The drizzle on my windshield this morning had the same flat patience as everything this administration does — not dramatic, just relentless, wearing the glass down one bead at a time. They are counting on exhaustion. We are going to have to be the kind of stubborn that outlasts a siege.

Survival tactic for today: Find one document — a letter, a photograph, a receipt — that proves someone before you existed and kept moving. Hold it for sixty seconds. History is not abstract when it has a texture.

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Atlanta: 66°, light drizzle — the clay along Little Five Points has turned that specific rust-red this morning, less mud than wound, holding the rain the way the body holds the things it hasn't processed yet.

Detroit: 50°, sunny — steel-bright and cold in the teeth, the kind of May morning that makes you feel briefly invincible before the news loads.

Kansas City: 53°, clear — the long prairie light sitting level on everything, flatly honest, casting no shadows yet.

New York: 54°, partly cloudy — harbor air moving through the canyon streets, the smell of brine and diesel, the city perpetually deciding what to believe.

San Francisco: 54°, overcast — fog erasing the skyline slowly, which around here is called Thursday.

Miami: 83°, blazing — May heat at full deployment, the kind that makes the body remember it is mostly water and nowhere near enough shade.

Corra mhios na Bealtainn — the wild month of Beltane — and the wheel turns hard into fire season. The first wisteria already dropped its purple; what's left is green, serious, done being decorative.

Yesterday, at a Military Mother's Day event in the White House East Room, his wife couldn't say the word empathy with a straight face — and neither could the room.

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Editor's note: The Strait of Hormuz is still partially blockaded, airlines are facing jet fuel shortages, farmers are staring down a fertilizer supply chain that has buckled under war pressure — and the official response is that prices will "tumble down." I am running out of polite language for this level of shit-brained governance, so today I will simply stop trying.

The number that lodged in my chest this morning: $25 billion — the Pentagon's own accounting of what this Iran war has cost American taxpayers since late February. Floor, not ceiling.

Verbatim: "Trump has incompetently and smugly led the world into economic disaster and shown indifference to the loss of innocent lives." — Marc Racicot, former Republican Governor of Montana, former RNC Chair, former Army JAG officer, writing in The Hill.

When the past chairman of the Republican National Committee files an op-ed calling the sitting president's war possible war crimes with zero legitimate oversight, you are not reading partisan screed. You are reading a smoke alarm. The fecal-tongued spray-tan running this apparatus launched 55 air strikes on civilian vessels — September through April — 174 dead, 11 missing, four survivors — without a single congressional vote. Iran retains the Strait. Trump's economy approval: 30%, a nine-point collapse. None of this resolves.

The damage: 174 civilians dead. Gas at multi-year highs. Airlines facing fuel shortages. Farmers watching fertilizer chains buckle.

Action: Call (202) 224-3121. Ask why there's been no Iran War Powers Resolution vote.

thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5865894-trump-iran-war-economic-disaster

The Framers put war powers in Congress because, in Madison's words, the Executive is "most prone to it." We are living the proof. Again.

A construction worker in a 2023 Hong Kong photograph: sitting on a curb, wet cloth on the back of his neck, the pavement radiating. He is not suffering dramatically. He is just waiting for the air to become survivable.

Evidence:

The threshold: The Nature Conservancy combined seven decades of global climate data with a physiological model to define "livability" — conditions safe for sustained physical activity. 35% of the global population now lives where heat regularly exceeds that threshold for younger adults. For adults over 65: 78%.

The arithmetic: Average younger adult: 50 hours per year lost to severe heat restrictions. Up from 25 in 1950. Older adults: 900 hours per year — more than a full month. Up from 600.

Expert voice: Lead author Luke Parsons, Nature Conservancy: climate change isn't only intensifying heat — it is reducing the hours per day a human body can safely exist outdoors.

Seventy-eight percent of older adults globally means millions of grandmothers who cannot sit in their own yards. That is not a policy abstraction. That is a sentence.

Action: nrdc.org tracks heat emergency legislation state by state.

earth.org/exposure-to-life-limiting-heat-is-on-the-rise-around-the-world-research-shows

The land is keeping score. It always has. It has started handing out the bill.

On the record, this: "Most know my husband as the strong commander-in-chief, but his empathy transcends the role and shape of a caring leader, who constantly remembers each and every American soldier is someone's child." — Melania Trump, White House East Room, May 6, 2026.

The room laughed. Trump smiled and shrugged. Even he didn't try.

Stakes:

Pattern: This man posted "Robert Mueller just died. Good, I'm glad he's dead." Since February, this administration has deleted LGBTQ+ history from National Archives keyword searches, removed more than a dozen NPS webpages on queer heritage, and stripped "transgender" and "queer" from Stonewall National Monument's digital presence. Quietly — the way you erase a pencil drawing when you think no one's watching.

Timeline: Activists from the Mattachine Society of Washington walked the Archives' new "The American Story" exhibition last week hunting for erasure — searching for Dr. Franklin Kameny, for their own organization's name. The documents held. Primary sources are harder to kill than webpages.

