We rubbed our hands with anticipation— there’s so much to linger upon, to talk late into the night!

Becca fell ill on her travel day— this morning. “I think I got the flu from my son on his birthday.”

She feared infecting me— so we scrapped our rendezvous. We know the influenza, the mystery bug, could keep us imprisoned in bed for weeks. At our age, a so-called “cold” is a Trojan Horse.

Maybe the young feel such danger these days as well. We live in the new Dark Age of measles at the opera and hantavirus on a bird boat.

Woolf wrote an essay called “On Being Ill,” when she was 42. It was 1925, and she was recovering in bed. I’d like to share an excerpt of it with you today, with my special love for those of you, who at the moment, are in the middle of something rather nasty. I’m going to poetically refigure some of her phrasing, because it is so beautiful, you have to take a pause to drink it in.

Or, listen to my voiceover tape, above. Better than ASMR.

Feel Better. ;-) Your friends love you.

“Considering how common illness is,

How tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,

How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,

What wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view,

What precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals,

What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,

How we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads1

and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s armchair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth— rinse the mouth”

With the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us—

When we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it,

If becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache.

But no; with a few exceptions Thomas De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater;2 there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Marcel Proust3— literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind;

That the body is a sheet of plain glass

Through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colors or discolors, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February.

The creature within can only gaze through the pane— smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant;

It must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness

Until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul, it is said, escapes.

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe.

They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.

Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncoming of melancholia, are neglected.

Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.4

The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it— wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks.

It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair,

And wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health) with a new significance,

While the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health.5

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.

It has all grown one way.

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready-made for him.

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand,

And a lump of pure sound in the other, as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning6,

So to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

Probably it will be something laughable.

For who of English birth can take liberties with the language?

“To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow.

Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions;

Love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104 degrees;

Jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica;

Sleeplessness play the part of villain,

And the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste— that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

“But to return to the invalid . . .

“I am in bed with influenza”— but what does that convey of the great experience?

How the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields;

And friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads,

While the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea,

And he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—

The experience cannot be imparted

And, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas,

Their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Sympathy we cannot have.7 Wisest Fate says no.

If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise;

Roads would peter out into grassy tracks;

There would be an end of music and of painting;

One great sigh alone would rise to heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair.

As it is, there is always some little distraction

—An organ grinder at the corner of the hospital,

A shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse,

Some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering;

And thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.

Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures

—Women for the most part, in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness,

Who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions.

C.L.,8 for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades;

Or, A.R.,9 the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the days;

The frivolous K.T.,10 who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted (which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and her mimicry. 11

But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

About sympathy for example—

We can do without it.

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan,

of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another,

where however strange your experience other people have had it too,

where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you— is all an illusion.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.

Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way.

There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.

Here we go alone, and like it better so.

To always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood— would be intolerable.12

But in health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed— to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport.

In illness this make-believe ceases.

Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair,

we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another,

we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.

They march to battle.

We float with the sticks on the stream;

helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn,

irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years,

to look round, to look up— to look, for example, at the sky.”

P.S. — Our friend, beloved Ka’ala, has not been feeling so hot. Music is the only thing that always makes sense. His voice is as beautiful as ever.

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For all the squawking about Substack’s “thousands of writers,” or celebrity overkill, it’s hard to find beautiful consistent work. Here, or anywhere!

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than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

This post has been a long time coming.

Perhaps it will begin as a book review. It ends in the territory of a moral inventory. This chapter has come with a cost, and the meter . . . is still running.

This spring, a new historical survey was published, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins.

It’s called: “From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists.”

It contains reflections from, and interviews with, 24 former members of the IS, and 6 members of The Red Tide. (RT)

Some, like me, were in both groups.

You see, The Red Tide started out as a radical high school newspaper in Los Angeles, in 19701– all kinds of writers/activists, all teenagers. Some were Yippies, some were Marxists, lesbian separatists, Black Student Union founders, everything.

Then, as the War ended, a significant part of the RT joined/merged with the IS. “The Grown-Ups.”

That really is how I thought of them. A little suspicious, a little admiring.

I was 15 when I joined the Red Tide. I was instantly attracted to a group of very young smarty-pants who were talking about revolution and history and seizing state power. They were miles ahead of what was being talked about in my high school history class.

My first presentation to our Red Tide study group, written in longhand, was on “Dual Power” between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as described by Isaac Deutscher.

Following such study sessions, we picketed local liquor stores to support the UFW Boycott and get Gallo wine off the shelves of LA grocery stores. Company goons occasionally beat us up.

We excoriated our textbooks at our high schools and founded classes on US Black History. Women’s history. We turned a janitor’s closet into a birth control and abortion information center. We brought Jeanne Cordova from The Lesbian Tide to speak on campus, and Jane Fonda, fresh off the plane from Hanoi. We sued the school district for the first amendment rights of high school students and we won.

When the LAPD installed undercover narcs to pose as students “scoring grass” on our campus, we sparked a walk-out across five city public schools and turned over a cop car or two.

This was not easy. You must imagine a lot of pandemonium and frustration between the highlights. We were not being controlled by some parent-specter-groomer. It really was “just us.” I learned how to organize, i.e., talk to strangers, and I learned how to produce a newspaper, from scratch.

Eventually the Los Angeles Red Tide hooked up with another high school student group in the Bay Area, who shared our vibe and determination. (Described in Higgins’ book by Larry Bradshaw.) Some of us would eventually move to Detroit, Michigan, where high school students would greet me outside their campus, saying, “But why did you come here? Everyone here is trying to get to Cali!”

