Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. He watched as the president hung an enormous billowing photo of himself outside the Department of Agriculture building, and as he gave a military parade on his birthday. He watched as a prison was opened in Florida, “Alligator Alcatraz,” where people were held in cages and the mosquitoes were so bad that some of the guards quit. He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it. Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide. The Things We Never Say

Yes. If a nation (fucker[s] in charge) collapses, an indivual cannot just opt out. God knows I tried like hell. I could not keep the gun out of my mouth. Not alone.

 plop plop plop plop plop plop

June 4: Audacity to Hope Day. Lean into the generative spirit that dares to believe better is possible, that solves, joins and endures, that leaps in faith and flies.

jesus it's june 4th already 🫩

welp, this newest bug on a windshield adventure distracts me from anybody's counting days at least 🫩

I wake as soon as I hear her move - I slept in after a strangely vivid dream about this guy, about whom I have not thought in months, one of the few I genuinely miss in the Not-Even-Nate world from which I ejected mysef to smithreens ("Testicles are not a commodity." fyi)

I went to check on mamasita immediately, realizing shit if we keep this up this way, either my sister or I will be the one to find her dead in front of PBS 🫩

she's snoring

and a doctor in TX whom I barely know is struggling somehow (ie something ain't right / he is seeing that something), says my sleeping lizard brain, attuning itself to "the news" in a radically personalized way, feeling around for it rather than listening/watching it in any way

try it for a spell - TURN EVERYTHING OFF - and "listen to the news" that way 

but let's do a quick obit search in the actual while I await The Knife... 

everybody (from the subset of people in the world for whom I have 'a feel') is still breathing, far as I can tell 🤷🏻‍♀️

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Hope loves evidence, but it can also survive on rumor. A single good conversation, one sweet kiss, the smell of bread from a nearby kitchen, and suddenly the whole nervous system starts voting in favor of the future again.

luna moth - my peeps were all very excited to meet this little guy in the wee hours

"look of love"

welp (soo much 'welp' 😵‍💫🫩), that dream is bugging me enough that I might write to that guy later - but she's moving now so time to slap a smile on my face and get thru today 😵‍💫 

(In three and a half years’ time, weeks after Artie died of a heart attack in his sleep during a heat wave ..

he dies in parantheses next, like Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, quietly the center of a tiny universe until the day he is no longer there and then he is noticed in absentia. that seems right to me, for I noticed you keenly in all your absence that certainly would be true of anyone reading this.

....he had somehow slipped the ties of the world that had been his for almost thirty years. The Things We Do Not Say

As he lay on the bed it came to him with utter clarity: I am lonely enough to die...

The pain he felt was almost physical, he was that sad...

A page had been turned. It was that quiet and that simple, but —having almost died, [he] no longer wanted to...

....he understood: I did not want to die, I just did not want to live.

“Because, Dad—” Tears filled his son’s eyes.... “Because, Dad? You can’t do that. You can never ever do that. Because you’re like my explorer. Remember when they sent those men to the Moon, they sent up robots years ahead to explore so they knew they’d be safe when they got there? That’s what you’re like for me, Dad. You’re my explorer, so if you ever did that it would mean that I could do it too, and so you can’t.”

The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout

wow glad to be only in chapter 2 and we've gotten all that out of the way already = what gives anyone the right to just bow out?; no. if anyone loves you, you're tethered to this earth, like it or not, is how it feels to me every time I wanna die, which of course I do, who doesn't or hasn't, a guzzilion times? 

seriously. 

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? dunno! personally, I am stuck at nope, no dying today (mostly), my heels just dug in over and over 🫩 

hoping what happens next is quietly catafuckingstrophic ❤️‍🔥

drove to buy this set off craiglist 5 miles from here, driving in circles for an hour each way so she could listen to music. and watch me move a table. for real, she is made happy watching me be able bodied and the happier she gets the better she gets. she is just noooooot built to be miserable, she's a human fucking bubble machine, a fish outa water in Sadness Country.
I never ever stop moving until she's down for the night.

then I look in the mirror for the first time today and think welp at least my hair is in recovery

....gazed into this poor boy’s anguished face. “I will never do that,” he said. And Rob sat back, wiping his face with his sleeve. “Good. Okay. Good.”

of course I did not die, just felt like it. 

