Three drunkennesses on one Friday — a president in Beijing committing to nothing, a senator's son slurring queers in a D.C. bar, a planet sweating through its own fever in South Asia. My titanium leg knew before the news did.

Survival tactic for today: Before you open any app, press the flat of your hand against your sternum for ten breaths. Feel the bone beneath. You came in here with a body. Don't let the news take it before you've finished saying hello to it.

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Atlanta: 61°, sunny climbing to 78° — pollen settling onto every black car like a yellow accusation

Detroit: 59°, cloudy — lake air carrying weekend storms in its mouth

Kansas City: 72°, partly sunny — prairie wind already hot enough to taste the summer it's promising

New York: 58°, sunny — Sunday will hit 86° and the trains will smell like everyone gave up at once

San Francisco: 54°, sunny — fog held off long enough for the bay to remember what blue was

Miami: 82°, sunny — humidity doing what humidity does, which is everything

Tha an talamh fhèin a' gabhail anail dhomhainn — the earth herself is taking a deep breath — and the mountain laurel in north Georgia is opening this week into the pink-white riot it does every May, a flowering so brief the bees treat it like an emergency. The chimney swifts are stitching the sky.

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Editor's note: The men running the country can't run a fucking errand sober, and yet here we are, taking their tariff threats and their UFO theology and their backroom bar slurs as though grown adults are at the wheel. They aren't. We are.

Trump landed in Beijing Wednesday, the first sitting U.S. president to make the trip since 2017, with a billionaire delegation whose combined wealth, The Hill notes, exceeded the GDP of most nations on earth.

The bloated grifter brought Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang along like trophies. Trump made no commitment on Taiwan. None. He flew home Friday with handshakes, gas tax fantasies, and a Cuba sidebar where CIA Director Ratcliffe delivered an ultimatum to Havana that read less like diplomacy and more like a dare. Xi mentioned the "Thucydides trap." The orange-faced serial lying grifter blamed Biden. Two emperors in a room. Neither said the word peace.

The damage:

Taiwan: 23 million people just learned their security is a bargaining chip.

Cuba: Ratcliffe's "negotiation window will not stay open indefinitely" — the kleptocratic criminal apparatus opening another front.

You: Call your senators. Ask where they stand on Taiwan defense before the next war bill arrives.

An empire that cannot commit to defending its allies will eventually be unable to commit to anything but its own decay.

Forty-six degrees Celsius. That's 115° Fahrenheit. That's what cities in India and Pakistan hit in late April and early May, and what killed at least 37 people in India and 10 in Karachi before the calendar even reached summer.

A new study from World Weather Attribution, published at Earth.org, confirms what the bodies already knew: heat at this scale is three times more likely now than the pre-industrial baseline. Mariam Zachariah of Imperial College London named it plainly — this is no longer extreme. It is a "regular reality."

Evidence:

Mechanism: Human-caused warming pushed the baseline up enough that a once-in-decades killer is now a scheduled visitor.

Body: Heat compromises sweat and vasodilation, the slow miracle of staying 98.6° while the world burns. Push past that, and the body cooks itself. Street vendors, construction workers, the unhoused, the incarcerated — the heat finds them first.

Expert: Zachariah's warning is the kind scientists deliver in flat voices because the alternative would be unprofessional weeping.

The predatory financial machinery profiting from extraction is the same one telling you the green transition is too expensive. The cost is being paid. Just in Karachi instead of on a balance sheet.

Action: Donate to Climate Justice Resilience Fund.

The body is where the land's memory comes due.

Tuesday night. The Tune Inn on Capitol Hill. New York Congressman Mike Lawler is talking to a reporter when William Paul — 33, son of Senator Rand Paul — slides onto a stool nearby and asks Lawler if he's Jewish.

What followed, per Courthouse News, was a ten-minute drunken tirade in which the younger Paul said the war in Iran is "all about the gays and the Jews, and I hate them both, and I don't care if they die." He flipped Lawler off, knocked over a barstool, and the next morning posted an apology on X blaming alcohol.

Stakes:

Pattern: William Paul has a 2015 DUI and a 2013 flight-attendant assault charge. He worked in Republican congressional offices through 2025.

Context: A pro-Massie PAC ran an ad this week depicting GOP megadonor Paul Singer with a rainbow Star of David next to his head. The dehumanization runs on television.

Here is what you don't get to do: claim the alcohol said it. Alcohol doesn't invent the sentence. It removes the social hardware that keeps the sentence from leaving the mouth. The hate was already there. He apologized for being drunk. Not for the wish. Then read what the spray-tanned fascist's GOP said in response — nothing.

Movement: Lambda Legal and HRC are tracking incidents like this.

To be queer in this country in 2026 is to be told you can be hated openly and the hater will be the one apologized to.

Arenas wrote this from a body the Cuba he loved had jailed for being gay, and an America that watched him die of AIDS without it. Both countries called him impossible. He spent his final breath being possible anyway. Today's news asks you to do the same — not heroically, just steadily, in the body you have.

What have you survived this week that you haven't yet named out loud, even to yourself?

Sit. Put both feet flat on the floor, or one palm on the part of your body that hurts most today. The May air, wherever you are, is doing what May does — warming, thickening, beginning to taste like the months ahead.