We started a RT chapter in Detroit, and we bonded hard, fighting for political prisoner Gary Tyler’s innocence, and doing citywide anti-apartheid teach-in’s.

The short story is, these friends/comrades I made during those years are my oldest and fiercest. We went through so much together — changing the world before our eyes. We saw what a small group of people could do. We also took our lumps from the state: in jail, targeted by police, labor bosses, the KKK, the Nazi Party, getting our asses kicked —feeling very isolated at times.

Then, there was an aftermath.

I have been an unaffiliated socialist since the I.S. expelled me in 1977. There was a lot of that, throwing people out in spasms of organizational ire. I wasn’t alone!

Still, what that word means in my heart—“socialist”— comes from the comrades I found when I was still in high school. My best friends.

I know you’re waiting for a BUT.

I am reluctant to give you my BUT. Let’s unspool this a little more.

My history is not in Andrew Higgins’ collection— I wrote a memoir about my years in the IS, long ago.1

I did consult with Andrew, and offered him my introductions, and editorial caveats. I gave notes to a couple of the contributors, like my friends Michael Letwin and Kim Anno. Their experiences are the most like mine.

Some of my favorite chapters are from my friends in Detroit— Kyle Hopkins, Tonya English, and Arnita Dobbins, who grew up in the city’s Black Power era at its zenith, when your stake in your political future, your family — everything seemed possible.

We were so lucky to meet each other that young, to trust each other a little. It was a huge leap.

I said the editor, “Andrew, I doubt you’d want my writing in this, because it’s too frank, sexually, for your purposes— and you know, a side of tragic.” —A little of the cautionary tale.

I am speaking from the uncomfortable-truth department, and it doesn’t make me look great, either.

Why has it taken so long for IS and RT folks to speak out? The adventures, triumphs, and heartbreaking twists of fate are remarkable. We did change the American politic.

I think . . . It’s because there is a lot of pain left in the wake of the IS splinter and demise. You could say the seeds of destruction were baked in, long ago.

The American Left, coming into the sixties, was devastated by McCarthyism fears, exile, sins of the father. That’s what the IS was born into, like all of the New Left during the Vietnam years.

American socialists in those days, were instructed by their mentors from Day 1, not to tell anyone anything, to keep our names secret, to remove traces of one’s past, to put everyone on a “need to know” basis. “Domestic matters” were not supposed to matter.

We never admitted problems or aired dirty laundry. How could we? The FBI had their sights on us. We were monitored by the COINTELPRO programs, we were infiltrated by creeps we only found out about, years later. Everything you’ve read about what happened when J. Edgar Hoover devastated the Panthers, we were well acquainted with. Smaller scale, same ugly impact.

We didn’t “win,” after all. No democratic socialism in my lifetime. So much for triumphalism and five-year plans, seven-year plans. Anyone from that era who’s still in politics now, has become zen-like. You burn through your attachments.

The more sensitive issues are the things we did to ourselves— those are the hardest to sleep on. The internecine battles between former loving comrades— the stuff of drama.

It has taken decades to open my mouth and say, “Okay. I’m ready to say what happened.”

One has to begin with the “good part.” Not to be an apologist, but to understand the stakes.

Higgins’ oral histories show how a cadre in the labor movement and community struggles held their spine and even slayed a couple dragons during the psychotically conservative Reagan years. It was a mouse that roared. We “did good” like Robin Hood.

If you’re young and curious about the organizing campaigns of contemporary socialists like AOC, or Mamdani, or how the rank and file trade union movement changed from a bunch of old Nixon-lapping fogeys to progressives of today— there’s a lot of the IS spirit in those movements. Foundational.

The Red Tide and the IS did create some moments intimate solidarity between “black and white” at a time of profound segregation; we physically resisted the Klan and the Nazi’s, the carceral system, the corrupt-cozy hell between union and company bosses.

On the theoretical side, the IS was on the money for two precedents.

They were the first socialist tendency to “Say No to Moscow AND Washington” — a Marxist group untethered to Capital-C communist oligarchies in USSR, China, and Cuba.

At the time, in the 60s and 70s, such a position was WILD. There were so many American lefty illusions about Mao, Fidel, and the rest.

We never had to go on apology tour.

The other tradition that came out of the IS in particular, was systematic, from-the bottom-up community, street by street, shop by shop, organizing. It owes much in debt to Farrell Dobbs and the earliest American socialist days, long before Bolsheviks. When you see how Minneapolis resisted ICE, you are seeing some of that legacy.

So too, as you observe campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, or the Black Panthers in the early days, you are looking at a particular kind of shoe leather that gets worn out organizing on the ground.

You identify grassroots charisma, form common cause, and keep pushing from below.

It’s the opposite of investing in magical leaders and political hubris. The hours involved are endless. It sounds noble, but it’s strategic. You want to be able to withstand being picked off.

Because you will get picked off.

So why did it all end? What broke up the band?

You don’t learn that answer from Higgins’ book— or rather, it’s obscure. You hear fragments.

I was startled reading some of my old friends’ accounts of “why we broke up” — like a divorce where you’re the stunned kid who never understood what the hell was going on.

There is a spoken reason for this disconnect, and an unspoken one.

The stated fatal argument was, “Whither American Labor?” How were we supposed to navigate the Reagan years when unions were being eviserated? —Or as one comrade put it, “death by a thousand cuts.”

The IS had, let’s be frank, shocking success building a rank and file movement in the Teamsters that ended up toppling the old-boy leadership, and prompted the first national general strike among over-the-road drivers. We could hardly believe it when we found we had a tiger by the tail. The timing was right.

