Part 1

I was traveling to Golub-Dobrzyn, a small town in north-central Poland where, almost a hundred years ago, my Great grandfather was accused of murder.

It was March 18, 2022.

I may have looked slightly disheveled when I entered the Warsaw train station as a Red Cross agent inside immediately asked which part of Ukraine I was fleeing from.

Looking over his shoulder I saw hordes of tired Ukrainians in puffy jackets wandering around the train station in a daze. One older woman wearing a frayed knit cap that matched her pale, purple skin sat hunched over sipping from an apple juice box. A six or seven year old girl in a peach fluffy jacket with dirt-encrusted petals on it was in her mother’s lap playing a game on her I-phone.

Watching them made me feel grateful I had a country to go back to, that I had shelter, food, stability, and like most feelings of gratitude, it lasted all the way until the next inconvenience in my life, which in this case was the train to Golub-Dobjyn that never arrived.

After three hours of impatiently waiting (officially making me one of the few Jews in Poland to be upset a train didn’t show up) I ordered an Uber for 450 zlotys- it would be a three hour drive- and eight minutes later a bald man pulled up in a black, bird-shit-stained, Camry.

His name was Gocha, he was originally from Georgia, and the only English he knew was “Let’s go” which he employed to mean a wide variety of things.

“For Raanan?”

“Let’s go!”

“We’re going to Golub-Dobrzyn, right?”

“Let’s go, let’s go.”

I got into the back seat right as he yelled “Let’s go” a third time- this one in a demanding, excited tone as if he was ordering someone else to drive- and then pulled jerkily out of the train station while slapping the steering wheel two times with his hand.

For Polish standards Gocha was a fairly safe driver by which I mean he waited until we were on the highway before FaceTiming with his grandson.

“Upro akhlos miit’ane,” he said, his eyes directly on his stocky middle aged son in the video, who was now trying to bring his baby closer to the screen.

“Ra saq’vareli bavshvia,” he said to the baby.

“Can you keep your eyes on the road?” I pleaded.

His twisted his head around so his eyes were directly on me now.

“Can you keep your eyes on the road?” I said frantically pointing out the windshield that he hadn’t looked out of in quite some time.

Tracing where my finger was pointing and ultimately deciding it was aimed at the cigarette dangling from his lips he proceeded to hand me one from his pack.

“Ak ts’adi.”

“Thank you.”

Soon it was dark.

Scraggly, Tim Burton-like trees barreled by in a starless night. We were an hour away from Golub-Dobrzyn. The road got darker, windier. Giant trucks flit by, ominous blobs of light and metal. No sound but the hum of the road. It was spookily dark in the way only rural roads at night can be.

I took out my Kindle and started scanning through a document my cousin- a physicist and amateur historian- had compiled about the murder.

It began on September 1st, 1926.

My great grandfather Avrohom Flusberg and his son Baruch- my grandfather- were pulling potatoes out of a small vegetable garden he had leased a block from his home when they heard a scream coming from the Jewish cemetery.

They rushed over to find a Roma woman in her 40’s- she was part of a caravan that had been staying in town since the previous night- howling over an open grave.

Annoyed that no one was helping her, Avrohom walked over to look inside the hole:

The corpse of a 4 year old girl lay at the bottom, her skin inhumanly white like a statue.

“Someone killed my daughter Ulka! Someone killed her!” The mother howled.

She started accusing one of the Jews in the crowd of murdering her daughter and when my great grandfather protested she decided he was in fact the murderer. She called out for help from Poles nearby who began eagerly chasing my Great grandfather down the slope that lead to the peacefully flowing Drwec River.

His plan was to make it to the police station before they could beat him to death.

What these Poles and that mother believed in that moment- or claimed to believe, or wanted to believe- was that my Great grandfather, being Jewish, had murdered that child and drained her blood to bake Matzot with on Passover. This antisemitic conspiracy is called Blood Libel and it has been leveled against Jews throughout history, often leading to pogroms and mass executions.

Avrohom made it to the police station.

He sat in a jail cell for three days awaiting trial. Meanwhile, Jews were beaten in the street, their businesses boycotted. Back at Avrohom’s home, his sister-in-law was giving birth in a room on the second floor while Poles stood outside throwing rocks through the window, the baby’s first cries mingling with the sound of shattered glass all around her.

“I am sure you have already read accounts of the Dobrzyn blood libel,” Avrohom wrote frantically in a letter to his brother in America. “I was the one who was worst hit by it…I am suffering greatly. My one aspiration is now to leave Dobrzyn and to never return to this Godforsaken place.”

Gocha was saying something from the front seat. I looked out the window:

We had arrived.

Part 2

Towering over Gocha’s car was a massive medieval fortress. The website said it was a 13th century Teutonic castle that had been renovated into a hotel though from the looks of it the renovations must have been on the inside.

In the night, it looked like something straight out of Dracula.

Gocha pulled up to the entrance which was guarded by a wooden statue of a man in a medieval hat smiling anti-semitically while holding a long golden cross.

I was about to get out of the car when Gocha put his hand on my shoulder.

“What?”

He wrote down the number 450 on a scrap of paper, pointed at it, and then pointed at me again.

“What are you saying, that I owe 450?”

He nodded.

“I paid already on the app…That’s how Uber works.”

He shook his head no.

There was unfortunately too much of a language barrier for me to explain that there was no way I didn’t pay for the Uber on the app as that is the defining property of Uber.

“I already paid,” I said showing him the receipt on my phone.

He shook his head again, this time in a sad manner that suggested he wished this was true but tragically it wasn’t.

I was in a bind.

The more I haggled with him, the more I was perpetuating a Jewish stereotype he might already have ingrained in him. But paying double for an Uber ride would haunt me for years, a feeling which also perpetuated a Jewish stereotype. In the end I decided to pay him the 450 zlotys but I didn’t tip, thereby perpetuating the ultimate Jewish stereotype.

You can’t win.

Gocha drove off so quickly it felt like he was obeying a trope in an old horror movie.

I pushed the forbidding double doors open and found myself in an ancient, stone courtyard.

All around me were big, fat, Ivyclung columns illuminated by a gumsmudged-dirty-penny-colored moon. There was no signs of other guests and the only evidence of modernity was a series of lamps hanging from the arches like fluorescent bats. I walked across the cloisters to a small lighted room where inside a woman with sleepy eyes stood behind a counter as if she was waiting for me.

You can check out anytime, but you can never leave.

“Hello…I reserved a room for the night.”

She stared at me.

“Raanan Hershberg,” I whispered tentatively.

The name- whose Jewiness grew exponentially with each syllable- pierced the airwaves like a grenade.

She looked at a black-bound ledger on the dusty counter and then handed me a cartoonishly big key.

I asked her what the Wi-Fi code was and she explained as best she could in broken English that this historic hotel didn’t have modern amenities like Wi-Fi or heat as they were trying to capture the authentic experience of not spending money on anything.

She then pointed to another set of doors in the courtyard for me to go through.

I pushed these two doors open and stepped into a cold brick stairwell shrouded in darkness save for a sliver of moonlight gilding the wooden bars on a crossshaped window twenty feet ahead.

The door slammed shut behind me. I looked back up at the moonlit cross. I took one step into the darkness and suddenly…

…light flooded the stairwell.

It was motion-sensitive.

I walked to the first landing and then turned to another portion of the stairwell that was also shrouded in darkness- this time complete windowless darkness. I stepped forward into the blackness which caused the area to be flooded with light once again.

In the distance an owl hooted four times.

It may have been slight paranoia on my part but I believe I heard the owl say ‘Jew’ on the fourth hoot (possibly to alert the town that one of my kind had entered the perimeter).

The jail cell my great grandfather had stayed in was probably a 5 minute walk from here.

As I kept climbing the stairs, transforming with each tentative step darkness into light, I tried to imagine what it was like for him to be waiting alone in that cell, wondering what fate lay in store for him. He believed in God but also he knew the history of the Jews was God not always being able to guarantee their safety and more often than not being the source of the threat.

He would have been thinking about his wife who died a couple years earlier and the 9 children he had waiting at home and the clover he sold as animal feed to Germans on the other side of the Drwec river. It was hard to feel what he felt. For one, 9 children at home seems unmanageable even without being wrongfully accused of murder.

His life was like those dinky planes from World War 1 that when you look at in a museum you think ‘God, these would have been terrifying to fly during peacetime, much less when the enemy is shooting at you.”

Even his good times were, from my perspective, quite bad.

He was also I’m sure thinking about a couple years prior when he travelled to see the Ger Rebbe asking if he should move to America with his family. The Ger Rebbe said no, that if he moved his children would become ‘treif goyim’. To someone like the Rebbe, assimilating was a greater existential threat than antisemitism.

And of course he prayed.

What else can you do in a world where life is cheap and so much out of your control; where history is a tidal wave that can sweep you away at anytime.

Out of the depths I call to you, Master of the Universe. Only you can help me- Kein yehi ratzon. Please free me from this nightmare. Please allow me to return safely to my children, to my business, to my home.

Two days later a girl in town claimed she witnessed my great grandfather draining Ulka’s blood.

Part 3

The first documented case of Blood Libel was in Norwich in 1144 when a boy named William was found murdered in the woods. Six years after his death an opportunistic monk wrote a hagiography of William in which he claimed an international council of Rabbis met each year in France and decided on a city where Jews would murder a Christian child and that year they picked Norwich. His evidence included the eye witness account of a dead person, the testimony of a dubious convert, and three different visions from God that came to him directly.

The idea caught on quickly and soon more and more of these cases were popping up all over Europe.

There were a lot of financial benefits to falsely accusing the Jews in your town of murdering a child. For one, if the dead child can achieve sainthood afterwards- which until the 13th century could be attained locally- your town could then build a shrine to them that pilgrims would visit each year. Towns made a lot of money selling religious badges at these shrines- mostly pins of the dead kid pilgrims would attach to their hat, cloak, or bag as proof they had visited. Secondly, when you executed all the Jews in that town as retribution it cleared some of the debts you might have had with them.

By the time my Great grandfather was accused, the shrine economy was ancient history, but the belief that Jews took the blood of children to bake Matzot with on Passover- a major detail included as the antisemitic conspiracy evolved over the years- was seen as fact by many.

Part 4

The next morning I walked to Golub-Dobrzyn District Police Headquarters. Almost a century ago my Great grandfather was placed in a holding cell somewhere inside this building.

On the third day, guards took him from his cell and made him stand in a single file line with six other local Jews. They then brought out the girl who claimed she saw him murdering Ulka.

They wanted to see if she could identify him in a line up.

If she could then perhaps she was telling the truth.

She looked into the faces of the six Jews standing there.

What was he thinking in that moment?

If she points to me, I am a dead man. Zol Got hobn rakhmones. And then what becomes of my children? What becomes of all the Jews in Dobjyn? And she could easily point to me. I am one of six Jews standing here. S'iz alts mazl. She could easily get lucky. And not just luck. Perhaps I am nervous in a way she can tell that will make her choose me in the end.

She looks around, her hand comes up, trembling, unsure.

Avrohom glances over at her.

The Jew eternally eyeing fate’s fickle finger.

Hashem will protect me.

That’s what really separated him from me, I thought. The praying. The constant praying. And not just praying but firmly believing those prayers might make a difference.

She lifts her hand.

Hashem will protect me.

She lifts her hands and points to…

…the man next to him.

He sighs deeply.

She identified the wrong person.

The Police Captain thanks her and she leaves.

He is exonerated.

Baruch Hashem. I have been spared. My children have been spared. The Jews of Dobjyn have been spared. Baruch Hashem

He stares down at his black boots pressed against the cobblestone street.

I can now return to my life.

96 years from that moment, I am standing a couple yards away from where my Great grandfather stood that day, looking at a small plaque inscribed in Hebrew that is the only evidence that Jews ever lived here.

Though my Great grandfather was exonerated, no one would do business with him anymore, so a couple years later he immigrated to America with his children.

In the end the Blood Libel charge turned out to be his salvation. If it hadn’t had happened, there is a good chance he would have stayed in Golub-Dobrzyn, and his entire family would have perished when the Nazis invaded in 1939.

The one thing history teaches is how impossible it is to know what is good or bad fortune. All the Jewish men secretly relieved they weren’t the ones accused of murdering the Romani girl that week- as if the curse skipped their houses- were dragged into the woods thirteen years later and shot in the head, their limp bodies tossed into the mass grave they had just helped dig.

Not too soon after that the Jewish women and children of Golub-Dobrzyn were shipped to concentration camps. 500,000 Roma- and some historians believe it’s way more — were also murdered by the Nazis during World War 2 in what they call the Porajmos.

No one was ever brought to justice for Ulka’s murder though there was a rumor, never verified, that people had seen the girl’s father chasing her the night before with an iron object in his hand after she had ripped up a 300-zloty note

When my Great grandfather fled he had to lie about some of his children’s ages so they could all be under eighteen and thus eligible to leave under his visa. But even with doctoring some of their ages on their passports that still left out one sister, 21-year-old Rivka, who, as a result, wasn’t able to leave. Years later he would realize what he could have done was said she was twins with one of her other siblings who was under eighteen. It was the perfect solution- he just didn’t think of it at the time.

