June Newsletter

Five days of summer, and the contemporaneous existence of aliveness and death.

You and I, we're like four-year-olds
We want to know why and how come about everything
We want to reveal ourselves at will and speak our minds
And never talk small and be intuitive
And question mightily and find God
My tortured beacon
We need to find like-minded companions

Joining You, Alanis Morissette

I found myself signing in the car, on June 23rd; it was the fourth day of summer, and I remembered every word as if it were 1998, when her album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie was released.

And then:

Mr. Play-It-Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to take that flight
And as the plane crashed down
He thought, "Well, isn't this nice?"

And isn't it ironic?
Don't you think?

Ironic, Alanis Morissette

I sang even louder, with a thirteen-year-old smile on my face, almost as loud as I did in Redondo Beach, earlier in the month May, when I saw her live with my friend Sarah. I remembered the pure joy and the excitement I felt on that Sunday evening, how alive I was — Converse in the sand, a carnitas tacos in a hurry, the breeze from the ocean, my voice trembling for the emotion.

I was so happy!

I think I was also happy in 1994, listening to Jagged Little Pill in my room, learning the lyrics from the cover of a cassette tape. I remember having a subscription to some kind of music store, from which I could choose three cassette tapes every month.

The cover photo of this newsletter shows Sarah and I on the stage where Jackson [Browne] performed, before Alanis Morissette; I remember looking at the late spring sky slowly darkening against the water, the beach filled with adoring audience, Jackson’s poetry becoming the air they would breathe — salty air they would, in return, infuse with their voices singing his songs.

How lucky I am! I know, I don’t take it for granted, especially at a time when the blatant contemporaneous existence of atrocity and humanity makes me doubt the real meaning of the latter.

I felt happy and alive in the car, on the fourth day of summer, with frizzy hair and a white denim shirt that was a little too warm for the 82 degrees of California sun without a breeze.

I was picking up Catherine from summer camp. The ordinariness of that day seemed at odds with the contentment I experienced: errands, parenting, writing, taking care of a leaking window before the rainy season would return, and of the exhaustion fan above my stove, that has been in need of deep cleaning for way too long.

The day before — third day of summer — Allison [Larkin] and I had recorded an episode of Now That We Think About It on the topic of fear (Out today, June 30th, on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Substack and Myaudiobrary).

The U.S. had attacked some of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, and Iran had, since then, retaliated by launching a missile attack on an American military base in Quatar.

For weeks, now, in Los Angeles, ICE agents (and likely masked bounty hunters) have been kidnapping innocent people of every age, hardworking angelenos who are part of our communities: taken from their cars, parking lots, place of work. They never returned home, disappeared, denied due process, justice, humanity. Because this administration wants to prove a pointless point, hurting easy targets, brainwashing another kind thereof.

Since January, we all have witnessed the complete disregard for the law, for basic decency, for science, for the knowledge of experts in the fields of economics, medicine, human studies. Many of us are using our voice — the biggest peaceful protest in American history took place on June 14th, when almost six million people took to the streets to express dissent and desire for change, some turn the other way in the name of “religion”, others prefer to ignore what is happening, hoping it will go away, eventually, some are okay with what is happening.

And yet, on the fourth day of summer, when I sang out loud every word of Joining You and Ironic, I was happy.

I was also happy, despite the cluster of migraines that have been debilitating me this month, before I knew of the American attack on Iranian soil. The sun slowly set on Dodger Stadium, where Ben and I were, in the company of some LAist journalists and donors¹.

I looked at the tall palm trees against the increasingly warm color of the Los Angeles sky; the American flag elegantly waved in the air, then the National Anthem echoed, from the diamond to the lodge, where we were.

I looked at the Ice Cube bobblehead in the see-through plastic bag on the ground, between my feet.

That’s when Ben showed me The New York Times headline:

U.S. Enters War with Iran

The headline was (on June 23rd, I believe) changed to: As U.S. Enters Israel’s War Against Iran, the Region Fears What’s Next.

But the initial shock-provoking choice of words did its trick on me: my chest tightened. The last words of the anthem faded out, and I leaned my head agains Ben’s shoulder: fear, dissociation, disappointment, anger, panic, and sadness.

How can life be at once so perfectly normal and so brutally unjust, every day of every season, whether we read a headline of war and genocide, or not?

That’s what I asked myself on the fourth day of summer, in the car, waiting for Catherine. How can I be so happy and so sad?

