LaurieWrites

More is all you need.

When I met you I was formless really, an amoeba of a person in so many ways that mattered. Something about you gave me a shape, not that that was necessarily positive (I don't believe in that, never really did) but it's what happened anyway. 

You were my east and the sun for so long when I was so young, when you'd ride your bike up to work and awkwardly tell me your stories, mostly about how fucked up it was at home wrapped inside a lot of talk of drums and shows and everywhere we were all going and wanted to go, along with the nonsense gossip of the every day. There were dreams floating around everywhere in the lounge where I'd sit and count my tips and edit your papers and smoke while you told me I'd get cancer if I didn't stop so I should stop, could I please stop? You could never date anyone who smoked, not that you'd date me, but still. 

They were fairly large dreams - I wonder if we'd recognized them now or if either one of us could even recall- and while I red penned your stuff they were everywhere. Editing, for me, is always love and as weird as it might sound if I read and edit shit for you without charge or bitching - willingly, happily, in fact - it means I love you.

It's what I know to do. It makes me feel useful. It's the most productive way I know to help. 

And then you grew your hair and turned into Samson so you thought but more to the point an asshole, except to me you were the same and that's when things got really difficult. I know more specifically now from inside of my own skin that people don't like to be reminded of who they were when they're trying to be different, most especially not when the shift they want to see is so drastic. 

Still. There are things you can't stop immediately. There are people you are drawn to even though you know it's not a good idea. There are people you can't let go for a long time, if ever, even when they hurt you. So I followed you around even when I pretended like I wasn't doing that, even when I was so mad at you and so beyond the place where I could even make an excuse for any of it. 

Like that night when Kix played Ritchie and filmed the video for some song. It took six hours because they were probably wrecked and some redneck guy pushed me and another guy hit him with his girlfriend's blessing and you for some unknown reason agreed to drive my friend and me over there and then never showed back up because you were trying to hook up with that other girl from the restaurant who had been in some kind of residential care. I had an excessive worn-off Jack Daniels buzz which at that point never ended well and when you finally did show and we'd sat outside the Cellar for hours for some ridiculous reason in heels and unnecessarily short skirts I yelled at you in the car and your defiant face said you knew you were wrong. Just like it said that, with me, it would always be okay, like you always knew I would forgive you. 

But you still made me tapes and stuck them in my purse at work. I still loved your mom and your dog. You still made me laugh and got my jokes and could keep up with me. You complained because I drove too fast. We went to Mexico and Daytona, Monsters of Rock and later Metallica and sat in statistics together senior year and you got so pissed because you worked your ass off for a C and I went to office hours and cried and screwed up my homework and got the same grade. 

We graduated from college on the same day, in the same room. And then we went in entirely different directions. You flew, I thought. I thought I stumbled mostly. 

You were the first boy I loved and so fully and completely, so it's understandable that when I finally chose to move away, when I finally thought I'd found the entirely stoned reason to forget you that all I'd want was for you to not want me to leave and conversely, simultaneously to be proud of me, happy for me maybe. But you weren't happy, you had inexplicable issues with that guy and then you walked away and there really wasn't anything after that until I went to your wedding. And when I thanked your wife for inviting me she said, oh, he wouldn't have had you not be here. 

Everything is different now, obviously. I was so bereft originally and now that's in no way the case. I just know that there will always be this particular orbit occasionally. We float into it in a familiar rhythm. We'll always be able to vaguely locate each other in space. And someday when I die you will still be one of the most important things that ever happened, even when nothing appeared to be happening at all. 

It's Okay to Be Unstable

Someone is reading my archives. 

I don't look at TypePad stats, ever, but now that there's this "follow" business in TypePad and one of the other blogs I write for is on TypePad I go to pages I don't usually go to. It turns out there ARE pages besides this frightening one with the blank text box into which I typically type like five sentences or so and then erase because I only play this writer person as a tripped out alter ego every now and then. 

So anyway, last night I was clicked by the stats page and noticed someone was clicking methodically through May, 2005. And I died. And this morning I noticed they move on to July. Slightly better, but still awkward. 

