by Dr. Susan Block.

Happy Slappy Mother-Effing 2025. Will anyone here get out alive? I’ll take my chances… 2024 having been such a bust (and not the good kind) of a year, an awful spin cycle of sorrow and fear, un-bonobo neopuritanism, Artificial Ignorance censoring and killing us, sadistic injustice, raging extortion, medical murders, the rich enriching the rich, war crimes galore and many more horrible horrors, or – in the plundered Latin of that lionized late queen for whom plundering was the family business – an “annus horribilis.”

Indeed, Brothers and Sisters, Lovers and Sinners, you can sling this ‘orrible annus up your Uncle Sam’s anus – and send Mr. $400 Billion Man and his “fast friend” Barron all the way up to Uranus. Happy Nude Rear! It’s been a rude year.  Sure, there’s much to be grateful for and a whole lot to love, and I’ll get to that – maybe – but I must start by shoveling last year’s manure out of the hemorrhoidal annus of 2024. Hold your noses, Comrades, squeeze that sphincter muscle and release! Or, as your friendly American Medical Insurance Ghouls like to say – along with “Deny, Defend, Depose” – Discharge!

Damn, 2024 was bad, and not the good kind of bad. It wasn’t just because 2024 started with a heroic Burning Man and ended with a horrific Burning Woman. And it wasn’t just because my so-called “people” (the Zionist war criminal branch of the Ashkenazi family tree) spent the entire year (and many before) committing certified genocide – using the money and gaily autographed missiles of my other so-called people (the American war criminal branch) – to slaughter, landgrab, lingerie–grab(!) and generally exterminate the indigenous peoples of Palestine, then Lebanon and now Syria – despite my protestations and lamentations (not that I expected much; no one’s ever listened to me in that family before, so why would they now?), not to mention the outrage of pretty much the whole world. For an anti-Zionist, Jewish-American, Pagan-Agnostic, Ethical Hedonist like me, this aspect of the past annus that is now bleeding like a malignant cyst into the new one. Rumors are that it’s also traveling up Bibi Netanyahu’s ass, but that doesn’t change this Shandah, this shameful horror, this indelible gory stain of aeternus horribilis (eternal horror) on the Ashkenazi soul.

Read “GO BONOBOS in 2025” on COUNTERPUNCH

Yes, 2024 sucked (not in the good way), and it wasn’t just because that old Shepherd of Suckers, the Trumpus, America’s Krampus, Dictator Don, King of the Cons, proud convicted Pussy-Grabber, grabbed the wheel of the exhaust-belching Clown Car of American Politics away from the hapless Democrats – who clearly couldn’t drive anything but Netanyahu’s getaway car. Having packed his butt–licking mob of Billionaire Thieves, Wrestlers, Liars, Slavers, Grifters, War Profiteers, Roadkill-Diners, Rapists and Killers into the trunk, Trumpty Dumpty rolled like an Easter egg through 2024 – as we all (never mind who we voted for) got orange egg on our faces. Now careening into the crumbling White House once again, he’s coming at us live from the twinkling lights of Mar-A-Lago, looking more and more like The Handmaid’s Tale with gaudier décor, porn-star-quality boob jobs, the Musky smell of Elon everywhere, and everything for sale, including the nukes…

Yes sir, would you like fries with your nukes?

And it wasn’t just because, no matter how many years I make a New Year’s resolution to “Go Bonobos in the New Year” (and 2025 is lucky #11), it seems that we (or at least our government and media fiefdoms) are all-in-all acting more like baboons (with apologies to baboons).

Moreover, the real bonobos are even more endangered than we thought. All of what we know as *life* on Earth is getting more endangered every trip we take around the sun. Yes, whether we knew it or denied it, 2024 – the warmest year on record – was another ecological annus horribilus for us all.

Stroke of Max

But for me, it was personal. Too personal. The profound horribilis-ness of this awful annus hit home when, on the morning of May 19, 2024, my beloved and amazing husband, my collaborator, my publisher, my “witness,” my lover and friend, my Amor Aeternus, Maximillian R. Leblovic di Lobkowicz di Filangieri, aka “Capt’n Max,” had a stroke.

I wish it was a joke. Or the good kind of stroke – a stroke of luck, a soft caress, a pleasure stroke. But no, Max had a stroke of seismic – or “ischemic” – pain… which is like a very bad joke that the body plays on the brain. The neurological term is cerebrovascular accident (CVA), but we call it a “stroke” – though it’s really more of a strike (and not the good kind) – less a caress than a bullet to the brain, or, in Max’s case, an unexploded bomblet that formed a blood clot blocking the flow of oxygen to the cerebrum, causing sudden and severe damage, a cerebral “Shock & Awe” splintering of the mind while incapacitating half the body (the right half, in Max’s case).

