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Wendy's Thoughts Before the World Gets Loud
Saturday's gunfire at the Washington Hilton arrived forty-five years almost to the season after John Hinckley shot Reagan on the same goddamn pavement. Read that twice — because the regime's people already are.
The story that survives is always the one that flatters the teller.
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Table of Contents
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The Ground Beneath Your Feet — Weather & Earth
Atlanta: 64°, cloudy — pollen on the black hood thick as rosin, the storm system queued for Tuesday like a verdict.
Detroit: 48°, mostly cloudy — the lake breathing damp into rooms that have not been warm since November.
Kansas City: 61°, cloudy — a 74% rain chance already fingerprinting the wheat.
New York: 45°, cloudy — high of 53 today, the city walking with its collar turned up like it is hiding from the news.
San Francisco: 53°, mostly cloudy — fog at this hour reading less like weather and more like a mood the bay refuses to break.
Miami: 77°, sunny — high of 80, an afternoon storm queued behind it, the palms holding still the way a body holds still before bad ne
The Part That Draws Blood
A man emptied between five and eight rounds at a Secret Service magnetometer outside the Hilton ballroom Saturday night. One agent's vest stopped a bullet. The shooter survived.
Allow yourself zero seconds of relief.
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Editor's note: Within minutes the spray-tanned fascist was citing the venue's "not particularly secure" status to argue for his White House Ballroom project. My titanium leg ached before the news did, the way it does before storm fronts and bad legislation alike. That's the tell. Watch what they sell you in the seventy-two hours after a tragedy. You will know what the tragedy was for.
Five to eight shots. One injured agent. Forty-five years almost to the season since John Hinckley emptied his .22 at Reagan outside the same Washington Hilton.
Verbatim: "Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job. They acted quickly and bravely." — Trump, Truth Social, minutes afterward.
credit: youtube
The wreckage:
Civic body: A sitting president evacuated from a press dinner the press was preparing to confront him at — five hundred journalists having signed a petition opposing his "efforts to trample freedom of the press."
Pattern: Eleventh scare in Trump's orbit since Butler. Numbers that stopped scanning as horror somewhere around the third one.
Cui bono: The narcissistic serial liar used the night, on the night, to argue the venue was insufficiently fortified — pivoting straight to the Ballroom project. Not the next morning. The night.
But the truth-murdering buffoon who has spent fifteen months calling federal law enforcement the deep state suddenly cannot stop praising them. The regime rolls out cruelty the way an engineering team rolls out features — continuous deployment, every Tuesday a new build. Cole Tomas Allen, 31, of Torrance. Name running in NBC chyrons before the bullet was an hour cold. Motive per Acting AG Todd Blanche: "preliminary." Convenience: total.
Action: Read every story this week with the dates and the demands stamped on top. Refuse the false-flag certainty AND the lone-wolf certainty in equal measure. Watch what they ask you to fund. The Washington Post live coverage.
Forty-five years ago Hinckley walked out of that same lobby and a Republican administration consolidated power on the back of a wound.
The hotel remembers what the news cycle will not.
In 2022, Antarctic sea ice hit a record low. At five known emperor penguin breeding colonies, every site but one suffered total breeding failure after the ice broke up. Chicks went into the water before their feathers could waterproof.
Evidence:
Relationship breaking: Emperor penguins require sea ice attached to solid land between April and January to breed. The warming pattern is not accommodating that requirement.
credit: earth.org
Scale: African penguins have collapsed by 70% in three generations — from roughly 82,000 to about 25,000. Two percent of the early-twentieth-century population remains. Two percent.
Expert voice: Researchers in Nature Communications Earth & Environment warn over 90% of emperor colonies will be "quasi-extinct" by 2100 if current Antarctic warming continues.
This is what the democracy-strangling parasite's extraction politics buys. The same regime gutting climate research is the same regime auctioning Arctic leases on Tuesday — and the bird that spent four million years evolving to fly underwater cannot evolve out of an ice shelf no longer there in fucking April.
Action: Donate to or volunteer with the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds. They are doing the triage no government will fund. Earth.org's full piece on endangered penguin species.
The land has been paying attention. And the penguins are simply where the ledger comes due first.
She has spent nearly twenty years inside academic, public, and grassroots archives. Brooklyn-born, queer and lesbian, daughter of memory-work most of the country has never heard about. On April 22, Mayor Zohran Mamdani named Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz commissioner of New York City's Department of Records and Information Services — the agency that decides what the city remembers about itself.
