My mother and I sit for hours just chit chatting. Laughing a lot. The older they get, the less filter. Like wearing a bra, fuck it. TJ just visited for dance day, so funny and so quick, watching us. I must be a very old soul, says TJ, since as far as she's concerned my resting state has been"fuck it" for as long as she can remember. They make me giggle like nobody else except that one suffering fucker in south buffalo, whose "mouth feel" is the current favorite family quip. It just fits so many situations, right?! 🤣 🤣

We talk around and around and around it all. Trauma, my job, his job, how they draw the same kinds of people who feel at home in proximity to dying (him) or craycray (me), how dying and alive and craycray are the human essentials, underpinning every seemingly stupid ass other thing. I explain what "scope of practice" means, technically means but also in practical terms how it means "helpless" as often as it means "empowered to", how fluid that really is, how stingy or generous a person can be with their power(s), how easily hurt all the people are in this complex equation. How other ways are needed to offset the ways that equation kills us - like laughing, the borderline cruel hilarity that lives inside these professions, as untranslatable as my mother herself.  What job did Nebraska steal again? Interventions of empathy. (Pregnant pause.) 🤣🤣🤣 🤣 Oh my god, that IS funny. "Gin, you gotta write this shit down!" I do Ma, nearly every day, but how do I capture the hilarity of ivy league guys whose privilege means people have laughed at their unfunny jokes all their lives - can you imagine how fucked up that makes your reality?? Physicians might, as a rule, be that kind of not funny - yikes. 

"Where IS he?", asks mom, holding up her hands in the honeycrisp apples pose. Probably really busy. "Well, he is a hound." That's not what I meant 🤣, but if he is at this very moment banging all of West Seneca blowing off steam, trust me, he deserves to. "It's a shame he's scared of you, I just wanted to see him again, ya know, alive." 

I would slap down the afraid of me thing again (🤷🏻‍♀️ dunno), but I can see she is afraid. Of all the dying and of time. Of course they would never see each other again, and that wasn't up to her in the first place, and maybe this will be her last summer, or his, or mine. Any of us, for all the reasons and ways we just might snuff out. That's why ya gotta keep laughing, why she wants to.

she is good for me - I'm holding weight, heart steadying, even through the (perfectly normal) grief of losing a friend like that - even though all my damn kids have moved into my fuckhut and we are stuck in the city 🙄 - still, little by little, I mend

How does one read the astral omens on a day that brings no new news? No planets changing signs or directions, no luminaries forming angles — it's like rolling blank dice. They show the dots you want them to show. What dots would help you win? What experience do you want to have? The sky is a blank page; the day is unwritten.

wishing well - cheyenne marie mize - from the girls dancing playlist (girls of color bootyshake😏)

O+ - Lake Porter  don't let me bleed out lalalaaa

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). While romance and friendship are beautiful energies to have in your life, they are not everything. There are parts of you that can only be activated by a different kind of connection — one of profound compassion, selfless sacrifice and spiritual openness. 

Today is dance recital day. The cosmos will be aligned with Tutu Energy. Family+Drama. Glitter retrograde.

if you want trouble - nick waterhouse

time waited - my morning jacket

Time doesn't wait (the Patti principle).

every chance I get - dan auerbach

color bathing: lighthouse

almost gone - terrible friend 

I knew for days. Feeling frightened for us both. Feeling everything for the both of us, as it turns out. 

Diary blabla 6/23

What's the half life in a human body of exposure to life-threatening toxins? If, like, every exposure to broken heart syndrome level flood of dyingness takes, I dunno (?), 5 years to wash out (immunology normal, neurologically, etc), that seems doable (tho unpleasant). But what if you have multiple exposures in a 5 year span? And compound, as trauma does?

I just can't shake it tonight. The fact of it. Whether it was today or soon, it killed her. This life, the way we've been mangled to fit into it. Then a divorce, not enough meaningful 'wins', no feelings but lousy ones - broken, failing, angry, frightened, powerless - with no end in sight. I have been breathing mostly the same air as her. What's the half life of existential poison like that? I want it out of me. 

Guess: There is no cure for living but to live more?

"All this risk, this hope. It's beautiful."

