60. The Week in Me
Y'all know I don't fuck with feet.
Starting today with an outfit, above, and a humbling, gratitudinous announcement, below, fully confirming my mini writing “tour” next month. I can’t believe I get to kick this year off with a bang - or, really, yang.1 I so hope to see you there, and I will try to have these appearances recorded for those who can not attend.
I had nothing to write about this week. Really. Lately, I’ve gone out to dinner with Monique and Shakthi and Tess, watched The Holdovers with Matt and my parents, attended a virtual 92Y conversation with Martin Scorsese. I lamented Charles Melton2 and Dominic Sessa’s exclusions from the Oscars, and hoarsened my voice when I heard Lily Gladstone’s name coming from my cellphone in my lap as I drove to work on Tuesday. I had a ferociously good mock marg3 with Sam at HiLot and we bounced on the waterbed at Joyface4. I caught up on the Housewives.
But. While reading about the “Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum — a creationist museum with significant funding from Montana governor Greg Gianforte” as detailed in this conversation between Betsy Gaines Quammen and
…
…Matt and I discussed dino creationism as we walked from his parking garage to the apartment Monday night. He told me of leviathans and behemoths in the Bible. “And are these supposed to be dinosaurs?” Matt, a white man who LOVES history, replied “No, they’re probably mythical dragons, which have appeared in all sorts of classic texts. Medieval European. Asian. Etc.
“And then also real dragons, you know, komodo dragons.”
And this is when I went off.
Do y’all know about the time Sharon Stone’s husband got his toe bitten off by a komodo dragon? I do. I know that my brother Phil Stone (not his legal name, which is Bronstein, also they’re divorced now, maybe over the trauma of a dragon EATING HIS FUCKING TOE) hopped into a KOMODO DRAGON ENCLOSURE and that dragon was NOT ABOUT the disrespect of this dude just striding into his house and kicking his damn shoes off. True colonizer shit.
Yes, yes. I see that he was asked to remove his shoes because the dragon might suppose they were mice the size of an average size 8 Croc shoe and get to nibblin’. We’re going to disregard this part. For comedy.
So they ask this man to take off his shoes to enter the, you know, dragon enclosure. Here’s where *I* would have said “Oh no no no, I have seen that one Sex and the City episode with the shoeless apartment and my shoes do not leave my body. Especially if they are my go-to sneaks, which are checkerboard Vans. Do I have two pairs in rotation and a backup pair in my closet? I do. But do I want to have to break in another pair I rush-ordered from Journeys because some phoot phreak wanted to huff my eau de toeax? No. Deuces. Sorry to this dragon5.”
Phil did not say sorry to this dragon.
So I spent Monday night screaming to Matt in an empty parking complex like a Def Jam comic6 “Google it! I’m serious. Google ‘Sharon Stone husband toes’! My phone is almost dead. You have to Google it!” in an empty parking complex while this exorbitantly patient man sighed, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and tainted his search history beyond repair and I narrated the turn of events that led to Sharon Stone, baddest bitch alive, feeding her husband to a fucking dragon like of yore.
Let me say this: I have no sympathy for Phil or his “toe casing",” the nastiest phrase in the English language, the North Polar opposite of “cellar door.” None. Don’t wear your feet out in public. Your clickety-clacks, your centaur boots. Dogs even wear little shoes on the sidewalks now. Dogs. Do you think you’re better than a dog, who might not have the most manicured hooves lately and EVER SO CONSIDERATELY dons a little shoe to prevent us the sight? You’re not, bitch. Dogs are great. Ya nasty. No wonder the Komodo dragon was quarantined. His opp-toe-nent was out here walking around a zoo footloose and common-sense free with his toes out like a war criminal. What kind of nasty shit did *Phil* bring into this Komodo dragon’s home? What kind of F-for-foot coli did he traipse in by way of his deceptively mouseian7 hooves?
That is where this man LIVES, Phil. That is his home. For all we know, it may not even be his captive home. He may have been born there, his mother opting for a home birth in a little inflatable pool in the middle of their encampment? There might be little etchings on the glass to indicate how tall Christoepher, as I have named him, had grown each year. PHIL clearly did not look around see the lilac La Creuset. The framed print of “Starry Night.” The Fleet Foxes vinyl on the turntable. The salt lamp. The ADHD medication on the nightstand. And really. “Wear a shoe; it’s the thing to do!” I always say this! Don’t I ALWAYS say this?!
