Death Watch

Being on death watch sucks.

Sam called my friend's husband (I am not giving names because I don't know if they want those spread, but I will call her G) and gave the husband his number for updates.

As of right now, there is no change. She is still comatose, and is likely to stay that way until she leaves us.

Jesus fuck, I miss her already.

G and I met 26 years ago, because we were both part of a rosary maker's guild. We were paired up on a swap to send our partner a kit we had put together to make a rosary (beads, eye pins, cross, centerpiece) and we both went kind of overboard. She sent me four kits, I sent her three. She included her phone number in her package, and I called her to thank her and tell her how much I loved what she'd sent. 

We ended up talking for 2.5 hours that evening, and a friendship was born. We were soul sisters from the get-go. 

Four months later she announced she was coming to visit me. That was the first of four face to face visits we were able to accomplish, every one of them rich and warm and funny. She even came for my son's wedding, and insisted on paying for half of the food for the buffet as her gift.

When my second husband tried to walk away without giving me any closure, she called him and ripped him a new asshole, as did my other bestie, Debb, which prompted him to come to the psych ward I was in after my suicide attempt and work out details of spousal support and what have you. That settled things for me, and I was able then to heal enough to go home. Without Debb and G stepping in, I might still be sitting in the hospital, fingerpainting.

When I moved to Texas and we had NOTHING, G made Christmas happen for our entire family. She sent an artificial tree, ornaments, gifts, and a Walmart gift card so we could buy dinner fixings. For the next 24 years, G sent a huge Christmas box for us, until I finally told her to stop, the kids didn't come home any more for the holidays.

If I needed an ear, G was there. If I wanted to laugh, G had a joke. 

I feel like I am losing one of my anchors, and I am flailing.

G's other best friend, Karen, is going to be a total wreck. From what G has told me over the years, Karen is a wet mess and depends on G to keep her stable and afloat. I don't know what she will do now. I hope she will be okay.

I will be okay, but there will be a big huge hole in my life and heart. This loss is deep and painful, and I'm not coping very well right at the moment, but I am strong, or so they tell me, so I will get through this. I will never get OVER it, but I will get through it.

Sigh. Tonight, I will grab the job's tear rosary that G made for me and pray one for her peaceful passing.

Ginger

One of my best friends is currently dying. She could go tonight, she could go in a few days, but she is going. Her husband called me tonight to let me know.

None of you know her, but she would have made one amazing Callahooligan, and fit in well with most of you.

She loved my kids, and they loved her, though they only met twice, since she lives in Philadelphia and we live in Texas.

Tonight I am utterly bereft and falling apart.

May her passing be peaceful. Please, let there be a reward for her after this, whatever reward she wants.

I can't stop crying. When I'm not crying so much, I will write more about her.

Fuck uncontrolled diabetes. Fuck it hard.

Ink, Strings, and Serenity OR Happy Little Clouds

There is a specific kind of silence that happens the moment I cap my pen after finishing a Zentangle. My hand is usually a bit cramped from the precision of the patterns, but my mind is finally quiet. To keep that peace from evaporating, I reach for my ukulele. The transition from the visual rhythm of ink on paper to the literal vibration of strings against my fingertips is where I find my center.

It’s a world of tiny, deliberate wonders. One hour I’m watching a Shrinky Dink curl and toughen under the heat, and the next I’m assembling an angel keychain, bead by bead. These aren't just crafts; they are anchors. In a world that feels increasingly loud and disposable, these small acts of creation are how I claim my space.

The Holy Trinity: Why I Keep Buying These Same Three Records

 

Most six-year-olds in 1971 were vibrating to "The Wheels on the Bus" or whatever upbeat nonsense was playing on the radio, but not me. No, I was already deep in the trenches of acoustic melancholy. I was sitting there in my kindergarten class, probably staring at a pile of blocks, while the haunting melodies of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the earthy warmth of Carole King’s Tapestry, and the gentle drawl of James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James played on a loop in my head. 

I’ve owned these albums on vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, and every digital format known to man; at this point, the only thing missing is a reel-to-reel copy, and frankly, my wallet is grateful for that one omission. 

And now, the albums.

Carpe the Fucking Diem

So my COPD is stage two moving into stage three.

What does this mean?

3-5 years remaining to me. 4-6 if I'm really lucky and extremely diligent.

I did this to myself. I knew I was risking an early death with my chain smoking. Now it's a reality, not just a risk.

The Great Kitchen Standoff: A Bubbly Backwash Production

Left to right: Romeo, Connor, Cubby, Rocco. Cats in order: Not Bob, Mary Ann, Ada

I’m currently living in a low-budget nature documentary where the dogs are hairy potatoes and the cats are fuzzy dictators. Between Not Bob’s entitlement and Romeo’s vibrating tail, the kitchen has become a high-stakes war zone. Send help; or bacon.