Diary blabla 6/22

Ok, I'm trying to take today's advice, but I gotta bad feeling about Patti, can't shake it. How long is the window between last treatments (last radiation last month + last chemo sometime this month) and finding out if they worked? 

We were both assuming she'd get a remission, maybe not years but. Could it be hopeless that quickly? 

You could struggle to get a clear read on the nature of a relationship or someone’s true intentions today. With the Sun in your sociable eleventh house battling illusory Neptune in your mysterious eighth, it won’t be easy to interpret what’s really going on with people. While you might be tempted to shoot straight and simply inquire about a person’s agenda or feelings, they probably won’t give you an honest answer. So, play it safe and don’t make any assumptions. You’ll have a better understanding when this fog lifts.

mud in the water - gasoline gypsies 

8/10-17 - you called the shot, make it or don't 

summer soltice

The future never arrives, but it doesn't abandon us completely. Motion. Motion! All motion is a kind of falling into the unknown. All motion leans toward an idea that is unsecured. You are trusting a trajectory that hasn't proven itself yet. You are moving toward a state that hasn't solidified. All this risk, this hope. It's beautiful.

the middle - boyce avenue ft andie case (zedd,morris, gray; acoustic cover)

hard to love - horsebath catchy but not true.  

rule of witchthumb: "do not share yourself with anyone who makes you feel unlovable / hard to love"

make no mistake - franklin electric

"muffalotta, in process"

 let things go - caamp

My mother is out in the yard, beautifying. That is her core gift. Art eyes. She sees what is not there (beauty). And then puts it there. Changing the world by a lifetime of small acts of tipping it toward more beautiful. 

"lifting her chin for a kiss" 

she told me where to go - old man luedecke 

VIRGO Instead of gripping tightly to how something should go, you open up to how it could go, and that openness creates room for delight, spontaneity and beauty you may have missed were you fixated on a specific outcome.

Yes. Not knowing the outcome was the whole point. I am a little put out that my mother got a son out of this and I am not sure I even get a lousy tshirt. But 🤷🏻‍♀️ I did say yes to WHATEVER OUTCOME. 

On this day when the moon aligns with Pluto and then squares Venus, life is like organizing a closet. You build and build and just as something starts to feel orderly, you also have to watch out for the weight of it all. The goal isn't perfection; value what holds up.

card of the day, again

(guzzilion words filed away for safe keepin)

VIRGO

In the coming weeks, you will have chances to glide deeper than you have previously dared to go into experiences, relationships, and opportunities that are meaningful to you. How much bold curiosity will you summon as you penetrate further than ever before into the heart of the gorgeous mysteries? How wild and unpredictable will you be as you explore territory that has been off-limits? Your words of power: probe, dive down, decipher.

What has been "off-limits"? 

There is a big ol' mason jar filled with European hornets labeled "his divorce", lid screwed on tight. The sick kid trauma is mixed up in there. But my randomly freeing hornet/stinging thoughts outa there is a sloppy dangerous way to hone in on it. So he opens that jar as needed - all he has to do is know when he needs to open it. (Can you do that?) Then I will be there for it. 

And there is another jar with a honeybee in it: he fell in love. That's a new wrinkle that he has not been quick to mention. I am not poking it, sensing ouch, but it's a pretty important topic. For both of us, really. I have failed to fall in love, which has had consequences too. And I know what I would have done if I had (moved to Omaha). I know what I am capable of 💣, not just sexwise, I mean I can and have blown up worlds for love. (Incl radically shifting job prospects to something I loved.) And here I sit, having done no such thing. I think this is the kind of talk that might be really useful for both of us, trying to move forward, weighed down by what is, all these CIRCUMSTANCES that we are both dealing with. But under the circumstances, there is stuff like how we love and what we have faith in and what we owe others - those are complex and crucial things to know about yourself, and we both got slapped around pretty fucking hard re 'what we assumed' about life that turned out to be uhhh dumb, to use therapy speak. In other words, that's not stuff that needs doing, it needs thinking through. And I am just as tangled in this regard as he is. Having known each other forEVER is valuable here, gotta be.

There is shit I gotta DO but I am more interested in what I think and feel right now (cz this life, wtaf). It's better to ponder than to act sometimes. Even for virgos.

