VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Try out the new idea, and don't stop there. Keep generating new visions for what could be and keep trying to bring them to life. Dream more, try more. That's the formula for the change you desire.

I dunno if 60+ aging relatives wearing pasta sauce and weeping whiskey tears is a likely cauldron of new ideas, but 🤷🏻‍♀️. Half of them, the dad half, are very well off $-wise, and that's the side full of suicides. And the other half, well- or ill- managed mental illness (do we thorozine [sp] the molested anymore? hope not). So much of what I remember of these people makes me incredibly sad. My uncle Perry, the eldest brother who climbed out the 3rd floor window of the orphanage to check on his bros - ages 7, 4 and 2 at the time.

He had 4 kids, one is dead, one grandkid dead, suicide adjacent are they all, alcoholics a lot, none of them not speaking to each other - how did we go from my getting Hammy (hamster) from my cousin, my first object of pure true love, to this? I remember watching the little peanuts come into the world with my cousin, dad name Bud and Mother of Pearl - baby hamsters were his first business. They all started businesses. They all prospered. They're all rich, and shattered. Like Hammy was shattered, whipped at a wall by a troubled neighbor kid. I know exactly how we all got here, random acts of violence and aggregiously bad or nonexistent healthcare. And there is no time to revise.

To a person, I can promise you not one of them intended these life outcomes. They were brimming with quick wits and a variety of talents. Gotta say, I am related to A LOT in every one of these folks. I think they all, we all, just banked on always brimming naturally, like we each had an endless supply of good health and wishing wells of possibility we could keep pulling from no matter how much we abused ourselves or each other. But the well isn't endless, it dies with each of us, and if not careful it'll dry up long before then. The day the possibility for anything new ended for my father, the day he knew 'this was it' = he died. COVID, he lived through it but never came back from it. He *wasn't ever going for a walk in the woods again*. So he wanted to die. I just believed him. 

same bikini, but the puppy is dead by now - can you see it on me?

I am the weird one.  I do god knows what for a living and I am always alone and far away. I make them feel odd and awkward - do we hug you?, they ask when I see them again, as if I am a different creature or maybe breakable. Today I will be sober, probably dry eyed (I am doing my crying now), quiet. I will stick close to my mom, like a spiritguard dog. I think I'll imagine being dead, too, try to. They say once you are released from time (die), all feelings like resentment and discontentment just fall away from you. How would all this look to me if I could do that? 

I hate to say it, such a cliche, but the thought experiment lands in my guts as a truth: nothing but love actually matters. Love, the best of humans, and still plenty dangerous, is more than enough. Everything else is just everything else. 

Tbones final playlist, Sis overruled Dire Straights, I squashed Jefferson Starship.