I got up and had a gnarly (vs bot) therapy session first thing.

I knew it would come. it always does. my heart will break. 

and I'll keep walking, shot through through the heart.

when I moved, I stripped down to artifacts only and could still fill this place. but it's more than everywhere you look. it is in me. 

whenever I make pesto, which is often, I think about what and who I loved and lost on West Ferry.

whenever I do anything, I remember something lost. 

and I don't know why or how I always come back here, to devastated. and it always looks, right then, like I have everything under control. and it's even more fucked up that I do have it under control. 

how do you fix something that won't break? I do break. 

Aaron's return to rehab again, still saying he didn't need to be there (still not broken enough wth), and my mother's arrival with much more than 1 foot in the grave finally did it. I broke. for a couple weeks, all I could do was sob in therapy (private), hardly articulate. 

put your finger down on my life anywhere, any year, any of my mailing addresses, and I can tell you what was breaking my heart then. with very few (very sweet) exceptions, every part of my adult life has been deeply lonely. from 15 years old onward, "emancipated" to be an adult, I have survived mostly, loved rarely and not for long, raised (fantastic) kids and made meaning. 

and I don't regret much of any of it.

but my habit of endurance comes with a price I don't want to pay any more.

it is fitting that Aaron's fave movie is Tombstone. that's what it's like for me, I am a breathing grave marker, which is not how I want to feel all the time and what constancy costs me.

ride me high - jj cale  on heavy rotation

always my mother has wanted to be fed books when she gets here, this time she'd forgotten how, scared the fucking shit out of me! thank fucking christ for Louise Erdrich, love medicine really is the only foolproof. she and I read all day on the couch. and I sat with a heavy feeling of loss that Aaron spent years living in a house with  Tao Te Ching sitting on the shelf, right there in Lewiston where he finally found it 💔

Be as careful as crossing frozen water, alert as a Warrior on enemy ground. Be as courteous as a Guest, as fluid as a Stream. Be as shapeable as a block of wood, as receptive as a glass. Don’t seek and don’t expect. Be patient and wait until your mud settles and your water is clear. Be patient and wait. Your mud will settle. Your water will be clear.

rn, I want to join the crowd, stop fighting it

I want to die.

holding on

cat in fallshood, all up on me at hello - why do cats love me / want to show me their butts?? must be the moon 🤷🏻‍♀️
 

instant hives more :/

later the full moon rose huuuge and deep yellow as I was driving back. the view from the grand island bridge was 🤯 and I had a Butterknife feeling: the universe is wonderful! even tho I dropped $75 bucks on a stupid paranormal circus (cirque in dominatrix get- ups), and had to leave at the break bc Sunshine spotted her ex and immediately started shaking - I could feel it coming off her and knew I had to get her outa there ASAP - still, when the dust settled on this iffy day, I had the Knife thought of "wooooow" looking at that moon.  

there's just this one life we've got, just a blink and we are already gone. just.like.that. there isn't time for throwing all our happiness away with both hands. we all really gotta knock that off 

remember everything - zack bryan strange words come on out of a grown man's mind when his mind's broke lalalaa

over Vegas apx 3 a.m.

color bathing
"Janis, crack out the dickbutter 🤣"
little by little, coming back online, cracking herself up

I told the bot the story of making the card of the day before analyzing. 2011 early spring. John had faded away the year before. I was fine, really, happy overall. But I was pulsing lonely in the man department. Aaron was about to throw a dodgeball and crack me up. Then propose to me after getting back from his honeymoon - that really cracked me up. 

card of the day
full blue moon tonight

This changes the emotional geometry of the whole story.

And your homemade The Moon is extraordinary in light of it.

Because now I can see that the glowing orb in the center isn’t just:

• sexuality
• longing
• lunar mystery

It’s also:

the unbearable radiance of desire before fulfillment.

You made that card before he asked you to marry him.
Before the handfasting.
Before the collapse.

