This week, please join us as a fourth for part one of our interview with internationally-famous comedian, and Max’s gay twin brother, Dylan Adler! In this 30-minute episode, he talks about his creative process, what makes Atsuko Okatsuka an absolute genius, and forcing his family to be in plays as a kid. (I swear the night before we recorded this, I had a dream that the three of us had a sleepover, and laughed so loud that we got in trouble with other sets of twins? Queer, but forever a hag lol.)

So excited to see what y’all think of the second episode of 3rd City. And y’all know how the economy works, please like the video / subscribe / comment/ email to someone artsy, funny, queer, or, ideally, all three: Dylan Adler gets interviewed by gay twin & hag bestie!! #twins #threesome #hot

3rd City is a comedy/spirituality podcast featuring Tucson BFFs — Lauren Duca (me lol) and Max Adler — shooting the shit in and around NY, LA, and our beloved 3rd city. We interview comedians, artists, academics, research scientists, mystics, and, of course, a few clowns. I’ve mentioned Max here before, he is the lead oboist of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, a Buddhist, a drag queen, and my neighbor out in the desert. With the help of our producer, Melissa Ingle, we are in very early stages, but it’s blazingly obvious 3rd city going show about what it means to be truly creative, how to be “spiritual” such a stupid world, and whether they’re the same thing?

You can check on the pilot on YouTube, and pls spread the love — subscribe, like, share, comment saying “this show looks like it’s going to be the best shit ever,” etc :P

I used to be getting a few good discoveries off Discover Weekly, but for the past two months I’ve started a practice of holding a Qi Gong pose for an hour a day while listening to Calming Classical, and, not to brag, but… my algorithm is cooked. So, help, send me groovy jams and bops! And other stuff, too. I need new music, I’m too young to be this graceful and refined.

Anyway, new songs, old ones, preferred but not required, please send me whatever you’ve been jamming to most recently (and/or your entire running playlist?)

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Thank you for sharing your thoughts on God. The atheist’s answers have stuck with me — so thoughtful and strangely “spiritual,” I think you’ve tipped the scales. I’ve been obsessed with “God” for eight years now, but I think I’m finally giving up on some sad hope for the big idea. The burden of backstory laced throughout the brutality of human history, forget childhood trauma, means “God” can only ever weigh down even the most basic conversation, never mind a conversation about why we’re even alive to begin with, or whether we have the capacity to expand our consciousness.

Raised Roman Catholic, I was a devout atheist until I smoked Bufo out of a crack pipe on a rooftop in Tulum. Bufo is a sacred psychedelic medicine also known as the “God” molecule, and that’s roughly what happened. I didn’t just see the light, I became the light. Infinite energy with no beginning or end — it’s impossible to describe infinity in terms of linear time, but they said I was screaming for three minutes. Back in my body, I could barely catch my breath, panting, What did I just see? Was that the center of the universe? Is that what people mean when they say God? And they said, Please stop talking.

It didn’t take long for me to go full God. At first, I aggressively qualified my position: “God,” Great Spirit, Source, what advanced theoretical physics calls “the field.” Less than a year later, I’d dropped the air quotes. I would tell anyone who’d listen, and people who were barely even pretending to listen, I am God, you are God, we are God, and my friends would say, Oh my God, why are you so annoying now?

Mostly, I was furious that I had brainwashed by weird old men in a Long Island dungeon. The Catholic church I grew up in was a gray stone tower with gargoyles, and inside, Jesus bleeding to death in his underwear. Not to mention, for all the trans panic, there have always been men in shiny dresses raping children, but I grew up calling them priests. Not all priests are pedophiles, but they are definitely dumb. You don’t even have to read The Bible to understand that Jesus’s favorite thing on Earth was treating everyone the same, but surely only boring old men in giant hats and gold kaftans are the ones who have anything to say about that.

In my craze of personal religiosity, taking “God” back meant everything and everyone with no separation, but the word only ever seemed to cause the problem. Simply saying “God” in conversation tends to make people uncomfortable, even if they identify as “spiritual.” Still, because I’d rejected the Roman Catholic “God” as something like the supervisor to Santa, the concept became a wide open space in which to see the light of pure being. Still, the poetry of the incandescent glow can’t do anything when you are stuck in the shit — and the shittiness of the life is the space where modern “spirituality” hasn’t even remotely begun to have a conversation. From Instagram manifestation techniques to Eckhart Tolle, the Western hologram of present moment awareness papers over the part where it takes fucking years to even begin to cultivate really consistent inner peace (and that sucks, too).

For me, the greatest separation has come not so much from “God,” as the ridiculous proposition that life is simple and therefore easy. People say “just be present” as if they have never had anxiety, depression, or too much bread at dinner. The term “spiritual” might even be more annoying than “God,” if only because it’s too many syllables. Ego has so much Freudian jizz on it, and then they want you to get rid of it, as if you don’t need to know where your asshole is in order to parallel park. These conversations, about “God,” presence, and spirituality, can become profoundly confusing, especially when definitions turn into pretend solutions. Giving up altogether, what if the answer is to drop all the big ideas as we learn to talk about the thing we all know: the time it takes to learn how to feel better. Heart open. Connected. “The light” (or whatever it is) shining from within.

