Not too long ago, a Facebook post by James Fell ran through my newsfeed. (If you don’t follow him, you should. He’s pretty great.)
Here’s what he had to say.
The comments were, as you could probably guess, reactive.Read More
03
Jun
Jun
It’s allergy season.
I live in the sagebrush dotted hills of Yakima Valley in Eastern Washington State. ‘Having allergies’ is no small thing.
We are a city of farms and crops and flowers and trees, so pollen. We’re practically a desert, if it weren’t for irrigation, so dust. Also animals, “because farms,” so dander. Once the scorching summer sun comes out in full force the weeds take off like wildfire, which means more pollen. The ragweed kind.
omg allergies.
To be fair, I don’t suffer as bad as some, but in my old(er) age (wtf total bs) I have developed a Goliath histamine response. From late April until late June, I’m Seven Dwarves all by myself – sneezy, watery, sleepy, cranky, runny, itchy, bitchy, and for the most part a completely unpleasant person to spend time with.
When my allergies get really bad, I stop listening to people when they talk. I spend half my time at work staring into space, the other half blowing my body weight in boogers out my nose.
I can’t focus, I can’t pay attention, because I’m too busy wishing I could shove a puffy pipe cleaner down my throat and out my schnoz (like the crazy-eyed middle school kid did with spaghetti in the lunch room), then grab both ends and give them hell, just to itch the spot inside my head that doesn’t stop itching for three months.
ALLERGIES.
I can hear you now.
[“Um… just take an allergy pill. They do make those, you know.”]
Yes, yes they do.
Trouble is, I’m also an addict.
PILLS are a problem for me.Read More
06
Apr
Apr
Last night, I had a bad dream.
It was a lucid dream. It was a dream that was so real, I woke up in a daze. The lines between sleep and reality were blurred for a long while after the alarm went off, and even after I was up and walking around, the dream clung to me like sticky, wet fog. It clogged up my brain like cotton wool, and stuck behind my eyes like the brightness-burn you get after staring at your computer for too long, when every blink illuminates against the inside of your eyelids a perfect, colorless, reverse image of real life.
The dream I had was about real life, and it still burns.
The life and the dream.
When I was six or seven, I was the target of sexual assault. The abuse lasted almost three years. I don’t think of it often, and until I had a daughter that hit the age I was when it happened, I never thought of it at all. Those memories were dark and ugly, denied and decidedly irrelevant, tucked away in the back-most corners of my head. I didn’t drag them out, I didn’t talk about them, and the armed guard in front of the closet door where they lived knew to not let anyone inside.
There they sat.Read More
11
Jul
Jul
YOU GUYS.
I think I beat the Binge Monster.
Even if just one time, that’s saying something.
Yesterday I went grocery shopping. I was in a rush. It was almost dinner time. I had three kids with me. They were hungry. I was not thinking clearly or straight because I was REALLY hungry, because I had missed lunch, because I had been eyebrows deep in numbers for six hours, because work, because “the SBA loan refi needs to be done two weeks ago.” I was wrung out.
I put milk, eggs, cheese, meat, meat, vegetables, meat, vegetables, fruit, and more vegetables in the cart. Then I looked at my list.
On my grocery list was “black licorice.” (Gross.) It was not for me, it was for The Mister. Mostly mindless, I pushed my kid-loaded-full-of-vegetables cart down the candy and cookie aisle.
You see where this is going, I bet.
Hungry + Tired + Stressed + Candy-Cookie-Aisle = TROUBLE.
Even for someone that is not bulimic, that’s a recipe for bad choices.
04
Sep
Sep
I was thinking.
If you could travel back in time and find the younger version of yourself, what would you say? What would you tell younger-you?
There are movies about such things. A guy is older and hates his life, then goes back to talk to the younger version of himself to set things straight. There are books and blogs that tell the same story, varied in one way or another. I’m positive that almost every older person has daydreamed and wished for the ability to teach their younger-selves a lesson and prevent pain, or mistakes, or regret.
I don’t usually check the rear view, but every once in a while I think about “MAN, how awesome would it have been to know this-or-that when I was seventeen.” I think about how differently things would have been for me as a kid if I’d known then what I know now. Or how different my world would be right now if I’d made a different choice for school, or work, or relationships. Like a line of dominoes, the first few tipping in a different direction would have laid down a whole separate path.
MAN I wish I would have known.
Read More
03
Sep
Sep
We met when I was really young. I was really small when I heard my mom say she was fat, when I heard my dad tell me how lazy and gross people were that HAD fat. Ana was there, then. She held my hand tight and told me that no matter what, if I was with her I would never be THAT. “Stick with me. We’ll never be fat.” Even though I didn’t need her help then, I always knew she was there. She was my safety net.
At age seven and eight I started hearing praise for how skinny I was. “You’re so small. You’re so THIN. LOOK AT HOW SKINNY YOUR LEGS ARE.” Ana didn’t do much at that point to earn that praise, but she liked it. It FED her. She felt happiest when I heard such things. I felt happiest when I heard such things.
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02
Sep
Sep
It’s been about six weeks. For about six weeks I’ve been trying to say goodbye to Ana.
I just haven’t been able to do it.
And believe me, I’ve really been trying. The fact I’m talking about her AT ALL should indicate that I’m making progress.
Read More
25
Aug
Aug
Through the process of writing I’ve come to realize that I’ve experienced some pretty rough stuff in my life.
[I can hear you now. “UM… are you freaking kidding me? I read your blog. Of COURSE the stuff you’ve been through is rough. Have YOU read your blog? MAYBE YOU SHOULD.”]
Yes, I have. (I love it when you speak up, by the way.) But before I thought things through far enough to write the stuff down I didn’t see it as ROUGH STUFF, I just saw it as STUFF. Stuff that’s always been there. Stuff that I’ve dealt with FOREVER. It’s always been that way, so it never struck me as anything HARD. Or heavy. Or painful, or something that I felt I could change. It just was.
Read More
22
Jun
Jun
This is Notre Dame d’Amiens, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Amiens, located in Amiens, France.
wow.
Amazing, isn’t it? AWESOME. Literally inspires AWE. To put in perspective the size of the building, please note the HORSES standing out front. They’re one quarter the height of the front door.
At the time it was built, the architects of the era were in a “whose thing is bigger” contest to see JUST HOW BIG IT COULD BE. Constructed between 1220 and 1270 (yes you read that right, it took FIFTY YEARS to build it), Amiens Cathedral is the biggest completed cathedral in France.
The building is gorgeous and inspiring from the outside, but you don’t see the stunning, almost completely unbelievable, “oh holy shit” part until you’re on the INSIDE.
Feeling worthless and empty?
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