Welcome to Bisexual Erasure Book Club.
What a time to be alive and to start a substack!
As I sit down to write this post and to welcome you to my substack, I do not feel at my smartest, sharpest, wittiest, most capable or even decently capable right now. I follow a lot of people who had incredibly thoughtful posts on Wednesday November 6th. All I knew to say that day, I said in a text to the oldest of my three nieces.
I told her:
I am so, so sorry. Adults are supposed to protect children. We failed to protect you. 💔
She’s 16. She phone banked for Harris/Walz, and she almost donated $5 to the campaign but then realized she couldn’t because she isn’t yet 18. She isn’t allowed to vote. How painfully ironic that my nieces, with so much to lose, had no say, no role in whether they lost their rights.
On any given day, I don’t feel like an adult. I once read that there’s a certain age at which we freeze and never really feel older than that. Mine is 33. And even at 33, I self-identified as a successful, mature 28-year-old. For those of us who had good parental models growing up, we had a feeling that they, the adults had answers. And then we become adults, and we realize, at least if we’re worth our salt, how very how little answers we actually have. Sure we have some. But nothing near the amount we expected. The writer Anne Lamott wrote:
"It's funny, I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools--friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty--and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do.' And mostly, against all odds, they do."
That tool box will have to do now. And what odds these are.
I do know I shouldn’t be writing this sitting on my couch, propped up against a pillow and under the blanket my friend used when she spent the night on Wednesday after we drank wine and watched Absolutely Fabulous. Because when life hands you a rotting lemon orange for president, drink wine with girlfriends and watch Absolutely Fabulous. For the sake of my back, I should write at my dining table. And yet…here I am on my couch, hunching my shoulders froward as if I think spines grow on trees, citrus or otherwise.
Tuesday night, I held out hope until Pennsylvania was called. When I went to sleep, he had 267 electoral votes. I dreamt he never got any more and all the remaining swing states went for Harris/Walz. Because it was a dream, I was also personally responsible for counting some votes, I lived in New Mexico, and someone (I can’t remember who) was mad at me.
The next morning, I put on Sleater- Kinney’s One More Hour.
In one more hour, I will be gone
In one more hour, I'll leave this room…Don't say another word
About the other girl
Don't say another word
About the other girl
I think it’s a form of psychic armor to listen to Riot Grrrl the day after we’ve elevated (again) a misognistic, r*pist to The White House.
That morning, I desperately wished to have one more hour where hope lived. Despite the campaign fatigue and the anxiety, during the 100 days of a Kamala campaign I truly felt hope.
The best break up songs can comfort us in non-romantic break ups. I am trying to emotionally detangle from a future we never got to have. It’s a fucking doozy. I wish I had a better phrase than fucking doozy. You were warned about my diction deficiency in the opening of this essay.
The photo at the top of this essay is from 5:11 PST on Election Day. I almost posted it to social media, but I thought. What if this is the sunset on democracy? Why didn’t I wake up and take on at sunrise? For all the pundits writing postmortems and pointing fingers, feel free to add me.
I sobbed Tuesday night. I screamed into a pillow. I cried fighting with my boyfriend on Wednesday because I wanted him to be angrier, as angry as I was and to feel the visceral destruction that I felt in my soul. Eventually, we settled on holding each other in the night.
On Thursday when my boyfriend left for work, he asked me to the dishes. I hate doing the dishes at any time even though I create most of them. My boyfriend does “our” dishes most of the time but not every single time. I’ve never been able to convince him that since historically, housework has fallen to women, he is responsible for making those reparations in our relationship.
However, I’m currently unemployed. He is a city attorney who commutes 5 days a week. It was a reasonable request that I do the dishes. I refused. When he got home, I told him I couldn’t do the dishes because I needed the sink to look like how I felt inside. I wasn’t ready to clean up the mess of wine glasses, plates of pizza, and babka.
Friday, I started on the dishes. I’ve thought about the writers and the Rabbis I know or follow who said those thoughtful things. What should I do, as I writer, I asked myself?That big question had a simple answer. My job, as a writer, is to write. Even if I fear, my words bad now.
However, the late Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, (talk about an Eras Tour) said:
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
I think this is a horrible thing to say about going to war, especially if the intelligence is about non-existent WMDs. It’s actually a wild thing to say when you really, really did not need to go to war.
But there’s a lesson in these words that I love, despite hating the messenger. We greet every day with what we have regardless of what we may want to have. I don’t have anywhere near the insight I would like to impart or the hope I wish to give you. What I have, is an essay that quotes a sober, Lutheran, a 90s-punk band, and a war criminal.
I also have a short list. On Friday (before I did the dishes) I decided to make a mental note of some good things that happened to me during the first Trump presidency. I needed to remember that even in dark times for humanity, our human lives can still experience joy and love and connection.
My youngest niece was born.
I adopted my second cat, Esther.
I wrote a solo show.
I won a writer’s grant.
Then I got really, really stuck for while. Then I had another one.
I moved to LA and made friends, really really good friends. Best friends. One of those friends met her husband during that administration. I recently taught their baby Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. One of them introduced to my boyfriend though we met under Biden, between my first and second doses of Moderna.
I didn’t go to 10, but I know I could. This is not to erase the very really suffering that electing him will lead to. I saw a tweet where someone was replying to the notion, Well, Queer people survived Reagan with the rejoinder that, No, quite, famously, many, many did not.
I’m not interested in sugarcoating that something bad happened. And I’m not going to tell anyone, myself, included to turn away from moments of joy and feelings of love when they make themselves known. For the first 48 hours after the election, I coped by eating lots of babka with my hands like a little raccoon, and I drank almost no water. It wasn’t great and by Thursday night my stomach hurt. It wasn’t the best coping mechanism.
I also turned off the news for a few days. I will avoid hearing his voice as long as I can. My goal is for at least 4 years. On Friday, I made pasta with kale sauce because I really, really needed something green. I drank more water. I don’t care that I didn’t eat vegetables for two days, I really don’t. I’m glad I am eating them now.
I mentioned psychic armor earlier in this post. Making a mental list of joy helped me repair my armor a little bit even if the patchwork job isn’t the best. I was never good at sewing anyhow. Countries may be stuck with the army they have when they go to war but we aren’t. (Suck it, Rumsfeld!) We can repair or invest in our physic armor, whether it’s being with people we love or going on a roller coaster and screaming for catharsis. (Yes, I am headed to the Santa Monica Pier to do just that.)
I don’t know what Bisexual Erasure Book Club is going to be exactly. I’m aiming for millennial musings and room temperature takes and to post weekly. I hope there won’t be too many typos. I chose the title because I’m a bisexual woman in a heteronormative relationship, I love reading, and it has a nice ring to it.
From my mother, context clues, and general culture, I know book clubs are places where friends gather to talk about a book they’ve read. Or where they go to drink, book be damned. Either way, they get together.
If you need me. I will be here. At my Bisexual Erasure Book Club.
Love,
Rachel