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If you are enjoying Pancake Brain, please spread the word — reccommend on Substack, FWD to your trippy friends… or just tell a rich person to send me money. Thanks for being here. :)

First of all, I love you! What a rare gift to find this kind of inspiration in the comments section. After we discussed the present moment, many of you shared what spirituality means to you. Through poetry and profundity, I noticed a binary among your responses: spirituality as relationship with a higher power versus simply that which is beyond the material. These definitions are not mutually exclusive, of course, though the apparent divide calls up a fresh question: What about “God”?

This week, I’m wondering: Do we need “God” to create a common sense conversation about spirituality, or are we better off rejecting the word altogether? (If you’re in the mood to share a longer answer than that one: What does “God” mean to you, and how has your relationship with the term changed over time?)

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Thank you for your answers to my question about the present moment last week. It means a lot to me that this comment section is so thoughtful, a sweet sandbox in the cesspool (as I continue to struggle to get back online).

I was struck by the range of your responses! Manuela R. mentioned finitude, and I saw a cartoon coin flip of scarcity and the absolute — our tiny, little lives versus whole big thing we’re swimming in. Max K. contrasted the zeitgeist of “the present moment” with the application of his practice in Zen. Geoff T. also mentioned Buddhism, the preciousness, rarity, and constant challenge around the return. Chris D. made had me smirking over “healthy compartmentalization,” while Tom J. called it the sum of everything. This spectrum of interpretation seems part of the obstacle we move through within ourselves each time we rediscover the now. Sean S. shared a lovely definition of no past and future, admitting the space is still hard to enter. Courtney wisely noted the filters that keep us from clear vision of truth, while Richard D. offered breath as the best he can do to remember the real thing.

Related to the so-called “the present moment,” I’m curious: What does “spirituality” means to you? (One-word answers are fine, but feel free to pop off! I’m interested to know how you interpret the term and how it plays out in your life.)

Thank you for sharing, and for being here,
Lauren

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In my spiritual practice, I’ve spent this year contemplating ease, praying for ease, really, just straight-up begging for some mother-fucking goddamned ease, and it has finally occurred to me that ease must be easy. This comes as a shock to my system.

After months of so many hours of practicing qi gong in honor of ease, I still snap out of my standing meditation and wantonly choose the other thing instead. Asking for ease, I’ve had my nose shoved in my own frustration, impatience, anger, fear, pain, and stress, not to mention the lingering fear that none of this matters if I don’t get enough done. I have faith in the infinite power of God, but only in theory. My heart opens to the unconditional love of Nature, and then outside in the grand majesty of the mountains at sunset, I kick rocks and miss the point. Where I am so endlessly connected to oneness in my practice at dawn, the world starts to annoy me before I’ve finished my coffee.

Then this weekend, I had a breakthrough. On a qi gong retreat in the Catskills, I tasted the trust I had been praying for, bursting beyond my mind to receive the flow of life. If this was a glimpse of the Great Mystery, that was certainly before I turned my phone back on, got wrapped up in a profound bout of family drama, closed my heart like a hockey goalie, and then, never mind, “trusting the universe,” I forgot how to make a decision.

The sudden slip of clarity was replaced with a fog then filled with Biscoff and ginger ale on the flight back to Tucson. Mulling over an offer to perform a run of my show in August, the whole thing felt like figuring out how to juggle sandbags on a full stomach. Desperately calling friends and family for advice the next day, I talked Becca’s ear off listing pros and cons, comparing calculators and calendars, until it finally occurred to me, clear as the voice of God, “What the hell do you think ease feels like?”

That slap of clarity was like taking one step backwards out of a swarm of gnats. If I know I want ease, why don’t I go ahead and choose that? Why would I juggle sandbags when they’ll never be light as a feather? Suddenly, there was no decision. As soon as I admitted it was going to be too much stress, something else was able to happen. Accepting defeat, I relaxed my shoulders, sighed, and the new thing floated right down into my open hand. Ease can only ever be easy, and you know what’s right, because your heart falls open, and a great “DUH” echoes out through the cosmos like a gong.

If it seems like I tricked you into a newsletter about contemplating the expansion of consciousness by swearing to practice piano, rest assured, I also tricked myself. At first, I tried planning for ten minutes a day, thinking such a small amount would be almost impossible to avoid… but that wasn’t enough to stick. Last month, I swore I would do 30 minutes a day for 30 days, hoping such a crash course could turn me “fluent” enough to compose sloppy improv. As it turns out, that was far too much, and I have nearly managed to spend 30 days avoiding practicing 30 minutes a day, because with my 30 for 30 method, I might as well have replaced my Yamaha with a cardboard cutout of a crown of broccoli.

On Tuesday, I leave for the beginning of summer travels so complex that I need a hand-written planner to remember them all. My serious practice cannot reasonably resume until midway through September, when Becca and I return to Tucson. In the two days I have left, I thought perhaps I could at least declaratively redeem myself by learning the theme to Jurassic Park. Since promising to practice everyday in January, I have memorized two versions of Billy Joel’s Piano Man… and not much else. Piano Man was chosen on account of I played and sang the song in the seventh grade talent show with not a hint of humor. The theme of Jurassic Park is in honor of one Deborah “DJ” Vance Jr. on the baby grand and church organ in Hacks.