Tha thu sàbhailte an seo — you are safe here — at least for the length of these few sentences, which is a longer safety than the news has offered all week. The mountain laurel is opening, the swifts are stitching, the red clay is drinking the rain. The earth herself is not in a hurry. She has watched empires get drunk and call it diplomacy before.

And the cardinal came back to the feeder — small, red, indifferent — and reminded me that the world has more than one author.

Spring strawberries → Halve, toss with black pepper and a tablespoon of balsamic, let sit twenty minutes. The pepper coaxes sugar forward. The Gaelic is sùbh-làir — berry of the ground — the season making itself known on the tongue.

Bypass the produce-priced herbs → Grow basil from a grocery-store sprig. Strip bottom leaves, place in water on a sunny windowsill, change every other day. Roots in ten days. You won't buy basil until October.

Pantry quick meal — 7 ingredients, feeds 4, under 10 minutes: Cherry tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, lemon, spaghetti, parmesan, basil. Boil salted water. Halve tomatoes, slice garlic thin. Heat oil with garlic three minutes — don't brown. Add tomatoes, smash slightly, two minutes. Toss with drained pasta, lemon, parmesan, torn basil. No one goes hungry because Tuesday was a wound.

Tulsi / Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum) Pharmacology: Adaptogen modulating the HPA axis. Eugenol and rosmarinic acid reduce inflammatory markers under sustained pressure. Use: 1 tsp dried leaves per cup, steeped covered 10 minutes, twice daily. Caution: Lowers blood sugar — monitor if diabetic. Slows clotting — stop two weeks before surgery. Avoid in pregnancy.

Elderberry (Sambucus nigra) Pharmacology: Anthocyanins bind to viral surface proteins, reducing flu and some coronavirus cellular entry. Use: Syrup from cooked dried berries — 1 tbsp adults twice daily during exposure. Never consume raw berries, leaves, or bark. Caution: Contraindicated with immunosuppressants. Raw plant parts contain cyanogenic glycosides — only cooked preparations are safe.

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) Pharmacology: Anethole and fenchone relax GI smooth muscle, easing cramping and trapped gas. Use: 1 tsp crushed seeds per cup, covered 10 minutes, after meals. Chewed dry after dinner is the simplest form. Caution: Mild estrogenic activity — avoid with hormone-sensitive cancers. Cross-reactive with carrot, celery, and birch pollen allergies.

Somatic → cold-water reset. Run cold water over your wrists for sixty seconds. The vagus nerve registers the temperature change, and the nervous system reads it as a return to safety. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers — that it was made to survive temperature shifts.

Cognitive → name three things you decided today. Not three things that happened. Three things you chose. Naming a choice is the act of refusing to be only a recipient.

Relational → send one voice memo. Not a text. Two minutes or less, to someone you love. The voice carries information the keyboard cannot. Your friend hears your exhaustion, your laugh — the body of you, alive and reachable.

Gomez wrote vampires as Black queer women who refused to be killed politely, because survival in this country has always required speaking the violence aloud before the violence wrote the obituary. The senator's son's slurs were said in a bar. The reporter heard. The congressman repeated. The silence broke before the hate became routine. That breaking is the work.

What is the thing you've been carrying silently this week because saying it out loud feels like it would cost too much — and what does the silence already cost?

The people whose work is why the rest of us are still showing up.

Reinaldo Arenas — Cuban poet who wrote five books on toilet paper smuggled out of Castro's prisons, fled in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and finished Before Night Falls in a New York apartment as he was dying of AIDS in 1990 at age 47.

Tony Kushner — Playwright whose Angels in America (1991) remains the most ambitious theatrical engagement with the AIDS crisis ever written. Pulitzer, multiple Tonys, still being revived.

Jewelle Gomez — Black lesbian writer whose 1991 novel The Gilda Stories reinvented vampire mythos through 200 years of Black queer survival. Founding board member of GLAAD.

A federal court is hearing arguments to block the DOJ from accessing trans children's medical records — Lambda Legal. Pope Leo XIV challenged Speaker Mike Johnson's framing of border enforcement as Christian, citing Matthew 25:35.

What these share is the slow accumulation of refusals — a writer smuggling pages, a court hearing the families, a pope quoting scripture back at the men who weaponized it — somewhere in that gathering, a different country is being assembled, by hand.

Kushner wrote this for a character dying of AIDS in a play whose other figures included a closeted Mormon, a hallucinating Roy Cohn, and an actual angel crashing through a Brooklyn ceiling. The play is a wreckage of a country, but the line that holds it is about what comes after — the patient act of telling, being heard, letting the story become more than the wound.

Who is the one person you can tell the truest version of this week to before you sleep tonight, and what is the first sentence you will say

Stand if you can. Put one hand on the doorframe — somewhere the house has been holding you up without thanks. Take the breath.

Beannachd na talmhainn ort — the blessing of the earth on you — through this Friday, through whatever the news does next, through the heat and the men who cannot hold their own bodies upright. The mountain laurel will keep opening whether or not the senator's son apologizes. The cardinal will come back to the feeder.

Gus an coinnich sinn a-rithist, biodh sìth agad — until we meet again, may peace be with you

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