Regime Change Starts at Home

The thing is dear Millennials, I do believe that you got somethings right. Take, for example, the shared invisible labor thing at home. For this show, I'm your biggest fan. Your love and parenting partnerships created something closer to parity than I’ve ever been able to attain, IRL and on tv. And, I have tried, oh, how I have tried to replicate it at home. It’s like how I keep getting closer and closer to farming becoming a real part of my financial stability. JK. Farming for all is to utopia what dreaming is to insomniacs, we want that, yes… but, y’know, reality bites. I know that the future will make us all farmers, just ask Matt Damon the pretend astronaut from the Martian, not the sexy CIA operative Jason Bourne (my go to alter ego; Janette Bourne) JK. And, I know that menopausal women of a certain white line-age secretly want to be Carrie from Homeland. 9/11 made her bulletproof. Take a hike cancel culture, we’re with Carrie! If only she were a bit older, Carrie could be a calling - She’s such a Carrie! But, people would probaby think of Sissy Spacek and it would all be ruined. OK Millennials, that’s two things you got right. You get credit for invisible labor sharing and Carrie Mathison.

There’s a drought going on in California, my home, and the drought will likely drive me from this place. Eventually. Or, sooner than I think. California will be a desert, again but people don't really care yet. It is written though as the costs of freedom and of pleasure when we turn our back on Mother Nature. The drought causes fire season to get more extreme here year after year but it's not a voting issue - yet. There are military style fire fighting camps popping up for youngsters and even though my daughter still wants to go play outside, she doesn’t spend her days talking make believe to animals and plants like before she entered the digital domain so forestry doesn't hold much sway with her. If we can outsmart the weather, I'd want her to grow up to be a farmer but she doesn’t have the attention span for it. Neither do I, but I can fake it when cornered. All my daughter’s attention span has been gobbled up by the overlords of the interwebs. Her growing things organically inspo is routinely carpet bombed by the armies of none. Nobody really wants to be a farmer anymore. Everybody wants to rule the world.

To be a good ruler, you first need an audience and to get a good audience you need a good controversy. Everyone on the internet knows that opinions are just as good as facts when it comes to likes. For example, the Iraq war. When that kerflufflefuckstick started in 2004, I for one, didn’t like it. But, back then there wasn't really anywhere to thumbsdown other than the street. The you break it you buy it underpinning of the vote to go to war in Iraq was a class A controversy that imparted lessons on individual choice if you had aspirations for getting an audience, or votes. I was already twenty five years old, but that was the first time that a vote inside my government got my attention. The meaning of that roll call pollinated in me like golden rice at a critical junction in my rainy season as a peaceful woman. War. It was a fact v. opinion exercise planted where a feminist doctrine ought to have been sewn. All that souped up WMD-GMO-VOODO vitamin A might have helped me to see more clearly how the levers of government can break down, I still feel ashamed that our feministic sensabilities lost out to a fib. Our own team exploited our fears of the Allahmighty boogeymen who came night riding through our ambien laced dreams back then, kicking up dust and apathy as we all crested that first really big American lie pretending to alter our patriotism, keeping us up too late with false flags about danger. Being crushed by a meteorite was more likely than being beheaded by Isis but that didn’t stop George Bush or the media rip readers from convincing us to be very, very afraid. As we lost our way and our collective audience power, channel + channel, bomb by bomb, I was caught up in thinking only of the backdraft to our freedom. We the audience started to disband and began to search online. Although back on tv we remained safely padded from the realities filtered by high production storytelling while the regimes did battle, dismantling our civic morality along with the deforestation and total annihilation of living history and ancient circle of life in Baghdad.

We survived our own trauma from 9/11 by yelling at each other for believing or not believing the big WMD lie. And this, before facebook! Somehow we communicated about it. We were reminded that words matter without the aid of social media. And yet, a thousand points of light be damned, the son of my father is your big brother or some bullshit kept the hawks flying. Terror begets war. War permeates our common senses. The insomniacs invaded our dreams. I think that the Iraq war was the most drama I had experienced watching Americans wrainkle each other, getting juiced off of finger pointing and I told you so’s, since the OJ verdict. Oh, but we’re so much more comfortable and well informed now than then, so much faster at missing the point.

That midlife calls and doesn’t leave a message, isn’t a surprise, it’s tradecraft. A younger me recalls those anti-war rally cries for world peace as natural. Self interest didn’t enter into the picture. Regime change starts at home. Ask any mutineer or a waterboarder and they will tell you to read between the teleprompts. Ask me no questions and I will tell you no lies came from the Andrew Sisters after all, the same war band that sang the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy song. If you really want to know how you got here, when the film of transparent tape stretches all the way from one side to the other - from left to right, you surprisingly find yourself somewhere everyone can agree. Spoiler alert: Social Media! The places where ‘forgive yourself and make peace with your mistakes’ and ‘you are the cause’ are not mutually exclusive. Ask any preacher. Don’t tread on me!