Her and her family were gassed in Auschwitz.

I walked around the town for the next couple of hours.

I saw the broad, two-story, stone house that my Grandfather grew up in with its weathered stucco and sloping corrugated metal roof blackened by a century of rain (the first floor was now a nail salon); I saw a leaf-strewn backyard with a rusty slide that was, if I was reading the old map my cousin sent me correctly, where the Jewish cemetery used to be (the Nazis had ripped out all the tombstones but the bodies were still there somewhere beneath the ground); I ate some pierogis with onions and sour cream; I walked along the banks of the Drwec river as the sun began to set.

In a couple years October 7th would happen, and all the horrors that followed: the obliteration of Gaza, the rampant antisemitism, the dehumanization of Palestinians and Israelis, people consumed by tribal fury, humanity drowned in ideology.

The woman behind the counter was half-asleep when I returned to the castle later that evening. I walked through the cloisters and then opened those big heavy doors that lead to the stairwell.

Above me once again was that window hovering like a backlit cross in the darkness.

The walls were cold, ancient-looking, as if I had found myself back in the middle ages, or as if the middle ages was as far as we have progressed, and everything after that just a dream.

I took a deep breath and then stepped into the abyss, praying the light would turn on.

The visions I saw were not pretty.

Every day, they will all be forced to watch The View while getting lap dances from Lena Dunham and having their balls electrocuted whenever they don’t laugh at a joke Joy Behar makes.

For four hours each day, Joe Rogan will be placed in a bath full of soothing, warm water. He will be screaming the whole time about how without the water being ice cold he can’t show off his level of endurance and high tolerance for pain but no one will take sympathy on him. In fact, bath bombs and scented oils will be continually added to make it an even more relaxing experience. After the bath, he will be heavily vaccinated against every type of disease while being forced to read an article with information that has been verified.

Each night Tony Hinchliffe will have to perform alone on stage without a panel of funnier people to bolster him up or an autistic open micer to denigrate. To make matters worse the audience will be made up of people from Hell so no one will find anything he says remotely offensive. Now that he's been stripped of controversy, he will finally have to face his greatest fear: being judged on his writing ability alone.

It will not go well.

Theo Von will still be contractually obligated to host his podcast in hell. And though he will try to avoid it, eventually once he’s run out of guests, he will have no choice but to make Marc Maron’s joke a reality and have Adolf Hitler on.

When I woke up the vision seemed so real I felt genuine sympathy for these comedians. The anger, the resentment, the feeling of shame that some of the top people in my field cuddled up with a tyrant who has brought so much suffering to the world, dissolved. I truly hope they enjoy their success…

The View awaits them

“What was he thinking?” Joe Rogan chuckled while lighting a cigar.

“Bro, don’t get me started,” his guest fellow comedy podcaster Danny Dipshit said, and then erupted in laughter as he always does when he hears his own voice. Danny, like a lot of the successful comedians today, had gotten big from his podcast where his lack of shame about his stupidity appealed to millions who held an equally unapologetic view of their own mental shortcomings. “People say this is what you voted for I’m like dawg…I didn’t vote for none of this hahahaha!”

“Me neither,” Rogan guffawed, as his jaw began to slide off his face and then swing like a pendulum in the air.

“What’s wrong bro? Is that from the nuclear radiation that’s poisoning all the survivors?”

“No…it’s a prosthetic jaw I had to get attached after an Anti-Vaxxer on my show recommended that instead of the Covid Vaccine a much healthier route would be to just shoot myself in the face with a gun.”

“Did that not go well?”

“It turns out one of the side effects of getting shot in the face is that you’ve been shot in the face.”

“Damn dawg, is that true?”

“Jamie let’s look it up just to be sure. I never want to spread misinformation on the show. Yeah it says it right here. Shooting yourself in the face can lead to being shot in the face.”

“Bro…that’s wild.”

“Right?”

“Anyway, I can’t believe Trump actually started a nuclear holocaust!”

They both laughed gleefully at Trump’s antics while in the distance you could hear the screams of millions dying from radiation poisoning.

Danny Dipshit continued:

“And the one thing I learned now that I’ve helped destroy the world…” and here he spoke in the quiet, sage-like tone of a narcissist who when they learn something, no matter how obvious, assume it’s knowledge that no one else has ever received before and thus have a duty to share it to the world… “It’s best to stay out of politics when you have a huge influence but at the same time are a complete moron.”

“I’ve realized that too now,” Rogan said as the skin on his face began peeling off in thin, dry sheets (now this was from the radiation poisoning)

“Because people got fucking mad when I platformed and endorsed Trump,” Danny chuckled.

“I know…” Joe laughed, his eyes sliding out of their sockets and rolling like marbles across the floor.

“People love to act…” and here Danny’s entire face started to slide off, revealing the dark-red, striated, skeletal muscles underneath. “People love to act like politics is life and death dawg…”

Though their voices now were barely audible due to their faces having fallen off, if you turned up the podcast really really loud you could still just barely make out the sound of their hollow, nihilistic, empty laughs.

So now Stuart sat alone in the show’s spacious writer’s room located on the 52nd floor of The Al-Qaeda Freedom Tower (Trump recently took a generous donation from Al-Qaeda so that they could have their name added to the building). There were three other writers hired by the show but two had called in sick today and the other had been killed earlier this week in a massive car-pile up on the FDR that started when a bus driver for the School for the Blind had a heart attack and one of the students was forced to take the wheel.

If Stuart didn’t come up with any good jokes to replace the four that were scratched out, Johny Capricorn would- to Stuart’s horror- have no choice but to use the remaining time of the opening monologue to be…sincere. This was a cynical ploy within the late night comedy world where when you haven’t come up with enough funny material, you instead launch into a heartfelt speech about the importance of unity and love and compassion in these divisive times. It was horrible. For Stuart, sincerity was the comedian giving up, tapping out, saying the world was too crazy to write jokes about; it signified nothing less than the death of comedy. And he would be damned if he let it happen on his watch.

He just had to think up some good topical jokes instead. How hard could that be?

He glanced at the first headline in the New York Times to see if he could extract something funny from it:

TRUMP THREATENS WAR AFTER BEING DENIED NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

How does one write a joke about this? The joke is already there, obvious, trite, hyper-ironic. What could he add to it?

The role of the comedy writer is to help people see the absurdity in our every day world but if the absurdity is glaringly obvious- so obvious that even mentioning how absurd things are has become trite- then the comedy writer has nothing to offer. He was as unneeded as a Catholic priest on Judgement Day.

He glanced at another article:

F.B.I. DIRECTOR APPOINTS GERMAN SHEPHERD AS CHIEF OF STAFF

What the fuck could he add to this! Could he could employ an analogy? That’s like....like what? Maybe he could say that’s like if the acting head of the T.S.A. was an elephant. But honestly even that’s only a little more absurd. Not exactly a lateral move but not absurd enough to feel like the writer deserves credit for altering anyone’s perspective.

Maybe Johnny Capricorn was right. Maybe sincerity was the only answer, a lonely cul-de-sac at the end of comedy’s dilapidated road.

No! The elephant analogy could work goddamnit! He just had to explore it. What would happen if an elephant was the head of T.S.A.? Obviously he’d resign like every one else in this administration. And what would he say when he resigned. Don’t judge, just write it.

Stuart wrote the first thing that came to his head on to a post-it note and then looked down at what he wrote with unspeakable shame:

“I Can’t Do This Anymore. Time To Pack My Trunk and Leave.”

Oh God. A pun. Truly the rock bottom of comedy. The only more obvious sign that you’re done as a comedy writer is writing some meta story about how nothing is funny anymore.

Stuart checked his watch: twenty minutes left. He couldn’t give up. He needed to find a good joke. He refused to let comedy die!

Next headline:

PRO-PALESTINE GROUP BOYCOTTS JOHN LENNON OVER SILENCE ON GAZA

Jesus. What could he possibly add to that? More and more of these satire-impervious headlines and articles flashed by:

ISRAEL BOMBS GAZA 421 TIMES SINCE CEASE-FIRE…Recently Unearthed Footage Shows Donald Trump Claiming To Have Never Heard of Jeffrey Epstein to Jeffrey Epstein…Tucker Carlson Says Anti-Semitism Isn’t Real, Just Something Made Up By Greedy, Jew-Run Media…ICE SOLVES LABOR SHORTAGE BY HIRING UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS

Once again! What can one say! The absurdity consumed all. Reality was like some foam-frosted icy wave ferociously drowning all attempts at satire. He checked his watch: twelve more minutes.

Jesus, he had to think of something. He would be damned if Johny Capricorn was going to give a sincere speech about unity and love. It was bad enough that on last night’s episode Johny played beer pong for an hour with Julia Roberts, a banal activity that the audience loved because it showed that a celebrity like Julia Roberts was just like everyone else. Though if she really was just like everyone else then why would anyone think watching her play beer pong was worthy of television? In fact the message being insidiously conveyed by her playing beer pong was the exact opposite: she was a God, deigning to take part in one of our frivolous mortal tasks, like Zeus playing Wordle.

Stuart suddenly felt dizzy. He propped open a window and slid his head out to breathe the cool air. At that very moment a window cleaner twelve floors above was trying to drunkenly recall the name of the actor who played the bad guy in Lethal Weapon when he dropped the squeegee in his hand and then watched helplessly as it crash-landed on the back of Stuart’s head, knocking him unconscious. “Gary Busey”, the window cleaner suddenly remembered right as Stuart broke through the window and fell thousands of feet, the shattered glass trailing behind him. He woke up just in time to see the sidewalk rushing towards him like the massive gray leg of a stampeding elephant you didn’t notice bearing down on you until the last second because you had your noise cancelling headphones on during the Safari.

An elephant! Suddenly he remembered the words he wrote down on that post-note in the writers room: “I can’t do this anymore. Time to pack my trunk and leave.”

Oh God, people would think his attempt at a monologue joke was his suicide note. Fuck! They would see that note and think he had given up in the end, thrown in the towel, packed up his trunk and left, when in reality, he was working hard to the very last minute to be funny. His attempt at not giving up would be perceived as proof he gave up.

It was just then that Stuart did something he hadn’t done in a long time: he started to chuckle. And that chuckle grew quickly into a guffaw that echoed wildly in the windy plummet. For once, instead of trying to come up with a joke, Stuart Goldfarb laughed at the joke he was already a part of.

“Hey ladies and gentlemen…Before I go into my monologue tonight, I have some really sad news. I just found out one of our writers Stuart Goldfarb passed away. Yeah, it’s really horrible. And what’s especially sad is that he was someone who was all about…unity and compassion and love….Even in these divisive times. Especially in these divisive times. Because love really is the answer. We need to have compassion and empathy. Hug your family and friends close tonight. Because life is so fragile. So fragile. And now…” Johny Capricorn sighed deeply. “Let’s play Twister with Florence Pugh.”

It was all so simple.

A clear fight between good and evil, as morally unequivocal as the sermons his bigoted father used to give at the Bible Baptist Church he attended as a kid in Blackwater, Missouri.

“If yew cain’t name yewr enemy folks, how yew ever gunna recognize the battle yewr in,” his father would declare with a warm, dreamy smile from the scratched and dusty podium, while Christian imbibed his lies from the front row pew. “We are in a war against the unbelievin’, against the whoremongers, the idolaters, the marxists, the heathens, the homosexuals, and anyone else who thinks hell ain’t real!”

Smoke billowed from a nearby grate as Christian stepped out on to the sun-baked, bird-shit-stained asphalt plaza of Union Square. Hundreds of protesters had already gathered in the suffocating, sweltering heat to protest the evil, colonizing, white supremacist, zionists. More black people than usual, he thought, and then immediately felt bad for thinking that. Why shouldn’t there be more black people? Of course they recognize their own plight in the struggles of Palestinians (in fact it was the same plight). He felt so ashamed for being surprised by the amount of black people. As if- what?- only white privileged people like himself — not consumed by their own oppression- could have empathy for those on foreign soil?

Christian shook his head. White supremacy really does effect everyone. As anti-imperialist, anti-hegemonist, anti-racist, and anti-labelist Isabella Ramirez once said : “Even I have white supremacist thoughts. So how bad must it be intertwined in other people’s thought patterns?”

The racism is everywhere, inherent, instinctual.

“AND WHY FOLKS? Cause of yewr impure thoughts….” his father again from the podium. “That’s right…There Ain’t No Middle Ground When It Comes to Salvation! Either yewr thoughts are in obedience with Christ or they are not….”

Christian had a lot of work to do, and he was doing it.

And now his favorite part:

He thrusted his cardboard sign high into the breezeless, sticky air.

“FREE GAZA, FREE GAZA!”

As he kept shouting, he felt the slimy, corrosive skin of shame uncoil from him, he felt himself floating effortlessly in the air.

