And friends? I saw nothing this summer, so it’s all new to me, Hollywood’s stupidest resident.

Below is my guide to the most hotly anticipated movies of three months ago. Do I have great taste? No. Talent? No. Will I always be sure to see a movie before forming an opinion? Absolutely not.

Now, I know some of you are still clinging to your high-cut bikini briefs and dancing around on rooftops, trying to rub the last bit of fading aestival light furiously between your lip and gums. This is for people like you and Sylvia Plath, who once called this “the odd uneven time,” when “the best of the summer is gone, and the new fall not yet born.” RIP Sylvia, you would have loved Scary Movie (2026).

Let’s have a little fun, huh?

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 (MAY 1) - There’s a hilarious rumor about a celebrity, one you can probably guess with minimal internet legwork. The rumor is that this actor continues to work into advanced age — despite having made tons of money in hit shows and film franchises— because he once snitched on a powerful drug dealer and must give the drug dealer 75% of everything he makes until he dies. Sorry, but 1) it is funny to think of someone having to be in The Santa Clause 7 or face being murdered; 2) I really think some actors just like to work. I think that Anne Hathaway is one of these people. She is leading five studio films this year alone and would probably come up to you at an Italian restaurant and make you a movie, tableside, if she could. I happen to enjoy her a great deal, but I hope when Stanley Tucci is 87 he’s ready for the middle of the night phone call from Anne, whispering, “Put down whatever pasta you’re hand-shaping, it’s time to do that gay voice again.” May they both know peace. May we all.

OBSESSION (MAY 15) - I had a family dog named Curry that my dad named while he was going through what we all refer to somberly as “Dad’s jerk chicken phase.” We ate jerk chicken several times a week while my dad maniacally tried to perfect his “spice blend.” I am telling you, the man went nuts about seasoning in a manner not seen since Europeans went sailing to the wrong places, hoping to murder people for nutmeg. Dad named the dog Curry, and we did not get input. For this reason, the name “Curry Barker” will never not be hilarious to me. By now we all know, Obsession was made by an 11-year-old after an escaped convict hit him while riding his bike, and subsequently wrote him a blank check. The thing I will say for this movie is that it was shot in North Hollywood, which is hands-down the best place to shoot a horror movie in the whole world. Every block is a bunch of flipped houses and then a random WeWork with a Domino’s Pizza in the lobby. Once, in North Hollywood, I saw someone outside a brick-and-mortar AmazonFresh store throw up into a frisbee. Nobody flinched. Just another day in North Hollywood!

LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY (MAY 17) - Lee Cronin could stab you with a sword in the middle of Times Square tomorrow, in front of dozens of onlookers, and guess what nobody would say, “Hey! That was LEE CRONIN!” “Somebody stop LEE CRONIN!” “Yes officer, it was LEE CRONIN.” That’s because we do not know who this Lee Cronin man is. Here’s what I do know: I love when a movie is called “SOMEBODY SOMEBODY’S SOMETHING.” It smacks of a credit dispute, a real nutty person, or the involvement of Rob Zombie — objectively three of the best things that can go into the making of a film. Buy big on this one, everybody.

DISCLOSURE DAY (JUNE 12) - I read a lot of reviews of Disclosure Day and hilariously, none of them could tell me if it was good or not. It was a lot of stuff like “the work of a master, distilled to his ether,” which feels like something I’d say about a drawing my kid tried to make of Captain America that kind of looks like a vulva. Plenty of people liked this movie! I’m obviously a massive Jaws freak, so I hope Spielberg is still making summer movies when the oceans boil. A funny complaint I heard about this one was that if aliens were really going to choose two humans to be their global ambassadors, would they really choose two random English people? I would counter: yes, but two who were not so random at all.

SUPERGIRL (JUNE 26) - I don’t know anything about this one other than that the actor who plays Supergirl was very charming when reporters demanded to know dumb stuff like if Supergirl’s dog is bi. This is what we are reduced to now, as we have exhausted the comic book movie discourse. At least, that is, until Christopher Nolan tires of unsolicited feedback from spicy classicists, and fires up the old plastic codpiece machine. Which unfortunately leads me to...

THE ODYSSEY (JULY 17) - Listen, I will not be the 10,000,000th woman with a closed-up nose piercing who’s ever cried on the phone with Madewell customer support to attempt some fresh, cutting observation about this guy. This movie is simply not in the cards for me, despite a lot of people trying to lure me in by telling me it includes a 60-foot-tall practical cyclops puppet (????). To paraphrase the old meme, I'm happy for u though? Or sorry that happened.

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY (JULY 27) - I have not seen any of these films but, like most people, I have thought about emailing that Swiss assisted death clinic to ask if they will take me if the news ever breaks that Tom and Zendaya have parted ways. I can’t even think about it. God. I’m already upset.

ONE NIGHT ONLY (AUGUST 7) - All I will say is this: when a guy comes up with an idea for a “high concept romantic comedy,” they make a whole studio picture out of it and release it nationwide, and whether it does well or not, they let him do one or two more, plus maybe a play, and unlimited “SHOUTS AND MURMURS” columns for life. If a woman comes up with one, they load her into a circus cannon and aim it at the sun.

THE END OF OAK STREET (AUGUST 14) - This movie is -- I think -- about a family whose house falls through a wormhole into Dinosaur Time, and they must defend themselves with makeshift weapons as their neighbors get eaten. I regret to inform you that my first thought on hearing this was, I would be able to park anywhere!

And that’s the end of This Post Street! Sorry for writing this! Happy fall, everybody!

I’ll see you for more of these in ... AWARDS SEASON.

This was the report one day from my oldest son, then in first grade. After some light parental detective work, we were able to determine that a teacher’s aide, hoping to demonstrate the utility of search engines, had allowed our kids to Google themselves in Computer Lab.

In my boy’s case, this called up an old photo from a magazine in which my husband, who shares his last name, is indeed perched on a toilet. In his defense, he is fully clothed, and atop the lid. Although in others, he is smoking a cigarette, or on trial.

My husband and I are both people who have lived “very online lives” as writers on the internet during a certain era, with the Google image search results to prove it.

Because we are desperate to impress our children, we’ve told them some things about that time of our lives— the time AJ went to Egypt to cover the Arab Spring (”Not very well,” he is careful to point out), or the time I was trapped in an enclosed space with Robyn Fenty for 7 terrifying days.

But, of course, there’s stuff that we aren’t like, dying for them to know.

We were two people who didn’t actually think we might have kids one day. That is to say: dirtbags. Additionally, I wrote (a lot. A lot, a lot) about sex; he worked for a couple tabloids and the kinds of men’s magazines that had cover lines like “What’s More Bitchin’: Bacon or Boobies? We Finally Make the Call.”

We met for the first time, briefly, when I had a job interview at a website where he was the editor. We became sorta-friends, experienced a kidnapping together, and then I got pregnant.

Lemme unpack that a little...

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Here they are, and if you’re so moved, take my hand, and tell me what’s sending you up the absolute wall today.

Above-Ground Sinks

Is this the technical term? Maybe not. I mean those enormous, often clear, Cost-Plus-World-Market-salad-bowl looking sinks that sit on top of the counter instead of sunken into it, as God intended. These do nothing but reduce the surface area of the countertop and cause the water to go spraying in every direction. Look, maybe you like the feeling of washing your face in a bowl like a 19th century leech physician, but being a Bowl Sink Person should be an agonizing personal decision you have to break gently to your parents and not the norm for people who are trying to rent an AirBnB for a wedding in a town with no hotels.

Hot Clipboard People

Look, maybe this is an LA-specific phenomenon, but “clipboard people” used to be old men with wonky home-haircuts who stood outside food co-ops and tried to kind of low-Testosterone menace you into signing a petition to add Brewer’s Yeast to public drinking water. Since the 2010s, the nonprofit goons have smartened up and instead dispatch the charming and sexy to separate us from our money and precious personal information. I can no longer go anywhere in my town without being warmly confronted the kind of good-looking younger people who used to be posted outside of Abercrombie or hostess meanly at Indochine. They are so hot that not even a safety vest and branded hat can keep them from flirting you out of five dollars and your fingerprints. Every ten feet some Connor Storrie looking 31-year-old in a half-shirt hits me with, “Hey, beautiful, can you spare 30 seconds from being sexy to talk to me about state-subsidized school lunches?” Please leave people in their forties alone, we are too vulnerable for this.

Home Fire Pits

It’s bad enough that one is now in the dead center of every suburban yard like a huge umbilical stump. But now it’s $30 extra to stay in a room at a Courtyard Marriot because it has “a fire pit” on the “lanai?” Why are these every where now? Did Clarence Thomas’s wife buy stock in s’mores?

Movie Reviews Where I Can’t Tell If The Reviewer “Liked It”

You’ll notice that many of these are about my twin obsessions, Zillow gooning and food, but this is a complaint that inched its way up the charts this summer. I know we’re all desperate for something new to say about the Super Mario Galaxy movie, but perhaps we’ve forgotten that the function of critical reviews for most people is not to know how much Buñuel the writer saw in film school. Now that Rotten Tomatoes is fully broken (I do not want opinions from influencers and people from websites like FilmSlurp dot net, not in my world, not in the world I’m living in), I just need to know things like “is it too long” or “in the most general sense did you personally enjoy the experience of viewing Disclosure Day.”

The One Vegetable We Still Refuse to Chop

I had a French teacher who had never been to France because, Ohio. I only later told a bunch of actual French people things he’d said about French culture, which turned out to be a slew of hilarious half-truths (the French don’t use laundry detergent, they think bangs are for children only, etc). One that turned out to be real, though, was that in France it’s considered rude to cut your salad with a knife. I don’t understand, we all said to my French teacher. Je ne comprends pas. "What do you do if the lettuce is too big? “You simply fold it into your mouth!” he screamed. And while we Americans do not object generally to cutting lettuce in polite society, I still do not understand why we cannot simply — as long as we’re chopping all the other vegetables that go into to the salad — cut the greens themselves into bite-sized pieces in the kitchen. Why must kale come in chunks the size of 3x5 note cards? Why must the arugula be served in an enormous bone-dry tangle like something that might go tumbling through the desert? Does any other food arrive so unruly that it immediately starts falling out of the serving dish the moment you touch it? I carried out salad the other day, it came with nothing but a bamboo fork and I swear to God I almost died.

Grar-dwood Floors

I used to complain about people carpeting over hardwood, but little did I know, the god of flooring would continue to send his worst battles to his least brave soldier. I’m speaking of course of the un-killable gray hardwood floor you see in every rental listing from Portland (OR) to Portland (ME). Wide plank, thin plank, light, dark, “rustic”… Every home renovator and realtor on God’s green earth seems to think that human people want to live in the part of Pleasantville before Joan Allen had an orgasm. You know that dumb old internet joke about how nobody’s ever seen a baby pigeon? I have never met a human being who prefers a grey floor. Not one! I would love for one, one person to show themselves, just so I can grill them for seventeen hours like I’m conducting a senate judiciary committee, even though they’d probably give me some pat answer from the shallow recesses of their Dunkaroo frosting cup of a brain like, “It hides dirt.” Do I need to leave my handsome natural wood floor bubble? Maybe. Am I “okay?” Absolutely not.