I was in the middle of the earliest days of TDU, when it was just a handful of us in a room, running the mimeograph machine. I typed and edited the founding documents. I drove cross-country organizing in truck stops, driver by driver. Loading dock by loading dock. Having guns drawn on me by opposing sides, staying up late at night strategizing, planning a next day. Crafting the kind of union we wanted. The membership swelled to thousands. People were READY.

So— one thing happening in the freight industry at the time, was that United Parcel Service, UPS, was coming into its ascendancy. They would change the business entirely, but we didn’t know that yet. UPS hired a lot of young people, Gen-X’ers. They changed protocols. They had their own language. They hired women. (Women who would become extraordinary union leaders, to their dismay).

Yeah, and you didn’t have to be white to be hired, either. Ha! This was really different for the trucking industry, and for the Teamsters Union.

UPS was not benevolent— they exploited the generation gap and race and gender gap, which they’ve continued to this day.

In TDU, and consequently the IS, there was an argument about whether we needed to emphasize the older veterans of the union, the gray-hairs, so to speak, versus the younger generation coming in. Women rising up. It was not a polite set of differences.

As an example, 1976, I was arrested on a UPS picket line with my comrades in Detroit, roughed up and thrown in a cell. I was 17.

When I got my one phone call from jail, I called not my family, but the IS national office. Older comrade Mike Parker answered the phone, and when I told him where I was— Can you get someone to bail me out? — he lost his temper.

“Sue, you’ve been told a hundred times. UPS is not a priority.”

And then he hung up on me.

And that’s what you call a difference of opinion.

This happened all over the Left, not just the IS. Members never talked about our own class origins and differences inside our groups, but it was tense. I didn’t like being lectured by people from backgrounds different from my own about what “a real worker” was.

There were purity tests. The Right Kind of Worker. The Right Kind of Internationalist. The Right Kind of Ally.

One afternoon, years later, I talked to Elaine Brown from the Black Panthers about the same bullshit in her era, (“The Right Kind of Black” category—you can imagine) and we started crying with laughter. Catharsis.

In retrospect, it was the internal power struggles of the over-matched, and it’s been repeated a million times. Crabs in a bucket.

So yes, there were disagreements about the group’s approach to labor, or how to live through a rather reactionary period where it was clear the Left and Labor were on the defensive. You would think we could overcome the differences, small as we were.

But no.

The fatal ingredient, was our lack of self-examination. The abuse of corrupt leadership. It was rotten. The dick-swinging made self-examination impossible.

So let’s rip off the bandaid. What finally broke up the IS tendency in the 21st century, both in the U.S. and the U.K memberships, was a cascade of events prompted by “a charismatic man”— reckless, narcissistic, drunk, and indulged— who sexually assaulted a comrade, a woman. More than one. More than once.

A consistent pattern, as they say.

And, instead of nipping the perp’s bullshit in the bud, and packing his bags, leaders close to the scoundrel closed ranks, made excuses, covered it up. They disparaged the complaining women.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Google your heart out.

The final dissolution happened around 2019, forty-two years after I was expelled. The trust was broken.

Toxic characters like these men have shambled their way through social movements for as long as we can remember. What different now is that finally, finally, a group of women and men said, ENOUGH.

I can’t believe the Chavez exposé has come right in time for this moment. Because it is endemic.

The IS was one domino in the history of organizations who preached one thing, and did another at their peril. There we were, ardent feminists, openly gay members in the 70s, people devoted to unmasking and repudiating racism wherever it raised its head.

And Yet.

By sweeping the ugly under the rug, you end up with a monster under the bed.

I was one of the young sweepers, the excusers, the insecure, the dupes, the exploited — until I wasn’t. I remember thinking that it was kind of weird I was asked to bed the National Secretary when he came to Los Angeles, like it was an assignment. He needs a young woman in every port! I thought he was an asshole. He was cruel. Was he supposed to be some kind of genius in spite of it?

Well, that turned out not to be true. He was not a genius; he was a con artist.

By the time I was 18 in Detroit in 1976, I’d surmised that if you were in our group and didn’t have a powerful “husband/protector,” then the only other avenue was to become an Iron Nun. There was nothing in between.

But there were bigger fish to fry, right? Weren’t we aiming for revolution? Why would I want to complain over a personal hassle, a pathetic misogynist stunt? I pushed it out of my mind and went to a lesbianfeminist CR meeting. Then organize another demo. Then print the next issue of our paper. Stay up all night until everything was done. There was more to do. I couldn’t synthesize the contradictions, only the imperatives that lay in front of us.

Marx was read, Lenin studied, but honestly, Freud and Shulamith Firestone could have offered some insights.

We did not discuss members’ mental health when it was failing. We looked past outrageous drug and alcohol problems, ones that probably mirrored those of our own parents.

We tolerated and esteemed and excused men in leadership who were beating their lovers. And their wives who excused it. —Violent drunken pricks who were supposed to be in charge.

Or we didn’t. I slapped one of those bastards in the face at a meeting and you can guess which of us got in trouble.

It was disgraceful. Blood was spilled, literally. And the chickens came home to roost.

How does one answer collective PTSD? It was never addressed, not even remotely.

I am haunted by all the things that “didn’t happen.”

This is one story.

One time after the Red Tide had organized a high school teach-in about South African apartheid, an inspiring day, I invited everyone over to my flat I shared with an older (27!) comrade who was at work. I would make spaghetti for everyone.

We were so tired that instead of spinning records, dancing, and carrying on, everyone was lying on the sofas waiting to eat. There were about 20 of us, including some ninth graders from Chicago who told their parents they were at a YMCA conference.

