Mood of the Week

Monthly Jams

Mood of the Week — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:01:56 GMT

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

Going from Know Your Enemy to The Healer to I’ve Always Been Crazy checks out…

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If You Vote For a Candidate, You Should Have to Fight Their Wars

Mood of the Week — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:00:54 GMT

Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Love Vigilantes by New Order

Listen here: Apple | YouTube

I propose a new law. When you vote, if the person you voted for starts a war, your name is automatically put into the draft and you are now responsible for fighting the war you voted for. Any age, any gender, any class, any party allegiance; let’s find a place for you in the fight.

In fact, let’s tweak it because modern warfare is more complicated than just boots on the ground. Did you, a politician, inherit a war and tell us you’re gonna get us out of it and then fail to do so? Do you want to start an air strike, a bombing campaign, drone warfare expansion? Destabilize a region? Supply strategic support to an “important ally”? Congrats, all your voters are eligible for the draft now.

As Americans, we are way too comfortable letting other people die for our “freedom”. And I am beyond sick of seeing poor kids being sent to die for the rich and, often times, the middle class’s comfort, while killing innocent civilians, animals, and nature overseas, who are just unlucky enough to be born somewhere with lots of oil.

The reason we can be so laissez faire about what our government does, is because a lot of us will never face the consequences of what we say we stand for.

And this is not a new problem in 2026. If you think poor kids haven’t been sent overseas to kill other poor kids by pretty much every president you can think of, then you haven’t been paying attention. If this were law, every single one of us would be eligible for the draft at one point in our lives.

That’s how violent America is.

Many people vote for their guy and approve of whatever they do cause it’s their team doing it, refusing to critique so it won’t be weaponized against them. Sometimes, they even stop paying attention altogether while innocent civilians are slaughtered around the world under our flag.

People need to start being held accountable for their politician’s choices, because I can’t see any other way that we can actually implement change. Everyday Americans have no real skin in the game in their own foreign wars, and we will continue to blindly tear the world apart until we are forced to feel the fear we impress upon everyone else.

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People I Wish Were Still Here

Mood of the Week — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:01:06 GMT

Anthony Bourdain

George Carlin

Richard Pryor

Mr. Rodgers

Lenny Bruce

Dalton Trumbo

Katharine Hepburn

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Prime Minister Winston Churchill

General George S. Patton

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The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Boomers

Mood of the Week — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 01:01:06 GMT

Photo by Georgi Kalaydzhiev on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Why Don’t You Do Right? by Benny Goodman & Peggy Lee

Listen here: Apple | YouTube

First of all, I don’t mean all boomers, many boomers have had their lives equally ruined by the choices of their peers. But as a whole, they are a generation that didn’t just pull the ladder up behind themselves, they set it on fire.

They seem to hate the continuance of life after their death. I know we’ve had many narcissistic leaders and movements in history and obviously tech bros are desperate to end the world because no one wants to suck their dicks, but it’s wild to see a good percentage of a generation who would rather watch the world burn than accept that good things, perhaps great things, will be made without them.

Have you ever tried telling a boomer that The Beatles are of their era? They look at you like you just shot their dog.

And I believe this is at the heart of boomer nihilism. (that and lead poisoning)

Boomers were the first generation to get special attention as teenagers, because they were the first teens with disposable income. They were targeted by marketing execs as being important, tastemakers, the future!! And boomers injected that hyperbole right into their eyeballs.

Before boomers, music was never targeted towards teens, none of the world was, it was targeted towards adults. A lot of the great teen bop rock n’ roll songs from the 50s are just repurposed adult songs.

Tutti Frutti? That’s a song about anal sex.

The thing about the boomer generation is it’s a narcissistic generation.

Narcissists love to have children but they don’t like their children to surpass them. Why else would our parents’ generation have stripped away every regulation that protected their kids’ and grandkids’ futures and drove prices into the inaccessible? Their prime slogan was “greed is good”.

I think, because the hippy movement was a part of their youth, they believe they are somehow immune to being bad people - they were the flower power children! You know, the generation that left a lot of single women with children, no partners, and a nice bout of gonorrhea.

I mean, our president is the most boomer of all boomers. If you’ve ever watched a narcissist face their moment in the spotlight dimming, you know this is exactly what it looks like. Nearing the end of their grip on everyone, they flail about, becoming more unhinged in their actions, desperately shouting to anyone who will listen, “No no, I’m a great man! Just believe me.”

Like fingernails on a chalkboard….

But the false narrative inevitably fractures beneath its own weight. Which is exactly what is happening to the false legacy that boomers have shoved down our throats for decades. It’s disintegrating.

My whole life I had to hear lies about the millennial generation, how we were entitled and lazy and etc etc while we worked so hard just to end up with nothing. The absurdity of saying eating avocado toast was killing the napkin and diamond industry.

Good. They’re bad for the planet.

It is possible to leave behind a decent legacy. The Greatest Generation, though they weren’t perfect, they did give us boomers after all, believed in and built something bigger than themselves. They believed in leaving the world a better place than they received it.

Plus, I’ve just never had a member of the Greatest Generation meltdown because I might think Benny Goodman is a product of his time.

…a banging product, I might add.

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The Audacity

Mood of the Week — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:07:03 GMT

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: April 29, 1992 by Sublime

Listen here: Apple | YouTube

If for some reason you want to hear my voice (it’s my first time recording, please don’t judge):

I’ve been hearing LA is next.

But I think what they forgot is one important thing and that’s that Californians are fucking insane. We’re not the descendants of plantation owners and debutantes, we’re not the descendants of pilgrims and puritans, we’re the descendants of the wild fucking west.

Our state is on fire 50% of the time and all we do is turn our air purifiers on.

California is so unhinged we have our own version of sober because we don’t consider mind-altering drugs uninhibiting, you cannot unstabilize an unstable force.

