As an older woman, it’s not so romantic or easy to diagnose. Maybe it’s menopause or just tired-of-this-shit-itis. How can one tell?

1. Taking two hours to cook bacon and eggs for breakfast on a Sunday morning because your kids got you up at 7:30am to make brioche bread french toast from scratch. Yeah, no. You cook the bacon in the oven at 250 degrees because you might burn it. You cook the scrambled eggs on super low heat so you can sit down and close your eyes and dream about a world where someone else does this shit for you. You wish you allowed boxed cereal in the house, but you’re still carb-phobic, although slightly reformed.

2. Sitting awake in silence for hours because listening to Fiona Apple didn’t deliver the emotional release you needed. It hits like the musings of a wealthy white woman, and you are neither white, wealthy, nor in the mood to muse.

3. Reading Kindle Unlimited literotica to feel something and getting distracted by the uninspired descriptions of orgasms — pleasure rocking through, surging release — until you’re so overcome with Red Pen Syndrome that you toss your e-reader down in frustration.

4. Hearing the opening strings of the Mad Men theme song 92 times in a row and wondering if your pain will ever turn into genius.

5. Driving to the supermarket and missing every turn necessary because you’re just trying to focus on the feel of the imitation leather steering wheel in your hands and stop before you run a red light.

6. Coming home from the supermarket with a bag of Honeycrisp apples and 2 packages of pepperoni and asking Alexa how to turn it into dinner for five.

…filed from my kitchen

I read that list and thought: Yes. That tracks completely.

We’ve spent years trying to decode each other through Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, and birth charts. But those systems only ask what you are like right now. Your formative books tell what shaped you before you even knew you were being shaped.

If someone drops Tressie’s trio, their literary birth chart is crystal clear: with Black Reconstruction and Caliban and the Witch as their Sun and Rising signs, they are a radical, system-dismantling force who stands firmly with the oppressed. But having Toni Morrison as their Moon sign means their emotional interior is deeply intuitive, fiercely protective, and intimately tuned to the heavy, aching human weight of it.

Given how insightful Tressie’s reading was, I wondered about my own literary birth chart.

The three books that shaped me in my formative years were Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Terry McMillan’s Mama, and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. I’ve read these three books on repeat since discovering them as a child. And yes, judge my parents for their very limited oversight.

My Bright Lights, Big City Moon sign was my inner world: navigating a dark emotional landscape built on the fact that adults didn't have it figured out. That I would need to take an active role in making myself okay. I started plotting my own self-determination way before I even had a driver’s license.

My Sun sign, my core self, is the Hyper-Independent Fixer. In Mama, Freda taught me to live without judgment. To be a quick study of human behavior, ready to pour a drink and tell a self-deprecating story in solidarity.

My Heartburn Rising sign, what you see when I show up, set the blueprint for weaponizing my own wit. Laughing through crisis. Walking away intact.

Personalities shift, but the books that cracked your brain open are the ones that form your Soul Blueprint. They are your real natal chart, the baseline of your internal architecture. They tell people who you are before you perform for the world.

1. The unofficial female uniform of Gov Ball is a flowy tank, cheek-showing hot pants, and cowboy boots. Frye boots are also acceptable.

Breaking up the monotony: a head scarf here, a fringed maxi skirt there. Think Fleetwood Mac without the cocaine, drama, or passion that made them interesting. With perfectly curated outfits there was of course no obvious public drunkenness, no fights, no heat exhaustion fallouts, no vomiting. Just orderly lines for matcha, roller skating with Verizon, and endless influencer posing and posting. Influencing people, apparently, to be their most boring selves.

2. The official drug of choice: mango flavored nicotine vape juice. Snuck in via the heel of said cowboy boots.

Not weed. Not anything mind altering. Candy flavored vapes, which let me know we have lost the plot on what it means to fight for our right to party. Are we saying the ultimate good time is giving yourself popcorn lung in the least performative way possible? NY festival goers are not okay. Gloria Steinem says depression is just anger turned inward. I’m not diagnosing anyone. But it’s clear therapy is needed.