Mixed in with this feeling of lightness was rage, unmitigated, monstrous, monomaniacal rage, for the Colonizers that are at the source of all the suffering in the world. The Colonizers that have devastated the Climate causing migrants to flee to the U.S. only to be kidnapped by ICE who were trained by the IDF with money from congress that could instead be going to free healthcare.

It was all connected and the evil was everywhere. When would folks wake up?

It was then he noticed an older black woman about fifteen away shaking her head in disgust at him. He glanced behind him to see if this look of revulsion was actually aimed at someone else. It wasn’t.

He turned back around. She was still shaking her head. In disgust. At him.

And it wasn’t just her.

He started to notice a good portion of the crowd was glaring at him.

What was going on?

Was he centering himself too much in the struggle, the cis white male compulsion for attention? Was he not giving enough space to those at the most intersected levels of oppression?

And then, for the first time, he started looking at the other signs behind held up.

DEFUND THE POLICE…BLACK LIVES MATTER…I CAN’T BREATH…

Suddenly his whole body was seized with panic.

For he realized, in that moment, that he had gotten his protests mixed up, and the Pro-Palestinian rally he thought was today was actually tomorrow, and the Black Lives Matter rally he thought was tomorrow was actually happening right now, and he was currently standing in the middle of that Black Lives Matter rally, holding up a sign with a giant watermelon on it.

Part 2 (read previous post first)

Three black men, two wearing a similar dark grey sweatshirt and the other in a white tang-top with a red bandana poking out of his pocket, started marching angrily towards him.

Oh my God, they thought he was some kind of racist troll.

They thought he came here to taunt black people by holding up a picture of a watermelon.

Him!

He wanted to explain to them that he got his protests mixed up, and even the disproportionate amount of black people at this rally, which should have revealed his mistake, he shamefully dismissed as racism, and anyway it didn’t matter, all these rallies are connected, they’re all the same, Palestinian rights are black rights are trans-

He started to run.

And they started to chase him.

Shamefully he soared past the statue of slave-owning George Washington forever stuck to a horse in mid-stride, past the Giant Digital Countdown Clock that is supposed to be a count down to climate apocalypse but for Christian in that moment appeared more like a countdown to the end of his persona life…

He looked back, the three black men were still chasing him.

He was still holding his sign. He needed to drop it, but he couldn’t. He was worried it would be used as evidence against him. A hate crime, he of all people, would be convicted of a hate crime!

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

He raced down Broadway, past the Strand Bookstore where he had bought so many books linking all these different types of oppression, past a Latinx police officer standing outside a costume store harassing an unhoused person. Should he call for help? He couldn’t. He couldn’t go to the police. What if one of those black people chasing him was shot. He couldn’t do it.

He refused to get an oppressor to help save him from the oppression of those oppressed men chasing him.

Oh my God, what was happening?

It felt as if his whole foundation was crumbling.

“MORAL CONFUSION!!!! That’s all that’s left when ya turn yewr back on God Almighty! MORAL-”

An M-1 Bus came barreling down 4th Avenue. It was headed right for where Christian was standing.

He jolted back at the last second, centimeters from having his body splattered all over the intersection.

He turned the corner and quickly ran down a gated stairway that lead to the door of a brownstone apartment below sidewalk level. He hid quietly in that concrete, prison-like areaway, a blue-eyed, haloed Jesus welcoming him from a faded portrait on the front door of the apartment.

A couple seconds later he heard the three black men up above him.

“Where did he go?”

“Whatever…the whole point was to chase him out and we did.”

“Fuck that…He doesn’t get away after pulling that shit!”

Christian didn’t deserve this. He had tried so hard to be an ally. Tried so hard to fight for what’s right. And now he was being hunted by black people. Like he was in some racist white man’s nightmare. Oh God. He didn’t deserve this.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe he hadn’t paid enough yet for his racist thoughts, his racist actions. Maybe he hadn’t fully redeemed himself from growing up in a white supremacist, christian nationalist family, where he was fed lies day in and day out.

Lies about America he still could not forgive himself for once believing.

“REPENT,” his father would begin to chant at the end of his sermons, having finally riled himself up. “WE MUST REPENT FOR OUR SINS…Now’s the time, now’s the hour.”

Stop hiding, Christian thought.

“Repent!”

Worn out and fatigued, and still carrying the cardboard sign with the watermelon on it, Christian slowly ascended the stairs, his legs weak and wobbly and about to buckle.

“Repent!”

At one point he fell but then picked himself back up and continued on his journey.

“Repent!”

“Here I am,” he announced, once he finally reached the top.

The three black men turned to look at him.

“Here I am,” he said proudly. “Now let me explain-

“Repent!”

He twirled backward from the right hook to his jaw, cartoonishly tumbling down the stairs. His face hit the ground next to a puddle of dirty rainwater being lapped up by a baby rat. He tried to get up and immediately felt a kick to his head. And then more kicks. A sea of kicks. A carwash of sneakered feet raining down on him.

“REPENT! REPENT! REPENT!”

“You motherfucker! You think that’s funny, a fucking watermelon on a sign!”

“Go easy on him!”

“You think that’s fucking funny!”

Christian locked eyes with the warm and radiating Jesus on the front door as they continued kicking him.

“JESUS SUFFERED THAT YOU MAY RE-”

As a child he would close his eyes in church and do his best to picture it:

His flayed flesh, his bedraggled, blood-matted hair indistinguishable in color from the wooden crown of thorns puncturing his scalp, the clinking, squishing sound of a thick nail hammered repeatedly into the palm of his hand, brackish blood burbling from the wound like a slowly weakening spray. The stoical moaning, the sensical suffering, the Christian demand for meaning behind pain.

“DO YOU WISHED TO BE REDEEMED?”

He was that person now…Going through life’s trials to be pure on the other side.

“DO YOU WISH TO BE BATHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB?”

To conclude his father would slam his fist down hard onto the podium sending dustswirls upwards into a beam of resplendent

He was being purified. He was pure-

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!” One of the black men yelled, suddenly backing away from Christian’s bruised body. “Motherfucker is hard during this.”

Oh no…In his quest for purification, he had gotten an erection.

He was so close to achieving purity, to achieving a spiritual liberation from shame and guilt, and now he would have to figure out how to pay for this too.

“What the fuck!”

“He’s a Goddamn fag.”

They started cackling in disgust. And then they started walking away.

Fear seized Christian’s heart yet again. No, no, it couldn’t end like this. Not this pathetic tragicomedy. He needed them to beat him up more. They barely left a bruise.

Christian sprang back up.

“Where are you going!”

They were halfway down the street.

“Come back and beat me up! Please…Please beat me up.” He began sobbing uncontrollably, while punching himself in his face, blood spurting anew from the black, sagging, welter under his left eye. “Please, you’re not done! I need you to beat me up. PLEASE! Come back and fight me…PLEASE!”

They were at the corner now.

In a second they would be gone.

Christian knew what he could do to bring them back to fight. He knew it instantly. One word. The worst word imaginable. He calls them that word and they almost have a moral obligation to come back and finish the job.

But could he do it? Could he expiate his white guilt by calling these black men the n-word?

He could.

The word tumbled out of his mouth like a grenade. It pierced the air waves. The black men turned back around, a look of unimaginable hurt in their eyes. Time froze for a split second, and then they charged towards him, the hurt having already morphed into a murderous rage.

Christian smiled.

Redemption was at hand.

Fortunately, I was able to overcome this challenge on more than one occasion. The trick was to view my whining as a beautiful and profound reminder that the Jewish spirit is alive and well after the Holocaust.

On the morning of the tour, I woke up on the aqua-blue, collapsible sofa I had been sleeping on in the apartment my wife Cate and I were Airbnb-ing in Krakow. Cate was upstairs in the loft, as our jet lag schedules were not in sync, and when she would finally fall asleep is right when I would toss and turn, and vice versa.

Above me was a window encasing a couple of scraggly, gray branches in the colorless Krakow neighborhood we had been clomping around in for the last six days. Having been in this bleak town that was the setting for Schindler’s List all week, I am now convinced that Spielberg was actually shooting the movie in color and that’s just what showed up on screen.

I walked outside into the cold, mercilessly crisp, morning air.

The driver for our tour, a short, stocky bearded man who looked like me (this describes 80 percent of the men in Krakow) was already waiting outside.

“Hello, I am Igor,” he said in a Polish accent as thick as my neck.

“Raanan.”

“You are ready to go to Auschwitz?”

Eighty-five years ago this would be a terrifying question for someone like me to hear, but now it’s been mollified into something mundane, practical.

Where my ancestors perished was for me now a ‘tourist trap’.

Life moves on.

“Yeah, my wife will be down in a minute.”

“Very good. I do not know if you got message but I provide lunch boxes if you want to order them.”

“Sure, that works.”

“Any dietary restrikshions?”

I closed my eyes and imagined the S.S. Guards inquiring of the inmates if there were any dietary restrictions when they arrived at Auschwitz. “Well, actually, I keep kosher, but you probably knew that already.”

A couple minutes later my wife and I were sliding into Igor’s faded black, bird-shit-specked van on the curb. A sleepy, octogenarian couple had been stuffed into the seats behind us.

The van rattled violently as its tires rolled over the medieval, cobblestone streets of Krakow’s Old Quarter, the heads of the now sleeping couple behind us bobbing against the car’s roof. Five minute in, Igor stopped the car.

“Guyz, I will be back one minute.”

Fifteen minutes later he returned with a middle-aged American couple who he sat up front with him. The man was wearing a bright blue Florida Gators T-shirt which I found to be in bad taste. Obviously you don’t have to be in striped pajamas when touring Auschwitz but it definitely feels like a ‘solid color shirts only’ affair.

A couple more blocks of driving and then Igor stopped again.

“Guyz. I will be back one minute.”

“How many more people are coming?” Cate asked nervously.

He returned with a stocky, acne-scarred Asian girl who, after Igor scanned the van, chose to sit half on Cate’s lap.

Jesus Christ we were taking a clown car to Auschwitz.

I began to legitimately worry that when purchasing the tickets online I had accidentally selected the ‘immersive experience’ option.

As Igor continued driving, he launched into his spiel. You could tell right away there wasn’t much for him to go over until he passed us along to the tour guide, so to feel more essential he padded what he said with a lot of superfluous information.

“Okay guys when you go inside there is security check point at camp of Auschwitz. So they just got couple of gates with metal detectors. It is made of course to make sure that everyone is safe.”

We all nodded blankly.

“Security check point is what I am sure you’re used to because it is same one you meet at airport.”

We nodded but our confirmation that we knew what security check points were didn’t stop him from continuing to describe them in excruciating detail. This reminded me of when I tell my wife, in the middle of her telling a story, that I have in fact heard her tell this story many times, and she somehow interprets this as a cue to keep going.

“So you will have plastic box to put your things in…phone…wallet…keys. The Plastic box will go through metal detector…then you will go through metal detector…then you will take stuff out of plastic box and put back in pocket. Now, when it comes to photographs…”

As I was bracing myself for him to explain the entire chemical process involved in photography, Igor abruptly swerved on to the highway.

The highway to Auschwitz.

“Actually you can take as many of them as you would like to, ” Igor continued. “The only thing is to just not to use the flash lamp in doors please…So I would say that’s all about the most important rules of museum of Auschwitz. Also your guide will be telling you lot of like real life stories from the camp of Auschwitz or even about sick medical experiment. So definitely will be very knowledgeable tour.”

I glanced out the window as rows of denuded oak trees flanking the highway hurtled by. These were the very woods that the few inmates of Auschwitz who managed to escape had hid in before being caught or in the very rare occurrence surviving.

The song “All Star” began blaring from Igor’s speakers.

And just like that, we were now being driven to Auschwitz, listening to Smash Mouth.

“Hey now you’re an all star…get your game on…Hey!”

We drove by a shiny-white, clapboard, church. What good are churches I thought, if they couldn’t stop this?

“Hey now you’re a Rock Star…Get the show on, get paid!”

We pass a restaurant pizzeria, a Dino grocery, power lines, frozen grass, a burger and kurzak grill, misty fields, a bridge over a creek whose surface mirrors the sky, subdivisions, more power lines, more frozen grass, a faded lime apartment complex, an ad for Burger King (2 burgers for 5 zlotys), a sign for Hotel Dabrowski, a sun slowly ascending from clouds, more fields, another church, another bridge.

And then, all of a sudden, we’re here, in the parking lot of Auschwitz.

“All that glitters is gold…”

Our tour guide is a petite, mousy Polish woman named Anna. What’s interesting about Anna is that she has this incongruously sing-songy voice that would be much better suited for a tour of, say, Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. She describes everything- no matter how horrible, and it’s all horrible- like she’s describing a beautiful, magical experience.

“And this is Block 11…” she would say with a dreamy lilt at the end of every word. “Where they would torture prisoners.”