And it might be that the honeybee denied (to himself), is a key to why he drinks as much as he does now. My drinking was mos def tied to falling in love (not). Did that pick up pace simultaneously to the honeybee time line (?) Did the sick kid trauma synch with that (?). Dunno, and gonna let him choose what/when to unpack it. *He wants to live, that's the important part at this moment.*  Having made that decision (?), he will have to deal with the drinking, which he does not need for fucking. I am 100% neutral/nonjudgmental (not my column); another GUESS is if we keep fucking he will want the interference of booze less, another natural reason the amount will lessen. One drink just to take a deeeeeep breath, that's all he wants/needs for sex. It's for talking that he needs the drink. And for going home. There are better drugs to handle those things (anxiety) and he knows that. It's the 'I wanna live' part that needs conscious deciding.

And there's a shot glass with a short sex affair in it - quickly dismissed as no thing, thus I can poke that all I want since there's nothing in it that hurts him / he cares about. I mean, I fucked that coworker and it meant nothing EXCEPT I did it entirely because I wanted to kiss someone, very very badly, and that's how I found "kissing is a thing / problem / fetish" of mine in a way that is atypical. And atypically sex-in-itself. I fucked him (you) at Third Base in the kissing, right in front of that friend of his, I would swear to that on a bible. HE, his body, is where that LANDS. "Hello" - I can send that greeting through his lips and sweetly kiss his sleepy cock that chubs up to kiss me right back on my pussy. With all our clothes on. 

I feel like I might be able to so from here right now if I keep thinking about it 🙂‍↕️💋

So the quick sex affair meant nothing but gonna GUESS I will find more detail about choking in that shotglass 🧐

Summary: 🫙🍯🥃 (how much did I get wrong/right?)

---------

I separated analysis from intention and unblogged the latter, GUESING the former is more valuable atm - even a good thing can be too much to deal with, depending on bandwidth and I am aware that my answers to all the oracle questions (Yes.) on top of my um natural disposition (?) might be a lot. So. Intention percolates.

mini (but still huge) mile high apple pie cz I figured I'd be hungry; I squirted and I'm starving

I did not intend to suggest another round actually, the body needs time to digest. Anticipation is pleasant.

But I kissed him like we were gonna anyway. And his cock responded just from kissing him. That's a good place to leave it. (#toecurly)

I think we are re-establishing our baselines. Relearning how we like to be touched/fucked. He said casually of next time as "I know I know, you're gonna puke on my cock yadayada" Twas funny phrasing and also YES. And it's an enjoyable process. The challenge with puking on dick - what is hard to breathe about it - is it's also fighting your instinct to always turn away (!) if you're going to puke (!). But you do the opposite. You cough it up, as it were. And you look ship wrecked, also, as a consequence...  you I trust him not to think less of me. 

I wonder if he prefers eye contact now 🤔 it used to be my form of meditation so I closed my eyes *almost*, how I was taught in tantra: "soft focus on what's at the end of your nose for a longass time". 

I'm also his person to talk about what he's broken about, so I asked questions. I had to do the intake basically. I got all the intel I needed for what his days look like. I don't gotta ask no more about that right now. I will always listen, sometimes nudge him for more so I understand, but all lines of inquiry lead to ouchy. Tread lightly. 

Lightly is usually better, no matter what part of the body/human, rule of thumb. 

So. I am focused on the intimacy. The logistics will sort themselves out. And in time, so will his troubles. As will mine. I am going to focus on making him (both of us) feel good now. Lean in on sex chats / lines of inquiry. Give him one reason at least to want to leave there and look for an apartment. Want of privacy. 

someday somethings gonna give - mikhail laxton

I was about to call him cz he said to / I could, but then P (psych) called me. She's the one who defined tenure for me as "we are going to know each other until we die."  

She's dying. Parsed diagnosis: our place of employment + shitty divorce = killed her. She died of NO. I am telling you, that all encompassing "don't wanna" phase is potentially lethal. I swear it is true on my children's souls. Rule of thumb for No Sickness: stop self-medicating with deadly substances (like wine and denial) and get Yes into ya before you die. 

