Here at the Weekly Zephyr, I take my duties to you very seriously

I couldn’t exactly tell you what all those duties are but I know them when I’m doing them and I have a creepy feeling when I’m about to not. One of the duties I can identify is DO NOT BULLSHIT THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE GATHERED HERE.

As you may remember, I’d been about to give you a Met Gala red carpet post. Unbeknownst to me, I had a window of about three hours from when the carpet started filling up with Fancy Folk on the afternoon of May 2nd until the news broke about Roe V. Wade—also on May 2nd—three hours in which I could feel genuine joy and interest in this red carpet and have a chance to translate that joy into a length of word fluff for you.

That soured fast.

Then I thought, okay. Keep going. Find the angle, damn it. Make this red carpet post anyway. Laughter and pleasure are important for our survival. The good folks of Zephyrtown want one small laugh while the world crumbles around them. Such a modest, humble, Tiny Tim wish.

I wanted to grant it really bad.

You know what kept being the problem?

People.

Who organizes the Met Gala? People. Who walks down the red carpet? People.

What kind of people? Rich people. Really rich people. Really quite very rich people.

What kind of people am I particularly unimpressed with at this moment on Earth? For whom am I feeling a freshly robust, XXL disdain, i.e.

WHO BORES ME

It is they, the really quite very rich, the very often also quite white, the boring few who needn’t suffer much after the policies so many of these people enjoy have ruined existence for everyone else.

I found that I could not and would not and did not want to sustain focus on their red carpet representatives, not even as a longtime enjoyer of fashion + appreciator of red carpets + particular enthusiast for the Met Gala red carpet, which gives all the rich people a more-difficult-than-usual fashion assignment with a bigger aesthetic payoff for those of us watching who like that kind of thing.

When you’re walking around with your disdain levels very high, it’s difficult not to experience spillover. I know there are a ton of human people out there who are perfectly wonderful, living well, doing delightful things that harm none of us, but I have been experiencing Disdain Creep with regards to humanity as a whole. I didn’t want to think about people, any people, much less these specific people.

When you don’t know what to do, do nothing*.

That’s what I did this week. I held the wish to give you some fun in one hand, and the reality of rich people being ostentatiously rich at a bad time in the other hand, and I waited for an idea to come by.

*excellent advice, also bad advice, depends

The idea arrived.

You, my friends, will have it. You will have your special edition red carpet post. Arriving in your inboxes shortly.

And separately because Substack has strict post-length limits.

Meanwhile, I did spend a good bit of time on the Met Gala post and some of you were hoping for a little something to roll your way on the topic. I will now rifle through my purse like a grandma and give you a handful of human red carpet peppermints I have stashed there as a treat.

Hold please for the special edition.