Good day, my darling hearts! I and my tattered anus have survived last week’s bout with typhoid or whatever the hell it was, and thank God because the stats on last week’s newsletter… not my finest hour, reader! Y’all were not fucking with the diarrhea diary! And honestly I respect it, drag me!!! If I had to identify the nadir of my writing career I think we’d all be hard-pressed to find a sadder moment than newslettering about gastrointestinal distress on Substack, although I did have a celebrity gossip blog in 2009 in which I unironically called myself a “citizen journalist” so who’s to say!
Anyway, the good news is I have returned to the “normal” range of the Bristol Stool Chart (which is a real thing I will never stop laughing about) and so, like my bowels, I am returning to the normal rhythms of life. And that means it is once again time for me to mash your wrinkly brains inside a waffle iron and make them nice and smooth so that we can be carefree and empty of thoughts in these very wrinkly times!
Although it occurs to me now that I’ve typed this that that wouldn’t do the trick, would it? I mean it’s a fine joke—succinct, and “waffle” is a funny word—but mashing your brain in a waffle iron wouldn’t smooth it, would it? It would just fill it full of differently shaped nooks and crannies that look like a waffle, like this meme I found by Googling “waffle iron brain.”
Can you believe the internet is real and also free? What a time to be alive!
What about a crepe iron? Is there such a thing? Is that a thing you can put on a bridal registry at Crate & Barrel? Cuz a crepe iron would def make a wrinkle-brain a smooth brain and then these jokes would be airtight! IDK, let’s all just proceed with the understanding that crepe irons probably aren’t real but that you get what I mean, and that way this joke works. Because you know what they say: The more you have to explain a joke, the funnier it is! Perhaps you’d like to support my groundbreaking comedy about non-existent kitchen appliances by joining my Patreon!
So ok! Now that we’ve settled that, this week’s crepe iron for the brain comes to us from someone very near and dear to my heart: One Martha Stewart of Martha Stewart fame. You know, of the Connecticut Martha Stewarts? And also of the minimum-security federal prison Martha Stewarts? Specifically, I would like to direct you to Ms. Stewart’s Instagram.
Now if you know me personally or follow me on IG, you will have long since known that Martha Stewart’s Instagram is my favorite corner of the entire internet. Yes, even moreso than Madonna rehearsal footage on YouTube AND the truly depraved parts of gay Pornhub that would make you call Joe Biden and insist gay men no longer have rights. Why do I love Martha Stewart’s Instagram so much? Because this bitch is absolutely batshit fucking unhinged bonkers cuckookachoo CRAZY. And I mean that as a compliment!
NOW THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT: We are talking about Aunt Mar’s personal Instagram here. Not the one she uses for, like, selling you knock-off Le Creuset at Macy’s or whatever it is she’s up to! That’s @marthastewart. We don’t want that! Fuck a @marthastewart! I’m talking about her personal account, @marthastewart48, on which she documents her life, BY HERSELF without a social media manager’s involvement (this is key!).
It is a mess. It is a gift. It is, say it with me, “a good thing.”
Martha Stewart’s Instagram posts fall into a rigid taxonomy, the categories among which include:
disgusting food photography
totally normal photos with extremely chaotic captions
shade, whether intentional or unintentional
This is by no means and exhaustive list—there are, of course, tons of other categories, like the infamous since-deleted thirst traps that have become unhinged classics of the genre.
There’s also the very, deeply uncomfortable photographic reportage about her various house and farm servants—I’m sorry, staff—the deeply weird product tie-ins (why does Martha Stewart have a Bic lighter line? Who asked for this? To whompst is this marketed?), and, of course, all the shit with Snoop Dogg.
Speaking of Snoop Dogg, quick sidebar: Are they fucking? They’re definitely fucking right? This is one of those questions I already know the answer to, like is there a God or will anything ever be okay again, and the answer is obviously “NO” but there’s just enough reason to believe it’s a yes that it keeps me holding out hope, you know?
