The Cassandra Diet – Recipe Included

Sandy Day

May 04, 2025

Give her some information.

A tidbit.

Something that hooks her mind.

Something that makes sense,

whether it’s MLK’s “I Have a Dream” alongside black and white photos of his assassination

in the public-school library.

Or, the “People not Planes” campaign her uncle talked about,

when the Ontario government expropriated masses of farms

to pave paradise in Pickering for an airport.

Or the scoffed at notion of curbside recycling of paper and bottles and cans.

Just give her some information

and she will want to change the world,

and all before she even hits puberty.

A pinch of information is all she needs.

And then she stirs it, swirls it, bakes it under a lightbulb in her Easy-Bake Oven.

And while it’s baking,

she collects more facts and more opinions and more, more, more,

and no one listens,

because she is just a girl with a funny lispy voice, pudgy cheeks, and blonde pigtails.

In high-school, she clipped stories out of the newspaper about sexual assaults,

and arrests of priests and boy scout leaders.

She was amassing evidence because there seemed no end to the threat and the harassment.

It would be decades between reading Susan Brownmiller and the #metoo movement.

Decades. Before Amy Schumer joked about it on stage.

I don’t know what else is on the plate for the cursed Cassandra.

But these days

she collects Covid-19 stories

and jaw-dropping corruption tales.

Scroll, scroll, scroll.

She reposts

and scans headlines,

gleaning, gleaning, gleaning,

and no one cares.

No one listens.

No one believes her.

The world is devolving into chaos.

It’s burning,

the water shrinking and flooding at the same time.

Tornado skies bruise up her nightmares.

The Russians are coming.

(She used to play that game at the cottage,

leaping into piles of raked leaves,

not knowing anything about anything,

just the name of a popular movie at the time.)

Not seeing the future that was to be hers.

Thousands of lies and more every day.

She thinks about a poem she either wrote,

or memorized:

“And lying like breathing like lying like breathing,” was the line.

Because that’s what it is nowadays.

Just lies floating around in the air, an airborne virus.

And she is a filter, she is a mask, refusing to breathe the lies up her nose.

No one believes her.

She exhales.

It’s okay. Don’t feel bad for her.

She’s so old, she’s used to it now.

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