HEY THIS IS A SUPER FUN TIME TO BE A PARENT, AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT?

Spoiler: It’s fuckin’ not.

And since Senate Republicans smugly shot down protecting the right to birth control right after we all had the honor of listening to Kicky Kicky Ball Boy, the Very Specialest Boy Ever to Grace Us with His Luminous and Wise Eminence, mouth off about what a waste of time it is for a woman to be anything but an adoring, silent wife and mother, silently raising as many babies as he wants, making bread silently from silent scratch, never asking for anything (more silence, girl! Where’s your head?) but his bimonthly (not guaranteed) glance her way and occasional remembering of her name (plus up to 75% of the children’s names!) as she watches him, silently, like a nervous border collie awaiting the next command and/or punishment, I THOUGHT WE COULD HAVE A LITTLE TALK ABOUT THAT.

Most of our culture is still clinging by its claws to the bedrock assumption that every household has a stay-at-home parent to deal with sick days, snow days, half days, Covid outbreaks, doctor’s appointments, playdates, extracurriculars from straight out of the womb, regular 9-5 business hours meaning no one has time for basic offline life logistics, least of all the people working those shifts, the crushing expectation of constant child-enrichment and engagement and no unsupervised time but don’t forget to serious limit and oversee any screen time, every single thing costing 2-3 times as much as it did three years ago when everyone also needed two incomes to make a go of it because go fuck yourself, that’s why (especially you, Joe Biden! Ha ha it’s not your fault but everyone’s gonna blame you anyway!), including child care of any type, school hours that don’t cover work hours, spring break, winter break, mid-winter break, and the looming eldritch creature called summer break (and don’t start, because I love my kid, but it’s three months with nothing but camps that cost more than cars, waiting lists, nannies and babysitters that cost more than trucks, and zero jobs, not even teachers, that take three months off every year. I used to think parents who looked forward to fall so school would start were the ones who never wanted to be parents, but I get it now, it’s brutal).

And on and on. Yet most households do not have a stay at home parent. What they have is (usually, not always) one parent who is working full-time and also constantly struggling to cover the enormous amount of labor and time that goes into raising children and maintaining a household—even if that one parent is married to someone who is working full-time as well. It’s mind-breaking shit, and there rarely seems like any way out or through.

Especially when suddenly, the news and social media and a bunch of rich white assholes who enjoy life as a perpetual child, pampered, cared for, shielded from harsh truths, and indulged in their loud but totally naive and bizarre opinions by a small army, only some of whom are paid, are screaming at us that we all need to have a bunch more kids on the chop-chop, and seem totally baffled as to why that hasn’t made the continent tilt with all women bolting toward maternity wards.

Almost every parent I know has an all-access unlimited strugglebus pass to this journey. It crosses just about every demographic boundary—I assume the very wealthy can pay their way through it, but what the fuck would I know about them. And I hear so often, from so many people, online, offline, in group chats, everywhere, that it didn’t used to be this way, that it shouldn’t be this way, that we need “a village” again, that if only we had a village like our parents and grandparents did, life wouldn’t be this way.

Now, I’m not gonna sit here tutting from my high, high throne of…also being totally unable to balance all this, thus failing both work and motherhood daily, and say they’re all wrong. It didn’t used to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It is completely unsustainable for it to stay this way, particularly if the billionaire toddlers of the world magically expect more children out of us groveling morlocks down here in the dripping hell-vaults of real life, not less.

But I think most village-less people raising children in the developed world right now are seriously misunderstanding what “the village” is/was and the price it demands, misremembering or misinterpreting our own childhood memories, or both. Or maybe just optimistically longing for a fucking break and imagining a system that never existed, at least not in a way that would actually solve the problem.

First of all, and this is no kind of original thought springing from my own unique and precious brain like unto Athena (who you just KNOW was a major behavioral problem in her preschool class. Just ask Pallas), but it must be said anyway: “the village” was literally always women’s unpaid labor.

OH NO BUCKLE UP I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT GENDER! BUCKLE UP AND PLEASE KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES.

