15.
Hola my Kencitos (he’s winning that Oscar):
I spent this Monday in an outfit best described as “Linda Ronstadt as one of the Tortuga wenches from Pirates of the Caribbean as styled by Reformation” belligerently, combatively flirting with a blonde, British missed connection from half a decade ago ten feet from his wife (poly, relax) as we all danced to ABBA.
And you’re like “okay, Tara, this is exactly what I picture you doing on a Monday night, where is this going?”
…We were at the Holocaust Museum.1
I hope this week has brought you your own moment of having to ask “What is appropriate Shoah shrine cleavage?” and then yeeting that concern into the sweating sun as a present and true rejection of GEICO payments, your persistent Back-Fat Betty2 and your persistent-er shame over her3, and the fact that we could write “We Didn’t Start the Fire” from scratch listing all of the people who have croaked in even the last two years while Henry Kissinger is breathing our valuable air that Canada Dutch-Ovened last week, safely hidden from the fists and fury4 of Tony Bourdain, God love him. And trauma. Your trauma, your mother’s trauma, your family’s diaspora, the trauma that made him do that to you.
I would jolt with sporadic recall on Monday, remembering that my knee was settled on top of a indefatigably Aryan goy’s pant leg in an institute dedicated to the sharpest blight my people have ever known. A blight that scattered leaves on my own family tree to Treblinka. But I looked around: at our rabbi and his pride yarmulke, at Esther Perel a few tables over, at the nonbinary artists in residence voguing on the dancefloor, at the succulents set before us as centerpieces, at the sweeping view of the Hudson behind us, at the turquoise hair and purple scarves and glitter.
We survived. We survived enough to evolve into permutations and presentations that our own ancestors might have raised an eyebrow to. Trauma, any trauma, genocide or a car accident or being cyberbullied in high school does that to you. It is ugly. And your healing is ugly. Your healing is ugly. It is two wrong feet in fucking ugly shoes. It bends you into someone you would rather die than be spotted with on the street. It cracks you like a glowstick and then you’re someone who speaks too loudly at the restaurant. Who can’t stop talking about it. Who gets mad at the wrong person. Who breaks down crying hearing the Chipmunk Christmas song. It is puce and garish and freakish and you want to cringe out of your own tired and frayed body.
And I am here to tell you that you are beautiful in all of that sick, scrambling scatter.
You are unfurling like that poor dog in The Thing, blood and alien sinew fucking everywhere, but I want you to take a moment to think that perhaps your barbed tendrils are casting home, reaching back, out of frame, towards the people who loved you into being. Let them catch you. Do not go to them. It is not your time. But let them hold you for a moment. Let them remind you of how they wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Their father was a drunk, too, but rehab did not yet exist. They had depression, bedridden but without a diagnosis. They were once dolling up for a night in Weimar Berlin and microdosing a panic attack over being caught by the most sadistic of forces, the way that Pride this year is fraught and fragile. Do you think they handled it all with poise? Do you think they were so much better than you that handled it better than you ever could? Then why will you not give yourself the same grace, and the gift of taking up as much room and color and joy as you can?
They only marched forward with the pieces of their souls they baked into bars of chocolate and smuggled into the rest of their lives, tried buy them back in time. Often failed. But they remained, carrying what they best could on their backs and in their hearts.
Just. Like. You.
They loved us, by carrying on. We love them, by carrying on. And I decided that to not just live to survive, but to thrive, is a way to carry them. To be as vibrant and annoying and queer and singular and unconventional as you damn well please. To look in the face of horror and hate that has whistled its way into the world and roar with the undeniable. You are you. They can take your breath, your bones, but they can’t take you. Not if you, in every moment, to every person you meet, stand in exactly who you are. By feasting, by toasting, by growing your community of blood and birth and beyond, by making yourself wonderful for the night, we acknowledge the violences minute and grotesque that got us exactly here, we carry forward.
So I kept that little knee right where I wanted it to be, and I laughed, and I batted the table linens out of the way, and I defied, and I sparkled, and I carried on.
(Don’t) Watch:
Don’t watch that damn Flash movie. Ezra Miller still hasn’t told us where the indigenous person they groomed and kidnapped is, and where that mother and her three kids who were sitting around popping bullets like pacifiers are.
If you still want to go see that movie, I’m going to leave you with an image I hope haunts you during every frame of what is probably a middling production where the lighting director is at sea anyway: this person’s centaur boots that they use to scurry around the country on their predatory little schemes, like some kind of cloven ghoul5 Liechtensteinian parents use to get their kinder to eat more string beans.