Then came the knock, or rather a series of hard blows on the door and everyone knew it wasn’t friendly. I cracked open the door and it was five of Detroit’s finest, batons at the ready while I sputtered out, “Don’t you need a search warrant? “—The lead thug pushed his way in, twisted my arm around in a half Nelson, and drew his gun to my temple.

They had that look the ICE agents have today. —Where they are both furious and embarrassed with themselves, which was only gonna be taken out on us. One of them claimed we were harboring a kidnapped officer, which was ridiculous. I got the impression a racist neighbor had tattled on us and reported a house full of black and white young people no doubt having an orgy.

They pushed me gun-first through the house, threatening everyone with the same fate. One of the older RT’er in the room made oinking noises, goading the cops on, which only made things worse.

Yeah, he turned out to be one of my comrade wife-beaters and pimps. Good times.

I really don’t know why the thug team gave up, but a headquarters message was crackling in the ears of the cop’s walkie-talkies, and the chief pig dropped my arm, spinning me, and threw me to the floor— You’re evicted; get out.

All I could think about was those little girls from Chicago scared shitless. And the look I imagined on my roommate’s face when she came home and saw the mess they made. Losing her apartment because of me.

Everyone fled like rabbits; it seemed like in one minute the cops were gone and everyone else disappeared— I was standing alone with a bunch of congealed pasta.

The silence I remember in that moment was a ringing in my ears. I didn’t sit. I remember, staring out the window as if waiting for the next shatter.

It came, with the arrival of two men from the IS leadership, Joel and Eric. One of them had been my lover the year before. Now disavowed.

The two men stepped in the open door— it had been broken. They surveyed the dismal scene.

Joel said, “Is this it? “ And then, “Well, clean it up.”

And that was it.

So many times, this scenario. This is on you. Toughen up. Say Nothing. Familiar messages in my family of origin, too.

As the decades went by, I began to wonder if anyone remembered what I did.

And then, five years ago, I went back to Detroit for a Red Tide reunion, and I saw Billy, now 60-something like me, one of the locals who’d been in Highland Park that day. I hadn’t seen him since we were 17.

We were drinking Vernor’s sodas and hanging around the grill outside at Tonya’s. Perfect summer day. Billy came running up to me with his wife who I’d never met, and he just folded me into his arms and kept exclaiming to his missus, “It’s Sue, it Sue, they held a gun to her head. She’s the one I told you, they held a gun to her head.”

What happened to those who left or drifted away from the IS? The paths are quite various. The folks you’ll see Higgins’ edition are people like myself who remained in the political life. Some are venerated in the Labor Movement. I’m friends with some. A few to confide to. Others, a respect for that fact we’re still here.

A lot of us had families and raised children and grandchildren and adopted children. We made neighborhood communities. We worked and worked and worked at all the jobs America offers. Making things. Taking care of people.

Quite a number of us became artists, that’s interesting to me.

I have comrades and ex’es who became inventors, and leaders in the beginning of the tech revolution.

I have others who joined Eastern-inspired religious groups, or became rabbis. Sects that made the IS look like a casual drop-in club.

And other comrades, because we were adept at publishing our own house organs, we got involved in journalism, book and media publishing.

When you were in the IS, you had to know how to write copy, capture the photo, lay it out, print it, and then market the hell out of it. We called that last part, “agitprop.” I have never had a better training ground, although ironically, no one at the time ever said, “Huh, you’re good at this.”

I thought we all had to be good at it. I thought you had to be able to debate the world and win.

So back to my book review — if you’re a critic/student of American history and politics, yeah, you will be curious to read it. The quality of the writing is all over the map, but the good chapters are really good, and you’ll learn things you’d never find anywhere else. Think of it as a primary document, the beginning of a trail.

Does it have major holes? Yes. I think we’re at the beginning of the “Can-we-talk-about-what-really-happened” phase. It’s ironic that it comes at the end of the founders’ generation.

So many young people are saying today, “Enough of you, and your excuses. We’ve run out of time.”

I can’t help but agree with them. I wish I had been that ferocious at the time. I thought I was. I thought I was.

The offending driver jumped out, already crying, tears streaming down his young face, saying he was to be shipped to the Strait of Hormuz the next day; he’d enlisted because “I’ve fucked up my entire life” and he couldn’t take wrecking his parents’ car on top of everything else. “PLEASE GOD PLEASE DON’T TELL THEM.”

We started crying too because who doesn’t need a good cry at this point.

Don’t tell my mother, don’t tell my father; they’re buried here, right by my side.

Our car went to the body shop, but we shouldn’t have bothered. A body shouldn’t have been bothered.

We shouldn’t have bothered because the insurance man said we’d still have to pay $10,000.

“Well, that might as well be a million,” I said.

Well. I will not sully my poetry with Allstate’s rhetoric. As JD Vance says, the Insurance Man should be careful before he talks about matters of theology. Theirs is the language of Pilate. No matter how many times they wash their hands, the blood does not come off. “Whether it’s home, health, or auto.”

During my time without a car, I am walking around the neighborhood. My favorite fashion poet, Derek Guy, calls this experience a fast-disappearing luxury— the ability to walk around a neighborhood, where on foot you can find groceries, tacos, or cigarillos. Yes, I live walking distance from a place called CIGARS R US.

My town, Santa Cruz, is a city of 100,000– give or take a few thousand as the students ebb and flow. The summer tourists swell it to a million on the beach. It has Victorians and urban alleys and suburban blahs and wide rural fields— a mix of all things, sometimes on the same mile.

My favorite pretty blocks are closely-nested single family homes built between the two first world wars. The houses are small, and some claim the sidewalk. They are grown over with roses at the moment. Everything grows in our temperate climate. The desert plants and the artichokes, the crabgrass lawns, the fir trees and the magnolias.