The thing is, I don’t say the village was always women as a criticism or even necessarily a complaint. It’s simply a fact. You can apply morality to it or not, but the fact won’t change just because it’s uncomfortable. Until extraordinarily recently, the “traditional” division of labor used to leave almost all the assistance dreamed of by my generation as labor to be performed, freely, cheerfully, promptly, unceasingly, and preferably invisibly, by women.

But don’t worry! As St. Mitch used to say, it still does, but it used to, too!

Whether we’re talking about grandparents and aunties and older siblings (and yes, the occasional male relative as well. Often one, who for one reason or another they weren’t allowed to discuss openly, didn’t feel at home with the traditional male side of the family) helping out with the next generation or an actual village in which unrelated people band together to share the load for everyone, it still ends up, most of the time, being a gilded metaphor for a vast network of women providing physical, mental, and emotional labor without acknowledgement or payment.

Many of us remember weekends and even whole summers at our grandparents in our own childhoods. We remember lots of help for our parents and daycare being somewhat unusual for us. Those childhoods, for Millennials on up, were both not that long ago and eons ago in terms of social evolution. For reference, women got the right to use the financial system without a male babysitter five years before I was born.

So I think, I hope, that deep down most of us recall that “grandparents” usually meant Grandma and not Grandpa, at least until the male children were old enough to fish or golf or play pool or nail things to other things or witness a sport or whatever activities Grandpa was going to be doing anyway.

And yes, yes, I know your Grandpa was super woke and wonderful and worked 200 hours a week while doing everything domestic to perfection while Grandma rested in luxury or ran about town on account of being the best man who ever lived and he tenderly nursed all the grandbabies at his own breast.

But generally speaking, for most of us, Grandpa was often still working outside the home. Particularly before people started having babies much later in life. When I was born, my grandfather was 53, and he’d been a somewhat late father himself, at least for his era. My grandmother was only 48. When my son was born, my father was 62 and my mother 64. As the younger grandchildren come, they’ve hit or are approaching 70. They’re not even comparable stages of life. At 53, in the 80s, a man could be expected to be at the height of his career. And while women often worked outside the home in every era, no matter how hard certain influencers dream otherwise, they were so discouraged or, depending on how far back our little wayback machine wants to take us, barred from fields with silly things like career trajectories and big rewards and high incomes, that the person who could make time for kinkeeping was the one who always had.

So much, much more often than not, it was Grandma that we remember taking us in so our parents could take a breath. She raised the OG children, after all. Her ability and interest in constantly nurturing others was expected, and a lot of society’s structures relied on not examining that expectation too closely. FUN FACT, STILL DO!

Much like “holiday magic” was also always women’s unpaid labor, because apart from (sometimes) getting the tree and (sometimes) assembling toys, the cooking and decorating and cleaning and gift-buying, gift-wrapping, card-sending, organizing, hostessing, inter-familial conflict-resolving, child-wrangling, and planning were and very, very often still are, the responsibility of AFAB family members.

Likewise, in the multigenerational households so many of us are able to fantasize about as a better system because so few of us in our working years now have ever experienced one, it’s the daughters-in law, the aunties, the mothers, the daughters, and especially the oldest, the female cousins, the sisters and sisters-in-laws—and the female members of friends’, neighbors, colleagues’ households—who do most of the work of helping and supporting and organizing and maintaining social bonds.

I’ve spent a lot of time on this point without a whole lot of joking or yelling because it’s most often AFAB folk I hear longing for relief and community and just a little fucking help—and the sheer intensity of that longing creates a TRAGIC misunderstanding of what actually happens in a village.

This “traditional” village we all think we want does not give Mama a break. It is built, stone by stone, on a deep and pervasive assumption that she doesn’t need or want one.

When people imagine this village, they imagine someone being there to lovingly and respectfully take on some of their burdens now and then, which would give them space to live and rest and breathe and think for ONE GODDAMNED SECOND. Maybe even do something for themselves for a change! And then they can return rejuvenated and sane and go back to every day life just worrying about themselves and their immediate concerns.

