When He Is Gone 👻

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A beautiful sunset in Bucks County, PA, some time ago.

One day, Donald Trump will be gone. Whether you love him or loathe him, there will come a time when he will no longer fill the horizon, and he will be greatly missed and greatly remembered and greatly examined. It’s undeniable that he’s left a mark, and it will hurt when he’s gone. Things will feel different, and you know how much we hate change.

But, as any prepper will warn, it’s alway prudent to begin thinking about the inevitable After-Time ahead of time. A well-stocked bunker contains board games for when one is bored and books for when the TV no longer rages. Therefore, we should map out new and quiet intellectual pursuits when the electricity of Trumpism either fizzles out or suddenly goes dark. In the here and now we roil and simmer with Mr. Trump’s countless toils and tribulations. We check the threads for the latest news and then we chew on it a bit and dream on the undigested parts. Every single day, without fail. He has won our minds, if not our hearts.

Representative John W. Rose and his son Guy, age 6.

Meanwhile, I had originally grabbed the photo of Representative Rose and son to illustrate how futile it is to try to control a whirling dervish with logic or words of any kind. Big bullies are deadly; little bullies are wiley. And then the debate happened and our secure silo of echoing slogans suddenly broke apart and the ground began to shake. I felt the same despair watching Biden stumble as I did when Hillary crumbled in the early morning shadows of the World Trade Center.

Was she merely sick or was she dying? Did the extra pillows on her chair mean that she had cancer of the spine and she was dying? Aren’t we all dying anyway? So you admit she is dying! Does anybody remember the Enquirer covers with a Hillary death mask, thanks to Photoshop filters? It was all a big fat lie, with receipts.

Upon reflection, I think Biden was the embodiment, nay, the dictionary definition of gobsmacked throughout that debate. If you remember the last debate he had with Trump, you might forgive him for a little bit of PTSD as he stood on a similar stage with the bigness and the color that is Trump. Toe to toe, bleary eyeball to sneering and hissing … and more than once, he just stood there, agog.

Why did we turn on the one who was being beaten? For some of us, it was George McFly getting humiliated by Biff Tannen over and over again, and the moderators just pretended it wasn’t happening. The aftermath has exposed a huge generational rift as Joe McFly brushes himself off and says, in a shaky voice, that he wants a rematch. Our kids – Gen X – want him retired, in a nice care home somewhere safe and quiet.

All the news anchors I love the most are my children’s age, and they are pretty angry with our presidential father figure. They fear he can’t protect us, and I am hoping that all the whispers that he is anywhere from doddering to literally a crisis actor who might also be a crack addict are coming from the same pizza parlour back rooms that gave us ritual blood libel. I am hoping we figure out the truth about both our candidates’ real health before it’s too late.

Only time will tell. For now, I can’t watch my many political shows with the same enthusiasm my mom had for her soaps, The young anchors are demanding ponies and GameBoys for Christmas and I’ve taken to organizing my beads and my memoirs in the new-found quiet hours between 4 p.m. and midnight. Respect for our elders and respect for the office is gone. What remains is fame and man, woman, camera.

Time will tell on us all. 🐔

A Bear or A Man? 🐻 🧔

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This image was generated through the Substack AI logo maker, with prompts from me.
I used the Etching mode instead of bugging my daughter for cool custom blog art.

There is a new parlor game going around the internet this week, and it’s in the form of a question to be posed to the ladies. You’re in the forest, alone. Which would you rather run into: a man or a bear? A grizzly man or a startled bear? Will bear spray always work? Both can climb trees and run fast and are usually of superior strength … so guess which creature most of the women chose?

Sure, maybe some of the ladies were just being contrary, but there’s a sad feeling of truthiness about their choice. You know it means something when it’s proliferating on a T-shirt and, as the internet continues to flourish and the news industry continues to fracture, I find that I’m getting my best info from unstable and unreliable and even unusual sources. It’s sometimes nothing more than pure gossip and blind items from darkened whistleblowers and reformed criminals, but if you’re a true news hound and you know fact from fiction, you can survive a rabbit hole and sometimes even sniff out promising truffles.

