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One Of My Favorite Short Stories

Many years ago (I believe it was a year or so after my first cancer) my ex (of twenty years at that point) and I were wandering through a mall, and as we made our way through Crate and Barrel, I happened upon this yellow vase.

While not a bowl, it still immediately reminded me of The Potters of Firsk and I casually mentioned this to Bernie and how beautiful I found the color. He immediately grabbed it off the shelf and said, “Happy Birthday.”

I’ve somehow managed to go through multiple moves with it remaining unscathed, and to this day I look at it and think of that story—as politically incorrect as parts of it may seem today.

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The Week In Stupid

as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.

monday: he likes them what?

frankly, I think it’s nice that our piss-drunk Secretary of Death was able to take some time off from his busy schedule of gleefully dropping bombs on Iranian schoolgirls to have a playdate with that noise-adjacent caterwauler, Too Old To Be A Kid Too Impaired To Rock.

the question must be asked: what in the actual small-batch artisanal fuck?

who thought this was an acceptable idea? why is it that our government never has any money when people need healthcare, or when children need a simple hot school lunch, but whenever some shrieking washed-up never-waswants to take a seven-thousand-dollar-an-hour joyride in an attack helicopter, the Donnysphere bends over backwards to accommodate him?

fix America’s actual problems first, you shit-kazoos. then you can waste all the money you want on performative dumbfuckery.

now tell me this: what wisdom could Piss Right Off, You’re Not A Kid possibly be imparting to the assembled crowd in the Pentagon press room?

maybe he’s reciting the lyrics to his charming song, Cool Daddy Cool.

young ladies, young ladies
I like ’em underage
see some say that’s statutory
but I say that’s mandatory

I’ll bet Jeffrey Epstein fucking loved that ditty.

I have a suggestion: if Not A Kid is so horny to do warmonger cosplay, let him enlist and go off to fight in Donny and Petey’s don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran.

no, wait. that would require actual courage.

oh and, Not Even Close To Being A Kid, can we talk? the next time Piss-Drunk Pete rings you up and asks you if you want to hang, tell him you’ve always wanted to go skateboarding with him. trust me. will be wild.

tuesday: kai yi yi

folks, pour one out for Preznit Fuckwit’s granddaughter Kai. she’s going through some things right now.

“I mean, hey. people— some people don’t like me, I mean 50 % of the world doesn’t like me because of my last name. one time I was out in public and someone literally walked up to me to tell me that my grandpa sucks.”

folks, how sad it is that the grifting grifter who has gone into the family business of selling merch and profiting off her famous name is catching shit for it?

Mayor Mamdani, can you and Ms. Rachel step in here for a moment and do us a solid?

thanks, guys.

now let’s do a quick fact check: does Kai’s grandfather suck?

apparently, yes.

I see two paths forward for Kai Trump at this point. one would be to do what Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana did — she solved that ‘your dad kinda sucks’ shit in a hot second by changing her name to Lana Peters and moving to Wisconsin, of all places. I shit you not.

or wait — even better, Kai could be like her first cousin once removed, Mary. when strangers come up to Mary Trump and tell her that her uncle totally fucking sucks, she high-fives them and is all ‘you don’t know the half of it.’

wednesday: she should have turned him into a human being

Christofascist hate-factory Joel Webbon is such a charmer.

“you look at Paula White, the chief faith advisor to Donald Trump, you look at some of the clips of her rolling on the ground, waving a coat and trying to slay people in the spirit, and ‘riririririririri’ speaking in tongues, she’s a witch. she’s a witch. she’s not just a Christian with some bad theology. she’s a wolf, she’s a false teacher — but even more than that, as a woman, I think that it is technically accurate to say she is … a witch.”

okay, let’s grant that Mister Stopped Clock here is right about a few things: Paula White is in fact a grifting charlatan who pretends to speak in tongues and has Donny Convict totally bamboozled.

but is she actually a witch?

well, Wytchfinder Joel has proof of Paula White’s witching witchery: she turned him into a newt — but don’t worry, folks. he got better.

thursday: all that glitters

wingnut screech-monkey Lance Wallnau has a few things he needs to get off his somewhat sparkly chest.