Alanis Morissette was still playing, but I had stopped singing; I had parked the car and began to write. Not a cloud was in sight, just the palm trees, parents gathering around the street corner where the bus would soon stop, carrying our happy kids returning from camp — my beating heart full of energizing memories and helplessness.

Thank you India, thank you terror…

Cars passed me by fast, at times, slowly, at others.

I wondered whether those drivers experienced what I was experiencing, a dissonant simultaneous feeling of aliveness and death.

And if they weren’t, how were they not?

How is it possible to be neutral, on the fourth day of summer of 2025?

On June 13th, not summer yet, I waited for Catherine to get out of school and, from the car, recorded a voice note for this newsletter:

I have just listened to About Today, from The National. I looked around, and realized I used to have creative thoughts all the time, in the past, and that today I don’t make time for them — too busy, too distracted. I started thinking about the world, and it was almost as if — for the first time that wasn’t really the first time — I acknowledged that the world had walked away. Did I allow the world to walk away? Will people still read books? People drive in the carpool lane when they shouldn’t, they just don’t care.

What could I say?
I was far away
You just walked away
And I just watched you

About Today, The National

I have been feeling the world increasingly slipping away. I have been feeling alone in respecting the rules simply because it is the right thing to do; I have been feeling alone in thinking I can raise my daughter the right way, grounded, not a victim of what keeps slipping away from us, too busy, too distracted.

You just close your eyes
And I just watch you
Slip away
How close am I
To losing you?

About Today, The National

On the fifth day of summer, I started listening to the audiobook of Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

I had many ideas and expectations of how this month would end. But expectations are just a waste of time, a fictitious way through which we think we are in control of what slips away, what changes, what takes us by surprise.

As Gilbert goes into a shockingly true and brutal analysis of everything women my age were exposed to, and were made believe being normal, even empowering, as we frailly came of age, I couldn’t help but finding the most sincere and deep gratitude for the every direction my life had taken — not really for what happened, but for what didn’t.

In the early years that Gilbert analyzes, the early 1990s, I wanted to be famous. But the truth is that I wanted to be accepted; I had felt so unseen that I just wanted people to see me, to listen to me, to be aware of my thoughts, desires, ideas, fears, dreams, of my very bodily presence as it was, without need to change it, adapt it. I wanted to be a model, at first, because I felt ugly and under silent pressure to manipulate the way I looked, in order to fit in — my body was the opposite of what was required of the job. Then, I wanted to be a singer, when Bob and Chris Herbert created the Spice Girls, feeding us a diet of fake girl power made of tight leather pants and frail personalities masked as irreverent behavior. So I wore a burgundy leather jacket and knee-high boots and dreamed of becoming special, of being singled out, chosen, made, a big star.

Today I know, mostly thanks to Gilbert, that there isn’t one woman that got to that ‘stardom’ unscathed, whether emotionally, sexually, spiritually, or physically.

On the fifth day of summer, the day after I sang my memories of 1998 and 1994 in the car, I understood how protected I had been, one night in Turin, high and drunk, half naked in a park, desperate for the love of a man who couldn’t love, desperate for more cocaine, for feeling “special”, and coerced to do something horrific I didn’t want to do, that did leave a permanent mark of shame and regret, but something I was able to escape before it could happen a second time.

How protected had I been, when I finally had the courage to leave a relationship where I was coerced to do, watch, and say what I didn’t want to do, watch, and say.

I have been protected, guided, and redirected all along.

I didn’t think there was something to be grateful for, in a month when the suffering of the most vulnerable has become unbearable, and our basic laws have been thrown in the trash while influencers keep selling collagen and discount codes for ceremonial-grade matcha powder and electrolytes.

But looking back, and seeing what happened after the happy years of 1994 and 1998, I tiptoed my way back to trusting that I (and we) will see it through. We will come out of it bruised, hurt, broken, but with a degree and a depth of resiliency, of presence, energy and courage that can only propel us forward, to what is right.

I know this newsletter has been all over the place, like some kind of modernist piece of art that does’t seem to make sense. But this is what we have today: hypocrisy that doesn’t make sense, and that isn’t art.

We have the contemporaneousness of aliveness and death, of bounty that is summer, and devastation that is too long a winter.

Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence

Thank you, Alanis Morissette

1. Our local public radio, formerly known as KPCC