But that’s not how a village works at all. You only get help because you gave it and will continue to give it. And the more help you get the more you owe. Yep, Granny is there to help with the new baby. And Mama will be on deck for her grandchildren, too. Just like she was for her siblings or her cousins or her neighbors’ children or whatever random fucking baby waddled by. There is no break, not just during childrearing years, but ever. It’s a system that requires a constant cycle of favors, and anyone who doesn’t pay in isn’t going to get much out because the village will hate them like fire and boy howdy if you think social media cancel culture is bad allow me to introduce you to kitchen table gossip because HOLD ONTO YOUR FUCKING HAT. Oh, you don’t have a hat? Maybe you shouldn’t have read that book instead of taking care of the hatmaker’s sick twins twenty years ago, hm? Or, you know, frowned when that hardworking haberdasher said you were pretty just because you were nine. Now you don’t get a hat, and neither do your grandchildren, because the village has INFINITE GIGS OF RANDOM ACCESS GRUDGE MEMORY.

Now get back to folding dumplings. The kitchen table comment section has disabled replies.

So welcome to the village! Your exhaustion isn’t just the twenty-odd years of your own child’s life anymore; you only get help with your own waddler if you’ve helped with everyone else’s from just about the minute you could , and will continue helping with everyone else’s for the rest of your life UNTIL YOU DIE OF A MASSIVE STROKE WHILE MENDING A BLANKET WITH A BABY IN YOUR LAP. (And yes, you guessed it—that is truly and actually how my great-grandmother died. Because after raising six kids and an almost mathematically infinite number of grandchildren and great grandchildren and a few neighborhood kids who had no one else while running a chicken farm for forty years, she was still minding the newest baby up until the millisecond her body gave out.)

And don’t think men were or are just totally outside this system, because they most certainly are not, even in the most “traditional” structures. They might not (mostly, generally) have had to manage the favor-economy themselves or worry too much about holidays or take on the majority of domestic tasks, and certainly in many cultures men had more time to themselves and the privilege to enjoy it, but in any given village, the men were still fixing shit and helping Bob build a shed and networking for money or advancement or both, or coaching or running for office or being part of the Lions’ Club or whatever Grand Order of the Water Buffalo society was available in their era and location.

But the majority of what my generation is crying out for help with isn’t building sheds. It’s the work traditionally done by women that women no longer have the time to do alone. A generation of AFAB people who were raised to forge a full life for themselves just like men…and no one really ever mentioned that the male version of that life tacitly included a spouse who would take care of everything at home. Someone also forgot to spend literally any time whatsoever talking to AMAB folk about other modes of life and work and love and connection they might explore in this brave new world we really, really, hoped would be a bit less shitty than the frightened old one.

And it’s never just the childminding, then or now. It’s remembering who’s sick and who’s dying and who’s bereaved and who’s destitute making an appropriate pain-casserole (or other culturally-relevant misery-carbohydrate) for all of them. It’s petsitting and tutoring and skill-sharing and fixing every item necessary for life and advocating for local issues and raising money for them. It’s knowing every birthday, anniversary, holiday, christening, retirement (for Grandpa only), graduation, birth, death, and never forgetting to acknowledge them the way each villager individually prefers it so no one gets insulted and withholds hats. It’s remembering that when you were broke, Helen gave you half her chickens’ eggs for months so now that Helen is about to lose her house you gotta do something for her or the whole fabric of society is meaningless and also the next time you’re drowning the village will watch from shore and whisper Helen to your slowly-sinking carcass. It’s giving a vast galaxy of rides to a vast galaxy of people: to and from hospitals, airports, relatives, funerals, games, events, schools, voting booths, churches, banks, the corner shop. It’s opening your home and wallet, often indefinitely, not just to your blood family should any of them get injured or ill or lose a job or flee from abuse or be accused of a crime or do that super gross inconvenient thing where humans grow old and need radical care and some needed it from birth, but to anyone in that network of lifelong trades, favors, labor, and support who has been there for you at any point in your life, and then, honestly, probably a few people who didn’t because they did help your spouse or your spouse’s friend or your spouse’s friend’s child. Or maybe everyone knows that person is just one of the few in every generation everywhere who was born a full-on chaos goblin who can’t handle life on any level and now it’s your turn.

