Wednesday is Monday

Yes, I'm still doing this.

Pictured here: post delayed due to a recent family gathering.

This meant to go out on Monday, but apparently I fucked up the scheduling with Fathermouth-level ineptitude. (Don’t worry, Fathermouth fans. He wouldn’t be offended.)

I’ve been distracted from more regular posting over the past week because of a 5-day visit from Mothermouth that ended on Monday. This was the first time Father and Mothermouths have been in the same house for 24 hours or longer in about 20 years, with the exception of the 3 days in January that Fathermouth spent on the floor of Mothermouth’s dining room on a shit-covered mattress being fed by hand and yelling that the chairs and furniture were angry dogs and children trying to attack him, as some of you may recall from my saga of his post-booster travails.

So. Being in a domestic environment with both of your divorced parents who haven’t significantly interacted since you were a teenager is an interesting thing. More than any other situation I can imagine, it recapitulates your childhood through the funhouse mirror of simultaneously being an adult who’s cooking their meals and having Zoom meetings with clients and running a farm.

You get a lot of interactions the equivalent of asking whether you’ve finished your homework while you’re on the phone trying to buy homeowner’s insurance.

Mothermouth is in many ways a contrast to the surly one-eyed fellow presently living with me: where he is almost maddeningly leisured in most things, Mothermouth is an anxious pinball with ADHD, unable to tolerate 30 seconds of silence without filling it with small talk (really, you can see how quickly she becomes uncomfortable when a house falls silent) and unable to sit still without inventing chores around your house. While Fathermouth inventively curses and delights in finding something that sucks about most things, Mothermouth couches the same critical feelings with cheerful, passive-aggressive statements like “I’m just helping around the house since you’re obviously so busy” or “you look like you need a break so I though I’d do this over for you.”

I’m not trying to bitch about my parents- an activity that, for spectators, ranks up there as about as ass-numbingly uninteresting as describing a vague dream you had. It just meant that there was an interesting cocktail of emotions constantly filling every inch of the house with a grumbly guy stomping around and an anxious woman re-cleaning everything and both of them continuously dependent on Guttermouth for basic tasks like how to charge their phones, checking, re-checking, and re-re-checking the locations of nearby stores, and needing immediate updates about emails they’ve received and don’t know how to open.

It’s like babysitting your parents while simultaneously going back in time to being 16 years old and living at home again. It’s exhausting and the two roles coexisting means you don’t get a single second of peace until they’re both asleep, but it’s an existentially fascinating experience nonetheless: reunited by the one thing they have in common, they’re constantly taking in how you’ve “turned out,” whether they comment on it or not; becoming aware of all the features of your now well-developed identity that came from one or the other of them; coming further to grips with the notion that you’re a fully-formed adult who continued developing outside of their influence and became something they couldn’t have predicted.

There was a moment when I was in the basement setting up the long tables of growing boxes to pre-grow seedlings for this spring’s crops, with Fathermouth holding up the floating substrate brick while I poured water into the reservoir and Mothermouth helpfully but unnecessarily tilting the growing lamp so we could see better that instantly transported me back to being about 10 years old doing science projects at home with them looking on approvingly in a very rare moment of harmony and peace.

There was also a moment where I paused in a phone call to ask Mothermouth, “let me stop you there. Are you in the middle of explaining to a 43-year old woman how to buy auto insurance?”

It was a great visit (I invited her, after all, since there was an Elvis tribute concert in town) and I’m glad it’s over, and I learned that if I have both of them in the house at the same time I can expect to accomplish absolutely nothing productive beyond the most basic of farm tasks, in which Mothermouth will dutifully follow along taking pictures of animals and volunteering to muck out stables like it’s a safari.

But here was the moment of that visit that will probably be of most interest.

Sometime last week, Husbandmouth and I were laying awake in bed and heard my parents talking in the kitchen downstairs, where they’d both woken up insanely early, found each other in there, and were chatting over coffee.

Mothermouth confesses to dad that about three weeks ago, a riverboat cruise in Europe that she’s going on with her friend changed their requirements to mandate booster shots, and while they would have issued a refund, Mothermouth was so worried about ruining the trip for her friend that she got the booster shot, was worried about what would happen to her, and was afraid to tell Guttermouth because she had been saying for over a year how strongly she agreed about the risks, tyranny, all of it, and now I would think she was a hypocrite, and she was, and so on.

So, me being the charming little firecracker I am, bop downstairs in my bathrobe, pour coffee, and say, “so, you got the shot?”

