I Have Good News and Bad News

Which do you want first?

Hi friends!

How we all doing? I know I am the words lady, but even I, the words lady, cannot adequately use human words to describe my recent mental state. So, in honor of my latest attempt to spiral up while mucking through a swamp of escalating depravity, we’re going good news first:

The Good News

My melanoma has been taken care of! Yay! I am so relieved!

I would not recommend having two surgeries in less than four weeks, but it was medically necessary and definitely did something to me. The extent of what it did I am still processing on account of my last brain cell taking medical leave, but I am so, so happy that my arm is now in the clear and everything is healing beautifully.

Hearing the word “cancer” was horrifying, but it broke a couple of very unhelpful loops I had going for quite some time. And, while none of this was easy for my mind, body, or spirit, there are worse things than having a 99.9% curable brush with your own fragility.

My greatest wish, which I couldn’t even share because I wanted it to come true so badly, was that the second surgery would give me nothing for my insanity blog. That wish, I am thrilled to say, was granted. My doctor was so quick and so kind, the sweet nurse fed me half a Valium in a little cup when I arrived, and it went perfectly. Even though it took two weeks for me to get back to a normal level of typing, here I am.

While I was recovering, I went back and read a few of my most recent newsletters and it seems that I left out two very unhinged details when I chronicled my shanking at the hands of an elderly man at Kaiser Permanente. That surgery was right where my bra sits, an area that they, in the construction business, would call a load bearing wall. It took three weeks before I could wear a real bra again, the longest I have gone without the assistance of underwire since I was 12.

But that’s not even the craziest omission.

After I was shanked, I put my useless cotton bralette back on and WALKED HOME ALONE. I now know that walking home alone with six fresh stitches in your back, even if it is just a ten minute straight shot down Sunset and you’re insane enough to think you’re OK, is wildly unacceptable behavior.

It took a week and a half for me to surrender to the reality of what was happening after I did that, but once I stopped trying to be OK it all got easier to deal with. So, here’s a downy-soft gentle reminder for those of us who strut through life refusing to be taken down: Being not OK is always an option and definitely less insane than walking home alone, tits askew, when you’re in shock after surgery.

Being not OK was old hat to me by the time I had my melanoma removed, so I knew what to expect and vowed to treat myself gently. I did get a little depressed when my arm hurt too much to write — they arrested Don Lemon and I didn’t get to make lemonade — but I got over it. I also briefly considered reviewing Melania, but realized that I might need a lobotomy after subjecting myself to that.

Two surgeries is my limit for this quarter.

The Bad News

Jeff Bezos could have used the Melania fake box office money to pay the journalists axed from The Washington Post, but we’re living in a confirmed pyramid scheme run by a bunch of pedophiles and sociopaths.

Because I’ve been trapped in my own personal hell for the past six weeks, I am very invested in improving my mental well-being and have yet to subject myself to combing through the millions of emails that are now public. But here is the link to Jmail, a working Gmail parody that lets you search, sort, and star what’s been released if that’s something you’d like to get into.

I don’t need to comb through the emails to feel the depth of what’s been revealed. I am a woman and I am disgusted alongside all other women who feel the pain of objectification and abuse on a sliding scale that begins with sexual harassment and ends with being sex trafficked and raped (while still a girl) by the most powerful men in the world. It seems preposterous that all of this would be out there with so little consequence until you consider that the global systems of justice are overseen by the same group of shameless, evil sociopaths protected in plain sight all these years.

The last I wrote about Epstein was a plea to center the victims:

This story is really about how powerful, soulless men can perpetrate this level of abuse and machination, globally, with little consequence.

And I am hoping with every fibre of my being that this is also a story about how the women who survived that abuse take those men down and see the justice they deserve at last.

Since then, Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice, while legally required to release all the files and redact the victims’ identities, released a version of the files that shielded Epstein’s associates, most notably Donald Trump, and revealed the names, addresses, and nude photographs of dozens of victims, including Jane Does. This morning, Bondi was questioned by the House Judiciary Committee. Every victim seated behind her raised their hand in confirmation when asked if her office refused to meet with them. Bondi didn’t even turn around to see their response.

Bondi and her team of miscreant patriarchal demons can redact the wrong things and reveal what should be concealed, but there has been a shift. These emails were squeezed out for public consumption. You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube again.

I felt the shift back in November, and I felt it again with the new release. This chaotic shift is worldwide and being met with varying levels of accountability. It’s both a conspiracy come true and a spiritual crisis that we’re now confronting globally. Epstein’s emails repeatedly mention the Dalai Lama. He, of course, has denied his involvement in a post on “X,” the platform owned by Elon Musk, who has deep ties to Epstein himself but denies ever visiting the island, which, if true, was due to logistical issues. That’s just so fucking him.

Any foundation, including our collective sense of reality, cannot survive this many cracks. And so, I think, now that we know what we know, we each get to pick one more conspiracy to believe wholeheartedly as a little garnish.

Mine is going to be the timing of Bad Bunny’s halftime show being way too convenient.

I want us to have nice things and moments of artful mass catharsis that deliver a powerful message of cultural protest. Bad Bunny is a phenomenal artist. Watching his performance was wildly moving. It felt like ingesting a beam of light in a buffet of darkness. I am a white lady writing a Substack post and I want to be clear that I am not saying representation is not essential or valid. But, this was a useful cultural release valve at a time when, and I do not say this figuratively, there are parts of America that are at war with ICE with plans for expansion. His performance dominated the news cycle so aggressively that I didn’t even know who won the game until Monday night. Also, that man dated a Kardashian. Donald Trump wins gold for his shameless, satanic self-mythologizing, but Kris Jenner and her brood run a tight race.

I’m having Barbie movie culture war flashbacks. Heavy is the head that wears the tin foil crown.

I am now nearly two months TikTok sober and have no plans to chase that dragon again. Unfortunately, I needed to fill the void with something else to look at. So, I re-downloaded the unique hybrid of LinkedIn and a psych ward that is the Substack app.

There is a lucrative corner of Substack that reads as if it was written by Patrick Bateman’s ravenous niece and I tend to avoid it by never engaging. But last week, one of the girlies decided to announce the launch of A Goop of One's Own — my name, not hers — a new vertical of her enterprise dedicated to the various things a gal might now do to maintain a certain level of aesthetic wellness. It set so many women off that I was forced to take it all in.

This extremely dramatic lady saying she would rather die was my fave response:

I live in Los Angeles, which is obviously the global epicenter of Unwellness Culture, so this kind of nonsense doesn’t do my head in. Mother Gwyneth’s vagina candle walked so perimenopause could run and I’ve been known to order her ghost kitchen’s chicken caesar wrap, a delicious, gluten-free creation that comes swaddled in an oddly textured casing of cassava root. I love it! And yet, as I read all of this ruckus, hagmaxxing, minus one chunk from my right arm, wondering why anyone would willingly go to the doctor so much, I couldn’t help but think I have been neglecting Unwellness Culture in my ongoing reportage. It is an important pillar of the Age of Unhingement™ and will be addressed accordingly going forward.

Peptides can fix a lot of things, but not your personality!

Anyhoo …

I’m so happy to be back and officially rounding the corner on 100 editions of Burn It All Down. If I get my shit together, I can hit that milestone around my third anniversary in April. I think that means you’ll be hearing from me a bit more frequently in the coming weeks.

I’ll let you decide what kind of news that is.

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™

Liz