3. Long Island in the house.

So many Long Islanders taking the train in for a day of fun. The LIRR makes the commute easy. But where did the New Yorkers go this weekend? I don’t believe they were anywhere near there. Even I live in NJ now so I can’t count toward the numbers. Katseye was a huge draw for this suburban day of fun and one of the reasons for the volume of kids. All of which ended up in the VIP section, where bored parents spread out in every available seat with bags and gear to ensure the kids were comfortable, with changes of clothes, snacks, pizza and chicken nuggets everywhere. And $6 waters. I have never felt so cheated. So very unimportant and cheated out of my money.

4. So when are the aliens coming?

This ho-hum festival has me wanting more. Based on TikTok and the mask man on Fox News they feel overdue. Last week the government launched aliens.gov, a website styled with UFO imagery and a teaser video captioned “They walk among us,” which turned out to be an ICE tip line. I am tired of politics. I need ridiculousness not tied to war or attacks on human rights. Something chaotic but also a bop. A song for the summer paired with chaotic performance art. Where is Ja? Take back Gov Ball. Bring back Fyre Fest.

5. Also, did we know that Lorde had more than 1 song?

…from the parking lot at Citifield.

What it sounds like if rocking out with kids is an intentional vibe:

Why are so many online Uncs and Aunties emotionally fragile, performative, and devoid of impulse control? Blame it on lead exposure. Kids born in the late '60s and '70s were at peak exposure to sweet lead paint chips and the intoxicating fumes of leaded gas at the pump. The 7 IQ points we lost may be the exact amount needed to self-regulate. Maybe it’s just as well that we are the smallest generational cohort.

I am skipping the MJ biopic. I already saw Michael become Michael in real time. Between the Broadway shows and the HBO Max doc, we know the good, the bad, and the Bubbles. But what about something MJ-adjacent? What about a biopic for the son and grandson of his mentor, Berry Gordy? Where is the LMFAO biopic? Give me Motown bloodlines, Rick Ross lawsuits, talent agent shenanigans, and royalty heists to the tune of party rock anthems. Add a BuzzBallz collab and I am shufflin' to the theater.

Watching the political rise of Spencer Pratt and his call for a repackaged, Giuliani-era “Broken Windows” policy in LA tells me exactly where the timeline is heading. Twenty-five years from now, he’ll be giving a post-election press conference for that generation’s President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. The venue? Four Seasons Total Landscaping, now a certified historic landmark, sponsored by Gatorade Agriculture.

Jaylen Brown is the new blueprint and we need to figure out how to create more of him. A fantastic athlete, MIT Media Lab fellow, and a guy who was asked to speak at Harvard on educational inequality, he is educated, outspoken, and determined to control his own narrative. The back and forth with media has been click-bait and messy. And while Stephen A. Smith did not fire the first shot, he did ratchet it up to a toxic level. Of course he was born in 1967.

…from my privacy closet.

Bravos and Fine Fares are just training grounds and now bananas are $10 everywhere. Cheap things always have a cost.

Living in a snake den, you never can predict which snake will bite, but suck out the venom anyway and learn not to die.

Is there a gene, hormone, or neural circuit whose job is to push you toward death? Bed rot or roller coaster decapitation all part of the same universal beat.

I am not being opaque to exclude you. I am being hyper-specific to find you. —someone then me

_______________________

…from my bed.

02 I dig “Roommates” by Malcolm Todd. My daughter put me on. I have trained her musical tastes for 13 years and now she is better than any algorithm from Apple or Spotify. It’s the 2026 version of having her change the TV channel for me.

03 It’s an expected trope now that internet personalities will be shit at their day job. EEEE-MAgine expecting activism from artifice. Come for the reads. Not for a roadmap.

04 @_michellelynn has captivated me in a way no other creator has. Her vignettes are a warm hug from my childhood and got me missing summer breaks in Ashland, KY bouncing between Dawson Pool, St. James AME, and Dairy Cheer. Grandma warning me to be back in the house before the street lights came on.

05 I read a TikTok that said “no one ever says ‘yo, throw on that Jermaine Jackson jam.’” I laughed because it is so right. He’s not Michael, but he had that iconic song with Whitney. And I cassette recorded “Do What You Do” off the radio when I was nine. Y’all know the words.

Let me jog your memory:

Filed from my couch. At 10pm

Strength and muscle are the new elite signaling now that GLP-1s have made thinness accessible to anyone. Ozempic will be the unlikely catalyst of an uprising of women who get a taste of physical power and embrace it. Think Linda Hamilton from Terminator 1 to Terminator 2.