Like a kid in the principal’s office, Mothermouth begins a lengthy confession-apology (thankfully without tears) where she explains at great, great length that she was torn, agonized over it for 3 days, wanted to call me to get my opinion but was afraid that I’d talk her out of it and then she’d still get her friend upset, feels weak, feels like a coward, a hypocrite, etc.

It was all pretty awful.

What was awful was what was going on inside me, too. I’m not going to lie, because a) I don’t do that, b) it’s gross, and c) it’s absolutely something I would not do on a publication with an audience. I DID feel a certain amount of disgust- my mind immediately wandered to, “how much of what Mothermouth yelled and commiserated and forward to her friends and read over the past year and a half was just her conforming to MY meme, because she talked to me so often, and the moment a stronger, more influential meme showed up since I don’t live nearby anymore, she just blows with the wind? Is my mom just a fucking sheep?”

And another part said, “well, maybe she is, and while that’s not admirable, it hasn’t stopped you from loving her, and this absolute anguish she’s in was inflicted on her.”

And another part said, “look how worried your mother is that you respect her, and in this moment, you kinda don’t, but are you going to kick her in the ribs while she’s down?”

So I slowly responded to Mothermouth by saying that no, I wasn’t angry, or upset, or disappointed, I was mainly just worried about the consequences of her getting boosted, especially when moderate valve damage showed up on a test for the first time in her life about a month after her first two shots, and also worried that the next time they threaten to inconvenience her, she’ll get another shot.

No, she assured me, with some renewed strength in her voice. She’s so angry that they forced this choice on her that she told her friend she won’t get another shot for anything at this point. This is absolutely the last one. (This is exactly what she said after the first two, when she would have been banned from the rehabilitation center she’s volunteered at for 20 years since retiring and is her reason for existence, but never mind).

I said, “this is what coercion looks like. How does it make you feel?”

It made her feel terrible, she said, and she hates them for it, and for the latest of many times in the past year said, “I’m scared of what’s next.”

I occasionally glanced at Fathermouth out of the corner of my eye who sat a few feet away, finishing his coffee, not saying anything, impossible to read. The weird liminality of the visit hit again and I thought that this- kitchen table and all (albeit a different kitchen in a different house)- was the same set dressing as 30 years ago except that Mothermouth and I weren’t shouting and it didn’t end in getting slapped across the room and maybe kicked in the ribs for good measure.

So. I sure hope Mothermouth is okay, because I believe this is the last time she will allow herself to be coerced like I believe Brandon gave a shit about immigration policy and inflation last night.

And this was the lesson here. I CAN’T get angry at people that aren’t indomitable Vikings who agree to do horrible shit that will create consensus and momentum to crush those of us who DO resist. Are they, as Mothermouth flagellated herself, weak? Cowardly? Hypocritical? Scared? All or some of those? Maybe. But it’s like getting angry at the rain for making you wet.

One of the underlying statements of the 30-40-30 model of mass formation psychosis is that these numbers are reasonably RELIABLE: there will ALWAYS be 30% who will discover that they were really Nazis all along, they just needed someone to give it a name, always be 40% who will just do what they’re told, no matter how absurd, because they want to go on cruises, and 30% who will have an autoimmune response to lies and coercion.

This is a rough map of the formula that humans have evolved: it’s a ratio that exists in balance to make civilization generally work, and you can’t get rid of it without completely changing the incentives for natural selection.

(This also applies to the elites, by the way: in their universe, we should ALL be the 40% because life will go better for everyone if we just do what we’re told, and the 30% of fanatics will always be THEIR fanatics, the noncommissioned officers carrying out their will. Everyone thinks they’ve got a better ratio in mind, and starts hacking on humanity to push the sliders in the directions they want. More on this in a subsequent article.)

Since you’ve made it to the end, it’s time for a reward: the introduction of a thing I’ll do monthly (since this was, again, supposed to go out on the 1st). I’m randomly selecting one of the paid subscribers to receive a FREE T-SHIRT from Brothermouth’s store (yes, the site is presently very ghetto, he’s moved to a new host and will beautify it later). Whoever you are, you’ll receive a private email with a code to redeem for your free torso pants.

You can pick whatever you want, but I recommend his most recent design created by popular demand on substack:

Pictured: A new reason strangers will stare at your boobs.

He’ll be rolling out a new design at least monthly.

You unpaid subscribing ingrates will have to settle for a 15% off code for anything in the store: BUTTHOLE. It will go live at 12PM EST today and be good through the month (or forever, whatever, we’ll see.)

New post arriving this evening, which was supposed to be your actual Wednesday update. Just look at all this good shit happening.