Fifty-nine percent of the country looked at this spray-tanned incompetent authoritarian and said he cannot lead. The White House physician is scheduling mystery dental appointments. The machinery runs with no reliable mind at the wheel. Your survival tactic: name what you actually see. Not what you're supposed to say. What you see.

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Atlanta: 68°F, overcast and humid — the air sits on your shoulders like a debt you've been carrying so long you stopped noticing the weight.

Detroit: 52°F, scattered showers — spring here is a negotiation, tentative, the way a union holds its breath before the vote.

Kansas City: 61°F, partly cloudy — the sky can't decide, and honestly, neither can the Senate.

New York: 57°F, gray and still — the city that never sleeps is finally just tired.

San Francisco: 59°F, low marine layer — fog erasing the skyline again, the bay refusing to perform legibility.

Miami: 84°F, heat building — the climate doing exactly what it promised it would do.

First time here? thistleandmoss.com.

Editor's note: My titanium leg is aching in the Georgia humidity and my hands are shaking — because the most dangerous position in America right now is pretending you don't know what you're watching.

On the record, we all think this:

Fifty-nine percent. Not a poll — a diagnosis nobody's been permitted to officially file. The Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos survey found 55 percent believe the dementia-addled despot lacks the physical health to serve. Sixty-seven percent say he doesn't carefully consider important decisions. He called his press secretary "Kellyanne." He said "Iceland" when he meant "Greenland" four times in Davos. The bruises on his hands keep appearing; the explanation keeps changing.

The damage:

The gap: Republican confidence in his mental fitness has dropped from 75% to 66% in one year — one third of his own base, quietly filing their doubts.

The cover: "Excellent." The schedule managed. The press sanewashing — selecting coherent clips, burying the rambles.

The action: House Judiciary Democrats have formally demanded a neuropsychological assessment. Back them at house.gov.

The question was never whether he's declining. The question is who decided the rest of us shouldn't know.

Before the Strait of Hormuz closed, oil companies had donated heavily to put the narcissistic serial-liar back in the White House. They've been paid back. The Iran war's fuel spike has handed fossil fuel giants an extra thirty million dollars in profit every single hour.

Evidence:

The manufacturing gap: China produces 80–90% of the world's solar panels and wind turbines. It installs more renewable capacity each year than the rest of the world combined. It began this investment twenty years ago. The US did not.

The acceleration: The Hormuz closure sent countries scrambling toward clean energy — Chinese solar exports doubled in March alone. The crisis is accelerating the transition everywhere except here.

The expert: Harry Rozga at Earth.org names it plainly: the US-China rivalry has turned climate stabilization into a geopolitical casualty — a commons problem sacrificed to zero-sum competition between two superpowers breathing the same burning atmosphere.

Climate policy was never separate from foreign policy. It was always about who controls the energy stack — and the fascistic authoritarian machinery in Washington just handed that stack to Beijing, one tariff and one war at a time.

Action: sierraclub.org — 3.8 million members, active Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign.

The land doesn't care which empire wins. It burns the same for both.

A bathroom wall in Statuary Hall. That's where they decided to fight.

Lauren Boebert — the pustulent charlatan from Colorado's 4th — went on camera with a far-right media personality and accused Representative Sarah McBride of demanding that photos of women in Congress be removed from a women's restroom. She deadnamed McBride twice. "Women are being erased from Congress," she said.

McBride reposted the clip immediately. Her response: "This is false — I didn't complain about photos. But Boebert was the one who harassed a woman in the women's restroom thinking she was me — only the member was not me. Maybe it was Boebert who ripped all the photos down because she couldn't tell if one of them might be trans?"

Stakes:

The record: In January, Boebert and Mace physically stormed the restroom after misidentifying a cisgender colleague as McBride. They apologized. Boebert said it wouldn't happen again.

The counter-record: McBride's first bill passed. Not one Republican voted against it. She is legislating. They are performing.

You tell me a trans woman is "erasing women from Congress." She's passed her first bill, served her constituents, and refused every invitation to perform fear back at the people provoking her. Nothing terrifies the corruption-festering kleptocratic cabal like someone who declines to play.

Movement: aclu.org/lgbtq-rights — 50 states, 2026 voter registration drive live.

She walked in knowing what was waiting. She walked in anyway. That's the opposite of erasure.

What Essex Hemphill understood about fear was anatomical — it lives behind the sternum, and the question is never whether it's there but whether you let it make the decisions. Today's news activates that grip: the poll, the bathroom wall, the burning Strait. Everything the fecal-tongued demagogues want is for that grip to tighten until you stop moving. Hemphill moved anyway. He wrote anyway. He named what he was in a world that wanted him unnamed.

What have you stopped calling by its right name because speaking it out loud costs something you weren't sure you had?

Bi mis fhìn — I will be myself — is not a statement you have to earn. It's one you keep returning to.

Your jaw knows before your mind does. Unclench it. The vagus nerve runs from skull through jaw through throat into chest — it is the wire of the parasympathetic system, the line between emergency and here. Release the jaw. The wire loosens.

Seasamh air mo chois fhìn — standing on my own two feet. Some days that is the whole practice. Not solving. Not fixing. Just locating your weight in your heels and refusing to float away.

The red clover is blooming early along the Georgia roadsides. May moves at its own speed regardless of what Washington decided this week. That is not comfort exactly, but it is fact.

What early May is asking for: bitter greens. Dandelion leaves dressed with apple cider vinegar and olive oil. The body coming out of hard months wants the liver moving. Bitterness is the signal.

