Build me a bridge/love rollercoaster/Above the clouds
This morning’s earworms
What a motherfucking Monday, December 15, 2025, has turned out to be. It had been a decent weekend. Mike came over on Friday and left Sunday night. That was fine; it was good having him around. Bill was on the road and did not come back until Saturday afternoon, and it was wonderful having him back home.
We’ve been having problems with the drain in the kitchen sink. It’s been backing up, and we’ve been using a plunger. Unfortunately, the water was not going down the drain but rather, into the washing machine. On Friday evening, when I usually do my laundry, I was all set, thinking I would have to stand by the sink during the wash.
I opened the lid and poured a cup of detergent into the machine when I noticed that it was half filled with dirty dishwater. So I gathered my laundry and walked over to the laundromat, where it was washed and folded, and ready 24 hours later. Tomas at the laundromat does a good job.
The showerhead I installed back in September had a bit of a leak, which I kept putting off, but would have to tighten it eventually. Saturday night, Bill went to bed early, and Mike and I shot videos of each other for a Facebook group.
On Sunday, Robert the ‘super’ came by and used a snake to go through the drain, and Bill was with Robert on that front. It seemed to have worked initially, but we soon found out that it did not work at all. In fact, Stephanie, in the apartment below us, knocked on our door to let us know that our drains were backing up into her apartment.
It was disconcerting. Mike eventually went back to his crib, and Bill and I caught up on TV shows we usually watch together. He was in bed soon enough and I followed soon after.
I woke up at the usual time for a Monday morning. I headed into the shower, where I found the showerhead was completely useless and soaked me and the bathroom. I yelled out ‘Fuck’ and Bill thought I had fallen, which is a fear of mine lately.
I removed the showerhead and had an awkward shower. After the shower, I sat at my computer and did what I always do, visit the Hunger Site and then post on that Met-ah website. A bit after 7 AM, I was outside in the 19° weather. I got my bagel and carefully walked to the PATH train. There was about 2.5 inches of snow from Saturday into Sunday, and whatever melted on Sunday was frozen on Monday morning, and people did not shovel their sidewalks.
Manhattan was bearable except for the cold winds blasting down the canyons of the city. I made it to my desk and started my day. The restart of the computer had the windows from Friday reopen, and Meta-ah was one of the tabs. It was shut down due to an accusation of sharing photos of the sexualization of children.
I immediately appealed the decision and did so numerous times throughout the day. There has been no reply from Met-ah. That leads me to think it was decided by some artificial intelligence. I have absolutely no idea what Met-ah was talking about and asked to see it, but I have seen nothing.
I have no clue as to where I stand. My dear friend RoDa may have been accused of something similar; he was accused of posting naughty photos. Neither one of us has any idea where we stand or even if we stand. But we stand together in the artificial intelligence dock.
The Google Gemini rewrite as a Fran Lebowitz essay
## 🏙️ Above the Clouds and Under the Kitchen Sink: A Motherfucking Monday in the Life
One is frequently asked, “Fran, what’s wrong with the world?” And I always want to say, “Everything. But let’s start with the sheer *audacity* of a Monday.” December 15th, 2025, to be precise. It arrived with the grace of a dropped piano.
The weekend, of course, was merely a deceptive overture. A brief, polite nod before the brass section of chaos started blaring. Mike was present. Bill, bless his road-weary soul, was briefly restored to the premises. Having people around—it’s like having too many coats in a small closet. Necessary, perhaps, but ultimately a tangle.
But never mind human complications; let us discuss plumbing. Plumbing is God’s cruel joke on the sentient city dweller. Our kitchen sink—a perfect metaphor for modern life—had decided that forward motion was simply beneath it. It was backing up, bubbling with the kind of indignant filth that only dishwater can achieve. We plunged, naturally. As if a rubber cup on a stick has ever truly persuaded a cast-iron pipe to behave.
The crisis achieved operatic heights on Friday night, laundry night. I approached the washing machine, detergent in hand, only to discover that the damned appliance was half-filled with the sink’s murky runoff. The machine, like so many people I know, was simply holding onto its grudges. One must admire the sheer logistical incompetence of a system that manages to divert dirty water *sideways*. So, it was off to the laundromat. And one must always mention Tomas at the laundromat. He performs the only consistent, reliable service in the Tri-State area.
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Then there was the showerhead. I installed it in September. That, right there, is the problem: a commitment to maintenance. It had a *leak*, you see. A charming, persistent drip, like a bad review. Saturday night, while Mike and Bill indulged in the modern narcissistic ritual of filming themselves for a ‘Facebook group’—a phrase that should make the Founding Fathers weep—I was ignoring the slow, wet decay above the tub.
Sunday was supposed to be the day of atonement, courtesy of Robert the ‘super.’ A super, in my experience, is a person whose primary job is to demonstrate that they are busier than you are. Robert brought his snake. A plumbing snake is a thing of such hideous, serpentine inefficiency that you know, instantly, it will fail. And it did. Not only did it fail us, but it inflicted our failure upon Stephanie downstairs. Our apartment, through the mysterious, capillary action of a tenement building, was now spewing our filth into hers. Disconcerting is too delicate a word. It’s a crisis of civic shame.
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Monday arrived, like a mugger. The showerhead, having endured the indignity of the weekend, chose this moment to utterly disintegrate. I stepped into the shower—a ritual of purification—and was immediately soaked, along with the entire bathroom floor. I yelled “Fuck.” I highly recommend it. It’s a word of such versatile despair. Bill, of course, feared I had *fallen*. Falling, one’s equilibrium giving way, is the final insult of the urban condition.
Having conducted an ‘awkward shower’—which is the only kind an apartment will permit—I sat down to the computer. The day’s essential, pointless rituals: visiting the Hunger Site (a minor, digital atonement) and posting on that hellish digital clearinghouse, ‘Met-ah.’
Then, the cold. Nineteen degrees, to be exact. The streets were a treacherous ballet of un-shoveled snow, turned into a black, frozen slick. People in this city treat their sidewalks the way politicians treat the truth: they just leave it out to freeze.
But the true atrocity of the day was waiting at my desk. I logged into Met-ah, and the digital guillotine dropped. My account, it informed me, was shut down. The charge? Sharing photos of the ‘sexualization of children.’
Now, if you have any experience with the human condition—and I have too much—you know that the only thing worse than an accusation is an **un-specific** accusation. I appealed. Repeatedly. To an audience of silence. This, you see, is the glorious climax of the modern age: being condemned to a digital limbo by some dispassionate, unseen, and utterly humorless artificial intelligence.
I haven’t the faintest idea what this algorithm is talking about. I’ve asked to see the evidence. Silence. I’ve asked to speak to a person. Hysterical laughter. My poor friend RoDa, it seems, is in a similar fix—accused of ‘naughty photos.’
We are, RoDa and I, standing together in the dock of the digital age. We have no idea where we stand. We don’t know if we stand at all. We are simply floating, two small pieces of debris, on a tide of algorithmic nonsense, having traded our real-world problems—the leaky pipes, the frozen sidewalk—for the far more irritating, far more *insidious* problems created by a computer that has mistaken a piece of digital dust for a major felony.
I tell you, the love rollercoaster can keep its speed. Give me a comfortable chair and a functioning drain. And perhaps a nice, long prison sentence for the people who invented the internet.
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