Official Announcement:
I am on the board of Electric Literature, a fantastic non-profit with a tight budget that has been trying to up their freelance payments for ages, and are currently running a big donation push to make that possible. Because I can only buy so many gems, I’m boosting donations 2:1 up to a total of $15k, and I would love it if you were so moved to drop a few cents in the bucket.
Okay, everything else in the column today is wild.
Except for my most-recent parenting column, which is not wild, just great.
Also this piece, now with a fascinating interview, written by a genius.
DID I MENTION I DID A PODCAST WITH DANNY ABOUT FRIENDSHIP FOR THE CUT! We recorded it last week and I loved it and it took ninety minutes and here are their best 23 minutes!!!!!!
You’ll remember that on Sunday we watched BOTH Endgame AND Game of Thrones, which left Steve and I…no longer REMOTELY in the mood for sex, which we were trying to get in before my period started (ah, marital romance!) So we set an early alarm for Monday morning, as one does, and Sansa, who is upset enough by RESPECTABLE NIGHTTIME WEIRD GROSS NOISY BEHAVIOR BY MOMMY AND DADDY, was so traumatized by this that once we exited the bed, we discovered she had literally surrounded it with used tissues she had yanked out of the trash and stress-chewed.
So, you know, a mixed start to the day.
When I opened my computer, I found so many lovely replies to my previous newsletter explaining my Twitter shutdown, all of which I read and appreciated truly and tremendously. I know that nothing will ever convince Cambridge Twitter that Kensington Palace has taken literally no notice of my existence, and that the hack was likely just a really-hepped up Wills/Kate stan, but I promise you, my devoted readers, my mention of lawyers several weeks ago was due solely to a lesson learned in a much, much earlier situation for which I had sought legal counsel, and not, you know, because an owl in a wig claw-delivered me an angry scroll from the Queen.
Now, let’s Reddit:
TERFs continuing to self-own diligently:
You’re gonna be great, I promise:
This absolute anti-vaxx tit (Roald Dahl was v e r y shitty as a man in a million ways, though I still love his books and read them to my kids) takes the most important thing Dahl really did (drastically increase measles vaccination rates in the UK) and shit on it:
Background: I have this friend Mandy who I guess what you'd call "militantly obese." She has claimed in the past that it's a civil rights issue and that she is "genetically fat" just like people are "genetically black" (her words, not mind but you can see her mindset).
Recently Mandy's husband said enough is enough is enough and told her that if she didn't at least make and effort to change he was leaving. Mandy was diagnosed with being pre-diabetic and called me sobbing both because of what her husband said and the doctor being "anofher link in the chain."
This was about January and Mandy and her husband have been on a calorie restricted diet and he has lost...probably 20lbs and Mandy has actually gained weight. Mandy was using this as "proof" that her issue was genetic.
I was helping Mandy unload groceries the other day and came across a huge Tupperware bin the back of her suv. I assumed she wanted it unloaded but as I moved it, the lid came loose and it was packed to the gills with treats, most opened and half eaten. I asked her about it. She got super defensive and told me to mind my own business. I asked her if this why she's gaining weight. She told me to fuck off. I texted her husband because in the heat of the moment I was furious she had spoken to me like that.
Her husband has filed for emergency separation so Mandy can't ruin him financially (she has threatened this in the past) with the aim of divorce. Mandy is blaming me, am I the asshole here?
THE LAST PART IS GROSS SERIAL KILLER STUFF, SKIP IF NECESSARY
Yesterday seemed like a fine day to watch several serial killer documentaries, the best of which, in my opinion, was 2012’s The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, which is on Netflix. Dahmer, or rather the mythology of Dahmer, has always been fascinating to me, because he’s “that guy who had the head in his refrigerator and ate all those guys,” when to me the story is truly “that guy who carefully hunted almost exclusively gay black men and other gay men of color, relying on Milwaukee law enforcement’s racism and homophobia and general lack of interest in truly getting to know the community.”
I have tweeted about this before, but the racial nature of the killings gets mentioned shockingly rarely (Dahmer’s father devotes a chunk of his mea culpa book to defending his son from the charge of having been a racist, which, once you already know your son killed and ate a bunch of people of color, is a real choice.) The doc did a slightly better job on this, and it spent a lot of time talking to Dahmer’s neighbor Pamela Bass, whose experience of sudden fame and horror and ongoing trauma really personalize a story which otherwise seems like a Stephen King novel.
A constant refrain of mine, when discussing Dahmer and the Milwaukee PD (not Det. Pat Kennedy, who I think really built a true rapport that helped convince Dahmer to do his actual best to help ID his victims, via missing person reports, etc., which by all accounts he really devoted himself to) is that they HELPED Dahmer return a naked, bleeding, terrified, 14 year-old to his apartment, where Dahmer almost immediately killed him:
Two women, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, discovered the victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, after he had managed to escape from Dahmer's apartment, naked, bleeding from the rectum and heavily under the influence of drugs. They called 911; Balcerzak and his partner Joseph Gabrish were dispatched. Though the Laotian immigrant had been in the country for ten years and spoke English fluently, in his drugged and brain-injured state, Konerak was unable to communicate his situation to authorities. Dahmer found the boy with the police and convinced them that the boy was his 19-year-old lover. Smith and Childress recognized the boy from the neighborhood and were convinced that Sinthasomphone's life was in peril. They communicated this to the officers and tried to save the boy. However, Balcerzak and his partner returned Konerak to Dahmer's apartment. The officers noticed a strange smell in Dahmer's apartment, which was the decaying corpse of a previous victim in the bedroom, but made no attempt to investigate. Later that evening, Dahmer sexually abused, killed, and dismembered the boy.
Balcerzak's and Gabrish's positions and roles within the Milwaukee Police Department were terminated after their actions were widely publicized, including an audiotape of the officers making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the "lovers". The officers had never checked the boy's ID or verified his identity. The officers did not check Dahmer's identification; had they done so, they would have discovered that Dahmer was a sex offender previously convicted for molesting Sinthasomphone's older brother. The city of Milwaukee later paid the boy's family a sum of $850,000 to settle a lawsuit over the policemen's handling of the situation.
Both officers later appealed their termination. Judge Robert J. Parins decided the case and ruled in favor of the officers, allowing them to be reinstated.
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
What a chipper note to end on! But YOU, you I love very much.
n