On foot, I walk and walk each morning, but don’t call it fresh air and exercise. I think of my life on my feet as “street photography.” A flaneur, gently spying in the gardens and gutters. I will lie down in a muddy alley to get my shot of a towering palm sheltering owls, morning doves, and probably, rats.

I talk to people who come in and out of their cars and front porches.

One woman this morning, Judy, told me her home was built by a sea captain in 1900. “The Ghost and Mrs Muir!” I said. Her front steps were built with abalone shells pressed into the cement.

“That’s right,” she said.

“I get lots of Facebook messages,” I said, “from men who say they are lonely sea captains with full heads of silver hair and rippling tattoos of mermaids on their arms and shoulders.”

“I know;” Judy said, “me too.”

We wished they were real and would make us a drink.

I lived half my childhood around Los Angeles. The red bottle brush plant is planted all over Los Angeles, their beds flourishing the endless freeways. The plant used to fill me with dread in those years, like I was trapped forever, Catholic school punishments, the sprawling red and green hedges in the 60s thick smog that said nothing to eight-year-old me except “You are lonely and that’s the way it’s always going to be.” Their fallen bloody stringy flowers were a carpet on every sidewalk.

But now I’m grown up and the same red Callistemon in Santa Cruz looks quite innocent. The chucked mattress in the street cracks me up. I feel like calling up Zorhan Mamdani and asking for his advice.

The truth is, in Santa Cruz, we don’t have “311” like New York City, yet you still call up our mayor— they are required to answer the phone, they take shifts— and ask, where do I get rid of this street mattress and the mayor says, “Oh THAT again” and you laugh together because who is this busy mattress marauder?

The best thing I ate on my walk today was lychee fruit. They are yellow and ripe on the tree. You split the gold fruit open, but don’t eat the alkaline skin— suck out the juicy pulp inside; it’s so sweet. You can say to yourself, “Close our eyes and we are in Hawaii.”

We grow many tropicals in Santa Cruz. Fragrant ginger grows easily. Tall banana trees don’t properly fruit. It’s not hot or rainy enough. But there are lots of avocados and avocados are so expensive now that when my avocado tree bears fruit this summer I am going to sell $5 dollar avocados on the sidewalk and it will be a retirement plan like no other. Maybe $10,000 each, we shall see.

I have a new method to make neighbor friends. I admire their broken-down vintage cars stuck for years in the weeds, or tagged on the street.

—Take a gorgeous dark green Mercedes Benz for example, or the GMC El Camino. What year? I don’t know. The kind of years I like.

I wrote a note in my own handwriting — “I love your car. I don’t suppose you want to give it to me? I could spend all year fixing it with my shade-tree mechanic and then we could go for rides.”

Oh boy, did they respond.

They will never give that car up; they have plans. They’ve had plans for 40 years. They love to be flattered, the gearheads, and we sit down and smoke and juice a few oranges that are rolling around in the driveway and before you know it, I know who they’re voting for, in the next election.

I tell them, I can’t afford ten thousand for a new bumper/rear/whatever it is that’s broken, and they say FUCK ‘EM; CALL LUIGI!

I can’t get over that everyone wishes they had their own personal St. Luigi of Vengeance.

There is a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo on television right now, PBS. A French and Italian production. Remember, as I said, Hollywood, c’est fini.

If you know the story well, I suggest skipping to episode 2 of this version; the pace picks up.

Our hero Edmond Dantés is locked up to die in the Château d’If, a fate worse than death except that he meets his one other brother in this forsaken hell, the Abbé Faria, played by Jeremy Irons, who anchors the script.

The two men talk late into the night, all the knowledge of the world from the master to his protegée. They begin to dig out. The Abbé tragically dies before their final day, and he leaves Dantés a map to a 300-year-old cave of treasures: gold and rubies and diamonds.

I love the treasure scene. I could linger there. Treasure used to be a thing of beauty: jewels, carved coins and stones made by artists, even engraved parchment instead of . . . cryptocurrency.

This PBS Count of Monte Cristo is a low-key TV hit. I believe, I do believe, it is because Alexandre Dumas wrote a tale of justified and sweeping revenge.

Dantés’ life was destroyed by the corrupt and the profane, and he, in time, destroys his enemies with as much cruelty as is required.

The Abbé warns Edmond before he dies, he says, “Mon fils, if you want revenge, you must dig your own grave first.”

And we, the reader, who empathize with Edmond after his fifteen years going mad in solitary confinement, we say, “Yeah, yeah, fine. Hand me a shovel, et allons-y, motherfucker.” Our mercies were destroyed long ago.

Our impatience is because of our thirst for justice, at the price of abject loneliness.

I thirst for the same.

Yet.

I also want to eat gold fruit that falls to the ground, and lie on a dirty trampoline that someone left in the street, staring at the sky, eating lychees and spitting out the seeds with some guy who isn’t going to give me his Mercedes Benz. Not today. But what a pal. What a pal.

In Case You Missed It

Today, we find out, Trump’s Pentagon thugs threatened Pope Leo— yes, the Pope— with a murderous analogy to the 14th century Avignon Papacy.

Um.

“What is The Avignon Papacy?”

Here’s the short version: in the 1300s, the Vatican’s Roman Pope was kidnapped by French King Philip, and beaten and left to die in prison while a series of “new popes” were installed by the French Monarch.

It didn’t turn out very well, but you get the drift!

Here’s the scoop that just got unearthed by The Free Press and Letters from Leo:

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You self-published an e-book and want to promote it. How?