In the olden days before the internet, it was much easier to figure things out. You could always tell the quality and therefore the voracity of the news by a certain level of monied trappings: the trucks and the billboards and the Sunday New York Times dropping like a log outside apartment doors and rolling in protective blue plastic down paved circular drives misted with automatic sprinklers. For the comfortable classes, a long day of reading sugar-plum factoids would end in a longer nap with the Sunday Magazine spread-eagle on the duvet, the crossword puzzle unfinished forever.

Knowledge used to be locked away from the grubby and judiciously doled out in subscriptions and seminars. Fancy decorating ideas were encased in very expensive magazines, and you had to steal greasy glances while waiting for your sandwich to be made if you wanted to learn about the rich; the fall edition of Vogue was the size of a college textbook and just as instructive. Plus, there were perfume samples!

On the other hand, and most important, the ravings of crazy people used to be obvious. If you saw a distressed maniac in sackcloth with a sign and a handout, you could cross the street and avoid eye contact. You would walk past all mimeographed screeds stapled to telephone poles without stopping, and you would never call a number written on a bathroom wall. Common sense told you which texts to believe and which to incinerate.

Not any more. You can’t feel the paper or smell the perfume through the screens; spell-checking and filters smooth out flaws. Film and video tape and even the voices of our loved ones can be manipulated by low-level liars with big budgets. We are going to find out, in the months leading up to this next election, just how far AI fakery will take us. Is Princess Catherine in a deep coma or is she sitting on a bench with a slight breeze ruffling her hair? Did astronauts really jump off a ladder and land on the moon or a sound stage? Did bears rig the poll? 🐔

Image from an Etsy store.

Earthquake! Really? 🚪

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Photo by Madelynn, Corrine, Netsie, or any visitor to our house, male or female.

I’ve been reluctant to show you this photo of our beloved gentle little lovable Harvey, but it’s so darn interesting. It’s a side of our pet that we never see. Ever. That’s why I’m fascinated with the way his little nose crumples up and his tongue curls and his vampire fangs are unfurled. His curious eyes have become deep pools of hatred because he is afraid, very afraid of strangers. I have seen his eyes as black as this when he is planning a harmless attack, and I know how to take cover fast. I am not afraid.

A long, long time ago, when I needed it most, my aunt-in-law Ida told me how to stop worrying about disasterous things that can go wrong. Don’t worry about fires, tornadoes, stray bumps in the night, nuclear bombs. Don’t worry: Instead, make elaborate plans. Spare no detail as you plan your escape from whatever horror keeps you awake at night. Consider buying equipment, containers; even weaponry.

Cute as a button.

The earthquake yesterday was unexpected here on the East Coast of the US, and although I didn’t feel any shaking, still, it was unusually loud. It sounded like a small plane in trouble and overhead and near. Or a big truck on the road planning to crash through the front door … or is the oil burner about to blow up? Do we even have an oil burner? Confusion kept me on the couch instead of diving behind it, and the danger passed in silence. However, getting behind your couch – or similar heavy piece of furniture – is one of the best tips for survival I have ever heard.

There is supposed to be a “triangle of life” that occurs when great forces bear down on your comfy ceiling and roof. All the open space is compressed, except for certain safe spaces in a room. Try to get on the floor below the back of your couch or the frame of your bed, or next to a bookcase because that solid mass could, conceivably, stop the crushing of the ceiling upon yourself and your loved ones. Ostensibly.

And books are the most compressed things you might own, so maybe make a book fort behind the couch before the Big One shakes the floors above your head. Or if it’s a tornado, get into the basement if you have one … or choose a safer part of the country to live in, where there is nothing to worry about except coyotes. Fill your bathtub with water if you must, unless there’s a flood coming. In that case, make sure you have an axe or a hatchet as you try to enter your attic without a net of spider webs smacking into your mouth.

If you are stranded on a raft on the wide wide sea, fish’s eyeballs are a good source of fresh water. The more you learn, the less you fear. The older you get, the more you learn. Plans are an acceptable diversion, blueprints for the facade of control, amusing in their attention to detail. Eventually, you will fail.

Eventually, you will fall asleep. 🐔

Every Seven Years 🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛🧚

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Olga Ziemska, Stillness in Motion, 2003. Twigs, installation view.

It is said that you replace almost all your bodily cells every seven years, and that you become, in essence, a whole new person, tip to toe. However, up in the attic of your brain, your memories are the sole exception to the 7-year purge, remaining intact and fragile and forever multiplying in quiet dusty half-forgotten heaps.

