Bread and Bread

The evening that Anne Frank's words wash up on our lawn follows the blue internet day that shows me the map of a planned community  for Gaza, shaped like a gun, with complex industry spotting the belly of the barrel and a pink ridge of coastal tourism along the top. The Palestinians, who have not been consulted, had plans too: tomatoes, oranges, peppers. Olives and dates. Children and school. The nearly grown children at the school down the street from us protested ICE yesterday. One of them, probably, quoted Anne in thick purple marker:  Terrible things are happening At any time of the night + day Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes, families are being torn apart. 1943, 1984, 2023, 2026 merge into a dull twilight, and that night I dream that Gazans have 24 hours to choose between being sealed inside the plan or roaming free in rubble. Source: Al Jazeera The interior is a shiny mall packed like the Blackest Friday. Nearly grown children start bands, every...

Photo by Oksana Vasilieva on Unsplash A white tree in a California winter scarred with graffiti looks like a birch in the taiga which (I learned last year) is the part of Russia where no one can live, or no one wants to Look, I know nothing about Russia, but I'm learning how official stories are farcical  but enforced by the state's jagged metal teeth and people vanish in the snow Yesterday I learned the man who shaves goat meat off a vertical spit on the busiest corner in my neighborhood was taken by ICE His absence is the absence of smoke while I wait at a red light (Look, I know nothing) and, for his family, a vertical spit piercing their hearts Masha from Pussy Riot  charts a path through the snow for those of us who are learning: When they say you can't assemble send one activist at a time When you're locked up with your lover fuck her while you can Masha lives in Iceland now because bodies are not infinite but her love for the people of Russia is a steady global ...

Among the celebrities lending their voices to the movement for Black lives, John Boyega has stood out. Not just because he’s put his body on the front lines at protests and because he’s shut down Twitter trolls with delightful wit, but because—in our house—he is Finn. You know: the ex-Stormtrooper stolen from his family and raised as FN-2187. When he refuses to kill for the First Order, he defects and eventually joins the Resistance. It’s not the subtlest metaphor, and I’m not the first to say “Yes, this guy! The guy who took off his blood-smeared Stormtrooper helmet and refused to be a cop for the last gasp of the Empire!” But at this moment in history, I am especially grateful for how much Dash, at age 5.5, adores him. Before schools closed in March, I had never seen a Star Wars movie all the way through, although AK, Dash’s other mom, flew her toy Millennium Falcon around her childhood living room and, as a forty-something adult, has been known to read Star Wars fan ficti...

1. when in doubt I signed up to help with the Homeless Count because I have house guilt . (I’m also working on a story about homelessness in L.A. for Razorcake , because what is more DIY than building your own makeshift shelter?) As we’ve settled into our new place, the streets of Highland Park and Chinatown have filled with motor homes like the one my family camped in when I was a kid. It’s like a post-apocalyptic time capsule. Meanwhile my middle-class friends struggle to pay rent on tiny apartments, and a not-small percentage of staff and clients at Homeboy commute from Palmdale. It’s safe to say L.A.—despite all its blue-state benefits—has a housing crisis. Glamping? After watching two online training videos, I arrive at W.O.R.K.S. , an affordable housing organization in Highland Park. I actually emailed them a while back to volunteer, but I never heard back. Ah, nonprofits. W.O.R.K.S. will be the starting point for counting NELA census tracts. I see my former neighbors, ...

All the sentences I say to AK lately begin with "In Far from the Tree ...." When I was reading the chapter about prodigies, she would say, "Ugh, what about prodigies now ?" I think I've shown great restraint in not diagnosing myself or Dash with the various maladies and challenges covered in the book, but right now I'm feeling a little extra empathy for the schizophrenics in the schizophrenia chapter. Many of them know that the voices they hear aren't real; it just takes a lot of energy--spoons in the language of disability and chronic illness--to shut them out. In the same vein, I know that my anxieties aren't grounded in a ton of reality, but it still takes effort to whittle them down to a manageable size. It's haaaaarrd, and I don't even have an official anxiety disorder, let alone auditory hallucinations.  Here's what's on my plate today: 1) Is it a problem that Dash dropped a lot of height percentile points between his 18-m...