These people who are being kidnapped are our community members, our fellow Americans. These are people who actually give something back to our city, unlike these punks with masks coming in from who knows where? We know you’re not just snatching up criminals, you are disbanding our neighborhoods. This isn’t your city, these aren’t your streets, you do not get a say in who lives here.

The people being kidnapped from us contribute to our culture, they contribute to our neighborhoods, they contribute to our economy. These are our people you thugs are putting your filthy little hands on. How dare you come into our communities and tell us who belongs here?

You are the ones who are not fucking welcome.

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In the Year of Finding Out

Mood of the Week — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:02:22 GMT

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

As the first full week of January 2026 unfolds, taking us to deeper levels of hell, my mind keeps going back to shortly before the new year when Logan Paul and Andrew Tate got the shit beat out of them.

If anyone needs a little pick-me-up reminder:

Unlike the rest of my personality, which one might call cynical and dark, I’m surprisingly a bit of an optimist.

And if ingesting unhealthy amounts of true crime has taught me anything, it’s that the universe tends toward justice. It usually takes too long, it’s not how you expect it, and there’s a lot of pain along the way, but I do believe Mother Nature/karma/Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ/whatever is a punitive bitch.

And the thing about the Paul and Tate knockouts that felt like such a mirror to the moment is we’ve been Clockwork Orange-style strapped into the absolute scum-of-the-earth’s joyride in to fuck-around-town.

FAFO, a lot of people love that phrase nowadays, but it always comes with this unbridled arrogance that they will not be the one finding out.

All of the sectors of our world have been hijacked by absolute loser dickbags who believe that they can do whatever they want because they have money. And we’ve all been trapped, for about a decade now, in this nightmare fantasy where money can allow you to be whatever you want. But money is paper thin and while it can buy you a lot of false advertising, it cannot change gravity.

Logan Paul and Andrew Tate were a part of the fuck around club and they just found out. And granted, it’s not as much finding out as they deserve, but it was poetic. These bags of garbage disguised as humans really thought they could buy their way into being big, strong men. How pathetic. Imagine being that stupid.

Now, we mere peons may not be able to do much to stop them, but reality can. And nothing is more real than a punch to the face from a professional boxer.

And as our arrogant, disturbed government, drunk on power, baits the world, the rest of the world comes together without us. Despite what many think, America’s power in the world has come in large part from its allyship, what happens when that’s gone? What happens when no one wants to play with the mad man at the helm anymore? Because it seems a lot less like the world has been fucking around with us and much more like our leaders have started fucking with everyone else.

I guess none of that sounded terribly optimistic… but it feels like it’s a sign of a tipping point, a sign that people are getting their footing again. A sign of the turning of the tide? Because, like with AI, money is still not an actual genie in a bottle. It can do a lot, but sadly, it cannot turn a YouTuber into Muhammad Ali.

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Quickstack

Mood of the Week — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:01:19 GMT

Photo by Road Ahead on Unsplash

I wonder if people in the future will see us calling things like ChatGPT and Grok “artificial intelligence” like we see people from Salem accusing others of witchcraft.

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Monthly Jams

Mood of the Week — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:01:19 GMT

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Living Through Loser Culture

Mood of the Week — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:01:10 GMT

Photo by Justin Chien on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Good Time by Brazilian Girls

Listen here: Apple | YouTube

Nobody wants to be cool anymore. At best, they want to be not-cringe, and as soon as you’re thinking that way, you can never be cool.

I miss the influence of snobs. Our world is fully formed by people with no taste and you can tell. I don’t mind nerds having a moment in the sun, but we’re in straight up loser culture now.

OpenAI is helping make the first AI-animated feature. And if I understood correctly, the design of the characters comes from one of the guys working at OpenAI (using OpenAI, of course) and I think that’s so telling. This guy dedicates his life to tech, but the secret is out, the guy is just a loser who didn’t have the guts to pursue something artistic.

I guess the old adage is true, those who can’t, tech.

And that’s who is running every department of every industry in our lives. Losers. Losers who don’t have the self-respect, patience, or ability to dedicate themselves to what they really care about.

And again, I go back to avoiding being cringe, if you’re unwilling to risk anything, you can never be cool. It’s part of why Hollywood has been flopping so hard so often, they’re obsessed with money. Money isn’t cool. It’s never been cool.

Money is for narcs.

Our architecture? Ugly. Our cars? Ugly. Even the interior design. Ugly.

People higher up in companies, the people running things, used to cultivate and communicate with culture. People wanted to have their fingers on the pulse of culture because they were excited to try and successfully predict where it was going.

Our world is being run by stupid losers who are so detached from reality, they keep forcing stuff no one wants down the public’s throat. AI, by and large, is not liked or wanted by the public, and yet, it’s everywhere. And it’s not even fucking good; it lies for no reason, it can’t hold a consistent style or logical through-line. AI, at least in the creative spaces, is getting visually better, but that’s about it; it can’t do long form ANYTHING and it all looks like variation on a theme tbh. And do you know why that is?

CAUSE IT’S A FUCKING ALGORITHM!!!!!!!! It’s like having Netflix’s algorithm pick a movie for you, and calling it a genius. You have to be so fucking dim to think you are talking to an intelligent being. It’s just taking a shot at what you might want to hear, it’s modeling itself off of a million conversations between real humans and grabbing the things that are most similar/common.

I saw a design professor share a story about one of her students submitting an AI generated image and how she had to tell them it was an automatic zero because it’s plagiarism. The young young adult, and yes I know this is the responsibility of the adults around them, thought the work was their own cause the prompt was theirs… got a future exec on our hands here.

But many young people also are hating AI. Students are sick of putting a bunch of work into an assignment, while others just go to ChatGPT. Imagine going $50k into debt for that. And as we continue to discover how limited “AI” is, maybe all we’re doing, is setting up those kids who are too dim to understand a prompt is not work, to have no skills when the bubble eventually bursts and we see “AI” can’t and won’t actually replace us.

