I’ve tried six times to write something to you today. Something about 2017. Something funny, maybe. Or something heartfelt. You know, all deep and hopeful and shit. But it all felt wrong.

Everything I wrote felt wrong—an infuriating feeling—when words simply cannot say a goddamn thing and it all feels forced and pathetic. The humor feels flat. The depth, fake.

Nothing but frustration. Nothing but irritation. Nothing but wanting to walk away.

Eventually, I did walk away, and went about my day, finally realizing hours later: “Confusion, Janelle. That’s what you feel. That’s why you can’t write about 2017. Because 2017 was a year of confusion. So of course you’re confused trying to write about it now.” Fucking confusion.

That was 2017 for me.

Mind-numbing, dizzying, whiplash days of utter confusion. It isn’t spectacular for the creative process, I’ll tell you that much. I try not to write unless I have something to say (weird, I know), but 2017 was characterized by a million attempts to contain the incomprehensible, by the feeling of “tomorrow, maybe tomorrow something will make sense,” only to find in tomorrow a bigger hit than today’s.

Back into the maelstrom of where the fuck am I?

2017 began for me with a tragedy that felt like the cruelest, most unnecessary slam against my family – like a kick straight to the jaw when you’re already bleeding on the ground.

I woke on January 1 to my husband standing in my bedroom doorway, saying, “Janelle! I went into Ava’s room and Laser is dead in there.” Our five-year-old Labrador died on New Year’s Eve during the night by suffocating in an insulated lunch bag that had a single candy wrapper in it.

A fucking lunch bag killed my dog.

Confusion.

Beyond the cruelty of the death of our pup was its timing. It happened six weeks after my grandmother was murdered by my cousin, which happened five weeks after the natural death of my grandfather.

My grandmother. Stabbed. Gone. She was old, but she wasn’t done.

Everything I thought I knew of my family, of safety, of living on earth, was gone. Between moments of terror and crushing grief, I felt confusion.

How? Why? HOW?

The year of confusion.

I spent the first day of 2017 pacing my house almost in a fugue, repeating the words, “Not our dog, too…not our dog, too…”

I knew then 2017 was going to be bullshit.

But I didn’t need the death of my pup to know that. I knew Trump was coming, and I knew it would be horrendous. And it was. It is.

Confusion.

Watching a man that evil run our country – a racist, misogynistic, ignorant, compulsively lying bully – but even worse, watching people support him. Watching the sycophantic GOP kiss his ass to make sure their tax scam passed, watching them fall in line through all his juvenile, dangerous, insane tweets and attacks of the free press – the sacred America institution of the motherfucking free press. His obvious guilt. His ignorance. His manipulation. His obvious racism and misogyny and threats to democracy.

He claims absolute right over our judicial system.

And they do nothing.

Nothing.

Money. Oligarchy. Here we are. I want to scream HOW DO YOU NOT SEE? WHY DON’T YOU CARE?

I get why the GOP doesn’t care, but what about everyday people? Family members. Trump supporters I know.

How do they not see?

Confusion.

Dizzying, mind-numbing, stunning confusion. How. Where. What. No.

I watch women and men fight and fight and kick and scream and call and write their representatives. Nothing. They don’t give a fuck. We have no power. We have no power. Why do we try.

Confusion.

I watch my hope dwindle. I watch it fade into damn near nothing. I wonder if I care anymore.

I read James Baldwin’s words on hope. I feel the weight of my own pathetic nature. I don’t even remember what he said. I only recall how his words made me feel.

White middle-class woman with healthcare in California. Oh, get over your fucking self, Janelle. Who are you to get all despondent? Who are you to lose hope?

But what do I do?

Confusion. 

My words were gone.

And yet, they weren’t. I wrote a whole goddamn book in 2017. I wrote 320 pages of sentences. I wrote them one word at a time, for hours, weeks, months at a time. Rewrote them twenty times. Wrote them again. I wrote a book I had in me for eight years.

I’d rent a motel room for the weekend and write for 18 hours. That was how I did it. That was how I wrote. I left my family. I left it all. I hid out. It felt weird and wrong and wonderful. It was joy and excitement and creation.