Iran's Lego video trolling propaganda strategy and possibly requesting Obama as the new US wartime consigliere makes the claim that reality has become unhinged because of a CERN something or other sound less crazy. TikTok is the new kill zone, trolling as an armamentarium.

Sydney Sweeney in the happy baby pose wearing a diaper and sucking a binky was the most disturbing scene in Euphoria. This latest depiction of female humiliation feels like sanction versus satire. I am disappointed in myself for being addictively entertained by the misery of these characters.

Runway had potential but it’s a little too RuPaul. A Madonna cameo, a Vogue interruption would have been less camp and more intentionally referential. Maybe they asked her. Maybe she declined. She’s on the cover of her new album in a pink see-through veil and purple lingerie. She looks like she has time.

On the end of civilization, specifically

When a sitting president warns that a whole civilization will die tonight, I have questions about the mechanism. Are we talking nuclear? A Mayan calendar situation, but this time powered by technology we got from the hybrid aliens living behind the ice wall in Antarctica? Some kind of super-frequency sonic event ala Havana Syndrome?

Or if it’s America, perhaps we die of apathy. Slow and comfortable and completely unsurprised. The most American ending of all.

On death and reincarnation

When you die, I think that’s it. Lights out. But then maybe you wake up floating in your next mom’s stomach, just hoping this round is a little less exhausting than the last one. The bar is not high. You just want a slightly better draw.

On cruelty as a cultural export

Is selfish, unempathic cruelty a uniquely American trait, or does this profile exist in mass quantities in other countries too? I genuinely want to know. Not to feel better. Just to understand the distribution.

On the sex drive as early warning system

The decline of one’s sex drive is either a harbinger of impending death within the next few years, or the universe clearing the decks so you can focus on one last great effort before you go. I have chosen to interpret mine as the latter. Optimism is a choice.

On the end of the world and extreme sports

If the world ends tonight, I will not be sad that I never skydived. I don’t understand the need for that big of an adrenaline rush. We all did drugs in the 90s. That’s good enough.

On survival TikTok

Watching survival skills TikToks is almost exactly like actually learning survival skills. Except I have retained nothing and am completely unprepared for any emergency. But I have watched approximately 47 videos about building a fire with a stick and river water, so I feel informed.

This has been Uninformed Opinions. Forward it to one person who is also unprepared.

Subscribe: latenightspiral.com

I am so glad I started taking Zepbound right at the exact moment ana-chic is making a comeback. Seems very aligned with my second puberty.

Dominique Morgan is a national treasure. She is the new Oprah and needs her own show immediately. Netflix make it so. It’s a better idea than Star Search.

Would it be bad to get a lower bleph when my kids still need braces? I mean, shouldn’t I put the oxygen mask on myself first?

I am kind of sad that my kids will never grow up in a world where casual drug use was just a good time and not a potential death sentence. Lenny Bias was a foreshadowing of the future.

Does anyone actually know the rules for U9 girls soccer? Does anyone keep score? Why does each match always end in a tie? I have no answers.

I would like to think that if I had seen pictures of head and neck cancer when I was young I never would have smoked. But I did have lots of sex in the time of AIDS so probably not.

Modern Family was just the movie Parenthood for the 2000s but funnier. I was today years old when I made this connection. I don’t know what to do with it but…think about it.

Are ellipses still triggering people?

Late Night Spiral is where I put the things I cannot say anywhere else. If this felt like something, forward it to one person who needs it.

Subscribe now

Actually, in 2010, most US public schools removed cursive writing as a requirement. Only private schools and better funded public schools kept it. So being able to write in cursive, to sign your own name, became a quiet class signifier. But for me, it was never political. It was personal.

It was the very beginning of figuring out who I was on paper. When I learned cursive, I immediately started practicing my signature, pulling inspiration from the women who came before me.

My grandmother’s cursive came straight from the Palmer Method. It was precise, measured, delicate, almost dainty with flourishes, but standardized. Her signature was clear and pretty and controlled, exactly like she was as a person. I have samples of her handwriting preserved as recipes written neatly on wisps of paper. Hot rolls with the time in the oven raggedly missing, just after the torn edge.