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If you did not grow up in the Midwestern United States, Erie is a lake. A lake is like an ocean, but smaller and just a little grosser. There are a couple of nice, big lakes all around the country for things like swimming and boating and admiring, and then there are ones that just kind of sit there, smelling not-great and making the weather worse.

One of the second kind of lakes is Lake Erie, arguably the stupidest of the somewhat excessively named “Great” Lakes. Erie borders parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, although nobody is really tripping over themselves trying to claim it.

It has neither the grandeur of Lake Michigan nor the brute majesty of Lake Superior. (I don’t know much about Huron or Ontario — those feel like Canada’s problem). Erie is the smallest, shallowest, and warmest of these lakes, although it is probably most famous as the filthiest. Although — contrary to what every smart aleck likes to say to a person upon learning they are from Cleveland — it has never caught on fire. That was our river.

In fact, despite a great increase in efforts to keep the lake a even a bit cleaner (after some pretty embarrassing studies in the 1970s that found it churning with industrial waste, sewer runoff, and, just for good measure, DDT), people were still a little iffy on, like, getting in to the lake by the time my childhood rolled around in the 1990s.

Yes, robust efforts had been made to disinfect Erie, but it kind of just felt like we’d only cleared enough of the chemicals and illegal dumping out to really let the bacteria and algae blooms flourish.

Also, there is more “stuff” in the lake.

If, like me, you enjoy a nautical disaster that occurred long enough ago that interest qualifies you as “curious about history” rather than “a sociopath,” Lake Erie has lots to offer you.

In addition to your garden-variety disappearances and storms and sunken freighters, there were some fairly large-scale human tragedies. Near the beginning of the 20th century, workers were attempting to dig a water-intake tunnel from the lake when they hit a seam of methane, causing an explosion that trapped the crew in an underground Tupperware container of poisoned air. In the late ‘60s, a plane mistakenly dumped a bunch of experienced skydivers into what they thought was a drop site near the airport but was actually the middle of the lake — sixteen of them died. And, perhaps most senselessly, in 1986, two lost boaters died on the lake when the Coast Guard could not rescue them via helicopter, because air visibility had been compromised by an idiotic municipal initiative to break the world record for “number of balloons released into the air.” That 1.5 million latex, helium-filled balloons.

Plainly: Erie is a big, dirty, calamity soup. There’s a lot of “stuff” in it.

None of this was a deterrent to my father’s stepdad, a man we called Grandpa Jim, who liked to take us to the lake in the summer while he rested onshore in a rickety, duct-taped lawn chair. There he sat in a kind of pleasant, estival stupor, drinking Schlitz, and fishing for pike, walleye, and terrifying, enormous monster-fish called a “sheepshead.”

Northeast Ohio enjoys less of a “winter” than a freezing sepia veil that lasts approximately 9.75 months, but summer is brutally hot and sunny, and children are more or less kept out of doors and continually moistened, like koi.

In the lake, my cousins and I would swim as far out as we could, taking huge gulps of grey water tipped with caps of brown foam. Grandpa Jim did not really “watch us,” per se, or provide us with any instruction about staying close or not swallowing too much water, which was freezing cold and tasted like the used paint glass of someone watercoloring a picture of hell.

Grandpa Jim’s only rule was that we had to be able to see him, which was easy. My grandparents were very thrifty, and he favored a wardrobe bought almost entirely at yard sales — specifically, brightly colored novelty shirts from the 1970s emblazoned with objectionable slogans.

They were either impishly chauvinist (“THIS MORNING I WOKE UP GRUMPY, BUT THEN I TOLD HER TO SHUT UP AND GO BACK TO BED”) or peculiar xenophobic grudges related to World War II (“ENJOY VISITING ROMANIA IF YOU LOVE RESOURCE COLLUSION!”) .

We’d easily be able to spot him from a few leagues out because he’d be dressed head-to-toe in neon macroaggressions, a blaze orange rude hat and lippy shirt in some kind of eye-maiming, electric pastel. Every once in a while, he’d wave to us.

This was not the only time Grandpa Jim played fast and loose with our safety. There was a massive, 22-foot oak in their yard that my 10 cousins and I liked to climb during our visits. One day, while Jim was driving in one of his mostly-rust, (domestically manufactured!!!!!) pickup trucks, probably in a smushed yellowing trucker hat that said “ALL I WANT IS PEACE AND QUIET, SO GIVE ME A PIECE, AND I’LL BE QUIET!” he noticed something by the side of the road. It was a twenty feet of steel walk-through scaffolding that had fallen off of a utility pole, or, possibly, the back of a Cleveland Water and Power truck. He hopped out, stuck it in his truck, and took it home, where he lashed it to the big oak tree in the yard with bungee cords.

“This way yins can get all the way to the top,” he said.

This was never, I should mention, sanctioned by my grandmother, a former hospital nurse within whom raged the “two wolves” of women of her era: a class-A worrywart, and a wolf who has to do whatever its insane husband wants without consequence. If my grandmother knew about how far out Jim let us swim in the lake, she would have, plainly, shit.

I inherited both her name and her anxieties about safety when it comes to children: strangers, heights, depths, water, sun, the bends, man-sized catfish, the general unknown, and so forth.

But now my family and I live in Los Angeles, a place famous for its variety pack of disasters. Every few years a documentary comes out about how at any time, a medium-size quake could send the area from Seattle to San Diego into the ocean like a crumbly bit of scone into a mug of tea. A friend of mine casually mentioned over coffee the other day, at a coffee shop on three blocks of street with four coffee shops, that our mudslides are probably going to be worse than usual this year because of “wildfires vibing with El Nino.” One of my children recently had a friend over to play in the house we rent in the hills, one of their parents asked if I wasn’t concerned about the lack of egresses in a fire, or “some kind of attack.”

The ocean is less than an hour from our home, but I dread taking them there, because all I do is think about riptides and water quality and that aerial footage of Great White sharks having a rave caravan just feet off the coast. When my sons and daughter go to their very cool hiking camp in the enormous mountain park near our home, I hope they’re having a nice time, but I fret about extreme heat and rockslides and actual lions. An enormous part of living here, or I suppose, anywhere in the age of microplastics and data centers and Flock cameras and drones, is a great amount of willful ignorance.

I do try to remember my own childhood spent teetering on tree canopies and bobbing around that disgusting trash lake, with my crusty step-grandfather and his lackadaisical supervision. Grandpa Jim was one of ten kids so poor that they took turns having meals. He was nineteen and had six days left until discharge when his barracks at Pearl Harbor were attacked — per a local newspaper article about him, he “joined his fellow soldiers in futilely firing rifles and pistols at the attacking planes. Later, he fought at Guadalcanal.” The man was at Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal. He was not concerned about a couple kids going for a little swim.

He probably would not be about much we experience here in the second largest, second wealthiest city in the most prosperous country on Earth. Senseless and uncontrollable things will happen here and elsewhere. Precautions might be taken. But it’s also still summer, only for a little bit longer, and perhaps the best thing to do is just get to a beach and let everybody swim out as far as they, personally, deem prudent. There’s still time in the season to find a body of water nearby. Don’t read anything about it first. Just bring sunscreen and, if possible, imagine someone who has cheated death more times than anyone could believe possible camped out on the shore, pounding icy cold ones, and waving at you from a chair.

While I’m not bipolar or on TikTok, I was able to relate to this because 1) there is still plennnnnnnty up with me, mentally, and 2) I’ve bought a bunch of things I don’t need in what we’ll call a “similarly heightened state.”

I’ll tell you all about it, so you can laugh at me, or buy this stuff too if you’re also a big, anxious dope with a head full of crème brûlée.

Let me quickly explain: I was born during a period of extended nuclear tension, when the person responsible for our fraught role in fragile geopolitics was a man who called his wife “Mommy.” I went on to give birth to all three of my children between 2017 and 2020, a time you might remember for such events as a “global pandemic” and “the leader of the free world bothering Kim Jong-Un at 3 AM on Twitter.”

I also had clinical postpartum anxiety, which, if you don’t know, is a temporary condition some people experience after childbirth characterized by constant, intrusive worry. My particular flavor of PPA took the form of “being super freaked out about nuclear and other large-scale disasters.” It was definitely outside of the realm of “normal,” but, ah, my friends… so were the times.

This led me to, of course, Prepper Reddit, which led me to Amazon dot com, where I bought a bunch of hilariously paranoid, dumb shit that I found on Internet lists like “Bug-Out Essentials” and “Life After There Are No More Hospitals” and “What You’ll WISH You Bought While Your Family is Doing the Breast Stroke in Boiling Liquid Magma After All the Volcanoes Explode.”

I eventually got treatment for PPA and learned along with the rest of us to numb myself to the never-ending horrors. But not before spending real, green money on things that men named CobyInTheDakotas said would be the only things keeping my family from being turned into Walton Goggins on that show where he doesn’t have a nose.

Please note, I would neverrrrr minimize mental illness and encourage everybody going through something similar to get some good help instead of making a bunch of ha ha’s about it. I’m able to (figuratively) “look back and laugh” only because, while I no longer have PPA, I remain very broken and only able to process things through humor. Also, it was very temporary, and I never went fully HAM on large-ticket items like a generator or gas masks for dogs.

Below is what I bought during the times I was at my most hormonally bonkers, most of which is lost to time, although my husband will still occasionally find something in the cupboard and yell things like, “Hey, what is dehydrolized peanut meal replacement? Can I still eat it?” when we don’t have dessert in the house. The important thing is, I’m “fine” now (ha), and I understand that if civilization ever does collapse, a bunch of assorted crap bought at vast carbon expenditure will likely not protect me.

Please enjoy the fruits of my afflicted idiocy. Here we go.

Potassium Iodide Pills

A lot of legit authorities on nuclear preparedness endorse these, which can prevent your thyroid from taking on radiation following a nuclear event. In fact, the CDC has a whole page on their use. The CDC also says they “aren’t recommended for people over 40.” I assume this is not because of any medical reason, but because the horny dorks who work in public health want their post-apocalyptic America repopulated by hotties and hardbodies. Well, fuck you, CDC. I bought them, they’re mine.

Clotting Gauze

Okay, this one I still keep in my glove box. This is wound dressing treated with a powder that can stop excessive bleeding while you wait for medical assistance, and an EMT friend told me it was not an unsensible thing to keep in one’s car. But of course, that’s not what I was imagining using it for when I bought it, which was “to stanch my wounds after someone shot me in order to get at my supply of vacuum-sealed, extended shelf-life rice.”

20 Pounds of Vacuum-Sealed, Extended Shelf-Life Rice

See above.

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To which you may respond, Buddy, we know. Look where you’re writing this.

And, yes. I have a BA in Literature and absolutely no “arm.” A highschool gym teacher who taught me P.E. for one miserable semester had the entire class calling me “Basketball Rudy,” and used to interrupt drills to ask if my mom drank while she was pregnant with me. (This was the year 2000 and you could do that kind of thing to a fifteen-year-old just for a lousy jump shot.) That spring, when that gym teacher was thankfully supplanted by a hippie sub and her unit on frisbee golf, I still somehow got a hairline fracture on my ankle while jumping, and spent three months in an air cast.