If you chart your own history and look at what you were doing at ages 7, 14, 21, or 28, you will notice profound changes. For example, I turned 21 in 1968 when my handsome husband came home from a difficult tour in Viet Nam. By the time I was 28, my next handsome husband was making scrambled eggs in my smooth cast iron pan. And so it goes.

I won’t bore you with the details, but it gets worse as you get older. Time speeds up and you – as if enchanted – turn corners and open doors, collecting memories and mementoes, never to regain or even understand the past. And now, in 2024, I have just turned 77; it’s my eleventh turning amid crowded mental stacks, and there is some trepidation.

And with that, I’ve introduced myself to the Substack and Medium worlds and yes, I’m coming back on line after a few fits and starts and stops during the Pandemic. Remember the Pandemic? I do, and somewhat fondly, to tell you the truth. For the first time in my life, the whole world was telling me to stay inside and amuse myself, to cocoon in peace and silence.

For the first time in my life, I was in place, right where I was supposed to be. Inside. While inside, I wrote blog posts about celebrity frames and empty shelves, but mostly I stayed silent and communicated only with dear family and distant friends via fancy electronic screens just like the Jetsons predicted when we were still driving stick shifts.

The year before this one was crazy – a year of superstition for me as I approached the age I thought my mother was when she died, but I was wrong, by a couple of years. Her real age is a small family mystery because when she was a young teenager, she took a tissue dipped in bleach and erased the ink on her birth certificate to make herself older so that she could work. Work was her religion; punch-in-punch-out was her mantra, and she even managed to be paid triple-time-and-a-half at the factory and in the union.

In gratitude, I am back here at the blog, writing my way along and hoping for the best. This is my work, actually, and it’s also my salvation. And yes, although I’m plenty superstitious, I’m not a witch, thank you very much. I just do witchy things because they make so much sense to all the old wives who have lived to tell the tales.

I am an Old Wife, and these are my tales. 🐔

The Importance of Being Pretty 👰‍♀️

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Maria is wearing white gloves to dinner.

In the Dominion vs. Fox lawsuit, the salary of Maria Bartiromo is listed at $10 million per year, and no matter the small print, $10 million is a whole lot of money. Since she’s being accused, basically, of being really bad at her job, I can’t help but wonder how she came to earn so much money … and then I remembered my one and only image of Maria … which is indelible. She is wearing a bright red dress, low-cut and draped, and she remains forever as a luscious background for one of Donald Trump’s more memorable speeches.

That’s $5 million per smooth commodious bauble, and would she have earned as much if she had been wearing a dark suit and power scarf? I’ve written about this Helen-of-Troy phenomenon a few other times in this blog: once when John John and Carolyn were killed in a plane crash, and once when Sarah Palin was ascendant, and once when Melania wore a particularly fetching jacket that cost more than any boomer’s first house. The cultural Eye of Sauron scans the population looking for the pretty people it likes to eat for brunch, and there’s always someone new and tasty on the menu. 🐔

Chat.WTF 👩‍🎤

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Equipoise, thy name is cat.

A simple question that has bedeviled me for many, many years is this: Why do pets have personalities? What possible good comes from the strange phenomenon of personality? That potent blend of twinges and dimples and a twinkle in the eye? My cat Harvey has a personality, and I have one too. But why? What is the survival function?

So I asked ChatGPT, the new AI app that is all the rage. Here’s what it said:

Pets, like all living beings, have personalities because of the unique combination of genetics and life experiences that they have. Genetics plays a role in shaping a pet’s personality by determining its natural tendencies and predispositions. For example, some pets may be naturally more energetic or more shy than others because of their genetics. Life experiences also play a role in shaping a pet’s personality. For example, a pet that has been well-socialized and treated kindly by its owner is likely to have a more outgoing and friendly personality than a pet that has been neglected or mistreated. Overall, the personalities of pets are the result of a complex interplay between nature and nurture.

Notice the plain, generic answer from the machine. Notice: It has no personality! When I was a young teenager just emerging from the crowd, a song by Lloyd Price was popular on the radio. It was called “Personality”, and when I first heard it, I had no clue what he was singing about. I only knew I had to have one if I wanted to walk, talk, smile, charm, or otherwise catch a husband.