My mother’s handwriting was a very different story. It was bold and definitive. Somehow simultaneously illegible, her signature leaned hard on the first initials her signature leaned hard on the first initials, breaking through the top and bottom of the line she wrote on. It looked messy, but if you looked closely, you could see textbook-shaped letters. The part of her that’s conservative and traditional that she’d never admit to as a woman who came of age in the sixties. Now in her 80s, her signature remains unchanged, although a bit less firmly pressed onto the page, a clear letting go of the effort and leaning more into the flow.

My own signature evolved over the years. Today my signature consists of defined first initials trailed by letters that have unraveled into a waving line. The perfect combination of confidence and “who cares”? It is what it is. I’m a done deal. But when I look at my kids, they all just print their names.

Their name isn’t an expression; it’s a data point at the top of a page. They define themselves through competition and the things they buy. That’s how they say, “I am here. I’m a winner. This is what a winner wears. This is what a winner has.” And maybe that’s enough. Maybe all of this American exceptionalism is all the self-expression they need.

The true marker of ownership for them isn’t the loop of a letter. It’s their Fortnite tag. It’s the meticulously chosen, unique Roblox name. That’s where they begin to define themselves. No signature required.

This essay has a soundtrack:

Cookies and cream.

About once a week I almost do something to mess up my relationship with GV. I almost go skiing, I almost drown in a glass wine, I almost fall down a hole I’d dug years ago and forgot was there.

Last night, as I tread wine in my local hotel watering hole with AL, my cute slide phone LA-LA-LA’d. It was POE. He was buying ice cream.

“What kind?”, I slurred

“Cookie’s N’ Cream”, he replied

“Mmmmm...”, I hummed just a moment too long to mean anything but...”that sounds good.”

“Wanna come over and eat some with me?”

I thought about it. Really hard. Like hard. Drunk hard. Why not? Who would know? Certainly not GV. I wouldn’t tell. POE wouldn’t tell. Who would tell? Could GV tell that I was thinking about it?

“No thanks,” I let out with a wine soaked sigh.

“I knew you’d say that.”

He thinks he’s so good with the reverse psychology. I was still thinking about it. He was being smart. I was thinking dumb.

I walked with AL to the bodega to get money for a cab. Swaying down the avenue, I pushed my heel through every subway grate. I stubbed my toe on every curb. Got the money and rushed AL into a taxi.

“Lub you. Get home safe” I yelled to her downtown cab. I was going uptown. I was still thinking.

It was biting cold outside and the wind kept pushing open my tweed coat and hugging my middle to shivers. The car lights blurred past me. I couldn’t tell a cab from a yellow Ford Taurus. I’d have to take the train. It was too cold to stand outside and hope a cab found me. It was too cold to walk more than a block in any direction. It was just too cold for ice cream.

Plus, I had to poop.

—posted by City Doll

Press play on the track below before reading.

• Agnostics

• Atheists

• devout Catholics

• Jewish men

• Arab men

• Irish men

• German men

• balding men

• fat men

• skinny men

• girlfriend-ed men

• married men

• divorced men

• old men

• young men

• broke men

• rich men

• smelly men

• women

• friend daters

• ex-girlfriend praisers

• dutch date-ers

• once-maker-hers

• cell phone fakers

• cat haters

• Stout drinkers

• Bud drinkers

• scotch drinkers

• heavy drinkers

• heavy smokers

• drug abusers

• money-order bill payers

• psychos

• stalkers

• tennis teachers

• school friends

• co-workers

• non-workers

• fathers

• mama’s boys

• dullards

• one night stand-ers

• tampon-phobics

• show offs

• misogynists

• disease givers

• interview reading porno creepers

• floor sleepers

• therapied wannabies

• And men who have pets named after famous Hollywood actresses

Copyright © 2001

Even as I type this, I am jumping to conclusions, imagining the repercussions of being too transparent. I am calculating the cost of my own voice. How do I articulate the truth without some mighty happenstance interrupting the life I’ve built? What about my kids? My husband? My mother with Alzheimer’s? The mortgage?

I feel like a dog with an electric collar, the kind that shocks you when you get too close to the imaginary fence where freedom lives.

But I’m looking for a sliver between the slats. An unguarded space where I can say this out loud without choking.

