Survival tactic: Drink the whole glass before you open any app. Let the body remember it exists.

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Atlanta: 78°, thunderstorms building — air thick enough to drink, dogwoods losing their last white before Bealtaine

Detroit: 62°, partly cloudy — Lake Erie still cold enough to throw fog over the riverfront at dawn

Kansas City: 68°, clearing after the tornadoes — two EF-0s landed Thursday, the prairie remembering it can split open

New York: 64°, mix of sun and cloud — Central Park's late tulips surrendering their reds

San Francisco: 62°, breezy — fog burning off the Headlands by ten, poppies blazing on cliff faces

Miami: 85°, partly cloudy — record heat coming, the hibiscus running ahead of the calendar

Tha an talamh a' tilleadh chun an teine — the earth is turning toward fire. Beltane crouches three days off, hawthorn buds tight as fists, and somewhere east of where you're sitting the mugwort has come up early enough to make an old herbalist nervo

First time here? You found us.

Editor's note: They demolished the East Wing for a vanity ballroom and now want you to write the check. The contempt isn't hidden — that's the goddamn point.

$39 trillion. Federal debt, current — and GOP senators led by bloated grifter princess Lindsey Graham want $400 million in taxpayer money for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the East Wing used to stand. They demolished it in October with cranes and a press release. The replacement bundles an underground military bunker and a Secret Service annex. Eric Schmitt joined Monday. The corpulent spray-tanned authoritarian initially promised private donors. Now he wants you to write the check.

What they said: "I don't know why you would do it" with taxpayer money "if it's all funded. We have $39 trillion in debt. Maybe we ought to stop spending money."

That's Rick Scott — endorsed Trump in 2016, chaired his Super PAC, won his Senate seat with the endorsement. When the most reliable bootlicker pulls back, you're staring at obscenity that nauseates even the obedient. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley joined him. The fascistic junta is fracturing on whether to charge the public for a tyrant's ballroom while DHS workers face pay freezes and six service members died in Kuwait last week.

The damage:

Cost: $400 million ballroom plus military facility plus Secret Service annex.

Pattern: Third assassination attempt aftermath, weaponized — every shooting turned into a budget request.

Action: Capitol switchboard, 202-224-3121. Oppose the Graham-Britt-Schmitt bill.

No empire pays its debts before it sells you the next ballroom as security.

The coal port city of Santa Marta hosted the highest ambition coalition this week — 53 nations, including Australia, Mexico, the UK, the European Union, every Small Island State the rising water is methodically erasing. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands. The United States was not invited.

Evidence:

The instrument: a binding treaty on fair fossil fuel phase-out — supply-side obligations, financial architecture, just transition.

The court: the International Court of Justice ruled last year that fossil fuel production may constitute internationally wrongful acts. Vanuatu's Minister Ralph Regenvanu was instrumental.

The math: climate-vulnerable developing nations need $1.3 trillion. Current commitments don't approach it.

Colombian Minister Irene Vélez Torres said it cleanly: "the countries of the Global South must not pay the price of a crisis they did not cause."

The excrement-spewing spray-tanned grifter withdrew from Paris on day one, then withdrew us from any seat at this table. While Graham fights for $400 million of ballroom, fifty-three nations are drafting the legal architecture that will judge us. They're rolling out climate accountability the way my old engineering team rolled out infrastructure-as-code — incrementally, with version control, the next deployment binding whether the first was or not.

Action: support Climate Justice Alliance.

The land remembers what the ledger forgets, and so do the children of the islands going under.

A trans woman walks into a gun store in Phoenix. Nine years on hormones — driver's license, passport, SSA records all updated. She picks up Form 4473, the Firearms Transaction Record every buyer fills out. The rancid despot signed an executive order earlier this term declaring there are only two innate sexes, and the ATF confirmed Monday it's updating its policies in lockstep — including, most concerning to advocates, requiring all applicants to list their sex assigned at birth.

Stakes:

Pattern: trans Americans = under 2% of the U.S. population, four times more likely to be victims of crime.

Timeline: executive order issued January, ATF rule pending Federal Register publication, Pink Pistols up 68% Nov 2024 to April 2025, Liberal Gun Club nearly doubled.

This is bureaucratic violence dressed as paperwork. The maggot-infested degenerate administration is building a list. Erin Palette of Pink Pistols said it plain — "not about safety or identification, targeting a minority for being a minority."Alejandra Caraballo at Harvard Law warned the same machinery could come for veterans with PTSD next. They aren't trying to keep guns from trans people; they're trying to identify which Americans are trans so they can come for everything else, and the chest knows that before the news anchors say it.

Movement: Pink Pistols (170+ chapters), Liberal Gun Club (38,000+ members), Trans Lifeline (877-565-8860 — peer-run, no police).

A government that fears a 2% minority armed knows what it's doing to them.