I now present a world premier: The Great Kitchen Standoff: A Bubbly Backwash Production

Born Loud, Raised Proud

The Dog Who Broke My Heart and the Dog Who Put It Back Together

I didn’t go looking for Lulu. She found me. She was five years old when I got her, already past the puppy chaos, already herself. The first time I saw her, she walked straight over, climbed into my space like she belonged there, and rested her head on my heart. Not my lap. Not my hand. My heart. I said her name and she responded instantly, like she already knew it was hers. From that moment on, she was mine and I was hers.

Creating, Growing, and Returning to Life

For a long time, I thought my creative life had gone quiet. Not dead, just sleeping under a pile of exhaustion, pain, and the everyday grind of being a human with a body that doesn’t always cooperate. But lately something has cracked open again. I’ve been wandering back into the arts like someone returning to a house they used to live in. Everything feels familiar, but also new in ways I didn’t expect..

When Bipolar Disorder Takes Another Life, The Stigma Should Be What Dies Next

 

Image courtesy Unsplash.Com - work of Paolo Nicolello

Robert Carradine died by suicide today after a long fight with bipolar disorder. The news hit me harder than I expected. Not because I knew him personally, but because I know the illness that took him. I know what it feels like when your own brain turns into a battlefield. I know what it feels like to lose the fight for a moment and still be here to talk about it. I have been there. I have survived it. And I am tired of pretending that bipolar disorder is anything other than a medical condition that deserves compassion and treatment.

Every time someone with bipolar disorder or another mental illness dies, the world reacts with shock. People ask how it could happen. People whisper. People speculate. But very few people talk about the truth. Bipolar disorder is not a character flaw. It is not a weakness. It is not a failure of willpower. It is a brain chemistry disorder that can be brutal, unpredictable, and exhausting. It deserves the same seriousness and empathy we give to heart disease or cancer or any other life threatening condition.

But that is not how society treats it...

FUCK Cancer! Fuck It In The EAR! I’m DONE Watching This Monster Hurt People I Love

Cancer is the one motherfucker that never clocks out. It doesn’t care how good you are, how careful you’ve been, how much you’ve already survived. It just shows up like a goddam wrecking ball and dares you to pretend this is normal. I’m fucking sick of it. I’m sick of watching people I love get blindsided by a piece of shit disease that feels like it’s everywhere, all the time, creeping into every family like some kind of outrageous cosmic joke.

We talk about cancer like it’s a statistic, like it’s a chart, like it’s a ribbon color. But when it hits your circle, it’s not a number, it’s a gut punch. It’s fear. It’s rage. It’s the helplessness of knowing that even with all our medical advances of the last motherfucking century, all our research, all our awareness campaigns, this thing still keeps taking swings at the people who deserve it the least.

And I’m tired. Tired of pretending to be calm. Tired of acting like this is just part of life. Tired of watching strong, brilliant, irreplaceable people get dragged into a fight they never fucking asked for...

Mogen David's for Donna Zentangle

 

Reblogging Marc-Anthony Macon, open letter to conservatives

 

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE 3 OR SO CONSERVATIVES THAT STILL FOLLOW ME 

[TLDR: I am asking if you are lonely and if we can help you a bit with that.]...

Racism in EVERYONE (especially ourselves), must be stamped out.

I thought I had erased all vestiges of racial prejudice from my brain, but I was wrong. Boy howdy, was I wrong. Turns out that I still have some FILTHY spots in myself that need major scrubbing and purifying.

I was watching Midnight Oil's video for Beds Are Burning. Much of it takes place in a town out in the desert, where the people are out having a good time dancing to the band's music in the street.

And there are these two girls, maybe 16 or 17 years old, absolutely stunningly beautiful in an 80s kind of way, and I said to myself: "I did not know that Indigenous People in Oz could be so attractive."

And I immediately facepalmed in disgust. That came out of fucking NOWHERE and broadsided me.

We may think we are the wokest of the woke, but depending on the culture when we were coming up, we may be carrying some really REALLY deep prejudices that need to be eradicated.

Boy am I triggered

So the death of Dilbert creator and infamous racist pig, Scott Adams, from prostate cancer this week has poked some of my buttons.

My Dad was a good man, but he was a little too damn much of a hippie. When he was diagnosed with bladder cancer, his urologist told him that removal of his bladder would get it all, and he would live a long life. Then the urologist explained that the prostate goes out with the bladder, and that's the end of the sex life.

My father was 38 when he was diagnosed. He had an active social and dating and sex life. Losing the ability to have intercourse would have really been devastating to him. So he told the doctor, let's do mild chemo, and I'm gonna do laetrile and the nothing but wheat grass juice diet, and visualizing the cancer going away and all will be well.

But all was not well. After a couple of years, his cancer was down to a small spot of atypia, due, no doubt, to the mild chemotherapy. So very "intelligently" he stopped the chemo and continued with the quackery.

Seven months later, the cancer had run wild in his body. All of his organs, and his bones.

Scott Adams was told he had early state prostate cancer. He opted for, of all fucking things, ivermectin. He gambled and lost, just like my dad.

And I am reminded once again of how dangerous "alternative/holistic medicine" is.