I always thought that I’d end up with somebody bookish; like, a male Sarah Lawrence grad with glasses that were way too small for his face in a way you’re not sure is an affectation or a general lack of self-awareness (Aaron Sorkin). A guy who maybe got, like, a couple stories into Granta but never even a response from the New Yorker, who stews over the success of people who can’t really even be called his contemporaries (Miranda July, Ben Lerner, Homer)… a guy who has like, four chest hairs and goes to see Studio Ghibli movies at the arthouse on Super Bowl Sunday, who won’t shop at Amazon because it’s killing bookstores but buys his hypoallergenic deodorant there in three-packs because the salaries at his creative-class job have stagnated since 1999. You know. That guy.

I thought we’d have one or two quiet, bookish children who would never so much as pick up a mini golf club for fear of hitting themselves on the back of the head. But, I did not end up with that kind of guy.

I ended up with this guy:

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Which all resulted in me summoning a car-cleaning professional to our house, via an app. At around 2.5 hours after the time I specified, just as the sun was going down, a man I’ll call “Terry” arrived in a custom-wrapped peach Tesla with a “Thick Thighs Save Lives” bumper sticker.

Terry was regally short, maybe mid-thirties, and smelled strongly of artificial melon. He was also in a mood that suggested his being nearly three hours late was somehow my fault. He curtly asked if I “had a hose or something.” Then he proceeded to fuck up my car in ways I had previously not thought imaginable.

After spraying the entire body with what I am pretty sure was Mrs. Meyer’s Lavender countertop cleaner, Terry flipped on a 100-year-old shop vac the size of a mini-fridge, and began rubbing the bristly “furniture attachement” in long, confused strokes over the paint of the car, sort of like he was combing the hair of a large, unruly animal. The resulting noise was deafening.

All this led me to ask — had Terry ever cleaned a car before? No, he admitted, through a puff of cantaloupe-flavored vape smoke. This was his first day on the app. Signing up for it was all his new girlfriend’s idea.

As gently as possible, I told Terry that I needed him to stop what he was doing (“doing” being a bit generous, here). It was ten o’clock, the noise of the vacuum was causing people to look out their windows, and he probably shouldn’t have opened my neighbor’s garage to find a place to plug his equipment in.

When Terry left (leaving a squeegee with the tag still on in the middle of the street), my husband gave me a real “look.” He wasn’t reading a newspaper and glaring at me sternly over reading glasses, but he might as well have been.

“Please,” he said, “stop doing this.”

“Doing what?” I replied.

Although, I knew.

Despite being a reasonably handy and marginally functional adult, I have sometimes outsourced tasks to strangers with almost unilaterally disastrous results.

This is, of course, on me. Obviously, the vast majority of gig workers and housekeepers and handy-people are capable, safe, and sane individuals. But, as the old therapy maxim goes, we attract that which we have not healed.

What follows is a short, very incomplete list of people I have invited to our home to help me do things for money, with not-so-great results.

You can ask my husband all about it. But, please don’t.

Millie, Hired Via Colleague

Once I was working on a TV show when an absolutely DELIGHTFUL actor did a guest arc. (If you are a woman, or gay, and I told you who she was, there is a 90% chance that you would go, “Oh, I love her!” in a high-pitched voice.) This actor was around the show for a bit and did nice things like talk to the writers like they were people.

One day she was chatting with a few of us and said that she and her husband (another lovely actor!) were moving, and wouldn’t be able to use their housekeeper, Millie, any longer, and asked if one of us could give her some work. I was single and living in a one-bedroom apartment at the time, so I didn’t really need a ton of help cleaning it, but so charmed was I by this actor (who now has her own TV show!!!!! Sorry, I love blind items) that I that I took Millie’s information.

A few weeks later, I arranged to leave my keys under the rug and $100 in cash on the counter so Millie could clean my place while I was at work. Around lunchtime, my building’s super called. He told me not to be alarmed, but that he’d had to call an ambulance for my housekeeper.

I was, of course, alarmed.

“Don’t be!” said my super, who was a laid-back sort of guy who was always inviting me to throw a frisbee around with him. “She ate a whole bar of your weed chocolates and thought she was having a heart attack.” He said he tried to tell her she was “just super high,” but she made him call 911.

I apologized, and explained that I don’t, nor have I ever, kept “weed chocolates” in the house, which is true.

“That’s between you guys,” he said.

The next day, Millie texted, somewhat frantically apologetic, and told me that she would clean the place again free of charge. I said that wasn’t necessary, but Millie insisted. Ultimately, I didn’t want to be “weird” about the whole thing, especially to a person cool enough to eat a whole bar of weed chocolate on the job, so I said sure, and left her the key again the following week.

When I got home, the apartment was sparkling clean. However, all four burners of the gas stove were on. Like, on high. I was beginning to sense a theme, here.

I texted Millie to about the burners, and she said she had no idea how that could have happened, althought the “how” of it all was kind of coming into focus by that point.

She texted a few times about coming back to clean, but, because I am a coward, I ignored her, and hoped that word wouldn’t get back to the fun actors—though, I feel like they’d probably take my side in this one.

About a month ago, over ten years after Millie almost set my apartment on fire and accused me of poisoning her with “my” chocolate drugs, I got a text from her. She said she knew it had “been a minute,” but asked if I’d be willing to write her a nice Google review.

“Sure,” I texted back.

Marc, hired via TaskRabbit

A relative of mine was kind enough to send our oldest son a genuine Radio Flyer Wagon when he was still a baby. Unfortunately, it arrived in roughly 70,000 parts and required tools usually reserved for Revolutionary War-era cobblers, like a rasp and an awl, whatever those are.

A good way to choose a skilled handyman on apps like TaskRabbit is to sort by “Rating,” but I felt bad doing that. Wouldn’t that give all the same six professionals all the jobs? What if some handyman -- or handy WOMAN, even -- was out there trying to feed their family but no one was choosing them because they were all sorting for the best ones? It should probably be noted that I was also newly pregnant with our second child, and coursing with hormones that made me sympathetic to all creatures forgotten by God.

So, instead, I sorted by “Tasks completed” from low to high, and chose Marc, a friendly looking young man who seemed like he could use a break.

I could tell this was maybe not the smartest methodology when Marc arrived and immediately started acting what we’ll call “just a little rude.”

At first, his zings felt kind of general, like the fact that it was too hard to park on my street and that it was a probably a little fiscally imprudent to pay someone $100 to put a kid’s toy together.

But then it got more personal -- Marc pointed at a velvet painting of birds that I’d purchased from a fire sale at a Mexican restaurant.

“This is so ugly,” he said, pointing to the painting. “I don’t like anything about what you’ve done with your house.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound wounded. I don’t consider myself a professional decorator or anything, but, as you can tell from my description, the bird painting was empirically a very beautiful ‘piece.’ “Maybe we just … get to the wagon. Did you bring an awl?”

Then suddenly, Marc shook his head. “Damn, I’m doing it again,” he frowned, slapping his forehead. I didn’t want to ask, but, I guess I sort of had to at that point.

“Well, I guess you should know,” Marc explained, “I was in a construction site accident where a beam fell on my head. And now, I just kinda say everything I’m thinking. I have no filter. I don’t even know I’m doing it sometimes!”

I nodded, wondering if such a thing could be true. Or, if it was perhaps just a creative excuse for being a big, huge asshole about someone’s wonderful velvet bird painting. Either way, I try not to get testy with people who have just told me about their massive head injuries. “Wow, I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said. Then, gesturing to his still-unopened toolbox, I added brightly, “At least you’re still doing what you love!”

“I’m not,” he said. “What I really want is to make a line of cosmetics and hair care products for women.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” I said, backing out of the room to text several people my location.

Just a few short hours of hiding in my garage later, Marc texted me that he was all done. And you know what? He’d done a great job on the wagon, which ended up lasting our kids several years of use.

I was just seeing him out the door, when my husband and son returned from a day trip to the botanical garden. Before I could make introductions, Marc turned to me.

“Your hair is so dry,” he said. “I make my own shampoo. All I want to do is put it on your head.”

I thanked him and closed the door. My husband turned to me, confused, our very young child in his arms.

“Marc put together our wagon!” I beamed.

Mary, Organizer, hired via TaskRabbit

I’d just started a new job and had a second baby, and, in the throes of stress and overwhelm, I began seeing an old therapist again. This one was a wealthy woman who sort of did psychotherapy “on the side, for fun,” and whom I eventually broke up with when she asked for help getting an agent. (Los Angeles! Such a country!)

Anyhow, this therapist told me I wasn’t “delegating” enough, and gave me an assignment: take one thing off my plate, and give it to someone else. So I hired “Mary,” a grandmotherly looking TaskRabbit to do what I’d planned that weekend: sort, bag, and store a mountain of disorganized baby clothes in my kids’ closet.

Hours after Mary had begun, I checked in on her, and oh, boy. Not only had she not organized the clothes, she had thrown them all on the floor in a heap. Then, on top of that, she had dumped out two large toy boxes, and the contents of both kids’ cribs, including the mattresses. There were infant Halloween costumes I could have sworn I gave to Goodwill sitting on the top, like a star on Christmas tree. Finally, and perhaps most inexplicably, she had taken the pictures off the wall and leaned them against the pile.

The resulting heap was taller than Mary, and looked like some sort of ceremonial offering, or perhaps a display in a toy store run by a doom metal band.

Mary also appeared to be packing her bag to leave.

“Uh, Mary..?” I said.

Noticing me at last, Mary said, “Hey Mama,” and hit me with her most nurturing smile. Then she walked over and put both of her hands on my shoulders. “I saw how stressed you seemed, and I wanted to do a little ‘something extra’ for you by cleaning the whole room instead of just the clothes. Then I just plain ran out of time!”

She said that she was sorry, but she had to leave to go to another job, and that I’d have to “take the wheel” from there.

Then, she hugged me.

“Please don’t give me a bad review for this,” she said into my hair.

“Well, of course that happened,” said my therapist the next week. “For a good organizer, you’ve got to spend some real money.”

Carrie, Psychic, hired via a Friend of a Friend

In 2018, I was cleaning out a storage space in our house when I found several very old photographs of a beautiful, sad-looking woman.

Two years ago we’d bought the house, which had been built almost a century before, and while I hadn’t seen a ghost in it, I’d definitely had that “people have been here” feeling you get in, like, historical societies or old cemeteries or other places where I force my children to listen to me read plaques.

It goes without saying, but, finding pictures of a beautiful, sad-looking woman stuffed in a crevice is a fairly good indication that you are about to be “Insidious”-ed.

And of course, even flimsy evidence of a haunting meant one thing: the end of me farting or having sex in my own home. I mean, probably not the END-end, but, I’d have to at least yell out, “Please don’t watch me do this!” first, which seemed like it could get old.

When I told my friend, Walshie, about this, she told me about a friend of hers who had just moved into a great old house, too, when her toddler son began complaining that a floating man with no legs was standing in the doorway of his bedroom at night.

This friend had hired a woman named “Carrie” who, for a fee, would perform a small ceremony, in which she’d address the deceased people who’d lived in the house before, and gently ask them to leave. Here’s where I somewhat redundantly remind you that I live in Los Angeles.

When I texted Carrie, she sounded enthusiastic about taking the job, to put it mildly; she told me that she could -- nay, felt she must -- come to my house the next day.

