By the time you read this, Lent will be over (except in the Orthodox traditions) but as I write this, I have about 36 hours before Easter Sunday arrives and I CAN FINALLY START EATING SUGAR AGAIN.

I started secularly observing Lent in 2010, when my poet friend Lisa inspired me to participate in her Lent blog. A list of the various things I’ve abstained from during this season over the years: sugar, Google chat (remember those days?), caffeine, television, meat, and social media. I appreciate the season as an invitation to refocus and cultivate awareness.

This year I gave up sugar, except for Sundays and a few other occasions, like my birthday. I’ve found the sugarless life harder than other years, perhaps because of those “cheat” days.

I also took social media off my phone, which has been a denial much more revealing about my psyche. A niche strategy to help smokers quit is to invite mindfulness - to ask them to name the feeling they are experiencing when they compulsively get out their pack of cigarettes. I’m not alone in thinking that looking at our phones is the new smoking. It’s what we do when we’re standing around, waiting in line, on public transit, in the car, in bars, when someone else looks at their phone, in the morning, before sleep, while eating, reading, watching TV, in the transition moments like arriving at home or paying the restaurant check or parking the car. It’s an activity and a posture that smoothes the social edges of boredom; at this point, we’d probably find it weird to see someone just hanging around outside, leaning against a wall or sitting on a park bench, gazing into the distance. Put a phone in their hand and bend their face to that phone and their behavior conforms more to our expectations.

I’ve discovered that I most often reach for my phone when I’m lonely. When I’m at social gatherings, the compulsion lessens considerably. In fact, when I’m visiting my family for holidays, my phone is often languishing in another room. These past 47 days, even though I know that there are no dopamine levers to push on my phone, I still grab it during transition times, when I feel bored or antsy or at loose ends. It offers me little, but the muscle memory remains.

I have also found it difficult to, as we say, “keep up with the news” with social media off my phone, and to voice my opposition to the ongoing genocide of Palestine, ICE kidnappings, invasion of Iran, decimation of Beirut and ethnic cleansing of Lebanon, and the escalation of a genocide against trans people, in a way that feels immediate and urgent. Multiple horrors happen a day for which the only reasonable reaction is screaming. Occupation soldiers drove nails through a Palestinian baby’s leg and burned him with cigarettes, in order to “interrogate” his father. What is the warranted response in the moment of learning that fact, besides screaming in disgust at people who legitimize that state’s existence and “right to defend itself”? I can’t think of one. On this continent, itself occupied by another illegitimate state, ICE dumped Nurul Amin Shah, a Rohingya refugee, in a Buffalo parking lot at night in freezing temperatures, without notifying his family or attorney, leaving him to die. What is there to do but scream fuck ICE and fuck the structure of borders that decides who is and who is not a worthy human?

Using social media often serves as a transmuted scream. In some ways, this newsletter serves that purpose as well, but with less immediacy.

It is not lost on me how many Christians will be spending Easter Sunday praising the men who kidnap and imprison children. Jesus preached forgiveness but because I’m an atheist I can say I hope those men and their supporters taste ash in their mouths for the rest of their lives.

I am still fundraising for six Gaza families. If you are able to give, please contribute to any one of these campaigns. Even small donations keep a campaign active, and let the families know that they haven’t been forgotten. If you, like me, were raised in the Christian tradition (even if you, like me, are an atheist) you might find that sending funds to families who are trying to survive a genocide in the land where Jesus was born and died is a meaningful way to observe Easter.

No Kings Day

On March 28, I joined my friend Katie to table for LA Street Care at our local No Kings demonstration. We handed out flyers about ICE collaborating with Ring cameras, anti-Tesla posters, copies of The New York War Crimes, Katie’s “cop-demoralizing business cards” that say “Quit Your Job” on them, various antifa stickers, and mini-zines. We talked to a lot of people and moved all of the free literature we brought. I belong to the church of “do something.”

What I’ve been reading and listening to

Camonghne Felix’s just-released book, Let the Poets Govern

I Shimmer Sometimes, Too: poetry by Porsha Olayiwola

Abolish ICE means Abolish the police (Death Panel podcast)

Why libraries matter in a fascist moment (Movement Memos podcast)

How Project Hail Mary makes the impossible possible (Reactor Mag)

Megafelinology: Snow Leopards + Other Big Cats (Ologies podcast)