One thing that has been interesting to me is how people have reacted when I have told them about our decision to end our marriage and how hard it has been to love Josh with all my heart and to not have him love me back in a romantic way. Almost everyone has said to me, with an air of protective emphasis, “Oh, but Lolly, you deserve to be loved that way! You will find someone else who can love you like that. You deserve to love and be loved in that way!” And I agree with them. The thing that I find interesting is that these are all straight people looking at me, another straight person, and being able to see the injustice of me not experiencing true love. They see that it is wrong that I have never felt that love. They feel it. They can put themselves in my shoes and realize how hard that would be for them. They can see it because it is presented from a straight perspective.

the sun was going down. i was late for a wedding, or a funeral- i didn’t know which- and a stern man in a slim black suit was shouting down at me from the street, “hurry! no one’s going to wait for you, and you don’t know the address.” but i kept leaving things on the marble benches of the platform, my coat or my heels or my notebook, and running back down to get them, and when i did, i’d find myself reading the walls again.

some of the poems i knew and some of them i didn’t. in the fading light they rearranged themselves into new shapes, in your slender slanting hand, and on the steps were things like “whales sing because / they remember the future,” and “is the bed on fire?,” and “dear jess: i couldn’t stop thinking of you.”

back above ground: my best friend walking, windswept, across a nearly-empty parking lot. he looks at me and says “i waited, but i guess i don’t know the address, either.” i tell him i want to talk about memory but he interrupts, says he tried to take my picture, but i don’t show up on camera. he says it’s because i’m such a coward that even my shadow wouldn’t stay with him. and i want to argue, or hug him, or cry, except you’re there, suddenly, leaning on the tailgate of my ex-girlfriend’s subaru, and you are smoking a cigarette and fiddling with your glasses and smiling.

“how does it feel?” i asked. “being dead, i mean.”

you shrugged. “your guess is as good as mine.”

“is it at all like being a flower?”

Amazon brings in over 34 BILLION dollars every day. Even a one-day boycott could mean massive leverage for the strikers – especially if the boycott coincided with one of the most profitable days Amazon expected to have all year, as this one does.

I was willing to let the “we must secure” headline go as an accident.  Maybe.  It’s horribly tone deaf, and possible that it wasn’t checked, and I could conceivably believe that it was an accidental co-incidence that happened while writing a statement that was already pretty racist and idiotic…  Maybe.  Like, a 1 in 5 chance that it wasn’t deliberate…

But that “fewer than 13 out of every 88″ ?  Fuck no that wasn’t an accident.  That’s not possible.  Whoever wrote that statement is a full on Nazi planting a dogwhistle to his buddies.

No one uses 88 as a basis.  “fewer than 13″ ?  You could just about 1 in 8.  Or give a percentage.  Or give a number out of a hundred ffs…  But no, you use 13/88.  Why?  Because 14/88 is too obvious.  but 13/88 is close enough, so that when you punch it in to your browser to see what % that is, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words as the top hit.

This.  Is.  Insane.

Of lesser insanity is the insane math they use as justification. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) apprehends over 1,100 people a day crossing the border illegally. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses entry to 7 known or suspected terrorists every day, 50 every week, and 2,500 every year.”