I know the goal is to raise the next generation on such low expectations, that garbage is normalized as art. But people are pushing back, we don’t want to live in the land of losers anymore.

Our leaders are so inept they can’t even see the money making opportunities before them. Physical media is back - there is so much money in physical media, analog, moving away from digital; which culturally we are itching to do. But the people running our industries are so used to “making” money by fucking people over, they don’t know how to work for it anymore. They’re lazy and so inflexible, they’ll let their industry burn before letting someone cooler than them take over and make them money.

If you were some hotshot not that long ago, the goal was to be cool, to be invited to parties, cause a stir when you went to a hot spot in town. You didn’t even have to be a celebrity to have status, within your own industry you could strive to be a star. Now the goal seems to be to die alone, gooning it next to your ai-girlfriend in your bunker next to a print out of your last bank statement.

Just like James Dean...

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We're All Sex Ed, the Clown

Mood of the Week — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:30:35 GMT

I’m standing backstage in a tiny theater with a full clown look on; makeup, rainbow hair, oversized pants; running through a monologue over and over, thinking, “why did I do this to myself?”

I was on a sketch team for years and recently, one of my old teammates asked if I wanted to come back and perform a solo sketch she wrote. Apparently, at some point in recent history, I had said, out loud, that I wanted to do live comedy again. I don’t remember that but I do say a lot of things.

And that’s how, a couple Saturdays ago, I was cast as Sex Ed, the Clown.

The sketch takes place in a dystopian future where I, a clown, teach 6th graders about safe sex. It may surprise some people, but I rarely wear clown makeup. And even rarer do I give sex talks.

The week leading up to the show I became distressed realizing I actually had to do the thing I’d said I would. I deal with this by not looking at the script, neither learning the lines nor getting anymore comfortable with the thing.

Then, Saturday arrives.

After doing shows on a routine basis, some (me) people (my teammates) can get a little loosey goosey about our prep work. I arrive at the theater to find NONE OF US have learned our lines or rehearsed one sketch in this entire half hour show. But it’s okay, we’ve got three hours.

Me and the script writer work out the beats of my monologue. I practice blowing a condom up like a balloon. I get about ten minutes of her time and then I’m off on my own, off to learn the lines and blocking. Also we decided to just go ahead and get me in that full clown makeup.

I’d picked up an Eastern European lager from Jons next door when I arrived, so, I’m also just drinking that as I look for a place to practice my monologue in private. The theater is tiny and all the shows’ performers have arrived and finding rehearsal space is proving difficult.

My team and I go into the back alley behind the theater; a common practice space for live comedy performers, where we belong, by the garbage. I’m looking for my little corner to stowaway in and practice. My theater is sandwiched between a Thai restaurant and a nail salon, so naturally, I go behind their dumpsters.

At this point, I have actually put my clown costume on. I didn’t want to fully put it on, for some reason, and I had one arm hanging off. So, I’m just standing in between the Thai restaurant’s dumpsters with full clown makeup and a clown costume hanging one-armed off my body.

I also don’t have my glasses on. Suddenly, one of the doors to the Thai restaurant opens up and a woman steps outside. Me, being blind as a bat at that distance, thought my teammate had come to grab me for the show.

So, this woman walked out of her waitressing job to take a small break in the back and finds a disheveled clown staring at her between two dumpsters.

And I’m just waiting for my teammate to tell me what’s up. So, from her perspective, I’m just staring at her. I wasn’t even smiling. Though I guess that’s not 100% accurate, as I did have a smile painted on my face. So whether or not I was actually smiling, I was smiling.

It finally occurs to me how she’s experiencing this traumatic event and I quickly tell her I’m from the sketch theater next door, to which she simply replies, “you scared me.”

Now we’ve got about 45 minutes to the show, and I’m just in, you know, full clown makeup, full clown gear, hat, wig, and the thing about me is this is not something I would ever think to do in my life. But I have a terrible habit of saying yes to things that sound interesting, without thinking about how dreadfully awful “interesting” can be as an experience.

The tech guy is new, the person who put the tech script together is new, none of us know our lines and this is my first (and final) time being a clown. It’s new, everything is new.

The show begins and cause everyone is a pro, everyone else is killing it.

I’m the third sketch in the show and this is my only sketch in the show, so to the audience, I have come here tonight to perform one thing and one thing only, my clown routine.

I, of course, totally fucked up my entrance, which is great, cause being such an early sketch, I’m helping set the tone of the show. The audience is tiny, maybe ten people, but it’s all our friends. In some ways, that should make it easier, but really the audience has all the backstory and they are amped to watch a friend do something they never thought she’d do.

So, I’ve fucked up my entrance. The tech guy fucks up his part, too, and I’m just standing on the stage, backlit in otherwise full darkness, doing BIG clown waves to the audience.

Finally, the lights come up and I’ve decided, fuck it, I’m here, I’m going full force. Fingers crossed, I remember lines, I go into full Sex Ed, the Clown mode. And I nail it. There was a stutter start but I saved it, I’m in the groove, I just got to settle into the character and let it take me through the next 3-5 minutes of my life.

The vibe is there, I can feel it. The audience is into it, I’m into. I’m feeling good. I’m in the groove. When suddenly I hear someone at the back of the audience repeating the words that I am saying.

There is a heckler in the crowd.

Later, we decided that he thought he was participating, that he thought sketch comedy was a call and response sort of thing. He thought he was helping us. But I did not realize that in the moment. In the moment, I took it very, very personally.

I forgot every fucking line of the script. For the next, what felt like an eternity, I just honked that stupid clown horn, throwing out the lines I could remember, holding on by the seat of my oversized clown pants.

I get back on track. I know what the lines are. I’m going with it, I’m figuring it out. But then it dawns on me… this script is inviting the audience to respond. I am supposed to talk to them like they are sixth graders, and encourage them to talk back to me.

So now instead of saying, “Come on, you’re sixth graders, don’t be shy, share your opinions!” I said, “Come on, you’re sixth graders!”