Because it’s always someone’s turn.

Now, do we do a lot of those things even in our highly-individualistic society? And are AFAB partners, GENERALLY SPEAKING, still the ones expected to handle all that kinkeeping and emotional labor but also a full-time job that pays well enough to live in this silly-ass world? Yes. Of course. And of course men are taking part in this sphere more than ever, but statistics concerning second shifts and domestic labor are still insanely lopsided.

But as life gets more and more complicated, we just let more and more of those old responsibilities slide, or focus them on biological family alone, or simply refuse to spend our precious free moments grinding for everyone else on the promise of our going around coming around at some point. Or just never have kids at all. But in a village, there’s no such thing as childfree. You’re not exempt—you were signed up for this system of social debt management at birth and someone took care of your shrieking colicky mucus-ful baby butt, didn’t they? If you don’t have kids of your own, you have so much more time to help with Helen’s, right?

Fuckin’ Helen.

I just don’t think working adults these days want to do all that—because it doesn’t mean any real reduction in workload. Most of the time freed up by a village’s support ends up being spent in supporting the village, because everyone pretty much needs some kind of help all the time. And the mental load of remembering and modeling the needs of that huge network of people (even a small family has a large web of connections) sit on the brain stem with the approximate weight of the fucking sun.

And it actually increases the workload in terms of years spent in the clownshow plate-spinning depthless hellpit of child-herding. We like the idea that until we have kids, our time is our own. We like the idea that once the kids are moved out, our time will be our own again. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. Even older generations do—Boomer grandparents statistically spend much less time with their grandchildren than their parents did. We want a village to help us—and HOLY SCREAMING FUCKBLOCKS SO DO I—but I see very few people pining to spend their entire lives helping the village. Because you can just…do that, you know? Anyone can. You can start doing favors for your neighbors and I can almost guarantee they will start looking for ways to pay that back or forward.

And we’re all just so tired by the end of the day.

But once you get that cycle going, another problem arises. Another one that is CRAZY EASY to forget if you’ve never actually lived in a multi-generational household or a tight-knit small town. And it’s this.

Every single one of the people who help you in any way, from your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s son’s former roommate all the way down to Helen with her shitty blackmail eggs, now gets a say in how you run your life.

They get to have an opinion on every aspect of how you raise your kids, and also their opinions on the general quality of those kids’s deepest natures, which they will not be shy about sharing. They do not and will not conform to each and every parent’s hyper-specific guidelines for gentle parenting, baby-led weaning, screen-time limits, balanced whole-grains diet, avoiding allergens and pollutants, accepting the identities of those children even if they don’t understand them, or even not actually hitting children in the face for sneaking snacks. They’re going to do what they think is right, what’s easiest in the moment because they’re watching someone else’s kids tomorrow and that list of rules is even longer. And more likely than not, as soon as you can be trusted not to immediately chainsaw yourself in half the second an adult back is turned, they’re going to turf you out on your own with zero supervision apart from other kids who’ll ask if you want to see their dad’s super cool chainsaw before lunch.

This is, in fact, how a lot of abuse and adult-on-child bullying happened in the parts of we middle-aged folks’ childhoods we don’t get quite so nostalgic about. Yeah, sure, we were free-range. And a lot of us got hurt. A lot of us experienced things we never should have at ages that would be shocking now. And some of us just didn’t make it out of childhood. When I was 13, we moved to a small college town just after a bunch of high school kids on their own and fucking around like we all did, pushed a middler schooler they’d bullied relentlessly in front of a train. It was easier for parents and grandparents to let us run wild, but sometimes the wild was exactly what we found.