In her defense, I’m sure if she was speaking Polish, she would have been able to modulate a somber tone, but with English it got away from her, without her realizing it. And now as a result, it sounds like we’re getting a tour of Auschwitz tailored for Neo-Nazis.

“This is of course the famous Work Sets You Free Gate,” she announces excitedly as if she’s pointing out where they filmed The Godfather on a tour of the Paramount lot.

We walk under the famous sign- it’s wavy metallic borders gave it an almost Modern Art feel- and into Auschwitz 1, which is made up of rows and rows of identical faded red brick buildings surrounded by barbed wire.

We walk through Block 4 and 5, where we see the hill of hair, the hill of shoes, the hill of suitcases. When we go back outside it’s even colder. Cate is shivering as if she’s about to die in a Jack London short story. I’m not as cold as I brought many layers- a hoodie, 40 extra pounds of fat, and a winter coat. You can hear a chorus of teeth chattering from the other people on tour.

“Okay next,” Anna says sweetly, “we are going to go inside the only standing crematorium in Auschwitz 1.”

“Thank God,” the American with the Florida Gators shirt says to me way too loudly. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

After Auschwitz 1, Igor drives us the 3.5 kilometers to Birkenau, the death camp.

Birkenau is essentially the remnants untouched; it’s lack of museum quality deprives it of any barrier or distance. You feel like you are there.

We gather at the railway station, where Jews were either deemed fit or unfit for forced labor. If unfit, they were told to wait in line outside a nearby showering facility, and in only a matter of hours the grass they were standing on would be sprinkled with their ashes.

We walk up to the remnants of Crematorium 111, blown up by Nazis at the end of the war to hide the evidence of mass murder before the Russians arrived.

Before me are blackened steps leading down to the burnt-out remains of the underground Crematorium, now just slabs of concrete and steel rods jutting out of the Earth.

It looks like a drained swimming pool full of gray corpses.

So much murder in such a small place.

That was what seemed most perverse in that moment. The fact that a million people were murdered in such a small area. How could such a tiny plot of land be where the greatest crime scene in the Universe took place? It should be fields, endless, endless fields, where massacres happen. Not just a small corner of the Earth like this whose perimeter you can walk around in less than a minute.

Being in Birkenau chips away every so slightly at the illusion that allows us to function as a civilization after the Holocaust:

That it was a long time ago.

Seeing the wooden barracks, the exploded bricks, the watch tower, touching the same stones touched by inmates, standing on the same hard, frozen ground where they were lead to their death, causes history to awaken briefly from it’s deep slumber. The Black and white of Schindler’s List allows you to detach yourself from it, to imagine that it happened in some ancient time, but it didn’t. Snow White and Gone with the Wind we're already classics. Jack Nicholson had already been born. The Holocaust is not from a different time, but our time.

The Holocaust was in color.

And the people who were erased during it were not different from us. That’s the real illusion! Not only that it wasn’t a long time ago but also that it happened to people different than us. The barriers and motes we build to separate us from the dead is one of life’s endless preoccupations. They’re not us, we say. Not the victims of the Holocaust or Rwanda or Hiroshima or Gaza or Darfur. They don’t mind the same way we would mind. Their dreams aren’t ours. We pity them, sure, but more as martyrs than reflections in a mirror.

That our bodies and minds are identical to those as the damned is a burden too great to bare for long.

As we were leaving the rubble of the exploded crematoriums, and walking past a long line of barracks, suddenly I had felt a feeling I had not prepared having at any point during this trip.

It crept up on me without warning.

I had to fart.

It felt deeply offensive to have this need here but my colon has no sense of reverence or sanctity. Like the flowers blooming in Rudolf Hoff’s garden a hundred meters away from the people asphyxiating in the gas chambers, my colon was indifferent to the sobriety of mass murder.

“Babe, I have to fart.”

“Well move away from everyone.”

“Obviously.”

I walk on my own down a field. As cold as it is, it’s a beautiful day. Around me the afternoon sun cobwebs patches of frozen grass in golden threads of light.

I start to fart.

They came out like little pops.

Fhfhf,….fhffh….ffhfh….fff….

We desperately try to hold the universe in mourning, but Smash Mouth and sing-songy voices and ill-timed farts get in the way.

I walk back to join the tour and soon we were all in the bookstore outside the barbed wire fence. It’s essentially the Museum’s gift shop but you can’t call it that. It would be in bad taste for Auschwitz to have a gift shop so they call it a bookstore.

I flip through a book of poems written by children in different concentration camps before they were gassed. I thought this might be a good addition to my shelf of Holocaust books in my apartment. As I am line waiting to purchase it, I read one of the poems:

“I want to fly but where, how high?

If in barbed wire, things can bloom

Why can’t I? I will not die!”

Did the forlorn child who scribbled this poem on a piece of paper in 1942 ever conceive that it would one day be sold in a gift shop right outside the fenced in perimeter? I look through the window back into the camp and imagine the emaciated child author of that poem staring back at me. In his shriveled hand is the piece of paper where he is writing the poem that more than half a century later has been published in this book I am now waiting in line to purchase.

Briefly untrapped by time his tortured eyes stare bitterly into mine.

If I look too long into his eyes I will drown.

“Next.”

The voice mercifully dissolves the child into thin air.

And now it’s my turn at the counter, and I have to take out my wallet and decide which of my credit cards I want to buy the book with. I end up going with my American Express card, as I vaguely recall getting 4 to 1 points for this type of purchase, though I’m not sure if it works internationally. Then I ask where the bathroom is and she points to one across the street. When I walk over I see it costs 2 Zlotys to use the bathroom. I slip two coins into the slot and it spits one back out. “Goddamnit,” I mutter under my breath. I slip the coin in again and this time the door unlocks with a click and I step inside.

As we’re leaving the camp I remember these famous words I once saw inscribed on the wall of the Holocaust memorial museum in St. Petersburg, Florida: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric…”

Barbaric as it may be, there has been so much poetry. Poetry and art and music and movies and comedy and commerce and progress and democracies and dictators and global harmony and genocides.

Unhalted in equal measure by the beauty and horror of man, the river of life hurtles on.

A cause for celebration or despair?

“Hey Now You’re A Rockstar!”

“What the hell was that asshole Joe Rogan thinking,” Joe Rogan exclaimed on the latest episode of his podcast to his guest Dave Jones, a non-historian with a history podcast who speaks authoritatively on historical events he is the first to admit he is in no way an authority on.

“I just can’t believe Joe Rogan would be so reckless,” Joe Rogan said, two minutes after his guest had convinced him that the actual arch villain of World War Two was the little boy hiding in the latrine in Schindler’s List.

“Yeah and now Joe Rogan has the audacity to distance himself from his endorsement of Trump,” Joe Rogan shouted, “by being outraged by the deportation policies that Trump made abundantly clear he was going to enforce on day one…” Rogan slammed his fist down on the desk. “Can you imagine such hypocrisy! It’s so infuriating.”

“It really is,” his guest said, “And I know infuriating. I once publicly said Hitler was right to kill all the Jews because every single one of them is evil without exception and the media took that and spun it out of context.”

For the first time during the podcast, Joe Rogan pushed back…in his chair to get another cigar from the shelf.

“Yeah,” Joe Rogan sighed, lighting a cigar. “In the end, it kind of feels like we fought so hard to say the word retard just so we could correctly identify ourselves.”

This was his third protest this week. Two days ago he was at a Climate Defiance protest outside the U.N. headquarters, the following day he was at a Trans Right Protest in Newark, and tomorrow he would be at a Black Lives Matter Rally in Battery Park. It was a lot of protests but for Christian it was all really the same protest. As black, trans, Afro-Caribbean, disabled, neurodivergent, anti-imperialist, marxist legal scholar Bella Bloomsfield once said: Trans rights are Climate Rights are Palestinian Rights are Immigration Rights. They are all interconnected, and it’s only through LGTBQ-inclusive, intersectional, decolonial, marxist activism- whether it be Queers for Palestine, Drag Queens for Clean Energy, Autistic Puerto Ricans against De-Forestation, Mexican Transgender Men against Militarized Nationalism, or Dark-Skinned, Disabled, Black, Queer Femmes for Prison Abolition — could we help dismantle the evil, capitalist, settler-colonial, nationalist, eco-fascist, theofascist, police-powered, transmisogynist, queer-phobic, autocratic, oligarchical, cisheteropatriarchal, Christianneocolonialkyriarchal military industrial complex.

It was all so simple.

A clear fight between good and evil, as morally unequivocal as the sermons his bigoted father used to give at the Bible Baptist Church he attended as a kid in Blackwater, Missouri.

“If yew cain’t name yewr enemy folks, how yew ever gunna recognize the battle yewr in,” his father would declare with a warm, dreamy smile from the scratched and dusty podium, while Christian imbibed his lies from the front row pew. “We are in a war against the unbelievin’, against the whoremongers, the idolaters, the marxists, the heathens, the homosexuals, and anyone else who thinks hell ain’t real!”

Smoke billowed from a nearby grate as Christian stepped out on to the bird-shit-stained asphalt plaza of Union Square. Hundreds of protesters had already gathered in the suffocating heat to protest the evil, colonizing, white supremacist, zionists. More black people than usual, he thought, and then immediately felt bad for thinking that. Why shouldn’t there be more black people? Of course they recognize their own plight in the struggles of Palestinians (in fact it was the same plight). He felt so ashamed for being surprised by the amount of black people. As if- what?- only white privileged people like himself — not consumed by their own oppression- could have empathy for those on foreign soil?

Christian shook his head. White supremacy really does effect everyone. As the Latinx, larger-bodied, disabled, dyslexic, mobility-device-using, autistic, neurodivergent, indigenous, queer, trans, non-binary, skoliosexual, reciprosexual, demiromantic, polyamorous, far left, anarcho-communist, decolonial, anti-neocolonial, anti-imperialist, anti-zionist, anti-hegemonist, anti-expansionist, anti-racist, and anti-labelist Isabella Ramirez once said : “Even I have white supremacist thoughts. So how bad must it be intertwined in other people’s thought patterns?”

The racism is everywhere, inherent, instinctual.

“AND WHY FOLKS? Cause of yewr impure thoughts….” his father again from the podium. “That’s right, there ain’t no middle ground when it comes to salvation. Either yewr thoughts are in obedience with Christ or they are not….”

Christian had a lot of work to do, and he was doing it.

And now his favorite part:

He raised his cardboard sign high into the air.

“FREE GAZA, FREE GAZA!”

When he yelled ‘Free Gaza’, in addition to this chant to demand an end to the murder of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives- lives that a disturbingly vast amount of people in the world instinctually devalued- it was as if he was also yelling ‘Free me…Free from the shame of my complacent, privileged past, free me, freeeee meeeee!”

As he kept shouting, he felt the slimy, corrosive skin of shame uncoil from him, he felt himself floating effortlessly in the air.

Mixed in with this feeling of lightness was rage, unmitigated, monstrous, monomaniacal rage, for the Colonizers that are at the source of all the suffering in the world. The Colonizers that have devastated the Climate causing migrants to flee to the U.S. only to be kidnapped by ICE who were trained by the IDF with money from congress that could instead be going to free healthcare.

It was all connected and the evil was everywhere. When would folks wake up?

It was then he noticed an older black woman about fifteen away shaking her head in disgust at him. He glanced behind him to see if this look of revulsion was actually aimed at someone else. Nope.

He turned back around. She was still shaking her head. In disgust. At him.

And it wasn’t just her.

He started to notice a good portion of the crowd was glaring at him.

What was going on?

Was he centering himself too much in the struggle, the cis white male compulsion for attention? Was he not giving enough space to those at the most intersected levels of oppression?

And then, for the first time, he started looking at the other signs behind held up.

DEFUND THE POLICE…BLACK LIVES MATTER…I CAN’T BREATH…

Suddenly his whole body was seized with panic.

For he realized, in that moment, that he had gotten his protests mixed up, and the Pro-Palestinian rally he thought was today was actually tomorrow, and the Black Lives Matter rally he thought was tomorrow was actually happening right now, and he was currently standing in the middle of that Black Lives Matter rally, holding up a sign with a giant watermelon on it.

Three black men, two wearing a similar dark grey sweatshirt and the other in a white tang-top with a red bandana poking out of his pocket, started marching angrily towards him.

Oh my God, they thought he was some kind of racist troll.

They thought he came here to taunt black people by holding up a picture of a watermelon.

Him!

He wanted to explain to them that he got his protests mixed up, and even the disproportionate amount of black people at this rally, which should have revealed his mistake, he shamefully dismissed as racism, and anyway it didn’t matter, all these rallies are connected, they’re all the same, Palestinian rights are black rights are trans-

He started to run.

And they started to chase him.

Shamefully he soared past the statue of slave-owning George Washington forever stuck to a horse in mid-stride, past the Giant Digital Countdown Clock that is supposed to be a count down to climate apocalypse but for Christian in that moment appeared more like a countdown to the end of his persona life…

He looked back, the three black men were still chasing him.