From the time I was 14, my life was an experiment in agency. My operating system was built on three questions:

• What happens if?

• What could be?

• What does it look like when?

Every now and then, I threw in a “fuck it” when the odds looked slim. For the record: the “fuck it” times never worked out. But the red thread, the thing that held me together, was an unwavering belief that whatever happened, I would be fine. I had a total, bone deep faith in my ability to endure, adapt, and move on to the next level.

Life was a Super Mario game. I knew the rules. I knew I could jump. I knew there were stars that made me go faster. Even if I didn’t beat the level on the first try, I’d tuck the lesson into my Gap green canvas messenger bag and try again.

I lived this way for twenty five years. I crossed every road in the middle of the street, no matter how heavy the traffic, with the firm belief that the cars wouldn’t hit me.

And they never did.

So it is with shame that I confess: somewhere along the way, I put down that belief. I replaced it with fear.

It happened drop by drop. I poured out the wine and replaced it with water. On the outside, the bottle looks exactly the same. But when you pour it out, it’s clear as day: there is no substance left.

Now, I look through the fence slats at the things I’m too afraid to name.

I am afraid of the threats others hold over me. The way my income is leveraged against my sanity just to pay the bills. I am afraid of my children being swallowed by government tyranny or illegal drugs. I am afraid of my husband’s health and the thought of being a widow with three kids, knowing I am not the fun parent and that their world will dim without him.

Most of all, I am afraid that I have lost my power. My miracles have become minor: my cookies don’t stick to the baking sheet; my skincare routine is consistent.

I am so afraid that I’ve turned to the machines for help. Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity have become my new best friends. They reassure me that what I’m feeling is “okay”; and then reframe it until it is palatable to my ego.

But who am I really dimming my light for? Who am I so afraid of offending?

Is it too late to take risks? Why does it seem so impossible now? Where did the girl with the green messenger bag go?

I am standing here with my pockets full of fucks that I’ve bunched up over the years, wondering how to get rid of them. I’m looking for the road back to salvation.

I’m looking for the girl who knew the cars would never hit her.

A rhythmic ride exploring familiarity, fear, and how the same faces recur across race, class, and time. From subway sightings to science and folklore, the episode asks what it means to recognize yourself in a stranger.

The Tracklist

• Girl on Fire Alicia Keys

• The Wheel Edie Brickell & New Bohemians

• Is There Anybody Out There? Pink Floyd

• Mango Butter Durand Bernarr

• How To Meet Yourself Hiatus Kaiyote

Listen. Read. Spiral.

I want to start out by saying that I wasn’t always scared of the New York City subway system. There was a time when I considered it my pathway to the world.

This was before random people were setting passengers on fire. Before victims were left to burn while passersby filmed them. Before cops paced back and forth, staring into open train doors at the spectacle.

The full piece lives in audio.

Listen. Read. Spiral.

• Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours Stevie Wonder

• Sign O’ The Times Prince

• UR Alanis Morissette

• Deadbeat Club The B-52’s

• Around The Block Company of Thieves

• Sign of the Time Winifred Tracey

Listen. Read. Spiral.

I thought cursive was dead, confined to rarefied, private, and historical spaces. But it is still taught in some public schools, present just long enough for the children to decide it no longer matters.

In this spiral:

• The quiet class signifier hidden within the loop of a letter.

• Decoding the women in my lineage through the architecture of their handwriting.

• Why my kids believe they no longer need a signature to say I am here (legal ramifications be damned).

Listen while you spiral.

Ten minutes. One spiral. A deeper look.

My husband brought home a “Buddhist Hand” lemon. It looks like a citrus octopus. It has fingers and digits. It looks like a creature.

My body rejected it immediately. No mouth watering. No anticipation of sour. Just a quiet decision: “That isn’t for me.”

It’s sitting on my counter right now. I know I’ll let it rot.

It got me thinking at this ungodly hour. How many other things in my life have I let rot simply because I didn’t believe they were for me?

In this spiral:

• The neuroscience of why your brain can’t tell the difference between a real lemon and a thought.

• Why belief is architecture and how we build houses we don’t want to live in.

• How I used a “future memory” to hack a presentation in front of 250 people.

• Why I am never eating that octopus lemon.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Podbean