HAPPY THREE DAYS OFF, BLOGLAND! Now go outside & be merry.

My Long Island Correspondent is home for a spontaneous visit this weekend, and I couldn’t be happier. (Perhaps I’ve mentioned this before? Whatev. When you get to spend the next 48 hours with the person that makes you whole, just TRY not to blab to everyone abt it. Annnnnnnd point taken.)

We’re heading out tomorrow night with my BFF and her friend I’m trying hard to like (fer real) for some much-needed recreational liver damage and tearing-shit-up.

But not before I spend the day with my superstar Grammie, who will join me at my second viewing of Kung Fu Panda (what? I’m a fucking warrior; back off) at 10:10am, followed by shopping for clothes sexalicious enough for me to bear going swank for the night surrounded by the predictable pods of high-fashion, underage college girls. (My tolerance for the perceived beauty of other women is famously low and I don’t need any extra bullshit in my head right now! leave me alone.)

After tae kwon do tonight I’m picking up books on hold at the library and a twelve-pack of Honey Weiss and going home to my honey and shit goddamn, let the weekend BEGIN!

 

(This means you, people!)

In an almost superhuman effort to cheer myself up, I am ignoring my severe stresses today and heading to the dojo for an hour and a half of getting-it-all-out. Then, after a shower and some lavender lotion, I’m barricading myself in the closet and making a cd for my Pickle.

I’m kicking off with “Hang On, Little Tomato” by Pink Martini because let’s face it, I could do with some of that advice.

I’m open for suggestions starting…….now!

 

How to Fuck Your Shit Up

Forget to take your craziness medication for oh, five nights in row.

Experience extreme lightheaded-ness, brain zaps, headaches, severe lower back pain, and very worrisome symptoms of depression.

Cry at even the most asinine, ridiculous things for 72 hours straight. Alternate screaming at and demanding things of beloved, consume own body weight in salt. Cry some more.

Rinse, repeat.

Welcome to unintentional withdrawal.

 

Cry

When I got to work this morning and found out my coworker had thrown me under the bus in the shittiest way, I was so angry I cried.

A few minutes later, I had to wrestle my inner pitbull for over-protecting my closest friends and the effort made me cry.

At lunch I forced myself to eat an entire burrito bowl because I was feeling extremely faint and I thought the protein and calories and extra cheese would help but shoveling it down made me feel so crappy about my body I cried.

Later I realized I was too ill to stay and work but my truly unstable boss kept holding the threat of being fired over my head and I can’t have that happen and it just felt horrible so I had to cry.

Then I called Matt an hour later and told him I needed him to pick me up after work because I didn’t think I could drive and he said he was coming to get me right then and I needed to hear those exact words so much it made me cry.

When I told my boss flat-out I was leaving I was so terrified and the walk out to my car was so hard I didn’t know what else to do but cry.

I got up into the truck with Matt’s help but the effort of keeping my head without fainting was so enormous I just cried and cried.

I laid on the table in the doctor’s office and listened to them say surprise! we’re gonna have to do a pelvic and I realized that’s something I usually have to prepare myself for mentally and I hadn’t and now it was happening and it made me cry.

I heard the PA say “we’re concerned about your thyroid levels and we don’t know exactly what’s going on and we’re going to have to look into it” and my mom wasn’t there with me because she’s whitewater rapid rafting down the Colorado River right now and dammit that just calls for a cry.

So I came home to the couch with no answer and no relief and Matt handed me the mail and I opened a completely normal thank-you card from someone down south and yup, I cried.

This has been an enormously long day that’s thankfully almost over and yet I still just want to cry and cry and cry and cry.

 

 

The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert

[page one in its entirety, I kid you not]

Were there signs, willfully ignored? Did you know, on some level, that something was wrong? Did you avoid knowing? What were the signs? What did you know?

She had been having symptoms. Only recognizable as such in hindsight, but symptoms, nevertheless. A headache. Some sluggishness. Disinclination to do much of anything but hang around her house, take hot showers, slather herself with lavender moisturizer, watch movies on cable, smoke a bowl every few hours, make toaster pastries and consume them methodically, in quarters. Check her email, then check it again. But none of these things much distinguished themselves from Dahlia’s normal state, so there had been zero cause for concern.

Well, concern, sure, but not concern. Just that her life was passing her by. That she might be, in point of fact, wasting her time, herself, utterly. That this might not be a phase. That, okay: What the fuck was she doing?

She’s figured she was due for a period. She always got those awful headaches, and/or the distended belly, bloat, and/or the general exhaustion. An impending period could explain away pretty much anything.

There was also the urinary tract infection for which she’d only just the week before completed a course of antibiotics. So there were all these things wrong with her. Not to mention everything, you know, wrong with her.

[Look. Apparently someone snuck into my life without my noticing, took notes, and wrote a novel. They might have kept that stuff abt toaster pastries and bloating a secret, but I can forgive.]

 

Wednesday night

Apparently weddings lead to COMPLETE FUCKING HYSTERIA.

And no! Not hysteria on my part! About anything! For once.

We’re fighting we’re fighting we’re fighting and all of a sudden, my hand is out the blue truck window in the wow-is-it-really-finally-summer-in-Wisconsin breeze and a small part of me wants to laugh and laugh, because this is preposterous, this is energy much better spent elsewhere.

But sometimes we have days where we need to be preposterously angry, where we need to spend the energy not elsewhere but here, in this dumb humid fight abt nothing important at all.

It’s just so damn hard to remember that when you’re not the one having the preposterous moment. It’s hard to be forgiving when you see your loved one acting like an ass (even though it the same ass act you’ve pulled, oh jesus, too many times to admit, even here).

I should have bit my sarcasm back but I didn’t. I should have drawn from my resources of kind - yeah, they ARE there, believe it or not - and said I know this has been a hard day and I’m sorry and I love you and how can I make it better? and let’s run the fuck away from this craziness I mean it right now next weekend in the fall but instead I looked out at the agriculture labs where you can stick your arm inside a living, digesting cow from a hole in its side and I thought This - this is when I don’t give up on us. This is when I want to fucking smack you, when I want to open the car door and figure out my own goddamn way home, but I stick to knowing there is good here, there is love. This is when I dig my heels in and just believe. 

 

 

Open Letter

Dear Weird Local Woman Literally Sitting on the Curb on Main St Chopping the Heads Off a Handful of Peonies,

When your vicious, yappy, scabies-riddled toy whatsit dog lunged at me and you said, “Oh it’s just a nice lady!” I admit I was surprised.

Because really? We’ve been over this.

And because I’m curious: when my gut reaction was to bare my teeth and growl back, what part of you considered that “nice?”

Best,

The girl who will be crossing the street to avoid you next time

P.S. Seriously. There’s a cream for that.

 

“Listen, in the next 16 months Im’a need you two to suck some ass fat up top here. Thanks.”

*this is not THE dress. THE dress is 39898 times prettier. But I like to tease you, duh.

 

I might be a little drunk. Or more than a little.

Here’s the thing I have over all y’all. ‘Cause no matter how good you have it, you still don’t have her.

(Also: you can’t have her or her either. I’ll fucking fight you. Fer real.)

 

You said it

There is nothing wrong with you. You are NOT a bad person. You are going to be okay.

Fuck you, brain. What do you really know.