Saturation Point: Instagram Posts That Have No Business Being Books

On By erintothemaxIn Random1 Comment

I’m quite active over on Goodreads, and am experimenting with bringing some of my book review stuff over here on this blog, too. Let me know if you like it, or if I’ve lost my whole mind. I’m also going to post this as a book review there.

I’ve reached saturation point with Instagram posts masquerading as whole-ass books. You know what I’m talking about, right? The endless self-help about setting boundaries, respecting your true inner-calling, and blah blah blah.

The discomfit has been rising in me for some time. Self-help used to be straight-forward hokey, like Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear … and Do It Anyway, which has a good message but also a whole lot of shameless copywriter tricks. You could see the exclamation points and know you were choking down a marketing platform, along with the timeless advice to get over yourself.

I’ve read many books of the Influencer Self-Help Variety before. It just so happened to be Pooja Lakshmin’s A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness: Real Self-Care (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included) that threw me over the edge. I feel bad about this, because in reading the book, I quickly come to like her as a person and more or less agree with her political inclinations.

And her basic point is spot-on:

“Self-care” as we know it is commodified and stupid (steamed vaginal eggs, anyone)? To retreat into floofy, femininey products or services for purchase won’t really get at the root causes of what you need. What you need is boundaries, girl! P.S. The world is an asshole to women. We’re expected to do everything, and enjoy putting others first. WTAF?

The problem is, the above can easily be accomplished in a short series of slides, or a quick video. Maybe an op-ed for those who hit it big time. And it is. All the time. By influencers. The author included. But the Penguin Life imprint slid in and decided to make this a pulp-and-cover thing, and got my library involved. Which is where I picked it up.

I have some regrets, because while Lakshmin’s basic message is sound, as a bound book it’s frustrating.

Instead of being straight-forward, hokey self-help, which back in the rugged, pre-social media days was at least honest about what it was doing (giving the author a platform for speaking engagements, where the money is!), it lulls into that luscious mix of glittering generalities and carefully negotiated vulnerability (with micro-doses of trauma dumping) that is associated with influencers. It speaks directly to you.

But also, it holds back. This is frustrating, because there is so much more that could be said. Lakshmin commits the error editor and author Susan Bell warns writers to stay away from–holding back your best material for another time. You’ve got to use your best material now. In this case, Lakshmin repeatedly alludes to having joined a female orgasm meditation cult because she bottomed out with stress, which ultimately wound up being the opposite of the real self-care she needed.

Holy batman, that’s such a good story! We could all learn something there! But instead of telling us that story, she alludes to it what feels like dozens times without ever trusting her readers enough to let us in. We receive an empty preach instead, with a small dose of “trust me, because I’ve been there.” Take us there, hon. We can handle it. We’d probably learn a lot.

Mostly, I found the book frustrating because it seemed an inevitable variant rejection of Lean In, and instead of getting interesting and embracing a dialectic, by which I mean resolving multiple seemingly opposing ideas to get at something deeper, it’s just backlash. In other words, instead of Sheryl Sandberg telling you to be the boss, whatever it takes, Lakshmin encourages you to tell off the boss, no matter how crummy that makes you feel, because you need to rest.

How do we get enough rest and build power? Seize power? How do we change the nature of power? Get comfy cozy with power? How can we do this when women are expected to do more, for less pay, or no pay, and 9/10 are not gonna simply ditch their family obligations? These are serious questions.

Too serious for an approach that mirrors content.

Writing For Democracy Because Our Lives Depend Upon It

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary2 Comments

“Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become.” – Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

I can’t get this out of my head: In fourth grade, my class completed an assignment in which we were supposed to take pictures of our lives, and paste them to individual letter paper-sized trifolds branded by Pepsi. This was 1989/1990, so I took pictures of my bike, my friends, and my simple, sweet life.

Here’s what was interesting about it. The teacher collected them all, and then they went to Russia.

Several months later, we received other trifolds containing pictures of Russian youth. The girl who got mine sent me hers. Her house was small. She sat on a step with a bowl and a spoon. It looked cold, there.

But basically we were the same. I’m sure that was the point. I’m also sure selling Pepsi was the point.

Those were the years that Russia was liberalizing under Mikhail Gorbachev.