And that, too, was confusing. Because here I am in hell living my goddamn dream. Here I am in hell with a pocket of heaven carved out just for me. A book? Fuck. Nah, not me. Not my life.

And yet, there I was. Here I am. All at the same damn time.

Confusion.

But a book is different from a blog. I got lost in my book, in the story, in the sentences fading to the next, in the tinkering of the grammar, the arc of the narrative, the woven themes and the problems I just cannot figure out. I could hide there. I could forget I was even on earth.

But the blog? Shit. That’s a conversation. That’s what’s going on right now, each day, and all I had for that was confusion.

And I still don’t have anything funny to say, anything profound or helpful about 2017. It was a bullshit year, but I learned some things.

I learned I can write through unimaginable pain. I learned meaning is not “found,” it is created. It doesn’t drop from the cosmos in one glorious bubble. It is sculpted and molded with our hands, maybe because we’ll die if we don’t make something out of the seemingly meaningless pain of our lives.

I suppose, too, what I learned is that there are times in life when your footing is removed, when the path is obliterated, when your feet can hardly see where to land at all – and shit gets weird there. It gets tense and terrifying and exhausting, but goddamnit it gets wild, it gets creative, it gets resistant and pissed off and somehow, through the din of the lies and basest nature of humanity, rises the sound of a few million people making meaning, looking to tomorrow, refusing to accept the confusion is for nothing.

So Happy Fucking New Year, friends. Good Riddance, you piece of shit, 2017, and while the pain may be our confusion, it will never be our undoing.

And that’s something almost like hope.

Mac and I saw this a couple weeks ago on our 17th wedding anniversary. It didn’t suck.

Hi, my name is Janelle, and I barely like sound. For many years, I thought I was simply an asshole. While this is undeniably true, my condition apparently goes beyond an irrationally low tolerance for people trying to chew food.

You see, I have “misophonia.”

Apparently this is a real brain thing. Whew.

I’m the person who visualizes stabbing strangers for eating Corn Nuts across from me at the library, or my husband when he has the audacity to eat a chip. I feel actual rage. It starts in my toes and runs all the way to my forehead, where it gathers into helpful ideas like, “Maybe I can kill this person and run out real quick and get away with it.”

I’m being 15% hyperbolic.

And yet, I have seventy-five children.

Fine, I have four.

Do they have a term for the inability to handle the wall of indecipherable sound known as “children?”

All they do is talk. Well, no. One of them, Rocket, the twelve-year-old, evidently adopted the quieter demeanor of his father.

While Rocket doesn’t talk incessantly, he does make some seriously odd squealing noises pretty regularly, sounds I imagine a goat would make were he being held over flames, but he doesn’t chatter on endlessly requiring the undivided attention of his mother. Interestingly, he is the one kid I TRY to make talk, and he barely will, and even when he tries, his words are drowned out by the raging torrent of his siblings’.

That’s because my other three children basically never cease speaking, no matter what, or when, or what the topic, and I just need to say this out loud: I CANNOT LISTEN TO ALL THIS TALKING.

There seems to be an expectation of me, as a mother, to exist in a state of rapt attention, endlessly interested in the yammering of small humans, in the barrage of stories regarding this and that, in the 800 billion questions regarding Peppa Pig and the nature of existence, in the dreams.

Oh God. The dreams.

NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOUR DREAMS.

Wait. I didn’t mean that. I meant, “Aim high and dream big, kiddo!”

No but for real. Stop telling me what you dreamed last night.

Sometimes my three-year-old wakes up in the middle of the night, talking. He’s in our bed, and thus difficult to avoid. The last time he did it, he told me something about a motorcycle and tiger, and demanded to know why I was wearing a shirt.

Yes, good call. Let’s talk about that. We don’t talk enough. Let’s add 2am bedtime chats to our talking schedule.

Do people really expect me to give a fuck about every single word that exits the mouths of my children? I strongly believe those people have never actually been around children.

I’m being a dick in this blog post, but I usually attempt civility and feigned interest in the sound wave crashing into my face.

