January was a long f'ng year.

The chaos you’re feeling is by design.

Last week was 10 years long. 10 of the most fucked up what the fuck is happening; where is Ashton Kutcher, and why isn’t he jumping out of a trailer parked in front of my house to tell me that I’m being “Punked” week in the history of time.

I admit, by Wednesday, I even found myself clinging to the Kafkaesque, half-baked hope that maybe Richard Simmons might appear as some bedazzled chimera, jumping out of a six-foot tall birthday cake in a tank top and short shorts yelling “SURPRISE” while grabbing my hand and a VCR so that we could sweat to the “oldies” together via a VHS cassette tape I thought I had long since destroyed with fire.

Planes are falling out of the sky, catching fire on runways, and running people over. The shellacked shit-for-brains supposedly “in charge” is blaming a collection of letters for every catastrophe occurring under his watch, his Secretary of Fashion Plates, Puppy Shooting, and Botox, Kristi Noem is cosplaying as everything from an ICE agent to a cowgirl, his Proud Boy Simp pick for FBI and dead brain worm, bear dumping, whale-head chain sawing HHS lead lied their asses off at their Senate hearings, and Elon “horses for hand jobs” Musk is all up in our federal spending like it dared to walk by him in a short skirt at a tennis match without understanding that as an oligarch (not one of us fucking voted for) that his status allows him to grab it, and by “it” I mean us, by the pussy.

When you’re an oligarch, they let you do it. Grab ‘em by the Treasury. You can do anything.

Ok, but for real, what the actual fuck is happening? What the fuck day of the week is it? I remember I started crying uncontrollably last Saturday, and the rest feels like a barrage of blueberry pies to the face.

I am pretty sure however, that my week began in the blacked-out, sound proofed back of an unmarked cargo van.

A young man from Brooklyn I had never met greeted me by name in front of my house at noon, slid the door open to the kind of vehicle I’ve long assumed was designed for Igloo cooler-stored stolen organ transport on the Oklahoman panhandle.

So before climbing in, I trepidatiously surveyed the inside of the van, noted the kidnapping/ransom note/snuff film vibes of a lone folding chair surrounded by miscellaneous wires and a sea of black sound proofing, poked my head back out towards the seemingly innocuous little fella and said, “You know that everything I’ve ever been taught for as long as I’ve been alive tells me not to get in your fucking van, right?”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.” He said, nodding politely yet ever-so-slightly impatiently while ushering me into the back of Sweeney Todd’s mobile meat pies on wheels.

He asked me to sit in the well-worn straight out of the Saw franchise folding chair which was facing a camera of which I could only see the lens and outfitted me with a microphone and an earpiece so that I could talk to three other men I had never met.

If you’re thinking milf spy porn meets film major mid-term horror flick project, then you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

He rather unceremoniously retreated, closed the van door behind himself, and within seconds, I had a British TV show producer in my ear with an accent so thick it could have cut through steel, “Right then, we want you to bring the fire, Jo….” He began, before telling me to channel my inner penguin or some other Big Ben on caffeine concept I didn’t fully grasp and honestly never hope to. “Piers loves people who bring the fiy-yaahh.”

And just as I began imagining a steaming cup of tea and a delightful plate of crumpets, the monitor in front of me turned on, and there on the screen was Piers Morgan, some thirsty ass attention-starved loser from January 6th, Geraldo Rivera… and ME.

If all of that sounds like the kind of weird-ass, edible-induced fucking fever dream you wake up needing to write down, so you won’t forget it while simultaneously questioning your very existence, trust me - I get it.

The only thing that might have been missing was a bespectacled talking turtle or maybe a diapered baby dancing to “Hooked on a Feeling.”

But it happened. I was really on Piers Morgan’s show. I don’t think it went horribly, but then again —- I am a mom in Jersey, and we’re not exactly known for admitting wrongdoing, so who the fuck knows.

I did land a fun little jab or two, randomly seizing on what may have been the worst TV letdown moment of all time—the Capone vault live event. So that was fun.

But sitting there, realizing a 3 to 1 margin outnumbered me and knowing that it would be impossible for me to respond to every outlandishly moronic and cultish kiss the ring sycophantic come the fuck on craziness they said about Dear Leader and the triumphant return of his DIET COKE button, it hit me… you can’t keep up with all of their flood-the-zone bullshit. It’s impossible. I don’t care if you’re Superman, Neo, or Usain Bolt on a bobsled; it is physically impossible to keep up with the onslaught of shock and awe insanity being hurled our way. And it’s utterly exhausting even attempting to. (As an aside, please take note of the still of my face vs Lara’s. I mean… LOL).

