The pollen settled on the black hood of my car at 6:47 this morning, the exact yellow-green of a bruise three days old. Bondi's lawyers are still drafting; House Republicans are still drafting too — and you are the one who has to stay awake through all of it.

Some days the work is just refusing to look away.

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Atlanta: 72°, hazy sun — the pollen count is the kind of number that used to be an emergency

Detroit: 58°, overcast — the river running cold past plants that no longer hire Kansas City: 67°, southerly wind — fields turning where the rain has not come

New York: 61°, drizzle — wet pavement reflecting a courthouse the morning shift cannot afford to enter

San Francisco: 55°, fog — the kind that hides the hills and the rent both

Miami: 84°, humid — saltwater rising one centimeter at a time, on schedule

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Editor's note: Three crises, one Tuesday, all run by the corpulent spray-tanned authoritarian's people — so no, we are not being polite about it today.

Capitol Hill, Wednesday morning. House Judiciary Democrats moved a contempt resolution against Attorney General Pam Bondi over her department's refusal to comply with congressional document requests. The marble was cold.

Verbatim, from the reporting: House Democrats are advancing contempt proceedings against the sitting AG over withheld materials.

Here is what the kleptocratic criminal apparatus is doing, in plain terms: stonewalling. The AG of the United States — a position whose entire constitutional purpose is the rule of law — is being instructed by the White House to treat lawful congressional oversight as optional. Third such standoff between this Justice Department and House Democrats in eighteen months. Not a glitch. The operating system.

The damage:

Human cost: Every day documents stay locked, investigations into civil rights, voting rights, and federal prosecutorial decisions stall — affecting cases that touch millions who will never know the records exist.

Pattern: Stonewall. Subpoena. Stonewall. Contempt vote. Court fight. Delay. The bile-spouting demagogue's first term wrote the playbook; this one runs it faster.

Action: Call your House rep. Not to ask their position — tell them yours. (202) 224-3121.

The minority will lose this vote. The vote still matters. Every roll call is a record, and records are how we know later who showed up.

Evidence:

Relationship breaking: Industrial supply chains optimize for cosmetic perfection. Misshapen tomatoes get plowed under. Bruised apples crushed for cattle. The aesthetic standard is the supermarket's choice — and the planet's bill.

Scale: Food loss and waste account for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions — equivalent to the entire global tourism industry. Restaurants generate 28% of global food waste; households 37%.

Expert voice: Earth.Org, citing IPCC findings, reports that increasing global composting rates alone could match the carbon savings of taking fifteen million passenger vehicles off the road for thirty years.

The fascistic administrative apparatus rolled back composting grants in February. Coincidence isn't the word for it.

Action: Buy ugly produce. Compost what you can. Push your city council on municipal composting. Tesco's "Perfectly Imperfect" line saved 50 million packs of fruit and vegetables from landfill in 2021. Read the full breakdown.

The land remembers what we throw at it. It is keeping a ledger we will eventually have to read.

House Bill 2616 — introduced April 3 by Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, the same Walberg who traveled to Uganda to encourage that country's leaders to "stand firm" behind a law that includes the death penalty for gay people — would force every federally funded elementary and middle school to obtain parental consent before changing a student's pronouns, name, or sex-segregated facility access.

Stakes:

Pattern: This is the seventh federal trans-targeting bill introduced in this Congress. The cumulative effect is the point.

Timeline: Companion bill House Bill 2617 prohibits any school receiving Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds — over 90% of U.S. public schools — from "teaching or advancing concepts related to gender ideology." Cosponsors: Burgess Owens, Mary Miller, Robert Onder, Kevin Kiley. A who's-who of the racist slumlord tyrant's loudest amplifiers.

You — yes, you — need to understand what this bill does. It conscripts teachers as informants. It makes the classroom a site of surveillance. It tells a fourteen-year-old that the one adult who knew her name has been ordered, on pain of federal funding loss, to call her father instead. What the fuck is that, if not state-mandated cruelty wearing the costume of parental rights?

Movement: Human Rights Campaign called the legislation "cruel" and is mobilizing. Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860.GLSEN is tracking every state-level companion bill.

Existence is the resistance. They wrote the bill because they could not write the children out of the world.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Lorde wrote that with cancer in her body and a country at her throat. She was not being poetic. She meant the bath, the meal, the hour of sleep — the literal upkeep of the vessel — was a refusal to let the regime have the last word. Today three different bills, three agencies, three rotting structures want a piece of you. You witness it. You eat anyway. You sleep anyway. And the maintenance is the resistance.

What have you seen this week that you have not yet allowed yourself to name?

Spring nettles → Blanch sixty seconds in salted boiling water, plunge into ice. The sting dies in the heat. The iron stays.April is the only month they are tender.

Fermented spring radishes → Slice thin, salt at 2% by weight, weight under their own brine for five days at room temperature. Roughly $3 for a quart that lasts a month. The corporate bypass is in your kitchen.