I can’t get this out of my head, because when I see pictures of old men being dragged into the winter cold without warrant or explanation, wearing only shorts that may as well be their underwear, pictures of a five-year-old boy being taken by masked agents, videos of protesters being shot, or sprayed in the face with toxic chemicals, or dragged, what I see doesn’t feel all that different from the imagery of Putin’s Russia, and its harsh, deadly crackdown on dissent.

Basically the United States has become the same as Russia or any other autocracy that is willing to harm its own people in the name of the supreme power of the supreme leader. That is the point of what Donald Trump is showing us in real time on the streets and in the schools of Minnesota. He’s showing us who he is. It’s not “like” a repressive government. It “is” a repressive government. And it is a danger to us all, no matter where we live, our citizenship status, and even our political beliefs.

But I also can’t get this out of my head, from “Requiem” by Russian poet Anna Akmatova:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
—-Leningrad, 1 April 1957

I believe writers of conscience have a patriotic duty to describe the subversion and destruction of our democracy, and its murderous impacts on real people, real lives, real neighbors. In doing this we are committing the ultimate patriotism.

So I don’t say casually, we have become quite similar to the Russia of today. Our country is run by a madman who doesn’t care who lives or dies, as long as he has ultimate power. We have a situation where it appears European leaders are more likely to hold American fascism to account than our own Congress and courts.

We are past the point of warning where we are headed. We are already there now. I write this knowing full well that our liberty to write words like this may be gone already, or retroactively declared gone at any point. And I refuse to give up that liberty. For me, or for you, whoever you are.

When the federal government lies, we have a moral obligation to speak the truth. I believe in the promise of a country operating under the rule of law. I believe in the power of love and community to overcome the horrible activities our government has weaponized against our own people. I have zero interest in our country igniting the world war our ‘MY COUNTRY, MINE’ president seems to want.

I believe in the importance of writing words, speaking words, sharing pictures. Whether they are exposing the harms of fascism in our country, or celebrating what a real government for the people is actually all about. We must fight for democracy everywhere, including the streets. And the page.

In Praise Of Minnesota Winters

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

Let me tell you about the lovely Minnesota winters. The deep, unsoothable itch of your skin. The knuckles and fingertips that crack open and bleed, staining your sheets. But the surface-level issues are nothing. I want to praise the way the inside of your nostrils hurt the moment you hit air. I want to offer my respects to the blinding nature of sun on snow. I want to feel the pride of having looked down on people from Chicago who bitch about winter as it comes to Illinois, because honestly?

They have no fucking idea.

“Ice Box of the Nation” is International Falls, Minnesota. The coldest temperatures in the nation are Minnesota. Period.

The people shooting people, teargassing clergy, intimidating Minnesota’s schoolchildren, arresting people regardless of citizenship status, demonizing the Somali community, driving immigrants and people of color into hiding, and terrorizing the whole damn state?

They have NO IDEA what is coming.

You can pop out of Texas. Florida. Oklahoma. Wherever they recruited you (jail? nothing would surprise) without caring that maybe you’re waving more red flags than a hurricane.

You think you’re tough. You can think you can wave your gun around to keep you warm. You know, you’ve got a little face cloth you wear because suddenly you’re into that. But these things won’t work.

There’s actually a severe weather advisory on its way. Because this is Minnesota, fools.

Starting tomorrow night, we’re talking about windchills as low as 34 below zero. This isn’t a matter of bundling up or keeping coffee in the car. But these arrogant folks? I guarantee you they think it is.

Napoleon tried to charge into the Russian winter. Didn’t work. Hitler did, too. We know how Operation Barbarossa turned out. There are some types of man versus nature that no weaponry can overcome.

While I don’t live there now, I’m born and raised Minnesotan. Spent my twenties there. I have always remained emotionally and psychologically Minnesotan. I’m incredibly proud of my community in these dark days. I know they are resilient, however much they are hurting and scared.

I also know they actually know how to deal with winter. Unlike, ahem, their invaders.

So this?

These are hard temperatures. Anyone serious knows windchill is the real game.

Yeah, baby, yeah.