While avoiding practicing piano, I read Made to Love by Alissa Nutting, practiced qi gong for at least two hours a day, spent roughly 24 hours binging Hacks, and finally decided, out of shame and guilt, before I left until practically October, I would at least learn the goddamn fucking theme of Jurassic Park. And so then it stopped me in my tracks, when I called my best friend Max – the principle oboist in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra – and he said he had traveled to Modesta for a gig playing the theme of Jurassic Park! What in the Carl “Synchronicity” Jung, you cannot make this shit up! Honestly, now, if I don’t memorize at least the theme of Jurassic Park by the end of this summer, I am worried there may be a time loop, in a bad way. (Thankfully, Max has offered to help.)

With enthusiasm, Lauren

p.s. Please give me your best recommendations for wandering around Paris?? (Bonus points for the best street food and/or weird art and museums.)

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Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter by award-winning & -losing writer Lauren Duca. Please like / subscribe / share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.

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It’s impossible to escape the billionaires. Whatever three or four tech oligarchs come to mind when you hear the word “billionaire,” squint, and it turns out, they’re all the same guy. In almost every piece of culture I’ve consumed lately – The Devil Wears Prada 2, Hacks Season 5, and Made to Love by Alissa Nutting – there is an ambiguous billionaire, who might as well be any of the five guys currently colonizing human consciousness. Nutting’s Byron, CEO of Gogol, is diabolical, and not all that far punched up from the abortion of media by BJ Novak in the Andy Sachs reunion show, or the AI titan who tries to tempt Debra into endorsing unethical slop and quite literally promises to erase the writing process altogether. It doesn’t matter which real-life overlord is in question, because they might as well be the same dude. He’s raping and pillaging humanity, and probably wearing a neoprene vest.

We all know that we are enslaved by robots. We agreed to the terms and conditions. The majority of the population is hooked up to machines that were created to capture and extract as much of our attention as possible. We all know that the facial recognition of private equity is surveilling our every move, monitoring our heartbeats so they can steal our energy and sell us shit. We are watching a handful of men in antimicrobial fabrics promise us that humanity is not worth their time.

The inevitability of AI is a PR stunt by half a dozen tech nerds. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, Soylent tastes like cum. Recycled prose churned out of the plagiarism machine will be empty to anyone who knows what it means to truly feel alive. And there’s the problem with the guys running the world. They do not understand the value of connection, because they’ve never experienced the sensation. I’m genuinely confused why any of them want to live forever, because they all look fucking miserable. When I see pictures of these guys with their pale skin and weird chins, I can’t help but think: If you’re going to rape and pillage humanity for profit, can you at least smile more? If you’re going to steal the collective soul for your own use and purposes, would you mind having a good time?

I am not scared of AI, because I believe in the human spirit. With a caveat. Unfortunately, the evolution of humanity is far from complete, and so there are an awful lot people who can’t tell slop from other thing. There are people who can’t feel the difference between having their hearts open to the unconditional love of the universe and being clenched. Those guys running the world have yet to feel a goddamned thing besides greed, and that’s as obvious as the fact that half of them feel compelled to torture little girls on rock in the sea.

The power of life always wins in the end, and it’s always a new beginning. A spiritual evolution is unfolding not in spite of, but because of, the extremity of our present enslavement. Metaphysical folks used to talk about escaping The Matrix when it was just a metaphor. Now we can see so clearly the emptiness of the machines and the men who own them. The idea that AI could ever get better and better by running through the same shit over and over again is the very opposite of the progress that is happening at the level of our spirit. We are beings with the power to feel our connection to life. We evolve by believing in the mystical gift of humanity. We get our best revenge on the billionaires by laughing and having fun.

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p.s. Tucson friends, I have a set at Groundworks tomorrow — come say hi :)

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Hi friends,

Have you heard The Mountain yet? I wouldn’t have called myself a Gorillaz fan before, but damn this thing is a masterpiece. To say it’s my new favorite album would almost be an understatement. My partner Becca and I drove from Tucson to the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas and LA. Despite all that listening, it hasn’t worn out driving around back in town. Just yesterday evening, we drove out to the mountains near our home, and listening to the titular song brought tears to Becca’s eyes. What an incredible thing to love a whole album start to finish in this era of six seconds or less.

This glorious experience of immersing ourselves so extensively in journey of the The Mountain has made me think of what other albums I love so endlessly, and from start to finish. Without thinking about it all too hard, my all-time top five would be:

Rumours, Fleetwood Mac. This album is my best friend, I love it so much I would marry it, etc. “Second-Hand News” through to “Gold Dust Woman,” every time.

Animals, Pink Floyd. I don’t always listen to music while I write, but when I do, it’s gotta be this 41 minute rock opera of class warfare.

DAMN. and/or Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick is on another level, and these play like favorite movies. (Screamed the first time I heard Eckhart.)

Modal Soul, Nujabes. The piano intro of “Feather” floats into my soul just like that.

Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman. Actually perfect, especially “Mountains O’ Things.”

To this list, Becca would like to add On The Corner by Miles Davis. In the interest of more long form listening experiences: What’s your favorite album? And, yes, I will accept top fives.