For example, when the dream recounting begins, I sit there staring at them with a sort of blank look on my face and my mouth possibly open, mumbling, “Oh.” And “Weird!” and “Dreams are like that.”

Later, I remind myself that kids can pick up on parental vibes and they surely know I was not exactly “riveted,” then I wonder if I’ve done irreparable damage to their self-esteem and psyches. On the other hand, shouldn’t kids learn that nobody wants to hear their self-obsessed chattering (lest they grow into mansplainers)?

I am grateful my teenager still talks to me, but the problem with the teenager (and three-year-old and seven-year-old) is that they are almost always asking for something.

So it isn’t just talking. Every word is adding a motherfucking task to the list of my life, and I already hate the list. I may have lost the list.

THE LIST IS NOT WORKING AT ALL ALREADY.

Reminding me of this or that commitment or wanting permission for something or asking for money or a ride or an outfit or some bullshit for school and I’m like For the love of god leave me alone for ten minutes so I can contemplate how I’m ruining you by trying to avoid you but also I need to avoid you.

Since we’re on the subject, I also don’t think kid conversations need to enter every adult conversation and I will, in fact, reject the blithering talk of my kids to enjoy an actual adult conversation and if I see my kids pummeling an adult with a wild stream of speech acts, I will make them stop.

Having hung out with many, many parents over the years, I have learned that this is not the way every one parents, and in fact, many parents make the child the center of all existence always and forever, no matter how fucking boring the kid is.

Did I just say kids are kinda boring?

Yes. Yes I did.

It’s not about “seen and not heard.” Nah, it’s about recognizing when you’re dominating the conversation, assuming you’re the only one that matters, taking over everything because it’s fun for you. I know adults like that. They only get invited to dinner once.

Anyway, when it’s just the five of us in the car, and my teenager is telling me about the 463 things she’s got going on in the next week and my 7-year-old is telling me about what this one kid said in line today and also when can she get horse riding lessons and the three-year-old is recounting a day when he went into the clouds on a submarine and saved his grandfather from a monster who lived in a tree, and I’m sitting there trying to drive or think or plan dinner or my inner spiritual life, what I really want to say is: EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Instead, if it’s really bad, I’ll yell something like, “Everybody be quiet for 30 seconds so I can think.”

Or I turn the music way up.

Or I try to choose which kid is actually saying something that matters, and I hone in on that one and ask the others to cease and desist.

The toddler just keeps on going. Forever. NBD. Who needs an audience?

What sort of bullshit genetic defect did I inherit that I have to hear every single goddamn fucking word that exits my children’s mouths?

There should be some sort of default silencing shut-down system in every brain to allow for the muting of unending child words.

And the worst part is that sometimes they say the sweetest and deepest shit imaginable, and I’m overwhelmed by adoration for their weird little kid brains.

But truly, no more dream talk. And I’ll wear a shirt if I want to, toddler. Also, tell your future therapist it’s not my fault. I have misophonia.

I HAVE KID MISOPHONIA.

Go team.

***

Let’s write together in 2018.

I have three workshops running in January/February:

Write Anyway: 3 spots left (one partial scholarship available)

Renegade Writers’ Group: 1 spot just opened

Brand new workshop on effective argumentation/political writing: 2 spots left

Join us, and please email me with any questions.

Let me get this straight. God created everything. He (we’ll assume God has a gender and it’s male, because I’m guessing you’ll like that better) made the sun and moon and clouds and oceans. He made every animal, every fish, bacteria, plant, and bug.

He made volcanoes that erupt molten rock and oceans pulled by the moon and gravity and seasons and delicate ecosystems that live and die and recreate and live again. He created the earth in all its ornate mind-boggling complexity to allow for the inhabitation of human beings. He made our cells hold together just so and our brains so complex we can’t even begin to understand them entirely and we are the ones who have them.

He created bodies that birth and heal and function daily with a beating heart and flowing blood and he did all this in addition to, um, creating the motherfucking universe.

An ever-expanding universe. Galaxies of billions of stars. Ever-expanding galaxies rushing into an infinite void.