At this point, I look into the audience and this dude’s just giving me a thumbs down. I’m in full clown costume, about to blow-up a condom like a balloon, and there is just a man at the back of the audience giving me a full-on thumbs down.

At that point, it’s just survival mode. I just had to get to the other end of this sketch, off this stage, and out of live theater for the rest of my life.

So I start blowing up the condom. But unlike when I practiced in the back, every time I blow it up and go to tie it off, I’m not quick enough and it deflates. For some reason, I decide this is the one thing the heckler will not take from me. So, I keep going.

After four tries, I’ve managed to tie off a small pocket of air. I was supposed to make it into a balloon animal and give it to an audience member but when I bowed and tried to hand it to an audience member, he passed.

I’m just standing at the edge of the stage with a deflated condom with red lipstick all over it. Holding this out to the audience member like a beautiful jeweled, diamond necklace. So when he weirdly didn’t want it, I just dropped that deflated condom to the ground.

Heckler is still yammering on in the back and I have one more pratfall to get through before I’m free. It’s time for me to peel a banana and put a condom on it. I peel the banana, put the condom on the banana, finish up my little bit just sweating buckets at this point. All I need to do is walk toward the exit and “accidentally” slip on the banana peel and fall.

I’m basically blacked out at this point. I don’t remember anything from the past five minutes, I don’t even know if I’ve said one joke. I start walking towards the door when it hits me, I did not set myself up for a good fake banana slip pratfall. I didn’t set it up at all. And right as I’m thinking that, my foot steps on the banana and wouldn’t you know it? Those are slippery motherfuckers. I slip on the banana peel as hear the whole audience gasp.

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My Thoughts On Current Events

Mood of the Week — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:01:30 GMT

🎧 Paired Listening: Tiny Cities Made of Ashes by Modest Mouse

Listen here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

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Uncomfortable Moment #83

Mood of the Week — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:01:45 GMT

Photo by Filip Filkovic Philatz on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Sweet Peony by Bobbie Gentry

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Last fall, I went to Spain. My dad had recently died. My industry was in turmoil. The world was in turmoil. And I decided to have a life affirming trip overseas. And on this life affirming trip overseas, I was gonna get some.

So I matched with a couple of Spanish gentlemen, talked to them before I traveled there. And to the best of my abilities, I verified them.

In Barcelona, I went out with this one guy who took me to a very nice restaurant. I’d been in Spain a couple days. Flying always makes me queasy, plus, I’m a vegetarian, which doesn’t always travel well, so I hadn’t been eating regularly.

Spoiled by LA, I failed to mention I was a vegetarian to my date and this very nice restaurant did not have one single item without meat. I take that back, it had a cheese platter.

Sometimes, when traveling, I’ll switch to pescatarian to make my life easier so, spotting the only fish item on the menu, I ended up ordering a lobster roll. Cause nothing is more appealing, when you’re craving vegetables and fruit - fresh food, than a big pile of lobster and mayo on essentially a hotdog bun. Yum.

But I don’t want to be rude. So I eat it. I force myself to eat the whole fucking monstrosity. I mean, I don’t even know why someone would want one of these. Why would anyone want this? But I eat it.

There’s a bit of a language barrier between me and my date. My Spanish is limited and not confident. He speaks pretty good English. But, you know, there’s definitely a bit lost in translation. We’re not able to communicate the nuances of ourselves to each other. So, when he starts kind of jumping into this really big brag, I just assumed it was that.

“When I was very young, I had an idea…” He tells me how he had started this business that he later sold for a ton of money, and how rich he got off of it. And, naturally, his dad had seen the way he managed his first business and asked him to come work at his dad’s company. Apparently, his dad was, like, “Oh, please, baby boy, show me how to be a businessman.”

And so he joined his daddy’s business, and apparently made his dad so much money, his dad begged him not to leave. But he had to, the world was calling. Everyone was always asking why, since he was so so so rich, he didn’t spend his money on fancier cars and fancier things, but he was just a simple man…

I’m thinking, woof, but, the words between us are limited, he’s probably just trying to show off for me. I decide to let it go. I’m not gonna think that hard about it. I don’t need this man to be my future husband, just my company for the evening, he has a lot of wiggle room.

After a lot of wine, we go walking into the night. Now, one of the things about me is I like to smoke weed and you can’t do that in Spain. And I was kind of missing just the, you know, the ritual of it all; the lighting of the joint, the actual smoke. A friend of mine had been saying how cigarettes sometimes worked in a pinch. Spoiler alert, they do not.

But I was in Spain where basically everybody seemed to be smoking. There is a smoking room at the fucking airport in Spain. Sponsored by Camel, it’s just a glass box filled with people engulfed in a thick layer of smog. I’m just watching everyone puff left and right, and it’s not what I want to be puffing, but, I envy them.

The guy that I’m with smokes because, Spain. And I decide to join. We’ve been drinking wine. We’re on a little walk. He’s showing me around this part of Barcelona. There’s a light drizzle as we walk in a haze through the busy but slowing streets.

And then he starts, “...When I was very young, I had an idea…” He then proceeds to tell me the exact same story he told me over dinner, right up to the confusion of his friends at his lack of splurging cause he was basically a millionaire, he suddenly added.

And I’m like, “Okay, well, it’s now this is weird.” One time, okay, you’re being a little showy. But twice? That’s exposing a real lack of self-awareness. Either that, or you have a real low viewpoint of women. Wait. Hey. I’m not gonna assume this is a gender thing. Maybe he just has a low viewpoint of all people.

But again, none of this matters. I’m not looking to raise a family with this guy. I’m just looking to bring a story home. It’s too late at this point for me to go back to my Airbnb - I’m renting a room in someone’s apartment. It’s super late, I’m drunk; I’m committed. We go back to his apartment.

Decorated by his mother.