Stakes:
Pattern: Smith-Cruz curated exhibitions on the Salsa Soul Sisters — NYC's first lesbian-of-color organization. As a teenager she co-founded Sister Outsider, a paid peer-education nonprofit for young women in Brooklyn rooted in harm reduction.
credit: lgbtqnation
Timeline: Mamdani's third openly LGBTQ+ commissioner. Taylor Brown — first transgender director of the city's first-ever Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs (March). Lillian Bonsignore — first openly gay FDNY commissioner.
This is the long game in a country whose federal apparatus tried to erase trans people from the Stonewall National Monument last year. While the obscene buffoon's regime deletes us from federal websites, a Brooklyn lesbian who built her career remembering the women nobody documented now controls a municipal archive. Reader: that is how you out-build a fascist. Make sure the records they want burned are kept by the people they want disappeared.
Meanwhile, comedian Jaclyn Lore-Edwards has gone viral with bits about being raised on "nothing but nuts and ingredients" by her two moms. The joke lands because the love is in it. LGBTQ Nation on Lore-Edwards's videos.
Movement: Follow Smith-Cruz's work at NYC DORIS. Original Mamdani-appointment coverage.
We are the only people who have ever kept us. And we will keep us tomorrow. The archive opens at nine.
The Witness — What We Carry From What We Just Read
"When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. Where they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind." — Pauli Murray, lawyer, priest, poet, Song in a Weary Throat (1987)
Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Murray wrote that during Jim Crow as a Black queer woman Harvard Law turned away for being female, and the men of her own movement turned away for being too much. But she understood the work was not winning the fight on their map. The work was redrawing the map. Saturday gave the regime a fresh circle to exclude us from. Today, you draw a larger one.
What in your life have you witnessed and not yet named — and what is that silence costing you?
The Turning — Where the Breath Comes Back
Sit down where you are. Both feet on the floor. One hand on the chest, one on the belly. The air on your skin — name it. The body before the news.
Anail aig an talamh — the breath of the earth. Five days from Bealtaine and the wheel of the year is opening its second eye. The dogwood has done its work and dropped its white. The earth, cridhe an talamh, is not asking your permission. She is doing what she has always done: keeping time for those of us who lost the count.
You read about the shooting and your jaw locked. You read about the penguins and your chest tightened. You read about Smith-Cruz and your eyes stung in a way you could not place. The body was paying attention even when the mind insisted it was fine. Listen to her — she remembers, somewhere in the iron and salt of her, every Bealtaine that came before this one.
The fierce and the reverent are not opposites. They are the same hand, opening and closing.
The Nurturing — Food As Medicine
Asparagus → trim woody ends, blast at 425° on a sheet pan with olive oil and lemon zest for nine minutes; flaked salt to finish. Spears bend slightly under their own weight when ready. Spring on the plate, here.
Regrowing scallions → cut white root ends one inch long, place root-down in a glass of water on the windowsill, change the water every two days. Full second harvest in ten days. Cost: zero. Sovereignty does not always cost.
Pantry quick meal — spinach lemon-garlic spaghetti (7 ingredients, feeds 4, under 10 minutes): spaghetti, butter, garlic, lemon, parmesan, baby spinach, black pepper. Boil pasta. Sauté four sliced cloves in butter until barely golden. Off heat: lemon juice, half a bag of spinach to wilt in the residual heat. Toss with drained pasta. Parmesan, pepper, plate. Keira's at the stove while I write this. Nobody goes hungry because the week was hard.The Breathing — Herbs As Curing
Yarrow — Achillea millefolium
Pharmacology: Bitter alkaloids and proazulenes act on vascular tone and the clotting cascade — anti-hemorrhagic externally, mildly hypotensive internally. The Druids called it nosebleed. They were not wrong.
Use: Dry leaves, infuse in hot water ten minutes; one cup at the first sign of stress-driven blood-pressure spikes.
Caution: Photosensitizes skin. Contraindicated with anticoagulants (warfarin, eliquis). Avoid in pregnancy.
Skullcap — Scutellaria lateriflora
Pharmacology: Modulates GABA receptors. Anxiolytic without valerian's sedation hangover. Targets the parasympathetic shutdown that follows acute stress.
Use: Tincture, 1–2 ml in water, twice daily during high-anxiety stretches.
Caution: Interacts with sedatives and SSRIs. Avoid in pregnancy. Buy reputable — adulteration with hepatotoxic germander has hospitalized people.