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Hi friends,

It is with urgent multiplication the ant problem in my apartment began on Friday. If I wasn’t sure it was officially summer in Tucson on account of the 88 degree temperature on its way up to 104, or the tan lines that force me to admit that I wear running sandals, then it was the ants, marching into my living room like so many microscopic groundhogs, not seeing their shadow until I’m about to crush them dead.

It was one, then two, then three at once, two different places, then there were four and three at once after that. On the patio, a dropped bit of dinner had them swarming. My partner Becca said, “It’s because there’s food there.” My eyes darted like Winston Churchill wondering if he had enough tacks and yarn to win the next string of battles. “It is ant season,” I said, fist on the table. “We need to move toward prevention.” Becca looked at me like I was Pete Hegseth fresh off a line of coke. I gestured desperately at the patio, which, had become totally infested two summers earlier. The initial scouts were swarming as we spoke, spiraling into each other, over and around again, too fast to be crushed or captured by anything other than a gallon jug of vinegar sloshing an ocean of acidity under the table. Unless anyone has better suggestions, the next step is those liquid bait traps that kill the whole colony from the inside out, and, I while I understand that is plain and simple insect genocide, what else am I supposed to do? I’m so very sorry, but it seems like I’m going to have to murder every last one of these ants, because, I swear to God, one is crawling up my leg as I write this sentence, and another one was on my sleeve while I was editing it!

Meanwhile, Becca refuses to kill any ants. Becca is transmasculine in the sense that they would build me a commune with a working farm, if I asked for that, but they will not kill ants, cockroaches, nothing, and I think this is rude, and a violation of the policy of being the one who is strong enough to build things or know how. We have similar disagreements regarding the gendered description of their use of body lotion, but that is beyond the scope of this letter. I totally get not killing spiders, spiders are artists who create with their bodies, and they deserve respect. The last time there was a spider in my office, I whispered to her, “Hello, you’re so beautiful, I love your work, and please don’t move around too quickly when I’m near you cause that’s terrifying.” The last time there was a cockroach in our apartment, I screamed and Becca patiently escorted him outside. If it is indeed unethical to kill all of these ants, then I am going to be very busy as I begin trying to name them, to offer them Trefoils instead of TERRO ant traps, to talk with them and tell them our dreams of owning enough land for them to be free.

But seriously, what’s the best way to kill ants?

For real though,
Lauren

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The ongoing death of creative thinking is much older than AI, as are our degrading attention spans, and the extent to which everything sucks. I would say that we’re moths in the flame of corporate greed, but it’s more like drowning, until we’re so saturated in content that nothing matters. Movies have been shittier since at least 2015, when the streaming wars were notoriously won by sheer quantity. In theaters, it’s almost exclusively known quantities, the IMAX doom-scroll of franchise fatigue crawling up old marquees, and even the Marvel movies have to cheap out on special effects now, if not only the plot. People will always go see the Marvel movies no matter how crappy they get, because it’s more of what they know, even if we all know that big machines have been feeding us regurgitated garbage since far longer than social media and AI sped it all up into a stream of endless slop threatening to destroy all meaning.

We all know humanity is hooked up to machines that were created to capture and extract as much of our attention as possible, but we were becoming anti-social, mentally ill, fatter, lazier, and more unhealthy, decades before the rise of social media. Bowling Alone could not have imagined Facebook in the year 2000, but maybe then it would have seemed like a tool made to be helpful to local bowling groups. Meanwhile, capitalism has been pillaging the Earth since long before data centers were a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. More than thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace and Neil Postman warned us TV was corroding our imagination and connection. With the invention of the iron stove, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried over the loss of the open fire — warning of a fatal frost, he mourned the communities coming together in the warmth of connection. They seem like a few chicken littles unless it’s all been a long arc to our current predicament: the enslavement of humanity by the technocratic oligarchy (a fancy term for a handful of pale white men who are variously addicted to cocaine, ketamine, or the rape and torture of little girls, harvesting our consciousness for profit, and not even offering good benefits). Up until now, we’ve agreed to the terms and conditions.

The promise of AI is collapsing because they are running out of money faster than they are willing to admit, and not one single person besides the profiteers wants a data center built within five hundred miles of anyone they love. The promise of AI was always a lie propagated by ultra-wealthy men who do not know the meaning of life anymore than they know they could raise millions out of poverty with a quarter of their billions. There are the scandals — like Claude randomly deleting a company’s entire production database along with the backup — never mind threat of accidental nuclear war, or the fact that the total endowment of human history is now mostly profiting a couple of guys in San Francisco.

The gross miscalculation of our billionaire overlords is their failure to account for the most powerful supercomputer on the planet: the vibration of our nervous system, our sacred, ancient ability to feel. Despite all the private planes, every conceivable luxury on the planet, nothing that they cannot be, or do, or have, they’ve got no clue how to feel. The technoligarchs and their robots will never know the genius flowering out of humanity, our capacity to explore infinite intelligence through the guidance of emotion, to be here, to feel real, to expand our consciousness in harmony with the oneness of all being.