Writing Memoir Will Warp Your Brain

On By erintothemaxIn CommentaryLeave a comment

I’m writing a memoir. I have been trained to think that’s self-indulgent and nauseating, but I’ve also been trained to hate myself because I’m a woman. I have figured out the latter is bullshit, so fuck it. I’m writing a memoir.

It is much harder than writing fiction.

True, fiction demands a higher level of engagement upfront: You have to figure out your characters, your plot, your narrative arc. But once you’re jamming, you can pretty much throw whatever sauce you want on the spaghetti. It’s fun to keep writing your characters in the face of new challenges that change them, but still leave them utterly, unmistakably themselves.

Writing memoir demands a different set of skills. I am prone to writing badly, and it’s quite easy to write badly when recounting what happened. Facts, facts, summary. Dull! Plus I have opinions about things. So many opinions. Too many opinions. (Husband: I’m sorry.) In any case, recounting facts and opinions is not creating emotion though action.

Writing memoir has warped the crap out of my brain. I have begun to deeply probe my actions, my beliefs, and the gaps between what I think I do and what I actually do. This is a big paraphrase, but Mary Karr advises to be gentle to others and go hard on the self. Writing memoir is all about self-accountability. This lens doesn’t go away when I step away from the computer.

But also, there is honesty and grace. To know oneself, to really embrace the warty self, brings a feeling of freedom and compassion. Isn’t it strange to be human? To have these flaws? To persevere anyway?

I Am On My Last Can Of Surly Furious

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

Every time I go home, I buy a six pack of beer. I drink one or two during my visit, and pack the rest in my suitcase. Minnesota beer isn’t sold in the Mid-Atlantic. Not even at Total Wine. I like a good hoppy beer that punches you in the face. There are many Minnesota beers I can recommend to fulfill this objective. Over the holidays I bought Surly Furious.

This morning, I ran. It was warm outside. I wore shorts. I thought about texting my mom when I was done, to show her a photograph of my bare legs, because Oh My God, how is running outside in shorts possible in January when you’re a girl from Minnesota? Well, it’s possible because you move.

But I didn’t text Mom, because I had a packed workday ahead. I needed to avoid distractions. I needed to get ‘er done.

There was a snowstorm in Minnesota during the visit. It was substantial. We cut our Christmas at the cabin short due to the forecast. Our daughter went with my parents. She would sleep at their house, so they didn’t miss out on precious granddaughter time. My husband and I went to a hotel. We were snowed in at the Mall of America. The winter storm warning was so bad they closed the stores early.

Nothing closes the stores early in Minnesota. They are fucking pros at snow.

I was cheated out of time with my parents by this storm. When parents are old, and they live far away, you don’t know how much time you will have. We tried to drive back, before they closed the stores early, but the highways were a mess. It was scary. The snow kept coming down. We needed to turn back.

I develop playlists for running. I rotate through them. I group them by the marathon I’m training for at the time of creation. This morning I listened to my “Minnesota Marathon 2022” playlist. It’s all Prince, Soul Asylum, Judy Garland, and Bob Dylan. I pressed shuffle. As I ran across this one curve a few miles from my house that is so achingly beautiful, “Purple Rain” came on.

We all remember certain days. I remember the day Prince died, and seeing people on the streets outside First Avenue nightclub, lighters in the air and singing “Purple Rain” together. I moved in 2009. April 21, 2016, was the first day I felt truly homesick for Minnesota.

I got through the workday. I was just leaving to pick up my daughter from school when I saw it:

The video of masked ICE agents shooting a mother in the head.

The neighborhood in the video looked so much like blocks that I have lived on, that I had to look up where it happened, to be sure.

I am on my last can of Surly Furious. I don’t know that I’m homesick. But I am not at home, and I am thinking about home. Psychologically, emotionally, home will always be Minnesota, though I love where I live now. I am calling my parents to ensure their medical appointments aren’t in places where they might need to consider the possibility of more ICE agents hiding their faces and/or shots fired. Their mobility isn’t so hot.