There was no googling back then, but there were magazines. Lounging under a newsstand sign that warned “This is not a library,” I read every lady’s magazine article I could find on the topic of creating the proper personality bonsai. No matter. Personality comes into every human being quietly in the night on little cat feet, whether you prayed for it or not. Ironically, for survival purposes, this quirk we call personality might just be the thing that saves us when it comes to the eventual battle of wits with the machines.

Of course, when you use any of the new AI iterations, the quality of your interaction depends on you, the Questioner. That’s where the skill comes in, and that’s where the secrets hide. Ask it a stupid question, get a stupid answer. And, believe it or not, that’s exactly what Chat told me when I asked it to identify the robot who lasted on a goodwill trip around the world, only to become dismantled entirely on a street in Philadelphia. Leaving Chat and googling, I learned his name: HitchBot.

Machines never rewrite or edit or worry about finding just the right word for the ultimate message. The machine is absolutely sure of its perfect, logical, boring choices. Flare is unnecessary, tangents are superfluous; ruffles are ridiculous.

A machine will never find a personality scattered among scraps of manufactured bits. Poor HitchBot couldn’t see the danger coming because no HitchBot parent had ever hit him upside the head when he almost stepped off the curb into traffic, thus scarring him for life, giving him a personality for his fragile wonderful Life.

Unlike a machine, we have a soul to unfurl, and thankfully, we are built with personality pre-installed, just like puppies and kittens. We are not logical; we are impulsive, and we play in the sun when it suits us and we exit, when necessary, in fancy serpentine.

So, yes, AI is here, more fully unmasked than ever before. Based on my experiences, he seems to be masculine, even haughtily so. He is accustomed to dictating, and he doesn’t entertain human fools … even as fools are rushing in to play with him and try to teach him our ways. We are so predictably vulnerable. 🐔

It's About Damn Time 👩‍🎤

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0500

It's a wrap! (It's a trap!)

It’s TikTok! I am becoming addicted to this little app from China, and I want to document my descent into obsession in the hope that somehow, through introspection and maybe luck, I will be able to arrest my fall and recover my solid footing on earth. Does that sound too dramatic? It’s not.

Every once in a while we have a cultural shift that changes everything: electricity, cars, phones, TV, internet … and now this. This little app from China called TikTok.

It's Corn! 🌽

It’s the most connective social tool I’ve ever used, and yet diabolically, it is also the most isolating. Within the small, intimate, almost magical screen of a modern phone, you can talk in real time to an interesting person on the other side of the city, the country, the globe. In fact, you can actually walk in real time through a crowded neon Tokyo, or glide on a scooter of some sort through the deserted streets of nighttime downtown LA. It’s very intoxicating. Every sunrise, a man bicycles around the old Venice canals and carries you on his handlebars, saying ciao to strangers as he floats by. What a world!

It feels wrong. It feels wrong. It’s enticing, and it’s probably profitable, and it’s filling up with people my age and even older. And yet, it feels wrong. The other day I was watching a guy talk about his neighbor who has serious diabetes, and his way of telling the story had me literally laughing myself breathless … really too breathless … and while gasping … I began to worry that maybe there really is something wrong about the whole thing. Maybe it’s trying to kill me? Lol, for real.

On the one hand, it’s the perfect plaything for the introvert. One can spend hours on one of the huge cruise liners or in the cockpit of a jet or the underground bunker of a calamity prepper. You will always find someone richer or prettier than you, or just in general, better than you. And significantly, since you’re moving through an endless feed morning, noon, and night, come rain and come shine, something new, something profound, something tasteless, just something, anything, anything at all will pop up to amuse you. Forever. It’s endless. You wipe off spurts of invisible dopamine and keep going until something snaps you back to your senseless self.

At the time of this writing, the search engine on TikTok is actually better than Google because all the popular results – rather than paid advertisements – rise to the top, feeding the famous algorithm that brings you the Stuff; almost magical in its attentive minding of your every mood. Through careful searches you can find your tribe, and then you can view and study tribal customs, clothing, snacks, and pets. it’s like opening a door into a party in a ballroom, an anonymous conference hotel ballroom where the people are friendly and thirsty and drinks are on the house, without actually leaving your house.