Lou wrote that dying. He'd founded the FTM newsletter from a kitchen table, fought out of the medical establishment's gatekeeping, won the right to be himself before AIDS came for him anyway. He saw both flowers. He named both. The discipline isn't pretending the rot isn't there — it's keeping the eyes wide enough to see what else the same garden is doing while it rots.

Mar a tha an talamh ag ionnsachadh a bhith dùisgte às dèidh a' gheamhraidh — as the earth learns to wake after winter— your nervous system is now learning to come down from a Tuesday it did not consent to. Three days off Beltane. The wheel turning hard toward summer. The hawthorn buds outside whatever window you have are closed; they don't open under fluorescent light or under fear, they open when the ground tells them, and the ground is older than every senator and every form. Anail dhomhainn — deep breath. The body that read those stories is not the body that has to carry them through the next hour.

Late-April asparagus → Snap off the woody ends, lay the spears on a sheet pan, drizzle olive oil and the salt your hand knows by feel, roast at 425°F for ten minutes. Squeeze lemon over while still warm. The first true green of the season — the body recognizes it before the mind does.

The corporate-bypass hack → Plant scallions from grocery stems. Cut off the white root with about an inch of green, set it in a jar of water on the windowsill. Eight days, new green tops. Cycle indefinitely. Cost: $0.

Pantry quick meal — no beans, feeds 4, under 10 minutes: Box pasta (1 lb), butter (4 tbsp), garlic (4 cloves smashed), parsley, lemon zest, parmesan, black pepper. Boil. Drain. Toss everything in the hot pot off heat. Done.

When the day is loud, dinner can be quiet. That's the medicine.

Plant medicine for the locked jaw → Brew nettle and lemon balm equal parts, one heaping tablespoon of dried herb to a mug of just-off-boil water. Steep ten minutes covered. Urtica dioica carries iron the body needs after chronic stress; Melissa officinalis settles the vagal nerve. Drink hot, slow, both hands wrapped around the mug. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers. Nettles were what your great-grandmothers reached for first.

The cognitive tool → When the news loop starts, write three sentences by hand. Pen. Paper. The hands know things the screen flattens.

Reach toward someone → Text the friend you've been meaning to text. Don't apologize for the silence. Just say their name and one specific thing you remember about them. That's the door.

This is what they're counting on. Silence as cooperation. The form filled out without protest, the bill voted through quietly, the treaty drafted on another continent without a single American voice. Rich named it fifty years ago: silence is also a lie. So speak. Call the senator. Show up to the school board. Tell the truth in your own kitchen to whoever's listening — you, if no one else is. Defiance starts at the volume of your actual voice.

What truth have you been keeping silent because saying it costs you something you weren't ready to lose?

Three people who refused the silence Rich named — body, page, street.

Lou Sullivan built the FTM International newsletter from his San Francisco kitchen in 1986; it became the largest trans masculine support network in the world. After his AIDS diagnosis, he told doctors he'd lived as a man and would die as one — the medical establishment had said he couldn't be both gay AND trans. He proved them wrong before dying in 1991, and archived every diary so the next generation could find their way home.

Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal of Arts under Clinton in 1997, citing "the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice." She named lesbian existence as a political act when doing so could end a career. 18 books, 50 years.

June Jordan wrote "Poem about My Rights" in 1980 and founded Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley in 1991, training thousands of working-class students of color in their own voices. Her bisexuality was not a secret and not a banner — a fact she let her students inherit.

Bright Signals:

Climate: 53 nations advancing fossil fuel phase-out treaty in Santa Marta — first formal coalition since COP30 collapsed.

Trans community: Pink Pistols up 68%, Liberal Gun Club doubled — community training over isolation.

Civic fracture: 4 GOP senators publicly opposing the Graham ballroom bill. Fractures are how light gets in.

What these three lives share is the same patience: refusal to wait until it was safe to be themselves.

The dates rhyme because the wounds rhyme — and the people who refuse the silence are why we still read these names.

Today the truth is being buried with concrete in East Wing rubble, with forms designed to identify and isolate, with treaties written on a continent the empire stopped pretending to listen to. Jordan wrote anyway. She taught working-class students until her body wouldn't carry her — and the truth she buried in them became truth other people now keep alive in classrooms, in kitchens, in the way a young trans woman in Phoenix decides what kind of life is worth defending.

When the day is over and you set it down, what truth will you carry into sleep that the news did not tell you was yours?

Stand. If you can't stand, place both feet flat. Press the soles down. Open your eyes.

Beannachd dheiridh airson Diciadain — closing blessing for Tuesday. The wheel turns toward Beltane. The hawthorn waits. What you read today did not undo you, though it tried. Carry the locked jaw, carry the questions, carry the names. Lou. Adrienne. June. The earth carried them too, and is carrying you, and will carry whoever comes next.

Slàn leat agus mìle taing — be well, and a thousand thanks.

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

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