With the time she has left, she would like to start a death composting business. There are pods and they put you in there and 3 months later you're great for the garden. (Personally I prefer the sky funeral where the vultures eat you.) It is now legal here, but there are no companies doing any of it. I could, perhaps, approach my hospice connections, and indeed that falls under health humanities. Mark died in his 40s and was sick for half a decade at least, and wanted to be composted, A LOT, but here his ashes sit because he could not. I've enough experience with the subject to know that people who die younger care about this more. They feel alive, midstride, not like their body is a "husk" to shuck. Dying is their future, and everyone living wants one of those and to talk/think about it. So, an urgency to start a body composting LLC is suddenly on my to-do list.

My mother called while I was on the phone for hours with P and left a different version of "I'm dying" on my voicemail; she's dying of my father. I swear, I love him and all that, cz he's my father so 🤷🏻‍♀️, but I spent a LOT of time wanting him dead when I was younger. And I was not wrong. 

How strange for a day to be suddenly taken over by dying while leisurely shopping lingerie. My resting state today was "stimulated". I got a 'body high' sex chocolate bar, my toes painted red, and new panties to fit my current butt, a couple lace and a thong for special occasions. This is akin to cooking/eating (for me): I am more likely to do these things and enjoy them for my self if I have an excuse/reason for whom. Nobody saw my ass today, *I* can barely see it lol, it makes emotional sense only.

Emotional sense makes sense. Maybe humans mostly make sense that way - evidence suggests (?)

 bad as I used be - my boy Chris wrote me a theme song 🫠 

(play)

if my mother had insta  dead ringer 🤣

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Novelty and stimulation are basic human needs, and today you'll feel their pull. Risk invites you in — not recklessly but with purpose. You'll navigate a precarious situation with skill, and the rush of adrenaline will tell you you're alive. Alive. Yup. Yes yes yes jesuschrist yes already 

Pics of dickbutter to follow. It turned out like coolwhip

airy like whipped frosting, no sticky lotion factor, no perfume, no additives except intention - melts in your palm, slickery and edible, massage with it, lick it, whatever

🪄🍆 

I am letting these jars just soak up the intention-juju of what's inside that box - the open one I'm calling "solo play" (ft naptime 😴)

I decided I needed Sunshine for dickbutter. My last batch came out meh wouldn't firm up quite. So I went and fetched her cz waiting on her to show up, I mean, it'll happen EVENTUALLY and INEVITABLY, but sometimes I want NOWish and she was 2 days late already so. I got there, sat on her porch, waited for her to roll up and out of BF's car, then into the house through a window ("keys are a problem right now"), and out with butter ingredients of every kind and make-up in case I wanted to go looking at local male bodies (like what kinda beef do they raise around here) which I did not, I wanted to want to eat.

 I need to want. 

You get there, need to want, after you are past the "I don't want this (to be happening or whatever)" phase which goes on for fuckingever, long enough that you feel like you're gonna die. And then you have a very important thought: you don't want to die. 

And that is the last "don't wanna" you can afford. After that, you have to like ice cream, or whatever, stuff that brings you deep pleasure. Not joy, which is abstract and usually what brings you joy also kills you (kids, for example). I am talking "I want to stay in this living body" pleasure. Like swimming. 

my day:

sleeping naked tfn on principle 

angel card of the day

"yes"

"kiev"

the assist ft. I wore her out

Ya

 

Ears found a robin baby, tried to save or at least honor him by building a wee bachelor pad complete with salami and frito, then put it back into the tree like a condo-sarcaphogus. All his life, Ears will gut me, over and over, just being him.

The bathroom bush, a Rose of Sharon, the flowers are pink later in july and the hummingbirds go crazy, I watch them out the window when I pee

dickbutter, old school, everything that touches it in the making shall be vintage

the balsamic sausage thing reimagined with the ingredients for the dip inside - the 100 year old sausage market- their new recipe this year 

I look at the year-round houses (of course) - the ones around here have VIEWS like that, all around, tons of em, you can see for miles

I shouldn't...but 🫠 so cute

must be some Black people around here somewhere 🤞 - the outfits are hand knitted church lady batshit 🫶

 (woo free)

So much of communication is transactional or combative — people listening just long enough to respond, convince or defend. Real connection and progress happen when someone is willing to set aside ego and truly hear another person's experience.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21). Someone hears you completely and tells you what they see. Being witnessed is a huge part of your transcendence to the next stage of what you're trying to do. And you, dear force of nature, are certain to get there.