This blog will be five years old in a couple of weeks. I wrote way more consistently back then, but I also messed around with more weird stuff as I am prone to doing when I start anything out. Some of my posts are entire riffs on off-the-wall links that I look at now and can't believe I found interesting. Others are in green font, or teeny font, because I'd try to change things to see what TypePad could do and then I wouldn't be able to change it back. Others are me writing in an affected voice that has very little relevance to how I tend to express myself in writing these days. 

You know what they say about finding your voice. They say a lot. A lot of it is crap, but some of it is true. 

I love reading archives, by month and by category. I've gotten to know new friends from going back and reading theirs and I honestly think it's nice that someone would take the time around here to do that at all. That said, I hope they skip up a few years because while 2005 was a particular vintage, it is one I'd send mostly back to the barrel room for a variety of reasons. 

Of course being the good little masochist that I am, I skimmed July myself this morning, and this is one post I liked. I'm reprinting it because I can, but mostly because I like knowing that I was capable of humor at all then, in a really unhappy time. (I also fixed the font. I understand some things way better now.) I may do a few more of these leading up to the overwhelming excitement of the 5th anniversary. Maybe not. I'm not much of a planner. 

It's Okay To Be Unstable

So I was a reader in my cousin's wedding weekend before last, which is fine. I am the go-to wedding reader. I'm not sure why, but it's something that I always get asked to do. If I hired myself out to do this, it would probably be very lucrative. Hmmm. There's an idea - especially as one can be ordained in the Universal Life Church for 50 bucks. It really couldn't be simpler.

But it probably helps to actually be on time if you're going to run around marrying people. I arrived in Delaware too late on Friday for the rehearsal, but not the dinner. My ability to arrive on time for dinner is legendary. In this case, the beach traffic just sucked and I was lucky I made it as early as I did. 

After dinner, my cousin announced that the priest - who is married, which in my lapsed but still oddly traditional Catholic mind does NOT allow him to be a priest, but whatever he wants to call himeslf is fine with me - wanted to talk to me about my reading situation. "I don't know what he's worried about," she said. "I told him you're an educated person and you know what you're doing." Have her fooled, don't I? So I took my apple crumble dessert over to his table and talked to him.

He was sitting at the table with his wife. Together, they looked like a couple you might see on the Carnival Cruise commercials - middle-aged, disposable income, tanned, but not too perfect. At least that was my first take. 

"Hello. And thank you for taking part in this event," he said. "Have you read in public?"

"Yes, a million times," I answered, which amounted to lying to a priest but hoping that the fact that this was clearly hyperbole would only make it an exaggeration and not a total untruth.

"She has," my aunt added. "She reads at weddings, family funerals, pretty much anywhere."

The way it was all sounding, I had visions of myself screaming out scripture and poetry on the Metro, in elevators, at the 4th of July fireworks. "Hold me back - I'm a READER!"

He implored me to speak slowly - always a challenge - and warned me that the wind and the water (she was getting married outside by the bay) would "impede the flow and projection" of my voice. I assured him that anything short of a monsoon is rendered powerless by the flow and projection of this voice. Volume is just. not. a. problem. Then the conversation got odder.

"I just want you to know that if you need to express emotion, it's okay," he said.

"Okay," I said. "I think I'll be fine. I'm pretty comfortable reading in front of people."

"No," he said. "I mean, if you feel like you're going to break down, just go with it. It's better to express it than to repress it."

"Thank you," I said. "That's very reassuring."

Break down? Would he be shooting us with pepper spray? Was someone on deck to speak now, not willing to forever hold his piece? Who knew? I mean, I'm a cryer, that's for sure, but he had no way of knowing this, and I knew my cousin hadn't told him. I've been known to tear up while reading, but I've never had a problem working through it. And this was a first reading from the Old Testament, the one about God making Eve from Adam's rib, which I was fairly sure, at this point in my life, would cause no emotional reaction to at all. Besides, I was very, very chill this weekend. I was ice. cold. I was Andre 3000.

He continued staring soulfully at me.

"Seriously. I just need you to know that it's okay if you're unstable."

I thanked him for being the only person in my life who has ever said that to me and meant it. And then I took my apple crumble and backed slowly, slowly away.

(PS My cousin's wedding was gorgeous and I'll have everyone know that the girl who read AFTER me cried. Not me. I was, quite simply, chill. Chill and loud. Score!)

Pancake Day

Today is a lot of things. It's Mardi Gras and it's the beginnings of Olympic hockey that I can't access online without a forgotten e-mail log-in and it's Tuesday. I have a snow/Valentine's Day/Presidential hangover. 

There is a lot going on in the world, it seems. The calendar is weighted down with commemorations and what have you.

Today is also Pancake Day. I grew up eating pancakes every year on the night before Ash Wednesday, on what we called Shrove Tuesday in my house. I didn't learn the Fat Tuesday term until I was old enough to go to bars called that where no one should ever go, seriously don't go to them because the floors are gross and the drinks are unnatural colors and all of the drink machines are swirling around and around in those colors so if you're a little "under the weather" as it were that can really get to you. 

Anyway my grandparents typically hosted pancake night (which is part of Pancake Day, I guess. Like how I make this stuff up on the fly?) and my father and his brothers and assorted aunts and cousins would come over for the most epic breakfast-for-dinner you'd ever care to see.

It was one of my favorite things growing up.

In the past few years I've visited New Orleans several times as I've gone on about on this site and in the process have learned to love all things traditionally Mardi Gras from a place where it really happens. Today I brought a grocery store King Cake into my classroom for my students to try. They're from all over the world, literally, places like Moldova and Thailand and Cameroon and Gaithersburg. They tolerated my drivel about Mardi Gras and Carnival and a side dish of it being all about the storm before the supposedly self-flagellating calm of Lent, although I made sure to tell them that it wasn't a religious thing for me anymore because I didn't want them to feel like I was pushing it because I wasn't.   

I also made sure that no one ate the baby, which Giant actually makes really easy because they freakishly tape the plastic baby to the box with its one-millimeter diameter arms reaching up at you while you're in the checkout line. HALP. HALP THE BABY. 

That was the only weird part.

I wrote about how Lent is not the 40-Day Shred last year and my irritation with people who "give things up" although they have no connection with this as a meaningful time of year, and because I don't practice the faith of my mothers and fathers I absolutely don't either. I re-read the piece this morning and felt a little softer now (and not just because I've gained most of this stupid weight back), like people really are in most cases doing their best and don't set out to thwart God by shutting off Facebook for Lent but I do still stand by most of what I said in general. Lent is not a pop culture phenomenon. If I all of a sudden decided to go on a diet and blamed it on Ramadan I would expect one of my Muslim friends to call me out, that's all I'm saying. 

What I miss is certain rituals that meant my family would be together. And I would really like a waffle tonight but I don't feel like making it. I think I'm just tired or snow-burnt-out. I know I am frustrated by all that I didn't accomplish while I was holed up for over a week because besides cooking and surveilling the skies for more frozen water and shoveling for hours my brain sort of shut down. The Super Bowl feels like it was a year ago. It has all been a gray, cold, snowy wrinkle in time, seriously.

And today I feel like I want this warm, wonderful tradition to recreate itself for me and I don't think it will and honestly, I don't feel like working on it. I also don't so much want to go to IHOP either but maybe I should or maybe I should just shut up.

I'm idealizing something that is a memory, that I need to put away and sometimes I wish I was better at doing that. 

And I have to admit that today this is making me a little melancholy at the same time I am fully aware it is not a tremendous problem. I am so not usually alone but the traditions I carve out beyond the major holidays and birthdays that my extended family and friends still celebrate are small and many times I'm the only one who knows about them, which as much as I like to do it still makes me feel like a bit of a quirky, weird loner. On Valentine's Day, for example, I hacked my father's car out of three feet of snow and ice on all sides (not an exaggeration.) I had put my remaining wonderful bottle of Ruby Cuvee in the snow in the backyard and after I came in from the three-hour marathon I sat in the kitchen and drank it and wished for...I don't know what. Love? High-quality sparkling wine at all times? The snow to go away?

I don't like letting things pass me by even if sometimes I feel silly doing it alone, which feels a little weird sometimes, even if when I'm being honest I know that Valentine's Day itself sucked the most on a few occasions when I had a boyfriend. 

I am talking in concentric circles to myself again. This is why I don't write. This is why I don't hit "publish." This is why everything stays in draft. Everything sounds selfish and unimportant in the context of others or a world in trouble but the thing is that when I spend a lot of time alone these things come to pass in my mind. Something is off-kilter. I can't really pretty that up too much and today I don't really care if you (whoever you are) judge me so much which is kind of freeing.

It's fine. I have lots of good fragments, sometimes I just wish they fit together better, which makes my life sound a little like an Ikea bookshelf but if the shoe fits, eh. Hopefully when I am next moved into my own place again I can feel the urge and the freedom to gather people in like I used to. I was good at it and I miss it. 

It's just hard to live in the in-betweens sometimes. It may not kill me but sometimes it doesn't really make me that much stronger anymore, either. It just makes me wish and wonder and hope more than is good for a feeling sort of person. That's all. 

On forgetting whether or not I ever told my blog that I danced to I'm Every Woman with Jane Fonda.

Seriously. 

I'm going through my photo archives for another day in a row, putting together some images for a friend of mine, and wow. The things you don't really forget but don't actively remember. Like this: 

That's my mother on the far right in this one. She looks like we all felt.

 

This is what happens when you follow Dylan McDermott into the W hotel in New Orleans because you figure that's where the party is because his stepmother just happens to be throwing it. And then somehow you end up in the party yourself (**coughpresspasscough**) standing a few feet away from an open bar and Rosario Dawson. 

 

 Dudes this is still funny, almost two years later.

 

That will never not be funny to me. That ain't no On Golden Pond. 

I have no idea what I said exactly to get us in those doors but I will never be sorry. Like Ferris said, life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

Whole set here. Fabulous trip. 

Robert T.

I am not in the place where my scanner is so it being your birthday and all I got some photos out of the albums and just used the iPhone and the ShakeIt app instead. 

It occurs to me that the scanner you were obsessed with was of the police variety and the kind I use wouldn't have made any sense to you at all. 

I like this image, though. You were overexposed in the bottom shot originally so there wasn't much to be done with that but that is the place and stance that I really remember you in most besides the front porch so it may as well stand. 

You would have been 88 years old today, which seems very young to me when I do the math. You've been dead since 1987 and that feels like such a long time that it seems that you should be ancient by now. When I first thought about calculating it I thought, wow, he'd probably be almost 100. Wrong, but I can see why I thought that. 

You were one of the most challenging people I've ever known but it was difficult not to appreciate some of the things that could be the most off-putting about you. One of the things I've inherited in a few different genetic ways is a struggle with the art of compromise and while I see how that can really bring me some problems what it also carries with it is a near-inability to back down from representing my own point of view when I know in my heart that I'm right not to do so. It's a trait that when flipped on its head and used for good is not such a terrible one to have, and I definitely try to flip it. You are a significant example of the fact that I do not come from wishy-washy people. I guess there are reasons why I usually speak my truth. 

There are things about your life that I wish had been easier not only because no one really needs an especially difficult life but also because I think it would have made life easier for everyone else too. And I really wish that your body had not been ravaged by disease quite so young - 65 is still young to die, to me - because I can see now from my adult vantage point that you were growing into being a grandfather, mellowing out a little, and that would have been the best time by far to have you around. I think you could have made a positive difference. I think you were finally genuinely enjoying yourself. 

But that is not what happened and it's only worth the few line of speculation and when I think about you I think about simple things for the most part, like food and the country and being a Marine and lottery tickets and a new car every two years. 

I think about how when you were on oxygen all the time and nearly on your last legs you came to the play in my junior year that was really a defining experience in my life and you were obviously genuinely proud to be there. And I remember how in spite of my teenaged angst making me a little embarrassed - because, like I said, you weren't quiet or halfway or tactful about much of anything - I was really happy and proud that you appreciated it. 

It's a good memory to have. 

And I hope it's okay with you but I also use you as my cautionary tale to really try not to drink bad beer, and I'm especially grateful for that unintentional life lesson (because if you knew how much it costs to drink good beer you would die again and talk about it loudly for hours.) I did not have one for you today, because I was out with some of my friends consuming sangria which is definitely what you would have called a sissy drink. But I definitely will tomorrow. 

Patrick - November 26

I'm late with these birthday posts. I'm late with life. I'll catch up this week - with the posts anyway.

This year we had the Thanksgiving holiday at the beach we usually go to in the summer, because it was your 50th birthday and it was what you wanted to do, and when other people started saying they'd come down too it kind of all just came together.

It worked out really well. It wasn't very warm at all but the sun was shining anyway, rather nonstop, and your kids were there and your brothers were there and to me those were the most important things, both because of this milestone birthday and because of the year it is otherwise.

I chose to go because of all the reasons I could have been anywhere else, including face down on a couch by myself (which in so many ways would have been fine this season, really, no hard feelings) you are really very important to me. And it seems like my reasoning anymore is fundamentally tied up in the question of what will I be sorry I missed the most? What will it make the most sense, looking back, to say I did? 

Showing up down south was in this case the answer to both of those questions.

And even though I wasn't excited about the seven-billion item dinner buffet on Thanksgiving and my back hurt so badly it was difficult to walk (seriously) and any number of the usual mindless complaints one can have about a day or a trip or a life, when you hugged me in the restaurant and thanked me for coming all that way for you and I said that I wouldn't have been anywhere else I knew I meant it long before I said it out loud.

I'll always be a little pissed at you for those days when you stumbled into the house at all hours and then the next day picked me up off the couch and pretended you were going to throw me down the very steep stairs in the way a youngest uncle will do, but not really. Because since then you asked me to stand up for your son 20 years ago, and you took me to a parking lot and taught me how to parallel park so I wouldn't fail my test for the third time. I've cried while I watched you graduate from college, and Rumours is still one of my favorite albums three decades after I laid on your bed and memorized the lyrics off of the record sleeve you taped to the wall. I'll never, ever forget you tearing up a little this summer over my tattoo, because we have loved and lost the same people. 

You have been my friend for a very long time and for that reason it was at the same time no big deal and also very important that I be there at the beach on your Thanksgiving birthday. I'm a fan of the easy decisions, particularly the ones that make things even clearer than they may have always been.

December 1

Last year I brought you Moose Munch and a green fleece jacket for your birthday before I left for California, where on your actual birthday as it happened I stood in the parking lot of a winery and cried and screamed into the phone at Mom because all of a sudden you were being transferred to a nursing home from the hospital where the assisted living had sent you the day after I left. 

You didn't know what Moose Munch was anymore but could still comprehend "original milk chocolate" and, more vaguely, your birthday.

A month plus a day later, just over the threshold into the new year, you died.It's crazy, really. One month we're talking popcorn and chocolate, and the next we're not talking about anything at all, because we can't.

Seriously? So weird.

It still sucks, the missing you part. I can see back now, to the photos and the videos I've got and the images in my head. I can comprehend how frail you were, how hard it had become to navigate the world, how there were gaps in comprehension and engagement that weren't there the birthday before, the one where a bunch of us went to lunch and you dove face first into your sundae when they didn't bring you a spoon. 

I know in large part that grief is selfish, but that's not anyone's fault, how it's felt, how it moves.

If we didn't love people so much it would have no origin or purpose. It's the constant push-pull, the crap reality of death.

I wish I believed in a situation that would even allow me to allude to things that people of faith allude to, like "birthdays in heaven," but I don't, and it's not even that on this count I'm that cynical or bitter. It's just that I don't really operate in that sphere. It's not something that feels genuine to me. Still, I honor the birthdays you were here and the 89 years total its been since you came to be a person.

Your birthday kicks off the holiday season for real, like it always has. It's Advent, right, the practice of waiting for someone new, for something new too, maybe, I don't know. I love it more than Christmas, really. It's one of the Catholic things I hold onto for some reason. There is nothing not beautiful about it, to my mind. It's so separate, to me, from theology - because it's the practice I love, not the reasons why, really. 

As part of its beginning and of your day itself, I drove towards water. I thought of you, but not the whole time, as much as I knew what day it was all day. I remembered just as much as I thought you'd want me too, if I could guess, and I ate a full fat dinner.

I love you more than I can explain to anyone but myself. I miss you so much it's sickening and for that reason these are things I will always do. I will try to write about it and to talk about it when it makes sense because I think it should be said, how much people can affect our lives for the good, so much that we can carry them with us for as long as we live.

These things about you are things I will always remember, as long as I can remember things.

Since I left Maryland...

Since I left Maryland two days ago, I have...

Had the best solitary I-95 road trip of my life. 

Stopped at the Aquia Target, again. I love the Aquia Target, but that could just be because the traffic from Springfield (ugh) almost to Richmond can be so ridiculous that by the time I get to Aquia (Phoenix?) it's impossible not to stop and try to think some happy thoughts. This time I bought three miniature Slinkys (from the dollar bins), tights, a clearance blouse that is totally too big but I can't return it because I ripped the tags off in a fit of Thanksgiving dinner clothing hysteria, shampoo, and an Icee.

I did not, however, buy an audio book, which is what I told myself I was going into the store for in the first place, because the two people who worked in the book/music area did not know what those were but they were pretty sure they'd not seen any there.

Stopped at South of the Border because I haven't been there in years and I thought it would be fun to shoot it at night and holy shit, I was right. I love those pictures. I'll have to upload them someday. I also found Blenheim's ginger ale there, which shouldn't really please me as much as it does. Unlike Kristen claimed she did earlier today, I did not see any bongs. Pedro sells bongs. Crazy fucker.

I did get some shots on the phone.

Been in excruciating back pain from that pinchy nerve spot (or whatever it is, it's from hell, I tell you) such that no Vodka can touch it, nor can four Aleve in an hour, or the ice pack I jammed into it to try to work out the issue. Seriously, my back is a wreck, in just this one place, and it's enough to make it an effort to walk. I am currently lying on a tennis ball to see if that helps. It's supposed to. I shudder to think what will happen when the 39 hammer comes down next month. Locusts. Fires. Sciatica.

Spent an honestly great holiday with most of my family, celebrating my uncle's 50th at a restaurant wherein the buffet was housed in, oh, five separate areas, all shaped like schooners. This was slightly alarming to me not because I necessarily expected Captain Jack Sparrow to jump up out of the bin of sweet potatoes but because I'm a snob about maybe three things and one of those things is dinner. Buffets freak me out. I eat too much, even if I don't like what I'm eating. My ADD goes into overdrive because I don't know where to go or what to get or what to look at first. There are five year olds who could handle this situation with their shit more together than mine is.

No matter. The important thing was not my buffet issue.

IT WAS EVERYONE ELSE'S. Y'all born in a BARN?

(Just kidding, I just felt like saying that. Back to my list.)

Spent the day yesterday with a relative whose health challenges are rough and felt about a hundred different things about it that were at a few points in time very overwhelming, but mostly amazed at our human ability to carry on through what can be crushing adversity, and a very particular kind of gratitude for the time we all got to have together.

Sat on the beach where it is sunny even if it's not 80 degrees and read an actual book and drank actual aforementioned Vodka and aforementioned ginger ale praying it would seep into this pain in my back and remove it, and thought about how little it actually takes to be happy if you're with people you care about who care about you, and how what makes me happy is to be very calmly on this little patch of earth.

The rest is just sort of Whipped Lightening and sunshine, in no particular order.

And I don't know exactly what happened to the ocean here, all crooked and whatnot, but today was a really great day.

Giving, thanks.

Hey! It's a mess of a Thanksgiving post ahead, written while I'm dying to get out of my state.