Like is it really THAT implausible that one time after an incredibly late night of filming that fucking deeply weird VH1 show they had (lol wat) Snoop and Aunt Mar were both stoned as fuck and exhausted and maybe it’s the pot, the gin and juice, the exhaustion or all three, but Snoop looks over and is like “Damn ma, those Eileen Fisher pants hittin” and listen, we all know Snoop isn’t much to look at but WHO, WHO has more swag? Nobody! And so he crip walks over and is like “Ayyyy MarMar, what it do?” And she glances over and there’s that look in his eye, and she meets it, and suddenly they SMASH together at the mouth and then he bends her over the kitchen table in his trailer and the rest is history?
I’m sorry, but I don’t think it is implausible. I don’t think it is implausible! Mainly because I don’t want to live in a world where it is, and so I choose to believe that Aunt Mar 🎶gave snoop all her pussaaaaay and she even licked-his-bawls🎶 Don’t look at me like that, Snoop and Nate Dogg wrote that song, not me, I’m just quoting!
Wait this fanfic shit is even worse that the diarrhea diary isn’t it. Fuck. Well whatever I can’t be bothered because I am too busy dying on this hill where I firmly maintain Martha and Snoop have done sex to each other bye!
I digress. While there are myriad genres of Martha Stewart Instagram posts, I think the following three are the ones that make her Instagram’s one true master, and I think after this highlight reel I’m about to present, you will agree. Fuck a Kardashian, fuck a front-facing camera comedian, fuck a carousel album Canva slidehow social justice warrior—Instagram is Martha Stewart’s medium, and the medium is the message, and no I do not know what that means I just heard it in a social sciences class I took at America’s second-worst Big Ten school ROLL TAPE!
Food Photography
For someone who is arguably America’s most quintessential culinary and aesthetic icon, well… listen I mean no disrespect but I need someone under the age of 35 to take Martha’s iPhone out of her hands and give her a fucking camera app tutorial because every food photo the woman posts looks like lovingly crafted dog shit. Martha, if you’re reading this, I need you to know IT IS OKAY TO PHOTOGRAPH FOOD WITHOUT THE FLASH ON I AM FUCKING BEGGING YOU.
And before you start YES I AM AWARE OF THE DISGUSTING FOOD PHOTO I INCLUDED IN THAT MENTAL ILLNESS MAC AND CHEESE RECIPE. But I am a fucking schmo with a diarrhea Substack that at most five people read IF they’ve run out of Wordle guesses and need something else to do while the gynecologist does their pap smear or whatever whereas Martha Stewart is MARTHA STEWART.
Like sorry, I have made your potatoes dauphinoise several times, Martha! It is needlessly finicky and so expensive it makes me feel like I was born in a trailer park toilet so you get held to a different standard! I see you bitch!
And yet, Aunt Mar is out here photographing food so epicurean I have never even fucking heard of it and making it look like THIS:
and this
and for dessert, this
Without clicking through and reading the captions, tell me what these are GO!
You can’t! It cannot be done!
Here are my best guesses: deep fried cockroach wings; a hot pad? that someone dropped on the stove and it melted? maybe?; a dish full of roux-thickened schoolbus paint trimmed with sage-green bathtub caulk.
Like truly what the fuck? No but like what the fuck?! Like I know that’s like fried seafood and a crepe and a lemon meringue pie or whatever, but like!!! I came for that Martha Stewart shit the fuck is this?! That crepe looks like it has MOLD on one edge of it Martha GO BACK TO PRISON.
Okay. But reader. BUT READER. What if I told you these aren’t even the worst ones?
For the past two to three years my girl Hazel’s and my friendship has been almost entirely composed of DM’ing each other Aunt Mar’s Instagram highlights (fun fact: Hazel, whompst is whompst discovered this batshittery in the first place, wrote her grad school application essay on Aunt Mar’s unhinged Instagram AND IT GOT HER IN. Martha’s impact!!!) so I went into the archives to find the two that have haunted me since the early days of the pandemic when they first dropped. They are:
This pile of—respectfully—literal, actual vomit covered in like I don’t even know—Gold Bond Medicated Powder™? Ally Sheedy’s Breakfast Club dandruff? Asbestos? Have you or someone you love been diagnosed with mesothelioma as a result of eating Martha Stewart’s spaghettini Alfredo? You may be entitled to financial compensation! The mind absolutely reels.
