I wouldn’t know whether to be appalled or appreciative if a doctor gave me this talk. Maybe it would help if there were martial music in the background, and she were wearing a tactical assault lab coat.

I’m also a bit put off at the idea that an appendix might grow back.

Hey, I survived registering a bunch of students yesterday! Barely. Spending hours trying to be on and enthusiastic with young people is sometimes tough for this old guy. I’m usually used to having time for my eyes to go black as my soul recedes into the void for recuperation, so I emerged from my day of brightness and light feeling drained. But it was worth it.

Part of my recovery technique was to sit back and watch something on the TV, and this time I tuned into Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé on Netflix. It was non-stop intellectual stimulation, though, and got me thinking.

Remember Nirvana’s “Feels Like Teen Spirit” video? That one tore down that common American experience, life in a public high school. The bleachers, the cheerleaders, the marching bands…all just a framework for ennui, melancholy, dismay. I loved it, still do, but it’s not exactly optimistic.

Beyoncé takes that same framework and turns it into a fierce celebration of music, dance, HBCUs (man, a lot of the dialogue is about the power of education and community), the black experience, liberty, and womanhood. The interludes where they show the process of creating show were exhausting — so much work and talent went into assembling a complex show. Beyoncé is a genius.

This is the America I want to live in.

“The charge on you is to make this country more than it is today.”

Maya Angelou

That’s the opposite of “MAGA” — it’s looking forward rather than desiring to return to the past.

That’s really all they’ve got in their big building clumsily laid out to look like a boat, anyway, just lots of didactic signage nailed up on walls.

I especially like the last panel.

This True News Story missed the most important detail.

After long eras of systemic racial discrimination by humanity, God has clarified he will keep inventing new, terrible kinds of spider until we stop.

“Okay guys,” said God after Donald Trump’s second attempt at a travel ban, while screwing giant mandibles onto the front of a new tarantula model. “You brought this one on yourselves, though.”

If they’d thought to look closely at the god doing the speaking, they might have noticed that he looks like this:

Or this:

Everyone knows the True Name of God is Iktomi, or Anansi. He’s creating new spiders to build webs in our bones if we don’t stop. He’s not trying to get you to stop, though, he’s just anticipating that your eye sockets and rib cages will provide plenty of homes for his children.

At least someone understands the appeal of working with spiders, and it ain’t Spider-Man.