You don't erase a people by deleting their metadata. This plundering corrupt cabal does not get to keep the word empathy. It forfeited that one.

Movement: The LGBTQ History Project, OutHistory, and independent archives globally are in active rescue operations. lgbtqnation.com/2026/05/is-determined-to-erase-lgbtq-history-but-the-national-archives-still-tell-our-stories/

A story is not gone until the last person carrying it is gone. We're still here.

The room laughed yesterday because everyone knew the speech was fiction — the administration's performance of care while the policy enacts erasure. Vaid spent thirty years naming that gap with a lawyer's precision and a queer woman of color's refusal to accept survival as the ceiling of ambition. The deleted webpages are not the war. The war is the assumption that we will disappear quietly if the pressure is consistent enough.

When was the last time you stopped performing harmlessness — and what did it cost you?

Sit with both feet flat on the floor. Thursday, early May, the fire half of the year open before you.

An domhan ag lasadh — the world igniting — and you have been reading about it all morning.

The news doesn't leave when you close the tab. It lives in the jaw, in the place behind the sternum where unresolved things collect. Today's load: a war without a vote, bodies in water, a room laughing at the word empathy from a man who deleted queer history on a Tuesday.

Tha thu fhathast an seo — you are still here. The red clay outside is soaked this morning, holding moisture and roots and the slow intelligence of things that grow through pressure. Your nervous system is part of that continuity. Let the weight settle into it. That is not surrender. That is the specific wisdom of something that knows how to stay.

Strawberries → Hull cold, quarter, black pepper, a small pour of balsamic. Ten minutes, no heat. Sùbh-làir — the Gaelic root means "soil-berry," which is exactly what a strawberry is. More vitamin C by weight than an orange. Put them in your body this week.

Sovereignty hack: One strawberry plant, under $4, produces fruit for three years. Ten in a balcony pot. You do not need a yard to grow something that feeds you. The supplement industry cannot follow you onto a fire escape.

Quick pantry meal (feeds 4, under 10 min): Thick toast + labneh + sliced cucumber + fresh dill + lemon zest + good olive oil + flaky salt. Spread, layer, drag the lemon over the whole surface. Done before you remembered you were hungry. The kitchen doesn't have to let the week win.

Jaw release: Open your mouth as wide as comfortable, hold five seconds, close slowly. Three times. Political fury lives in the jaw as cortisol debt. Pay it off. Cuimhnich air do bhodhaig — remember your body. It processes what the mind refuses to file.

Cognitive tool: Name one true thing about yourself that this administration cannot delete. Not a right. A fact of character — your stubbornness, your tenderness, your persistence. Write it somewhere. The archive that matters starts here.

Community action: Call one older queer or progressive person today and ask what they remember. Ask how they held on during a previous siege. Record it if they'll let you. The living archive is the one that can't be scrubbed from a government server.

Bheir mis' an aghaidh — I will face it — which is what Riggs did from an AIDS ward with a camera in his hands and a country trying to pretend he wasn't dying into something that mattered. The administration deleted a webpage. It cannot delete what you carry, what you say, what you hand to someone who needs it when they need it.

What truth about your life have you been performing too small to keep the peace — and what would it cost you to say it, once, at full size?

Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022) — Indian American activist and attorney, NGLTF executive director at 31, author of Virtual Equality, the most incisive diagnostician of respectability politics the queer movement produced. Never stopped being angry. Never let the anger stop being useful.

Marlon Riggs (1957–1994) — Black gay filmmaker, Tongues Untied, Ethnic Notions, Black Is... Black Ain't — finished by his collaborators after his death at 37. The work didn't need his heartbeat to keep beating.

José Sarria (1922–2013) — the Widow Norton. Drag queen, WWII veteran, first openly gay political candidate in American history. San Francisco, 1961. 5,613 votes. He closed the Black Cat bar every Sunday night by leading the room in "God Save Us Nelly Queens." Theater as politics. Politics as survival. Still the template.

All three refused the deal where you exist quietly in exchange for never quite being seen.

Tha gaol agam ort — I love you — including the version of you that opened this newsletter half-asleep, that is still figuring out whether the stubborn thing or the tender thing is what the moment needs. Sarria ran for office in 1961 while his city was actively arresting people like him, and got over five thousand votes. He understood that silence was the actual danger. He sang them out the door every Sunday. That sound is still moving through the air. You are part of that frequency.

Tomorrow morning, before you open the news, what does the version of you that is still singing need to hear first?

Beannachd leibh anns an là a-màireach — blessings to you in the day that is coming.

The rain on the red clay outside my window this morning knows something about patience. It doesn't hurry. It just keeps showing up at the edge of things and working.

You held the accounting today. You sat with the erasure. You are still here.

Cum ort — keep going.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Trip The Light Cosmic: keiraofthestars.org
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade