SOUNDOFF! It's Your Wonkette Mental Health Check-In!
I hear y'all are wilding in the comments.
Everybody! How are we feeeeeling! Me, I have been headachey all week, and crabby, and I announce things in the chatcave like "btw I am in a FOUL MOOD, so if I snap at you, it is definitely me," which I think is nice but then everyone gets VERY QUIET. Here we are, finally having stopped the lunatic marauder at the top of the government, and instead of fixing the GLOBAL CRISES, we're in this stupid holding pattern, because Joe Manchin woke up Joe Manchin again today.
The rightwing media is not sitting down and shutting up; the 1/6 Treason Caucus is not hiding away in shame; we're about to get a whole bunch of Obamacare-style Tea Party town halls about the bad Black people doing cancel culture by teaching that US history had slavery in it on top of the gerrymandering and laws saying legislatures can just throw out elections they don't like; the pandemic is not over yet, and I will never in my lifetime understand the people saying you shouldn't wear a mask because ??? ... PROFIT!!!
Everything seems kind of overwhelming and pooey and if they're trying to make Joe Biden into Jimmy Carter, "existential malaise" would certainly fit.
And I hear y'all are wilding in the comments.
Honeys of love, I get it. We are a broad tent here; some of you actually defend Joe Manchin! There is going to be interpersonal aggravation and bitchery, and often, it is from me! I'll just remind you please that when you find yourself looking for a reason to be mad at each other, or if somebody's very user name fills you with inchoate rage, get a hold of yourself, save the dunking for Twitter, because that shit catches like B.1.617.2!
I've gotten several nice notes lately from beloved readers who are logging off, and they're allowed to. They need a break. I know they'll be back when they need us. (And they will.)
I can try to make you feel better, if first I heal myself. Because this week and this month have been both scary and enervating, and we don't know how to get us out of this mess. It's hard for us in the writers room to remember to bring you nice stories to cool you out, but even if we found three a day, that'd still be like 10 stories of garbage people raising your blood pressure and ours. Most of it we really do need to pay attention to. Like Bill Clinton's war room, you let nothing go unanswered. Some of it's just stupid people we feel better for mocking. Wonkette will never be Upworthy.
Still, let's all try to remember that in St. Molly Ivins's First Rule of Holes, we have stopped digging. And that counts for a lot.
But let's do this. Let's each and everyone of you (okay, let's one in 100,000 of you) volunteer to throw a WonkMeet. Let's make plans to look forward, and let's see us! The first one's Friday, June 18, in San Francisco! Fukui will be your host. Then there's July in Portland, Oregon, and Spokane in August, which I'll be skipping because my niecelets in San Diego turn 16, so San Diego, let's throw you one there! In September, Paul and Holly will welcome you to the Berkshires. And sometime this summer, I'll invite you Montana bitches TO MY HOME. I have always wanted to throw a weekend campout meetup in my yard. Let's get crunk! (I do not know what that means. Is it good? I bet it's good.)
Now please turn to your neighbor and give the sign of peace.
"Peace be with you." "OH YEAH? FUCK YOU."
I Am Worried About My Mom
This one stays at the top a while, so NEW POSTS ARE BELOW.
We arrived home from Mexico late Thursday night, after an 18-hour panic attack through two international airports. (Denver International had bright shiny new posters, not even faded, warning against BIRD FLU and MERS. I wish I'd taken some pictures for you, but my hands were full of daughter.) I was in a low-grade panic, because I didn't want to bring coronavirus home to my 81-year-old dad. "Leave it," I told my daughter as she went to return the yellow teething ball the baby in front of us had dropped. "Leave it. Leave it. LEAVE IT!" I had seen so many comforting pictures of empty airports; neither of our airports was like that at all. I think everyone was trying to get home at once after Trump the night before started shutting down travel. But at least we got home before this ...
Thank you for the vacation, dear ones who pay my salary. It was wonderful, until the end.
Friday morning, my mom — this is my mother — got the results of her biopsy and news that her surgeon would be happy to take her breast off this coming Wednesday. She doesn't mind the breast. It will make it easier to shoot arrows, like an amazon. She lives alone, out in the country, on the 13 acres she bought to retire to after she got her then-57-year-old schoolteacher ass kicked by a proud member of the Manhattan Beach PD. She needs me to be with her. And I've just traveled internationally, and there are no tests.
I shouted at my senators, Jon Tester and Steve Daines, on the twitter machine. I need to get down to my mother. There are no tests. Tester's state director, Pam Haxby-Cote, called me within an hour; their phone lines were all being forwarded to two numbers since the Senate went to recess. They had just taken 43 messages off their VMs. She knew that I knew that I have no symptoms; she knew that I knew I haven't been in contact with anyone who's tested positive, because nobody has tested positive, because there are no tests. She chatted with me quite a while considering she had 42 other messages to return. She was pretty wonderful, truly. She knew that I knew she could not help. Montana has 1000 tests. We have to make them last.
I just wanted to know that I had gone to the top, and the top had listened. I mean, not Steve Daines. Obviously. That guy's a choad.
We will stay here for 10 days and then complete our self-quarantine for four days in the RV as we get to my mother. In addition to the breast cancer, she's worried it's spread to her spine; she had a TIA a month or so ago; her heart is fluttering so hard that when she lies down on her bed, the bed shakes like one of those "magic fingers" sex motel beds. She is having some bleeding. She's a perfect storm.
And now the news says asymptomatic people could be shedding more of the virus than people with symptoms. And two weeks honestly isn't a long enough quarantine. And there is no way for me to see if I am bringing my mother a warm bath of death.
There are no tests.
Shy read me the news that the Utah Jazz — the visiting team! — got 58 of Oklahoma's tests that day last week after that young man, with the hubris of all the dumb young men, touched everyone's microphones and then turned up sick. Oklahoma, according to USA Today, has 250 tests left.
Neither of my parents watches Fox News; they've got the MSNBC or the CNN on all day. But it still wasn't until I got home that they started listening about how serious this is. I thought the cable nets were on panic mode? Or just "contradict the president" mode, which I guess is the same thing. No, Dad, after today you can't go walk dogs at the shelter anymore or go to your Friday AA meeting. No, Mom, that doesn't mean you have to live your life not even looking at strangers (though I have a vague wonder how many of our Dark Ages started with a plague and a concomitant fear of the other); "social distancing" means just ... keep your distance. But we all have to stay home for now, just for a few weeks, to keep it from spreading. My mom yelled at me, upset. I let her. A few hours later she called me back, soft and sweet. She was sorry she'd been mad, but she was just worried.
I'd made her worry. I should not have made her worry. I should not have made my mother worry. I shouldn't have.
"You obviously know more than we do, and you get the information faster," she said, correctly. "When ..." she asked haltingly, "when will there be tests for anyone who wants one?"
I laughed, hollow mordant laughter.
I told her Mike Pence had promised a million tests by the end of the week, however many eons ago that was in Trump Time, and some time after that we achieved about 10,000. Then he promised four million tests? And maybe we're at 20,000 now, I don't know, the lies keep coming, and I only know they're lies. I told her Elizabeth Warren put out a plan seven weeks ago on public health and testing, and a second one a week and a half ago about public health and the economy. I told her that Trump said that "four weeks ago" nobody had any idea this was happening. Time is a flat circle. I told her it was a tossup whether we refused the World Health Organization's tests "to keep the numbers low" or because he was invested in the lab that got the contract. I had only seen one woman report it; Snopes says it's false because he sold the stock which he did indeed own; Snopes does not consider the fact that DJT Holdings (his trust) provides zero information to the public and that he's more breathtakingly crooked than anyone we've seen in our nation's history. I'm not an investigative reporter; I don't know how to follow up on it; I just don't know. If venality (putting Mike Brown at FEMA because he'd raised money), laziness, and willful ignorance caused Bush to ignore Katrina, I can't even begin to sort out the 50 strains of shit that make up the whirling miasma that is Trump's response to COVID-19.
So we're sitting tight for the next 10 days. The Walmart was wiped out of canned goods (the Mexican foods section completely intact) but Safeway was totally normal. And this is where I ask you for money. Not to buy me a trip to see my mama, or to pay for my belated prepper syndrome; you guys pay me a salary for that.
This is where I ask you for money because far too many of us are about to be laid off. Our waiter friends, our events friends, anybody who works with the public. Walmart is cutting hours in its 24-hour stores. Everyone will be cutting hours soon. A big hit is coming to our economy, to our friends, to their livelihoods. And so for us, your Wonkette, which some of you need now more than ever (and if you are taking a mental health break from us, I get that too!), we need to spread the cost to more of you, two or five or 10 bucks a month across many more thousands of people, so the people who need to cut us out of their budget don't have to feel bad about that too. They've got enough to worry about without feeling guilty about five dollars for fucking Wonkette.
Evan and Dok and Robyn and SER and Liz and Jamie and Michael and Shy and I will be here for you and with you, working as always safely from home, to entertain you and inform you and keep you company. Except when I'm working from the passenger seat of our RV.
Please click below to donate if and only if you can; hit the button to make it "monthly" if you are able; and don't forget to choose "paypal" or "stripe" to actually make the payment go through. We love you really a lot.
YES, PANIC.
By which I mean come see us tonight, Vancouver, and tomorrow, Seattle!
My mom, God love her, has a touch of Marianne Williamson to her, a vestige of her 30 years with healing crystal friends in Southern California. She doesn't have Williamson's anti-science crazy, but she holds the idea that if I talk about my paranoia, my deep suspicion verging on certainty that His Lunatics have already started their shooting war, I am putting it out there in the universe and creating it as fact.
I always yes her. Yes, Mom, yes, I know. Of course, yes. I never argue that we need to be alert to the dangers around us, and that refusing to name the monster will not make it go away.
I am supposed to plump you up here, to assure you that in the case of that shooting war, we will have the military on our side, and we may. But we won't have the small town police departments, or even the Portland PD. I am not supposed to let the shooting war enter my brain at all, or I will ideate their bullets with the 3D printer of my mind. I must be a cheerful warrior, pure of heart and without fear; paranoia is bad for readership, unless your readers are stupid wingnuts desperate to SELL GOLD and BUILD THEIR BUNKERS for the HOLY RACE WAR they've got their sad old boners for.
I have been on vacation I think a week now, and the paranoia hasn't receded a bit.
My husband's grandparents passed down to all the hundred cousins a share each in a 60-year-old cabin in the middle of the ocean in the Puget Sound, or, I'm told, the Salish Sea. There is no electricity. You boil the water for the coffee, and the crab you just caught with a turkey leg, and the dishes. Everything takes a long, peaceful time. You do puzzles at the massive table for three days straight; you take a hot tub stoked by a wood fire and filled with water from the sea; you make sangria and wave to the boats; you do not, like an idiot, check your phone. It isn't until the ferry ride back to land that you look at Twitter and see the president wants to nuke a hurricane. How silly. Everyone knows nukes are for asteroids, and perhaps a volcano. You can not fight wind, you dope. You must call her Mariah!
This vacation has not heartened me, or strengthened me for the (metaphorical) fight, but it has been a cessation from the constant. The constant embarrassment. The constant whiplash. The constant bad-faith whipped-up bullshit. The constant Mitch McConnell, and the constant Trump, more and more and more of it each year that used to be called a "day." And that's as much as I can ask for at this moment in the alternate timeline that produced President Biff. I don't need to be vigilant for another five days; I can look out the goddamned window and try to stay off Twitter; Evan and Dok and the kids are being eagle-eyed for me. Well, I can ask for more: I can ask for more money, as last month and this month have been low-tides for donations, and with one more like them -- no, I'm not going to threaten, or ideate that into fact.
If you are in Vancouver, I hope you'll join us tonight, Thursday, at Spanish Banks (look for the banner!), let's call it 5:30 to 7:30, since we got an RV park way the fuck out of town. (But we'll doubtless stay late with you.) And if you're in Seattle, please do come and see us tomorrow (Friday) at Golden Gardens, let's call that 6:30 p.m. We will potluck, and in person I won't bum you out or get my melancholy on you, it wouldn't be good host-man-like. Instead we will laugh and be gay; we shall potluck and dance. (We probably won't dance, unless you have a feeling you want to interpret through movement, oh fuck it, we totally will.) Whatever it is, we'll do it together. You, knowing you are out there, are my strength.
Aloha nui loa.
Your editrix (me)
She Don't Lie She Don't Lie She Don't Lie SPOKANE
Wednesday night, bitches, come see us!
Spokane, Anacortes, Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle! We are loading up the Wonkebago with gasoline and children and dogs and sausages and watermelon salads (watermelon, lime zest and lime juice, and SHY'S BEEZ HONEY!), and coming to see YOU! Join us, like a common partygoer what loves to be fed and drinked and kissed on their faces!
Spokane, Wed., Aug. 21 (that is tomorrow!), 5:30 to 8 p.m. at Audubon Park, 3405 N. Milton St! May you bring us a dish to share? Only if you feel like it! May you bring us presents of pot? Well we are law-abiding law-abiders, so yes you fucking may.
Anacortes, Thurs., Aug. 22, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Washington Park. Look for the children and dogs! And the Wonkette banner! Same as above!
Then we are taking an actual vacation and leaving Evan in charge because he is that perfect late-30s power-hungry for the job! And we will see you again in ...
Vancouver, Canada, Thurs., Aug. 29, 5:30 to 8 p.m., we don't know where! Kindly to email rebecca at wonkette dot com with your suggestions of a nice park that is transit-friendly and that we can drive our longass housecar to and grill the tofus.
Seattle, Fri., Aug. 30, 6-9 p.m. We don't know where here either! Email me the same. Maybe that Golden Gateway (?) Beach Park we hit up two trips ago, or maybe a different place that is different!
There, now I am on vacation, suckers, and that means seeing YOU! (Unless you don't live in those four places, in which case you can congregate together HERE in this nice OPEN THREAD.) (WHOOPS I forgot I was going to put this up at End of Day, but fine, have an open thread anyway!)
Send money for all the freelance posts we will be needing extra of while I am out, and also the gas and the grass. (We are married, no ass.)
