda don't fucking care.

Last week I scored 1,250 AP exams in an English Lang College Board sweatshop of sorts. The Tampa Convention Center was unprepared for us. Toilets overflowed. The Snack Revolt of 2017 happened because of a banana shortage. DO NOT HOARD THE SNACKS they warned, and so we stuffed them deeper into our pockets, our pants. The heat of Tampa felt like relief after the forced, sewage'd cool of the convention center central air. Everywhere we turned, there was a way out of the building, but only one way back in. Security guards chased us if we went in through the out doors. That's a metaphor. 

It's all metaphor.

I miss my friends. I talk to them most days and I miss them. I miss the America I believed was real before I knew better, though that was decades ago now. I have enough hope left to believe, perhaps, my voice might be heard, even relevant. But I'm afraid it's too late.

I'm afraid. 

I sit on my porch in a chair that leans back until it is parallel to the ground. My husband cooks. He cooks casserole in the summer, the stove burning humidity dry. 

My home is cozy and my shoulders are in pain. The clouds are fat and they look like home. Did you know that Larry Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? Did you know Kennedy defeated Hoover? Did you students in Silicon Valley test better than students in Mississippi?

I want to be Capitalist enough to be Marxist again, I've said a few times now. 

Time to start my second, third, fourth, unpublished book. Life is so good, and I mean that. It is.