He was still holding his sign. He needed to drop it, but he couldn’t. He was worried it would be used as evidence against him. A hate crime, he of all people, would be convicted of a hate crime!

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

He raced down Broadway, past the Strand Bookstore where he had bought so many books linking all these different types of oppression, past a Latinx police officer standing outside a costume store harassing an unhoused person. Should he call for help? He couldn’t. He couldn’t go to the police. What if one of those black people chasing him was shot. He couldn’t do it.

He refused to get an oppressor to help save him from the oppression of those oppressed men chasing him.

Oh my God, what was happening?

It felt as if his whole foundation was crumbling.

“MORAL CONFUSION!!!! That’s all that’s left when ya turn yewr back on God Almighty! MORAL-”

An M-1 Bus came barreling down 4th Avenue. It was headed right for where Christian was standing.

He jolted back at the last second, centimeters from having his body splattered all over the intersection.

He turned the corner and quickly ran down a gated stairway that lead to the door of a brownstone apartment below sidewalk level. He hid quietly in that concrete, prison-like areaway, a blue-eyed Jesus welcoming him from a portrait on the front door of the apartment.

A couple seconds later he heard the three black men up above him.

“Where did he go?”

“Whatever…the whole point was to chase him out and we did.”

“Fuck that…He doesn’t get away after pulling that shit!”

Christian didn’t deserve this. He had tried so hard to be an ally. Tried so hard to fight for what’s right. And now he was being hunted by black people. Like he was in some racist white man’s nightmare. Oh God. He didn’t deserve this.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe he hadn’t paid enough yet for his racist thoughts, his racist actions. Maybe he hadn’t fully redeemed himself from growing up in a white supremacist, christian nationalist family, where he was fed lies day in and day out.

Lies about America he still could not forgive himself for once believing.

“REPENT,” his father would begin to chant at the end of his sermons, having finally riled himself up. “WE MUST REPENT FOR OUR SINS…Now’s the time, now’s the hour.”

Stop hiding, Christian thought.

“Repent!”

Worn out and fatigued, and still carrying the cardboard sign with the watermelon on it, Christian slowly ascended the stairs, his legs weak and wobbly and about to buckle.

“Repent!”

At one point he fell but then picked himself back up and continued on his journey.

“Repent!”

“Here I am,” he announced, once he finally reached the top.

The three black men turned to look at him.

“Here I am,” he said proudly. “Now let me explain-

“Repent!”

He twirled backward from the right hook to his jaw, cartoonishly tumbling down the stairs. His face hit the ground next to a puddle of dirty rainwater being lapped up by a baby rat. He tried to get up and immediately felt a kick to his head. And then more kicks. A sea of kicks. A carwash of sneakered feet raining down on him.

“REPENT! REPENT! REPENT!”

“You motherfucker! You think that’s funny, a fucking watermelon on a sign!”

“Go easy on him!”

“You think that’s fucking funny!”

Christian locked eyes with the warm and radiating Jesus on the front door as they continued kicking him.

“JESUS SUFFERED THAT YOU MAY RE-”

As a child he would close his eyes in church and do his best to picture it:

His flayed flesh, his bedraggled, blood-matted hair indistinguishable in color from the wooden crown of thorns puncturing his scalp, the clinking, squishing sound of a thick nail hammered repeatedly into the palm of his hand, brackish blood burbling from the wound like a slowly weakening spray. The stoical moaning, the sensical suffering, the Christian demand for meaning behind pain.

“DO YOU WISHED TO BE REDEEMED?”

He was that person now…Going through life’s trials to be pure on the other side.

“DO YOU WISH TO BE BATHED IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB?”

To conclude his father would slam his fist down hard onto the podium, sending swirls of dust upwards into a beam of resplendent light streaming from the stained glass window behind him.

He was being purified. He was pure-

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!” One of them yelled, suddenly backing away from Christian’s bruised body. “Motherfucker is hard during this.”

Oh no…In his quest for purification, he had gotten an erection.

He was so close to achieving purity, to achieving a spiritual liberation from shame and guilt, and now he would have to figure out how to pay for this too.

“What the fuck!”

It’s all connected he reminded himself, blood and broken teeth spilling out of his mouth into the drain below. What seemed absurd was actually the carefully constructed systems of oppression and the perfectly interwoven plight of the oppressed.

All this pain, his pain, Jesus’s pain, the world’s pain, it couldn’t be in vain.

“Fuck you you MAGA-loving racist piece of shit,” one of them shouted, stomping on his face.

Also, I will be taping my Special this THURSDAY NIGHT at 9pm at Sesh Comedy Club in Lower Manhattan. Click here to get Half-Off Tix. Promo Code: LOUD!

Enjoy!

On February 22nd at 2:35 a.m., comedian Richard Pieta (Conan, 2017 JFL New Faces Repped, Winner of the 2013 Boston Comedy Festival) hung himself in his apartment, two hours after posting a suicide note on Facebook. For years, posting a suicide note on Facebook tended to put people in an uncomfortable position, as they did not know whether to like or ignore the post. Fortunately now, one has the option of the Angry or Sad Face, which allows people to simultaneously express support for the person and anger or sorrow at the unfortunate circumstance that person is in. But before the implementation of the Angry or Sad Face, it was hard times for the Facebook Suicide Post. Most either received a disturbing amount of Thumbs Ups, as if their entire community was unanimously giving them approval to end their life, or very few responses at all, which would only contribute to the overwhelming indifference that was inspiring this person to take their life in the first place.

Richard’s suicide post got 589 sad faces, 432 angry faces, 120 hearts, 58 likes, 42 Wows, 32 Loves, 300 comments, 18 shares, and 4 Hahas. It was the most likes he had ever gotten on a post, barely beating out a picture he took last June of a bulldog that looked like Josh Gadd.

Tragically, he was no longer around to see the amount of traction and support the post received. To add insult to injury, in the post above his a very successful female podcaster had accidentally typed the letters ‘FVTJ’ in her pocket and and it had gotten 2400 likes.

250 comedians attended the wake. Between them, there were 32 Just For Laughs New Faces, 12 Late Night Television Appearances, and 6 Comedy Central Half Hours.

Richard lay in a half-open, Elite Casket (5 Star Rating on TrustedCaskets.Com, Voted Number 2 Most Elegant Casket in American Funeral Director Magazine). His head rested gently on the velvet, eggshell interior, with his arms crossed over his chest, and a slight smirk on his face, as if he was merely pretending to be dead as a prank and was seconds away from exploding with laughter.

As the comedians sat huddled in the pews, some sobbing uncontrollably, others teary-eyed with heads down, Harrison Green (3rd Place Winner of the Funniest Person in Scottsburg, Indiana Competition) approached the podium to say some words about his friend.

“Richard and I moved up to New York at the same time five years ago,” Harrison began in a tremulous voice. “We used to bark together outside LOL. I remember one time some asshole French dude spit in his eye when he offered him free tix to a show and we chased that motherfucker for like 12 blocks.”

Anya Shoal (Brooklyn’s 750 Most Up and Coming Comedians, Comedy Central’s 4 Second Digital Stand Up Clips) whimpered softly in the front pew. Anya was a voluptuous trust fund baby who rarely did stand up but in between semi-topless selfies on Instagram would post the occasional video of her doing an impression and pretend that’s why she had a huge following. She was very shaken by Richard’s death as they had had sex in a bathroom at a party in Fort Green only two weeks ago. And this wasn’t the only upsetting thing to happen to her this month. Last Thursday her Grandmother was rushed to the hospital with a gall bladder infection. The good news is her grandma had finally left the hospital. The bad news is she was dead.

“And a couple months later,” Harrison said proudly, as if he was listing his own credit, “he got Just for Laugh’s New Faces.”

A tinge of jealousy sprung up from the the bowels of Anya’s sorrow like a lone, tiny turd resurfacing after you flush the toilet. But she couldn’t help it. She had been on the same JFL audition as Richard that year, and she was so surprised when he got it and she didn’t, as he didn’t even do that well. He did fine, but he definitely didn’t crush. But of course he would fucking get it. He was likable and hot and Mexican or Guatemalan, she couldn’t remember which. But it was definitely South American.

And besides, she reminded herself, as she always did to keep herself from falling further into this rabbit hole of obsessive thinking, she couldn’t care less about JFL. She had 30,000 Instagram followers, more than anyone who got JFL this year (she checked). She had interviews with Snapchat and TikTok later this week. She was doing just fine.

She turned to her left to see Tori Markowitz (PBS, NPR, Boston Women in Comedy Festival), a bitter, chubby lesbian with pedophile-thick glasses and beady, crow-black eyes. She always felt Tori hated her for her scantily-clad photos on Instagram. But she was probably just projecting.

Tori hated Anya with a passion. Anya represented everything that repulsed her about the present state of comedy. It was all about looks and showing your tits on Instagram and nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with jokes.

Stop being so bitter, Tori thought to herself. This wasn’t the time to reflect on how much she hated certain people in the scene, it was a time to honor Richard’s memory. She went back to listening to Harrison’ speech. She had always hated Harrison. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and it was infuriating. The only thing in life Tori really enjoyed was talking shit, and if you weren’t capable of doing that she was at a true loss of how to relate to you. And in her tyrannical fashion, she felt animosity to those she could not relate to, as if their different approach to life was a blatant critique of her own.

“Only a couple months before he passed away,” Harrison said, “he achieved one of his biggest goals since moving to New York. He got a writing job on The Tonight Show.” Harrison’s quivering voice finally gave way to sobs. “In fact, in his last text message with his Mom, he was talking about how excited he was to work on this show he used to watch all the time as a kid.”

On hearing this, Tori’s heart broke. Would she ever get a writing job on a T.V. show? She had sent so many writing packets to The Tonight Show and never heard anything back. Which made sense. They had already met their one woman quota. And Richard of course was young and hot and Malaysian or one of the islands neighboring Malaysia so he got everything he auditioned for. Everything came to him so easily.

Except life, she thought, suddenly recalling he had commit suicide.

“He had been on Conan 7 times,” Harrison added. “He was about to be on it an 8th time before he passed away.”

Some people have all the luck, thought Stuart Greenbaum (Laughs on FOX, Sirius XM, 4th Place in The Laughing Skull Festival). Stuart sat hunched over in the 3rd pew, stout and despondent, like a Gastonless LeFou. He had been going from one shitty club to the next for the last 12 years while Richard got everything handed to him. So many times Stuart buried him (bad choice of words) at shitty bar shows and clubs in the city. But despite this, the industry always flocked to Richard after every show. Even audience members seemed to like Richard’s sets the best even though he didn’t get nearly as many laughs as Stuart. But of course laughs don’t matter anymore. Likability and being cool, that’s all that mattered. But Stuart was fucking likable! He just wasn’t hot and young and Pakistani or Indian or Arabic like Richard. They talk about diversity but the industry hasn’t really changed much. They used to gravitate towards hot young white guys now they gravitated towards hot young ethnic guys. But the hot young part never changed.

“For all his achievements, Richard was very humble,” Harrison said. “I remember he didn’t even tell me he was on WTF…I found out when I went to listen to it.”

Alright, we get it, Anya thought, he‘s doing better than us. No need to keep hammering it in. He had achieved so many things. Conan at 21, The Tonight Show at 23, a ‘Netflix 1 and a Half Minutes’ at 26, a writing job on ‘The Jewy Mrs. Jacobson’ at 27. And although his career had abruptly stopped, and Anya had all the time in the world to pass him by, no matter what she got, she could never get Conan at 21. She couldn’t surpass that credit. In a way, he would always be doing better than her, even in death.

Taking advantage of the appropriateness of the occasion, she sobbed loudly, grieving not so much Richard as her younger self who would never get Conan at 21, no matter how hard she tried.

Tori glanced back at Richard’s body. She had been overwhelmed by so much jealousy in these last couple of minutes. She thought her jealousy would have died with him but it actually grew stronger. And why wouldn’t it? She was jealous of how well he was liked, and there is nothing that makes you more likable than being dead.

Staring at his closed eye lids, his arms crossing his chest, the slight smirk on his face, she realized excitedly that he no longer had to be hounded by someone announcing their next Late Night Set on Facebook, or experience the devastating Ego-blow that comes with finding out a comic you once gave condescending career advice to just got cast on SNL, or another 20 people were selected for JFL and you weren’t one of them.

Tori always thought if I could just leave the country, go deep into woods,, unplug my phone and live in isolation, I would never get jealous again. In self-isolation, no word of someone’s success would get to me. I would finally be free. Free from comparing myself to others. Free from the persistent, gnawing, existential pain of being passed over. But she knew she would never have the strength to go into the woods or unplug her phone for more than an hour. She knew there was only one way to really unplug your phone.

And that’s when Tori Markowitz realized what she was actually jealous of.