Folks, laetrile is poison and does nothing. The baked potato diet will bore you to tears. The wheat grass juice only diet will turn you into a skeleton and weaken you so you die faster. Vizualization is soothing and helps the psyche, but it does not cure cancer. And if ANYBODY suggests bloodroot to you, kick them out of the house with prejudice.

And horse wormer will not cure cancer, either.

Got cancer? Go to a DOCTOR!

That closet has several thick oak doors, and it SUCKS!

 I wish my daughter felt safe to be herself, but outside the house, it's rural Texas out there, and it ain't safe. It ain't safe at all in this part of Texas to be visibly trans. If you don't "pass", you best stay presenting what your birth determination says you should dress like. And Lis does not pass. She's beautiful, absolutely beautiful, but even if she dressed as a girl usually dresses, they would spot her and make her life hell. Or make her life... NOT. Texas.

I wish she could afford to move to at least Austin, but on less than $800 a month income (disability) that ain't happening. At least there's liberals there. 😛 But ideally, I would see her in the San Francisco Bay Area, with her unusual sibling, my 34 year old estranged kid. However, I think those two would really be good for each other. And Lis would be a lot safer. Sadly, I can't say "safe". Nowhere seems to be all that safe for trans folks. Some places are better than others, but none of them are wondefully safe.

If you're trans, a lot of the world paints a target on your face and on your heart. And that just sucks so damn hard. If you don't feel safe, then do what you are able to do in order to stay safe. And safe also includes safe within yourself, not hurting yourself by staying hidden, if it's making you absolutely miserable.

It's making Lis miserable, and I want to help her and I don't know what the hell to do. I've told her that if she wants to dress pretty around the house, even if she doesn't want to dress that way in downtown Fort Worth, she is more than welcome to. I've offered to show her ways to braid her long hair. When she came out to me and Sam, I took her to get her ears pierced. I just don't know what the hell to do to be more supportive of her and help her be happier. It hurts, to see her moping and moping and rarely smiling. She was such a happy go lucky kid.

If wishes were fishes, then beggars would ride, as I always told the kids when they wanted the impossible to attain, like the latest most brand new gaming console that can't be had for love nor money, and even if you found one, it would be $750 and you can not spend that on games.

Reblogging Stacie Rose - It's about power

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about trans girls in girls’ sports.

Let’s stop pretending this is a good-faith debate.

The political right is openly demanding that two opposite things be true at the same time, and they don’t even care anymore if anyone notices.

Arachnophobia

I am a major arachnophobe. Show me a spider, I show you a woman having a panic attack, whimpering and staying in the center of the bed for safety from spider fangs. I am particularly terrified of tarantulas, the big hairy bastards.

Here in north Texas out in the boonies, we get one sneaking in the house occasionally. I generally freak out until my husband catches it and removes it from my house. But they're NOTHING compared to the opossum who somehow got in and spread our full trashcan all over the place. But the worst was that fucking giant white and yellow snake, about four feet long and rather girthy that it took two healthy teenage boys to lift from the top shelf of my pantry, and then carry out of the house.

I do not like living in a place where the wildlife just feels like it can come in and set up housekeeping. I fully expect to wake up one day and see a damn coyote curled up on the big dog bed. Or maybe a bobcat snoring on the couch.

Well, at least its not giant flying cockroaches, like in San Antonio.

Not a thankful day for First Nations peoples

I am observing a day of remembrance and mourning for our land's Native Americans. Her first stewards, who loved her, and the cultures we destroyed and women and children and innocents we slaughtered so we could steal their homes and colonize, pollute, and desecrate.

Never forget. It was theirs and we stole it. It belonged to the Choctaw and the Blackfoot and the Nez Perce and the Apache and the Mohican and the Aztec and Inca and Maya and the Inuit and the Miq Maq and so many beautiful civilized nations.

We should really clean it the fuck up and give it back.

"The time has come

To say fair's fair

To pay the rent

To pay our share

The time has come

A fact's a fact

It belongs to them

Let's give it back.."

-Midnight Oil, Beds Are Burning, about the destruction of Australian aboriginal cultures, but it suits our US and south and north of the the border massacres as well.

It is time to shout out the truth.

 

Thank you, Deb Colburn, owner of Nomad, Cambridge and pretentiousl;y fake 79 year old hipster with the screaming fire engine red hair, the stupid glasses, and the designer dogs, for showing me a complete tour of your naked vagina, clitoris included, when I was five and you were 21, and encouraging me to hold and rub your boyfriend's penis and testicles when I was seven and you were 23 or 24. For breaking wooden spoons on my ass. For telling everybody I was a crazy liar so that they didn't believe me when I told them what you were doing to me.

For driving a wedge between me and my sister, and my father. For driving my mother away, then abandoning us when you had your own kid.

I hope you die bleeding painfully from your asshole.

I think I'll send this letter to the Cambridge Chronicle, Boston Globe, and WBZ news.

Bet you voted for Trump, too. Cunt.

Shit is going to get real, Deb. I won't hurt you or encourage people to. I'll just drive you batshit crazy.