Robin Whetstone

WTH? Athens: Meat Sales and Butt Smears

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"Your receptionist tells me you don't experiment on any of the meat you sell to the public."

"Well, sometimes we do," he replies.

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Red Ticket: Searching for Dmitri Orlov

From 2008 In 1991, I was a junior at the University of Florida, majoring in Russian and religion. That summer, I spent 6 weeks in Moscow with 20 of my fellow students. They had flown over as a group, but I was very fortunate to have been able to spend several weeks in Europe before going to Russia. So, instead of flying as part of my school group, I took a train from London to Moscow when it was time for the program to start. This meant that at the end of our stay, I had to take a train back to London, to catch my flight home. I was dreading the 3-day train ride. I had never taken a train anywhere before this trip, much less to a Communist country, and had no idea what to expect. No one told me to bring my own food, for example, and if it hadn't been for the two Kazakh women I shared a compartment with, I would have gone hungry. At least this time I had packed food for the return journey back to London. I waved to my classmates as their bus to the airport pulled away, an...

Dictator Minute

If you think 2018 is a crap year, try 1933 on for size! What made the 1930s so miserable? Dictators! Not enough people know about dictators, but Dictator Minute aims to fix that. Take a minute every day to learn to learn something new. You'll be glad you did! 9. Dictators Target Transgender People First Dictators get their start dictatoring by going after the most vulnerable, least popular members of society. Before Hitler graduated to the Jews, he cut his genocidal chops on groups he knew "real Germans" would not miss: immigrants, the disabled, and transgender people. Very early, way before Germany's descent into mass murder, was the sacking of the Institute for Sexual Science, an institute that researched transgender-type things, performed reassignment surgery, and advocated for equal rights and tolerance. But Hitler and the people at his rallies thought that transgender and other non-conforming folks were impure, depraved, and "un-Germa...

My Other Hobby

If you think my hobbies are limited to reading about 1930s world history, writing poems to trade magazines, and thinking about maritime disasters, think again. I also enjoy cross stitching. Here are some of my favorites. This is the first in what I hope will become a series of safety-icon cross stitches. I call it "Corrosive." This one is called "Abu Ghraib." I did it back in 2003, when the story about torture at the notorious prison, where people were kept for years without charges, broke. Maybe I was thinking something deep about persecution based on religion, but I think I was just struck by the form of the image of the man on the box, wires attached to his outstretched arms. It seemed archetypal to me back then, like it referenced something more than what it was. This one is called "Jesus," because it's an image of Jesus. I'm very sad that I can't find the finished cross-stitch ...

Scandal in North Florida

A story I told at The Moth story contest about the biggest scandal to ever have rocked a small North Florida town. CW: Swearin' https://youtu.be/Ozeghp8V9Z0

Losing My Place in the Book of My Life

One Wednesday night in 2009, I had just finished washing my face in the bathroom sink. I was drying my face in the towel hanging from the shower curtain bar when I heard a voice say, very clearly, "Your mother is going to email you and tell you that your grandmother has died." My face was totally buried in the towel when whoever it was announced this. I knew I was alone in the house, but still, I stepped back and looked all around the small bathroom. Who said that? It was a male voice, and a bland one. Not deep, or scratchy, or anything, and no particular inflection. Just a very neutral statement from a very neutral voice that definitely wasn't my own. I walked into my room and sat down on the bed. Looked at the clock. It said 9:55 pm. I thought things over. My grandmother was in her 80s, and lived 200 miles away, in the same city as my mom and stepfather. She'd recently moved to a retirement home, where she'd promptly started a residents' committee and been e...

