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?
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I’ve Been To the World, and I’m Going Back Inside
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
Can I Extrovert Safely?
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?
Listening To My Body
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
To John Prine, With Love From a Bartender
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
All Apologies
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
Pandemic Verse
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
Spring Sprung
I usually plant something on the equinox, but today I didn't. I stayed inside. No playing in the dirt. It rained and felt cold where I live, and I'm under self-imposed semi-quarantine because of lingering respiratory symptoms and sporadic fevers (but it's almost gone I think—hoorah!) and general social distancing for us all. When I … Continue reading Spring Sprung
Fiddlers Three
It's time for the jesters and the minstrels. My mother called me this morning filled with contagious anxiety, and it took an anecdote from a friend for me to understand what I could do for both of us: make her laugh. I pulled out the big guns and sent her a Key & Peele skit … Continue reading Fiddlers Three
Don’t Give Me More Than I Can Hold
Tonight I'm reminded that in the face of unprecedented world events, regular life carries on. People are going to break their legs and give birth. We're still going to fall in love and die from all the same circumstances that assailed us before there was a COVID-19 assassin on the global prowl. I wish these … Continue reading Don’t Give Me More Than I Can Hold