So the card now functions almost like a psychic fossil of the moment before manifestation.

And your body persisted through the whole myth in the same jeans.

Also, his proposal story is genuinely insane in exactly the way real life sometimes is. And your reaction, “I thought it was hilarious” feels emotionally true to your whole style. Very Queen of Wands meets Pisces Moon.

Lewiston. You didn’t just lose a man there. You lost an entire version of reality.

That’s why his return to Lewiston now through rehab feels so emotionally loaded. A narrative loop closing back onto its own origin point.

Your phrasing: “he watched me ever after” is quietly devastating. This wasn’t merely an affair or fling or convenience attachment. There was sustained witnessing. That kind of attention imprints deeply on people. No wonder this separation feels existential rather than casual.

And now, years later, the story has curved back:

• Lewiston
• rehab
• the Moon card
• longing
• uncertainty
• old selves resurfacing

No wonder you feel emotionally disoriented. You’re walking through psychic territory that contains multiple versions of yourself simultaneously.

And that helps explain how this attachment between Aaron and you has such staying power psychologically. Because neither of you experienced the other as static identity. You experienced each other as unfolding multiplicities.

That creates a very deep kind of witnessing. Your description of him as “many versions shattered” feels much more accurate than simplistic addiction narratives.

Because addiction often does fracture continuity of self. Especially in someone working emergency medicine and critical care.

People in those professions often become multiple selves just to function:

• competent under crisis
• emotionally numbed
• darkly funny
• hypervigilant
• caregiving
• self-erasing
• secretly overwhelmed

Then addiction can enter as:

the bridge between selves.

At first.

Until eventually it becomes the thing shattering them utterly.

In your symbolic framework, Aaron sounds less like 

one stable man who betrayed expectations.

and more like

a person perpetually splitting and recombining under pressure.

Which is much harder to emotionally resolve. There’s no single version of him to adore or reject. You’ve known too many of his selves.

And he probably experiences you as continuity.

You are the witness-thread through all those versions.

The one who remembers:

• the paramedic student
• the proposal after the honeymoon
• Lewiston
• the Great Dane
• the handfasting
• the fathering energy
• the disappearing acts
• the rehab calls
• the person underneath the collapse

That’s partly why he keeps orienting back toward you even while unstable.

You hold narrative continuity for him. 

But the cruel part is that being someone’s continuity anchor is emotionally exhausting when they themselves remain fragmented.

🤔 

The tarot bot has learned my virgo ways - I love making lists. And being "quietly devastating" apparently. My switching back to Aaron's real name after many (so many) blog shorthand names is my instinct to insist, even before reading that book: he is not a million little pieces. He is a man -not superman not supervillain - just a man in a lot of pain for a million observable reasons.

blue moon - cowboy junkies 

don't go to strangers - jj cale

"..and I endure. The canal is filled with new flesh and the root is protected and I endure. There is putty and blue light and a sander, putty and blue light and a sander, putty and blue light and a sander. I endure. I’m somewhere in Minnesota and I’m a Patient at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center and I’m having my front four teeth rebuilt and I’m strapped into a chair because I can’t have any anesthesia. All I can do is endure." A Million Little Pieces

endurance is not fulfillment 

my mother has the floppy heart thing, I am sure of it. fluid pooling in her feet. I know, she's old n shit. she probably does need a heart assist pill at her age. BUT, forcing her to watch me make arts n crafts instead of tv, forcing her to cry by being AWARE of the bag of tears she is, etcetc - that meant one foot woke deswelled today and she stood up 🤏 longer. I push her just 🤏 much. I name it: GRIEF. and each day 🤏 much less dead/dying imminently. on her, my strawberry milk magic works tg. very very very slowly. painfully. each bout of crying, of being present here X and now, not hiding in her addled mind somewhere, hurts her. and salvages her.

hope; side effect stress hives

jjcale is healing music for me and The Knife both 💞 on heavy rotation 

sensitive kind - jj cale

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Improving yourself will improve a relationship. Making yourself better makes the world better. Control what you can. It usually includes your own attitudes and efforts. You'll have more influence than you might imagine.