As I texted Dylan: KOMODO INNOCENT!!!!
Years later, the New Yorker profiled Sharon Stone and gleaned a shocking epilogue:
Once again: KOMODO INNOCENT!!!
Here come the recs. Thank you for indulging this moment of stupid. My ass after going on this tangent (Tara-ngent?) for y’all:
To read:
As I’ve said before, I love Margot Robbie’s work not only as a multiaccented actress, but as a producer. Her production company LuckyChap is, while I do not dream of labor, a company at which I would take a pay garroting to work. This Deadline interview with Joe Utichi validated my esteem of her as a producing visionary - and taught me what a LUT is!
As a cisgender female who was on puberty blockers from about 9 to 13 years old (monthly Lupron, to optimize daily human growth hormone shots: I will probably write about this someday, but I would have been FOUR FOOT SIX AS AN ADULT without medical intervention) I was excused from gym during those years due to medical concerns around bone density at the time and because my mom knew her roundass child would be much happier reading Nancy Drew books in the library8. This has never once been presented as a concern in my adult endocrinology panels. Of course transphobes “just being concerned for children” are weaponizing and legislating against these life-enriching drugs, and of course their science is way the fuck off, off the fucking cliff like they belong.
Those needles were two inches of metal a month jammed into my ass cheek. My pediatrician, a man I mourn like a grandfather, felt palpable pain at having to give me, a child who gained 0 pounds from third to fourth grade, these needles half the size I was. The kids taking them are fucking tough in more ways than bone. Every drug has a side effect - one of the Real Housewives was recently in the hospital after Ozempic gave her an impacted bowel. This grown woman did not poop for like two weeks. The scale probably registered weight gain, because this woman was holding two weeks’ worth of poop inside her body. Which defeats the point of the drug in the first place!!! Every drug poses some medical risk, and the studies prove that the risk of permanent bone density loss for kids on puberty blockers was vastly overexaggerated by the NYT.
My gratitude for Evan Urquhart’s concise, objective reporting linked above and
for alerting me to Evan’s work.Leave trans kids alone.
I found this piece by
on her history in stunts, David Carradine, and Charlie’s Angels delightful:
Excellent news on carbon-reduction efforts, coming out of New York City, from
at :
Daniel Day-Lewis for the Sunday Times in 2005, on his experience in Gaza. “This is a state of apartheid. It's taken me less than a week to lose impartiality.”
This is literally just Simone:
When Simone is ruffled from sleep, I beckon her over (aka move MY entire body to go cater to the princess) to smöiuve her, aka flatten all of her ruffled feathers.
This is literally just Lugosi:
Mortimer here reminds me of last summer when Lugosi was in the hospital with bladder crystals. It is a terrible memory; I climbed into the cage at the vet to hold him because absolutely I can fit into a cage at the vet and cried, and knowing he was sleeping without us that week is emotional ardor I can not face ever again…but. But he is okay, and his fur is growing back and when I saw this photo I felt so proud of my beautiful son and how good he has become at not licking his sweet belly. I love him.
Actually my babies:
Various and sundry:
We all know that Fran Drescher is my biological mother, but Carrie Fisher is at the very least an aunt if not my mother in some kind of Bobby Darin way. She is my favorite writer (I recommend Postcards from the Edge and Surrender the Pink, which is the reason I switched gynecologists, and which I may write about further in the future). I turned down a Comic Con Meet and Greet with her, assuming I’d have the next year. She died. I will regret this until I do, too.
I love Carrie. No one was funnier. No one is.
Take me here.
Me and who:
I asked Matt if this was me:
His response:
From
:
I leave you with this:
Love you little loverseals,
TG
I have decreed this year a year of yang, after several months of laid-off yin. I have been making moves to yang creatively, emotionally, professionally. Lots of yanging.
Phucking PHIL didn’t even do his research to determine that a white shoe would be enticing to the damn dragon. JUSTIFIABLE TOEMICIDE.
Thank you, Mom - and the many white men whose checks read “Carolyn Keene.”
Just followed you back and I gotta say, no regrets so far. You seem fun! Immediately digging your style.
If Matt tells you something believe him, he’s seldom wrong. All you went through as a young girl worked making you the prize you are today! Love Carrie Fisher!! 👏👏