As anyone who knows Max knows, he was – and still is – an astoundingly strong, vibrant, creative, passionate, Zorba-like character, the most loving and romantic husband, but also a force of nature, always creating, publishing, helping and mentoring others, making you think or laugh or maybe making you mad – a larger-than-life lover of life.

But no matter how lively you are, a major ischemic stroke takes you – body, shattered brain and soul – to as deathly a place as you can go in life – short of death itself.

What a stroke of madness, immobility and pain for my beloved Prince Max! Though it can always be worse; he could have had a stroke in Gaza.  Sorry, I don’t mean to be flippant; I am truly thankful for the life-saving medical care Max has received that so many others – from bombing victims in Palestine to abortion-seekers in Texas – cannot get right now. Indeed, Max is *privileged* to have access to healthcare – crippled as it is by America’s insurance-dominated medical system. And I am privileged to take on the utterly impossible task of navigating it for him.

And yes, since the proverbial stroke of dawn, 5/19/24, when Max’s deep growl turned into a howl of cosmic terror and pain, shocking me awake, catapulting me into a real-life Bizzaro World – until now, tapping this out on my phone next to him as he naps in the “SNF” (skilled nursing facility) – I’ve been by his side – both the “good,” strong but rambunctious left side and the “bad,” stroke-stricken right side.

It’s a crazy level of life we’re now living. Sometimes I don’t know if he knows who I am. Sometimes I don’t know if I know who I am. Our lives have been flipped around and upside down in one stroke of old Cronus’ clock.

“The goal is the journey,” Max has often said, and – for better or worse – this is a journey we “witnesses” to each other’s lives have been on together for almost 40 years, 32 of which we’ve been married. It’s a particularly challenging leg of the journey, of course – especially for Max’s twisted right leg – but this is the road we’re on right now.

Aphasia Maxolalia

He’s come a long way from life-support and intubation in those first weeks after the stroke, but Max still suffers from several life-threatening physical complications – a dangerously leaky g-tube, a frightening (or as the nurses like to say, “gnarly”) bed sore, recurring congestion and infections – as well as the uniquely frustrating post-stroke brain injury/side effect of “aphasia.”

I’d never even heard of aphasia before. My only relative who had a stroke was my grandfather on my father’s side who died 10 days after the stroke struck, so I had no experience with post-stroke life, let alone the maddening mysteries of aphasia, a language disorder that greatly damages the stroke patient’s ability to speak, breaking words into incomprehensible nonsense syllables. That is, even as Max’s remarkably resilient and enterprising brain cells forge new pathways, partially restoring his powerful creative mind, the aphasia mixes up the words, phrases and sounds so that they come out mostly broken, garbled and out of order, like a jigsaw puzzle you spilled on the floor so most of the pieces are in the wrong places and many are just missing.

Apparently, aphasia is a *secret* language that no one understands – not even the speaker. No neurologist, no multi-lingual interpreter, no speech therapist, not even the great linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky – who happens to have recently had a stroke that sounds very similar to Max’s – can translate the lingual mysteries of aphasia. And yes, Chomsky is still alive and convalescing, though many news outlets reported that he was dead – just going to show how deathlike strokes tend to be, especially with aphasia in the mix, not to mention how news outlets don’t fact-check anymore.

Aphasia is a one-person Tower of Babel.  I call it “Maxolalia,” as it’s rather like “Glossolalia,” or “speaking in tongues,” a much more deliberate oral practice in which devout church-goers utter fluid but incomprehensible words or speech-like sounds – rather like Max’s verbal jigsaw puzzle parts flung around the room. Unlike aphasia, which is understood to be incomprehensible, glossolalia is often thought by believers to be mystical and divine languages, though like aphasia, the meaning of the words is confounding, even to the speaker. The term glossolalia wasn’t used until 1879, but in Acts and First Corinthians, Jesus’ followers speak in the tongues of at least fifteen nations.

It’s heart-wrenching to see Max wrestling with simple words that used to flow so easily from his silver tongue. It’s enough to make a tough guy cry. Though sometimes the struggle explodes in a symphony of laughter. Every so often, he blurts out pithy phrases like “spoken word” poetry or delivers carefully pronounced but utterly scrambled instructions with the gravity of a Mafia don.  Once, in the midst of a rush of babble, Max suddenly and very clearly declared, “We Are An Art.”

I wish I could say that was a breakthrough, but more unintelligible Maxolalia ensued. Of course, we all have trouble finding the right words to get our thoughts across sometimes, but aphasia is the epitome of frustration in communication, creating a virtual solitary confinement of the mind.