Now, I feel the need to point out that I was between jobs, had a second new baby, and was feeling a little stir crazy. I had nothing much going on aside from caring for two babies and ranting to my poor husband about the existence of a new TV show called “God Friended Me.”

Carrie showed up at my house looking and acting appropriately woo-woo. She was in her mid-fifties, and wore lots of florals, and told me a bit about how she “communicates with spirit,” just like in that old psychic reality show on TLC. You know, the one where that gay tween lied to grieving widows.

I left Carrie to her task, and I was just beginning to wonder if I should have gotten an estimate beforehand when I began to hear her “speaking in tongues.” I don’t know if you’ve seen someone do this, but, it’s very funny at first, and then very, very scary. Think of an episode of Widow’s Bay without the team of writers and self-awareness.

After wandering through my house, for a long, long time, she grabbed a stack of index cards and post-it notes from my desk and began to have what was either part of her process or a full psychotic break.

She could see “demons everywhere” in my house, and in between shouting at them and banging on the walls, she started writing “Demon!!!!” on post-its and then taping them to our things: My son’s stuffed T-rex, some body wash, a particularly breathtaking Mexican restaurant bird painting that I cared about very much, and more.

I messaged the friend of a friend who’d referred Carrie to me and asked if this had been her experience ('“No? Definitely not?”). Finally I told Carrie that this had all been very helpful, but that I needed her to “wrap things up,” regardless of whether all of the demons had been dispatched. Preferably before my husband got back from LA Fitness to witness all of this.

“Your husband needs me even more than you!” she said, slapping the walls some more. “There is a malevolent spirit that follows him!”

Normally I’d make some kind of joke like, “I’ve noticed that, especially after he has a meatball hoagie,” but I was genuinely uneasy at this point. Who knows why? I wish I could say that I was kind but firm to this person. But, because I am a coward AND an idiot, it took me a long, long time to get her out of my house and back into her Kia Soul.

I know what you’re thinking. A professional exorcist from Glendale? How could that person have mental health issues? I guess what they say is true: you never know what someone is going through until they’re trying to tape a post-it note that says “HELL BEAST!” to your husband’s golf clubs. Later, she sent me a Venmo request for $570.

And yes, before you ask, I always tip.

* If you don’t have several kids under ten, the “why” and “how” of a pie fight might not be immediately clear to you. Let me explain: long car ride, lax parenting, pie.

I once worked on a TV show that necessitated the hiring of child actors. This was back when the majority of casting was still done in person. Since I happened to have written a particular episode featuring kids, I was sitting in on the kid-auditioning process.

As you might imagine, children are not doing, like, Austin-Butler-level character work at the age of six or seven. It’s a lot less “who can best use their instrument” than “who can limit the number of times they wander out of the room or just fully lie down and on the carpet making noises like a garbage truck” type thing.

Our casting director would begin by asking a few questions to put the kids at ease — you know, Do you have a dog?, Any siblings?, etc. Then, after they’d loosened up a little, they’d be asked them to repeat a line or two from their sides.

Most of the kids were then gently broomed out of the room by a parent, who sometimes would say something in a rush before they left, like “He just did an episode of ‘NCIS: Boston’ and they would have brought him back for a second, but his character was murdered by David Faustino, who played a male nanny who fell in love with him. Thank you so much for your time!”

A lot of these moments tend to run together in my memory, but there’s one child actor that I won’t forget.

After sweetly interacting with the casting director, reading her line, and being thanked for her time, a little girl with curtain bangs and eyes the size of toasters turned to us and said something that still sends chills down my spine.

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Not long ago, I recommended Bury Me Already, the new book by genius cartoonist and humorist Julia Wertz, on my Instagram stories. Julia’s diary comics are granularly clever and voluminously crude and hauntingly funny. And, solipsistically, she also used to be kind of a “New York City dirtbag” and now she is a (somewhat) emotionally renovated California mom. We also both gave birth to sons with “some health stuff” around the same unpleasantly historic time, the first three months of 2020, a fiscal quarter whose wild personal peaks and global lows her new book largely busies itself with.

A few days after I posted my recommendation, a friend of mine said, “Should I get this for my coworker who’s about to go on maternity leave with her first?” And I said, “Yes, but maybe tell her not to read it for like, six months.”

It’s not that I don’t think everyone can read and enjoy this book, but that parents probably shouldn’t be “too informed” before their first baby. Having a child is like one of those A24 movies people are always telling you to “go in not knowing anything about” (and twice as long and overpriced!!!! HA HA just kidding. I love you, A24, please give me money to write a movie about a woman who goes through a traumatic breakup and becomes sexually obsessed with a fire hydrant or something).

Anyhow, the book does not shy away from The Horrors when it comes to parenting, and that includes pregnancy loss, birth trauma, child peril… all stuff I generally probably would have scared the shit out of me before I went through it. (That’s why the book is good! You should buy it! )

And in that spirit…

Here are some parts of childbirth and rearing that I was unprepared for. Please note: these are not necessarily universal things, but ones based on my personal experience as a big idiot with a brain purchased from an Aldi. I experience levels of agita and overthinking entirely unjustified for someone of my relatively comfortable circumstances. Every day my body prepares for some kind of Hurt Locker situation when I am, in fact, going to Ralphs to buy a bottle of salad dressing. (To be fair, some Ralphs locations deserve this.)

When having a baby, you may find yourself...

... getting Preeclampsia.

What is it? Unclear. It’s one of those “cluster of mystery symptoms we didn’t tell you that you could have” type things that very little research has been done on because only one gender gets it (two guesses which).

Will you get it if you have a baby? Probably not. But, MAYBE? Some estimates say as many as 10% of women will experience it, and yet nobody tells you about it even though it can literally take you out. Hilarious! And the most fun part is, when you ask your physician what causes it, they go, “Well, don’t actually know.” Ha ha, it’s fun to be a woman; you get to see doctors shrug a lot.

When I was 36 weeks pregnant with my first, I went in for a routine checkup and my blood pressure was “uh oh” over “carnival game where you hit that thing with a big mallet.” My OB was like, “Hey great news, you’re having a baby! Like, in an hour.” I did not even have time to be frightened for my C-section. I have stood in line for concessions at AMC for less time than it took for me to give birth, and yes, I am a Stubs member.

Then I had to be on some kind of IV drip for 24 hours that made me feel like I was in the medical tent at Burning Man for drinking dirty well water. Let me just say this: if men got preeclampsia, they would sell preeclampsia-shooting laser guns on every street corner. (These laser guns would do nothing, but they would make really loud noises.)

... never experiencing labor, ever!

I had two more kids after my preeclampsia “whoopsie,” and my doctor is Mr. No Fun Zero Chill, so he would not even let me attempt a non-surgical birth after a caesarean. He also thinks I am a handful so I think he tries to spend as little time with me as possible. (This is LA, and he is also a big name-dropper, so he’ll say fun stuff like, “You know who never complained this much? Sharon Stone.*”)

Anyhow, because of this, I’ve never “been in labor,” or had so much as had a contraction. Birth for me has kind of been on par with a very uncomfortable haircut, both in that it is scheduled far in advance and that I try not to look at what is happening during. (Why does every salon mirror make you look like the bathtub hag from The Shining?)

Going through a relatively suffering-free birth process originally made me feel sort of bad, like I hadn’t suffered as much as women who labored for several hours, especially since many women are very proud of having done this. This is fine. You are allowed to feel proud about it! I am personally sort of over the moon to be Not Dead from a Uterine Hemorrhage, although nobody’s handing out medals for either of us.

... in the postpartum vortex of lamentation.

A few people sort of warned me about this one, yet I was still unprepared. For some people, there’s a moment not long after giving birth—like in the four-to-ten-day range—when some dastardly glandular alchemy takes place, and it manifests in the craziest involuntary extended weeping fit you’ve ever experienced.

As my husband will tell you, I’m “not a crier”—I don’t deal well with overt expressions of emotion in adults. I like to have one, manful, petite, tear-producing event a year in which to get out of all of my physical lamentation in one go.

HOWEVER. Childbirth is basically like that thing where you go to Burger King and mix eight different sodas into an undrinkable fizzy slurry that never actually tastes good and makes you feel insane, but it’s your brain just squirting 50 different hormones into the waxed paper cup of your fragile essence and making you feel insane.

My husband is a “big Pearl Jam fan” (I know! And yet, somehow, we’ve had enough sex to create three children???). I am ….not. Yet when he played our first child a Pearl Jam cover of “Don’t Be Shy” on his fourth day of life, I sobbed like a toddler at an Anne Taylor-Loft. Like, spittling and wailing, my friends! It was not a short or gentle cry! I wept for my baby, for myself, for Edward Jerome Vedder, and for the recondite, mysterious God that made us all.

Don’t be caught off guard by this one, kids; you’ll want a private place and a very tolerant and supportive partner. (Mine still laughs “tolerantly” and “supportively” at me whenever we hear a Cat Stevens song).

... wanting another baby even when yours is, like, 1 week old.

I have a (male) friend who told me he believes that the number of kids that seems “unmanageable” to you is usually one more child than you currently have. I also have a sister who reported that, seconds after the first time she finished pushing a child through her birth canal, her first thought was, “I want to do that again.” (I was there for the whole thing; my first thought was something closer to “what the fuck!?!?!!”).

That said, I had three kids in rapid succession mostly because I loved being a parent and I loved my children so much that I did not even make time to think practically about just keepin’ it going, like when you go bowling and you finish the game in like 20 minutes and you’re like, “Should we just keep going? Okay, Kevin, you go” and the whole thing just starts a whole other ten frames without much effort on anyone’s part. Like that.

However, after three, my doctor was like, “I’m going to tell you what I told Anne Hathaway*: you need to take a break,” and I’d sort of been pregnant for five straight years at that point so… I took it under advisement, and it ended up being the right “stopping point” for us.

... thinking a lot about that one woman with 19 kids.

Did I watch that reality show when it was on? No. For the seven years that it aired, I had at least one other thing available to me to do other than doing that. I don’t even know what her name is.

And yet, now that I have my own kids? I think of this woman from that show every single day. Even given the bottomless financial resources that stone-cold freaks on TLC always seem to have, I cannot fathom having enough time, space, and money for this many kids. I can barely keep up with the dining and lodging needs of three small children, let alone a dozen plus future sex criminals.

I have three small kids and my god, the grocery bills. Did you ever see that one episode of Hard Knocks where the player with a home pizza oven was having all of his teammates over for pizza night and he showed the amount of ingredients you need to feed the other players on the practice squad, and it was like 40 bags of flour? It was like this man was going on the Oregon Trail! That is what having three school age kids is like.

Money aside, I am a middle child, and I am especially sensitive to their inexhaustible needs born out of default neglect. My second does things like grab my sleeve and say, “Look, Mama! I washed and organized the entire utensil drawer! My hands hurt from scrubbing. Do you love me?” I mean!!!! Who would have time for 17 people doing that??? Not me!

... with a weird new brain.

This one is harder to explain. I mean, yes, obviously, the world reorients when you have a kid and you can actually physically feel yourself going from the center of the universe to some kind of orbiting planet around the new sun of your little baby. (Sorry, — big annual cry is probably coming up.)

But I mean that the way you form and execute thoughts might actually change. I have a friend who only now realizes that she doesn’t “think in sentences” like most people (apparently this is a real phenomenon), and describes her cognitive process as a kind of wordless visual dictionary.