Yes, she was jealous of Richard’s 12 Late Night Appearances, yes she was jealous of his Just for Laughs Credit, yes she was jealous of him being hired on the writing staff of four different television shows, but mostly she was jealous he was-

Just then a seagull flew past the window of the Funeral Home, soared fast and low over the gray-green water of the Hudson, then darted back up into the sky, appearing, for a split second, to be swallowed by the sun (Center of the Solar System, 70 percent Hydrogen, near perfect sphere).

In these moments I wasn’t thinking of the comedian as a real human being but simply a perfect symbol for comedy’s spiritual decline into algorithm-feeding, fatuous, drivel devoid of any real point of view and further chipping away at our already decaying artistic standards.

Often my posts would get push back from comedians who would say he must be doing something right, he’s selling out arenas! To which I would reply that, based on this logic, congratulations are also in order for Adolf Hitler, as he too sold out arenas. (Obviously I am in no way comparing this comedian to Hitler; say what you want about Hitler but he always went straight into material).

And so I continued on this bitter, mean-spirited track. And then one day when I was reading an interview with this comedian to find something to be outraged by, I spotted this quote:

“I definitely suffer from imposter syndrome.”

While I admit ‘syndrome’ might not be the correct word to use in this comedian’s situation, I did feel a strange tug of empathy in that moment. Naturally I tried to push this feeling down as it contradicted my worldview in which he was the enemy of all that was good. But try as I might, I couldn’t fully extinguish this connection I was now feeling towards him, as I too suffer from imposter syndrome despite being a comedic genius.

A couple days later I was pitching an idea for a sitcom to an exec at Comedy Central. As he was explaining to me that, while the idea had a lot of potential, unfortunately Comedy Central had shut down three years ago and he was just a crazy person squatting in their abandoned office, I started to reflect on my one-sided feud with this comedian. What had he done to earn my wrath besides being a constant reminder of the ongoing lobotomization of stand up comedy? So what if he got rich pandering to the lowest common denominator while still having the audacity to demand to be seen as controversial and edgy?

Has culture become so spiritually bereft that at this point everyone is entitled to find their own grift just to survive? And was the true essence of my anger merely the fact that I had yet to find one that has worked for me?

As I was leaving Comedy Central’s abandoned office, I turned the corner and who did I run into but this very same crowd work comedian.

Though we had never met, he immediately started yelling at me.

Apparently my tweets had gotten back to him and he was not happy.

I wrongly thought the millions he had accrued had alleviated his insecurities and lack of self-worth but they appeared to have magnified them instead.

He called me gay, he mocked my weight, my disheveled appearance, my smudged, dirty, glasses.

And honestly, the barbs he was throwing at me were quite good. A couple I couldn’t help but laugh at.

For you see, I realized in that moment, admittedly a little too late, that it really is better to see this comedian live. His clips on Instagram did not do him justice.

While the content (me being fat and gay and retarded) was not unique, the brilliance was in his rapid-fire delivery and the imaginative variations on these themes.

As I continued to watch him perform his new hour, I felt my view of comedy had been greatly altered. This man was indeed great at crowd work and deserved all the success he had achieved. And not only was I wrong to make fun of him, if I knew what was good for me I would try and learn from his business acumen and crowd work skills.

And while not one element of this story is true (otherwise known as a one-man-show), this Thanksgiving I am grateful for the epiphany this crowd work comedian bestowed on me: We’re all in this together, and we all have talents that should be extolled, not derided. Why do artists demand that every other artist be similar to them, when if that was the case, it would deprive them of their own uniqueness?

Like a Jew in Auschwitz having to begrudgingly admire the immense organizational effort that lead him to be there, I take my hat off to to this King of Crowd Work…knowing all to well he has a killer joke about my hat locked and loaded.

Personally, I am not comfortable living in a world where people are defined by their last 4,000 social media posts alone.

And also, I truly believe that if we give Kanye one more chance, with enough encouragement and open dialogue, he could rethink his position that the Jews should be completely eradicated from the face of the Earth and that the Holocaust was a great first step in that direction. But it's up to us to show him the way. To teach him that not all Jews are evil, and in fact, some are pretty cool: Bernie Sanders, Albert Einstein, I'm having trouble naming others off the top of my head but the list goes on and on.

When you think a member of a group has wronged you, it’s only natural to put out a Super Bowl ad selling T-Shirts proudly emblazoned with the insignia of the political party that murdered six million other people in that group.

And while yes Kanye knows six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, I think if he a really thought about what that meant, he would stop seeing it as an event that gives him immense joy. Just like Elon Musk regretted sharing a blatantly antisemitic post to his two hundred million followers after he went on a tour of Auschwitz. That tour made him realize antisemitism is actually not great, something he had failed to see before despite being a genius, and he hasn’t done anything antisemitic since.

But Kanye will never get to place of understanding like Elon has unless, like Elon, we learn to forgive him. This is what the Grammy’s courageously did by inviting him, or his talent agency who only now just dropped him because they were shocked by his antisemitism over the weekend. They refused to give up on him because they knew with enough support and encouragement they could make money believing that he could change.

And who doesn’t want to choose such a positive outlook when that option is also the more profitable one?

And that is why I think we should give Kanye a second chance.

And you know what?

I have a pretty good feeling we will.

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“We’re not all bipolar millionaires,” a 9th grade history teacher in Omaha, Nebraska explained. “A lot of us are regular, hard-working, Americans who just happen to really hate Jews. We’re normal people in all walks of life and that’s what what makes Kanye’s behavior so upsetting.”

His wife went on to explain: “Just like not every Italian is a mobster, not every Irish person is an alcoholic, and not every Jew knows about the world-wide conspiracy their people are enmeshed in, not every antisemite is crazy. That’s a very hurtful stereotype. And we should know about hurtful stereotypes. We spread them all the time.”

“Kanye has done such irreversible damage to people’s perception of antisemites,” lamented an Uber driver in the Bronx. “Whenever I now confide to one of my rides my theory about how Jews infected me with pedophilia, I sense a little tension. It’s like right when we’re starting to feel normal again in society, Kanye ruins all that.”

“Not to sound like a broken record, but I blame the Jews for this,” said the Vice President of the Neo-Nazi Chapter in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “The Kanye you’re seeing is not actually Kanye but a clone created by the government to make all antisemites look crazy. And we all know who pulls the government’s strings.” (Note: this interviewee emailed later with a request to make it clear he was referring to the Jews in that last statement. I said it was very clear.)

“What people fail to understand,” said an M.R.I. technician in Cleveland, “is that the Holocaust would never have happened if not for millions of decent, hard-working citizens who also really hated Jews. Sure there’s some crazy ones like Kanye and Mel Gibson but it’s the millions of normal ones that keep antisemitism from ever going away. We’re not crazy, we’re hateful, and we’re everywhere. We’re your teachers, your mailman, your Aunt. And every time we hear a crazy person like Kanye we laugh him off like the rest of you, but deep down we know…,” and here the M.R.I. technician smiled deviously, “he’s right.”

I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the sustained influx of Maple Syrup coming in from the Canada border is endangering lives and putting a severe strain on our health care system. This, as well as an unmanageable influx of undocumented Canadians, are threatening the fabric of our society. Thousands of Canadians who will literally apologize for every little thing even if they did nothing wrong are pouring across our borders and into our communities. Instead of learning our language, they still continue to mispronounce words like ‘about’ and ‘sorry’ in a flagrant disregard of our way of life. In many of these communities they have infiltrated, we have seen a disturbing uptick in unnecessary apologizing, excessive politeness, and alarming reports of grown men referring to other grown men as buddies.

If we don’t stop this influx now in only a couple of decades we will all be Canadians, a fate worse than death. Imagine apologizing even if someone bumps into you? Imagine thinking ice hockey is the greatest sport or that Seth Rogen is funny?

This is why I have Declared my 15th National Emergency since I was sworn in two weeks ago.

Ever since the Lord Jesus Christ stopped that assassin’s bullet from killing me and gave that voter at my rally the great privilege of sacrificing himself, I have been determined to make American great again. Which is why I hereby determine:

1. Henceforth, all products of Canada will be subjected to an additional 25 percent Tariff.

2. The songs of Bryan Adams will be no longer found on Spotify or played on the radio.

3. No one will be allowed to reminisce about any of the SNL Casts that included more than 2 Canadian members.

If Canada attempts any reprisals, such as retaliatory tariffs, we will execute Justin Bieber. If Canada does not attempt any reprisals, we will still execute Justin Bieber.

The American public voted for me as President for one simple reason: to create unnecessary and costly trade wars with our biggest allies as a fake solution for made up and/or complex problems. And that’s exactly what I am going to do. As one of our greatest presidents Jefferson Davis once said… “We will protect our property at all cost…”

Signed,

Donald J. Trump

Jeffrey Dahmer is my name and this is my song

I killed a lot of people, I knew that it was wrong

I was a monster, I was evil, I was lonely, I was sick

The Universe that bore me played a dirty rotten trick

Born in Wisconsin right outside of Milwaukee

And if loneliness were waves I guess my soul would be the sea

As a kid I was withdrawn from the people that I’d meet

My youth was spent hearing echoes of monsters at my feet

By eighteen I was drinking hard to keep the thoughts from breaking through

But the things you try and run from you’re really running to

I picked up a hitchhiker one day when my Dad was out of town

We went back to my place to drink some beers and wind down

We got into a fight I vaguely remember

He wanted to leave that night, I wanted him to stay forever

In my thirties I moved into a place that would live in infamy

I brought back many men no one ever again did see

And after I killed them, I kept the bodies around

To have someone to talk to when I was feeling down

When a victim finally escaped, the cops came knocking on my door

I tried to play it straight but it was time to pay the score

When one of the men opened the fridge he let out a frightful gasp

I had kept many souvenirs from my long and lonesome past

In prison I was sent pamphlets from my sad and aging father

About a man who knew how to stand upon the surface of the water

They say this man could forgive any sin but this gave me little hope

When it came to my crimes I really pushed the envelope

I was baptized in ’93 so that my soul would not be lost

The water cleansed my body but did nothing for my thoughts

And then one day in the weight room after being checked for lice

I was beaten to death by an inmate who went by the nickname Christ

I was cremated that November, they scattered my remains

My apartment was torn down and my brother changed his name

Mommy says if we get everything on the list I can go back inside and watch Octonauts but only for an hour.

We have three things on the list: a butterfly, an owl, and Charlie.

Charlie is orange and white and brown. Did you know Charlie once tried to eat a rabbit but I chased Charlie away because I am so brave? Charlie did not like me after that. But Charlie is nice to me now because I’m the only one who loves him.

Charlie is not out but I wish he was so I could take him off the list and then take the others off the list and then go back inside and watch Octonauts.

Do you know I loved Octonauts from Adrian? On the Halloween party (whenever he has a Halloween party he invites me) on the Halloween party he showed it to me. Adrian is the only one not mean to me on the playground. The other boys do finger guns at me and my friends because they are so rude.

Mommy wants me to do karate but I don’t want to cause it’s gonna be hard and I’m gonna meet new people and I don’t like to meet new people I just want to meet my friends and I already met them.

She says if you don’t want to do it then don’t complain about the boys being mean to me at school but I don’t complain she asks what happened and I say the boys were mean to me cause that’s what happened. I say all the boys except Adrian were mean to me.

The sky goes dark and then I hear Mommy yell owl and then I see an owl fly on top of me and then I see it go sit on top of Rick’s house with yellow eyes that don’t move.

Scratch it off the list Mommy says.

I scratch it off the list.

Only a butterfly and Charlie left.

Two people with white hair are coming and Mommy says move across the street but I don’t so she says it louder then she pulls my arm because she’s so rude and drags me across the street.

“You’re so rude!” I yell. I used to say stupid but Mommy and Daddy said I can’t say that word anymore. If I want to say something I can say rude. So I say rude, but in my head I still think stupid.

You know we can’t be around other people right she says.

Yes I say.

Why can’t we be around other people?

Mommy is being very rude not letting me watch Octonauts.

I want to watch Octonauts I say.

You can watch it once you get everything on the list she says…Now this is important. She kneels down. Why is it bad for us to get close to other people right now?

Butterfly, I see a butterfly…I say. We can scratch it off the list.

Where?

It flew away Mommy.

Did you really see a butterfly or did you just lie to get done with this game quicker?

I saw a butterfly! I yell.

I did not see a butterfly. But she’s being rude and I want to watch Octonauts.

It was so pretty I say. It was yellow.

I did one time see a yellow butterfly so it’s true from then.

Adrian loves butterflies. Did you know he draws one every day and no one can tell it’s a butterfly because I’m so much better at drawing than him? Did you know I am so good at drawing and swimming and flying and cooking and booking and looking and fooking and pooking and tooking.

There is a fire truck at Bertie’s house. Mommy says it’s not a fire truck.

Yes it is a fire truck I say.

Fine she says. It’s a firetruck. Now Let’s move a little quicker she says.

Wait I say.

What she says?

I scratch the butterfly off the list.

The firetruck leaves Bertie’s house.

Mommy, did you know Octonauts is um called Octonauts because um the boat they are in the boat they fly around in um looks like an Octopus?

