Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
The administration spent Sunday night calling Norah O'Donnell a disgrace for reading aloud what a stranger wrote about him. The reader is invited to notice who flinches when a sentence is read.
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Drag queens raised twenty-five thousand dollars in Bushwick before the gunfire started in DC. That order matters.
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Table of Contents
The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 62°, mostly cloudy — pollen sitting on every black car like the news did, evenly, without asking
Detroit: 55°, cloudy — the kind of grey that asks you to check the date twice
Kansas City: 63°, heavy thunderstorm — sky cracking open over wheat already up past the knee
New York: 55°, sunny — Bushwick still smelling faintly of rosewater and burnt vinyl from last week's show
San Francisco: 51°, partly sunny — fog burning off the Castro at the angle that makes the windows cry
Miami: 76°, sunny — April heat that used to arrive in June and now lives here year-round
The wheel of the year has tipped. Late dogwood, maples already past their first impossible green. The earth keeps the date when the news refuses to.
The Part That Draws Blood
A man with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives ran past the magnetometer at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night while the spray-tanned fascist was on stage at the WHCA dinner. Secret Service got him to a hold room. The agent who took the round wore a vest. Then on Sunday Trump went on 60 Minutes and called Norah O'Donnell a disgrace for the crime of reading aloud.
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Editor's note: A man almost shoots a sitting president and the president's instinct is fury at a woman with a microphone. That's the entire fucking presidency in one Sunday.
A 31-year-old from Torrance, California named Cole Tomas Allen wrote a manifesto calling somebody — never named — a pedophile, rapist, and traitor. On Sunday afternoon, Norah O'Donnell read those three words aloud to the man the manifesto was almost certainly about. He turned, on camera, into the version of himself the manifesto had described.
What ShitStain said: "You shouldn't be reading that on '60 Minutes,' you're a disgrace. I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody. Excuse me, I'm not a pedophile."
The truth-murdering buffoonic ass monkey spent more energy Sunday attacking the journalist who quoted three words than on the federal agent who took a round defending him. He used the shooting to pitch his new White House ballroom — the Hilton wasn't secure. He called the shooter a "blur" and added: "NFL should sign him up." The president of the United States, joking about the man who allegedly tried to kill him, less than 24 hours later.
The damage:
Human cost: One Secret Service agent shot in the vest; thousands evacuated; 30 college journalism scholars sent home shaken before their scholarship moment.
Pattern: Second known assassination attempt at a Trump event in two years. The political-violence machinery the bloated grifter has tuned for a decade is eating at the room he sits in.
Action: Watch the 60 Minutes segment yourself. You should know what defensive looks like in a man with nothing to hide.
The shooter wrote I am no longer willing to permit. The president performed the rest on television.
1.3 degrees. That's how much the planet has warmed. CO₂ emissions from energy use climbed 0.8% in 2024 — not catastrophic on its face, until you remember every fraction of a degree is somebody's coastline, somebody's harvest, somebody's elderly mother in a Phoenix apartment with no AC in July.
Earth.org's Paula Pérez González-Anguiano laid out a path that doesn't require waiting for a politics that isn't coming: capture the CO₂, then use it.
Evidence:
Relationship breaking: Forests, soils, wetlands, oceans — the carbon sinks that have done this work for the entire run of human civilization — are starting to flip. A degraded forest doesn't store carbon. It releases it. Scale: Amine solvents scrub up to 99% of CO₂ from industrial flue gas. Microorganisms can metabolize captured CO₂ into PHAs — biodegradable plastics replacing the fossil ones poisoning the gulf you grew up swimming in. Expert voice: Spain's BETA Technological Center, running the European CERNET project, is producing PHAs from CO₂ at lab scale. Slow microbial growth and energy cost are the bottlenecks.
The kleptocratic criminal apparatus running this country won't fund a watt of this work. Other countries will. Spain already is. We will buy what we could have built.
Action: Pressure your state attorney general on industrial flue capture mandates; back municipal renewable buildouts. Earth.org full piece.
The land remembers what the budget refuses.
A gay bar backyard in Bushwick on April 16. A projector throwing a U.S. flag onto a sheet. Lauren Banall walking out to "We Are Charlie Kirk" with a lit lighter and a bottle of Visine in her red blazer, faking the tears, wiping them with a handkerchief. The event was called Turning Point U.S. Gay. By the time the lights came up, the queens had cleared over $25,000 for the ACLU's Drag Defense Fund.
Stakes:
Pattern: The Drag Defense Fund — launched 2023 with RuPaul's Drag Race and partners — has blocked drag bans in Texas, Florida, and Montana. Timeline: Same week, the American Library Association reported 6,588 books pulled from public and school libraries last year, highest since 1990. At least three of the eleven most-challenged were LGBTQ+ teen titles. Flamer. All Boys Aren't Blue. Gender Queer.
The sex-offender grab-anything predator wing has decided two things at once: that drag threatens children, and that books featuring queer kids are sexual material. Wrong on both counts. They know it. The strategy is volume — flood every school board, drown every librarian, make existence a paperwork burden. So what did Bushwick do? Raised twenty-five grand in a night to sue them in federal court. That's the answer.
Movement: Lauren Banall's GoFundMe; ACLU Drag Defense Fund; LGBTQ Nation's ten banned YA titles worth buying.