He told me that but it looked like it was. He told me and as soon as he told me, I knew he really didn’t have to, I could see it. It was clear a woman in her 60s or 70s had decorated this 32-year-old man’s apartment. Who else would it be but his mother?

He shows me around. We have more wine. We go out on his little balcony, we’re smoking cigarettes. And the question of why I’m in Spain comes up and I explain that my dad had just died after a year of illness.

My date is moved by this. I’m not a teenager, not even in my 20s anymore, but, it’s not super common to lose parents in your 30s and I think I’m an unwelcomed reminder to some of my peers that that day is coming.

My date is very moved, very stirred by the fact that I had just lost my dad, and is honestly shocked that I’m as together as I am. I talk about what a surreal experience the whole thing is. You think it’s gonna be one thing and it is just something that you can’t really anticipate. You’re losing a loved one but also moving closer to the finish line yourself and you become aware that one less person knows your story in this world.

He tells me he doesn’t even think he could handle it. His dad is so important to him. I tell him that’s sweet and ask if they’re close.

“Well, he just always believed in me... See, when I was very young, I had an idea…”

Are you fucking kidding me?

We just stopped talking about my dead dad so we could go back to your portfolio? But you know what? Fuck it. I don’t care. Conversation is not what I need from him. He’s cute. We’re having drinks, we’re having smokes. We head back to his bedroom, probably decorated by his mom. He opens the door and laying across the bed is a black, PVC, Dexter-esq tarp.

“Welp, this is what you get for being a slut,” is my first thought.

Yeah, no, of fucking course, this motherfucker’s gonna murder me cause I can’t keep it in my pants. I’m just standing there staring at him and he’s just carrying on as though this is the most normal thing in the world. So then I’m, like, hey… why’s there a tarp on the bed?

He tells me it’s because he has an assistant who does all of the laundry and he doesn’t want her to have to clean up the bed after us to which I had two thoughts. One, why could you not wash your sheets yourself? And two, what fucking kind of sex are you having tonight?

We got rid of the tarp. Now, I’m not really one to kiss and tell, so I’m not gonna dive into details. But I will share one thing that I think will very easily paint a picture of what the next 10 minutes of my life looked like. About every 30 seconds, he would pause and go, “Now what would you like me to do?” I don’t know!

Surprise me.

A little while later, we’re going to sleep. Again, I’m here for the night, I got nowhere else to go. He pulls out his phone and starts watching YouTube. Besides being rich, the other thing he’s told me all night is how hard of a time he has sleeping, and how YouTube helps him pass out.

He spends the next 15 minutes showing me what he likes to watch on YouTube. It’s Joe Rogan, comedians that sound like Joe Rogan, and carpentry. We watched a whole ass video on carpentry. As fascinating as this is, I’m just dying to get to sleep and get this night over with. I tell him I’m gonna pass out, he offers to put headphones in but I say it’s okay. He makes fun of my cold feet and I press them flirtatiously back at him adding, “you have to warm them up!”

His voice turns stern, like, he’s my teacher or something, “Rebecca, I have told you I have trouble sleeping. I can’t have that disrupted. But I wish you a good night’s sleep.”

So now we’re just sitting in silence, silence and YouTube. He ends up sleeping in another room because the YouTube is preventing me from sleeping and baby boy needs his YouTube. And then I lay there, in his bed, alone, without falling asleep, until 6am.

I quietly gather my things, call myself an Uber. At this point, I haven’t slept all night, my stomach is filled with lobster, mayo, wine, and cigarette ash. And there’s traffic. So much traffic. My driver is zigzagging through cars when suddenly I realize, I’m gonna vomit. I’m definitely gonna vomit in a foreign Uber.

And then, as I’m fighting back puke, my Uber driver starts hitting on me.

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Monthly Jams

Mood of the Week — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:01:49 GMT

Illustration by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Trying to be back on my bullshit and keeping a normal schedule again. By the end of the year, my goal is to switch from Spotify to another platform (if anyone has any good tips/recs) but until then… my September jams:

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We are divided. We are conquered.

Mood of the Week — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 18:01:21 GMT

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Jump Into The Fire by Harry Nilsson

Listen here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Except for a couple big losses in my life, I realized recently this is the loneliest I’ve ever felt. I have loved ones, work, things I’m excited about, but the world is a lonely place right now. Some of the loudest voices in the world are the worst among us and they’re driving this train.

We’ve become so detached from one another, our whole understanding of each other is through our screens. That’s how many of us understand the world now. And while that’s tragic, it’s also extremely dangerous. We don’t know each other anymore. And it’s crushing us.

When something bad happens now, the first instinct isn’t to figure out how to fix things, it’s to figure out how to put the blame on someone else. How to use this moment to prove we are good and others are bad. It’s gotten to the point where it often feels like we are hoping for the worst outcome just to feel validated.

The disconnect is palpable, it permeates our whole lives. Single people are the canaries in the coal mine of human connection and it is bleak out here. Not just in the dating scene but just being in the world. When you’re single you get a lot of your human connection from strangers; it’s from the barista making your coffee, it’s your USPS driver, it’s the only other single loser at the party you spend all night talking to. And it’s not that those moments don’t happen anymore, it’s just that in the past few years they’ve felt empty, distant.

No longer are we meeting a random person at a party and embarking on a fruitless love affair for the next 3 months. In fact, any time I feel a mutual connection with a man, I can pretty much guarantee that means one of us is gonna disappear at some point soon. Cause I’m just as culpable. I don’t think I realized what I was doing but I think in this post-covid political hellscape I’ve been seeing everyone as other; I’m just living my life, building my stability, taking care of what is in front of me, and protecting what I have from being snatched from me.

And that’s what powerful, rich people want. Me, on an island alone, guarding against my neighbor.

I keep thinking about this man at a steakhouse in Texas, he’d passed out from a medical condition and the staff thought he was a passed out homeless man, putting aside how unbelievably fucked up that excuse is, they carried his unconscious body outside and left him there, without calling for help. He died.

I think, if I had to pick a story, you know, as an example of where I think humanity is at on the scale of decent to not decent, I think that would be the story I would point to to sum up about where I believe we are.

Or the Ukrainian woman who was stabbed? Okay, you don’t want to chase down the guy with a knife, fine, but you don’t go to her? She’s left to die completely alone, without even the kindness of a stranger? Or the homeless woman on the train in NY who was set on fire and people just kept walking by. They filmed it, but they didn’t help.

We’ve stopped seeing the humanity in each other.

In the early 2000s, there was this theory around voting. How people voted against their best interest because they were voting “aspirationally”, they weren’t rich but they figured they would be one day so voted to benefit the rich they hoped to one day become. I kinda feel like people are aspirational living nowadays, detached to others but hopeful when our time comes, the world will see our humanity.

This is what the powerful and rich want. They want us hating each other. They want men and women to be at each other’s throats, unable to build lasting relationships. They want generations to be shaming each other, instead of sharing knowledge and resources. They want people across the political spectrum seeing each other as enemies instead of potential allies. We have so much more in common with each other than we have different.

People think karma is some woo-woo, new age thing. It’s not. It’s something much more real. How you see the world is how you will experience the world. If you approach life from a place of fear, you will have a scary life. If you approach life from a place of anger, your life will be filled with rage. If you approach life from a place of hate, your world will be nothing but hatred.

Look, I think we’re all traumatized and have brain rot, and I think we’re detached and exhausted. But no one is coming to save us. We’re all sitting around being like, no no, trust me, MY MILLIONAIRE/BILLIONAIRE will fix things. None of them give a shit about us. We’re in this situation because decades ago there were certain people in power and then other people were in power and then other people were in power and then other people were in power. We’re in this situation because for decades people with money and power from all walks of life deregulated us into oblivion.

Women aren’t going to go to Venus, men to Mars. I don’t think a second Earth is coming any time soon. And, like it or not, we can’t turn back the hands of time. We’re unfortunately in it together and we’ve got to figure it out. And when I say, we, I just mean human beings. Humans. We gotta just start giving a shit about each other again. And not in an Instagram post but in how we approach each other.

They say Millennials are dying at an unusually high rate. In the past three years, I’ve lost three Millennial loved ones. And while diseases are on the rise, so are deaths of despair. And the three I lost I would categorize as deaths of despair. And the thing that was so clear about each of their deaths, the thing that haunts me, was that they were so failed by us around them. I won’t speak for anyone else, actually, I’ll just speak for myself. I failed them. They needed help, and I was so exhausted and in my own world, I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t show up in the way they needed.

I’m not saying this because I’m looking for pity or think it makes me a terrible person. I think this is a symptom of now and I’m desperate for us to change it. I don’t want to live in a world where no one sees each other.

Or idk, maybe this is just a me thing.

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Attempting to Fall Back in Love w/ Life

Mood of the Week — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:01:31 GMT

Photo by Vibek Rana on Unsplash

🎧 Paired Listening: Bring On The Lucie (Freda People) - John Lennon

Listen here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

It's been five years since 2020 and I still don't feel like I'm back to ”normal”. And by normal, I just mean, living a life that feels like a life. Our worlds have become so much more solitary since the lockdowns and I often feel like I’m living on the outskirts of humanity. And I know so many people who feel the same way - trapped on the outside looking in.

Our social skills were just obliterated during the year plus we were stuck inside. And when we did have to venture into the world it was paired with anxiety directed at one another, don’t get too close, you might kill someone. There's no way that hasn't left an impression on our psyches.

And, at the same time, we've had the rise of TikTok, which is just a massive onslaught of opinions and perspectives and information and stories and horrors and delights and other people thriving and et cetera, et cetera. It’s all the other social media platforms on steroids and with it the era of perfecting ourselves began. It started with Instagram for sure, but TikTok is a whole other level.

Since TikTok has entered the scene, I have learned I am doing literally everything wrong; I date wrong, I eat wrong, I sleep wrong, when I’m listening to people share stories with me, I’m listening wrong. All of sudden, the amount of things it seems I need to do to live a thriving and successful life is gonna take me the rest of my life to complete.

It's like, we're trying to live forever, but not happily.

We're all trying to live to be 100 years old, but we're gonna be fucking miserable the whole ride there. It not only feels impossible to enjoy life anymore, with the state of the world, it feels wrong. But if we don't love life, how are we supposed to feel rallied to fight for it? If you're not spending time in nature, how are you expected to care what happens to it?

I mean, you should care. You should fucking care. But it's hard to believe your care matters when we are all just stuck isolated in our individual little lives, our little pods, just scrolling and scrolling.

It’s the era of longevity over life.

Everyone's working to save up a bunch of money so that they can take care of themselves until they're 120 years old. Unfortunately, all their friends will be homeless and their whole life will have been one boring anecdote after another. But, hey, they'll have gone to bed on time.

And I'm just realizing, yeah, I don't want that. I don't want to do another five years like this let alone 50, 60, I'm good. I mean fuck, we've got people falling in love with ChatGPT (may that love never find me).

Every time I feel like I’ve been stuck in hermit mode I turn to one man and one movie for inspiration; the 2008 Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man. In the movie, Jim Carrey decides to say yes to everything that comes his way and it changes his life for the better, he meets Zooey Deschanel, so… point proven.

I’m in my yes man phase. And I’m over being the best version of myself.

I’m getting a full night’s sleep much less. Some weeks, I eat terribly; food is my fuel and sometimes that fuel is french fries. I’ve been prioritizing the gym and seeing my friends over work. I had an important meeting I could cram all night for or I could push it, possibly looking less “on it” but ultimately feeling more confident and good about things, I pushed the meeting.

I’ve also been drinking too many beers and smoking way too much weed. I stay up late on school nights, eating candy. I wear the expensive perfume, I’m done saving things I love for the future. I’m spending (a little) money I could probably save on treating myself and the people I love. I don’t finish books, shows, or movies that bore me.