And sometimes being supervised was worse. If Gam-Gam believed sparing the rod doth spoil the child, you got that rod. If your neighbor didn’t believe in depression or ADHD or autism, you didn’t have any of those things the second you stepped foot in her house. If your aunt and uncle thought you were weak and soft, they made sure you knew it. And if your neighbor hated the kind of person you were, you still had to go over there when Mom had to work or pick up somebody from the hospital, and maybe, just maybe, it made you hide who you were for the rest of your life.

But wait! The village also gets a say in your job, your choice of spouse, your haircut, your hobbies, your pets, how many glasses of wine you have with dinner, every single choice you make in life. Depending on the type of village, they may or may not be able to compel you to choose differently, but they will 100% DEFINITELY opine at length about all of it like an HOA on planet-strength steroids.

We like the idea that we get to decide how to raise our children, whether to have them or not at all. We like the idea that we get to decide our own lives and associations with little to no input from anyone else. As a culture, we like those ideas A LOT. There’s no going no-contact with a toxic relative in a village, no deciding not to care for elderly parents just because they abused you, no surrounding yourself with only positive energy. Your village is your village. You can leave it, but people are people everywhere, and joining a new village is a VERY uphill climb.

I don’t think many of us would give up the individualism and self-actualization we prize so deeply in order to work from cradle to grave dog-paddling in the exact impossible-to-balance sea of troubles we can’t manage for a limited span and just for ourselves right now. Even rural American culture has become more insular and anti-social, less group-minded and more isolated. I don’t think that many of us would take free babysitting in exchange for a whole group of people getting STRAIGHT UP IN OUR BUSINESS about everything and losing all control over our children’s direct influences and formative experiences. I know I’m not letting Dipshit McRacist-Homophobe Esq who has a picture of Mrs. Trunchbull taped in her dream journal take care of my kid no matter how free she is—and she ABSOLUTELY feels the same way about letting a loud feminist queer lefty agnostic with rainbow hair and tattoos like me within five feet of her little soldiers for Christ.

We say we want a village, and we do—in the sense that we want to feel connected and less lonely as humans. That sense of community is certainly a huge gap that’s only being filled with worse and worse nightmares as the years go on. But we seem to want a village where everything else about how modern families prefer to live and pursue their own happiness stays the same, and that’s just never existed anywhere. There is no cultural framework where help flows toward working parents but not from them. Where we are beholden to no one but entitled to support. Where we only have to associate with people we choose to at our leisure. Where there’s always someone to pick up slack for us and manage whatever we find unmanageable.

That’s not a village, it’s a wife. Which is why conservatives, faced with the same difficulties, don’t call out for a village, they start changing laws so women can be controlled again. And that brings us right back around to the beginning. Yeah, it’s great to have someone to do all that and ask for nothing for themselves, but a whole lot of us (not all!) are trying SUPER HARD not to expect fully-realized sentient human beings to spend their whole precious finite lives that way anymore.

We may or may not actually want a village. I have a strong suspicion many of my peers in the mines of middle age right now would run screaming from the actual realities of one. We just want a little reprieve, a little help we don’t have to pay a mortgage for, and it feels impossible without returning to a way of life that necessarily curtails free will QUITE A BIT (citation: all of history forever).

We will have to find a new way. Fill in the social blanks that got forgotten along the way to modernity. We’ll have to build our own systems and hope they last (they don’t, ask any village where a teenager has ever drawn breath). We’ll have to do all the unromantic, tedious, slow, grinding work of fighting for better and hoping that favor comes around before we die (it probably won’t).

And you know, maybe if we weren’t all so fucking tired, we’d be able to imagine what that new way might be.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, EVERYONE!

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Hello, everyone. Very sorry I’ve neglected you. I’m working on a big new trad-WTG post, things have just gotten…complicated in my world. So I thought maybe something lighter and more fun would be a nice palette cleanser while I finish up both the post and the convention in Denmark where I am currently Guest of Honor and Not In My Time Zone. (Hey if you did not know, I am also a science fiction and fantasy writer!)