2024: Annus Horribilis & Mirabilis

One language Max and I still understand – maybe better than ever – is the language of love. Pleasure is the most effective painkiller, and the oxytoxin of love works better and faster than the oxycontin of drugs.  Even stroke patients need to be stroked; Max certainly does! Maybe especially stroke patients need to be stroked – mentally and physically – encouraged and caressed.

So, every day, all day, and sometimes deep into the night, for the past seven months and change, in three hospitals, four rehabs and over ten ambulances, I’ve stroked Max’s arm(s), held his hands, rubbed his shoulders, smoothed the crease in his brows, caressed his chest (and other things….) and tried my imperfect best to help my lover and friend of almost 40 years to survive and somehow ease his staggering agony.

And yes, there are those moments of ecstasy in the agony, waves of pleasure that heal the pain, cute crooked smiles, whispers of desire, joyous giggles, big left-handed hugs, flashes of radiance, hope, healing, holding, even profound eroticism, fun, flirtation, sensuous touch, precious kisses and bonobo love glowing like a fire in the darkness. Desire is at least as strong a motivator as fear. The health benefits of pleasure ought to be explored among adults in medical settings, to kill pain and promote healing – but don’t hold your breath until that’s covered by your insurance.

Too bad Max and I don’t have more of a medical fetish. Maybe we’re developing one.  I know, I always find a sex angle – usually several – even in a stroke, and after all, this stroke patient is my lover of 35 years. But it’s true; sex heals a billion times more than it kills. I’ve learned that truth every day of my life, but I feel like I’ve taken a Sexual Healing Stroke-Training Intensive through 2024. Basically, it’s been a nonstop nightmare, occasionally interrupted by moments of transcendent adoration, radiant romance, infinite empathy, deep eye-gazing, tantric connection, laughter, singing (Max loves to sing), awe and amazement.

So yes, on a certain level, this Annus Horribilis has been an Annus Mirabilis – an Amazing Year – for us. In a way, I have never felt so much miraculous love as I felt for Max in these horrible, draining months of 2024.

Ironically, Queen Elizabeth’s Annus Horribilis – 1992 – was an Annus Mirabilis – an amazing year – for Max and me: it’s the year we got married. And there’s something amazing – mirabilis – about every moment we share, the good and bad, the pleasure and the pain, this life on its journey of wonders toward death.

America’s Killer Insurance

This is where Max hovers, as 2024 turns into 2025, clinging to the rungs of life with all of his formidable strength and joie de vivre, as kind nurses, doctors and therapists help him to find his way… and medical insurance adjusters step on his fingers.

Consider some American Health Insurance history:  Exactly 17 years before Max’s stroke, on May 19^th 2007, Michael Moore’s Sicko premiered at Cannes. Nine years old at that time, little Luigi Mangione was not in attendance, but when he did see Moore’s brilliant documentary on being sick under the boot of American health insurance, he was, according to his manifesto, deeply affected. Our paths would cross – at least in my mind – on Wednesday, December 4, 2024, when Medicare denied Max’s Appeal for much-needed post-stroke care. As I was desperately disputing their now-notorious imperative to “deny… defend… depose” and discharge Max prematurely from the hospital, little did I know the tables were being violently turned in midtown Manhattan.

That is, just as Max was being denied and discharged by Medicare, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was being assassinated – allegedly by the now 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, sickened by Sicko and his own experience in that same UnitedHealthcare/Medicare/Denial-of-Life system in which Max and I were, and still are, ensnared like rabbits, with Max’s right leg and arm caught in the trap. Such is the American Way of Medicine.

From manifesto to mug shot to perp walk, Luigi Mangione (sounds like one of Max’s Filangieri cousins) appears to be acing the audition to play the role of himself in the ongoing movie casting America’s greatest enemy – unfair healthcare – as his foil. Or maybe he’s the fall guy. With his striking good looks and thick Italian eyebrows (just like Max!) – and with the atrocious state of insurance-driven healthcare, as 2024 gives way to 2025, Luigi is Sicko America’s date for the New Year.

But time out; regardless of what the Trumpus said about being able to “shoot somebody” in the middle of New York and not lose any votes, let me be clear:  I condemn murder!

One among many problems with murder is that it is NOT bonobo. Humanity’s closest genetic cousins, bonobos are the “Make Love Not War” chimpanzees who swing through the trees as well as with each other, valuing love over hate and lust over greed, practicing what I call “The Bonobo Way,” an uncanny but very real path of peace. More to the point, bonobos (pan paniscus) are the only great apes who have never been seen killing, let alone murdering each other in the wild or captivity.