Potemkin Villages

Let's say you manage a McDonald's across the street from the bus station, on the rough side of town. You show up one morning to learn that the CEO of the company -- that's right, the whole international corporation -- is coming to visit your McDonald's in just a few days. On a "fact-finding" tour, it says. "Fact-finding my eye," you think. You know the real reason the big boss is dropping in for a visit. It's because, somehow, you, General Manager #5308429, and the leader of this iconic company had a hot, torrid romance a few years back. Yes, it's true. It was doomed to end, obviously, and it did. Badly. And that's why your boss' boss' boss' boss is coming to see your store. To wallow in your embarrassment. In your obvious lack of achievement. You look around at the smears on the windows. Some of them must be ketchup, but you can't be sure. There's Dwayne, the homeless guy, over in the corner with his newspapers ...

My First Alternative Boyfriend

This is a picture of my first alternative boyfriend. I will call him Jay, because that was his name. I was 15 when I met him on August 15, 1986. It was a Friday. I know precisely when I started dating him because I stopped dating him exactly one week later. We broke up forever right before Henry Rollins took the stage at Einstein-A-Go-Go, a legendary club in Jacksonville Beach. Even though we’d not gone out anywhere or even spoken to each other during the 7 days of our courtship, the breakup still stung. I was so excited to finally have a boyfriend who understood me – the real me that most guys my age thought was weird, and ugly. But not Jay. He also loved that Nemesis song by Shriekback, and not only could but actually would cut quite a step when the DJ put on Love and Rockets’ Ball of Confusion . At last, I had an actual boy to dance with instead of the cloud of shuffling girls I was usually a part of. And that was what we did the first night we met; the first an...

A Bad Week to Be a Parent

“Hello,” I said to the staffer who answered the phone at Johnny Isakson’s Atlanta office. “I am a constituent of Senator Isakson’s, and I had a problem this week that I need some assistance with.” “Absolutely!” she said, “How can we help you?” She sounded relieved. Maybe I wasn’t calling to yell at her about Trump. Maybe I needed help with something simple, like a neighborhood meth lab. “Great. Well, two things happened, actually. The first is that my 5-year-old saw pictures of the march in Charlottesville. She saw the picture of people marching with swastika flags and confederate flags, and then she also saw the picture of the guy carrying the torch and chanting and wearing the Make America Great Again hat. And she asked me, mom, why do Nazis like Trump? “And so then, later, we were driving behind a pickup truck over in Monroe and the guy had a bumper sticker on one side that said ‘Trump’ and one on the other side that said ‘Trump That Bitch’. And my eleven-year...

Fuck You Daycare

Folks who’ve only ever been to Disney World think they know exactly what Florida is. They know it's the land of palm trees, and detectives in speedboats; a place whose quirky residents are prone to attacking soda dispensers while wigged out on bath salts . They are also certain that, whatever Florida is, it definitely "isn't really the South," and they are fond of telling me this as soon as they find out I grew up there. To these people, I simply reply, “Fuck You Daycare.” First, some context. This is my grandfather, Merrill Glisson. He’s from that other Florida, the Florida of palmetto-choked slash pines and mean, sandy soil. He called it “the land that holds the world together,” not because it’s so essential, but because it’s the space in between the places people come to visit, the land nobody wants. The people who live there are similar. His neighbors, descendants of the “turpentine negroes” who worked next to my grandfather as a boy, live in yellow...

I tried to make a new mom friend. Here is what happened.

When you're a mom, it seems like you'd have a lot in common with other moms. You're both exhausted. You both can change a diaper while eating a hamburger while making a doctor's appointment while driving a car. She has spit-up on her shoulder? Yeah, well you have Goldfish in your hair. But it's surprisingly hard to make mom friends. Go to any park or playground, and you'll see lots of Lone Moms dotting the landscape, swiping at their smartphones while their children play. I don't know why this is, but it's always kind of bothered me. Raising children can be a terribly isolating endeavor. You are busy, but also bored, since most of the tasks required of you are mundane, repetitive ones like loading the dishwasher, cooking food, and extinguishing the dog. You are surrounded by people all day, but these people are mostly pre-verbal, so you end up feeling lonely a lot of the time. I would think that moms would flock to each other like toddlers flock...

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