I can only describe what happened to my usual process of thought as going from, like, a casual interior monologue of things like, Maybe I’ll hit a farmer’s market today to navigational system a sheepdog is born with. I barely have the words to describe this, but something very primal kicked in and even now that my children are all in school, I have the involuntary urge to count them several times a day to make sure that they are all there. This base urge to satisfy their needs supersedes all else, which is probably why I frequently “don’t get to the toilet on time.”

In high school, my friend Tony Dilansico tried to convince me that he was actually a better driver when he was baked, because under the influence of marijuana he began to see things as a pure grid of directives, “like RoboCop.” This is the closest thing I can compare it to, except that instead of helping me drive, it ruins girls’ trips and dinners out away from my family.

(I once went to Las Vegas with my friends to see one of the Jersey Shore castmates in a nude male revue, but the entire time a jacked Australian guy was twerking in my face, I was wondering, “I wonder if my four-year-old has had fruit today.”)

... and one final post-birth physical thing that NOBODY told me about that is so horrifying and gross that I will only tell you about it if you’re a woman and you email me, because it’s really that awful (and you won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you).

There’s more too, but I’ll probably put those in another essay. Also, if their bellybutton stub doesn’t fall off right away it can stink up the entire house so badly people will think there is a body in it. Sorry!

*Actual celebrity names changed for HIPAA reasons but, you get it.

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This was fine with me -- for a small pug, he had enormous testicles the entire family found unsettling. But the clinic that was going to relieve him of them was all the way across town, and we were instructed to drop him off at five AM and await a text that would give us a thirty-minute window in which to pick him up in his significantly lighter, albeit woozy state.

The day of the big chop happened to coincide with two of my three human children coming down with whatever moist ailment was raging through our elementary school that week.

So when I got the message at 9 PM that night that said, “Pizza is ready to go home, please arrive before closing time” (9:30 PM, obviously) I sped across town with the aim of (gently) scooping him up before rushing back to my two feverish human charges as soon as I possibly could.

When I arrived at the vet, the only spot on the street that was open was at an electric vehicle charging station. Which was fine, because at the time I had a hybrid, so while I wasn’t going to plug it in (no time!), I was technically in an EV vehicle.

And besides, I figured, I’d only be there long enough to grab my groggy dog and his poor vacant scrotum. I was inside the vet clinic all of fifteen minutes, but when I returned, there was a note on my car.

“I need to charge my car to get to work

You are a selfish, thoughtless, ugly person.”

Well.

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It was a Talking Heads song called “Heaven,” and the lyrics repeated in ceaseless loop: “Heaven … Heaven is a place … A place where nothing … Nothing ever happens.”

Of course, I took this very personally.

Before I’d ever met my husband, I “knew” him as a writer and personality on several cheeky, coastally relevant blogs and publications. I was a deeply bored early-career desk potato during the peak of an era where he functioned as something of the internet’s asshole little* brother. He was sent interesting places to write interesting stories. He dated cool women, very publicly did drugs, and was once profiled in GQ where a professional photographer snapped him sitting on a toilet**. He wore a backwards hat to work most days. Basically, before me, he had a pretty good time.

And now, he seemed to be saying, he was in “a place” where “nothing ever happened???”

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Peronally? I love the Oscars, no matter what. When it’s Emmy season, I will absolutely participate in the exhausting dialogue about how awards are stupid and essentially contests over who runs the most expensive marketing campaign, but not in the greater January to March area. In that time, I become the guy I once saw proudly applying an “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE” bumper sticker to the back of his orange Chevy Volt, thirty-six weekends after “There Will Be Blood” opened.

I get this from my mom, a stone-cold Oscar freak with big, excellent opinions she’d dispense at random throughout the show, such as “I never ‘got’ Ali McGraw. And now, where is she? Not here!” We used to watch the Big Show every year while massacring an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos, and at some point she would inevitably turn to me during someone’s wet and trembly speech and say, “That’s going to be you up there someday.”

Little did we both know that I would be doing something even greater -- writing dumb jokes about the people on stage in a newsletter that makes me dozens of dollars a month. So, without further delay… “Enjoy” some of my “thoughts” on this year’s Oscar “contenders.”

blue moon: I’ve been on a real journey with Ethan Hawke. In my youth I found him to be kind of annoying in that “hot guy who wants to be a smart guy” way (if I ever run a country, modernizing Shakespeare will be punishable by death). But, in my dotage, I find we’ve both mellowed, and I now find him to be a delightful presence, on and off the screen. This particular film is an enjoyable collection of just the parts of “Midnight in Paris” where someone walks in and goes, “The name’s, Ernie… Ernie Hemingway.” Although, I have to say, for a town positively milling with cokeheads, we still don’t make a ton of “nuanced” movies about people in the throes of addiction. With the exception of “Jesus’s Son,” which you should watch if you’re craving a Denis Johnson adaptation and are on the fence about seeing “Train Dreams.” If so: damn, what a specific feeling you’re feeling. Life is a rich pageant, isn’t it?

hamnet: “In their time, the names ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were virtually interchangeable.” Sorry, no. What? What the fuck? I’m not buying it. And what’s more, I will never get over the suggestion that I do buy it. “Oh btw, before we start this movie you must accept that there was a time when the names Greg and Grog were the same name so if you died and your dad wrote a play called ‘Damn I Miss u Grog’ it was about you.” Belief unsuspended, possibly forever.

song sung blue: This movie is like if in the middle of one of the Mamma Mia! movies, people just started killing each other with machetes. A film truly more fucked up than anything the “Triangle of Sadness” guy thinks he can make. Having said that, I must say with zero irony, Kate Hudson should 100% win for this, she is low-key one of the 11 people who can do comedy and drama at an elite level. She is the Shohei Otani of people with a signature hairdo.

marty supreme: Everybody who’s mad about this guy, name ten operas. lol just kidding I don’t care what Timothee Chalamet said, can you imagine? I liked this one, but only because I’m like a enormous kitty cat in that I genuinely love watching people play ping pong.

one battle after another: I saw this way, way after everybody else in a free union screening full of the industry’s Oldest and Most Coughing People. Afterward there was a Q&A with the director and Paul “Thomas” Anderson said that the story is largely about how every generation fails to fix the world, and so we have to pass the baton on to the next one. “So I’m off the hook? That’s sick,” I said to myself, through my tears about what a good dad Leonardo DiCaprio will make when he’s 85 and his vas deferens collpases from age, allowing for a spontaneous vasectomy reversal in the middle of sex with a 23-year-old who is NOT a model, because modeling is no longer a viable career, having been taken over by sex Waymos.

F1 - hahahahahahahahaha. Okay, one thing I can say about this movie: there’s a character named Smolinski in it!!!! There has never been another character with my last name in a movie, ever. This guy is some kind of hot-headed Polish tire expert, which would normally not be great for us, culturally, except that this movie is largely about tires. If you’re on a date with a “cinephile” and they surprise you with a question about how you feel about the movie “F1,” you can just stroke your chin and say, “Well, it’s largely about tires.” Then go buy some condoms, because you’re in.

train dreams & weapons: Why am I doing these together? Because I have kids. And when there’s some sort of locomotive in whatever picture is playing at my Rialto, it sends me running out of the theater in a panic because I can’t distinguish film from reality and I think I am going to be run over. What I’m saying is, I can’t watch movies where bad things happen to kids, and I always ask my friends if there’s child peril in something so I know not to see it. I knew from the very poster for “Weapons” that it was going to be “not for me,” and when I asked my one friend about “Train Dreams” he said “Wellllllllll…” in a kind of high-pitched voice. So, I read the script for these two movies instead (you can do the same here), and therefore am not qualified to say anything about them. Other than, I don’t think any movie where someone sleeps on a “pallet” or is implied-eaten off camera is going to be one I’m rooting for with my mouth full of sugar, unbleached enriched flour, alkali-processed cocoa and palm oil (the primary ingredients in Double Stuf Oreos).

sentimental value - The biggest jump scare of the year is in this movie — when the house got renovated, I gasped like I’d been hit by a weighted blanket thrown out of a speeding car. Do not watch if you follow any of those Instagram accounts called “I Love Vintage Bathroom Tile” or anything. Otherwise, pretty good.

sinners - I heard Ryan Coogler interviewed on Amy Poehler’s podcast, and ran around for like a full week after telling everybody about how RC’s now-wife secretly saved up to buy him Final Draft while they were in college together so he could write his first screenplay with the proper formatting, and how that act motivated him to write prolifically since that day, to make her selfless investment in him worth it. In college I also vowed that I would write a screenplay before I graduated. I did not. But I did once put an empty 12-pack of Genessee Cream Ale on my head like a hat, and some leftover adhesive ripped all of the eyelashes off of my right eye.

the secret agent - I could write anything here. You haven’t seen this movie. Neither have I! That said, “The Secret Agent” is about a guy who breaks into a stuffed animal factory because he’s running away from his past, and instead, finds a new best friend, a talking bear named Secrety.

frankenstein - thanks, but we already have a “hot” frankenstein. his name is Booberry.

bugonia - I was at Descanso Gardens for their Christmas light show thing one year, and I went to a little pop-up concession stand to get my kids cocoa. The woman working there said, “Wow, I thought you were Emma Stone for a second,” and I replied, “Wow, thank you,” and then she explained that I do not actually look like Emma Stone, and further more, that she was “a little high.” That woman is my hero, forever and ever. I have not seen “Bugonia.”

Sorry for writing this. HAPPY OSCARS!

I should preface this by saying that, while I am not terribly generous of spirit otherwise, I do think that most of the time when we think others are being willfully offensive, they’re just desperate to make small talk. As a gold-star idiot who has put my foot so far into my own mouth that I’ve tasted knee, I wish we’d all be a little more forgiving* of the fact that in even the most lightly trying situations, the poor, overwrought human nervous system simply defaults to a kind of limited language model line of questioning. Emphasis “limited.”

(As a side note: I don’t get mad when people in Los Angeles default, as they famously do, to banalities about the weather or an exhaustive list of what roads they took to our coffee meeting… mostly because I want the right to do the same. What do you all want us to talk about, anyway? The Magna Carta? Middlemarch?! It’s a miracle that we’re hauling our crispy microplastic brains out of our protein-popcorn-crumb-filled bedsheets just to dissociate at each other all day. Let’s all cut one another a break if we can’t come up with anything better for the CVS cashier than “Rainy out there!” )

Okay, back to me and my personal grievances. When you’re a woman over 30, you often get asked if you have kids, but for me, it’s the follow-up question, “How old are they?” that shoots me and people I’ve never met before right to a place of deeply unerotic, mouth-puckering, nose-wrinkling discomfort.

This is because, during these few particular months, my children’s ages are consecutive. Right now, they are six, seven, and eight years old.

I realize this is fairly unusual, but it makes people’s eyes spin around in their heads like ping pong balls in a bingo hopper, and steam comes shooting out of their ears. I’ve heard every iteration of remark that means “How often were you and your husband doing intercourse? Did you go to work? Who was watching the other children while you two were humping yourselves into oblivion?” Then there’s the inevitable mention of “Irish twins,” a quaint, hilariously ethnically rude phrase that has somehow survived a century of whipsawing cultural sensitivity.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this happens at least once a week during the spring months — in part because my children are very loud and occasionally disruptive in public in a way that prompts others to demand their biographical information.