You don’t have to be woo to see that humanity is in the midst of an evolutionary shift. We are changing as a species, altering the way we use our thinking minds, becoming aware of the power of the energy we sense in ourselves and each other. Our species is growing and changing, feeling our way to something other than violence and greed as a baseline. We are desperate to transform as completely as a caterpillar to a butterfly, and so it may be that the most important thing to do is nothing. To ask a question of infinite intelligence is to be open to the totality of absolutely everything that could possibly happen, and it requires at least one moment of nothing… but it’s better if you have, like, fifteen minutes. To do nothing does not have to mean to meditate in the traditional sense of sitting with your eyes closed. It can happen on a run, while spending time in nature and/or power-washing the deck, we all get glimpses of the endless genius that lives in nothingness, for we’re all deeply enlightened by the being of eternal oneness, if only by the time we fall asleep.

Pancake Brain is a (free) newsletter in which award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca contemplates the expansion of consciousness and tries to learn how to play piano. If you had a good time here today, please like, subscribe, and share wherever you do your best doom scrolling.

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If you’ve ever Googled “Pete Hegseth,” you will see that he is the United States Secretary of War — yes, you read that right — and, unfortunately, the one and only thing that Pete Hegseth and I have in common is the forehead wrinkles. There is a link, I think, between the obsessive neuroticism of our inner monologue and the very prospect of war, for both involve obsessing over the problem as a means of solution, as if that has ever worked for anyone in the known galaxy. The big fat cosmic fact of existence is this: you’re never going to find your keys when you’re obsessed with losing them. There is no way in the Dr. Seuss meets George Orwell fantasy dinner party that you could come to believe the best way to war is peace… or is it the other way around?

Though I repeatedly ask my partner to stop sharing the news with me first thing in the morning, I was recently forced to spend all day thinking about the fact that Pete "W as in War” Hegseth was asked why his Department of War must be called that, and he said: “When you go about war the right way you bring about peace.”

“When you go about war the right way you bring about peace.” He then cited the United States Military winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and I would like to argue that Pete Hegseth, then, too, deserves this prize. I hereby formally nominate Pete Brian Hegseth for the Nobel Peace Prize for the precision and eloquence with which he has expressed that, at best, war is an excuse for peace. I mean, give that man a Purple Heart, or at least whichever one you can have while you’re still alive.

The other day, I caught up with a friend, and he asked, “How are you dealing with the war in Iran?” I told him that every month I spend hundreds of hours serving the local women’s shelter, and it does almost nothing. I’m kidding, of course, but genuinely asking: to what extent are we meant to spend our God-given energy thinking about the worst case scenario for absolutely everything all at once? We all know the weight of global terror — the threat of nuclear war, climate catastrophe, anyone we know and love having a health crisis, the fact that so many people are homeless, whether or not you are allowed to even say “homeless,” anymore — and then our internal monologue of the worst-case-scenario of what could happen in our glorious speck-of-shit timelines, which, truly applies to everyone, unless you are a Billionaire, unless you are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or, at least Oprah or Taylor Swift. As mandatory would-you-rather of our petty insignificance, I think we should all be forced to choose one or the other: Would you rather worry all the time about the worst case scenario of your stupid little life or the crisis of the world at large? Indulging in imaginative negativity is an act of violence in your conscious mind whether it involves the war in Iran or your rude neighbor. Imagining anything less than the most beautiful future is violent, insane, and the number one cause of forehead wrinkles.

There are violent and insane men in charge of nuclear weapons, and the degree to which you are powerful or powerless in this scenario is combination of the two: freedom through insignificance which agains returns us to the truth that we are one. Peace is not an outcome of war, it is the natural state of being, the infinite, interconnected oneness of all being, that which Advanced Theoretical Physics might called “the field,” and perhaps that could be “God,” though J.D. Vance wouldn’t know that if it slapped him in the face.

Ethically speaking, too many powerful men are unqualified to tell their dick from their elbow. Sam Atlman, CEO of Open AI, once questioned with how to program robots with virtues asked, “Whose values would we use though?” The answer is, you hope, humanity, the planet, and it’s not a matter of ethics, it’s consciousness, what gives us energy, life force, the power to evolve and change as a species in harmony with a planet. This leap of evolution is the outcome of our struggle as a species, and that’s just if it even goes along with a basic Hollywood blueprint. We are on the verge of a total transformation that will require an internal transformation that echoes out through collective consciousness, and I believe it is at the level of knowing in our hearts what is truly right and wrong. Of course, Sam Altman could never.

As much as religion, government, language, patriarchy, and the legal system has sought to give us a reason for rules and laws, the fact is everything is bullshit the second it feels wrong in your heart. What is true is what feels light and open. We are connected to infinite intelligence that is unconditionally loving, that can be as simple as connecting to nature, and you don’t need any qualifications to know love does not mean war, but Pete Hegseth doesn’t have those either. To call war the reason for peace is just about the same thing as overthinking whatever stupid shit you are currently worried about, to cast it all into the darkest timeline, the violence of the worst case scenario, whether it is war in your mind or at the gas pump, when all anyone ever wants on a good day is inner peace, and, hell, peace for the world, if they could have that, too.

Pancake Brain is a (free) weekend newsletter in which award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca contemplates the expansion of consciousness and learns how to play piano. If you had a good time here today please subscribe, like, share, and email to your BFF.

