COVID Drinking, Unmasked

Published by Starshine Roshell on January 6, 2021

Floating Through Pandemic on a River of Booze?

I’ve never been a big drinker. Up until March 2020, I’d sip maybe three small glasses of wine per week.

Since then, I’ve done shots with my 22-year-old son while standing in my kitchen. I’ve poured Bailey’s in my coffee at 2 pm on a workday. And I’ve polished off a Costco bottle of Malibu Rum.

Never mind the amount. Malibu Rum, you guys.

These are desperate times. And millions of us are hoping to float through them with a merciful little buzz on. One study found that by May, the average American was already drinking 27 percent more per day than in the previous year, and binge drinking had increased 26 percent. Numbers were highest in households with kids (which will surprise no one in households with kids).

Screw Hope. Trust Tenacity.

Published by Starshine Roshell on December 6, 2020

How Hannah-Beth Jackson Beat the Drum for Women’s Rights

Photo of Hannah-Beth Jackson by Paul Wellman

It was 11:56 p.m. on her final day of her final term in office — and things didn’t look good. “I had ’til midnight to get this bill passed, and I’d been working on it for years,” State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson says of her Paid Family Leave Act, aimed at protecting the jobs of folks who take leave to care for family. It had passed the Senate but needed 41 votes to clear the Assembly.

Fresh from a C-section, Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Berkeley) showed up with her newborn to cast the 40th vote in favor. “We were running out of time,” Jackson recalls, “and I thought, We’re not gonna get there.”

And then (get this!) moderate Democrat Joaquin Arambula, who reps conservative Fresno and had publicly spoken out against the bill, voted in favor — tipping the ayes to 41.

A casual observer might call it luck. But anyone who’s followed Sen. Jackson’s career — her stint in the State Assembly from 1998 to 2004, and her two terms in the Senate, which officially ended Nov. 30 — knows it’s the result of the senator’s political mantra:

“Never ever, ever, ever, ever give up.”

Enlisting the Break-Up Pros

Published by Starshine Roshell on September 30, 2020

Could Japan’s Wakaresaseya Woo Away Our Ball-and-Chain POTUS?

Dear Wakaresaseya Agency,

We were recently perusing the news when among the usual fare of planetary plagues, unsurvivable hurricanes, and right-wing Christian three-ways, we read about your surreptitious services. We don’t mind confessing we’re entirely intrigued.

Can it be true there are businesses in Japan dedicated solely to breaking up relationships? And that people hire these covert agents to bust up their own marriages by luring their spouses into affairs??

It’s hard to believe — but then again, if someone had told us six months ago that we’d be marching to save the US Freaking Postal Service and shoveling mountains of money at Ole Grampa Biden, we’d have laughed in their unmasked face, sputtering, “Shyeah, right, I’d sooner homeschool my kids!”

Zooming Away from Privacy

Published by Starshine Roshell on July 10, 2020

Nonstop Video Conferencing Puts Our Once-Secret Sanctuaries on Display

It’s gutting the economy, ravaging health care, and battering education. But fewer are talking about the ways this pandemic may be impacting our culture, taking things from us — lovely things — that we might never get back.

Rock concerts. Open-office floor plans. Fro-yo toppings bars.

You know what else is likely to be rendered obsolete in a post-COVID world? Curtains. Shutters. And blinds.

While our homes were once sacred spaces where we were free to let down our guards, the new dangers of the outside world have forced us to invite the outside — awkwardly and perhaps ill-advisedly — in.

Now, between Zoom, FaceTime, Teams, BlueJeans, and Google Hangout, there are more ways to bring strangers into your home than there are good excuses to leave it.

Mating in Captivity?

Published by Starshine Roshell on May 2, 2020

Why the Wave of ‘Quarantine Babies’ Must Be a Myth

I’ve heard the prophecy. You’ve heard the prophecy. By now we’ve all heard it: Nine months from now, we’ll see a wave of “quarantine babies,” conceived while humans across the globe stayed indoors and *wink, wink* found ways of entertaining themselves.

But I don’t believe it for a minute.

Have you ever seen a porno featuring a couple in sweatpants and rubber gloves wiping down boxes of frozen waffles and Minute Rice with spray bleach after returning, face-masked and reeking of Purell, from a terrified jaunt to the market?

The answer is no, my friends. No, you have not.

Because this moment we’re suffering through is not a sexy moment. In fact, this bizarre blip in history couldn’t be less of a turn-on if it were a glob of ketchup-flavored spittle dangling from Donald Trump’s twaddle-spewing flaptrap.

Starshine Roshell

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