Visitors
Friday July 4, 2025
No, we weren’t visited by extraterrestrials, but the amount Lindsey Hoffman travels she might as well be an alien.
You might have thought I’d say something nice about America today. Well, on a day that MAGA is celebrating achieving its self-destructive dream of taking healthcare from the poor and elderly and food from children in pursuit of a government that only serves rich white men, I don’t have much nice to say.*
Anyway, let’s talk about our first visitor of the summer: Little Linds.
I should have taken notes on where Linds has been since we saw her last spring, because I’m going to get it wrong. After living in London for a few years, her work visa was coming to an end, so she began plotting an even more ambitious adventure: Relocating to New Zealand. As I imagine some readers of this newsletter have been finding out recently, it’s not the easiest thing to pick up and move to another country, especially when you’re a date behind for all but five hours each day. While trying to figure out a job and work visa from the other side of the world, she decided to forgo a home for a little while, traveling around Europe, WWOOFing in Switzerland, and making a couple of stateside stops to see family in Vermont and California.
In Switzerland, she worked on a farm with a woman, her partner, and her father. The latter two spoke only Swiss-German. Each day, she tended to chickens, ducks, goats, geese, rabbits, and some other animals I’m probably forgetting, and helped keep the farm operating smoothly. Each night, she dined with these foreign strangers, only one of whom she could communicate with verbally, and played a Swiss card game with a name that sounds nothing like whatever I’d spell if I ventured an attempt. She rode along on trips to the local chocolate maker, loaded up the farmstand, and accompanied her host on visits to neighboring farms to trade eggs for meat, herb salts, and all sorts of other sundries. She contributed to a little self-sufficient economy.
And then, all of a sudden, she got a job in New Zealand that required her to be in Christchurch by the end of July. So, she left Switzerland, made a brief visit to Italy, and flew back to the U.S. to begin preparing for the next chapter. We’re fortunate her sister and nephew live in Vermont; she flew into Boston and stayed an extra night to hang out with us before heading up there for a visit. Then she’s back to Boston, home to California to see her parents and get her stuff in order, then off to New Zealand to start a new life on the other side of the planet. Quite the month.
Linds is our first visitor this July. We’ll have Lindsay’s cousin, Sydney, staying with us a few days next week, and her childhood friend, Erica, for the week after that. And then we’re hosting a baby shower at our place after that. Pretty busy month! But nothing spectacular compared to Linds’s July. We’re not the first people to tell her to write a book. She hasn’t committed yet, but we’re keeping her postcards for her records when she decides to start.
One Hollywood: Somebody Feed Phil, Netflix
More than ever, I think Americans need to remember (or learn) the benefits of travel. I have a theory that if you forced every MAGA psycho to spend a month in Europe, a quarter of them would come back socialists. They probably just wouldn’t come home from China.
But traveling is expensive and hard, so watch Somebody Feed Phil instead. Phil Rosenthal was a creator of Everybody Loves Raymond and he’s this relentlessly cheery, dweeby guy in his 60s who loves to travel and eat. Each episode focuses on a specific city, region, or country, and Phil throws himself into the cuisine and culture of each place. He’s incredibly corny, but in a very endearing way, and he has great taste in restaurants. Lindsay and I make a point to watch an episode if there is one before we go somewhere new. We basically planned our entire Lisbon trip around the Phil episode, and we’d 100% do it again. He just came out with a Boston episode that put me on the verge of tears; he makes everywhere he visits seem so special, and Boston already is special to me. Emotional overwhelm.
One Song: Lake Street Dive - Hypotheticals
Lake Street Dive performs the theme song to Somebody Feed Phil, and when I Googled to confirm that fact, I learned they’re a Boston band. They formed at the New England Conservatory of Music. Fun fact, so here’s my favorite Lake Street Dive song.
One Book: “Fool’s Errand” by Robin Hobb
I said I wanted to start reading fantasy, right? Well, this one came highly recommended by the hot construction guy who loves fantasy books, who TikTok thought I’d want to get book recs from. I don’t know if I trust him yet because I haven’t started this, but my hold on Libby just came in. Time will tell if I return for more book recs or just to read the comments from incredibly thirsty BookTok women.
One Food: Bird Seed
We’ve got a bird feeder in our backyard that I swear is a friggin’ Michelin star restaurant for these Melrose birds. I’ve been getting a 10-pound bag of bird seed every week because it’s Snow White’s forest in the backyard every time we load up the feeder. There’s a wait list 5,000 birds long. Lindsay and I have started watching the birds and squirrels and learning what they are. We’ve got cardinals and blue jays and finches and doves and sparrows and woodpeckers and so many squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits, which are not the desired clientele, but they keep showing up anyway. (Trump will have rodent ICE on them soon, I’m sure.) Even Goose won’t stop eating the bird seed that spills on the ground and he poops out these horrifying turds that look like they’re covered in maggots or fungus. Gotta be something to this, right? Should I start eating the bird seed?
In other news, I met a conure at PetSmart that I named Rogelio, and if it wasn’t for the $750 price tag, Goose would have a practice brother already. One day, Rogelio. One day.
* Between stripping millions (of LEGAL CITIZENS, not undocumented immigrants as the Newsmaxx machine keeps lying) of their health insurance while dramatically and irresponsibly raising the national debt so much that Elon Fucking Musk has become a voice for austerity, on top of gutting an economically viable and productive clean energy sector and putting hundreds of thousands out of work, on top of a blatantly partisan Supreme Court that weaponized itself against Democrats only to quite literally tell the federal court system it may not check the current sitting president (hope you’re happy, RBG), on top of the fact that naturalized citizens are now being targeted to have their citizenship revoked and Americans returning from abroad are being regularly accosted and illegally searched, on top of the fact that Palantir is the most patently evil thing ever created and Trump is going to use it to begin imprisoning people for speaking against him in the literal concentration camps he’s already building, on top of the fact that conservatives have begun loudly claiming responsibility for ending slavery and calling liberals fascists while simultaneously carrying Confederate and Nazi flags with no sense of irony, on top of all of that Middle East stuff I’m not allowed to talk about, on top of so much state-sponsored and publicly-funded hatred, I’m really not proud to be an American right now. It was always a risk, but this country has officially applied self-determination to the truth, and you can quite literally name your own truth, call anyone who says the sky is blue a liar, and be completely correct because nobody can tell you otherwise. This is the Truth Social era. We have completely and utterly lost the plot, and there’s a non-zero chance that I’m put in a concentration camp in a few years for the mere existence of this footnote.