This is my Substack. It’s a Substack “Bestseller.”

On my Substack, “How to Have Fun in the Apocalypse” I approach the topic from different angles once or twice a month. It is Visit my Substack here. Below are 2 sample posts.

Twenty Dogs Sitting in a Row with Their Leashes on the Ground Next to Them

I just wanted to tell you all that in various parks in Mexico City you can find lines of dogs sitting next to each other with their leashes on the ground next to them. This is a form of doggy daycare/school. The people who train and care for these dogs are as skilled at this as anyone is skilled at anything. What you see in this picture is not a moment. This goes on and on for hours and hours. Sometimes, one dog will start to get up and mostly the dog whisperer just sort of lifts their chin in that dog’s direction, shoots them a look, and the dog sits back down. I have spent lots of time observing, and I can tell you, it rarely goes beyond that. When it does, they calmly walk over and wordlessly lift the dog’s leash and it sits back down. Once, I saw a dog run off and expected the person to run after it, but he did not. Three or four other dogs got up and went and got the run away and brought it back. Then they all sat back down(!). I felt like I had just witnessed a miracle, but the person barely reacted. In Mexico, people have higher expectations of dogs. I think in the US, we set the dog bar too low and they trip over it. The order of best things in life is: love, art, food, sex, dogs, nature. OK bye.

Poetry and Jobs

Bernadette Mayer was a very cool poet who also wrote writing prompts. They are here. I can’t recommend them enough as a way to coax yourself into creative play. I’m in a writing group that my friend Nicole Stanton started where once a month we spend exactly 25 minutes doing one of Mayer’s prompts. Mayer was known for documenting and celebrating the mundane. What the hell is actually mundane though? “Only boring people get bored,” my grandma says.

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Last month, the prompt was “Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry.”

Here is what I wrote:

When I sold mushrooms at the farmer’s market, I met a lot of old people. One of them said, “don’t spend your 20s trying to fix broken men.” Another, who was 99, told me, “enjoy your life.” Another told me that cats know all about quantum physics.

When I was a hostess at a 24-hour diner, I got in trouble for spending unnecessary amounts of time “marrying the ketchups.” It was so satisfying.

When I was a hostess at a hotel steakhouse, my manager asked me to put on some lip gloss and I said I would only if he did first. Later, I had sex with his brother who lied to me about his age and drove a probably-leased yellow Lamborghini.

When I took care of children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan my older West Indian nanny counterparts at the park told me, “look how you dressed all ya clothes with holes! People gonna think that you are po’!” They offered to help me make a budget so I could figure out how to buy new clothes.

When I worked at a state senator’s office, I wrote a letter to constituents on her behalf assuring them “I, too, oppose human consumption of horse meat.”

When I worked at Senator Durbin’s office I read every letter ever written to his office by someone in an immigration detention center. Many mentioned floods of raw sewage.

When I worked for GrowNYC, I left a few hundred dollars worth of EBT chips on the subway and also drove my boss’s car into a wall from a full stop while she was in the passenger seat.

When I worked for the Art Institute of Chicago I watched a woman sit in front of an medieval tryptic restoring it with the precision of a surgeon—she’d been retouching the same painting full time for two years. Later, in a meeting, I stretched and my armpit hair horrified a room of perfectly-dressed curators.

When I worked for MetLife, a man told me how he had been accused of murdering his wife and daughter, imprisoned, and beaten mercilessly. That’s why he didn’t have teeth anymore, he said. He didn’t have teeth. Turned out they weren’t even dead. She’d gotten mad at him and taken the kid to her mom’s house. The bodies found belonged to a different mother and child. That interview was supposed to be about insurance.

When I worked for a world champion race car driver, I talked to homeless teenagers who passionately loved desert plants.

When I worked for a makeup company, I gave an all-day, all-hands workshop with a big bright red period stain on the front of my beige slacks (I don’t know how it went forward instead of back.) I just pretended it wasn’t there. It was fine.

Anyway, jobs make you tired. And it’s hard to write tired. But it was all poetry.