The last time I was in Minnesota was five days ago. Friday. I made a point to wear my “AMERICA NEEDS IMMIGRANTS” T-shirt in the airport, because while I’m kind of over performative activism, the reality is, our war-mongering government is focused on demonizing and terrorizing a specific group of people at home (immigrants, and in Minnesota’s case, Somalis) while simultaneously threatening to invade and/or depose the leaders of multiple nations. I want to be counted, and I want to demonstrate–we need to continue speaking up. They want us to be too afraid to speak up.

Other leaders and other countries have declared enemies within, deployed masked agents, and declared intentions to invade other countries. We know how these behaviors end. (Hint: It’s not just talk.)

To see our disintegrating democracy streaked with the blood that belonged to a six-year-old child’s mother in the snow in the sunshine in the snow in the sunshine in the snow in Minnesota in Minneapolis in a neighborhood breaks me. There are stuffies in the passenger seat of that SUV in that video, and when the ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in the head the stuffies were right there and they saw the whole thing.

I pray for my friends, my family, my country, my world. I only wanted to see you underneath the Purple Rain. I have loved living my whole life in a country that strives to be a democracy, and that strives for peace. These are the stories of peace and democracy we have told ourselves our whole lives and much of our history reflects those stories, and even when they don’t, people could peacefully protest and organize and vote. The concept was rule of law, not rule of man. Our American ideals as written in the Constitution are beautiful. I want that country back. I want my home back.

We Should All Be Worried About The State Of Feminist Infrastructure

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

“The initial Trumpean protests were largely unfocused and self-satisfied. They had limited structure and deficient leaders–if they possessed leaders at all. The Women’s March crumbled away. Black Lives Matter devolved. Serious organizers sat at the helm of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and material change was won. The upsurges of the 2010s and 2020, when George Floyd was killed, amounted to spectacle and little else. Some laws did change on the criminal justice front, and progressive prosecutors were swept into office, but there was little thought given to the long term, to building durable organizations that would outlive the boom times. Movements cannot rise on froth alone.” – Ross Barkan, “Facism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics”

In these waning days of 2025, there is much to be worried about. I am not advocating unmitigated despair: There is also much to be joyous about in the confines of our own lives, if we are willing to look for those reasons to smile, to love, to be (and we should!). But if we’re talking about the republic of the United States, the democracy we are at least on paper supposed to be, we are not doing too well. An authoritarian is president; Congress has all but abdicated its authority; the judiciary, stacked by that same authoritarian in his first term, seems to consider itself along for the ride.

I am a lifelong feminist, and a feminist organizer along with being a writer, duh. And so, I take an explicitly feminist lens. When I lay the facts side by side that feminist infrastructure is weak, and that we are in this authoritarian moment, I grow very concerned.

Because women’s movements are one of the chief tools we have to fight against autocracy. The reason why repressive governments crack down on women and sexual minorities first is not just culture wars, it’s a mechanism of control. For organized women are very powerful.

Do you know it might be a crime to look up and watch Pussy Riot videos in Russia? This is not some random thing. Dictators hate feminist women. They are terrified of us.

Recently, a friend who I respect very much, who participates in organized feminist work, and writes, but what is unique about her is her willingness to take radical direct action whether or not people support her, this friend posted on social media about the weakness of the feminist movement. She is right to be concerned. I had replied at the time that I saw it, too. That we are weaker today than we were ten years ago, when there were people marching in the streets, when there was a cultural feminist moment. We are in the midst of a cultural backlash with trad wives and super skinny heroin chic all back. Hell, we can’t even teach women’s studies in a number of the universities anymore (and of course these attacks are quadrupled on DEI, and women of color–Black women in particular have been disproportionately fired from the federal workforce by unqualified Elon Musk backpack dudes).

But also, we are in a time where are organizations have dwindled greatly. Root causes include a variety of issues, including but not limited to infighting, lack of sustained investment, and the false mirage of so-called ‘leaderless organizing’ (which is never as egalitarian as it professes to be, since when there is no leader, the unspoken power that is wicked powerful takes the wheel, but everyone denies it at the same time). What’s more, we now have a president who wants to decimate the primary sector that supports structured feminist organizing, which is 501(c)3s.

To be very clear, I don’t think a non-profit or a set of bylaws is what makes a movement, but I also think we unabashedly need structures. I want women in particular to get serious about tending to and building our feminist structures. If we’re going to fight, we need to methodically build capacity.