Lus a' bheannaich — the blessed herb — is what Gaelic speakers called most spring greens. They didn't need a clinical trial.

Grow it yourself: Arugula in a pot, three weeks to harvest, seed packet under three dollars.

Ten minutes, four people: Rigatoni, olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, Swiss chard, lemon zest, Parmesan. Boil pasta. Wilt greens in oil and garlic. Combine. Lemon. Cheese.

Nobody starves because Tuesday was hard.

Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) — adrenal/endocrine system

Pharmacology: Active withanolides — withaferin A and withanolide D — modulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, reducing elevated cortisol while lifting blunted cortisol. Adaptogenic bidirectionality. Anxiolytic activity via GABAergic pathways without the sedation signature of benzodiazepines.

Use: 300–600mg root extract standardized to 5% withanolides, once daily with fat. Evening dosing preferred. KSM-66 is the most studied commercial form. Eight to twelve weeks for measurable HPA axis retraining.

Caution: Contraindicated in autoimmune conditions — Hashimoto's, lupus, RA — due to immunostimulant activity. Thyroid hormone levels can shift; monitor on levothyroxine. Not for pregnancy. Nightshade family.

Nettle (Urtica dioica) — renal/mineralocorticoid system

Pharmacology: Aerial parts contain silicic acid, calcium, magnesium, and iron in bioavailable form, plus polyphenols with mild COX-2 anti-inflammatory activity. The leaf is the mineral delivery system. Gentle diuretic action increases urine volume without the electrolyte depletion of pharmaceutical diuretics.

Use: Nourishing infusion — one ounce dried leaf per quart water, steeped four hours covered, strained, consumed throughout the day. Four days on, three days off. Fresh nettles sauté like spinach after blanching.

Caution: Significant vitamin K content — monitor on blood thinners. Diuretic stacking risks hyponatremia. Not in acute kidney disease. Plant concentrates heavy metals from soil; source carefully.

Holy Basil / Tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum) — respiratory/immunomodulatory system

Pharmacology: Eugenol and rosmarinic acid drive anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial activity. Tulsi modulates NF-κB — the central inflammatory cascade switch — while upregulating T-cell and natural killer cell activity. Not immunostimulation. Calibration. Respiratory benefit through both expectorant action and bronchodilatory activity in smooth muscle.

Use: Tea, two to three cups daily. Tincture: 30 drops in warm water, three times daily. Combines well with ashwagandha — the combination is long-used and well-tolerated.

Caution: Mild blood-thinning properties — avoid stacking with anticoagulants without monitoring. Lowers blood glucose; diabetics on medication must track. Fertility-inhibiting in animal models; avoid if actively trying to conceive.

The body is the first territory.

Anail na beatha — breath of life — requires no equipment. It asks only attention.

Jaw release. Three times. Tongue to the roof of the mouth, four counts through the nose, release the jaw on the exhale. The jaw holds what the voice won't say.

Palms up. Open hands, facing ceiling. Not submission — reception. Despair closes the hands. Keep yours open.

Cold water on the wrists. Fifteen seconds. Vagus nerve registers it. Present, not catastrophe.

Walk where something is growing. A weed in a parking lot crack counts. One piece of evidence, daily, that something green still does what it does.

Gheibh thu troimhe seo — you will get through this — is not optimism. It is genealogy.

Del Martin knew what the body knows before the mind catches up. The chest-drop. The small wrong note that your nervous system files even when your brain is still rationalizing. There is something in today's political theater — in the bathroom surveillance, in the "dental appointment" cover story, in the cheerful "excellent health" dispatches from the physician — that doesn't feel right. Because it isn't. You don't feel right about it. Sit in that wrongness. It is not anxiety. It is information.

What are you still calling fine that your hands already know is not?

Tha sinn ann — we are here.

Essex Hemphill (1957–1995) hand-stapled his first collection at 26 and distributed it from a milk crate at DC community events. He edited Brother to Brother — the first major anthology centering Black queer male voices in the AIDS crisis. He died at 38. The literature was more honest for him.

Del Martin (1921–2008) co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis with Phyllis Lyon in 1955 and spent fifty-three years refusing to let the movement leave lesbian women behind. At 87, she and Lyon were the first couple legally married in San Francisco. She died 59 days later. The marriage stood.

Barbara Gittings (1932–2007) spent thirty years working to remove homosexuality from the APA's diagnostic manual. By 1973, the diagnosis was gone. Not erased. Corrected.

Seasamh còmhla — standing together. Three people who did not wait for permission to be fully themselves.

There is a particular exhaustion in being required to justify your existence inside every institution you enter — the bathroom, the legislature, the diagnostic manual, the poll that treats your civic fitness as a question. Gittings didn't ask the APA for permission. She walked into their conference. She ran their booth. Made them deal with the actual thing, not the projection. That is the practice. Arriving as the full fact of yourself and refusing to shrink while the room decides.

When the world keeps offering you its idea of who you are — what does it cost, each time, to set it down and return to yourself?

Falbh le cridhe fosgailte — go with an open heart — not because the world has earned it, but because closing is its own kind of damage.

The hawthorn is in flower along the Georgia fencerows — sgitheach, the tree of the threshold, the tree standing between what was and what is becoming. You stand there too.

Bidh sinn ann a-màireach — we will be here tomorrow.

Go eat something. Put your hands on something green. Come back.

Beannachd leibh — blessings with you

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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