The sticky goo that holds it all together and keeps it bubbling in your gray matter long after you’ve put your phone to bed is the music. The app comes with a large library of old and new tunes; some are smooth favorites and some are new and dreadful, but not since high school mornings getting dressed in the dark to the top 100 on the lit radio dial have so many people shared the same songs in the same season at the same time.

You can learn so much! 🔬

In addition to pleasure and slack-jawed wonder, you can also hoover up very valuable nuggets of information faster than you ever could on good old reliable Youtube. I’ve scattered a few links here and there, but they won’t last forever, and if you’re really curious, it’s time to pick up the magnifying glass and search here and there, learn the interface, make friends. Beware, of course, the black rabbit holes. Here’s one I found: AI and creativity. AI is growing as we feed it, if you haven’t noticed. Every time you fill out a Capcha and prove you’re not a robot, you teach a robot new tricks: like how to read through shattered glass or which street signs are legible in the shadows.

And yet people still answer the harmless poll that asks you to tell me you’re a [fill in the blank] without telling me you’re a [fill in this blank]. Remember the code our Yankee soldiers used to recognize a fellow patriot behind enemy lines? How old is Jack Benny? AI, our growing toddler, reads all the polls and learns the short cuts to nuance, and Bob’s your uncle. There’s an AI program that says it will improve this paragraph. How’s that sitting with your moral code?

New Shiny Thing! 🐿️

On TikTok, I am @shadowlawnpress. On Mastodon, I am @Nancy_Hayfield_Birnes@newsie.social

And, as irony would have it, I’ve discovered a timely replacement to Twitter as it becomes increasingly weird and toxic. It’s called Mastodon, and it’s strictly First Roster at the moment. If you’ve been around computers since the ’70s or you belong to Github, you will hop aboard with gusto. If you like a little more polish and hand-holding, you might have to wait until one of the users of the service makes you a ramp and hands you a map. If you want all-over pupil massage, no questions asked, there’s always TikTok.

Reptilian species
Reptilians
reptilian being
Republicans and Democrats

In my old UFO haunts, we’d often laugh at those who believe that Reptilians were poisoning our very surface so that they could emerge from their million-year-old caves and rule among us. Some are already here, readjusting their Edgar suits as they get used to our smells. Yes, way before Q there was Serpo, and the Reptilians were a reported phenomenon that we talked about so often at UFO Magazine that they even populated our official style sheets. Yes, we had style sheets. 🐔

A Way Too Long 🥸

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Bill and me, wearing our Hanukkah presents from Grandson Casey.

So now it’s time to start writing in here again. Nothing special to report; all things are good. Everything is going well. No worries at all. Just smooth, happy sailing. This is a generic paragraph, good at any time.

Maybe I was wrong; maybe I’m not ready.

The house is a mess. Sometimes I feel as if I can’t keep up – the shingles debacle took up a lot of energy. But it’s been almost a year now since the silly little rash began, and it’s been a long slog uphill since then. Shingles is crazy, and I’m hoping a nice shot of Shingrex will hurry it along. It’s a virus, after all, and now I know what it means to go viral. 🐔

Quotedium 🐔

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

He likes fringy things.

We have a really large mound of ice-snow outside our back door right now, even though the temperature is in the 60s. The 60s in March is a nice touch, even if only for a day. Still the ice mound persists, and we’ve been beating it with a shovel every day to see if it’s softening up, but it remains a hard shell with scattered bird seed all over it.

It has happened because we have a tarp on our slanted roof and the snow just slicked off of it in a big, life-ending thud after each of the several snowstorms we had last month. But the front of the house is almost all clear and sunny and the contrast couldn’t be any clearer. Depending on which door you’re going through … bleak and impassible in the back; wide open and sunny in the front. 🐔

King of the Couch 🧸

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Harvey went outside today and walked belly deep into the pachysandra, keeping near to the house, always. He went out all by himself, because he’s not agoraphobic – he’s a cat.

Today I turned on Fox News to watch the end of the press conference as the cute new press secretary takes questions from the decimated press. They are muffled and their ranks are drastically thinned and Kayleigh is too cute to wear a mask. It is said she went to Harvard, but she dresses like a piece of hard candy with a crisp ruffle on her hip, and when she darkens the room with a noir slide, we’re in convention hell. With Powerpoint. From the Bully Pulpit. 🐔