Some are doing this work.

But as of right now, it’s not enough to break through. Given the overwhelming power of organized women in fighting back against autocracy, that makes the low-infrastructure state of feminism everyone’s problem.

Are Art And Activism Incompatible?

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

I’d just quit my job as an officer of the National Organization for Women (NOW). What did I do the next morning? I pulled my laptop into bed, and launched this blog. This sounds fairly anticlimactic, but it was a huge deal. I had pulled my old blog offline after being elected action vice president. Too much stuff was getting scrutinized by too many people.

The truth was, I felt horribly stifled. To be a spokesperson for the nation’s largest feminist organization was awesome, exciting, and an honor–and a lot of the time, it really fucking sucked. I was an activist and an artist. At the time of my election, just after my twenty-ninth birthday, I had been in a phase of life when I’d been deeply expressing my artistic side. But all that changed when I moved to Washington.

At the time I told myself that abandoning my writing was about the climate surrounding me. In Minneapolis, I’d been surrounded by artists. Those were my people, my friends. In Washington, I was surrounded with feminists and activists and political types. In Washington, what do you do? was the transactional question when you met someone. The question really meant this: what power do you have, and how can that benefit my agenda?

So, I basically stopped writing for three-plus years. I didn’t have the time to do it, because I was a workaholic. But I also didn’t have the frame of mind to do it, because as a primary spokesperson for NOW, I knew that everything I said would be taken as a reflection of the organization. There were many people out to get that organization. And the organization also had bitter infighting, over a variety of topical and identity fissures. One glance outside the invisible lines and the grenades would come.

Today I have found a healthier balance with work, life, activism, and art. I still apply myself to more endeavors than almost anyone I know, but that’s also just kind of what I like to do. It’s who I am. I like to do stuff. Life is short, and I like to live it.

I kept the same old crutch from my NOW days, though: I felt like my feminism and my writing had some serious incompatibilities. While I am most definitely a feminist writer and these things are intertwined, there is a tautology in movement life. There is much saying of the same things: a climate of stifling agreement. Even though in my current activist posture there are no longer decades worth of NOW resolutions of policies and platforms (many of them predating my life) I have to reflect throughout my words, as when I was in leadership there, I still find myself at times contending with the deep and incredible pressure not to challenge group wisdom as it exists in movement spaces. There are stories to be championed. Stories that fall outside those lines are often branded harmful.

The problem is, that’s not how life works. It’s certainly not how writing is supposed to work. You need to go for the truth, no matter how damn uncomfortable it is, or you’re writing absolute schlock. You need to let the words get away from you. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in What Is Literature?

“A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work.” (160)

I was afraid to write freely. Might I write outside the lines? Would it get me cancelled?

I’d also felt a certain self-imposed pressure to downplay the work that I do as a writer, because would that mean that I might be perceived that I’m not committed to my professional leadership roles?

I’ve been in the process of getting over this. I’m beginning to see that I can integrate my life more, and that it’s okay for my nonfiction writing self and my fiction characters to reflect the messy that is real. I’m beginning to see that I can be an artist and activist at the same time, and that these things are not necessarily in opposition to each other, but rather, that they offer different outlets for expressing my desires for a better world.

One more Sarte quote from What Is Literature?:

“The ‘committed’ writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that once can reveal only by planning to change. He has given up the impossible dream of giving an impartial picture of society and the human condition.” (14)

As I’m starting to see it in my newer integrated conception of myself, both art and activism are tools. They are not the same tools. I am not a writer in service of anything but truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be. I still get to be a feminist when I do this. I’m also starting to understand it’s on me, too, to model the change I wish to see regarding the non-productive pressures for group-speak in activist spaces. Finally, I’ve stopped hiding in my professional life how much writing matters to me, personally, outside of work. These moments are liberatory.

This is journey of abandoning my own dogma (“my art and my feminism are in conflict with one another,” as I’ve said for years), and woo-ee, is it refreshing.

A Trip To Paris With Pictures And My Commonplace Book

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary5 Comments

During my first semester of my MFA program, one of my instructors assigned us to keep a commonplace book over the course of the semester. A commonplace book is a file of quotations. It had to be at least 25 pages, so I had to be a bit of a bunny with our assigned reading. I couldn’t slough it off until the last minute.