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In contemplating the question, “What if women knew who we really are?” other questions arise, like, “Are women people? And if you get murdered, does it matter if you were hot and skinny?”

I’ve finished watching the HBO Max limited-series DTF. St. Louis and waiting on the next episode of Imperfect Women. With the penultimate episode airing next week, I’m hanging on for the plot twists that have been turning Elizabeth Moss’s Mary into what would happen if Gaslight had a baby with A Doll’s House and the whole family moved to Pasadena. Moss is a force of nature, from the constraints of Mad Men to the gore of the Handmaid’s Tale, her full range is unfurling toward the season finale, as she spins out on black market Adderall while wearing prairie dresses. In voice over, Mary laments that her dead best friend Nancy (Kate Mara) was hotter and skinnier than her even before it is revealed that she slept with her husband… never mind that Nancy’s other best friend slept with her husband two minutes after she died. I’m probably strong enough to throw Kate Mara over my shoulder, but I’m sure I could not bear the weight of all those secrets.

In DTF St. Louis, the deadly murder menage is told in dark comedy and American Sign Language. Set to workout montages and sit-down bicycle rides lined with gushing foliage, the biggest reveal of DTF is how easily two men can fall in love. In the ease of each other’s company, they’re able to be themselves in such a way, their wives might as well be dead. Linda Cardellini’s so-named “Carol Love” is so cold and two-dimensional, she could be cardboard, and the teeny-tiny blonde who plays Forrest’s wife so thoroughly fails the Bechdel test, she doesn’t even get lines when her husband is on the news for murder.

The most wonderful part of DTF is the conversations in American Sign Language by two hearing men who are desperate to communicate with eachother. The subtitles lend a Wes Anderson-ian quality to an otherwise gloomy color palette of cloudy, suburban sadness. Floyd is fat and deeply insecure. Forrest is so fit, you wouldn’t be surprised if he was logging body fat. In the transcendent anti-climax of Forrest trying and failing to get hard for Floyd as a show of affection, Harbour and Bateman give one hell of a performance dancing in their tight-y whities, they themselves tightly-wound whities, variously fat and skinny. With the presence of Arrested Development in the room there with them, I can’t help but see Harbour’s tragic Floyd as a cinéma vérité Tobias (David Cross) having “blue” himself as a personality. As a foil for the overburdened widow of Bateman’s Michael Bluth, Tobias takes sobbing showers in jorts (jean shorts) against the cold, dead sluttiness of Portia de Rossi’s iconic bitch Lindsay Bluth Fünke. There is a clear motif about the unhappiness of marriage in Bateman’s psyche, and in DTF it’s cast in sharper relief than his clavicle.

I shouldn’t point out any particular skinniness or fatness. The celebrities are shrinking, and we’re not supposed to talk about it. Perhaps it is easiest to go ahead and chop the head off of this phenomena, or anyway, that’s what happened when Amazon Prime automatically started playing Scarpetta. While binging Imperfect Women — centered around the dead Nancy, a hundred pounds just barely living— I thought the show would keep rolling and went to make stovetop popcorn. Distracted by the perfect ratio of heat and olive oil, I was shocked when I looked up from the pot. Staring at the beheaded, naked corpse of a woman, she was so sexy, she might as well have been posing for Playboy, except, of course, for the fact, that she did not have a head. In the opening image of Scarpetta playing by sheer force of streaming rights, there was this dead body bloodied, beheaded, sexy flat stomach to be contrasted with the balloon of Floyd’s beer belly, and you have to wonder what it would take to let a woman be so disgusting that she could stop sucking it in.

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My piano practice has been so lazy, I’m embarrassed. I told Max, my BFF and also the lead oboist in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, and he said, “You have to really want it. It has to have meaning for you.” (Damnit.)

Meanwhile, my brother is desperately learning Spanish, and he doesn’t just really want it, his life low-key depends on it. His family moved to Puerto Rico, where his partner grew up, and now he’s the only one around the house who doesn’t speak Spanish. Five hours of intensive study every day, and he hates it, but he’s hanging on. I told him that at least he’s still better at Spanish than his toddler, and he was silent for too long. I asked how long he thought it would take for him to get fluent in Spanish, and he sighed. Paul is also a musician. I wish I could pick up the guitar and just play around the way he can, with natural knowing of which sounds sound good together. That got me thinking how long it would take to get “fluent” in piano, and I wondered if it would be two years — roughly how long it takes to change the way you listen by practicing an instrument. “It depends,” he said, “How much have you been practicing?” (I was silent for too long.)

My answer was a bit of bargaining, “What if I practice thirty minutes every day for thirty days?” Doing “30 for 30” sounds good, even better when you realize it doesn’t have to do with whole foods. When I first set out to try and form this habit of practicing piano, I thought going low would be the best way in. Ten minutes is easy to spare. I imagined I would start with ten, and expand to more and more, and then I barely did that. Maybe there wasn’t enough buy in, and definitely not enough of an investment to see returns behind having memorized “Piano Man” and “Let It Be.” A third of the way into April on this new year’s resolution, I’m going to try the opposite approach: Thirty minutes of practice a day for thirty days while studying music theory.