And all of that, as we all well know, is by design.

They want us overwhelmed. They want us demoralized. They want us to be traumatized.

The goal is to make this trauma begin to feel normal. Donald Trump has changed our sense of what we can and should expect in little imperceptible bites and great, big, giant ones simultaneously. But this week was especially bad. I think we can all acknowledge that. Friends of mine who are casual engagers of the news have been texting me all week to say they can’t take anymore. They have to walk away and unplug.

It’s too much.

Because it is too much.

It’s way too much for any one of us to handle by ourselves. And in recognizing that reality, we find our antidote to it.

If each of us does a little bit, none of us has to do it all.

It is really easy to get demoralized during times like these. No one should beat themselves up for feeling that way. Authoritarian regimes thrive on a demoralized populace. They survive by slowly and relentlessly wearing us down, convincing us that there’s nothing we can do to stop them or fight them.

That is exactly why we cannot give them what they need. Yes, it is easier said than done, but spending our time paralyzed in a panic only emboldens that tomato-sauce-stained sociopath and his stupid fucking taint suppers.

There are things we can do every single day, small actions and larger ones. We can call our congresspeople, show up at their offices, organize, speak out, stand up, march, and protest.

We still have a voice. Lord knows I understand how fucking hard it is to find the impetus to keep going right now. Like I said, I spent an entire day last weekend crying. I haven’t been able to stop spinning for the better part of the last week.

But we did have a win last week when we stood up and spoke out against him, shutting down the Medicaid portals and freezing all of those government grants from HeadStart to Snap.

They were on their heels, and their newest propaganda Barbie of bullshit, with her supersized cross of convenient Christianity, said the quiet part out loud in a tweet, resulting in a judge stopping them from freezing that aid.

We, the people, did that.

Elon Musk literally bought himself the fucking presidency of the United States of America.

And what that UNELECTED fucking psychopath is doing to this country is absolutely batshit motherfucking, game over, in-fucking-sane.

So that means that we need to get motherfucking LOUD.

Right the FUCK now.

And for the record, there is no such fucking thing as being “too woman” to pilot a helicopter, “too gay” to land a plane, or “too black” to be an air traffic controller.

There is, however, such a thing as being too hateful, too stupid & too sociopathic to be president.

And we call that Donald Trump.

That six-time brankruptee, nepo-baby, reality tv game show hosting, sexually abusing, serial philandering, a convicted felon, business fraud, charity thief who has a new VP because his last one almost hanged, sent his eldest spawn to conquer Greenland, picked his daughter-in-law to run the party, a Russian asset to be DNI, a dead brain worm, bear dumping, whale decapitator for HHS, a chick who shot her own dog for Homeland Security, a Proud Boys simp to lead the FBI, a weekend Fox anchor day drunk for Sec Def and a reality tv star for Transportation wants to lecture the rest of us on “merit-based” hiring?

If this country hired people based solely on their competence and merit, we sure as shit wouldn’t be looking at the second term of an insurrectionist who saddled our country with $8T in new debt, lost the most jobs since Herbert f’ng Hoover, and let 500K people die on his watch.

And as I have already said, I get it; I fucking get it. I know we all just want it to Fucking stop; we want just to go back to living our lives without having to wake up bracing for the next Fucking crazy…

But we can’t all unplug. They want us to do that so that it becomes normal, so that it all somehow becomes OK.

This shit is not normal, and it is not OK. And I know you all know that, and I know you all feel completely overwhelmed, and I know that we will have to be there for each other now more than ever.

Shit is so unrelentingly dark. We have to stick together to get through this. We have to.

I know we will. I KNOW WE WILL.

It’s a mad world, but we are each other’s way through.

MAGA is a grey sprinkle on our rainbow cupcake, and we just need a little time to chuck that motherfucker in the trash where it belongs.

Prayers for the families and loved ones of all who perished this week in a series of unthinkable tragedies. It’s all just so heartbreaking. 💔

Hold on to each other tightly, friends. Hold on with everything you have. Love each other. Be good to each other. Be there for each other.

And fuck the fascists.

I am eternally grateful to all of you.

Stay safe.

Stay sane-ish.

Stay away from grey sprinkles.

Love,

Jo ❤️