This week was the last true week of filming on RA. I have complicated feelings about the wrap this season and some of the reasons for that are actually spoilers (no one dies, which technically is also a spoiler that I could get in trouble for but I like to break rules and also I feel you are all special and deserve a little treat). I can only discuss so much of what I am going through up here as we finish season four, and I want to write about it, but it’s a minefield of spoilers and personal information I can’t unravel without a legal team and a therapist, and I need to save those things for going back to america. Though I will be sad to physically leave my apartment here in Vancouver (photo of view included in post) I am anxious to get back home so that I can know what it feels like to be down there. I got here in December of 2024, I went home briefly for the holidays, and then returned to Canada in January of 25. The country that I left is not the one I will be returning to, and that terrifies me. I cannot know what it feels like to be there until I am there, I don’t know if people in the U.S. are experiencing the horrors the way I imagine they would. Because of my absence I actually feel like an imposter. I wasn’t there when my city burned down, and I wasn’t there when they started letting the foreign billionaire dismantle the parts of the government that take care of people, and I wasn’t there when they started sending the masked plainclothes agents to abduct people for improper ideologies.
This side of the border is where the news is pretty much still doing the news. The democratic government by and large is chugging along, slowly but surely meting out the will of the people, and the leaders are reacting to the Fascist with measured yet appropriate alarm. All that and ketchup flavored chips? If Margaret Atwood were here right now, would she tell me to stay on this side and have Garret pack the cats into a single carrier and pretend they are one cat and try to sneak them through customs? Would I listen? I think I would, if only to the part about the cats. I would love it if Margaret Atwood really dug in on pet-smuggling practices and then we decided to collaborate on a screenplay about the Rise of Gilead from the perspective of a cat. I feel like if you get the right border agent, they will look at my 14 year old cats shoved into a single sweater labeled “Freakish Two-Headed Service Cat” and just wave me through, because -Ooof.
Hypothetical cat-based script collab aside, I wouldn’t stay. I have to be where the action is. I am just extremely that bitch. Maybe you have had the conversation with friends or co-twerkers where someone says “When the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m out. Just kill me.” Chat, I’m always the first person to say “Oh, not me. Zombie time is when I will become activated.” Garret and I like to make up doomsday squad brackets with our friend groups and decide who we would take with us to the bunker or the forest. Garret usually picks all women and him because he is a horny creep and we love that for him. His fantasy of the Great Disaster is that he will have a harem of women cooking delicious meals from the subsistence farm he tends. My fantasy is that I will have many guns and muscles, and that I will never, ever be afraid. Today I have no illusions about what we are getting wrong in these imagined scenarios. I know that not every female friend garret has is that good at cooking, and I know that when the grid comes down I won’t be some fearless warrior on the frontlines. I know I will be afraid, because right now I am in Canada sitting on a literal tuffet I am very, very afraid. What scares me is what I have wrong about my non-fantasy version of events. How tired I might get when it’s time to figure out how to secure my data so that I don’t get scooped up for saying the wrong thing online. How will my deep disinterest in getting to know my neighbors foil my plans for any mutual aid networks I might participate in. How real will it feel, and even more frightening, what if we don’t feel it at all? What if we don’t feel the water boiling because we are frogs and it was pretty warm in the first place? Are you also scared now, too? Sorry sorry sorry. I love you, but I had to. Because the next thing I say is very important: You might not know how to grow kale or shoot a gun, but to help the people we need to help right now, you don’t have to. On Tuesday there is a special election in Wisconsin that will determine a great deal of what will happen over the next few years. If you already know why this race is so important, skip this part and go to the next paragraph.
From the AP: “The upcoming election on Tuesday, filling a seat held by a liberal justice who is retiring, will determine whether Wisconsin’s highest court will remain under 4-3 liberal control or flip to a conservative majority.” Elon Musk has already spent 13 million doll hairs to swing this election to the conservative, who would uphold abortion bans as well as any and every new bullshit shenanigan the right comes up with to make voting in Wisconsin prohibitively difficult. The consequences of a loss would be enormous, but the gains from a win could mean even more. The race is a referendum on Musk’s ability to buy elections in the US post 2025, not to mention his ability to break election laws doing so. If we win this race, republicans in congress who are squishy about surrendering every ideal they have claimed for the entirety of their career can think twice about the challenge Musk’s money gives them in a primary. Maybe, actually, it’s ok to defend free speech and stand up for the military and foreign allies if it doesn’t automatically mean you will lose your special little seat of power. And my favorite part would be the delicious moment that Elon realizes that not only did he waste tens of millions of dollars, but he wasted that money making sure he can’t open any Tesla dealerships there. I need it. Guys. I personally need to see the breakdown of the fragile ecosystem of this man’s ego. The egosystem, if you will. It’s like a coral reef made of gizz kleenex and ketamine. And we will get to watch it crumble. Gross. Sorry.
Text anyone you know in Wisconsin, or anyone you know who knows people in Wisconsin. Tell them to get out and vote for Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, and tell them why. If they say they heard she’s a pedophile, tell them any ads that say that were paid for by Elon Musk, and they owe it to their neighbors to make sure that those ads are not complete fabrications made to scare nice Wisconsinites. I texted a guy I was dating for three months and brought to Hawaii for one week and then dumped when he got back home because I used to be a really shitty person, just because he’s from Wisconsin. I made amends to him, so this wasn’t the first communication, but it’s the first in a while. It was way, way easier than growing kale, though.