Yes. 

 

It is hard to leave a life. And to live it at the same time. While trying to conjure a new one.  How do you do that, Clippy? It seems like it outa have dramatic moments or epiphanies? Or something? But it's almost the same as NOT ending it if most of the time you're just doing the same shit. What am I missing, Chippy?

Update My mother's song choice for the day  . It was her choice yesterday too 😂

Happy International Kissing Day (news to me) - "honoring the versatility of a kiss. It can reanimate the girl asleep for a century, turn the frog to a prince, betray the holy. A kiss can cross into risky territory, seal fate, put the power in a spell, be the heart in a ritual, or the reason for a head cold. The point is, what starts with a kiss rarely ends there." 

real things - joe henry 

"strike a pose"

"Smokahontus" is racist af 🤣 - that's like using the N-word in your business logo and making white customers trip over it all damn day 🤣 kinda brilliant

The 4th at the cottage is Omaha-level fireworks, making dogs and old women hysterical. So I grabbed Gma and bailed back to the city last night before that got going.

To get to Smokahontus is a straight shot from the cottage up 77 to the Darien area, hills getting less as ya go, so you trade valley vistas (#traumabrain likes high ground) for rolling farmland and cute podunk villages. Very pretty ride until ya hit a looming roller coaster.

Then boom, a dispensary so big it's like a Pandora's XXX Box store. (ie, What even is that??) My fave part was when Ma asked about the building labeled "sacred goods." What that could be?? "King Tut's tomb, they own it now." Shit is so craycray generally that she believed me for a minute 🤣🤣. My 2nd favorite part was when, overwhelmed, I said to the nice girl behind the counter "sleeping, laughing, fucking - please" and she filled a bag with what she prefers for those activities and I bought it on faith. 

The kids are talking about moving out there, to Arcade. I dunno much about the Big Beautiful Thingy, I broke up with national news. Doesn't matter which "side", all sides are NOT on my side, so why should I tune in? Here's what I can tell ya about it though: 17 million folks kicked off Medicaid = 17 million poor folks lose any reason to stay in their city/county, where those benefits are assigned and administered, which frees them up to MIGRATE. 

Works for me! Maybe there will be a reverse migration of people like me/mine out into hinterlands 🙏. I've been wanting a chicken and a frequent flyer card at Tractor Supply for forevvvver, so long that I gave up on it deep down 😪, tbh. My "bucket list" has been whittled down to nearly nothing, being realistic.

But.

Patti's dropping dead was the last of the last of the last of the last latest straws that broke my back. If I keep on as I have, that's how I end up: Dying of Death, feeling like I failed to fully Live.

I would prefer to die by being run over by an Amish team of horses while spraypainting a recently blacktopped country road with GILFS RULE in neon paint that could be seen from space.

nice to each other - olivia dean

BOOM - sierra hull   song of the summer

"Falling to the Ceiling"

memory lane - old dominion 

smoking gun

Patti was one of my pistol character witnesses.  That wasn't the worst ah-ha of the day (ya think you know people) but I'd give it most annoying (now what?)

Dropped mom at the cottage puppy pile with the kids for a spell. Went to yoga. In underpants I bought on clearance at Rite-Aid. Then had a double quarter pounder with an Ensure+ drink for dinner. 

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Do it the easy way today. When you get irritated, try using your feet. Sometimes walking out the door solves everything. If someone doesn't get your vibe, that's their loss. You'll attract your real allies by being fully yourself from the jump.

I read "full of yourself". I mean, I can do that! 🤣 Oh, FULLY not FULL OF, gothcha. I need to mull the difference -_0 

My mother has discovered that when I get Frustrated with Life, I yell at my house, like yelling at God only I displace it onto the dwelling. It's brick on concrete with cast iron rafters btw the floors (a bunker, of course). If I yell and call my house a boring motherfucker who hands me expensive problems and keeps me prisoner in a life of nothing but workwork that's now filling out forms more than it is unearthing craycrays and it can go fuck itself and WHERE ARE MY FUCKING KEYS YOU STUPID FUCKING HOUSE etcetc, who will that bother? Nobody can hear me. The dogs don't love it, but they're used to it. Ma is not 😳. 

It is what it is, as Sis would say.

But it is harder to yell at yellow walls - again, Ma is right.

So ok, I will take walks instead of yell at my house today, that'll be better for my body and easier on her nerves. If it rains, I'll force myself to go shopping (maybe) (where do people even do that anymore? seriously?). I have almost no clothes. Btw the pandemic and the giant skinny-making tantrum with a home invasion theft btw, there's just nothing left. I basically just hang out in my underwear all day, every day. Yoga, my fave place to go, the "outfits" are underwear, so that doesn't inspire shopping. The last time I wore full yoga pants there, my sweat weighed them down, they started to slip off, so I just took them off and kept going, fuck it, and nobody batted an eye. So basically, if I have to get actually dressed, it frustrates the hell out of me, and I yell at the house over it 🤷🏻‍♀️. I am not saying it isn't craycray, but there's a logic to it ish. That logic is lost on Ma 😳. She's just like, do you need a nap? (Yes. Who doesn't?!?!)

I could live in this. And not need clothes. Just sayin.

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. 

Uh, I am down for being a weather vane in the Wizard of Oz 🌩

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

if you want trouble - nick waterhouse

...psychological and physiological responses to admiration, longing, idealization and more. 🤔 (mulling the "more" in this sentence, a word usually followed by of)

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Your emotions run deep and strangely specific today. Your body picks up what your mind can't yet name — a shiver, a tug, a pause. Pay attention. These subtle cues are your map forward.

I might do anything. Logically speaking. I mean, if I'm sick nearly to death of all my options, then WIDEN the WILLING TO parameters. No?What's more nuts than hot yoga??

time waited - my morning jacket

Time doesn't wait (the Patti principle).

every chance I get - dan auerbach