“let’s face it, most of the media’s left. it’s not evenly divided. you got, I saw Politico, and The New York Times—”

wait, wait, hang on. I’m sorry, I drifted off and stopped listening to Lance almost immediately, because I got distracted by— dude, what on god’s green shit-tangle are you wearing?

did you crash your car into a glitter factory on your way to the studio? have you been moonlighting at drag queen story hours?

bro, I’ve got Liberace on the phone. he says to tone it way the fuck down.

you’re giving him a headache.

friday: the further adventures of Some Fucking Idiot™

for once in his chaotic, look-at-me-look-at-me life, some fucking idiot actually had a quiet morning. there were no public appearances on his official schedule, and the feed on his crappy app stayed relatively free of batshittery.

it wasn’t under later in the afternoon that the fucking idiot popped out of his spider hole to inflict himself upon the world.

at 3pm, the fucking idiot addressed an audience from the Florida retirement community The Villages.

he played ‘Live and Let Die,’ which is a totally appropriate song to play for the extreme elderly.

the amost-80-year-old, gripping the podium for dear life, both hands visibly rotting, blithered about being ‘young, vital and vibrant.’

the fucking idiot bragged about being the shittiest boss ever.

the fucking idiot also committed a racism, because of course he did.

fact check: Ilhan Omar did not marry her brother. that’s a racist lie that racists like to tell because racists suck.

once again, the fucking idiot bragged about acing the test they only give you if they have a good reason to suspect you have brain damage, by successfully pointing to a drawing of a camel — oh no, wait, this time it was a bear.

tell me, were percentages on the fucking idiot’s dementia test? I’m guessing not.

finally, the fucking idiot cautioned against his own presidency.

trust us, homey, we all understand what it’s like to be stuck with a president who’s a moron.

mere mortals would have been exhausted after all that — but the fucking idiot isn’t like you or me. he still had some gas left in the tank. between eleven pm and midnight, the fucking idiot started shitting lunacy onto his crappy app.

what kind of fucking idiot would think it appropriate to joke about swimming in the Reflecting Pool? the fucking idiot kind, that’s who.

also, in your dreams you’re that svelte, you floating sack of shit.

oh look, the losing loser who’s lost his war in Iran is imaging he’s a winner.

the only cards you hold are jokers, dumbfuck.

and of all the things that are never going to happen, this next one is never going to happen the most.

now, because it was the middle of the night and the fucking idiot was holed up all alone in his vermin-infested Florida golf motel, not one reporter was around to stand up and ask ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Can We Fix The Broken System?

Brian has some ideas:

When I saw this week that the Supreme Court had taken a hatchet to the Voting Rights Act, I was – depressingly – not surprised. Because of course they would. This conservative court has by now pretty much declared their fealty to Trump over the Constitution. So the ruling was – in my opinion – a foregone conclusion.

The reality is that this is just going to keep happening until we’re left with a hollowed out shell of a democracy. Even in an ideal scenario, where Democrats have full control of government and can finally pass a new Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Supreme Court will always be waiting in the wings with a machete to break down whatever Democrats build up.

But there is a solution. This is the clearest way I can explain it, in this excerpt from my book:

To restore democracy, to restore integrity to the judicial system, we urgently need to reform the Supreme Court. Those reforms need to be based on principle, not politics, to have any legitimacy or public support. The first order of a filibuster-free Congress should be reform of the Supreme Court. Not the second or the third or the fourth, or it will be too late to save the republic and our independent judiciary. If any subsequent reforms are to stand a chance at surviving, we cannot leave in place a rogue branch of government with the power to strike down anything that doesn’t comport with its far-right ideology.

The first reform should be to expand the Court, in line with the principles that determined the number of justices in the early years of the republic. The first Supreme Court had six justices, reflecting the six federal court circuits. The Court grew to seven justices in 1807, after a seventh circuit was added. It grew again to nine after two new circuits were added in 1837. Today there are thirteen federal court circuits but only nine Supreme Court justices. The Court should reflect the size of the country and the scope of its legal challenges, as it did more than a century ago.

The second reform should be to limit the term of new justices to eight years, allowing newly elected presidents to choose their own nominees regularly. This would reduce the opportunities for the kind of procedural delays that stymied Obama’s appointment of a justice in his final year in office. The regular flow of new appointments would help remove the national drama from each nomination by diluting the novelty of each new appointment. Once again, there is widespread public support for term limits for Supreme Court justices: 75 percent of Americans agree with term limits, according to a PRRI survey in 2025.

The third reform should be to establish an enforceable code of conduct, with a Supreme Court panel mandated to investigate allegations of wrongdoing and impropriety. The panel should have the power to force the recusal of justices in cases where they have personal ties and even force the removal of justices in cases of conduct unworthy of the Supreme Court. Public polling suggests that there is huge support for such reforms as well: 76 percent of Americans are in favor of a binding code of conduct, according to a USA Today poll in 2024.

The final reform should be to retire any justice over the age of seventy from the Supreme Court, regardless of who appointed them. The Constitution says that judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which has been interpreted as lifetime appointments. That is one way to interpret the phrase but by no means the only one. A retired Supreme Court justice could be moved to a lower court and still stay within a reasonable interpretation of the constitutional language.

