Ducks, Newburyport

by Lucy Ellmann

it’s “a process of acceptance and rejectance,” the fact that I don’t know how that came out but Leo liked it, the fact that I don’t know if it’s English but it’s true, the fact that adolescence is a process of acceptance and rejectance,

the fact that they put Teflon in school uniforms these days, I guess just to make sure everybody gets cancer as soon as possible,

the fact that it’s hard to be calm when ninety-three people get shot dead every day,

the fact that you can’t really make a lot of banana bread at a time, on a commercial basis, or I can’t seem to, because it’s all about the ripeness of the bananas, cheerleaders, the fact that they need to be a little over-ripe, bananas not cheerleaders, and

the fact that you lose everything in life, everything, and then you lose your life too,

the fact that this here that I’m getting seems to be the skimmed milk of human kindness, ♬

the fact that I like the way Holly Hunter talks,

the fact that Trump is like King Lear with all his tantrums, the fact that he even has a favorite daughter,

the fact that it’s un-American, I know, to admit you’re scared of all these screwballs but I am, my fellow countrymen, the fact that sometimes I wonder if I’m scareder than I even know,

there are two alligators in the radioactive pond at the Savannah River Nuclear Plant, the fact that they’re called Tritigator and Dioxinator, and

Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter were roommates in New York,

the fact that I just realized that with this worry-doll industry, Guatemala’s indirectly benefiting from stress levels all over the world, or even directly benefiting, the fact that that is one weird export, but it’s kind of them,

Uranus has a layer of diamonds in its ocean,

the Iroquois Confederacy is the oldest democracy in the world,

Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes,

the fact that there are twenty threats of school shootings a week now, across the whole country, and hundreds or thousands of false alarms and lock-downs,

the fact that sometimes all these payments and co-payments and deductibles and whatnot make you feel like you’re buying your body, section

the fact that people have to pay $200 a month for water in Flint, water they can’t drink,

the fact that somebody said a housewife’s salary would be about a hundred and fifty thousand bucks by now, if we were really paid for what we do, but it would still be manual labor, or some of it anyway, personal-assistant-type manual labor,

the fact that the average score for an American bridge these days is C minus, Skagit River Bridge, the fact that most of them were built before metal fatigue was even known about, the fact that they were only meant to last fifty years or so, the fact that they’re all past their demolish-by date,

the fact that I often think about Abby, the fact that at any point in the day I might think of her, the fact that I miss her so much sometimes it hurts, the

the fact that most people’s clutter is there so they can hide the piles of past tax returns behind it,

you shouldn’t judge the barrel by all the rotten apples, or whatever the expression is,

the fact that first they poison you, I mean DuPont, and then they sell you the antidote,

the fact that I can never read WaPo articles online now because you have to subscribe,

#relatable

the fact that in 1900 there were seven thousand varieties of apple in America, and now it’s only fifteen,

the fact that I just realized that when this monologue in my head finally stops, I’ll be dead, or at least totally unconscious,

the NRA is at war with America and they’re going to win too, because they’ve got all the guns,

if we all blow ourselves to smithereens, at least Pepito has existed, and that is good, the fact that it’s just plain good he was in the world,

the fact that we didn’t bring four children into the world just so they could smoke on chog, I mean choke on smog, and watch the ozone disintegrate and rivers burst into flame, and animals disappear from the face of the earth,

somehow I don’t think I feel like having chloroform in my coffee today, a little hot milk maybe, on a cold day, no chloroform, thanks,

some people will get closure while other people internalize stuff

you will wait a long time for the bus and then two’ll come at once

if aliens come they will never stop laughing at our sci-fi movies they will never let it drop

some man threatened to do a mass shooting because he couldn’t get a date, the fact that, hey, maybe nobody wanted to go out with you because you’re a mass shooter, ever think of that,

Native Americans didn’t think of the land as wild, they saw it as a harmonious system that humans were part of,

Howard Hughes also designed a hospital bed that could lift you up and lower you down by pressing a button,

SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST NAZI POTUS,

the fact that Goofus and Gallant were always getting into trouble, the fact that Goofus acted like a normal kid and Gallant was the goody-goody,

Nixon knowingly kept the Vietnam war going an extra ten years, just so Johnson wouldn’t get the credit, the fact that that has to be a war crime,

they’re digitizing all the books in the world, and Leo says we’ll be left with incomplete books full of errors, that people can alter whenever they feel like it,

some people get soundwave tattoos now, sound memories, the fact that the tattoo plays a snippet of music or whatever back to you if you scan it or something with your iPhone,

Pol Pot’s real name was Saloth Sar,

if America had never had the war with Vietnam, none of that Cambodian stuff would have happened, the fact that Saloth Sar might have just read a lot more Verlaine and refrained from killing two million people,

Louisa May Alcott said Tom Sawyer would corrupt children, and Mark Twain said it wasn’t meant for children,