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Read:
I spent Sunday sitting in Lincoln Tunnel traffic catching up on
’s Substack. Her piece on Old (which I have not even seen) and The Green Knight (which left me morose and suicidally sexless on a six-three metalhead’s Clinton Hill couch, the filmic wrong dose of an SSRI) and moreso that death is not what lurks in the shadows but the loss of time was an unexpected vivisection, something Zeba has the intellect and effortless voice to simply sigh into being.I mentioned my friend Arielle’s newsletter
in my last Friday newsletter, but her newest and this ensconced passage kicked me in the nuts.Just because I am slow to express anger doesn't mean I don't know what it is, exactly. I am angry at many things: slow walkers, climate change, transphobes, billionaires. But these are concepts. Interpersonal conflict feels harder; instead I rush to find some aspect of their history that explains their behavior, or, crucially, some quirk of my own behavior that might have triggered theirs, some way it could have been my fault, not that big a deal. In other words, I have difficulty ascribing my anger to any one person—except if that person is myself.
She threads narratives with a skill I covet.
’s scythe of an essay on schadenfreude. I can only tell you to read it, and think. It is a commentary that will remain with me for a long while.AND:
My best friend is releasing her chapbook through Bullshit Lit, and you can buy that here. You must buy it, read it, savor it, and fall in love with my own magical Mary Tyler Moore of a friend.
, I would (and will, many times) tell you how proud I am, but the fact that I am postponing my birthday this year to help throw you a book release party should say it all.Listen:
Church of the Cosmic Skull. If you want to hear what getting raptured by ELO sounds like…The Polyphonic Spree as conducted by Anton LaVey and that Taylor Swift looking bitch he always had hanging around…The Leftovers during that orgy episode where the Ninth Doctor screams “All you care about is fucking and Frasier!”6
Matt and I appeared on the Piecing it Together podcast, discussing Renfield, which I deeply enjoyed as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
The movie while yes, being a campy NIC CAGE AS DRACULA romp and a vehicle for my god, my king Nicholas Hoult (#HoultHive rise)7 is also a deeply satisfactory story of emotional vampirism, codependency, and the shame that keeps us in toxic relationships. The director, Chris McKay, has also been deeply involved in the LEGO movies (and directed The Lego Batman Movie) and worked on the story for the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, which was delicious for me, a fan of Chris FINE (one of our best Chrises, not distant to my favorite titty-grabbing, smooth-talking, Southie-spewing8 Evans but of course falling behind Meloni, Eccleston as per the above devotional to my beloved The Leftovers, and mommy’s dark horse number two: MESSINA) and also an unrepentant Hugh Mungo9 Grant apologist.
Thank you for having us, David! You can listen here, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.
Love you bitches,
TG
P.S. This got my ass.
I am part of a fabulous, progressive, gay gay gay Jewish community called Lab/Shul, and the gala I attended celebrated their tenth anniversary, including rituals, our staggering musicians in residence, the tiniest potato pancakes I have ever seen, and a puppet named Booba, which is what I call Lugosi actually. I didn’t like the puppet. I learned that maybe I’m picky with puppets. If a Henson or a Henson-by-extension isn’t fisting it, I don’t want it.
I think about this scene from White Chicks every time I criticize my own body and I had to take a moment as I wrote today to reflect on how devastating it is, how unfair to Tiny Tara, that I saw this movie at twelve and related to her internalized anger at her body, how even a thin rice cake of woman would fret over being perceived as “pretty for a fat girl” so deeply that I have retained and revisited this scene in my mind for twenty years.
Yes, her. Make her part of you. Tattoo her. Rub lotion on her. Put your partner’s hand over here. Exfoliate her. Love her. Whatever your “her” is. We have to try.
Quoth Bourdain in his 2001 book, A Cook’s Tour:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
If you’re not watching him give the comedic performance of several lifetimes on The Great, why is that? Who are you? Where is your spine? Do you hate yourself that much? Do you not know about Talkiatry? Etc. Etc.
Matt got to the point where he’d start muting that ad if it came on because I’d be halfway to a Paul Reubens moment every time that Bostonian-ass himbo said “Hey Rachel, how are ya?” Matt’s very patient with me.
"By feasting, by toasting, by growing your community of blood and birth and beyond, by making yourself wonderful for the night, we acknowledge the violences minute and grotesque that got us exactly here, we carry forward."
Wow. So beautiful and perfect.