OR

You had an existing paperback, or hardcover, or audiobook, and now you finally have your ebook ready. How do you tell all your old readers? —and the new fans who might like it?

OR

You’re standing in the street screaming, “What the fuck is the difference between Kindle vs. Amazon vs. an Ebook vs LOSING MY MIND?”

. . . And, some of you wonder if it’s too late to promote an e-book, because you should have done it so long ago, it’s a disgrace and how are you suppose to rise like a phoenix at this late date.

Yes, I can help you, too.

Watch the video, and add any questions you have, in the comments! I will reply to all.

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McCarthy’s Blacklist, who can forget? Women in fear of losing their kids. Gay writers with good reason to know they could be prosecuted. People who smuggled their work out of the country with their lives on the line.

“But that’s not me!” you may say. Your apprehension may be closer to home.

Your family members— your parents or children— might not be pleased with the “unexpurgated you.” Do you really have to wait ‘til everyone dies before you can write your opinion, your observations?

Finally— a group I hear from a lot: academics and scholars, who see their university &/or government watching them like hawks to pounce if they so much as comment negatively about the weather. “Alw…

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I thought we might as well kill some time, before we kill anyone else.

Because the killing hasn’t stopped, whatever the poison.

Sometimes speeches fail me and I’d rather sing, or listen. I put together some songs for us to share, and you’re welcome to lend me yours.

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• The White House Didn’t Listen to Machiavelli: “Wars Begin When You Will, But They Do Not End When You Please.”

I have a couple tips for how to circumvent the rather-flailing American press. Persian strategy vs. Clown Car Continuum.

• For my birthday month, I went from “Cancer Sufferer” to “Cancer Survivor” in 2 weeks, thanks to an early-detection surgery. It’s my first existential procedure!

• How do you exhibit conflict-art in places where politeness is valued and aesthetic experience is sheltered? I got my eyes opened throwing my first “War At Home” show.

• “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the AI Juggernaut.” —If it hasn’t succeeded in porn, it can’t make it anywhere. No proof of concept. Let’s talk . .

Some Photos from the Sweeter Side of my Birthday Week.

Thank you for the flowers and the affection!

If you meant to bring me an ice cream or a pearl necklace for my birthday/cancer recovery/show debut— it’s not too late!

If you’d like purchase a small subscription to my blog, it would mean the world to me.

It’s cheaper than food, gas, or helium! - Susie

In Case You Missed It

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Good evening everyone, to the March 14 edition of Sage Lee’s “Storytime.”

My name is Susie Bright, and Sage asked me to guest-host for him while he and Ed are traveling overseas. I want to do him proud!

This is a dream come true, to continue Sage’s weekly poetry reads that have been our tradition for years.

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(See occasion details at end of today’s story).

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Do you realize what a hit this is?—10.6 million viewers per episode! That’s a lotta ice. I proceeded to read all the hot takes, of which Alexander Chee’s might be a classic.

For me, the show is a hot tub time machine. Make that two hot tubs, actually. I’m having deja vu from two different centuries.

Number 1

In the early 2000s, I was an editor at Audible who suggested we bring in independent romances, something different from Harlequin. The romances on audio at the time were tame, very “Forever Amber.”1

At the time, the “Reigning Hunk” of the Romance genre was the Navy S.E.A.L, à la Top Gun. This broody leading man had replaced the “Fabio Swarthy Bodice Ripper” fantasy years previously. Movies like An Officer and a Gentlemen kept the Navy hero going. I thought we’d never see an end to the military cosplay.

Then, one day in 2014, I got a comic manuscript from an author named Helena Hunting, about a libertine tomboy from a hardcore hockey family who hooks up with her stepbrother’s bad-boy team captain— an NHL team. Yes, she was Pucked— all the way down.

“This is going to be a bestseller,” I said. Her series made her a fortune.

BOOM— in one year, Navy S.E.A.L. was old socks, and it was hockey bad boy, center stage. We’re not even near the end of it.

In the same era, Romance fans were demanding, and producing, male/male storylines, or “fan fiction”— it dominated the indie ebook circuit. Mainstream publishers were bewildered until the money became undeniable. Whatever happened to Cathy and Heathcliff? What were straight women thinking?

I had a hunch . . . straight girls were thinking the same thing dykes had been thinking for awhile.

Number 2

In 1989, the topic of women voyeurizing gay men first came to my desk.

37 years ago, I was editing a lesbian magazine, On Our Backs, and it was the heyday of “video rentals”— ha!

Women, for the first time, were checking out porn tapes. Why not? You could sit privately at home and laugh, or grab your vibrator, or wonder what all the fuss was about.

Women had never talked, as a group, about what kind of sex movies they liked before. We had endured trite sociology like, “Women don’t like to look at sex, it’s too bracing for them.” Or, the classic, “Women aren’t visual.” They really said that.

It all came back to the chestnut that women didn’t have sexual appetites, period.

OOB began our erotica beat by reviewing the nascent lesbian-made erotic video scene. —Not the fake girl-girl stuff that came out of Hollywood and Times Square.

Then came a surprise: a small but ready stream of readers confided to us, that they enjoyed gay men’s porn.

Some dykes told us they liked it better than any other kind of erotica, while others remarked that it was something they got an occasional kick, or enlightenment, from.

I wanted to interview them further. I put out the word that On Our Backs was looking for lesbian’s detailed experiences with gay pornography. The answers I got were some of the most candid sex histories I’ve ever read.