Pantry pasta with garlic, oil, lemon, parsley, parmesan, black pepper, pasta water → Boil pasta. Bloom four sliced garlic cloves in a quarter cup olive oil over low heat for three minutes. Drain, reserving a cup of starch water. Toss pasta with garlic oil, juice of one lemon, half cup parsley, half cup parmesan, starch water by tablespoons until silken. Eight minutes. Feeds four. Under five dollars. Nobody at this table goes hungry because the week was hard.

Nettle (Urtica dioica)

Pharmacology: Iron, magnesium, calcium, vitamin K, plus histamine-modulating compounds. Reduces seasonal allergy response, supports red blood cell production, mild diuretic.

Use: Dried leaf infusion — one ounce in a quart of boiling water, four hours minimum. Tincture 2–4 mL three times daily.

Caution: Avoid in pregnancy without practitioner guidance. Interacts with blood thinners (vitamin K), diuretics, and lithium — diuretic effect alters lithium clearance. Fresh plant stings; dry or cook before internal use.

Tulsi / Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum)

Pharmacology: Adaptogen acting on the HPA axis — modulates cortisol, supports adrenal recovery, reduces inflammatory cytokines. Mild blood-sugar regulating effect via increased insulin sensitivity.

Use: Hot infusion, one teaspoon dried herb per cup, ten minutes covered. One to three cups daily. Tincture 2–3 mL twice daily.

Caution: Lowers blood sugar — diabetics on metformin or insulin must monitor. Mildly anti-fertility in animal studies. Slows clotting — discontinue two weeks before any surgery.

Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)

Pharmacology: Cardiovascular tonic. Flavonoids and oligomeric procyanidins improve coronary blood flow, gently lower blood pressure, strengthen heart contractility over time.

Use: Berry tincture 2–4 mL three times daily. Effect cumulative over six to eight weeks — not for acute symptoms.

Caution: Potentiates digoxin and beta-blockers — dosage adjustments required. May lower blood pressure additively with hypertension medications. Slow onset means people abandon it early; that is the mistake.

The dogwoods are blooming on the corner of my street. White and four-petaled, ridiculous in their certainty that this April was always coming. I noticed them on the walk back from the mailbox this morning and I stopped, because somebody had to. The administration did not notice. The bill's sponsors did not notice. The landfill did not notice. But the tree did not care that nobody was watching — it bloomed anyway, on schedule, the way it has bloomed every April since before this country had a name to be ashamed of.

This is the turning. The place in the day where you remember that the world is not only what is being done to it. A red-tailed hawk circled over the playground at noon. A nine-year-old in my neighborhood, who does not yet know what is being legislated about kids like her, was on the swings — pumping her legs, head back, laughing at the sky. Somewhere in Tennessee, a stranger's rent got paid by another stranger this week. Somewhere in Oregon, 47,000 acres came home. Somewhere a trans kid found one safe adult and the world did not end. These are not consolations. They are facts, and the facts stack up on both sides of the ledger, and we are the ones who have to keep reading the whole page.

The breath comes back when you let it. Right now. Three counts in. Six counts out. The pollen settling. The dogwoods stupid with bloom. The hawk circling. You are still here. The work is still here. The morning is still here. And tomorrow morning will arrive whether or not anyone in Washington deserves it.

Moving forward — your armor for today: You do not get to wait for a clean fight. There is no clean fight. The contempt vote will probably fail, the bill will probably advance through committee, the food will probably keep rotting in the same bins — and you still have to act, today, in your specific zip code. Lorde was not promising you a victory. She was telling you the fight is the practice, and the practice is what you owe the people who taught you to fight in the first place. So fucking move.

What are you willing to lose to keep what matters?

What you carry forward into the burning world: The fear does not leave. That is the part nobody tells you. You do the thing while afraid. You eat the nettles while afraid. You make the call while afraid. You hold the trans kid in your life while afraid. And somewhere in the practice of doing the next right thing while terrified, the fear stops being the thing in charge. It is still there. Just no longer the driver. That is what every ancestor whose name we just read was promised, and it has been enough.

What does survival look like in your specific body tomorrow morning — what is the one small refusal you can practice before noon?

Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl — May the wind be ever at your back.

Go lonraí an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh — May the sun shine warm upon your face.

Go dtite an bháisteach go bog ar do pháirceanna — May the rains fall soft upon your fields.

Agus go gcoinní an domhan thú i mbos a láimhe go dtí go mbuailimid arís — And until we meet again, may the world hold you in the hollow of its hand.

The old tongue knew something the news cycle does not: a blessing is not a wish, it is a witness. It says — I see you going out into the weather, and I am naming what I want to be true for you. So that is what I am doing now. Whatever the bill says tomorrow. Whatever the vote says tomorrow. Whatever the headlines say tomorrow. Go n-éirí an bóthar leat — may the road rise to meet you. We will be here when you get back.

🌿 Slán go fóill, a chairde. 🌿 (Goodbye for now, friends.)

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

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade