The only person who takes good pictures of me is my sister. The question that has haunted me for years is whether I’m the swollen, drunken, deformed, hideous troll that appears in other people’s photos or the beautiful, elegant woman in the ones my sister takes.

This is a town filled with Ukrainian flags and “Ultra MAGA” T-shirts. I feel very at home.

It’s unbelievably easy to psy-op people because they don’t resist. To the contrary, they do everything to make the brainwashers’ task easier. You’d think that nothing could be clearer than the need to be suspicious of turns of phrase that magically appear out of nowhere and are suddenly everywhere. But no, people gleefully adopt the brainwashy slogans and repeat them on a loop, doing the propagandists’ work for free.

To give an example, the Russian who invented the deeply meaningless and moronic expression “the West will fight to the last Ukrainian” is getting paid every time an eager American uses it. And gets reaffirmed in his belief that Americans are stupid.

Will anything ever teach people to be less gullible?

Few things are more fascinating than book collections comprised of the reading matter left behind by tourists who come to the same resort. My mother’s condo, for instance, has a robust collection of Dutch semi-pornographic bodice-rippers, a bunch of Evangelical theology books, some unavoidable Harlan Coben, a couple of biographies of US military generals, and the novel Ohio that I dragged away solely because of its title and its 500 pages of length.

In our condo, the previous guests left a bunch of home COVID tests, a pretty stunning quantity of unopened beer, wine, and hard lemonade in the fridge, and a gigantic brand-new jar of peanut butter. There is a vast leftover book collection but not a single book in it appealed to me which is pretty unusual. I’m very happy with my pilfered Ohio, though.