If you’re a musician, or, better yet, a music teacher, I would love to hear your recommendations (e.g. tips and tricks, favorite books for learning piano and/or YouTube videos). I’ll let you know how it goes.

with curiosity,
Lauren

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This past week, my partner was away for work. Planning to be on my best behavior, I was going to read more, play piano and memorize “Let It Be.” A few times, struck by anxiety, I sat down at the piano, and played the bit I’ve learned so far. While I wish I could tell you that I had spent roughly eight hours learning all of the scales and chords that would allow me to improvise and become lost in flow state, instead, I binge watched two TV shows — Imperfect Women and DTF St. Louis — both of which are about what happens when three people get involved in an affair and a murder. You already know it’s the cheated-on friend who got murdered, and in both, the slow burn reveal that their cheating best friend loved them most of all, got to know them as well as anyone ever would.

It’s in this week of watching menage murder investigations, I was cordially invited to the wedding of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. The Drama took a minute to hook me as a must see for its premise, but then something turned, and I just had to know what it was that Emma (Zendaya) had done so terrible that her wedding might fall apart. I was wondering if I would hate it for its hook. The haunting cinematography of the couple’s inner monologues weave a tapestry of profound uncertainty backlit with the looming prospect of forever. Their coupledom is a haunted panorama of two cake toppers tumbling off the icing and falling into a puddle of blood. The most unsettling aspect of all this is that we have no clue who Emma is. If she had any friends whatsoever, we see something other than her being gorgeous and terrified. There is a vacuum where her personality might have been, and that’s not a criticism of Zendaya’s acting. I suppose it’s not Kristoffer Borgli’s fault that the very institution of marriage is a two-dimensional farce — their dance teacher says as much at the beginning of the film. It’s an artfully shot comedic horror movie, where everything is a big performance: weddings, identity, and maybe the very idea that we can really know each other, never mind ourselves.

If the title of Imperfect Women is too on the nose, well, then, frankly, so is Kerry Washington’s non-profit rendition of Olivia Pope getting into new fashions. Eleanor’s dead best friend is Kate Mara (Nancy), whose husband looks like a sicklier version of the President from Scandal, and their other BFF, Elizabeth Moss, playing a mom on a mission. In this albatross of secrets embedded in dark pasts, the imperfect women are so expertly caged, their micro lies and grand performances render it so that even their deepest intimacies might as well be shared among total strangers. Meanwhile, the core friendship in DTF St. Louis is Jason Bateman (Clark) and David Harbour (Floyd), with Linda Cardellini as the widow. Where Eleanor and Nancy unweave a Shakespearian performance piece of smoke and mirrors, Clark and Floyd ultimately just want to go bike riding with each other.

There is a sense of ease between straight men that is often not there with there with their wives and girlfriends. Watch any romantic reality television show, and whether or not the heterosexual relationship at the center is real, I can guarantee you by the end of the season, the men on the show will have become a wolf pack that will be friends for life. As a daughter of a father and the sister of a brother, both with lifelong wolf packs of boys for life, it does not seem as if there is a whole lot of intrigue and secret telling. There is none of the drama that comes with the implicit threat of moving through the world as a woman. If it was safe for women to be who we are — deeply feeling, emotional, tender, at once ultimately vulnerable and powerful enough to create life — it would be safe for men to be who they are, and it would be safe for all of us to live beyond the expression of these genders that includes in it the performance of being beautiful, and thin, and doing enough Pilates to look good in a white dress. What is beauty, though? Where does it really come from? Can we agree, it is, in fact, not a skincare regimen or tummy-tucking Spandex?

In DTF St. Louis, the murdered Floyd was sad, underemployed, and overweight, but in his moments of feeling peaceful and connected, he is so kind, it could be a superpower. That’s true beauty on the face of a gross middle-aged guy with a giant gut, not to mention the recurring joke about his fucked-up penis. Beauty is kindness, gentleness, tenderness. To be beautiful comes from feeling safe enough to be seen, gentle enough to be genuinely sweet, loving enough to be open. We all have this emotional power which can only be tapped with compassion, but women have it spades. Beyond the confines of these gender roles, we might find the key to the infinite intelligence of intuition lies within the underbelly of vulnerability. Instead, we’re training girls from out the womb to someday look good in a wedding dress, sure as a society of nothing more than the sad fact that of all the people in all the world, straight married couples may be the least likely to ever really know each other.

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Last week, on a road trip that began with the Grand Canyon, I was crushed like a bug by billions of years of stone. Meditating on the perimeter for three days left with me with the mind-altering effects of a psychedelic trip, though the epiphany arrived in delay. On the way to Las Vegas, with the castles of natural law in the rear view mirror, it occurred to me that I was (still) wasting an awful lot of time being a piece of shit.

There is an infinite, unconditional love that I can find every time that I meditate, or wake before sunrise for a walk in the mountains, or finally remember to take one good deep breath. The interconnected energy of all being can be found alive and well while spending time at peace in nature. Of course the only problem is work, interpersonal conflict, poverty, fascism and war, to say nothing of the fact that all of a sudden all celebrities are skinny.