Burdock root — Arctium lappa
Pharmacology: Inulin and arctigenin support hepatic phase II detoxification and lymphatic drainage.
Use: Decoct dried root twenty minutes; one cup daily for two weeks.
Caution: Diuretic — adjust if on lithium. May interact with diabetes medications. Avoid if allergic to ragweed family.
The Tending — Survival Protocols for Your Actual Body
Hand on sternum, slow exhale through the mouth → Place your dominant hand flat where the breastbone meets the soft hollow at the top. In for four through the nose. Out for six, mouth slightly open, audible. Eight rounds. The vagus nerve runs directly beneath where your hand is resting. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers — the threat is in the news, not the room.
Name three things, then name one truth → When the doom-scroll has you, look up. Three things you can see — specific, not categorical. Not "the wall" but "the long crack in the plaster above the doorframe." Then one true thing about your life right now: a person who loves you, a meal you can make, a small task that is doable today. The mind cannot catastrophize and inventory at the same time.
Send one message to one person you have been meaning to reach → Not a long one. A sentence. Thinking of you. Hope the week is being kind. The reaching is the medicine. Connection is not a feeling. It is a verb the body performs.
The Practice — Armor You Can Wear Tomorrow
"There are still people alive who knew the people who knew the people who started this movement." — Cleve Jones, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (2016)
Moving forward — your armor for today: You read the news this morning. Your jaw locked. You wanted to crawl back to bed. Don't. Cleve Jones wrote that as one of the few survivors of an entire generation the federal government watched die — and what he understood is that the chain of knowing is the only thing that has ever broken a fascist regime. The line that scares them is not your rage. It is your memory and the people you tell. Pick up the phone. Show up. The work. Today. Specifically.
What are you willing to lose this week to keep the thing you actually love?
Heroes & Bright Signals — The Ones Who Showed Up and the Proof It's Working
People and moments stitching us forward.
Pauli Murray (1910–1985) — Argued the Brown v. Board strategy thirteen years before the case was filed. Co-founded NOW. First Black woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Refused every box, out-built every wall.
Cleve Jones (b. 1954) — Founded the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1985 while the federal government pretended we were not dying. 48,000 panels, 54 tons.
Joan Nestle (b. 1940) — Co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974. The largest collection by and about lesbians in the world. Started in her apartment.
Bright Signals:
Mamdani's third LGBTQ+ commissioner this year — Smith-Cruz at DORIS joins Taylor Brown (LGBTQIA+ Affairs) and Lillian Bonsignore (FDNY).
Jaclyn Lore-Edwards's videos about her two moms — going viral on the love.
SANCCOB's penguin rehabilitation — the South African Foundation has hand-fed and released thousands of African penguins, the work continuing in the absence of governmental will.
These three figures and three small bright facts share a trait: they kept building when the wider world insisted there was no point.
Gathering History — The Roll Call of Those Who Were Here First
Pauli Murray graduated Howard Law first in her class (1944); Stonewall (1969); the Lesbian Herstory Archives opened in Joan Nestle's apartment (1974); Audre Lorde published Sister Outsider (1984); Cleve Jones unfolded the first AIDS Quilt panels on the National Mall (1987); ACT UP shut down the FDA (1988).
The Carrying — What Your Body Knows When You Close This Tab
"When I sit down to write the history of our movement, I sit down with the bodies of the dead beside me." — Joan Nestle, co-founder, Lesbian Herstory Archives, A Restricted Country (1987)
What you carry forward into the burning world: Mamdani gave Smith-Cruz the keys to the city's memory the same week the federal regime tried to erase another national monument. The work is mathematical now. Every record kept is one fewer to recover. Tonight, before you sleep, write down one true thing about the day. The archive opens with you. The archive has always opened with you.
Whose name will you say out loud tomorrow morning that nobody else will?
Beannachd Dheiridh — A Blessing for the Road Ahead
Stand if you can. Both feet flat. Touch the ground one final time — palm to wood, palm to stone, palm to whatever the earth made that is nearest you.
You came carrying Saturday night, the penguins, the hands of a Brooklyn archivist — and you are leaving carrying the same, only now your body has remembered what to do with weight. Bealtaine a' tighinn, a charaid — Bealtaine is coming, friend. The fires the old people lit between two flames so the cattle could pass through clean — those fires are still being lit, in basements and kitchens, by people exactly like you.
Sìth dhut, agus gaol an domhain. — Peace to you, and the love of the deep world.
✨ 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