If I’m already out and someone suggests we go to a second location, I go. If I’m at home and someone invites me to something where I don’t know anyone, I go.

None of this is extravagant. None of this is massive. But after the past few years, it feels revolutionary. And honestly, it feels like I’m 18 again. At my first community college party, meeting people my age for the first time who I hadn’t known since kindergarten. Everything is possible and everyone is just as nervous as me.

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What Comes After the Internet?

Mood of the Week — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 18:01:30 GMT

Photo by Alan W on Unsplash

The internet, currently, is hell. None of us are happy here. We're all addicted to something we never knew we could be addicted to. Most of us couldn’t say for certain what's real and what's not real on the internet. It’s just a little black hole we carry around in our pockets, sucking the joy from the world.

And that makes me start thinking about what’s coming next. There has to be a next, or human beings are just gonna spend the rest of eternity trapped in an ad manager's wet dream.

I started listening to this podcast recently, Who Broke the Internet. I'm not that far into it, just the first episode, but they explain how Google's search engine has become such garbage. It’s called the ‘enshittification’, the way that technology and platforms become worse over time to make more money off the consumer. Google used to be a great search engine, just like Boeing used to be a safe airplane, but things change.

To please the ad department, Google's search engine team made the searching model worse so that you, the consumer, would have to search again. And again. And again. To get you looking at as many ads as possible, as Google enshittificate’s all over our eyes.

Meanwhile, bots are just talking to bots. Social media, once a haven of your high school acquaintance’s recent sandwiches, is just ads and QVC hosts -sorry, I meant influencers- talking about their lives while selling us things.

It’s literal fucking hell.

As the idiom goes, the only constant in life is change. For better or for worse, things will change.

We’re all in this codependent, abusive relationship with the ether. It's designed to be an awful experience so that you keep getting frustrated and keep going back.

my dumbass 18-year-old self

I find myself finding ways to be less and less online. And I don't know a ton of young people, so maybe this is an older person thing, but I feel like young people are equally as sick of this shit. They’ve been on this ride since birth.

And I feel like most people around me are asking how to remove this from their lives. You see headlines about stay-at-home moms bringing back the landline. I've had a landline off and on since I was in my mid 20s. I would love nothing more than to have just a landline. And maybe like a beeper or something. Bring back the fucking beeper!

I want a hard physical newspaper that I can hold in my hands. I want to fill in the crossword puzzle with a pencil. I want to excitedly buy the DVD, the Blu-ray, the vinyl, the whatever of the thing that I just discovered that I love, that I love and adore so much, I want to have a little piece of it in my life that I can turn to at any time. I want diversity of experience back. Every sensation, everything I enjoy, looks exactly the same because it's all coming from the same black box.

The next time I do a phone update I’m getting a light phone. Give me a fucking iPod back. Have it connect to Apple Music and podcasts or whatever. Perfect, magical. If there's a way that I can call somebody in an emergency, I can get directions to where I’m going, and I can listen to stuff, what more do I need?

And this is killing us. It's killing our psyches. It's killing our connection to each other. It's killing whatever was left of community. So if the internet is turning into a bulge of glop, what comes next? Do we have a resurgence of the physical world? I mean, dancing is back. Did you hear that? Gen Z has let us have dancing back. Granted, I've heard that they like to do their dancing and partying at brunch…? I’m not gonna judge, I’m just glad they’re enjoying their youth.

So what comes after the Internet? Do we start going to plays again? Human nature is so cyclical, I mean, podcasts are just radio shows.

The internet, as we know it now, feels like it’s wobbling. Not that it’s gonna go anywhere but this doesn’t feel sustainable and while we’re all still addicted, we all want out.

To me it feels like there's three options. The internet gets fixed. which, sure. The internet keeps going to shit, and we all just dive in after it, which unfortunately seems a very likely scenario. Or as humans be humaning, we get bored, we shuffle, we change, and we find something new. And I'm so curious, what is the next new?

Is it digital? Is it just more of us texting each other? Do we become even more siloed in our independent worlds? Our lives just intertwine with a flat screen entirely, sending, "hey, how are you?” texts for the third time that week while never actually seeing each other.

What is the next step? It's not just me, we're all craving more. What happens after we've gone into the ether and come back? Do we disintegrate and disappear or do we return to our feet firmly in the grass? Or is it a cool blend of the two? I'm curious.

What comes after the internet?

🎧 Paired Listening: Uncertain Smile - The The

Listen here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

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Movie Viewing

Mood of the Week — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 18:00:15 GMT

I didn’t have the bandwidth for a rant this week, so, I thought I’d share a list of movies I’ve watched recently (nothing new) that I loved:

Night of the Hunter (1955):

The ONLY movie Charles Laughton’s ever directed. A depression-era noir, it’s a simple story but the imagery is stunning. A “preacher” dupes widows into marrying him and then he kills them for their money. We meet him when he’s targeting Shelley Winters and her two children. Again, a very simple story, but it was shot with the idea in mind that children notice details adults don’t and they use a soundstage, art direction, lighting to create a feeling you won’t find in any other movie. It’s a stunning movie I love going back to.

Memories of Murder (2003):

Based off a real series of murders in the 1980’s, in Korea, that were still unsolved when the movie was made. Directed by Bong Joon Ho, it made me want to go out and watch every movie he’s ever done. The movie is funny, dark, real, and moving. There’s a simple but epic shot at the end that the director put in specifically for the real killer to see cause he knew the killer would watch the movie. When the killer was eventually caught, he admitted he DID watch the movie - apparently, he felt nothing.

The Art of Self Defense (2019):

My favorite thing about Jesse Eisenberg is his awareness that he’s off-putting. I’ve liked him in movies I’ve seen him in but this movie made me really love him as a performer. It’s very dark and bloody, so, be prepared to grimace as well as laugh. It’s a real “fun” examination of toxic violence and toxic masculinity in our culture.