1. What kind of gay porn/erotica do you like?

2. What’s one gay fantasy that gets you off?

3. Who do you identify with, when you fantasize about men together? The top, the bottom, the watcher?

4. How does a lesbian perceive gay porn differently than the intended audience?

5. If someone asked you, “How can you fantasize about men and not be straight?” —What would you say?

You’ll read their answers below, along with Honey Lee Cottrell’s 1970s and 80s, photographs of gay men in our erotic milieu.

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“We are up against an ideology that has given up— not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world - on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species.

“The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, 2/28/26

On this afternoon’s podcast, Susie and Jon discuss US/Israel Strike on Tehran, and the Ensuing DeEvolution of WWE. World War Epstein, ammiright?

What say you? Some references are below, and I’d love to add yours.

What We’re Reading

‘W.W.FU,” as I’ve dubbed it, isn’t about regime change, it isn’t about an Axis of Evil, or “terrorism” — This is a monstrous act for redrawing the world map, and a massive market manipulation. - SB

Sarah Kendzior, Always

“I’ve said since 2017 that Kushner is my litmus test of whether the US is an entrenched mafia state, and we keep failing. He is not an official member of the US government, but we are not really ruled by the US government: we are ruled by a shadow government, and he is a reigning member.”

Shanaka Anslem Perera

I stumbled upon this market risk analyst the morning of the strike. I haven’t anyone else presenting and synthesizing military intelligence, shipping and air global events, and economic triggers — like Perera does. EYEOPENING.

It’s a little hard to follow because he makes ample use of acronyms, but I have my dictionary at the ready, and it’s worth it. And the fact that he actually names all the players, the multitude of countries, the languages involved— gives Americans a far more accurate picture of all that’s at stake.

Perera seems to be awake all hours . . . driven. I believe he’s Sri Lanken originally, based in Australia. He discusses the changing scene like a “market guy”— risk analysis for insurance, that sort of thing. My philosophical stakes in the world are not in the market. I bought his one book to figure out where he was coming from, and when I saw he listed Rebecca Solnit in his bibliography, I decided, okay, I’m game.

When You’ve Lost Erik Prince:

Jonathan Larsen

Larsen’s morning-after is the Swiftian-noir S.O.B. you need to read at times like this.His run down will set your oars straight. Big picture, people.

Johan

Keep your eye on this man’s column.

Johan (pseudonym, naturally) is retired a US Foreign Service diplomat, and offers a well-written primer to open up the discussion. He is one of the dying breed of those who champion diplomacy and democracy. As he calls it: “19th century imperialism with 21st century weapons.”

Lucian Truscutt:

“He opened his mouth and lies came out and bombs fell and people started dying”

And, It’s One Two Three, What Are We Fighting For?

Al Jazeera: What the Fuck is a Hexagon?

Netanyahu’s ‘hexagon’ alliance: Analysts call Bibi’s pitch a ‘fantasy world.‘

TMZ, of all pleces with the four-drunks-in-a-bar gossip ahead of the attack:

“I’m moving all of my gold out of Tehran…”

Max Kennerly on the WSJ story, “But We’re Almost Out of Bombs!”

Love how we spend >$850 billion annually on defense so that we can have a week’s worth of relevant munitions.

Bloomberg

“As US and Israeli bombs fell on Iran this weekend, bettors on Polymarket — where $529 million was traded on contracts tied to the timing of the strikes — were cashing in . . .”

Josh Gondelman: American innovation" now refers to making a kind of atrocity cronut by combining insider trading with war crimes.

You Can Take the Word “Courage” Out of Your Mouth

Death Toll Hits 148 - Israeli Strike, Iran Girls’ Elementary School

Not one British paper covered the Girls’ School Murders, a UK friend reported. Al-Jazeera is probably your best bet for on the ground coverage at the moment. I’m also reading Le Monde and the Guardian.

Tim Mak, just started an Iran War Dispatch. I’d keep Mak on speed dial. You know him from his Kiev, Ukraine reporting— was once an investigative correspondent for NPR, and a former U.S. Army combat medic.

And Your Additions? . . .

In Case You Missed It

I was a friend of Hunter’s, for two reasons. We were both fucked over by our publisher, Simon and Schuster — haha. Not unusual in the publishing world. Hunter’s first call to me on that occasion, “I will not be their Judas Goat.”

Secondly, we knew each other because he was the “Night Manager” of the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, when I was one of the lesbians in the dancer locker room. Hunter managed nothing, but he played pool and was quite the charming Kentucky gentlemen

As the decades went on, we corresponded in his typical witches’ dawn phone calls. I always, ALWAYS appreciated our talks about our children. He loved his son Juan so dearly. An extraordinary life story.

Hunter and I talked, more than once, about elective suicide. The pain he was in, the lack of mobility. I told him about legends in my life, like Sally Binford, who chose checking out..

I knew it was coming, like everyone close to him.

I hope you’ll understand, listening to this conversation with Juan . His memoir, Stories I Tell Myself, is beautiful.

In Case You Missed It

I was an early adopter of audiobooks as an author, before they were digital and it was rather laborious to produce and listen to them!

Then, as you’ll see me describe below, a fellow reporter friend of mine from Rolling Stone, invited me to be part of the first digital audio company. What a ride. I’ve recorded thousands of titles since then, and advised many friends and students— so much history in my head.

Today, I’ll share my notes and two videos with you. I talk a lot about the financial and practical aspects— that’s what I mostly get asked about. For me, it’s an artistic movement first, and that will never change.

Shall we?

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I am reduced to endurance … I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity, always bewildered, never discouraged. I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance, assured by an inner balancing pin.

But WHAT is my balancing pin? The force of love?

…Such is life, falling over seven times and getting up eight.

—Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

I was fortunate in the depths of my greatest erotic humiliation, (some years ago), to seek solace in a cavernous bookstore. I spied a book, spine out, with a price sticker that said: “Lover’s Disco, $9.99.”

I snorted, and pulled the book out of its hidey-hole. The real title was Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, the greatest book ever written on love’s labors, and love lost.

I muttered whole chapters of “Lover’s Disco” to myself like prayers, my heartbreak bringing me to my knees.

I barely made it out alive and Barthes gets all the credit.

In homage to Barthes, I composed a musical meditation for the stages of love, from infatuation to contempt— and finally, to picking yourself up.

Stage 1:

Infatuation

“I Only Have Eyes for You,” The Flamingos

Someone scooped the starstruck right out of the sky and placed it in the cradle of these opening notes. Cupid’s arrow goes right through you. When my heart beats hard at the sight of my beloved, it’s these piano notes that spin. This is what true love is supposed to feel like.

Stage 2:

Declaration

“Not Fade Away,” Trout Fishing in America

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be . . .

Pheromones don’t lie. We are destined to twine like a lover’s knot; we’re going to go splat in the middle of the night. We might fight and pout, but nothing can come between us. This. Is. Certainty. Now pass the bottle.

Stage 3:

Delirium

“Crosseyed and Painless,” Talking Heads

I feel like an accident.

People speak of orgasm as la petite mort, but that’s too easy. Falling in love, by comparison, is like a car wreck in which you never lose consciousness.

We vamped, didn’t we?

Stage 4:

So Fine

“You Make My Day Pretty,” Sweet Honey in the Rock

I love the part where I wake up in the morning, and turn to see that adorable face on the pillow next to me. Everything about my beloved is . . . perfect. It doesn’t matter what happens today, or tomorrow, or any day. A joy fills my heart, and this time it’s content.

Stage 5:

Do I Need To Remind You?

“Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” John Doe

I’ve given my all to you. People look at us and say you’re the luckiest bastard alive.

One morning I looked over at your pillow and you weren’t there.

Stage 6:

Suspicion

“Who Is He and What Is He To You?”, Me’Shell Ndegeocello

I remember the night I couldn’t sleep, and there were no more “sleeping aids” in the cupboard.

I drove over to her house on Jones St. in the middle of the night and pounded on the door. She came out in the foyer in a white nightgown, you behind her. You looked like you planned it.

Stage 7:

Do-Over

“Littlest Things,” Lily Allen

I didn’t want to believe it. There’s no schedule for “moving on.” I can’t wash a dish or put on my clothes without every memory.

Stage 8:

Tore Down

“Why Am I Treated So Bad?,” Pops Staples

I used to hear this song as a political anthem, a gospel haunt, the last song Martin Luther King asked Pops Staple to sing for him before he was assassinated.

That was before my love put the screws in. Now it’s both.

Stage 9:

What Happened?

“Notturno,“ composed by Ottorino Respighi.

Nocturne: n. A pensive lyrical piece of music (especially for the piano).

I first heard this piece played by the son of a dear friend, and the tears poured down.

The piece segues from grief to “How could I be so stupid?”

How can the young know the resignation one feels, when there are no more tears?

They do.

Stage 10:

Contempt

“Why’d Ya Do It?,” Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull was a flaxen-haired aristocrat-turned-convent-girl who became Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the 60s and scored a couple of hits that sounded like pretty paper doilies. Then she disappeared for most of a decade.

When she re-emerged with “Broken English” (1979), the track “Why’d Ya Do It?” was the most obscene and vicious accusation ever cut on vinyl.

The betrayal absolute.

Stage 11:

Sometimes, I Wonder

“The Cuckoo,” Holy Modal Rounders

Sometimes I wonder what makes women love men
And I look back, and I wonder what makes men love them

I have to turn back to my Barthes for his last advice, the words that soothe even though I don’t want to admit it:

The sentiment of amorous suffering explodes in this cry: ‘I can’t go on…’

But you do.

Falling over seven times and getting up eight.

It’s better than sticking my head in, right?

I am planning a major televised escapist weekend today and tomorrow, in between a few subversive errands for the cause.

We gotta eat and we gotta dream, in order to fight another day.

So let’s roll this out:

Television is peaking this weekend. We have the Winter Olympics, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, and the new episode of Dunk and Egg. Not to mention a solid binge of The Lincoln Lawyer, Season 4.

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Believe me, it will have changed by the time you’re done with your first draft.

But in edits, as you’re closing in on your final draft, you’re correct to be thinking, “Where Do I Place This?”

Who’s the right editor, the publisher who will see its potential and quality?

This is the moment where you begin a pleasant and eye-opening bit of investigation for your new publishing partner. It IS kinda like getting hitched!

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I am so in love with your new Masterclass series. It couldn’t be timed more perfectly for me.

I wrote a book called ______ back in 2012. It was published by “Prominent Indie Press.”

The Founder loved it but her conservative colleague was “uncomfortable” with one of my chapters. They buried the book.

Post-pandemic, I pitched a new edition of this book to a “Big 5 Publisher” and they bought it. Not only did they buy it, but they helped me reimagine it into something more than a revised edition! It will be published this August.

I know I am asking an extremely busy person, but here goes: Is it possible for you to give me an endorsement? I’ve attached a galley so you can see it in its new version.

I am way behind in getting endorsements, so if you can send me an endorsement it would make my editor very happy if you could manage it by 15 Feb. I’d offer you an antique chastity belt as a reward but I just gave away my last one. 😂

Thank you for considering this and THANK YOU for the m…

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The basics are not hard. Not at all. You can learn the central issues in an hour, which is what we are going to do.

And, it will, if you don’t mind me saying, change your destiny as an author.

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