Last year I had this wine for the holiday.

This year I will not. I will miss it. I thought of drinking the remaining bottle last night that I have been hoarding since I brought it back from California this spring but decided against it. It's more of a birthday sort of thing to do than a Thanksgiving eve eve thing, I think.

I just realized that it will be my second Thanksgiving in a row in a coastal city (this time the right one) with some configuration of my extended family. I may be having trouble with a general sense of gratitude at the moment, as I noted below, but I'll be glad to be with them tomorrow. Life is basically a series of choices and activities, moving on from one thing to the next in the best way we know how, and I'm very happy that we have all chosen to be in the same place tomorrow.

I just hope I can scrounge up a relish tray, because without one on Thanksgiving I'm not sure I can carry on.

I wrote a much more articulate Thanksgiving sort of post two years ago and I enjoyed re-reading it today.

I'm praying for wireless in the place where I'm staying because tomorrow I'm kicking off a month and change of birthday posts. I can't even tell you how many people I know who were born from the last week of November through the first of January. It is a crazy number, and it just so happens that this span of time includes the birthdays of some of my very closest friends and family. It's weird. 

And because I'm not such a fountain of joy and light myself as much as I just reflect it back from people in my life who rock, I thought I'd spend the holiday season talking about them. This isn't a revolutionary idea. There are other bloggers who do it all year round (I'm personally a fan of Mr. Lady's birthday posts for her people,) and I'll gladly thank them for the idea in the first place. But this year it has special meaning for me. I will be eternally 39 on December 27 and I know a lot of people in transition. It just seems like the right thing to do.

I'll start tomorrow, assuming that stretch of coastal Carolina has it some Internets.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Of NaBloPoMos Past

It occurred to me as I sat on the couch tonight and processed my current state of mind that NaBloPoMo makes me a little bit nuts, above and beyond any existing and constant state of nuttiness, of course. And I may be grasping at straws here, but whatever. I thought it was time for a little tour of the archives of Novembers past.

If you are new to this ridiculous magical mystery tour of my life, this will point out that there was life before you, which can be fun and enlightening, or it can just be boring as hell, your call.

Here, I made myself laugh with this bit from November 21, 2006, wherein I rationalized my ongoing and conflicted relationship with yet another 80s cheese rock band.

And now all of a sudden "wacked out and posting" reminded me of the line from REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Lovin' You", a song I've heard repeatedly in random places lately because God hates me, although maybe I should be glad it isn't holiday tunes, because those have taken over most places already. Anyway, you know, the REO song with the line that sounds like it goes, "Instead you left stealin' the rent/ALL HIED UP AND LISTEN'" but it doesn't. It really says "Instead you lay still in the grass/All coiled up and hissin'", which is just weird. And it's important to add that though he knows all about those men, inexplicably he don't remember. Cause it was her, baby, way before then, and they're still together. This in spite of the fact that he's a fucked up stalker with memory loss who compares her to a snake, which I know is how I like my men. Especially the ones who insist that they're gonna keep on lovin' me, and are apparently going to go on cocaine binges to avoid sleeping to do so, even after I've told them to get the fudge out cause I'm watching Montel. Those are my favorites.

Sorry. Decompressing. I will admit that "Take it on the Run" is one of my favorite songs of all time (and okay, I like "Time For Me to Fly" too, but not as much), which doesn't allow me to bring the hate on REO Speedwagon without that full disclosure, but one of the best and most humorous stories that Casey Kasem ever spat into the mic (could they not get that man some water? A lozenge? Some freaking hot TEA?) involved the DECADE that it took Kevin Cronin to write "Can't Fight This Feelin'". A decade to come up with "You're a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter's night," and to rhyme "longer" and "stronger", and "show" and..."show." Scary. 

And because this is how my brain functions, this post only makes me wonder how I have never written about Damn Yankees?

Don't worry about it, ma'am. Just them Damnnnnnnnnnnn Yankees.