More than three years later, I’m still going strong, although I’m no longer doing it in a document in exchange for class credit. I now have a small Moleskin notebook. I write in it by hand. No one is assigning me this. I just love to do it.

Please meet my commonplace book, as it records my readings during my stay in Paris over the past week.

“I always say that you can not tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading can never do.” – Gertrude Stein, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

I picked up a copy of Gertrude Stein’s “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” at Shakespeare and Company, just behind Notre Dame. I read it in one day. Admittedly, this is the day we flew home from Paris, so I had time on my hands. Let’s talk about the above quote, because not only is it the ultimate validation for my quest, it’s fascinating. I reread it several times as I transmitted it to paper. She really spelled “can not” as two words the first time, and “cannot” as one word the second time. This was a woman of great intentionality. I refuse to believe she made this choice casually. What does she mean?

Notre Dame at night. We stayed at an apartment so close by, sometimes you could hear her bells.

I read Gertrude Stein’s poetry, if you can call it that, during the course of my program. It was inscrutable. It made me want to craft shoe leather out of the roof of my mouth, anything, anything to get away from her words. But “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” was pretty good. I’m glad I gave it a try.

“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.” – Gertrude Stein, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

Ouch, Gertrude. A little close to home, yes? Me and my tragic unhappiness and sorrows, and sloppy prose. Alas. We went to Musee D’Orsay and the Louvre. There are no little artists featured there. I’m not much of a picture-taker, though. I delegate that to my husband. He loves a camera. Thus I took no pictures in the Musee D’Orsay or the Louvre. But I did take this photograph of a coaster at Les Deux Magots, where James Joyce used to drink.

What kind of idiot looks at fine art for several hours on two separate days, and takes no pictures, but does take a picture of a used coaster presented with her glass of red wine? Alack, a little artist.

I read two other books during the trip. Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84,” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” Technically, I started Murakami at home, but the book is bigger than the telephone directories they used to give you for free. It was totally genius. The two quotes from the trip that I’ve put in my commonplace book I’ll withhold for now, as I may use them in a project I’m working on.

I also still have a bit to go with “What Is Literature?” Perhaps 70 pages remaining. Maybe 60. I read that immediately after finishing “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” I never got up from my window seat during that Air France flight. Why worry about blood clots when there is the threat of brain clots? These are the two books I purchased at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. I worry that, like the maracrons purchased at the airport, I shouldn’t let Sartre go more than a few days if I hope to get back into it. It will be hard to finish that book in a not-captivity situation, but I’ll do it.

Things they do better in Paris, beyond the accurate “EVERYTHING” include public toilets and a genuine encouragement to give to the poor. This encouragement to donate sits inside the front gates of the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. I didn’t take photos of these graves visited: Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Frédéric Chopin. I was too busy looking at them.

Cemeteries are among my favorite places. I go in a cemetery a half dozen to a baker’s dozen times a month, and have been doing this for years. They are great places to still the mind, to explore, to run. Thus, Pere-Lachaise is the place we visited that was my favorite. No contest. I can’t believe how packed together everything was. Rotting grandeur is my favorite vibe. This one had it.

“You must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.” – Gertrude Stein, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”

It is possible to lean on one another in life, and in death. This is what I see in this image.

Reviewing my phone, I took seventeen photographs during my seven days in Paris. The first photograph was of kohlrabi for sale in a market. My small-town Minnesota grandmother loved kohlrabi. As they say, wherever you go, there you are.

And that was me. Reading my books. Writing down quotes. Not taking many pictures. Eating croissants every day. Never looking once at social media (oh my God, yes). Drinking copious quantities of red wine. Not having Thanksgiving dinner because our family is vegetarian anyway. Rather, some nice wine and cheese.

This is what a nice Thanksgiving meal in Paris looks like when no one in your family eats flesh.

I was struck, landing at Charles de Gualle, and walking through customs, how different it felt to be in a country without fascist leadership. I felt much freer and safer than I did walking through U.S. customs on the way home. You never know what kind of shit they’re going to pull on the abortion people, and when.

But in Paris? I didn’t have to think about it.