Back in Tucson after my road trip, I have been too busy to make it out to the mountains but one morning. I hit snooze on my 5:00 a.m. alarm too many days in a row, and then the weather turned. On Friday, a dust storm rode in on a heatwave, swirled around Saturday morning with sporadic, thrashing winds, and blotted out the sky through Sunday evening. I can usually see the mountains from my desk, but you wouldn’t know that if you sat staring out the window today with the horizon dusted out into a damning glow of gray.

Record hot temperatures this early in the year have us raising our eyebrows here in Tucson, wondering if we’ll even be able to live here if it gets any hotter. The opacity of the fate of our species on this planet seemed to match those awful clouds taking out the horizon. $6.00 gas in LA looked insane on last week’s road trip, until I got back and saw $4.60 at the local Circle K. I found something for $4.20, and filled up my tank, hacking up some strange dust, trying not to get it in my eyes.

The mountains are still there behind the clouds, I know it. The infinite, unconditional love must be behind of all this confusion and fear. Swirling like the dust swallowing up the horizon, the conditions of chaos conceal our connection to the vertical dimension of pure being. Eternal truth leaving sandcastles of billions of years of history, and then you’re trying not to eat dirt at the gas station so you can weave around Trump bumper stickers in traffic.

Talking to my brother this afternoon, we caught up after a few weeks of phone tag. I vented about something that was bothering me, told him about the weirdness of the weather, and then remembered about the road trip. “By the way the Grand Canyon is wild,” I said casually. “I remember being there,” he said, “Seriously, billions of years of rock. Standing there you have to realize you are just a speck of shit on the sands of time.” I laughed, having remembered again, ‘Totally, I almost forgot.”

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If you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you know we’re all insignificant specks of shit. On the edge of a cliff, the whole horror movie of western civilization is a blip in the scheme of things. Even The Constitution is too small a detail to consider in the scope of a few million years, and the Earth is 4,560 million.

My partner and I recently drove from our home in Tucson, to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, which is really insane to do in that order, but we were trying to get to LA for Becca’s show tonight. I usually hate being in the car, because it makes me want to die after about two hours, but this time I had two projects, thousands of words to write over a few days, and the trip flew by like one long sunset over the I-10 horizon. What seemed to take a lot more time than the pain-in-the-ass part of driving there was meditating in nature once we got where we were going.

Even just getting close to the Grand Canyon, I could feel it. In the lodge, I was nauseous, excited, overwhelmed, as if my nervous system could not comprehend the profundity of what was so near. Becca and I planned to meditate for three days on the perimeter, because our qi gong teacher said that his teacher said, “The beginning of time is in there.” There are rocks at the bottom of the canyon are estimated to be 2 billion years old, and that night he was so full he couldn’t eat dinner.

Unlike that Grand Master, I definitely ate dinner after I saw the canyon. Meditating on the perimeter for three days straight, I wasted probably hundreds of minutes thinking about what I was going to eat for dinner, and other meals, too. Standing on the edge of so many millions of years, I wondered if I had eaten too much for lunch. Then there were moments of profound inner peace, my heart radiating in rhythm with the frequency of all those temples to temporality, bowing in gratitude to the castles of natural law, and then, once again, wondering if I was going to have time to get a little snack.

Time winds and unfolds, it flips around, inside out, turns back again, then reminds you to call your mother. I have no perspective of the true age of the Grand Canyon, but I do know that this road trip has flown by and also lasted for ten years. It’s been years, but in a good way — so much growing and changing, like these seven days could add up to more than whole eras of my life with a few swatches of time.

Time is a funny thing, except, of course, for when it’s cruel and unusual, or just plain rude. Somehow, it’s possible to have not enough time, and then a minute takes an hour – never mind what has, could, or would happen over billions of years, or when you spend a really long time meditating. It is said that meditation is to go beyond the mind, or beyond time, with mind and time linked just like patriarchy and the written word — two firm handshakes in the collapse of our true knowing. When I practice qi gong, I manage to make my way beyond time at least some of the time, and the rest of the time, I exercise an extraordinary capacity to annoy myself. I do not at all enjoy annoying myself, but I could never seem to stop. For hours every day, and especially the precious minutes I spent meditating, I was very busy bothering the crap out of myself, until a few days ago, when the scope of all time crushed me like a bug.

Meditating on the perimeter of the canyon, I found profundity, but there was no great epiphany, not yet. It didn’t happen until our days at the canyon were in the rear view mirror, we pulled up to 24/7 party in Las Vegas, and realized I had been way, way, way, way, way too hard on myself. Over and over again, beating myself up for being a dumb, hungry human being standing on the edge of a cliff, poking and prodding at every stupid thought that crossed my mind, not even realizing how much I had released to the womb of the time, until my shoulders relaxed, and the very prospect of bothering myself dropped on the floor like a broken phone.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I will never annoy myself ever again for all time, but it’s a joy to run around in this wide, open field. In 4,560 million years of history, one, tiny, totally insignificant human life, time ceases to matter, and one moment is all you need to connect to the infinite, interconnected oneness of all that is, but it’s impossible when you’re busy being a piece of shit.

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In the meantime, we are taking the scenic route from Tucson, stopping at the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, and blasting the new Gorillaz album. Road trip music reccs more than welcome.

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