How do they do it? Bonobos make peace through pleasure (including but not limited to sexual pleasure), with a generous helping of female empowerment (females rule Bonoboville), male well-being (we must nurture our dudes), ecosexual intelligence (save our planet!), a strong sense of connection (community is key) and sharing resources (sharing is caring).

By “caring,” I don’t mean just feeling strongly about something. After all these months of being Max’s “caretaker” while hearing so many people say they “care,” I realize that caring is easy – like “thoughts and prayers” – but caretaking is hard and so much more essential to life, especially if you value relationships more than personal gain, like bonobos do. Bonobos don’t just care about each other; they take care of each other. They are caretakers for one another. That’s why this is a very special Year of the Bonobo for me.

My 32-year marriage to Max is intertwined with our mutual love for bonobos who showed us the way to mix lust with trust, to combine passion with compassion, to put the fun into caretaking, to reduce pain with pleasure.

Pleasure is an essential part of Max’s pain management. Of course, sick people aren’t supposed to be sexual, but they are, and it’s healing. Here’s where the good kind of strokes, kisses and squeezes come in to counteract pain (better, cheaper and healthier than Norco), raise endorphins, lower stress levels, and remind Max he’s a dude with a reason to live.

So, I’m resolving to “go bonobos” in 2025, aka MMXXV (Make Rome Imperial Again). Call it My Project 2025.

And yes, it was my last year’s New Year’s Resolution and My Project 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015 … and now it’s the 11th Great Year of the Bonobo! Let’s go!

So being very pro-bonobo, I must say that murder – even murders of thieving, grandma-killing, Max-killing(!) CEOs – is very bad, and not the good kind of bad.

However, there’s very bad, and there’s astronomically bad. Compared to the gargantuan lethal collateral damage of the American medical insurance racket, on top of the American war machine and rising economic injustice, the murder of one medical insurance mogul, albeit nothing to celebrate (well, maybe just one glass of bubbly for the New Year…), was a remarkably precise surgical strike. Unlike other strikes – and strokes – this one is already having a remarkable effect, galvanizing medically disenfranchised Americans across the political spectrum to join together to commiserate, communicate, laugh, lust after Luigi (ooh-la-la!), protest massive medical injustice and maybe even DO something to improve the disgraceful state of American healthcare.

Unfortunately, it’s not happening fast enough for Max. So, we’re grateful for what we can get. Denied and discharged, we did some very fast fancy footwork and were lucky to find a SNF willing to take Max just hours after he was prematurely discharged, the same day sacrificial CEO Brian Thompson was summarily dispatched to Hell.

Better a bed in a SNF than ”dumped” on the street (as some are) by Medicare. The SNF’s care, especially wound care, is far below hospital level, but we are grateful and always mindful that almost none of this mess is the fault of the individual overworked nurses, doctors, therapists or even the insurance-minded administrators and case workers; all of them – all of us – are chained to the American Insurance Racket. There is not much choice. This is not a hobby, religion, game or political party; this is life-and-death.

As our friend, the fantastic artist, Dominatrix, human rights activist, patient advocate and founder/director of The Sidewalk Project, Soma Snakeoil, who is helping me get through this, put it, “Suzy, you are in the belly of the beast now.” And oh, what a beast it is, having chewed us up in 2024, now about to “hawk tuah” us into the new year… hopefully not into a mass grave, but who knows?

Bonoboville Under Attack!

The medical insurance racket may have been the worst, but it wasn’t the only beast threatening to stomp Bonoboville through the floor in 2024.

For almost 40 years, Max and I have been on a sometimes bumpy, but generally pretty amazing roller coaster of romance, mixing lust with trust in a Bonobo Way. But no couple is an island, and our community of Bonoboville is especially vital to our survival and success. Our business model has always been an intentional, sexy, lefty community sustaining our unique variation of a “Mom & Pop Shop” (and vice versa) as we support the individuals in that community, and it’s worked like a charm for over three decades, but then Pop had a stroke, and though Max is the patient, the excruciating and discombobulating trauma of his stroke has struck us all.

Reactions have been mixed – from the stoic to the heroic, from the frustrated to the exploitative to astonishingly destructive extortion and lies. It’s quite eye-opening to see how different friends, family, members of our community and City officials have reacted to Max suffering a stroke. People who are great company in good times can be the opposite in bad. I guess that when you get hit by a missile, a setback or a stroke, the people in your life show their “true colors.”