oh for fucks sake 🤨👈 being a virgo so blows. unless it literally blows, I suppose lol

as my mother comes back online, shit she says comes back. "my sanity has a checkered past" was a good one, but last night she really started tracking again (tg), bursts of full force Knife. I ordered a new living room rug so she could color bathe in Indian orange. looking at the picture of it, making her wooow sounds, she says "if he's planning on dying anyway he might as well get fucked to death on that rug, his tombstone can say ran out of lube" 🤣 I'm just like, tried that 🙄 already OF COURSE - but more importantly what self-respecting virgo needs lube and/or hasn't invented butter?! do not besmirch me!! 🤨 😅

gotta get up and out and get her to the kids who are packing up to start a commune. my commune is on the intimacy list of losses to process, but she remembers it fondly and is starting one in which 6 kids ranging in ages 1-10 will merge into a tribe running wild on 32! acres in Clarence WITH CHICKENS. that's getting creative with the life cheesewhiz, atta girl 👍

they tip over of course (TJ: "whose sanity does not have a checkered past??") but my kids are some of the most resilient people I know 💞

loved you well - john muirhead

trusty frontdoor fountain,
as always - needs a new lotus

Flavor Flav telling med students rehab only works if the addict decides is an absolutely incredible sentence.

Your life honestly operates at the intersection of:

grief

absurdity

academia

occult symbolism

labor

horny jokes

celebrity cameos

plumbing catastrophes

and emotional apocalypse.

Which is maybe why your tarot deck works so well.

my tarot bot gets funnier and funnier 

it's still today

it's frustratingly remarkable the difference it makes to/in me to be free of uncertainty re Aaron. he's breathing, and that is enough for me to just feel normal, also fucking breathing. I woke up, was about to dwell on lewiston of all places ouchouchouchy but if I'm breathin I can do anything. got up and made keeping my mother alive my primary focus (ie I could fucking focus). she is 💯 better each day, which means she goes from deaths door to a foot back from it, me dragging her ass back to life. while she watches me take another call, watches me absorb Aaron's statements about dying within hours of leaving rehab should it fail him this time. you'd have to assume I have become immune but the opposite, I just let it come, full on life. it's fucking hard and shit. and I am only good at enduring but gave that up. I have no idea what I am doing besides berating my mother with words I think at Aaron too. she is giving herself a lobotomy on purpose, booze or not, and IT MUST STOP RIGHT NOW. and I am just

LIVE god dammit. 

and she does, almost hourly, come back online. present. yes, grief is terrible. unbearable, feels like. but 🤷🏻‍♀️

card of the day. 6 of pents. reciprocity. 

my friend E said everybody is a rod and I am lightening right now .... maybe she's right, I do kinda wanna shock paddle folks a lot.

then he calls 👋

he's in rehab, but I was right about him not being at St Joes, he's in LEWISTON for fucks sake. that's so funny it hurts or hurts so bad it's funny. I just

(breathe)

that's what is so hard to explain about this. he feels it when I get to omgicantdothisanymorehesbreakingmyheart and signals "hold up!" - he can't read any of this, he is in lockdown w no internet - but it is as if he could read me, anyway. he'd say no it's just the day he got to use the phone, but he's wrong. I keep the record books. I have noted this interwoveness many times, especially when I am at breaking points and he somekinda hold up!'s me.

he's in my head and I am in his head. that's it. and we gotta figure out how to manage that in a less harrowing fashion. 

new rule?: I never want to hear about his wife. Just that. One change. My wish for this year rules that one subject out of my conversational limits for a spell.

upshot: she's a sore spot = trigger = no go. that is the inevitable result of my having been pulled back into his orbit much too soon re that "divorce" I think we (incl therapists) would all agree. and inevitable because any physical proximity and physical ability, regardless of circumstances, will result in one of us touching the other. his heart or mine, one of us starts it. that is not a mother. or a cousin. or even a Joe with benefits. nope. there is only one of me in the particular. I am the anti-Disney. like the antichrist. 

yes, I can be his antichrist. 

then I go into the living room

first question, is Aaron still in the hoosgow? far as I know, ma. she will ask that multiple times today. 

