Just drink the coffee.
"Are you interested in our spin?" "I don't know. I'm not sure what that is." "Oh it's great, I'll put you in it. There's a black light, loud music, it's so fun. You're all on bikes." "Oh wow. Okay. I'm actually going to pass on that one. I have PTSD and am high anxiety with … Continue reading Yoga, Malaise, Ink
Yesterday, it would have been about work and how my stove caught fire in the morning, how I threw handful after handful of flour on the flames and when it finally went out, I had this mess of burned and caked flour everywhere. I'd have told you how I couldn’t leave the kids with that … Continue reading If We Could Talk, Part 2
I would tell you I looked at two apartments today, and both left me feeling like Goldilocks: one was too big (in price and space—the ceilings were loft-height, glorious Old Chicago 12-footers. In winter, I fear the heat would never reach me or my children in our beds. We'd swelter in summer. The place felt … Continue reading If We Could Talk
I horrified someone into understanding one of the darkest stars in my mental illness sky yesterday because she wanted to "...yeah but..." her way through my answer to her question: why would anyone with everything going for them commit suicide? She came to a group of mentally ill people to ask that question—to a tiny … Continue reading What Do You Do With That?
Mes amis, it's been a hot minute. I haven't written here since the end of April, when I declared my need to leave the hive for honey—time to go collect pollen and bring it home for processing. I forgot I said that. Spring came for me. I spent Beltane in a hot tub with an … Continue reading I’ve Been To the World, and I’m Going Back Inside
I'm dreaming in color of driving dead friends like cargo through towns I don't know until I arrive home with their bodies. I don't know what to do when I get there, so I just leave the back windows open 4" or so and go back in my apartment. But once I'm inside, I'm obsessed … Continue reading Can I Extrovert Safely?
Although I've proclaimed the gospel of mind-body connection (as above, so below—my mental state and my physical body are not islands in the same stream, they're the water and the flow), I needed The Universe to teach me how it feels with a mallet, so I threw out my back a few years ago while … Continue reading Listening To My Body
From a bartender’s perspective, you’ll never beat John Prine, and although I’m a songwriter, a singer and a storyteller as well, I think the shit-bar matriarch’s point of view is the one Mr. Prine might have enjoyed the most from me, had I ever had the fortune to meet him. Trade secret: she who rules … Continue reading To John Prine, With Love From a Bartender
Here's a link to AA, because you just find trouble at Narcotics Anonymous. We were burned out on the Sunset Strip. We’d been through Reagan and most of the first Bush. The Berlin Wall was down, we’d Just Said No, then we said fuck it. The 90210 fantasy didn’t belong to us. We hated the … Continue reading All Apologies
I call it bloom because that’s not dying. We’re about to see the bloom, I told my friend. It’s growth but not a flower. Not canna not rose, not casket nor corpse; it just means something has opened. My friend draws blood. He says he cried last Sunday. Another counsels the sick and the doctors … Continue reading Pandemic Verse