We keep on walking.

I want to go home and watch Octonauts I say.

Not until we find Charlie or another cat.

But I don’t want to it’s hot.

That was the agreement. Remember?

You’re so rude!

Now that you’re not in school you can’t watch T.V. all day! It’s very bad for you she says.

You’re rude and I hate you!

You can watch it when we find everything on the list. You had so much fun doing this yesterday!

Mommy gets a call.

I look for Charlie.

Charlie where are you!!!!

When Mommy says quiet.

Charliieeeee!

Was he alone? Mommy says

Charlie where are you?

I look under the boat at Rick’s house.

Thanks for calling Mommy says.

I can’t find Charlie.

I can’t find Charlie I say.

It’s okay. We don’t have to finish.

But I want to find Charlie.

You can watch Octonauts.

I rush inside.

I go on the couch and I pet pickles cause she’s so cute Pickles is my big sister then I turn on the T.V. myself cause I know how to now and I find Octonauts and I turn it on and Mommy goes into the other room to talk to Daddy and Daddy starts sobbing.

Octonauts is my favorite show!

But then I hear a loud sound from the window.

Mommy!

What

There’s another fire truck.

It’s not a fire truck.

Yes it is a fire truck!

No it’s not it’s an ambulance. It’s taking sick people from their house. Do you understand? I need to you understand.

Yes I understand.

You know what it’s like to be sick and how it feels so bad.

Yes.

Well a lot of people are getting sick now. So we have to be very careful not to get close to anyone to make them sick. Okay?

Okay.

You understand? I need you to understand?

I understand I say.

Good girl she says.

Mommy-

What?

I can’t hear Octonauts over the fire truck.

Mommy sighs and makes the volume louder.

I can still hear the fire truck I say.

She makes it even louder.

I still can hear the fire truck.

She makes it even louder.

Now I can’t hear the fire truck anymore.

Thats good I say.

Then I keep on watching.

I love Octonauts.

Adrian loves it too.

What a wild year it’s been.

This was the year we all watched the Trump/Biden debate, where Americans had to choose between a man accused of rape and a man who looked like he had just been roofied by a rapist. This was the year O.J. Simpson passed away, and of course the second he died the woke police dug into his past to find out something shady he had done.

This was the year police broke up protests on college campuses across the country, resulting in thousands of officers being told to ‘get a real job’ by undergrad philosophy majors.

This was the year we kept seeing videos on Instagram of a Neanderthal frozen in immense pain that in the end turned out to be Joe Rogan filming himself in an ice bath.

This was also the year that Russia called in bomb threats to voting booths on election day which was somewhat unnecessary as Tony Hinchcliffe had just proven that no amount of bombing can stop Trump from becoming president. This was the year that Trump’s cabinet nominees worked hard to get support by going door to door letting their neighbors know they were registered sex offenders.

This was the year a bunch of people who spoke out against Boeing died of ‘suicide’, and Americans cared so little in response that you would think the whistle they were blowing was a rape whistle.

This was the year New Jersey was struck with a 4.8 magnitude earthquake when Chris Christie performed a cannon ball into his pool. This was also the year that mysterious drones flew over New Jersey that turned out to be aliens who left angrily when, upon landing, were told a gas station attendant had to refuel their spaceships for them.

This was the year that, during lent, thousands of priests heroically gave up having sex with children for a month. This was the year that Matt Rife put out a crowd work special and not since Dylan went electric have we been graced with such a bold and radical new direction from an artist.

This was the year where mounting evidence showed that P. Diddy had previously raped you and everyone you’ve ever met. This was the year where New York subways had so many delays that many people had no choice but to untie themselves from the tracks and keep on living. This was the year of unpopular, New York laws that say a crazy person can only be locked up if they are seen physically punching or kicking your decapitated head down the street.

This was the year where the fun culture war debate was whether certain people deserved to be gunned down during the holiday season.

This was the year where Elon Musk’s tweets raised such interesting questions as “Is Rocket Science that hard?”

One night, Bono and I were on a train, having dinner and talking about how famous we both were.

“It’s hard to believe that a man like Bob Dylan could write so many profound songs in his lifetime,” I said to Bono.

“I know, it’s incredible. Even though I’m a bit of legend myself, it’s almost intimidating sitting here talking to you.”

“I’m intimidated myself,” I sighed. “The other day I spent three hours in a hotel begging me to explain what the meaning of existence was.”

“What did you tell yourself?”

“I said it would ruin my mystique if I ever said something in my life that made even remote sense.”

We continued talking on a wide variety of subjects that ranged from my musical career all the way to Bono’s musical career. Bono has got an amazing sense of right and wrong, although he occasionally forgets which is which. I told him if he had been alive in the early 1800’s, such is the strength of his moral conviction, that he would have most surely been born a circus elephant.

Bono said that, like the majority of my lyrics, that line could either be taken as brilliant or entirely incomprehensible, and the fun was to guess which.

The night wore on. Bono asked if I had any new songs, any unrecorded ones. It just so happened that I did. I pulled the pages out of my suitcase and showed them to him.

“These are brilliant,” he said, as I was handing him the lyrics. “You should record them.”

I said I wasn’t so sure about that, thought that maybe I should pour lighter fluid over them- and then dry the pages off and then record them.

He said, “No, no,” and then brought up the name of Daniel Lanois, said he was a producer, said he was a great partner, be perfect to work with me.

I had no idea where he was going with this, so I asked him to elaborate. He told me that if I wanted to record another album Lanois could produce it. I didn’t understand why he was being so cryptic. If he has something to say, just say it. I asked him again what he was getting at, that he should stop speaking in circles, and he finally seemed to understand. He then said, “Lanois could be the savior that would jetty your talent into the great highways of America and make you be the court jester you’ve always dreamed of being in the jingle-jangle morning.”

Lanois produce my new album? It didn’t seem like a bad idea. I told him I’d think about it.

Later that night, I went back to my house. I listened to some news on the radio and then went into my bathroom and started removing the Mascara I had lately been wearing to conceal some of the wrinkles on my face. Twelve hours later, I left the bathroom and went into a small art studio on the property. I started thinking about Lanois, what Bono said. Maybe I should get back into recording, that old rat race. Lately, my live performances have failed to capture the inner spirit of the songs. For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards and dead grass. There were just too many distractions that had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs. And what’s worse, I could now only think of four metaphors for every situation instead of the usual eleven or twelve.

Prior to this, things had changed and not in an abstract way, which was unusual for me. A hurricane had come and blown away my reputation. A Tsunami had licked up all my previous musical skill and dragged them into the impenetrable darkness of the ocean’s abyss. Also, my brain was becoming confused between reality and hyperbolic metaphors. The other week, an actual tornado formed in my backyard, and I stood there relating it to my musical career before my wife dragged me into the basement.

Here the memoir travels back in time to when Dylan arrived in New York in the early 60’s, to make a name for himself. While many critics agree this fragmented structure serves as an excellent literary device, Dylan’s own explanation- that frequent drug use had corroded the area of the brain that conceptualizes time- no one would deny that the jumbled structure does little to make his life story any more interesting.

A month after finishing up a tour in Europe to publicize my 38th album, I went to New York to try and make a name for myself. I was 18, and came across the country from the Midwest in a four-door, sedan 57 Impala- straight out of Chicago, clearing the hell out of there- racing all the way through the smoky towns, winding roads, green fields covered with snow, a twenty-four-hour ride, dozing most of the way in the backseat, making small talk, strumming on my guitar, suddenly remembering I was the only one in the vehicle and leaping frantically into the front seat to regain control of thewheel…

The big car came to a full stop on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. I slammed the door shut behind me, waved goodbye to no one, and stepped out on to the hard snow.

I was there to find singers, the ones I’d heard on record- Dave Van Ronk, Woody Guthrie, Charlie McCarthy.

The Café Wha was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. A man on the corner told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show. Said if anyone could get me a gig, Neil could. This was a little odd, since all I asked the man for was a light, but I just took it in stride.

I found the place and was told that Freddy was downstairs in the basement engaged in a heated political debate with some of the hats and coats that were checked in there. And that’s where I found him. Neil was the MC of the room and the maestro in charge of all the entertainers. He was a tall, lanky dude with a well-trimmed, black mustache that he kept in his wallet. He asked me what I did. I told him I sang, played guitar and harmonica.

“Well, play something for me, kid. Let’s see what you got.”

I was signed to a record deal as I was taking my guitar out of its case, and was soon hailed by music critics all over the country as the best thing to come out of the folk music scene.

The memoir shifts again to the recording of his album Oh Mercy, which one rock critic was famously noted as saying, “Out of all his 42 albums, Oh Mercy ranks somewhere in there.”

I was over by the pool, sitting with G.E. Smith, a man who claims to have been my back-up guitarist for the last 58 years. I like Smith, he’s mild-mannered, and has got thoughts that could kill a man, although I have no idea what this means. He had just spent 4 months on the road with Willie Nelson before both of them realized no tour had been scheduled.

He asked me where I was living these days.

“Everywhere,” I said. “And nowhere.”

“What does that mean,” he asked, unable to comprehend my obscure comments but still feeling fairly certain they were the words of an undeniable genius- a common reaction people have towards me.

“It means nothing,” I said. “And everything.”

“Aren’t you just saying a vague answer and then following it up with it’s opposite to sound profound?”

“Maybe,” I said softly. “But then again…maybe not.”

Just then, a waiter came up and asked what if we were ready to order. I explained to the waiter that I had achieved such a mythical status in the last 25 years that I no longer did such petty, mortal things as consume food or water. Then I ordered a fried enchilada.

Later that day, I went to the Marie Antoinette Hotel, where the Beatles were staying on their first tour in America. The success of the Beatles had finally gotten to Lennon’s head, and he now not only claimed that he had composed the majority of their songs, but also helped write the Magna Carta. Ringo was back at the studio, vigorously trying to hone in on his drumming ability, and could now hit two of the drums at the same time.

The Other Musicians on “Oh Mercy”

Lanois had recruited an eclectic alliance of musicians for my new album. They included the singer Maron Rufkin who played in Bourbon Street bars like The Rising Sun before someone explained to him that the bar was a fictional place in an old folk ballad and didn’t actually exist. Rufkin was a regional star, he had a high pompadour and a set of pearly teeth. He told me that as a teenager he’d played with Memphis Slim. I thought I had something in common with him there because I had also once been a teenager. Rufkin had some fine songs. One of them had the line: “You do good things for people and it just makes them bad.” I might have thought about recording it if I hadn’t written thousands of better ones. There was also the guitar player Brian Soltz, whose licks were thought out like piano patterns but still left dabs of saliva on your face. And how could you forget to mention Lightning Willie Green, a man who achieved the incredible feat of being a folk legend without having written any songs or knowing how to play an instrument.

They were a good group of performers, and I felt they could me well. I had a couple of songs with me, though I had yet to write lyrics or melodies for them. Right now they were just blank pieces of notebook paper. But that was a start at least. All I had to do was sit down in a quiet place, remind myself I was Bob Dylan, and then some of the most brilliant lyrics in the world would start effortlessly flowing from my pen.

Because I’m Bob Dylan.

She scrolled through the list of people who reshared her clip to see which influencer caused it to spread like bird flu across the internet. Mostly nobodies- friends and family- and then she saw it and immediately her soul was hugged in a deep, dopamine caress: Howie Mandel had reshared her joke. She felt so strong in that moment, so powerful, like nothing could ever hurt her.

The joke was in reference to an asteroid that would be crashing into Earth in a couple hours, obliterating all living things on the planet. It was sixty miles long and when it collided debris would be blasted into Low Earth orbit only for it to return just as quickly as a steady stream of fire and ash that would incinerate the entire human race in a matter of minutes.

It was such a surreal experience to have Howie Mandel reshare her joke. She had always been a big fan of Howie’s ever since Howie reshared her joke a couple minutes ago and now that same joke had 8.5 million views, 560,000 likes, 75,000 shares, 46,000 comments, 12,000 interactions, and a watch time of 1 day, 14 hours, 52 minutes, and 39 seconds.

“Where are you?” her Mom texted, followed by an accidental GIF of Snoop Dogg smoking a blunt.

Shit. Maria had been so distracted by her clip going viral she was now running late to the last dinner she would ever have with her family. The End of the World Count Down, which was being broadcast from Times Square as a sort of ironic, inverse Ball Drop, was in one hour and fifty-two minutes. The plan was to eat dinner with her family and then go up on the roof and watch Carson Daly ring in the Last Year.

It would take twenty minutes to walk to her Mom’s place. There was no time to waste.

She reshared Howie Mandel’s reshare of her clip with the sarcastic comment ‘Ha..ha…I can quit comedy now’ (simultaneously mocking her poor luck of only getting someone of Howie Mandel’s caliber to to reshare her clip while also letting everyone know Howie Mandel had just reshared her clip) and then bolted out the apartment.