Timing and healthy soil are the tools of the successful dictator looking for trouble and also of the tough love spiritual teacher. I took to the desert in the 90’s to farm where there is little water and the ground is hard and full of cracks to meet such a man. I wanted to make an effort for something bigger than my own backyard and get to pick fruit from the tree of life as a reward for the time well spent. I was an empty vessel looking to hitch up my wagon for some enlightenment or a good conflict (still true today). I found a spiritual teacher there in the high desert who ruled a remote ashram with benevolence and knowledge. A cis-boom-Buddah-Jew, he knew how to farm the mind. First he found the cracks and then he withheld the water. It’s a much longer story but I loved him like a stockholmer in spite of his almanac being a bit misogynistic and more than a little bit outdated. He was actually good for me, until he wasn't. He deliberately planted a mind-bomb close to where the fissures occurred naturally, in my weakness. Cheeky monkey. The purpose, he claimed, was to realize the power in the holy waters of causation and to teach me to divert them at will. My life was to be steered toward the Sun at all costs, nevermind the pulling of the tides. In other words, all yang and no Kuan Yin. A better architect would know that levees built on unstable banks eventually fail. In my case the moon finally showed up and pushed all the silt downstream until it stopped sifting in semi-regular tessellations and built up in a pile entirely on the right side of my body. The masculine energy side. The linear, independent, hard, fast, protective side. The irony that remains as ‘you are the causes’, was imparted with a gueschault that spiraled up through what is likely an all male lineage of asceticism, a long line of observant troglodytes and gets perpetrated over and over at home and at work. But, at the time the hardness of the rule appealed to the hardness in me and so placing a lock on the pink palace door just seemed a prudent thing to do, a way to warn off bandits or freedom of thought. I put a pause on feminine influence for too much time.

Freedom, as a general rule, is often co-opted as a male condition mirrored by surrender on the feminine side of the ledger. As I contemplate just how exactly I am to reconcile the cause of freedom fighting from the current meno “pause” of my fifties, I must point out that there is some righteous biblical jelly going on that keeps blaming Eve for everything millennia after millennia. I do want to do gender traditional things while being modern. I do want to be a good mother. It doesn't seem fair that I was raised on a diet of 'tough love' and fake it until you make it. I should have seen the flaw in the credo then, way back when I was tripping through the high desert. Snakes are everywhere in the desert. Hey, there's a snake in my boot!

The Mojave, in particular, may be best known for its prickly pear cactus, its dryness and heat but not as much for its extreme cold metal temperature dips and day for night lights. Being a spiritual nomad I spent many-a-galaxy-glowed-up-all-nighter in communion with the high desert silence. I can attest to the spectacular nothingness of the Mojave. Silence on Earth's desert mountains invert sound in surround sound-less-ness that we all should aspire to, probably daily. The Mojave kidnapped my breath without a witness while the surrounding air retreated to nothing. The desert sound vibrates backward the way an explosion crushes noise under concrete and dust and turns the whole world inside out until breath crawls back on its belly humming in a foreign language. In the desert the hunger that overtakes is not for food, it's for freedom. If I waded deep into silences so deafening and terrible that the fear became love and the dark became so void that it was clear to see that the ground was the sky, then crack by crack causation became the concept that snuffed out the thoughts and broke down the wall. Life before the sun comes back is still life. Meditation. Fait accompli.

In the nighttime desert, in the Mojave, accusations arise from an infinite horizon and the answers come calling like a scream through the starlit straights - ‘it is all your fault!’. You are the cause. ~ I alone can fix it. Saddam Hussein probably knew that. George Bush probably did too, although I can’t vouch for the Arabian desert or the Texas one either. Why didn’t the magic work on these guys? These two. Jesus Christ. I'm sure they both were out there at one point or another, smoking weed or burning flags or something akin to a blow job of the mind by some profiteering advisors. Leadership has its perks. I think about the big lie that happened to the Iraqi desert that used to be worshipped as the cradle of civilization. The few opposing the many on opposite sides of the world. 9/11/9/11/9/11/9/11. The loss. The pain. The cause of that perverted thinking laced to our legacy of freedom forever. The layers and layers of lies and unforgivably despicable assault that our war heaped upon their desert, and the bycatch of women destroyed while feeding their families. War is pitiless and unfair. How complacent must we become to allow a lie to become a war?

Operation Inherent Resolve 2.0. Let the great matriarchal melee commence! There will be no fightin. Trust is the only weapon we have for hybrid war so who better to manage it? Who better to lay out a new narrative. C'mon M&Ms, we've got training to do. It’s going to have to be truth that takes out the big lies. Trusth and the Internet. David and Goliath. Attention trainees, call upon the daily balanced and awake and start your engines. Forgiveness does not come for those who watched, or those who faked it, just ask the greatest generation. Let’s bake bread with our enemies.

Awaken the matriarchy and invite the revolution in for dinner. If we're too tired to do it, maybe Gen Z can.