But that is nothing—nothing whatever!—compared to this act of absolute culinary, photographical and social mediac terrorism. Please brace yourselves against an interior wall of your home and make sure a friend or loved one is nearby to call emergency services. Because… you guys.
You guys this chicken. This fucking chicken.
GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! That looks like that fucking sewer baby they cut out of a shitpipe in the first episode of Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1!!!! Truly, this chicken makes me fucking sick. I feel like I would put that in my mouth and that skin would feel like the cartilage in my earlobes during the chewing and one of those gnarly, gelatinous loads of jizz during the swallowing where you’re like “Homie have you ever considered DRINKING SOME WATER FUCK!!!” I mean I just absolutely want to fucking die having looked at this chicken again. This is cyberbullying!
It’s vitally important to note: She posted this spatchcocked jizzgoblin on MARCH 31, 2020. Remember March 31, 2020? We were all CERTAIN we’d be dead by Easter! Trump was on TV telling us to shoot up Clorox and shit! We didn’t even know if we could crack a goddamn window to let a fart escape the car without dying from the pestilence that blew inside! WE WERE BOILING ENTIRE BOXES OF HONEY NUT CHEERIOS TO MAKE SURE INSTACART DIDN’T INADVERTENTLY MURDER US. And then this bitch pops up on Instagram like “hey here’s a literal rubber chicken from Spencer Gifts but also it’s haunted bon appetit!” Bitch if you don’t—!!!!!
And then—AND THEN!!!!!—this woman had the sheer, unmitigated temerity to give us a RECIPE in the caption!!!
“Silky tender”??? SILKY TENDER???
I will murder her in cold blood and then turn the gun on myself.
Shade
But as good as Aunt Mar is at revolting food photography, she’s arguably better at the art of shade. I don’t think she likely KNOWS she is, but she is an ascendant master at the shit nonetheless.
Case in point, this seemingly innocuous post about daffodils.
Now I know what you’re thinking: Aww, pretty flowers! Yes, well, you WOULD think that, wouldn’t you, you absolute bucket of boiled beaver shit, because you haven’t read the caption yet.
Now I speak fluent Martha, so allow me to translate:
“it’s daffodil time at the farm. thousands of blooms scores of different varieties DID YOU KNOW THAT DAFFODILS AND NARCISSUS ARE THE SAME THING YOU STUPID FUCKING PIECE OF WHITE TRASH I BET YOU DIDN’T NOW OPEN YOUR LITTLE BITCH MOUTH SO I CAN SHIT DOWN YOUR NECK YOU FUCKING TOILET-SUCKING LITTLE PIG SQUEAL! SQUEAL FOR ME YOU LITTLE SHIT-CHUGGING PIG SQUEE SQUEE SQUEE your mother should have drowned you in the bathtub after you were born.”
Truly WHO among us regular people with like jobs and bills and diabetic ketoacidosis and shit knows ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING AT ALL about daffodils and narcissus let alone the FORMERLY STRINGENT RULES about their GENUS. This is like when Ina Garten says, “If you don’t have actual imported Burmese honey from Himalayan orchid bees raised by Buddhist monks in the subterranean monastery where they hide from the murderous regime of post-coup Myanmar, store bought is fine” except 936% more sinister.
(Unrelated but related question: Do you think Ina and Martha have ever met? If so I assume Martha mean-girled the fucking shit out of Ina and definitely called her fat but didn’t call her fat? You know? Like I’m sure she was like, “I love that blouse, Ina. My collection at Macy’s doesn’t have blouses that big but the Walmart line does. I’d be happy to send you some samples.” Martha!!! Honestly bring back body-shaming because WOW, this absolute READ! 10s across the board!!!)
But no discussion of Martha Stewart and shade would be complete without this utter masterpiece she weaponized against legendary fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg.
Oh okay, Martha’s that bitch who takes a terrible picture of you with your eyes closed as if you’re a narcoleptic who’s been Weekend at Bernie’s-ed up against a table and is like “Don’t give girlie, I look PERFECT” and posts it anyway. Boss bitch energy!!! And that’s before we even account for the fact that this was taken at an event IN DIANE VON FURSTENBERG’S HONOR AT WHICH SHE WON AN AWARD. Diabolique! The Regina George of Heather Chandlers!