That my children are present sometimes seems to be no impediment to anyone — from Jersey Mike’s sandwichistas to pediatric dermatologists — to declare, “Wow, you and ‘Dad’ were busy!”

Because I am from the Midwest and have issues with overapologizing — not to mention creating and enforcing boundaries — rather than letting these comments pass, I sometimes feel that I must explain myself.

I’ve thankfully gotten to the point that I no longer say things like, “No, no, we weren’t having that much sex,” or “Yes, I know, the third one was such a shock I dropped the test into a shag rug and had to cut it out with nail clippers and still got pee everywhere and had to throw the rug out, but the sanitaiton department wouldn’t take it for weeks so I called them up and yelled at them in my second-trimester and they only got it because I was crying,” etc.

For a while, when the kids were still VERY little, I tried to come up with some sort of sly retort, the kind syndicated newspaper advice columnists were always advocating for in the 1990s, that indicates that I’m delighted with my life and you’re the creepy horndog for looking at my toddlers and immediately imagining me getting my back blown out, non-stop.

But, as it happens, I’ve been overexplaining it since the beginning — I got pregnant after dating someone for only a few weeks.

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I don’t consider myself unfriendly, per se, but long before my brief time as a New Yorker, I adopted the city’s approach to strangers: I’ll gladly help you out if you’re being actively killed, but otherwise, you and I are none of each other’s business.

I’ve always fallen somewhere between “a little shy around new people” and “pants-pissing social anxiety” -- in my younger years, I could fake being “outgoing” if I had roughly a soup pot’s worth of alcohol and some kind of stimulant, but in general, I’m awkward and sweaty with new people and strangers. Because of this, I’ve always enjoyed the solitude that travel and transit afford -- when you are between places you’re supposed to be, you can just take the time to think, and the polite thing to do is keep to yourself. I’m also someone who has always generally enjoyed silence and alone time (which, needless to say, has been rough on me as a parent, but that’s another essay). It’s when you’re expected to be friendly that I get sweaty and ridiculous — I once stopped going to a small mom-and-pop grocery store that was a block from my house and had incredible produce in favor of one that had to be driven to and whose tomatoes tasted like wet feet, because the manager at the “good” place greeted me by name every time I saw him and I couldn’t remember his, and after months, it was too late to ask.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook too much, but moving around a lot and changing schools often as a kid had made me extra wary of people I didn’t know -- I was nearsighted, bad at gym, and had a bone deformity, all things children were famously chill about in the 1990s. If I’d become a misanthrope by nine, I felt it was justified and hard-won.

So, in high school, when my older sister was in a school play and couldn’t drive me home after classes, I immediately took to public transportation, in that riders all pretended mutually that the people inches to the left of us or sometimes partially in our laps do not in fact exist. In Cleveland, we have a kind of B-minus light rail system that runs from downtown to some of the suburbs -- think of a trolley without the looks or personality -- and for a couple of quarters, I could get from high school to my house in about twenty minutes among my fellow sophisticated commuters, sharing a genial silence as North East Ohio flashed brownly by.

Until one day, when a boy about my age boarded. He wasn’t bad looking; in fact, he was one of the first in a specific subsection of people who would be attractive to me until they prove that they are interested and available. He was on the smaller side, in a huge North Face jacket through which a tie peeked out at the collar. There were many seats for him to choose from, but he sat down directly across from me.

Now, I don’t want to be controversial, but I don’t think introversion and extraversion exist as two distinct and exciting personality types so much as “ways every alive person feels at some point.” I understand the contemporary urge to align ourselves with any available subgenres of mental illness as an organizing social principle or thing to put on a couch pillow. But, not liking to be at parties where you don’t know anyone does not make you some sort of rarefied Victorian invalid or emotional protected class. Canceling plans at the last minute because your “social battery” is “drained?” In my day, we called that “being a big fucking flake.” However, in whatever construct-y way pure extraversion is real, this kid was it.

“So where do you go to school?” he asked, as if we’d already been in the middle of talking, leading me to do the classic, Are you talking to me? look around that gives you a brief time to assess whether you’re about to be annoyed or murdered with a shoe.

I told him I went to the public high school in my suburb, in my most inviting-zero-follow-up voice. He nodded, and I figured that would be the end of that, since I certainly wasn’t going to return volley, but as I would soon learn, he was the kind of conversationalist who sees “replying” as wholly optional, if not at cross-purposes with his particular talking style.

“I go to [X],” he said, naming one of the private, all-boys schools nearer to downtown, then he leaned forward. “I heard your school is dangerous.” And he went on to say something about kids having to go through metal detectors, which was a tedious “60 Minutes”-concern of old people at the time, who maybe shouldn’t have spent the entirety of the 1960s emotionally dysregulating our parents if they didn’t want their grandchildren to listen to Ween and carry pocket knives.

“It’s not,” I rolled my eyes, and decided to take out a book, which was absolute amateur hour -- the type of guy who talks to you unbidden on a train LOVES a book, because it gives them a handy topic to bother you about.

“A reader, huh,” he said, then he whispered conspiratorially, “Did you know Shakespeare was gay?”

Boys like this were always trying to convince you of some dusty old piece of historical apocrypha that a “cool” teacher convinced them was true -- like that Pepsi used to be mostly heroin or that the vibrator was invented by doctors to calm down Eleanor Roosevelt. A good 90% of the time, it was just that some historical figure was secretly homosexual. Paul Revere? Gay. Gandhi? Gay. Napoleon? Un gay.

Luckily, this couldn’t go on for much longer, because I was only two or three stops from the school, but before I left, this boy insisted on getting my name and telling me his, which we’ll say was Danny. And from then on, I saw Danny. So much Danny. I don’t know how he managed to be in the same railcar as me, but there indeed he was, every time I got on, ready with zero introduction or lead-in to disgorge an arsenal of unprompted urban myths and vaguely insulting breakdowns of current events, usually about how public schools were essentially depraved urban gulags overstuffed with illiterate teen larcenists.

I heard that in your neighborhood are gangs that drive around with their lights off and if you flash your lights at them, they’ll make you be the leader of the gang, and then you have to be in charge of the gang’s snack every week?

I heard that in public school, if they catch you praying, they make you watch PBS until you don’t believe in god anymore. Speaking of PBS, Jim Henson died of AIDS.

Also, did you know Mother Theresa was gay?

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of Cleveland winters could keep him from his chit chat, like Terry Gross with frosted tips and slightly less self-awareness. It seemed like there was nothing to do about this daily trial. Until, one day, a strange, golden opportunity arose: I got a haircut.

I should specify, this was also a time when I was fully obsessed with the television program “The X-Files,” including writing fan fiction, poring over episode guides, and dissecting each episode on online message boards with other people who had never had sex. If you’re thinking, Hm, sounds like you weren’t really in a position to reject anyone socially, you’re correct. I mention “The X-Files” because I’d been begging my mother to let me transform my shoulder-length, Purina brown hair into coppery, face-framing wisps like actress and harbinger of my nascent bisexual awakening, Gillian Anderson, and my mom had finally agreed, despite the expense and clear cross purposes with my shiny bagel of a face and medicine ball-sized head.

My mother’s colorist at the Cleveland Galleria took one look at my olive Greek complexion and said, “I’m sorry. You’re just not a redhead.” Until then, I was not aware that hairdressers had the right of refusal. But after a little convincing on my part (tears), he agreed to compromise on a light “auburn,” and I left the salon with a trapezoidal newscaster’s bob in the color of purplish brown favored by Batman villains and elderly female shut-ins.

I did not look like Dana Scully. But I did look different. Enough people said something like “Wow, I didn’t even recognize you” (derogatory, as we say now), that the little flame of an idea began to grow inside me, and as soon as the train approached the platform that day, I knew with sickening certainty what I was going to do.

I sat down at the opposite end of the car as Danny, who never met a hint he couldn’t fend violently off. He scooted down until he was next to me, and whistled at my hair.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he asked, with his characteristic pleasantness. I pretended not to hear him. Then, after he repeated my name a few times and waved a hand in my face, I made my move.

“Oh,” I said. “You must have me confused with my twin sister.”

For once, Danny seemed to acknowledge that I’d responded, although he didn’t look like he’d quite ingested it, so of course, I had to double down.

“I am an identical twin,” I said, trying to summon my actual, non-twin sister’s flair for the theater that put me in this wretched situation to begin with. “I can see how you’d be confused, but my name is Erin. My twin, Julieanne, takes this train too, but she has brown hair. I am a wholly different person.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I am not and was not a good actor. But I was desperate, and the idea that identical teenaged twins might have different haircuts but the same backpack and pair of Chuck Taylors that they’d drawn David Duchovny on seemed like what we in the TV industry call “refrigerator logic.” I couldn’t take another day of being badgered about whether, as a public school kid, I’d decided to pledge the Crips or Bloods yet, or if I knew that Hitler invented R&B. It was utterly unbelievable, except that this was a kid who believed that Mountain Dew made your sperm swim backward, so it was maybe worth a shot.

Regardless, it didn’t work. Danny’s face darkened. Somehow, after everything, I’d never actually just told him I didn’t want to talk. Yet here I was doing it now, in the most cowardly way possible. I could feel that I’d crossed some sort of crucial moral line -- he may have been obnoxious and intrusive, but I was a liar. And in a reversal that defied belief, HE took out something to read (not a book, no -- couldn’t be Danny -- but one of those period-specific magazines dedicated to calling women “hotties” and exalting the flavor of bacon that we used to hilariously believe represented the worst masculinity had on offer).

And with that, he proceeded to ignore me.

I should have felt free, but instead, I felt the full weight of his judgment, and more than that, the true spitefulness of what I’d done. Anybody could tell after looking at Daniel and his Aztec-printed fleece jester hat and male-fupa-enhancing school uniform pants and my burgundy nightmare haircut that we were more alike, socially, than I’d been willing to admit. And, as a person who’d gone through long periods of friendlessness, not counting the fictional FBI agents I spent my weekends with, shouldn’t I have been the first to offer him a bare minimum of civility? How terrible is it really, to talk to another person for a few minutes every day, even if they’re a little bit annoying? Wasn’t it Jimmy Carter, or somebody equally nice and morally superior, who said that the cost of community is inconvenience?

From then on, I felt the black heft of Danny’s coldness every day, until, at last, the school play ended and my older sister could drive me home once more. But every time I saw my old train stop or had trouble sleeping at night, I’d see the look on his apple-cheeked, still-boyish face, when I’d attempted to fool him in the dopiest way possible. Confusion, disgust, and perhaps worst of all, hurt.

Two years later, I went to prom as the date of a boy from another school. It was one of those group hangs where you were only nominally someone’s “date” -- my escort and I weren’t interested in each other romantically. In the intervening time, I’d adjusted to high school life somewhat. I’d also grown enormous breasts, gotten a more flattering haircut, and secured a tentative spot in a large friend group who preferred leaving the house to smoke weed in each other’s garages to ranking members of the writing staff of a spooky primetime soap on the FOX network, so I was now sometimes invited to things like prom.