Yeah, so, well…depending on how many other streams you follow me on, you may or may not know that I have separated from my partner—it its a very stressful, anxiety-churning, financially ulcerating, and uncertain time in my world. I have no other way to excuse my silence but by saying there is pain, and there are ways through it, and not all of them are out loud.

So I made some stupid meaningless art, because that’s the only thing I know how to do when I’m lost. And I thought I’d share it round.

When I had the original idea to do this, several deadlines ago, I figured I'd post it under a paywall. Maybe people would give a little something for original micro-micro fiction.

But honestly I'm just so pleased with it I'm making it an open post so everyone can see what, specifically, is wrong with me that I would, while literally and actually losing hair over multiple by-wooshing deadlines and struggling to pay the cat's medical bills, feel compelled to buy a novelty claw machine which IN NO WAY TAKES REAL MONEY, and fill it with hand-written fortunes/mini-stories as a stress-reliever.

OKAY SO FIRST OF ALL.

Depending on how long you've known me, been following me, and/or reading my fiction, you may or may not know about my THING with claw machines.

My thing is I always win at them.

Now, I have strategies and philosophies about it, and a little knowledge of how the machines work as a last-ditch if none of the aforementioned philosophies or strategies seem likely to work out AND YEAH I MEAN OBVIOUSLY THE PHILOSOPHIES ARE CONVENIENTLY RELATABLE TO LIFE IN GENERAL I AM WHAT I AM. (Number one rule: you cannot care what you get. The goal is not to win a specific prize, it's to beat the machine. To get a prize at all. If you happen to want a prize that's advantageously positioned, good for you, but the ways of the machine are wily. If you care what you get, you've already become attached to an outcome that's mostly outside your control and the machine has won.)

But that all came later, reverse engineered from, and to explain, the fact that since I was about 10 years old, 9 times out of 10, if I walk up to a claw machine, I'm not walking away empty handed.

That bit of The Difference Between Love and Time where the protagonist is ten years old in Ocean Shores, WA, wins at the Time Claw, gets approached by a tiny kid asking her to win for him, which she does and goes forth always able to from then on? THAT SHIT IS ACTUALLY TRUE. It really happened, in that place, when I was 10, and ever since it's probably the only real superpower I got.

I FUCKIN LOVE CLAW MACHINES.

Do I want a real life-size actual one in my house? Of COURSE I do. But those bad boys are anywhere from $2000-$4000 and ain't nobody got cash for that. Not in this economy.

But awhile ago, while I was building the Speakeasy, I had this notion that maybe I could find a little wee dinky one. And when people came to the Speakeasy, they could get a fortune. And clearly they would be super rad cool original fortunes/mini-fictions/tone-poems by me, and in my head all this was just unassailably awesome.

Turns out, you can get a little wee dinky one for a cool $40.

Especially if, for no reason any human could ever fathom, it says BEAR MEAT in large, friendly bubble letters on the front. With a cute cartoon paw print for punctuation.

Spoiler: it did not come pre-loaded with bear jerky.

There were a lot of color and design options available but COME ON YOU KNOW I HAD TO GET THE WEIRD BEAR MEAT ONE. I probably would have given it a whimsical little name, too, but it says BEAR MEAT right on it, and bears have claws, so there's some logic there, and you're just never going to beat that in the Naming Inanimate Things Olympics.

I thought I was ready to go. But the capsules that came with it were way too small to hold folded up pieces of paper comfortably (ridiculously small, like they'd have been lucky to handle a single lonely Skittle) so I had to go order larger ones to achieve my dumb-ass dreams. Dreams that, at that point, I did worry were a bit out of my reach. I didn't have any ideas for shit to write in there, I was way overworked and no idea not immediately applicable to a book or story dared show its face in my brain. But whatever. My brain usually shows up on the night, even if it takes its SWEET GODDAMNED TIME.

So I found a kit full of capsules and toys and stickers that was the same price as plain capsules without toys and stickers, and I have a five year old, so hell yeah I chose that one.