I know. I can't help it. Seriously, scary visceral memories associated with this song, especially considering I'm a little fuzzy on some of the details of what happened yesterday. Jack Blades (haha, Jack Blades) in mom jeans FTW. IT'S NEVER OVER. (I really really love this song. I'm dealing with this right now.)

It's been three years since I wrote this on November 10, and it's kind of alarming that I could still spit it out almost verbatim:

I over-gave, and it still kind of embarrasses me and makes me want to reach back through the pensieve of the past decade and yank me even further back, so I could turn different corners and tell people to fuck off when actually I said, "Yes, baby. Anything for you." But in spite of this shift inside of me, the one thing that makes a difference is my refusal to succumb to inertia, because even if I'm sitting on my very own single settee for the rest of my days, I want it to be in a cool spot. And I want to say that in the process of getting to be the rotten, hilarious-to-myself, intellectually overstimulated and completely batty yet endearing old woman I know I'll be some day, that I did not stop exercising my capacity to do cool shit, or to push myself to create or to make something better out of where I've ended up. I've been lagging for the past couple years, but it's safe to say that it'll get better from here. And thank God. I'm so on my own nerves.

I'd totally forgotten about this picture that went with the post. That's me on the day trip to San Francisco after my first BlogHer. Melanie Morgan took it. (Where have you gone, Melanie? Where have you gone?) I still dyed my own hair then, all four or more of the colors, poor little girl who never pays attention to the back of her head. It was pretty bad. I also fell in love with the city in those eight crazy hours. Besides going back for BlogHer last year I haven't been again, and I really want to go when I can just be there without the imperative to spend three days immersed in talking to so many great people I don't get to see all year long.  

Sunshine and me, November 30, 2007.

I loved and I miss this silly little dog so much...Look at her with the big bug eyes and the kisses...That was the summer before we left and we did step aerobics and kickboxing every day, which tired her out and actually gave me some arm definition.

And I've never found a better hairdresser either. Damn.

I still haven't, and this picture was taken in 1999. (That's dust on the print, by the way. Didn't bother to edit it. LA-ZY.)

Hanging out with Andrew at an open mic on November 20, 2007:

Me: She's really not bad. But why must every girl who looks like that look like that in the same way?
Andrew: Yeah. The leg warmers. The argyle tights. The harshly cut bangs.
Me: I mean, it's like they go to the same school for it.
Andrew: The bangs.
Me: Those bangs look good on no one. And oh my God, she has him banging that tiny little drum. That's really unnecessary.
Andrew: I was just thinking that that drum was unnecessary. I love hanging out with you. We think the same things. We're the same. Except you like Dar Williams and I like German thrash metal bands.

*************************************
Me: I just had the insane thought that I miss working for Restaurant Digest.
Andrew: Me too.
Me: Yeah, I miss those messed up times when Bruce was alive.
Andrew: Yes. There was a time when Bruce was alive.
Me: And how sometimes he'd give me money when he was alive. And I'd actually get it. That was nice.  Maybe I just need money.
Andrew: It was better when he wasn't crying when he gave me money.

Talking to some students the day before, November 19. 

Exhibit B:

"We have our list."

"Okay, who would you talk to?"

"Joe Francis."

"Who is that?"

"The founder of Girls Gone Wild."

"Oh. Really? Why?"

"Because he made a lot of money. I'd ask him how he did it."

(From across the room) "Isn't he in jail?"

(Me) "He's incarcerated? And you want to know how he accomplished that?"

"Yeah, but he's got a lot of money, and it's only for eight months."

"You can't interview him. I'm not signing off on what I'd have to sign for that to happen. Also, you'd have to do it through a glass window."

And finally, from November 26, 2006, Movin' On Up. 

 Note to self:  First of all, good morning, sunshine.  Second of all, when you get the bright idea to make the Jefferson's theme song your primary ringtone, please remember to turn it to Edelweiss or just fucking OFF before you go to bed, so when the phone rings at 4:00 a.m., you do not go shooting across the room in a crazed, suddenly-awoken frenzy.  Thanks.

I have eight days left of this. Whatever shall I write about? No, seriously. WHATEVER SHALL I WRITE ABOUT?