Dear Reader, 4/19/26

Dear Reader, 

There’s a line in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men that has been popping up in my head a lot lately. Usually it’s Candy’s line, “I ain’t got the poop no more,” which I say in jest often and about almost everything, because I truly ain’t got the poop no more. Even though I am an excellent actress (apologies to Curley’s Wife) and fake having the poop on a daily basis, a combination of burnout and the combined side effects of certain depression and headache medications have taken the poop right freakin’ out of me. 

Lately, though, the line popping up in my head has been in reference to Candy’s dog: “He don’t have no fun.” 

Of course, Carlson is talking about a geriatric dog with no teeth, who stinks, suffers with every movement, and is speaking mostly out of selfishness rather than any empathy for the old dog or Candy. Slim, at one point says, "That dog ain't no good to himself. I wisht somebody'd shoot me if I got old an' a cripple." 

Reader, I am not geriatric, I blessedly contain all my teeth, sans the wisdoms (I grew up with excellent dental coverage, which seems a more remote dream than any land or rabbits that George and Lennie could conjure) and I am in excellent health. 

At the moment of this writing, I don’t want to be put out of my misery, nor am I suggesting that any of these emotionally stunted, racist, and sexist men from a Great Depression-era novel are hitting something exactly on the nose for the times we live in. 

And yet, as a Mom, a teacher, a Millennial, an author, and a woman, in this the year of our lady Liza Minelli 2026, I don’t have no fun. 

Even when I am “having fun,” I am not Having Fun ™ . I could list all the ways my generation has been kicked in the crotch and told it was tough love, list all the awful milestones we’ve watched with our mouths agape and pockets empty, discuss the deprogramming of the aughts’ beauty standards I am still consciously engaging in every time I see a picture of myself, rail against the perpetual adolescence we’ve been relegated to, even as our children age and our fucking backs hurt and our crow’s feet form on our faces. 

I could talk about the dehumanization of the job market, how it feels like winning the lottery just to have stability these days. I could talk about how I wish I could be the person I was when I was a seventeen-year-old standing on a street corner, convinced my “No Blood for Oil” sign would change hearts and minds, when I was (I thought) proven right a few short years later, watching in awe as the first Black president was sworn in. 

But “We don’t have no fun,” is all my brain can cough up most of the time.

 To say it’s not fun right now to be a person with empathy, dreams, a healthy sense of morality and reality, an awareness of the interconnectedness of all people, environments, and living things, is a vast understatement. Nothing fun, or relaxing, easy, or enjoyable in this the year of our lady Sheryl Lee Ralph 2026 comes without a hefty chaser of grief or guilt, a lingering awareness that all of your joys are a momentary distraction from All of This Fucking Shit ™ , that the literal or figurative bill you need to pay for some goddamn fun will be more than you can afford in both the literal and figurative senses.

 Some of you may be thinking, C.G., that’s simply not true, but then I would have to assume that you are on far fewer anti-depressants than I am. 

And for those of you nodding your head and feeling the tension pull your shoulders back up to your ears as you read, first off, I am deeply sorry for the pain I may have caused, because I know many of us would benefit from healthcare and deep tissue massages we simply can’t afford, but also, I offer you this: “Because I said so” didn’t work on us then, and it won’t work on us now.

Unfortunately for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, whose parenting many of us in Intro to Childhood Psychology correctly identified as “Authoritarian,” we’re just too goddamn over-educated and therapized for this shit to work on us. Barring the ghouls of our generation in the White House and the ones who put them there, by and large, most Millennials I know are conscientiously trying to do things differently because we were raised to know better, and we Know Better ™ . 

The ghouls, the system, the Administration, middle managers, evil men, and hoarders of resources don’t like it when we own our power–  hence keeping our heads underwater, the infantilization, the perpetual fight-or-flight mode of our entire adult lives. 

Hence the conscientious attempt by all entities stated above to chew us up for resources and labor and spit us out like an overcooked porkchop. 

And Readers, to this I say: they will choke on us. 

We have suffered many moral injuries and outrages, we aren’t having any fucking fun, but damned if

I’m not sure (pretty sure, almost positive, really hoping) that the chronic tension in our bodies and our ability to survive high-pressure situations like we are freaking diamonds, will choke the systems trying to swallow us. 

Some of us have taken ourselves off the menu, either through aligning with the persecutors or having had enough privilege in the first place to be the ones sitting  at the table, stuffing themselves of humanity, rather than being served up for chow. 

And they will live long enough to see the consequences, and the pendulum will swing hard enough to knock them out, hard. 

But as for the rest of us, let them choke on you. 

It’ll be fun. 

Love always, 

C.G.