Oh my god, the stickers and toys in that kit saved the whole half-baked scheme. THEY WERE ALL WEIRD AS SHIT. I mean, I guess there were a few fidget poppers and finger skateboards in there, but almost everything in the box looked like it arose unbidden from some seemingly-adorable-but-secretly-highly-disturbing anime I'd never heard of.

Why the fuck is that rat in an ice cream cone. I ask you. THAT IS NOT WHERE RATS GO. F SAFETY RATING FROM THE HEALTH BOARD.

Coming up with fortunes turned out to be not much of a problem at all, given inspiration like that. I spent about an hour writing out whatever popped into my head. I made myself rules no one else cares about but I NEED RULES OKAY. No discarding or editing, composed in pen so no erasing, No longer than five minutes to make each one, then on to the next. Bastian picked the sticker or toy, handed it to me, I wrote the mini-fic to go with it, sealed it up, popped it into the back of BEAR MEAT, and by dinnertime we were in business.

By which I mean not in business at all, as this thing takes only fake plastic novelty coins so it's not like any income whatsoever will ever be generated here, it's just...I don't know. I was moved to do this dumb crap, and now there's BEAR MEAT on my porch.

Now people pull a fortune when they come over and...well, honestly, they rarely know what to do with what they just read. I modeled the style a bit on this old horoscope column that used to run in the Sacramento indie rag when I was a teenager. I highly doubt they were ever based on real astrology, but we loved them for how weird they were. So sometimes people just look at me like I stabbed them in the heart when they read one and I FIND THAT VERY SATISFYING WHAT CAN I SAY?

My last job before I became a full-time writer was as a professional fortune teller (also a thing that sounds fictional but is not, and honestly, kind of amazing training for writing short fiction), and now I get to be that again a little.

Now I know a whole lot of folk pooh-pooh any and all mysticism or "woo" and that's fine. Much like the Claw Machine, I was always weirdly good at it, and while I had strategies and philosophies (YES YES ALSO APPLICABLE TO LIFE), mainly, they were reverse-engineered from what I quickly came to understand people were actually after: a little comfort, a little confirmation that whatever they'd already decided to do was the right choice, a little connection, a little touch of magic, or even the hope of magic, in an unremarkable day.

So don't get mad like I'm claiming to actually predict the future with these. Part of what I have always found very real and sacred about all forms of prognostication, regardless of culture, is the bedrock assumption that there can be and is divinity in randomness. That the card you draw, the stalk you case, the dice you roll, the stars' position at your birth, the flip of a coin, any simple action, has personal and significant meaning. That is so fundamental to the entire concept of fortune-telling it doesn't even get acknowledged or discussed. Without a silent agreement to try to believe that for a second, it all falls apart. Sure, some people believe a subset of humans is just straight-up psychic, but most fortune-tellers use tools that are designed to be randomly arranged/selected/mixed/drawn. And the Schrodinger's Faith the reader and the querent share for a brief moment is that this randomness is not truly random. If we try, we can understand the order this randomness expresses.

It's a terribly human search for, and conscious manufacture of, literary foreshadowing in real life.

Which is why I never called myself a psychic and don't like the word, even when I break out the cards now. I'm not psychic. But I'll tell you your fortune, and on a long enough timeline, it'll probably foreshadow something in your life pretty eerily well.

Stories do that.

And we all need a little hope of magic. Hope that the randomness of life might not be completely pulled out of the ass of the galactic core.

These are some of my favorite fortunes. I know my handwriting is a bit idiosyncratic and many internet folk have visual or other issues that make image-only problematic (which I 100% just typed as problemeatic THE BEAR STRIKES AGAIN), so I've transcribed them for ease of giggles.

There's obviously a lot more than these, but LIKE THE GENIUS I AM I forgot to take photos of each one before loading up the machine, and ADHD means always having a brain that won't go back and re-do a task even if /especially if the fix is very simple because awwwwww but I already diiiid that. So I wait til someone draws one and make them send me a photo of what they got. So this is what's been "won" so far.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I have been enjoying making them. I'll restock BEAR MEAT soon and continue to share the fortunes if you guys enjoy them--I'm oddly proud of this little extreme, pretty pointless, micro-fiction experiment. POINTLESS ART IS ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT IN THIS FALLEN WORLD. It's just so much fun to be a Forest Witch with a Cauldron of Destiny next to the mulch and the mosquito repellent!

