Because he is so deeply, irredeemably amoral and stupid
Hi, friend. Your Miss O’ awoke this morning, the first day since Saturday, October 3, on her own without an alarm and feeling not unwell. After ten days nursing a nasty respiratory infection, I found myself on waking thinking of a title, “Why the Sea Is Salt,” and another, “Snow White and Rose Red,” and visualizing a filmstrip called “Pandora,” accompanied by a cassette tape or record on which played a high “BEEP” when it was time to manually change the picture cell. (I was fortunate enough to be not only a student using such machines, but a teacher who used them even four or five years into my job.)
The titles, I realized, all came out of a foggy memory of fourth grade, the year I had a depressive young teacher named Miss Shelburn, whose unusual blond streak of hair and blotched skin meant, I realize now, that she had Vitiligo, a condition where the immune system causes lighter skin pigmentation to show up in patches. She spent most of her teaching time sitting at her desk, slightly slumped over. She liked that I read aloud with so much expression that I didn’t notice I said “lives” with a long i when it should have been “lives” with the short one, a mistake that made her snort, the only trace of a laugh in her I’d seen, more than worth a little personal embarrassment.
Miss Shelburn’s one day of true enthusiasm came the day she wheeled in a television set and turned on Princess Anne’s royal wedding live from England, and we watched it all day. (We watched a lot of television that year, Public Television, especially The Electric Company (starring Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman) to help us learn the metric system, for all the good that did, but hey, Rita and Morgan!) Miss Shelburn was enchanted by this fairytale wedding.
That year of the stories, first, those myths and legends of salty seas and fairy tale castles and locked boxes, that came into my waking world this morning, and I’m not sure why.
Fourth grade was also the year we learned American history, going so far as to spend a day out in the cold mist in “Pilgrim” clothes, and I think some “Indians,” in paper hats and no coats, roasting potatoes in a pit poor Mr. Westerberg, the custodian, had to dig. I mostly remember flying around on the blacktop looking out at bare gray trees and suburban houses, trying to imagine a log village and pretending this was fun.
I still have the white Pilgrim apron my reluctant mom, Lynne, sewed for me by hand, which I wore over her 1950s tiny black and white check skirt, long then; a skirt I wore again, now knee-length, for the Junior Variety show in high school, and which we donated to the drama club along with several of her other skirts and dresses.
[We interrupt this letter to note that a search for the apron for a photo portrait was unsuccessful, because like a dope I moved it out of its drawer of 20 years when I reorganized some drawers this summer, but prayers to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost objects, have been dispatched. -ed.]
Fourth grade—for all the weirdness of Miss Shelburn, and my burgeoning hormones returning my hair to natural curl, and Billy Beard accidentally smearing India ink on my only white blouse (this being the time when art teachers let children use supplies like India ink), and learning about the happy slaves in the fields of our Southern plantations through the Ginn Reader (I wish I were kidding)—was the time when I think I discovered the real magic of fiction. The Scholastic Book Fair meant something better than candy. I could read whatever I wanted.
It was the 1970s, and all the girls and women, even teachers, wore miniskirts. My mom wore slacks. Both meant liberation.
Women are human beings, living, sentient creatures who love to feel sensation and experience their bodies and think with their minds. We generate and incubate and give life. Without women, and their lifelong transformative sufferings, there is no being.
Unfortunately for the species, far too many men do not experience women as beings.
We are [checks notes] “whores.”
How is this still the American female narrative for American men?
I’m sick of it.
I’m sick of stupid.
I’m sick of men.
We are bored.
There is not a moment of my life I have regretted living and sleeping alone. Not a minute.
All this comes to me full force from SNL standups and rape allegations and once more, with feeling (no, really, this time we mean it), “no more frat parties until further notice” and promises to “investigate.” Until the coup, of course.
Was it those gym shorts? But wasn’t she a whore? Megyn said she was “beefy.”
How in the name of everything sacred in the universe is THIS where ostensibly sentient humans are? How is this the best we have to offer our creator? (How pathetic is it that a powerful man can only feel smart when represented by that sort of female?)
All that off my chest, it’s time for my nighttime antibiotics, inhaler, and Flonase, as I gratefully turn toward my very own bed in my very own home surrounded by collected things imbued with love and memory, a sacred place, free of collective human-made stupidity and frail-egoed men, and lift from my bedstand my reading glasses and a novel into which to sink, to sleep perchance to dream.
Americans, as if it’s not enough to have loved ones facing terrible illnesses and personal tragedies, we are daily perpetuating a hellscape for the nation, all of our own making. Bigotry and hatred and mass murder and rape cannot be The Story. We’ve done that to death. And it sucks. We have to write another story. Write your chapter. Have a reading. And Abolish ICE.
Sending love and reading among the evils (unleashed on us by men),
Miss O’
