Actually, I Don’t Have Time: Breaking up with Orange Is the New Black

*Full of as many spoilers as OITNB’s writers room is full of white people* Forty years. I turned 40 in the woods about 90 minutes northwest of my West Oakland home enjoying the peace and relative quiet of the redwoods, the Russian River, and the quaintly gentrifying town of Guerneville, California with my partner, our then 20-month-old, two silly brown pit bulls, and a dizzying cast of our son’s many adoring fans/my friends/our family. One of the reasons we went up to Sonoma County for my birthday is because I wanted to get away from our neighborhood during the week my birthday shares with America: the “4th of July” fireworks started in June, the day after the shootings at the Pulse night club in Orlando, and the constant booms and bangs had us all on edge. Plain old firecrackers seem downright quaint these days. M80s set off just down the block from our house, wake the baby, cause the dogs to lose their minds, and leave me shaken and shaking. There’s enough actual gunfire around here to make setting off fireworks that sound like it both redundant and also evidence that one is a dick. But whatever. [quote_left]Even when we’ve had glimpses of brilliance, usually through flashbacks but rarely in the ongoing, current narrative, the writers have time and again flattened these women into tired, racist clichés[/quote_left]I was also hoping that going to a cabin with no cell service for a week would help me detox a bit from screens and their own peculiar trauma parade. You know, the…