In fact, there’s widespread public support for retiring all public officials over a certain age, and there’s a surprising degree of consensus on what that age should be. As many as 79 percent of Americans favor age limits for elected officials, and 74 percent favor them for Supreme Court justices, according to Pew Research Center. Polling by the Benenson Strategy Group showed that a clear majority, 63 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans, support an upper age limit of seventy for anyone to be sworn in as president. (The Constitution does not set any age range for the Supreme Court but does state that the presidency has a lower age limit of thirty-five.)

Mandatory retirement at seventy years of age would lead to four immediate vacancies on the Supreme Court: three conservatives and one liberal. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would leave, along with Chief Justice John Roberts. So would Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by Barack Obama. All three Trump judges would remain, along with one Obama and one Biden appointee.

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed to expand the Supreme Court, Washington has shied away from reforming the highest court in the land. However, FDR’s plan was the product of another political era, almost a century ago. The Court had struck down several pieces of his New Deal plan to revive the economy from the depths of the Great Depression. FDR also proposed to retire judges at age seventy, but if they refused to leave, he would be free to add an additional justice, potentially expanding the Court to fifteen. Congress defeated his plan, but FDR ultimately prevailed; within five years, seven of the nine justices were his own appointees.

Today’s Supreme Court has weakened itself by its political activism, repeatedly disregarding the Constitution and its code of conduct. It is populated by older justices at a time when the American people are yearning to reform the status quo. If we want to revive our democracy, we need to revive our Supreme Court. If that seems extreme, consider an alternative that is already upon us: a Court that undermines the very Constitution it’s supposed to uphold.

This week’s ruling was not a one-off. It’s the logical endpoint of a decades-long effort to disenfranchise minority voters and keep minority representation to an absolute minimum.

The three longest-serving conservative justices on the court right now have a combined 75 years on the bench. This is their pet project. They own it. And the other three conservatives, all Trump appointees, are comparatively young and spry. Gorsuch doesn’t even have a full decade under his belt. Without court expansion, we’re stuck with this right wing majority for another couple of decades at least.

We need to normalize ourselves to the idea of court expansion, so that when we have power, we don’t waste our time negotiating what we should be doing, but rather spend our time doing it.

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It’s been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Right now, I’d say that it’s stepping into a new day and expecting Republicans not to do something horrible.

It happens to all of us.

We wake up in the morning, eventually check our phones or turn on the news, and are greeted by some new abomination: an unprecedented legislative assault on a central pillar of our Republic, the dismantling of long-established civil rights, a heartbreaking act of violence against the most vulnerable among us.

We encounter a legion of novel nightmares authored by the same people whose brutality from the previous day we’ve not yet recovered from, and we are somehow surprised.

Despite a decade of their daily atrocities, despite their prolific portfolio of inhumanity, despite their seemingly inexhaustible disregard for legal and moral law, their malevolence never fails to rattle our nervous systems and boggle our minds anew.

Each day, a sickening sense of deja vu sets in as we find ourselves freshly outraged, as if these moral abominations are out of character for these people, as if they might have reached their capacity for cruelty overnight, as if they’d suddenly had their sociopathy satiated and will magically relent.

Good people, we need to stop doing this.

This is who they have been; it is who they are. There is no moment of clarity coming, no soul awakening, no tearful repentance. They’ve long passed that possibility. To still be tethered to something as monstrous as this man and his movement is to have permanently abandoned the fundamental humanity required to feel empathy or possess self-awareness. We need to stop wasting time hoping his supporters will suddenly call upon their better angels, as they killed those off long ago.

Yesterday, a distraught member of our online community said over Zoom, “No matter what we do, no matter how much we fight, it seems like nothing gets better. Every day, things are worse.” I think she was hoping I would disagree with her.

I assured her that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon, because the people in power have no current external or internal obstacles in their path. They are not ethically bound by the Constitution and possess no regard for the rule of Law. They have commandeered the highest court in our nation and hold zero compunctions about violating the inalienable rights of other human beings.

They also realize that their time is incredibly short, despite appearances to the contrary. They’ve been paying attention to the elections over the last 16 months, and they know the public sentiment against them is rising swiftly. They live with the Sword of Damocles hovering overhead: the unforced errors of a sexual scandal that will not go away, a costly, unwinnable war, and an economy they have singlehandedly driven to life support.

There is no way back; there is only the way down. All they have left is destruction.

Right now, Americans need to make peace with the fact that the news is going to continue to be bad. We are going to witness an ever more desperate and violent descent into the depths of the malevolence human beings are capable of. These people are going to wake up every day, as in this one, singularly driven to damage as many people as possible as quickly as they can, and we should prepare ourselves by not being pulled into disbelief as they do.