Ran (1985):

I’m gonna be real douchey here and say, you should see this in a theater if you can. I saw this Akira Kurosawa film at the New Bev a few weeks back and it was one of those cinematic experiences where you remember why you love the movies. The kind where there’s many beautiful sweeping shots to give you chills. Ran is an epic family drama that plays out like a wild soap opera. It’s about 3 hours long so def strap in. The sweeping shots and unexpected character turns will leave you breathless.

Cries and Whispers (1972):

Ingmar Bergman wanted to make a movie with women in a red room. So he did. Set in the late 1800’s, two sisters sit by their sister’s deathbed. Through this moment in time we can see the damage their distant mother took on each of them. A household maid who previously lost a child steps into a pseudo-mother role for the dying sister. It’s surrealist at times but mainly focuses on the complexity of sisterhood and the harrowing feeling of being near death’s doorstep.

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Monthly jams

Mood of the Week — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 18:00:42 GMT

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A Barrel of Amputated Limbs

Mood of the Week — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:01:24 GMT

push play:

There was a period of time I had to stop going to Home Depot because every time I went I had a really weird interaction with an employee.

Like the one time my disgusting Echo Park studio apartment had water bugs. I’m at Home Depot, in the bug aisle when this very friendly Home Depot employee approaches me asking why I was there. I told him about the water bugs and he helps me find an awful man-made toxin to take care of these small, disgusting creatures who are just cohabitating the earth with us. I had my poison, I just needed to find one of those little drain cover thingys so I start walking toward the drain cover thingys aisle.

Now, the friendly Home Depot employee, we’ll call him Rick, offers to escort me. I’m, like, you really don’t have to do that but he insists. As we're walking over to the drain aisle he starts telling me about how this is not his real job, this is his second job. This is the job that pays the bills while he pursues his passion project. We’ve all been there, working extra hard in hopes that one day you’ll only have to work one job, the one that you love.

He may just seem like a simple Home Depot employee but in his dreams, Rick was a medical waste collector.

If you've ever wondered what happens to the stuff that comes out of a person during a surgery, Rick can tell you all about it. Sometimes he’d be called to clean up after a suicide. Sometimes, an amputation. The day in the life of a medical waste collector can really keep you on your toes.

I told him I could probably make it the rest of the way on my own but Rick is nothing if not a gentleman, he’s not about to let me walk Home Depot alone. There are weirdos out there.

Rick continues to regale me with tales of his little limb mobile all the way there. He tells me how he and his coworkers would sometimes pose with the limbs, like, shaking hands with an amputated arm, “we would take pictures but then we would delete them 'cause you're actually not supposed to take pictures of that.” Oh, really, Rick? Weird. What a completely anticipated restriction I would expect and hope was placed around these kind of things.

We finally make it to the drain thingy aisle, and I'm thoroughly traumatized at this point, just hoping to God he, you know, either goes away or murders me quickly. And I'm looking for what I need so I can get out of there when he asks if I want to see a gross picture.

Now, I don’t know if my brain just blocked out the past five minute walk to protect me but, for some reason, my head immediately goes back to the water bugs and I’m like, “it’s not of water bugs, is it? Because that would be gross.” Yes, of everything that just transpired it’s the water bugs that are icky. Somehow, I use my very capable brain and come to the conclusion that, yeah, no, sure, totally. Show me that picture. I want to know what is on Rick the medical waste collector’s phone…

It was a photo of a barrel of limbs.

He wasn't supposed to have it, but, you know, he snuck it out. Rick’s a little rule breaker like that. Anyway, as I'm making peace with my clearly limited time on this earth, I make a break for the cash registers but before I can go, he stops me and says, “hey, if you ever need anything at Home Depot, even if I'm not working, ask for Rick, and I will come down here and help you personally.”

And they say good customer service is dead… like me after Rick figures out where I live.

Song: Goodbye Horses by Q Lazzarus

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Uncomfortable Moment #327

Mood of the Week — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 18:00:23 GMT

in case it’s not clear, push play:

I was 20 years old and riding the New York subway with a terrible haircut. I was a mushroom in a petticoat. I'd gone to some underground barber shop that was supposed to be affordable and cool. It was one of those things.

Next to me on the subway was the much better version of me; young, dark hair (appropriately cut), she was a college kid.

The car was pretty full and we started noticing a guy, a little up the car, was drawing one of us. So me and the much cooler version of me awkwardly smile at each other, exchanging a look that women often exchange, if to say, "well, this is happening now." We looked between each other and to the man drawing and after assessing the situation, wordlessly agreed he was, in fact, drawing her.

She’d look at me from time-to-time and I’d give her a supportive look that said, “yeah, that super sucks but you’re not alone, I’m here. At least until my stop comes.” And then I’d think, “thank God I got this haircut.” I could see it in her eyes, she envied my Beatles hairdo.

After a while, a crowd began to form behind the artist. They’re looking at his drawing and are ecstatic. They look blown away even; giving thumbs up, mouthing ‘wow’. I guess the beautiful girl got the beautiful drawing after all.

Now the collective of us are wordlessly communicating with each other. Me and my biological superior made it clear we understood he was drawing her. But the crowd shook their heads, no!

They were pointing at me, the haircut. I was the subject.

At that point, the beautiful one turned to me and gave me a look that said, “yeah, that super sucks but I’m here with you until my stop comes.” I could see the joy and relief I once held now in her relaxing shoulders. But the crowd was being convincing, maybe it was a drawing I would be flattered by.

The train kept going, the onlooking crowd got off, giving me big thumbs ups on the way out. The angel by my side eventually reached her destination. She gave me one last look of pity before she was gone. Free.

The artist finally makes eye contact with me and tells me he's been drawing me. I told him, I’d gotten that. And then he shows me the drawing. And I was right.

I was the gremlin that day.

Song: Ugly by Violent Femmes

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