Card of the day: Seven of Wands, reversed
Currently listening to: Tinned Meats’ new album KILTER
I don’t think God reads those lists of People Who Should Die (Of Natural Causes Of Course) because I keep seeing obituaries pop up for people not on those lists. Catherine O’Hara? At 71? What’s going on up there, gang?
It sure feels like all the warmth and joy keeps getting sucked out of the world, or at least in the States. No place had a temperature above sixty degrees yesterday, and outside of Los Angeles and southern Florida, that’s still the case today. Everywhere feels cold, especially up here in the great Northeast. No plastic over the windows, no amount of layers or blankets, no space heaters, and no hot showers can prevent the chill from penetrating through the walls of any edifice. Even a bowl of boiling hot soup became lukewarm within minutes of sitting on my desk.
This administration sure picked a hell of a time to go full Fourth Reich on us, too. Let mountains of ice and snow fall across most of the country, let the temperature drop to frostbite-inducing levels, and then start arresting journalists for covering protests, sue the IRS for billions, push for more funding to the American Gestapo, and use that secret police to go after political enemies. The opposition party’s leaders, by the way, have done nothing to push back against this expect for write a concerned letter about it. More letters that won’t get read!
Talk about an accurate card to pull for the day, though. The Seven of Wands reversed means something in the universe wants us to give up in the face of overwhelming nonsense. It wants us to throw up our hands and go, “Fine, fuck it. You win. Do what you want.” We can take that as advice, if we want. But I like to think the card suggests we push harder. Things suck? The wrong people keep dying? Assholes continue to stack the deck against us? None of those count as reasons to quit.
(Fuck though, I can’t get over 71. Did you know 70 is the new 40? That’s too young to go.)
When the weather gets too cold out, sure, it’s easy to lay in bed under ten blankets, binge-watch more of The Sopranos, order in some Chinese, and let the world freeze. But people in Minneapolis and LA and NYC and Boston and all over the country have continued to take to the streets this winter, especially over the past few weeks in response to ICE killing Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Heber Sanchez Dominguez, and Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Many more people remain in custody in deplorable conditions; a horrifying amount of them are women and children.
We can’t let them get swept under the rug. We can’t let something as shitty as a beloved celebrity death get our heads in a funk. Catherine O’Hara would have kicked our asses if we spent all day moping about her and posting GIFs of her as Moira Rose saying “Fold in the cheese” instead of getting out there and doing the damn work. The Trump administration and all their backers want us to look the other way while they set us all on fire and pick our bones clean. No matter how overwhelming or sad things seem, we gotta do what we can to protect ourselves from the vultures.
As I do whenever a celebrity passes, I looked for quotes from Catherine O’Hara to plug into this post, and I found this one: “I think everyone is born funny. Sadly, some lives beat it out of them.” Let’s do what we can to make sure in the not-too-distant future, more people can hold on to their funniness, to their spark, to their joy.
That’s all for now. Be safe. Be well. Fuck ICE.