One queen with a lighter raised more for civil rights in a Brooklyn night than half the Senate raised this quarter.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"It was a rebellion. It was an uprising. It was a civil rights disobedience — it wasn't no damn riot." — Stormé DeLarverie, butch lesbian, Black drag king, the woman whose scuffle with police sparked Stonewall, recalled in archival interviews decades after the night itself.
The witness gets to name the thing. Saturday at the Hilton was many things — security failure, political theater, a man on television performing the precise charges the manifesto had made — but witness is what we have. The drag queens in Bushwick were also witnesses. So was the librarian quietly reshelving Flamer after the Christian mother left. We do not always get to choose what we see. We get to choose what we call it after.
What did you see this weekend that you have not yet given a name?
The Nurturing — Food As Medicine
Asparagus, finally local → roast hard at 425° for 12 minutes, lemon zest at the end, flake salt. The first stalks taste of the soil they came up through. April is the month the South starts feeding itself again.
Sourdough discard crackers → discard, olive oil, salt, rolling pin, 8 minutes at 400°. Costs nothing. Replaces a $7 bag of marketing. Sovereignty starts at the counter, not the ballot.
Quick spring pasta (7 ingredients, feeds 4, under 10 min) → orecchiette, garlic-confit oil, fresh peas, lemon, pecorino, black pepper, parsley. Boil pasta. Bloom garlic. Toss off heat. Nobody in this newsletter goes hungry on a hard week.
The Breathing — Herbs As Curing
Lemon Balm — Melissa officinalis Pharmacology: Rosmarinic acid and citronellal acting on GABA pathways — anxiolytic without sedation, mild antiviral against herpes simplex. Use: 2–3 fresh sprigs steeped 5 min in just-off-boil water; tincture 30–60 drops up to thrice daily. Caution: May suppress thyroid function — avoid if hypothyroid or on levothyroxine.
Yarrow — Achillea millefolium Pharmacology: Achilleine constricts capillaries and staunches bleeding within minutes; sesquiterpene lactones reduce systemic inflammation. Use: Crushed fresh leaf as a field-grade wound poultice; dried flower tea (1 tsp/cup) for menstrual cramping. Caution: Asteraceae allergy crossover with ragweed. Avoid in pregnancy — uterine stimulant. Photosensitizing in fair skin.
Calendula — Calendula officinalis Pharmacology: Triterpene saponins speed fibroblast migration — heals torn skin faster than placebo in controlled trials. Use: Infused oil on dry heels, eczema, post-surgical incisions; petals in salads for liver-supportive bitterness. Caution: Asteraceae cross-reactivity. Don't apply to deep puncture wounds — seals the surface, traps infection.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"Some of us are dying. Some of us are not. Live or die, all of us are at war." — Vito Russo, Why We Fight speech, ACT UP demonstration at HHS, October 1988.
Russo gave that speech surrounded by people who would be dead within five years. The choice was never to outrun what was killing them — there was no outrunning it. The choice was what you did with the time you still had your voice. Drag queens raised twenty-five thousand in Bushwick last week. Librarians are reshelving banned books in red states tonight. The war is the war Russo named, in a different theater, with the same casting.
What are you willing to lose this month to keep someone else alive next year?
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
Stormé DeLarverie — Black butch lesbian, drag king at the Jewel Box Revue for 14 years, the woman whose punch sparked Stonewall on June 28, 1969. Patrolled queer bars as an unpaid bouncer well into her 80s. Died 2014 at ninety-three.
Vito Russo — film historian, ACT UP co-founder, author of The Celluloid Closet (1981), the foundational catalog of how Hollywood erased and pathologized queer characters. He fought erasure by counting it. Died of AIDS-related illness 1990. He was 44.
Lorraine Hansberry — first Black woman with a play on Broadway (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959), closeted queer writer whose journals were sealed for decades, one of the most quietly ferocious thinkers America has produced. Died at 34.
What they share: they refused to disappear from the record. The record is what we have left.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
Less than 24 hours after a man with a shotgun ran past the magnetometer ten feet from him, the president suggested the suspect should play in the NFL. The Drag Defense Fund — actual legal arm against drag bans — has now raised more in three years than several state Republican parties have this cycle.
History: John Hinckley shot Reagan at the same Washington Hilton entrance in 1981. Forty-five years to learn what that hotel teaches. We have not.
Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington (1963); the Mattachine Society held its first chapter meeting in Los Angeles (1950); Larry Kramer co-founded ACT UP at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, NYC (1987); Pauli Murray was ordained the first Black female Episcopal priest (1977); the Stonewall Inn was officially declared a National Monument (2016); Sarah McBride was sworn in as the first openly transgender U.S. Senator (2025).
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough — and I wish to live." — Lorraine Hansberry, journal entry 1962, published posthumously in To Be Young, Gifted and Black.
She wrote that the year before the cancer was found. Two years left. Reason enough — not a flourish, a math problem she was solving, the only way one solves the problem of a life cut short, by insisting the wanting outlast the body. We carry her sentence forward because she wrote it knowing she would not. That is the entire job.
What does Tuesday morning's first hour look like, in your specific body, if you accept that your wanting is meant to outlast you?
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
May your spine stay straight when the world tries to bend it.
May your hands find work that matters when the news makes you feel small.
May you remember that survival is not passive—it's the quiet rebellion of showing up tomorrow.
May the land beneath you remember your weight, and hold you anyway.
Go beannachd leat—go with blessing, go with fire, go with the knowledge that you are not alone in this.
Slán go fóill.
✨ Who Is In The Gathering? ✨
The voices woven into this work:
🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com