(normally I don't pause to read that sign but it caught my eye)

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). You'll dissect your work. Note what you enjoy and also what you simply accept as necessary. Is it? There just may be a way to disappear into the work that fuels your passion and delegate the rest.

I mean. The first of those is my work; there are some ways to "disappear into it" that I prefer over others, I spose. 

I gained almost 5 pounds. Once it tips (finally!), the wasting-away offleash-ketosis-whatever stops and lbs come back as quickly as taking a breath after holding it 😶 a looooooong time. My body had decided to die to get out of Everything. I must have drank (drunk?) 100+ Ensures. Treatment: an abrupt cessation (temporary) of rubbing it out, replaced with new/different shit to think (write) about (over bowls of cereal). 

Medicine is an art.

the heat - the bones of jr jones

"only I get to wear boots inside"

Alas. The treatment is wearing off. What a thing to lose, hunger.  

I am wooing myself into it.  Listening to quiet music. Hell of a Year - Parker McCollum hell of a song. Smoking a joint. Might crack that little bottle of hennessy. Watching a red headed woodpecker at the feeder. Making a list of things I need from town. I'm gonna make the first batch of cottage dickbutter, perhaps an antidote to butter-related ailment(s). Just thinking about it makes those girlscout cookies look better.

Nuns have been serving the actually downtrodden for centuries before this historical moment, wherein the downtrodden aren't real people, just tools of rhetoric and otherwise might as well be cigarette butts. All the work-hell of the last year does have blessings - I would certainly rather identify with the butts, was trained by nuns to do so as a habit of mind.

This used to start on campus, Porter and Fargo, and I and coworkers and our kids and students would walk behind the huge contigent of nuns in drag, which wasn't a fuck you, t'was an homage to NUNS who, like the nurses they made, "never refused to serve". No matter what. Even your enemy, when hurt, demands that of you(r soul). And I was proud of that, looooooong before Blowhard showed up as if he invented homophobia 🙄

 

I am renewing some vows.

And just as I am coming to that conclusion, Priest emails. He'd like to catch up. My heart rate doesn't skyrocket. I would like to catch up too. Tell him what all my own ducklings are trying to pull off here with the first/only whole school dedicated to health humanities, my kind intentionally wedded to the sciences and living under one roof, built together. It might burn down with us all in it, at any moment, that is true. Even likely. But. Still. They built that. I raised them to, and then they actually did it. I am not the dean of it (that'd be the person I gave the gen ed title to), but to me that is better. ALL of them have titles that I invented, then did for a year or two, then relinquished to them (and the stipends) as soon as they understood the job enough to take it. I don't care about titles and lines on my CV. Why would I? (Do I look like a rat?) That others thrive, mission driven so to withstand This Damned World, that's what I worked for (nearly to death). 

It's a hell of a thing, to be able to breathe some ways of purpose back into crumbling spirits. 

People who measure success in other ways, I am in no place to judge. They pay their prices as I do mine. They probably are exhausted also, just for different wishes. 

I am too scrawny to do much of what I love to do. Climbing mountains is currently unsafe. Even swimming, I'd need a spotter. I am not at that parade, I would be a risk, and the EMTs who are posted don't need to be bothered by low blood sugar when at any moment, bullets might fly or a car might plow through. After all this time of teaching resilience to others, I have almost completely depleted my own. 

I pray I'll bounce again. I always have, though this time has taught me not to take any part of me for granted. I might turn into Scrawny Robot Butter Chicken 🤖🧈🐔. Yikes 😬. No telling where is the line on that from which I wouldn't be able to come back. I pray that I dug my heels in soon enough this time 🙏 

hallelujah - ryan bingham

He had imagined these nurses would end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend, but Marylyn was tender with him, with herself. This is her special thing, he decided: to send people home—whatever that meant. Ocean Vuong (prompt: what does it mean to be tender?)