We cannot waste a single second being shocked by their depravity, or hoping they will tire of violence, or expecting them to be anything other than who they have shown us they are.

Instead, our energy should be better spent keeping our heads down and getting on with the work before us, of building a broad coalition of resistance, of taking our stands where we can, of leveraging our economic power, of caring for those being targeted, and creating a compassionate community that curates decency and love for neighbor.

We need to stop being surprised by Republicans’ inhumanity and to go about the work of being human.

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As A Lifelong Fan of FLW (And His Progeny), I Could Most Certainly Live There

Located in West Hollywood the Olga & Llloyd Wright House & Studio designed by Lloyd Wright (Frank Lloyd Wright’s eldest son) in 1926. Designed in the Mayan Revival style the home is a signature example of Lloyd Wright’s architectural vocabulary, blending Art Deco with pre‑Columbian motifs. The home was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 1987 and was restored by Lloyd Wright’s son architect Eric Lloyd Wright in the 1990’s.

[source]

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In 1974…

In 1974, John Waters’ **Female Trouble** was a blistering satire on American celebrity culture. As Dawn Davenport’s fall from a Christmas lunatic to a criminal celebrity, the film used Divine’s gender-bending performance to explore and subvert traditional conceptions of the family and sex roles. It helped to define the “Dreamlanders” style, which combined street realism in Baltimore with melodramatic camp.

For the mainstream audience of 1974, the film was largely treated as an assault on public decency. Though it found a rabid audience in the “midnight movie” culture with other avant-garde classics, established audiences and critics often reacted to it with both visceral disgust and cynical bewilderment. It was often dismissed as “amateurish” or “vile” by the critical establishment, which had trouble understanding Waters’ irony. This however functioned as an ironic achievement for the film, and eventually led to the film’s evolution from a shunned midnight movie to a cult masterpiece of independent cinema.

[source]

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$5000/Month?!? 🫪

WTF happened to my beloved city over the past twenty years?

Okay, it’s nice, but $5K a month?!

When I left SF in 2002, I was paying $1300 for a very nice 60s-era one bedroom place on Twin Peaks with a view of downtown, and even that was a stretch financially.

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How Long…

No, not that. Get your minds out of the gutter!

How long have you been visiting Voenix Rising? Are you an old-timer who’s been with me from the beginning (ca. 2005 or thereabouts)—including that horrific period when I lost my mind just after we moved to Denver and I wiped the previous ten years of posts—or are you fairly recent?

How did you find me initially?

Leave a comment. Inquiring minds want to know!

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Ben Is Going Through This Right Now

How a sinister manager slowly pushes you to quit:

Step 1 – I’d get a little cold. Less friendly, less supportive. You notice it but brush it off.

Step 2 – I’d stop noticing your work. No appreciation, no recognition. You’re getting slightly demoralized now.

Step 3 – You’re suddenly not in important meetings anymore. Things move without you. It hurts but whatever, I guess.

Step 4 – Your good work gets taken away. You’re left with random, low-impact tasks. You feel devalued. This feeling ruins your evenings.

Step 5 – You’re told to “do better” but no one tells you what that actually means?!?! This is turning into actual frustration.

Step 6 – Out of nowhere, “performance concerns” come up. You panic. “What am I doing wrong?”

Step 7 – You try to fix things… but the goalpost keeps changing. You just had your first anxiety attack.

Step 8 – They start watching everything you do. Small mistakes become a big deal. You’re constantly walking on eggshells now.

Step 9 – I’d become harder to reach. No guidance, but still judging your work. You’re feeling deflated.

Step 10 – Everything gets written down. Emails, notes, “just documenting.” You know they’re setting you up to fail.

Step 11 – You get put on a Performance Improvement Plan. It looks official, but it doesn’t have clear metrics. You’re angry.

Step 12 – You start hearing lines like “this might not be the right fit.” Subconsciously you’re prepared to leave and never look back.

Step 13 – Your workload gets weird. Either way too much or barely anything. You’ve started making applications elsewhere.

Step 14 – You feel confused all the time. You’re trying harder but it’s not landing. You can’t wait to get out of here.

Step 15 – I’d hint that leaving might be easier. You AGREE. Like, so much easier. Now, if only you had another back-up option.

Step 16 – You’re exhausted and your self-esteem has taken a major hit… and quitting starts to feel like the only way out, with or without a back-up option. You quit. They win.

Bad employers are very good at psychological pressure. As an employment lawyer, I’m trained to spot these patterns early and see what’s coming next. Follow along to learn.