PLEASE TO ENJOY BEAR MEAT IT IS DELICIOUS AND PORTENTOUS.

Nothing random. Only not yet understood.

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No matter how you look at it, everything is just weird and hard. Mostly because we're all on fire and flying through space and we were all supposed to be dinosaurs but we're not. Might as well love people and make art, fellow failed lizard.

Ducks have interlocking corkscrew genitalia that makes it impossible to separate once the act of mating has begun, even if one duck isn't that into it, and that's why you keep choosing toxic people. You're not even into it, you just have a wound in your heart shaped like a corkscrew-knife.

The male seahorse carries and births thousands of babies and deeply understands both emotional labor and intersectionality, so ease up on what you've been told you're "supposed" to be.

You are an Adequate Monkey. Millions of years of evolution, billions of distant ancestors' lives of pain and passion, the rise and fall of countless eons spinning in an infinite hostile void, all came together to create you and then give you anxiety. HOLY SHIT, CONGRATULATIONS!

Any worker bee can become a queen if it's a space of its own and a TON of royal jelly. But the jelly is excreted by the worker bees in the first place; they could make themselves queens anytime if they read more theory, They should form a union. But this is actually about you. Queens of the World Unite.

This is Philippe. Philippe is pure evil. And he's after you. Philippe is also pretty bad at time management. And executive function. And he can't fly. Evil is usually like that. You'll be okay. Probably.

This is an alligator with an orange on his back. So...obviously nothing matters, existence is meaningless, and chaos rules this vale of screams. But good news! That work thing probably doesn't matter either!

Are you a customer who only wanted a treat and got served a flipping rat-cream cone? Or are you a rat who ate all the rum raisin before anyone caught you and now they have a big problem and you're a rat legend?

You deserve love. So does a footless teal four-armed bashful alien with a broken egg for a heart. But you, too.

This is Rufus. Rufus is an Actually Demonic Pig. But he doesn't let his culture dictate his destiny. He's going to nursing school. He's learning to paint. He volunteers with the Fire Department. So why can't you tell your parents how you feel?

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Note: the way this Substack works is that every public essay has a follow up piece under a paywall for the part I wanted to say but either didn’t have space for or, more often, didn’t want to deal with drive-by goblin-screaming by bad-faith internet vultures. This piece, somewhat unusually, follows on from two: Take My Life, Please: The Media's Will They/Won't They Love Affair with American Fascism Prepares For Its Terrible Wedding Night and Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

A little over a year ago, I started this digital space with an essay on, well, digital spaces. It was two months after Musk had taken over Twitter—oh halcyon days of innocence and youth! Everyone I knew, followed, was professionally connected to or wanted to be, whose politics I agreed with, whose morals I admired, all of them were very busy at that moment in time, very loudly proclaiming that they could not possibly stay on Twitter given Musk’s obvious econo-cultural malfeasance and vividly telegraphed nasty intentions.

It felt inevitable. A sorrowing sort of twilight moment. We were sure we’d lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots.

Because purity is so important, you see.

We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There’s no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don’t you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow’s most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement.

Because obviously I just can’t vote for Joe Biden. Yes, the alternative is grinding, authoritarian far-right fascism. I feel just peachy about letting that happen (to other people, I literally cannot imagine it ever affecting me, why yes I am the working class proletariat salt of the earth, you’re too kind), but I will not, not ever, NEVER OH NEVER SHALL I check a box next to someone who…has had to suck it up and quietly work with people they don’t like and profoundly disagree with in order to accomplish any version at all of the things I keep saying I want!

AND I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT FROM THE PAID ACCOUNT I NEVER DELETED ON ELON MUSK’S CRATERED HEARTLESS NAZI-INFECTED HAZMAT DUMPSITE TWITTER WITH A STRAIGHT FUCKING FACE.

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