There was rioting in Union Square. The trees shook like trembling hands beneath the whirlwind of a military helicopter overhead. Tongues of flames leapt out of the shattered, tinted windows of an overturned truck. Two police officers were tasering a black person just to have something familiar to latch on to in these troubling times.

Maria was now at 568,000 likes.

She scrolled through her phone to see what Sophia Shoal’s follower count was currently at. Sophia Shoal was Maria’s least favorite comedian in the business, and she loved nothing more than checking her feed just to get annoyed. For the last five years, Sophia had built a huge following by going through the traditional comedy route: posting endless pictures of her perfectly tanned, bikini-clad body with captions disingenuously co-opted from the body positivity movement such as ‘I am proud of my figure and I don’t care what anyone says’, as if anyone had said anything negative in the first place. This fake courage was applauded as real courage by women, while also attracting millions of men who were following for mostly masturbatory purposes. Somehow her comedy was even worse. For every ten minutes of rambling she had one mediocre joke and that mediocre jokes was always met with desperate, undeserved enthusiasm, like a small pool of muddy water a parched traveller finally stumbles upon after wandering for hours through a harsh, barren desert.

Also Maria’s ex-boyfriend Steve had left her for Sophia and now they were engaged.

That truck from before exploded.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Maria muttered, seeing that Sophia’s latest clip where she’s asking someone in the front row what they do for a living (one of the consequences of social media is that now 90 percent of comedians are indistinguishable from Census Bureau employees) already had 980,984 likes.

Had everyone gone insane?

Sophia was the most narcissistic person in the world Maria thought as she stepped over the corpse of someone who had just jumped off the roof of their building. And the industry always rewards narcissists. If only Maria had had the necessary psychopathology to succeed in this business, but unfortunately she was always held back by her own inherent sense of goodness, her own boundless-

“What does this cunt want now?” Maria blurted out loud when she saw her Mom had texted her again.

‘We’re at Dessert! Where are you?” the text read, immediately followed by another accidental GIF, this time of Scarlett Johansson undressing in front of a mirror.

Maria was about to respond when a convertible whizzed by her and drove into a crowd of people like they were curtains in a car wash. Bodies were catapulted into the air, landing on or around the Astor Place Black Cube.

Maria jolted down Lafayette Street, past a broken down city bus with a large ad for Young Sheldon, past an Equinox, past an Urban Outfitters, past a crowd of people who were all filming on their phones a man on a roof who was firing a machine gun into that same crowd of people filming on their phones, past a Jamba Juice, past a T.V. in the window of a Best Buy where Jimmy Fallon was playing beer pong with Big Bird, past a line of dazed 16 year olds stumbling out of a high school, past a Chase Bank, past a large poster for ‘Lucky Inmates’, a new game show hosted by Chrissy Teigen where the winner gets their death sentence overturned, past a CVS that had either been terribly looted or just had its grand opening, past an ad on a taxi for a reboot of a remake of a prequel about Captain America in pre-school, past a half-melted snow cone stuck to the asphalt, past a young Venezuelan girl pushing her own stroller, past a school bus on fire.

She was now at 720,000 likes.

Still nowhere near the number of likes Sophia’s bullshit typically gets.

Turning the corner she found herself on an eerily quiet street. She sat down for a moment on a park bench with its back to a torched Cathedral.

She was 12 blocks from her Mom’s.

Why did she have to go viral on the same day the world ended, which gave spending time with her family ‘added value’? She loved her family, especially her seven or eight (she had lost count) nephews, but she also resented feeling so torn when she had such little time left.

But of course she wasn’t torn! She obviously needed to be with her family right now. She sprang up from the park bench with fierce oh my God…one of the Menendez brothers just reshared her joke…And also the Hawk Tuha Girl…And Kim Jong-un. Wow. Just wow.

All these reshares by successful people allowed Maria to feel, for a moment, as if she was sharing in their success. It was as if, by resharing her, they had granted her permission to bask momentarily in the warm glow of their much easier lives.

The sun, like the last deflating balloon at a child’s birthday party that no one came to, dropped silently behind the clouds.

A warm, soft, shadow unfurled across the bench Maria was sitting on.

On the other side of the street, a gray cat, perched on a T.V. someone forgot to turn off, was staring at her through the lighted window of an empty bodega.

Staring in judgment of her entire being.

Which is how all cats stare.

It was in that moment, while taking a short break from her phone, on a near-empty street with a torched cathedral towering over her, and a cat peering into her soul, that she felt the magnitude of her loneliness come crushing down like a comet. She always thought she wanted love but did she? So many relationships she had ruined because her priorities were always on her, her accomplishments, her petty jealousies, and of course, the hot, successful women guys seemed to always like more than her.

She didn’t want love, she wanted justice.

And where had it gotten her?

Alone on a park bench on a planet that was about to explode.

Suddenly, mercifully, Maria was flung out of this vortex of despairing thoughts by the comforting ding of her phone:

She was now at 920,000 likes.

Maria smiled.

For she felt, had always felt, a deep crater within herself, a crater that widened with each rejection, with each heartbreak.

Wounds from childhood that wouldn’t heal.

But looking down at that number she now saw with perfect clarity what she needed to achieve in order to finally close that crater, to heal those ancient wounds.

A Million Likes.

A million likes was the justice she was always looking for.

A million likes was the only thing that could make her whole again.

And she had forty minutes to do it.

‘We’re going up to the roof now’, her mother messaged her followed by a GIF of Winnie the Pooh licking honey off of Christopher Robbin’s penis.

‘I’’ll be there shortly’, she texted.

Maria put the phone on Do Not Disturb so she wouldn’t get any more calls.

To get a million likes, she would have to nudge the clip along, behave as the clip’s PR Manager. This would involve a lot of resharing of reshares coupled with incessant bragging masked in fake modesty.

Maria had been training for this moment all her life.

First, she reshared any celebrity who reshared her clip with such comments as ‘WOW’ and ‘So Surreal’ and ‘I can die happy now’, and then for those celebrities who reshared her clip but didn’t tag her she took a screenshot of those reshares and then posted that screenshot of those reshares on her stories and a screenshot of those reshares on her grid and then she immediately replied with a prayer emoji on the first three congratulatory messages under the screenshot of those reshares of her clip on her grid, and then she went on Twitter and commented ‘Thank you, huge fan’ underneath all the Celebrity retweets of her clip that she also posted on Twitter, and then she watched to see what celebrities liked her ‘Thank You, huge fan’ under the retweet of her tweet, and when a Celebrity would go above and beyond and not just like the ‘Thank you, huge fan’ but reply to it with their own comment to emphasize how much they liked the tweet they had retweeted, she would then reply to that comment on the retweet of her tweet, and they would like the reply to the comment that was a reply to their comment thanking them for retweeting her tweet.

She looked at the time.

Ten minutes left before the world ended.

She only needed 800 more likes to hit a million.

But there wasn’t much more Maria could do to nudge the clip along (also, she didn’t want to come off as obsessive).

Just then from the T.V. across the street: “I hope all this Champagne I drank doesn’t mess up the counting I’m about to do…”

Oh no…

It was the calming, painfully unfunny banter of Carson Daly.

The Count-Down was about to begin.

“Here we go…We start with 10, right?”

Suddenly, thousands of voices wafted through the night sky, a choir of drunken children chanting in unison, their voices betraying a slight hint of relief that this nightmare called the Modern Age would soon be over: 10…9…

Fuck.

8…7…

She looked down at her phone: she needed 600 more likes.

6…5…

Oh please God..

4..3..

please God show some…

2..

Mercy

1…

The asteroid entered the thermosphere, the outermost layer of the earth, swallowing up the Ghostbusters-green spectral glow of the Aurora Borealis in its oceanic shadow, and incinerating a Satellite upon contact….Wanda Sykes reshared Maria pushing the clip to 999,500 likes…The crater-covered planetoid careened through a puncture in the Ozone like a Cosmic Game of Pinball, draping a deep black curtain across Siberia…Seth Rogen’s Great Aunt reshared Maria’s clip and now it was at 40,000 miles per hour was the asteroid’s speed as it plowed into the heart of the Amazon basin….Billions of animal life were vaporized in an instant…She was now at 999,967 likes……Tons of debris flung into low orbit… 999,980 likes…and began raining down… 999,984 likes… like fire…999,986 likes…all over the shit shit shit she needed 10 more likes she wasn’t going to make it she wasn’t

And then something miraculous happened.

Something that could only be called divine providence:

Sophia Shoals reshared her.

Perhaps she had misjudged her all these years.

Sophia reshared her and two minutes later she hit a million likes.

Like watching the video of the end of a Jewish wedding in reverse, Maria felt the shattered pieces of herself fling back together again.

All her pain melted away, all the betrayals and feelings of worthlessness, the shame of being alive, the million lonely loveless nights. Looking down at that glorious number next to that heart-shaped logo next to her clip, she felt for the first time in a long time strong and visible and necessary.

She felt heard.

Skyscrapers toppled over each other with the pointless ferocity of a toddler stomping on legos, the trees blackened like burnt paper and the dust gathered like a trillion flocks of crows crowding out the sun.

She died, like so many others, staring deeply into her lover’s eyes.

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Last year, during the October 7th massacre, the Lebanese porn star Mia Khalifa sent out a tweet asking for the Hamas terrorists to flip their phones horizontally to get a better view of the carnage. This was really hard for me to hear. Not as a Jew, but as a big fan of all her previous work. In a way I felt like I knew Mia so her tweet couldn’t help leave me feeling betrayed. And I know they say one has to try and separate the artist from the collection of hard core porn they engage in on a regular basis, but this is easier said than done.

I was facing a real moral dilemma:

How could I continue masturbating to this woman as she’s being gang-banged by an entire college basketball team and still feel like I was doing the right thing?

The answer is reluctantly.

But the penis has more tribal allegiance than you might expect and I soon found myself returning to the Jewish heritage I had turned my back on for so long, by which I mean I started masturbating exclusively to the Israeli porn star Chemda Shoshana Bracha Chachachachchchchchch.

Although I hate being idealogical when it comes to pornography, I found myself enjoying Chemda’s work quite a bit. She was a big fan of B.D.S.M. (Bondage, Domination, Sadism, Masochism) though not so much a fan of B.D.S (Boycott, Divest, Sanction).

Her work really spoke to me, and helped fill the void left by Mia.

But then a couple months later I was performing at a comedy fundraiser in Manhattan that Chemda also happened to be on because hot girls are now doing stand up which is cultural appropriation.

After the event, I nervously approached her at the bar and told her how much her work meant to me.

And then we started talking.

It was an amazing conversation until the question of Palestinians was brought up and she, without hesitation, referred to them as animals and said they don’t deserve their own homeland….

Never meet your heroes.

This was worse than when I found out Woody Allen had married his stepdaughter Soon-Yi, which to me has always been the strongest proof that Jews will stop at nothing to marry Asian women.

I was in a serious moral conundrum:

How could I continue masturbating to this woman as she’s getting bukakkied by a bevy of dwarves dressed in dominatrix attire, while her husband watches gagged and bound in a corner of the barn, and still feel like a good person?

I began scouring the internet for a porn star who had an actual nuanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instead of one blinded by tribalism, dogma, and prejudice.

This turned out to be a difficult task. For one, this is not a category on Pornhub (though, surprisingly, Pornhub does have the category ‘Girls with a Comprehensive View of the Soviet Union Collapse and Big Clits’)

Desperate to find this elusive porn star, I remember paying to watch a woman on a web cam at one point.

“What would you like me to do, honey?” she asked.

“I would like you to sit on that big purple dildo while shoving those anal beads up your butt but first…what is your historical interpretation of the Oslo Accords?”

Her answer was disappointingly reductive. I by no means want to truck in the hurtful stereotype that porn stars are not well-educated, but she often confused the Oslo Accords with the Camp David Accords.

It was embarrassing.

I soon gave up on my quest.

It’s been five months now since I’ve watched porn.

It hasn’t been too terrible.

Instead of going on Pornhub, I now just masturbate to the faded memories of all the beautiful, sexy, women I used to watch on Pornhub.

But I don’t give in to despair.

Call me an optimist, but I still believe that one day in the near future I will be masturbating to a porn star with a balanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a porn star who can hold both Netanyahu and Hamas accountable; a porn star who can condemn the genocidal, far-right thugs in Bibi’s coalition but also the blatant antisemitism on the left; a porn star who cannot turn away from the immense, horrible, suffering in Gaza but that also doesn’t feel the need to criticize Jews for being worried about antisemitism (you cannot tell a Jew to not be worried about antisemitism when worrying about antisemitism is what being Jewish is all about). A porn star who understands the paradox that is Israel- a country that is viewed by Jews as a safe haven before, during, and after the Holocaust, and by Palestinians as a land they were often cruelly displaced from.

In other words, a porn star who can recognize the humanity in Israelis and Palestinians, while also acknowledging the religious fanaticism that is poisoning both sides of this awful conflict.

Call me naive, but I know in the deep, recesses of my heart, where a broken, fragile faith still resides, that a porn star like this exists.

They must.