I saw Danny almost instantly when we walked into the decorated gym. The little trap door keeping my stomach in place gave way. I hadn’t known what grade he was in, but this was a small school -- he had to know my date and our prom group. What would he say to them? Would he expose my essential badness to my new friends? I spent all of the seated dinner with sweat making dark donuts on the corset of my Jessica McClintock princess dress. Then it was time to dance, and I found myself nearly back to back on the floor with Danny.

He looked pretty much the same as he had the last time I’d seen him, except that he was wearing suspenders and a top hat, like Mr. Peanut, and one of those “fun” cummerbunds with a loud pattern of colors and shapes. He didn’t notice me at first, because he was busy doing the “worm,” but I couldn’t stand the tension, and decided I would be the first to say “hi.” So I did. Even if it was too little too late, the least I could do now was to be friendly.

Maybe he’d been drinking that night, or maybe it was the smoke machine and the dimness of the gym, but his face was a complete blank -- there was zero recognition in his eyes, and he just sort of nodded at me before he went back to dancing.

As he pop-locked enthusiastically away with some startled girl — probably regaling her with statistics about how many substitute teachers in the public school system have criminal records — I realized that while my dismissal of him might remain a shameful dark mark in my past, maybe I was the one who hadn’t ultimately registered to him. Maybe he was just the kind of person who talked to everybody, who simply chose goodwill over hostility when given the opportunity, even if the rest of the world didn’t reflect this neighborliness back to him.

I worried that I would always be one of those people who cannot naturally commune with others with pleasure and ease. I would never be the kind who just instinctively waves the other driver across the intersection even when it’s not their turn, who has a smile for every toll booth operator or grocery bag checker and fellow commuter, who makes lasting friendships with their seatmates on airplanes instead of pretending like the people around me are invisible in the name of protecting my own peace.

Or maybe he just genuinely didn’t recognize me — after all, I had just gotten bangs.

My husband and kids and I used to live on the border of one of these highsy-lowsy situations, and a lot of “solicitors” would mistakenly wander on to our side (the cheaper one) looking for rich people. They’d knock on our door, looking for the willing moneyed, to sign some petition against affordable housing, to secure a vote for some anti-affordable-housing candidate, or to find someone who reviled the poor to join their religion.

Most often, the people who knocked on our door were sales reps, the worst of whom were from solar panel companies. Of course, I get that everybody needs to work, and that it takes more grit than I have to do what they do -- work on commission, risk violent confrontation, wear polo shirts in the “true spring” color palette. But these particular fellows were rarely carried away on the gentle wind of a polite “No thank you.” They were — in a word that probably meant something very different to their supervisors — aggressive.

Two years into living in that neighborhood, I began to tell the “solar guys” who mashed the doorbell (over which I’d taped a “don’t, for the love of Christ, ring” sign) things like, “Gosh, I’d love to consider alternative energy. When I’m out of prison, where I’m going again because I can’t stop doing vehicular manslaughter when I’m mad. I’ll just take a brochure.”

Sometimes, if my younger son had been napping when they rang, I was not as nice. As long as we’ve been together, my husband has maintained what you’d call a robust spiritual practice. He reads a lot of books with titles like Radical Kindness and Letting Go of What You Can’t Control and How Buddhism Can Make You Less of a Classist Monster Even If It Can’t Help Your Bitch Wife. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived with a person who’s trying actively to better themselves, all the time, but it really keeps you from acting insane to strangers who mildly inconvenience you. I thought, “Okay, fine. Perhaps I could try to be kinder to these sales gentlemen who bang ceaselessly on the door the minute I enter in the shower.” That didn’t work, so I tried something else.

“This isn’t house isn’t even ours,” I started hissing to anyone who knocked, and this seemed to be the magic hiss. In fact, I recommend admitting that you aren’t a homeowner to anyone looking to get census takers, fringe mayoral candidates, and other people with clipboards off their stoop.

It also happened to be true — the house wasn’t ours. We were, and are, renters. Before leasing that place where I’d hung my home-made lunatic doorbell sign, we’d briefly owned a house, with a mortgage and frighteningly expensive fire insurance and all the delightful attendant problems of vile private proprietorship. It was on the smaller side, and yardless, so we sold it during the pandemic, thinking we’d rent a place big enough for the three kids to play and have outdoor space, and then eventually we’d buy something again when things “settled down.” But then, as you may have heard, they didn’t— the bottom fell out of the entertainment industry at the same time as real estate and rental prices in LA began to inconveniently skyrocket. We’re currently living in our third rental since 2020.

I don’t mind this. I moved a lot as a kid. There’s only one time I can really think of when home ownership felt like being granted passage to a special kingdom of achievement and adulthood: the time when my father, for a short time, owned his dream house.

When I was very young, a relative of my dad’s died and left him a small, surprise sum of money. This is the kind of exciting thing that usually only happens in YA novels or in limited television series with terrible wigs. Unfortunately, since it happened to my father, it will almost certainly never happen to me, as “good” unlikely plot points tend to skip a generation.

My parents, at the time, were a law student and a school teacher. Neither came from a family with an ounce of generational wealth, unless you count the 6 closets full of hoarded two-ply toilet paper that were violently apportioned between me and my ten cousins, when our grandmother passed in 2013. (Let me know when you’re ready for that riveting tale of one dynasty’s asset division, HBO.)

My father took the relatively petite windfall and set to work constructing a kind of ‘80s Dad Barbie Dream house. As I would hear him repeat as he chose finishes and finials, he preferred a “contemporary” look. In 1988, that meant teal cedar siding, pale wood cupboards blasted with halogen track lighting, and — from wall-to-mauve-painted-wall — nubbly carpet the salesman referred to as “prismatic berber.” My dad proudly showed my sister and me how the fibers glittered a raw-meat purple when the sun hit just right. It looked like the drywalled corner of heaven where Patrick Bateman might settle down with Paula Poundstone.

My dad loved it.

When I had friends over, I’d show off our amenities like a salesman in a showroom. Note please, the mini hibachi in the middle of the kitchen island, where my parents cooked all manner of period delights-- shrimp scampi, portobello mushroom burgers, pasta with a risque amount of fruit in it. My room had a built-in trundle bed, and there was a Jacuzzi in the primary suite (“Jacuzzi is a brand, remember. Anything else is just a hot tub.” - Dad).

Til then, our family had been renters, but I was too young to think about whether building this house meant we’d leapfrogged a social class or two. The line back then, when kids would ask parents if they were “rich” or “poor,” was always “We’re comfortable,” a nonsense deferral that could indicate either vast stockpiles of cash or mere days til a loan shark started taking toes.

The development where the house sat was all “middle-class” families, but there was a kind of blithe sense of temporary abundance in the air -- new people were always showing up, trucks full of big sheets of pink insulation were always arriving and excavators were always showing up to dig fresh muddy foundations. I first kissed a neighbor kid in the skeletal wood frame of a new home whose occupants I never ended up meeting. This boy’s stepdad was obsessed with the maintenance of their brand new home and yard-- their daily housekeeper was four feet tall and had rubber blocks on the pedals of her Camaro; she used to put out little pie pans full of beer to keep slugs from the roses, which made the whole neighborhood smell like flowers and warm booze on hot days.

When my parents split up, my mom and sister and I became renters again, in an apartment complex that was full of single parents. The mother and son nextdoor to us had a king-sized waterbed she’d taken in her divorce, which filled an entire room of their tiny, brown-carpeted apartment. Once, I stayed over with them, so my mom could clerk for a judge or work one of the jobs she took on in order to afford an attached 2-bedroom unit while paying for a graduate degree. Before bed, the neighbor-mom made Tombstone pizza and warned me in a whisper, “The waterbed makes Marc pee sometimes. Just wake me up when it happens.” From there, my mother and father each moved house two more times, when I was seven, eight, nine, and ten.

This year, my own family and I are moving yet again -- our lease is up, and we don’t want to commit to reupping for two more years. I don’t mind -- I’m used to hopping around, and it’s nice to have a real reason to be on Zillow at one AM instead of malingering there, like someone in the parking lot of a strip club.

If -- like my husband -- you think there’s a pathology to my moving this much in adulthood, you could be right. Perhaps I see where we live as a thing I can control when other parts of life are in disorder. He grew up in one house his parents owned, and would prefer the comfort and stability of a fixed family home. My youngest complains that he wants to live in a place where he has “memories.” (If you don’t have little kids, they’re always saying maudlin stuff like this. I blame the sundry cartoon dogs of Disney+.)

My kids ask me to avoid driving by places we’ve lived, but it doesn’t cause me the same pain. Even places we brought babies home from the hospital, or living rooms where I can still see the spots where we set up our Christmas tree. Maybe there’s something very mega wrong with me, or maybe I prefer the illusion of freedom that comes with knowing we can “pick up and go someplace.” My feeling is, home is wherever we are, and maybe it’s a place with a better stove, or a picture window, or a neighbor who didn’t accidentally see my butt that one time my sweatpants got caught on the recycling bin.

If I feel any longing, it’s for the greater ease with which people used to save up for a place or a city they liked, and just stay there, money or inventory being less of an obstacle. People my age speak of a time when buying a house in or near certain cities wasn’t “beyond reach,” although of course, there were plenty of people thirty years ago for whom it was never within reach. It does seem like there are more renters than ever where we live, and more people leaving altogether.

Not long ago, while messing around on Zillow one night, I decided to see how much houses cost in the part of Ohio where I was born, and saw that my Dad’s dream house was for sale. I clicked through the photo gallery, wondering if I would feel anything, if I’d associate that specific house with some emotion, like the feeling of an unexpected bonanza in a life with few surprises, or a more globally: a rare, sweet moment in time of real ductility for families trying to climb the ladder alongside their neighbors, who were busy digging their own dangeous pits and designing their own heinous cabinetry.

Unsurprisingly, the house looks dated and shopworn. The hibachi is still there, perhaps ready for some phantom Reaganite chef to blacken a swordfish on it, with a side of baby vegetables. The house has had a few owners over the years, and the newest price seemed absurdly high to me, especially given that one of the bathrooms was redesigned with a kind of faux southwestern, chili pepper motif. It’s not what I would choose, but, then again, it’s not my house.

One of these gone-forever things was my most popular post on a women’s website known for its sexual candor and intense personal essays. My contribution? A recipe for cabbage soup.

It was published there one long-ago January, during the drowsy stretch of post-holiday indolence when everyone is back on work computers, but still feeling a little logy from charcuterie and “oh just one” cigarettes. I wrote the post about a “cleansing” soup after a celebratory season in which I’d skeletized an entire seventeen-inch plastic Christmas tree made out of Ferrero Rocher chocolate candies (and washed it down with 800 bottles of Trader Jean’s Côtes du Rhône). I was twenty-eight, and pretty much the only thing I did well at the time was the soup.

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I chose to write to a local newspaper plant that produced a lot of smoke, causing me to suspect that it was polluting the local river. I can’t explain this choice, other than to point out that, like many people born in the greater Akron area, I was not much fun until I left the state and discovered stimulants and alcohol (at which point I became TOO fun, but, that’s another newsletter).

