Boy, the Qataris Must Have Some Crazy Present Closet! 😂 ✈️ 🎁

Surrendering to the Gifts of the Universe (and The New Yorker. Ta!)

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Jacopo Pagin - Electric Stars Body Memory Music

Hello, Lovelies. How the hell are you?

Can you believe our boiled hotdog skin of a president is off cosplaying “King”?

(clicks tongue)

And, hello? This plane is the ultra-on-brand equivalent of the Russians lacing Navalny‘s underpants with Novichok. Talk about Trojan horses. No person should be allowed to be President without having read Homer. Jeez.

Required reading.

Meanwhile, Putin is ghosting Zelensky in yet another round of Kabuki theater peace talks just as our Secretary of Health & Human Services is reenacting La Dolce Vita in a pool of raw sewage while trying to enforce eugenics policies on our nation’s neurodivergent communities.

And, of course, Pope Leo’s MAGA bro is trying to pull a full Merkle.

I used to have all these fancy mantras for saying, “My future self is so totally going to know how to solve these things.” Now, very much in the vein of

Tom Cox

, I just say, “Future self, you can go fuck off, right now. You might not even be a self in the future, so just cool your jets, pal.”

If your brain is slipping and sliding through time, you are not alone, dear readers.

Mine certainly is.

My seizures put Lazarus in the shade. My brain knocked me down in the middle of life and demanded my fealty.

They begin with a murmuration of starlings and low birdsong in my chest and then whirl into a tornado of stars that consumes the whole of my consciousness.

I do not wish them on anyone, but oh, how I wish you could see what I see, and hear what I hear. I’ve said it before, but the ecstasy of them feels like this:

There is nothing for them but to surrender.

I first learned of surrender in the 80s. As a kid, I would pad silently toward my mother’s study in the weeks before Christmas, drawn by the rustle of tissue paper and the unmistakable scent of scotch tape and pine. Just as I’d lift my hand to the doorknob, she’d call out—brightly, mischievously, like a cheery commandant from some festive front—
“HALT!”
I’d freeze.
“Do you have the Christmas spirit?” Came her voice through the door.
“Uh… yeah?”
“Then DON’T come in!”

I know what you’re thinking. She had a plane in there!

Alas, no. Inside, she was a woman possessed—not by mania, but by magic. Her present closet wasn’t a closet so much as a vault of wonder: textiles and scarves that matched the soul, one-of-a-kind objets d’art smuggled home from foreign markets, singular books wrapped in velvet ribbon, chosen as if each person she loved had their own secret mythology she alone could decode. If you knew her, you got a gift. No exceptions.

Sometimes I think I’m still outside that door. Standing quietly. Waiting. Trying to understand what’s inside—not just the gifts I’ve been given, but the ones I haven’t yet unwrapped. The trick, I’ve learned, is to stop. And surrender.

Surrender, from the Latin surrendere, means “to give over.” But more intimately, it means to become one with the thing.

Motherhood forced me to surrender in ways I never could have imagined. Yes, my daughters both have the will of Nietzsche…

The Will of Said Daughters

But then also…

Fetal microchimerism is the very real phenomenon where cells from the baby's body persist in the mother's body—in her blood, her brain, and her muscles for decades after birth.

Yep, my daughters are still right here with me, of me—even on the days when they will not reply to my texts. Ah, surrender.

And then there is death. I’ve met it in three ways, each with its own kind of music.

First, in adagio—the long, slow movement of protracted illness of a loved one. It is an agony of slow rebellion whereby the body, even as it fades, cannot stop playing the melody of survival. It clings with primal muscle memory. It does not know how to surrender. Not yet for it does not know… or refuses, at the core, to believe it is dying.

Then, death in maggiore—a violent burst, as sudden as it was incandescent. The hands closed around my throat, and I fumbled—clumsily, desperately—for the can of RAID on the nightstand, spraying blindly. The tops of my feet scraped against the carpet, rug-burned and useless as if even my body had frozen in disbelief. The rage did not stop. Not then. Not with poison. Not with pleading. It was a brutal movement with no conductor and no score. Until help arrived.

And lastly so many times, again in crescendo—my brain’s private symphony: seizures. Gorgeous, ecstatic, terrifying. A neural storm, that tornado of stars. There is music in them too—loud, discordant, holy. For some reason, my brain soundtrack also includes a lot of Freddie Mercury. They leave wreckage, yes. And they may not be over. But when the storm passes and the light returns, I often wake into a kind of technicolor clarity. A beginner’s mind. As if the universe has hit reset. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” It is the possibility of everything.

They say the novel is the art of the possible.

And what I see on Substack—what I feel—are seeds of that possibility, scattered across a vast and luminous landscape. Some see Substack as a testing ground—a space where new voices, new forms, and new works take shape on their way to more established cultural institutions. Others argue that the very format lacks the editorial discipline and that there’s too much mollycoddling, to produce anything of lasting quality. To this I say, good god, have you read,

Tina Brown

this week? She is doing some of the most transformative work of her life. At Empress Editions, we see it as both: an incubator of (often neglected) voices and a platform where, with the right editorial eye, rough work becomes radiant.

But more than anything, Substack is a scaffolding of community around which books can thrive. Not just to write them—but to cultivate them. To share the work in real-time. To build audiences organically. To map out a book tour in comments and DMs. It’s not just a newsletter platform—it’s a quiet little revolution for literary citizenship.

And it's also a place for future collaboration—not just the solitary grind of authorship, but the shared thrill of building something electric, something unexpected. Someday soon, I’d like to say to a handful of you:
Let’s write a television series together.

Not because we have to. But because we can. Plus, being in a writers’ room is probably the MOST fun you can have with your clothes on. Because the space between us genuinely hums with the potential of that kind of creation.

All of this has been swirling in my head as I make the rounds with our partners, trying to assign value to a thing still in tissue paper. Still in ribbon. Still becoming.

Maybe I should just wait outside the Qatari gift closet?

It seemed to work for the boiled hotdog skin.

And Now for Something Marvelous

Two books I am enjoying:

One so lush in its dopamine-infused language… I feel like the world needs this book to heal right now. Tartufo by Kira Jane Buxton is about a gigantic, foul truffle that forever changes the fate of a quirky, dying Italian village and its colorful cast of inhabitants.

And the other, the book we all yearned to write in our thirties because we loved and longed to be Chabon, Lethem, and Franzen, Glass Century, by

Ross Barkan

:

And ICYMI from my other Stack, the roast of the century to make you chuckle…

And a Quote:

“We are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”

—Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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OK, that’s what I’ve got this week. I want to thank all of you. I just found out that Gotham Girl rose to number 35 in Humor on Substack last week—WAY above that asshat Bill Mahr, who I would gladly pay to never speak again as long as he lives. Thank you for that gift—it was such a joy to experience.

Yours in surrender - xoxo - gotham girl

PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.

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