But even that can’t top this next shit. This next one is galaxy-brain-level shade.
Have you ever watched any clips from Aunt Mar’s old show where she’d cook with her mother? If Substack would get its ass into the fucking 90s and let us post Instagram videos in here I’d show you one, but just take my word for it: every single segment is a master class in the type of passive-aggression that makes you shriek “Oh shit these hoes hate each other’s fucking guts FIGHT!!!!!” while gleefully gnawing the hand you’ve clapped over your mouth in shock until there’s blood pooling in your clavicles.
So with that said, I give you this:
“Happy Birthday, Mom. Yesterday would have been your 107th birthday. Sorry I almost forgot.” [emphasis mine!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!!!!]
I screamed.
And then I got to the closing:
thanks niece @sophieslaterwellness for reminding me of this very important day.
thanks niece FOR REMINDING ME! Of my dead mother’s birthday! Not Martha hitting momz with the ol’ “Oh I don’t go on Facebook so I don’t know anyone’s birthday anymore” after already telling her she is GONE BUT DEFINITELY FORGOTTEN! I shrieked the top of my fucking skull off and my brain blew out of it like seawater through a dolphin’s blowhole. Martha said fuck you old lady, hope your cake was good!!!
But as good as the shade is, where Martha truly excels is:
Chaotic Captions
Listen, Martha Stewart doesn’t write Instagram captions, she writes poems, okay? And poetry does not adhere to your banal customs of grammar, punctuation, or words making any sort of sense.
An ellipsis with only two periods? But of course. Spaces on both sides of commas but NOT after colons plus a period in the middle of a sentence? YES, obviously. Because Martha Stewart doesn’t write captions. She writes jazz.
And just as she won’t be hemmed in by your hackneyed grammar cliches, she sure as fuck won’t be hemmed in by your expectations that the people she tags in her captions actually be the people she meant to tag in her captions and not, like, a Romanian eighth grader with 5 followers.
Take, for example, this photo of her and Drake at the Super Bowl in which she talks about also partying with Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin.
Except @coldplay._.chrismartin isn’t Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
It is a Coldplay’s Chris Martin fan page, because as it says VERY clearly, Coldplay’s Chris Martin has no Instagram. (Related: Quick! Without thinking! Name something sadder than running a Chris Martin fan page. Couldn’t be me!)
Then there was this one:
Wherein she mistagged everyone’s favorite musical bridge troll Ed Sheeran Ed Sheerin and led her followers to a fan page with one (1) post. (Wait is THIS sadder than a Chris Martin fan page? Hmm. And then how does this all stack up to me having written Martha Stewart/Snoop Dogg fanfic a bit ago? Much to think about!)
But then one day Martha really went and outdid herself and posted this:
In which she mistagged herself. I presume you can indeed buy that “cozy faux fur scarf” at @martha.com, but at martha dot com dot?
No can do, friendo! Please, whatever you do, note that Martha at some point edited this caption but did NOT fix the tag of her business account. It is not her problem that Zuckerberg won’t keep up with Martha’s grammatical innovations! It is not the job of an iconoclast to bend herself to the strictures and structures she was sent here to upend! Buy someone else’s cozy faux fur scarf and leave Martha alone!!!
Anyway it’s really weird that Martha is so bad at tagging in her captions because she is absolutely terrific at posting photos WITH the tags showing.
If this woman ever hires a social media manager I will kill myself with a knife.
So there you have it—go follow Martha Stewart’s personal Instagram and your brain will slowly deteriorate before your eyes! If you enjoyed this bullshit, won’t you tell a pal that it made you do a haha from your mouth?
You should also subscribe so this budget-rate bullshit will just ~*appear*~ in your mailbox as if by magic!
And of course, I would very much appreciate you throwing a few measly ducats into my bank account if you are so inclined and able!
And to all of you darling hearts who already do this shit, thank you one million times. You’re a real one!
Okay enjoy your weekend I think you’re great bye bye!!!