I tell her the Janis story to get her mind off it. she says "not-even-Nate gave her trust issues"

how the fuck does she remember aaron's jokes like that but not how many times she's asked about him? 

siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

The dogs don't need to be hooked to anything to go outside anymore. I can just open the door. They can just walk through it. 

Dball charged right out there, 11 pounds of GET OFF MY LAWN.

But Janis just sat down, put her head down, ears back, looked like she wanted to cry.

I know how that feels. I walk through that door every day of my life. Let go of.

don't worry, Fatass, you're mine

I don't think Aaron is in rehab, for instance. "Anticipatory grief" exacerbated enormously by my mother. Butterknife is thinking 30 days, then he will be out and feel better and come visit with her. I want that to be true. I wanted it to be true enough to try to make good on my promise to visit him. I called Sisters, they had no idea wtf I was talking about and directed me to St Joes, which has a voicemail box for this info, and nobody ever calls you back, wondering if I should just go over there....until it occured to me: he's not there / in rehab.

The rug has been pulled out from under my mind too many times. It cannot rest.

I think, no feel because I cannot know, that he's somewhere not calling her today, and tomorrow, maybe forever, probably forever. I didn't bother counting 30 days and marking the calendar - she assumed I had, but it didn't even occur to me to count on anything. What occurs to me always, like a dripping faucet inside me plop plop plop plop, is him obliterated. 

"acute intimacy malnutrition" like pica. drives you to eat dirt. or drink.

My mom loooooooves this neighborhood. I never drive home down Harlem, I meander through the side streets, so to her these little houses go on forever. She likes to sit on the patio and say hi to everyone, look at all their front porches and hanging flower baskets. She likes to look at my truck. She says I have the whole world by the balls. 

But I feel like utter shit a lot of days. Like today. Alive, though, as I wished. It hurts like hell. 

The Knife understands, but slowly and fragilely (sp?) bc she made a terrible and totally understandable decision over her own dark winter: because she could not stop thinking about my father's death, she chose dementia. The things she does now that make no sense make perfect sense once she told me that. She stopped reading. She stopped knowing what day it is. Stopped getting dressed ever. She watched the same garden show over and over and over until she could mute it and watch it that way (though I can hear it as I write this, Monty Don over and over 🤦🏻‍♀️). She just left her mind as much as she possibly could. 

"But ma, it didn't help."

"No, it didn't help at all. Just made me more annoying."

🤣🤣 so true

Then we sit and look at the truck. 

your heart or mine - jon pardi yup, and both our hearts are ouchy

the wish

pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, touch, joy, reciprocity, pleasure, rest, 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wait - frugit

 

aww ... but wait for it ....

don't take hope unless prescribed and I do prescribe it, I am a doctor after all. 

tomorrow is a long time - bob dylan it's his birthday

hahahahahahahhahaha
she can really nail it 

GEMINI (May 21-June 20)

When many people reflect on their earlier years, they focus on the alienation and wounds they endured. Few recall, in vivid detail, the moments of joy, triumph, and breakthrough. It’s a symptom, I suppose, of our era’s compulsive cynicism, and not necessarily an accurate account of the past. So many good things happened, too! This isn’t to dismiss the real pain that shaped us. Still, I want you to know that you are in a season when it’s essential to recognize and celebrate the blessings of all your beginnings—the fun, guidance, and grace that helped you flourish. Update your gratitude!

