I've decided that Tom Wambsgans stans will be called Wamby Mombys.

This is my first Substack. Sorry 2 be sad!!!

Hello! If you’re reading this, you know why you’re here: I have started a newsletter. I don’t yet expect this to be a daily or even weekly emission - I suspect that I have created this to connect with my friends, lovers, and enemies about the shit I’m into, as a way to avoid logging onto social media to talk about it. Around 83 percent of my every waking thoughts lately are put towards minimizing my social media use, deciding which of my gummy vitamins is the best tasting day to day (right now, it’s SugarBear, although: too small, and that’s me saying it), and trying to shadchan my current need to never speak to anyone again with my desire to live like Isadora Duncan without the scarves.

Today I am thinking about a harrowing line uttered by Tom Wambsgans on last night’s Succession and how grief, a fundament of life, a Biblical promise of God, a catalyst of art and interiority and forgiveness and closure, once "Very an Occasion" and now one’s own meager platter of bruised fruits and stale bread that we call PTO (Personal Time Off, Perdition’s Truancy Officer) one must kiss Workday’s ring, kiss their boss’s ass, to eat. How keening has been reduced to Halsey singing Blink-182 in the mall. How an ordained and condoned and noble year of black clothing, a year of veils, a wedding band on your finger as long as you damn well please, sigils that slam their palms onto the hood of the nearest taxi and rasp “Hey, I’m mourning here!” so you don’t have to, has been lost to the vile and slanderous assumption from others that you’re the founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.

It’s all gone.

Our neighbors calling their neighbors, the news making it to your book club and back to you in florists’ handiwork and glassware made opaque with sympathy cooked at 350 degrees for four hours and children sent over to shovel the walk for the next few weeks. Your best friend packing a light bag, a black dress, a leather heel that grass can’t stain, and driving to the airport. Hands, sometimes wrinkled and in the worst of handshakes, some elastic, some still quite new, on a receiving line turning yours over in theirs to induct you into understanding, they know, they have been where you are before…it’s all gone.

It’s all gone. It has been reduced to emoticons of hearts, more a capitalist ghoulerie, Mickey Mouse ears straightrazored to a daggerous point, than any heart that’s ever beat or been broken, on a social media post that you write just two hours after you leave the hospital room. That you write because you hope the boy you like will see it and call. That you write because your professor demands it along with an obituary to proffer an extension on your term paper. That you write because you feel no one will shake off their introversion to come sit shiva anymore, so a one-sentence condolence will have to do. That you write because you hope this will suffice as a plea for no one to send you (for the month, at least for the week, at least for the rest of this business day) pleas of their own for attention in the cruel guise of five to ten Instagram messages a day: videos captioned “that feeling when…” and memes about television shows you recognize as popular but have never watched and pastiched words upon thieved images that evoke the kind of fun, freewheeling slut you never were but went along with for brand engagement, and especially are not right now, when all you are is a girl who will never again hop off the concrete seal fountains in the courtyard and flee through a door propped open by yellowing postwar trust, left at the elevators, and down the hall to be swept off her tiny Ked-ded feet by air doused with talc and what roses should smell like only when they’re pink, acoustics that God and Paul McCartney would kill for both trilling a voice, the happiest voice, the one that was saved for her, through her, around her, right over her head, and out to the entire first floor; and….no, she was too alive to write down. I will not.

(Now, I turn right at the elevators.)

This was a dark one but hey, sometimes that’s life. Sometimes that’s me. But. I will leave you with some dumb shit:

1. If grieving was an assignment from a daily practice app, what animal would it be? Does the DuoLingo owl have a goth gf? I feel like her name is Raven but she is not a raven and perhaps a marmoset.

2. This pin from Patti Lapel made me holler aloud today. I will be looking at the Met Gala outfits, but since Karl Lagerfeld was a racist and an anorexiamonger, I will for once not be persnickety about who was or was not following the theme. I’d like to put together some of my favorite looks and write about them tomorrow - let’s see how much sleep I get.