Some in our community have risen to the occasion, soaring so high, they are real-life angels. Others we thought we could trust are weaponizing their relationships with us (even now as I write this!) to exploit Max’s tragedy for their financial and personal gain, launching untrue, extortive and wildly insane attacks on our lives and legacy, doing their damnedest to destroy all the bonoboësque goodness we have worked so hard… with pleasure! – for over 35 years to build – perhaps out of envy and/or in the hope that they can lie their way into an impossibly and ridiculously big payday from our litigious society. It’s just another 2024 – 2025 soap opera scenario that plays out dozens of times every week these days on social media, but when it falls on you – while your husband is recovering from a stroke – it can trigger your annihilation, or at least, damage your foundation.

Usually I prefer to punch up – against Meta, tRump, Zionism, Zuck the Cuck and the LAPD – and not down against the villainous extortionists, depraved marauders, envious interns, petty administrators, quack journalists stalking me at Max’s rehab and hacking into my phone(!) and gangster-destroyers I find myself now battling – parrying attacks from the right, left, above and below. Honestly, it’s so bad, my attorney/s won’t even let me talk to the press, and I always (used to) talk to the press. So Max, Bonoboville and me are living the (bad) dream of that old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” Someday soon, I will write about this; for now, I’ll just say: no more 2024.

Too much fighting! I’m a lover not a fighter. I love to love (and make love!) and I hate to fight, but sometimes I have to fight, such as when it’s for something I love. And I had to fight for love in so many ways this year – for my great love Max, for our work over the past forty years, for Free Speech, for our Bonoboville community and for our kissing cousins who so inspire us, the bonobos.

Go Bonobos for Sexual Healing

Bonobo also fight (like humans), but unlike (some) humans and every other Great Ape, bonobos never kill each other or make war – and they seem to use pleasure, including sexual pleasure, to keep the peace.

So, let’s go bonobos in 2025!  That’s my resolution anyway, and the resolution—as well as The RƎVO˩ution—starts with me… and you. Since you’re reading this New Year’s plea for bonobo awareness (perhaps for the 11th time), I hope you’ll join me, Max and Bonoboville in helping save the highly endangered bonobos from imminent extinction.

If there’s any hope for us humans going bonobos—even if our chances are slimmer than a blade of rainforest grass—we must do all we can to keep the real bonobos alive and thriving in their native habitat of the Congolese Rainforest, as well as in sanctuaries, primate centers and even in zoos.

• Lola ya Bonobo (Bonobo Paradise) is a bonobo “refugee” sanctuary outside Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Founded by the visionary Claudine André, Lola rescues “orphans” of the devastating “bushmeat” trade, cares for these little refugees like “family” and eventually releases them back into the wild. Donations are administered by Friends of Bonobos, including our amazing friends, Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare, authors of Survival of the Friendliest, as well as Ashley Stone and Amanda Kuttner, all of whom tirelessly help Lola to keep studying and saving bonobos.
• The Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), founded by another wonderful pro-bonobo friend, Sally Coxe, is developing the Bonobo Peace Forest, providing much-needed food, medical care, school supplies and jobs to indigenous villagers who live close to the bonobos in the Congolese Rainforest, and who protect their precious and vulnerable wild populations from the ruthless, desperate or just uninformed poachers who shoot them for bushmeat. BCI saves many bonobos, often giving the orphans to Lola ya Bonobo.

Thus, in 2025, while some resolve to destroy – even to destroy lil old indestructible me! – I resolve to help save the bonobos, as well as release my inner bonobo and help Max and others to release theirs. Make Kink Not War! Be Bonobo (Save the Humans). It’s getting tougher by the algorithm, but let’s try to care-take each other – like the late great post-President Jimmy Carter did for so many – so we can survive and maybe even thrive… in 2025.

Read “GO BONOBOS in 2025” on COUNTERPUNCH

Something to celebrate from 2024: Julian Assange went free! Hounded by various U.S. and U.K. governments for daring to publish the American War Machine-humiliating truth about perma war (just like perma press, only instead of pants that don’t crease, it’s wars that won’t end), and its inevitable, insidious, Collateral Murder, Assange is a true Free Speech hero. We have been rooting for his freedom since 2011, before we even started resolving to “Go Bonobos” in the new year.

Let’s really do it this time! It’s now or never. Amen. AWOMEN. Praise the Lord and the Ladies, especially all the ladies (as most of the care providers are female) who have helped keep my darling Max in my life for another Happy Nude Rear! It’s true that our two nude rears aren’t in as good shape as they used to be… but at least they’re ALIVE. #GoBonobos in 2025!

© January 1, 2025. Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For information, call 626-461-5950. Email comments or questions to her at drsusanblock@gmail.com and you will get a reply.