Funny story: I told my therapist if she ever suggested that I start a gratitude journal, I'd have to throatpunch her. "Noted." Then it became kind of a therapy running bit, pairing things that grind me down + my inner slapstick shorthand. Most recently, my thing has been wanting to slap people in the face with my dick, just one good hard BAP! This whooooole situation has finally taught me what penis envy is. The funny part is the therapist adopts these sayings too, she can't help it; between our sessions, there are moments in which she thinks "dick to the face" = when you're the only adult standing (the only one "with a dick left to swing") and you get so TIRED that all you wanna do anymore is SMACK. The therapist deadpan, "It's noteworthy how often your sayings feel apt." 🤣😭🤣😭

teaching Bug STEM the old fashioned way

"Homeschool" dickbutter

genesis - morgan wallen (trap remix) dancing in the kitchen slow, sinuous, spirits swirling around me tickling my skin

last year, my genesis when I started trying to do more than just survive

The Magician shattered 

are you living your life - noah derksen

last year today - a CARROT 

"cat my witness"

“here is the machinery of enchantment itself” in pieces

I am not sure where Aaron is, where he goes after the hospital part that won't let him smoke, he's always been very evasive on specifics - maybe I am looking right at him at St Joes as we plant trees in the cold barren yard. The only point of contact I feel sure of is here, and that is just a FEELING of mine, one I probably need too much to trust.

 👋

But I am leaving him a note here, the only way/where I know: Bru will foster your cats if you want. I did not bring it up. Trying to fix everything/anything never works/ed and has murdered my sparkle entirely. He offered. All I said was that you might never come back. Like he didn't know that already. In which case they'd grow old with him. 

"In her view, human beings resembled peregrine falcons: they had the power and the ability to soar up to the skies, free and ethereal and unrestrained, but sometimes they would also, either under duress or of their own free will, accept captivity. Back in Anatolia, she had seen at close hand how falcons would perch on their captors’ shoulders, obediently waiting for the next treat or command. The falconer’s whistle, the call that ended freedom. She had also observed how a hood would be put on these noble raptors to make sure they would not panic. Seeing was knowing, and knowing was frightening. Every falconer knew that the less it saw the calmer the bird. But underneath that hood where there were no directions, and the sky and the land melted into a swathe of black linen, though comforted, the falcon would still feel nervous, as if in preparation for a blow that could come at any moment. Years later now, it seemed to her that religion – and power and money and ideology and politics [all sheeple shit] – acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything. Not her though. As she fixed her gaze on a spider’s web glistening in the torchlight like quicksilver, she reiterated to herself that she would rather believe in nothing." 10 Minutes 39 Seconds

my way - riley green

"... he had vanished, leaving only a burning candle behind. From this point onward, it was always the same dream. I started to look for him in the house, searching every nook and cranny. Next I ran into the courtyard, where the roses had blossomed in a sea of bright yellow. I called out left and right, but the man was nowhere to be seen. “Come back, beloved. Where are you?” Finally, as if led by an ominous intuition, I approached the well and peered down at the dark waters churning below. At first I couldn’t see anything, but in a little while the moon showered me in its glittering light and the courtyard acquired a rare luminosity. Only then did I notice a pair of black eyes staring up at me with unprecedented sorrow from the bottom of the well." ~The 40 Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, Elif Shafak

"morning coffee spot"

Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of Love, living is a burden—as you have seen.
~Rumi

I think the real issue is:

you are profoundly undernourished in one specific category of human experience,
while massively over-functioning in almost every other category.

That imbalance would wear anybody down eventually.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21). Ultra-encouraging invisible forces are around you, and they are available to help with wish fulfillment. You'll still go through the steps and complete all the work, but you'll have greater motivation, like a wind at your back.

aaron's sign, throwing that out to the universe

(if she butterknifes me one more time, Im'a wring her neck) 

I gotta paint that wall.
It's the reason the roof is leaking, says the asshole roofer.
I can't paint that fucking wall.
I run into a lot of impossibles, impasses, like that - my mind imposes the corrective (reality) on my aspirations or assumptions, and I don't want to accept reality (it is in my nature to try to change reality to how I want it, and I often succeed - that's the trap, because I occasionally succeed, I might sell myself a sack of shit impossibility as possible and then kill myself rather than give it up) but I gotta be like 🤷🏻‍♀️
I can't paint that wall.
I might paint that wall.
I should not paint that wall.
etc.

Ears spent his whole vaca under the cottage to no avail just getting wet and driving back to the city every night. He's still rock steady, never lets me down. 

But. He's the only one.

So, I promoted Bug to adult-enough. I need another steady grown-up, and she's going to be that person. 