And this dude, this God, this white dude you evidently worship, this omniscient being who created everything from our ever-expanding universe to the micro-bacteria that keep us alive, also gives a shit if you serve a bakery cake to a gay dude.  

That’s right. NO PASTRIES FOR THE GAYS.

He’s also super involved in bathroom issues and making sure transgender folks don’t have access to Civil Rights. This is extremely important to the creator of the universe.

He also wants to make sure brown people don’t make it into America with their wily, brown-people ways. Especially if they don’t speak American. You gotta look American and speak American to be in America. That’s God’s will.

God loves America. That is why he created national borders. Wait. Did God create national borders? Are you arguing God created national fucking borders?

ARE YOU REALLY FUCKING ARGUING THAT GOD FUCKING ALMIGHTY CREATED RANDOM ARBITRARY LINES WE CAN ALL FIGHT OVER AND KILL PEOPLE FOR SO WE CAN EARN MORE GREEN PAPER WITH NO ACTUAL VALUE WHICH WE WILL ALL LOSE ANYWAY WHEN WE DIE?

It’s cool. I’m fine.

How am I doing so far, oh far-right fanatical “Christian?” Am I holding strong so far?

God is okay with endorsing child predators as long as it will beat Democrats.

God really, really hates Democrats.

God hates Democrats almost as much as he hates gay people.

So what if a grown man preys on children? They’re just girls. God doesn’t like girls as much as boys. That’s why the violation and objectification of their bodies is of minimal importance in light of political gain, particularly in the service of the obscenely wealthy.

God gets really angry when the richest 1% of America aren’t served more and more money bags. That’s why the Bible says: “Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with money bags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail…”

Wait. It doesn’t say God wants billionaires to rake in more wealth on the backs of the needy.

Whatever. Let’s move on. Maybe your God doesn’t come from the Bible? Huh. Weird.

Anyway, God obviously hates poor people. If he loved them, he would have made them rich.

Like a blessing.

Let’s not forget how God is not worried about human influence on the delicate balance he created and in fact believes climate change is fake news.

FAKE NEWS!

He does, however, occasionally punish Californians with earthquakes and wildfires for being queer antifa pieces of shit.

God also hates Starbucks cups that aren’t sufficiently Jesus-y.

After creating gravity, The Almighty articulated paper-cup printing standards.

I’ve noticed your God doesn’t care about a lot of things I would think he’d care about, but I guess He’s a complicated guy. Some may say “hypocritical” and “nonsensical” but one thing your God hates, I’ve observed, is critical thinking.

Critical thinking must be of the devil.

Let’s get back to sexual assault of young girls. Apparently, because Mary was underage when she was impregnated by God, raping teenagers is A-okay.

Sure. That seems real.

He also doesn’t care about men who brag about the physical assault of women because it’s just “locker room talk.”

Also, that Moore guy is definitely innocent because he’s Republican and women are liars and he’s not a Democrat.

Like guns, sexual assault and racism are God-given American rights.

ALL HAIL TRUMP JESUS, sent from the Almighty.

Praise.

You know what?

Fuck your small, sad God. Fuck him all the way to hell. You’ve deployed the concept of religion to oppress, beat, rape, kill, and harass. I’m tired of your pathetic dreamland spirituality. Your ever-shifting imaginary ego God. Your evil, slight, simple-minded, nonsensical Creator.

Nazis in the streets? The ones chanting Third Reich slogans? They call themselves worshippers of your God, plus Hitler. (Hitler? Remember him? The one who burned babies in ovens?)

The money-and-power-worshipping men in D.C. creating laws to strip the most vulnerable among us of their health and money? They call themselves worshippers of your God.

The Westboro Baptist Church? The ones who rejoice in the deaths of gay people, harass their family members while they mourn? They call themselves worshippers of your God.

You know what Jesus did?

He washed the feet of his disciples. He ate with sinners and whores.

Your story is a lie.

You are some grade-A fake news.

And if there is a hell, you’re first in line. No worries though, I’ll pray for your damned soul. That’s a lie. I probably won’t. (I ain’t that holy.)

It’s time we bury your small, sad God.

Maybe next to Nietzsche, though surely his atheist ass did less harm.