Dispatches from the Frayed Edge
Your May update on what’s unraveling personally, politically, and everything in between.
New Name: “Pulling Threads”
“You Gotta Eat Something” is still here. It has its own page now, like a museum exhibit that deserves its own placard. I’m still writing about food and the politics around it because, in this country, food is where our ugliest values come dressed as common sense. We reward corporations for price gouging and punish families for needing help. We tell people to shop smarter while letting mega mergers wipe out every affordable option in their zip code.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. Every time I wrote about food, I found myself in the middle of something else. One minute I’m looking at grocery delivery fees, the next I’m reading about Reagan’s USDA reclassifying ketchup as a vegetable to cut school lunch costs (yeah, that actually happened.) I tried to write about the SNAP program and ended up in a Senate transcript from 1964 where someone earnestly suggested that the poor should farm their own food in window boxes (also a thing that really happened.)
So I renamed the blog. Pulling Threads is what happens when you follow one small detail to its absurd, infuriating origin. It’s a name for the essays that begin with a grocery receipt and end with a Supreme Court ruling. It’s what happens when you start asking questions in a country that has always preferred answers that fit on a bumper sticker.
I Started a New Job and I’m Commuting Again
It’s May in Chicago, which means the weather has entered its annual identity crisis. Shorts and warm coats coexist in uneasy truce. The sun comes out just long enough to make you hopeful before disappearing behind clouds that smell like bus exhaust and a melange of pavement juices. I, like thousands of others attempting to simulate normal life while the foundations of American democracy groan like a rusted drawbridge in need of federal funding, have resumed my daily ride on the El.
I’m happy to report the Red Line still smells like skunk weed and pee. These days it feels less a transit system and more like a municipal shrug on rails. A sort of moving diorama of everything we pretend not to notice. It rattles. It leaks. It routinely fails to show up. And yet, it is oddly clarifying. Somewhere between Belmont and Clark/Lake, I find myself composing notes in my phone like I’m preparing testimony for a truth and reconciliation commission that will never convene.
Most of these notes are half-formed ideas about democracy, food policy, or the uncanny frequency with which Chicagoans eat egg salad on public transit. One just says, “Capitalism with seasonal allergies.” Another, “We used to build libraries. Now we build branded immersive experiences about libraries.”
Still, there’s something illuminating about moving through the city again. You notice what’s changed. What’s broken. What no one’s fixing. You get a front-row seat to the quiet erosion of public life, the out-of-order escalators, the boarded-up shops. You start seeing connections. Not necessarily solutions, this is still public transit after all, but patterns. The graffitied over signs advertising “luxury” apartment buildings next to community pantries with lines out the door. You start to think about who benefits from pretending this is normal. You get used to the unsettling ease with which people talk about politics like it’s weather or sports or someone else’s problem.
So yes, I’m commuting again. And yes, I’m still writing. Sometimes it’s in complete sentences. Sometimes it’s just: “haunted house but make it America 2025”. I don’t always know what I’m writing toward, but I know the feeling of watching things fall apart from a window streaked with other people’s fingerprints.
I Was Banned from the MSNBC Subreddit for 90 Days (And I’m Still Giggling About It)
Technically, it ended up being a 24-hour suspension. But in the grand tradition of American overreactions to speech, I’m still calling it a ban. The offense? A passing comment about how ducks, like the sitting president, possess genitals so bizarre and alarming they seem less like an evolutionary adaptation and more like a dare.
I was banned for a comment I made on a post that I had written. It’s the digital equivalent of being escorted out of your own living room for using the wrong tone while describing the furniture.
To be clear, I’m not outraged. I’m delighted. America has never known what to do with people who say things plainly. We jailed Eugene V. Debs for opposing a war, blacklisted the Dixie Chicks for opposing another one, and now, in this brave new world of digital decorum, we delete a comment for comparing a fascist’s (well-documented) weird dick to a duck’s. Obviously the line between “insightful political commentary” and “waterfowl obscenity” is one the mods enforce with puritanical consistency.
The absurdity is delightful. Unfortunately, the moderators did not share my enthusiasm for zoological metaphors and the comment was removed.
This country has always had a complicated relationship with dissent. In 1798, the Adams administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to criminalize criticism of the government. I made a joke about duck dick. One of us was considered a threat to national security, and the other was me, temporarily muted by a platform that routinely features all caps debates about whether Joe Scarborough is a deep-state psyop or just a sentient jar of mayonnaise with a cheap suit and regrets.
History doesn’t always repeat. Sometimes it just bans you from your own post.
Pulling It All Together As It Comes Undone
So that’s where we are this month. The blog has a new name. The Notes app has become my most active collaborator. I have a new job and was banned from a subreddit I used to moderate because I unflatteringly compared the sitting president’s weird dick to a duck’s. It is all deeply, stupidly American.
But Pulling Threads exists for exactly this reason. Because unraveling is our national pastime; because this country was built on ideas so contradictory they make your teeth hurt. We have spent the last two and a half centuries patching over those contradictions with myth, marketing, and the occasional commemorative coin. If you don’t tug on the threads, if you don’t ask why the grocery store is union-busting on TikTok or why book bans now extend to the Pentagon, the unraveling happens quietly. Invisibly. Like a hem coming loose while you smile for the family portrait.
This blog is not here to fix it. I do not have a plan. I have a browser history full of congressional transcripts and a recurring headache from trying to make sense of it all. What I do have is a record. A habit. A willingness to point and say, look at that. If you are still here, still noticing, still reading, congratulations. You are paying attention. And in a country that has always preferred forgetting, that is no small thing.