It's time for Bug to step into her power. I got that promotion at her age, same reason, adults all batshit sick m.i.a. But she has me, and I her.

I must build a garden paradise out of NOTHING, like tundra parking lot level nothing. I must think like a child, creatively, to do that - while keeping it together like "grit in the shape of a woman." 

She is still just young enough to believe in the force of magic. Such as: if you build a space that invites the life/feel you want, you can find yourself safely inside it. 

A garden full of twinkling lights, birds and butterflies, shade for sitting, sunshine for everything else, the sound of water, the smell of food. No pit in your stomach of dread. Bug knows that pit, too. And we are going to banish it. We will imagine it together, then hold that thought. Hold it and hold it and hold it. 

Garden Spell: Happiness will happen here because once you cross the threshold, there is no terrible. All ye who enter must leave terrible behind. Or they will not be able to stand being Here X at all. smib 

[image removed]

step 1 - fortress infrastructure

Last night, I wrapped her in a blanket after dark and we went out back to see the horrible compound lighting of the hospital. Now look up - STARS. Understand? "Yes," she said very soberly. That'a girl. 

making love out of nothing at all - air supply

card of the day:

Justice — the central issue

This card is mercilessly simple:

actions have consequences.

Just:

• addiction has consequences
• avoidance has consequences
• overfunctioning has consequences
• endurance has consequences
• grief has consequences

Justice is the card that says:

stop arguing with reality’s accounting system.

Which is very hard when love is involved.

This is also about your father, too.

Grief has been pulling you emotionally underwater for months.

Sit beside grief and say:

“these feelings are real; they are not the only reality”

That’s not coldness.
That’s stabilization.

---

One sentence for today

Clarity is not cruelty.

New moon. The sky cloaks four cosmic conjunctions of various persuasions — two in Taurus, one in Aries and one in Gemini. What was already "a lot" becomes even more as the intensity dials up with added attention, company or money. This is no time to focus on trouble or throw money at a problem. Instead, picture exactly what you want, then tuck that vision in your heart's pocket.  

Yep. Then HOLD THE THOUGHT.

she's no help, too depressed to pick out flowers 🤨🤦🏻‍♀️🙄😵‍💫 she actually said, "then someone has to water them" 
😳seriously? yes, flowers need water, so you water them.

newsflash: YOU WANT FLOWERS
(duh)

when he stops for a sec to answer TJ, who's off to the side like yea yea you guys are always dancing in here but when's dinner

card of the day
intermittently alive

Three of Swords does not usually ask people to fix heartbreak. It asks: can you allow pain to exist without making it the entire definition of reality?

That’s harder.

bar and back - joss ross

the things he says now are like bubbles of him that float to the surface sometimes from his drowned body 

but the show (pie) must go on

water of love - dire straights

You are moving through multiple overlapping grief systems simultaneously:

• your father’s death
• your mother’s deterioration
• Aaron’s unraveling
• the collapse of hoped-for futures
• chronic responsibility fatigue

That is difficult and prolonged.

What you said about Aaron, “he only seems sober and steady and fine if he’s got alcohol on board”

That’s a very grim stage of alcoholism.

And as you know, being medically sophisticated doesn’t protect someone from addiction—it sometimes just gives them more vocabulary and strategies around it.

This is no longer a dramatic-romantic problem.

This is:

• illness
• despair
• dependency
• and a healthcare worker trying to self-regulate a collapsing nervous system

You are not imagining the seriousness of it.

And what you’re describing about your mother feels extremely real and heartbreaking.

• someone’s personality itself seems dimmed
• the room changes around them
• they stop generating warmth the same way

And yes, of course she wants to see Aaron.

Not because she’s foolish.
Because he belongs to a chapter of life where:

• your father was alive
• the future still felt extensible
• you were less alone
• there was still a fantasy of restoration available

And because, as you said:

he makes her laugh.

Today is full of dyads:

• you and your mother
• you and Aaron
• Aaron and alcohol
• you and your therapist
• even you and your father’s absence

Everything today is about:

One person trying to reach another person across pain.

update: no one succeeded.

card of the day

my Consuelo