By the end of the school year, my fellow students began to receive their responses. When my more interesting classmates began to gleefully wave their glossy signed Ryne Sandberg and Barbara Bush headshots in the sweet spring air, I realized I might have made a tactical error, especially when my reply from the newspaper plant came. What I’d referred to in my scoldy note as “smoke” was actually steam, and the company’s splenetic spokesman invited me to visit their factory (in what now strikes me as a bit of a catty reply to a child), on the next date that the state EPA made their regular compliance visit.

As is my fashion, I took the absolute wrong lesson from this, and was delighted by the idea that you could compel a company or newspaper or late-1980s sort-of-luminary to reply to any Ohio nobody with a stamp, as if we were actual people.

Over the course of the next several years, I wrote to National Geographic, Highlights, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, TIME, Consumer Reports, People, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, and more. Sometimes I was ignored, but I usually got replies and even had my letters published a few times (look for my name in the front pages of Entertainment Weekly following their deeply unjust pan of “The X-Files” movie).

I mostly stopped doing this once I began working in journalism, out of some combination of job-grubbing and concern over ethical purity. As an adult, and sometimes writer and maker of Stuff myself, I’ve redirected my ire to swearing at AI chatbots on food delivery apps.

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There was not only zero chemistry between us then, but we also did not instantly “like” one another.

I often joke with him that we’re what would have happened if Emilio Estefez had gotten Ally Sheedy pregnant in an inadvisable sequel to “The Breakfast Club.” I was a one-time teen playwright and poetry magazine stalwart who favored that shade of box-dye black that turned your hair the color of the Old Navy logo. He played high school football, was on something called “prom court” (sp?), and thinks any problem — professional stagnation, Lyme Disease, seasonal depression, war — can be solved with goblet squats.

We are two people who — on paper — have very, very little in common, the least insurmountable of which is that I cannot do a goblet squat. (And do not want to.)

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Like all millennials with zero generational wealth, I am erotically obsessed with real estate. AJ, then my still-fairly newish boyfriend, was used to hearing me burble on about parquet floors and original tile and crown molding with the same enthusiasm and consideration for the interest of my audience as a four-year-old recounting the entire plot of “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”

I hadn’t really thought seriously about pulling the trigger on anything until one day, when I was doing my usual deluded fantasizing about home ownership, and saw the listing.

“Danzig’s house,” I gasped, like somebody waking from a dream in a stupid scary movie. “It’s for sale.”

And there was an open house scheduled for that week. An open house! At Glenn Danzig’s!

If you live in LA, you know the place I’m talking about: a morose grey pile on a block of Franklin Avenue near the House of Pies diner that looks like… well, like it belongs to Glenn Danzig.

If, for some reason, you don’t know who that is (hi, Mom! thanks for subscribing!): Glenn Danzig is the frontman of The Misfits, a pioneering horror punk band from the late seventies and early eighties. The Misfits’ short, poppy, catchy tunes cover such topics as drinking blood, killing babies, killing moms, raping moms, creatures raping your face, androids, and more. My personal favorite lyric? “An omelet of disease awaits your noontime meal.” I mean, Mary Oliver could never. Even if you don’t know Danzig’s music, you’ve probably seen the band’s inescapable Crimson Ghost logo, which has appeared on the bumper stickers of some of America’s ex-iest boyfriends.

Danzig himself is known for being what you might call “kind of an intense guy” — picture, if you will, a milk-white topless He-Man doll sporting mesh pants and Gal Gadot’s hair. I remember reading an old interview with him in Spin magazine where he said the R word maybe nine times and threatened to beat up the makers of Guitar Hero. Danzig never, ever wears a shirt, and definitely does not seem like he might get along with members of an HOA.

I’d lived in LA once before, in my very early 20s before leaving to pursue a writing career in New York, and I’d dated a musician who played Static Age on repeat and was determined to find a way to get inside the house — Danzig had reportedly stopped living there years earlier, and the property had been empty for years. My ex wondered how tough it might be to get a look inside and see if any of Glenn’s shit was still there, a plan I sensibly refused to entertain, because I had a bright future in online journalism to think about. I haven’t talked to that ex-boyfriend in years; we broke up and he almost immediately got married to a woman in a non-legally binding ceremony that involved a shaman pouring two different colors of sand into a big jar.

But now? It was my chance to do what my ex had threatened to do after too many Fireball shots at Ye Rustic Inn. But, like, legally, and in the presence of a licensed realtor.

If the idea of Glenn Danzig having a realtor is funny to you, let me just say: yes. The open house was on a Saturday in the summer of 2017; and the listing was near enough to our apartment that we could walk over with our baby son. He was just under two months old, the absolute perfect age to visit the abandoned home of an Italian-American satanist.

The property is surrounded by a wrought iron fence and an imposing gate studded with a sunburst of pointy-looking arrows. In the front dormer windows, the horizontal blinds have been broken on one side for years, giving it a crazed, pirate-y look. The foliage is overgrown, the shingles are sloughing off. That said, it’s in one of the nicest areas of Los Angeles, just down the street from restaurants where you might take your parents to maybe catch a glimpse of Matt Rogers eating a frisee salad. The property is expensive, and you can tell from the outside that not much has been touched. In short, there was potential for it to have potential.

I do not like new construction, or renovations of nearly any kind; those little rectangular backsplash tiles that have become synonymous with affordable real estate fill me with a kind of nameless dread. I think people who see “stainless steel appliances and granite countertops” as a positive should be sent to re-education camps run by septugenarian homosexual vintage furniture dealers. I would gladly vote outside my party for any gubernatorial candidate who ran on a platform of making it a crime to install grey hardwood flooring in the state of California, and I would rather breathe benzene directly from a bag than own an electric stove. Like Glenn Danzig, I have many strong opinions.

When we approached the front door of the house, a harried-looking realtor was having a harried-looking phone conversation. We were a little surprised (okay, extremely disappointed) to see that he was just a regular-looking broker guy and wasn’t wearing like, a hooded crushed velvet cape or winged eyeliner and warning us to turn back or he’d rape our faces with a diseased omelet.

Instead, he set a hand on our stroller. “You’re not going to want to take that inside.”

“The baby?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “The stroller. The wheels will get stuck. The carpet is very wet.”

“Why is the carpet wet?” asked AJ sensibly.

“We don’t know,” said the realtor, who then returned to his upsetting phone call for the duration of the time we were inside the house. Which was — let me tell you — twenty-ish minutes of pure mall goth euphoria.

Danzig’s place looks less like a home and more like a Universal Studios attraction. I would say it is so spooky and dilapidated as to seem art-directed, but that would indicate a level of care that could not apply to a structure where your feet sink into the floor, as though it were made of flan, on the other side of which was surely the mouth of hell.

Everything inside was black — black walls, black furniture. Black wires connected to nothing hung from the ceiling like party streamers. The carpet was very wet and very black. Every appliance in the bathroom was black and looked like it had never known the gentle touch of a cleaning cloth or toilet wand. On top of the (black) fridge in the kitchen was a single box of Count Chocula cereal.

We were too enraptured to take a single cell phone photograph, but I did carry our baby up the stairs so he could see out the famous front window. In that bedroom, or whatever it was, where I was finally able to the other side of the view that’s so indelible from outside the gates, I had an overwhelming urge to fix the blinds that had been hanging askew for at least a decade. But the idea of even gently pulling on the cord felt like taking a withered hand from the tomb of a mummy.

Outside the house, there was an enormous, overgrown yard filled with bricks and a back “recording studio” that the realtor warned us against getting too close to the structure lest it fall on us. We poked around then took one last spin around the house, our shoes squelching on the black carpet. When the sun shone through the broken blinds, I’m pretty sure you could see clusters of lead paint wafting in the kitty-litter scented air like snowflakes. AJ nodded solemnly and put a hand on my arm.

“I think we should buy it,” he said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed, blowing off a layer of chunky grey dust off that had settled on baby’s head during the walk-through.

A few more people had shown up, and the realtor had assumed the terrified air of a nervous kid whose house had been commandeered for a keg party by his bully older brother while their parents were out of town.

“Please don’t touch anything!” he yelled. “The owner is very … particular.”

The asking price hadn’t been posted in the listing, but, come on. How much could this place cost? Again, it was 2017, when mold and vaguely grave-shaped heaps in the backyard were still considered “barriers to entry” for most homebuyers.

“The owner is unwilling to make any concessions or repairs,” the realtor told me, as my then-boyfriend walked the baby over to examine a pile of broken wood with nails sticking out. I’ve heard some people won’t even take a baby on a plane at that age he was then. “Also,” added the realtor, “He’s not entertaining any offers under a million dollars.” We did not buy the house — I’m not sure anyone did. According to Zillow, it was last sold in 1989, for $275,002.

AJ and I got married a year or so after we saw that house— we’ve had two more kids. Our oldest son, now eight, has a favorite t-shirt with The Misfits’ logo on the front.

We eventually did buy an old house, but we sold it during the pandemic, and now we’re back to renting again. Like a lot of people who live in a major metropolis and work in media during what feel like its dark, Danzigian death throes, I don’t know when we’ll be in the position to buy again, if ever. The real estate market in Los Angeles exploded in the years after that open house, to the point where a million dollars for a heap of haunted mesothelioma near Little Dom’s seems like a pretty incredible deal. I don’t mind renting, although I still refuse to live anywhere built after 1940 that doesn’t look like it’s housed a small cult or seen at least one murder-suicide.

My husband and I drive by Danzig’s house all the time, and we still talk about the open house a lot, in a way that’s equally wistful for that time in the market as that time in our lives. We were just a new couple with a new baby, the future felt far away and anything seemed possible. I think about what we could have done with a little paint, a few industrial fans, some new window treatments… That room where you swear you can still see a skeletal hand separating the blinds to bedamn the passers-by from its unholy den could have been our bedroom. If I remember it right, it was definitely wide enough for a king bedframe. We could have made it work.

Listen, I’m not a complete idiot*. I mostly wanted to shift the burden of saying no to someone else. And, in my defense, when I was in elementary school, there were Saturday morning kids’ versions of “Rambo” (a movie that features a speech where a sobbing Vietnam vet with PTSD played by Sylvester Stallone vividly describes seeing one of his friends explode) and “Police Academy” (a movie where a cop getting his head stuck in a horse’s anus is one of the tamer events).

And, as many kids who grew up before the advent of that little noise your car will make until everybody has a seatbelt on, PG-13 was a relatively new invention, and a lot of our parents let us watch a lot of what they remembered vaguely liking when they saw it in 1978.

When I was a kid, I was treated to both ends of the content spectrum, because I participated in one of the great bygone seasonal traditions of the American 1990s: summer with dad.

If you did not have this experience, let me briefly describe for you the nature of Summer With Dad: usually, long days of being put outside in the heat with only a single popsicle for hydration (this was before we knew you were supposed to give children water), capped off by an afternoon of watching syndicated television or rented Blockbuster videos. Entertainment was often taken in front of some kind of foul bachelor dinner: hand-burnt steak, or leathery chicken nuggets and a foamy taupe brownie microwaved to a uniform goo in a plastic tray. There was lots of carryout pizza (90s dad LOVED a carryout pizza, a cost-saving measure that also allowed them dad to flirt with whoever was working behind the counter.)

After one or two wildly unsupervised summers where my sister and I were left to entertain ourselves with a variety of charming, retro threats to our lives (rickety hammocks, creek parasites, desolate bike paths that were like Amazon Prime for kidnappers), my dad remarried.

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