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I took that picture.

Farm Karin’s dad’s horse, AJ. He was sassy and I wanted him so badly.

But, in no way did I have enough experience to give him the life he deserved nor the training he needed.

I still enjoyed him in the time I knew him. And that is one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken.

To take said picture, I had to drive down Prospect side road in a snow storm. A month prior I had made the same drive and flipped a jeep into the swamp. My first car wreck. The road was pure ice and all peaks and valleys and super narrow. I came down a hill too fast, fishtailed and lost control. I think now, in retrospect I either hit the brake too hard, or accidentally the gas. No way of knowing. I just know I fucked up.

I remember being terrified to take that same road, in yet another blizzard.

But I did it.

The universe rewarded my bravery with some really gorgeous pictures and a few hours of playing ball with an amazing horse. And that feeling of “I was scared, but I did it anyways”.

I have fallen into a common Canadian winter mind trap.

A tease, but not quite a lie.

The myth of +1.

Those who make the long range forecasts always throw in a +1 C far enough ahead in the forecast to give us hope. Sometimes it comes, more often than not it gets pushed forward a week until finally, in March something breaks.
Once every few years we get a balmy day or 2 in February followed by a colossal dump of snow.

But eventually winter ends and the joy of summer returns. And maybe if we didn’t have the deep freezes, shin deep snow, and the darkness of winter as a comparison, June, July and August wouldn’t be so sweet.

If I ever look back on this article, mayhap I can remind myself that this too shall pass.

But we have been in a deep freeze for about a week now, and weather patterns that have been patterns for my entire life are changing rapidly.

I find myself in a constant state of ‘let’s just get through today’, ‘one more day’ or 2 or 5. 

Or, as of the time of this article being published 144 weeks, 4 days, 16 hours and 19 minutes.

I know we aren’t going to vote our way out of this, but it is something to hold onto for now.

Last night/this morning was supposed to be the worst of it and Monday is supposed to be a balmy -1. -2 now, but who is counting.

It’s been the end of January for about 84 years now.

And the snow just keeps falling. 

I flagged down a dude with a truck and a plow last week and bribed him with my last $40 in cash  to dig out our back parking lot. Took him 5 minutes, would have taken me hours. Worth it.

It dropped from -18 to -22 last night. I had to work yesterday and every atom in me was screaming, “go home, make soup, keep the animals warm, light candles, make tea and hibernate.” But instead I was planning events and counting chafers.

Somewhere deep down in my peasant DNA there is the voice of my ancestors screaming at me to survive this.

Or maybe it’s Laura Ingalls.

I read the entirety of the Little House on the Prairie series hundreds of times as a kid. I still have the OG copies my mom gave me that were hers.

She wrote prolifically about the winters she survived. Dedicated an entire book to one specifically extra ultra mega bad one.
Grinding wheat in a coffee grinder to make bread when they ran out of food. Twisting hay and straw into tight bundles to burn when they ran out of firewood. Digging a tunnel between the house and the barn to tend to the animals. And finally, eventually, one day the winter broke and the train that had been delayed for months arrived.

So honestly. This isn’t that bad. The kittens and I are warm. We have food, I made sure of that. And the car still runs. Begrudgingly, but it runs.

My son works for the football operations side of things at the same stadium as me. He worked yesterday too, and his team was stuck outside clearing the snow that won’t stop falling. I made sure there was hot coffee and soup for my family. Perks of being in food and beverage.

All of the pipes have burst on the east side of the stadium and we have a championship game on Tuesday.

I know this too shall pass.

All of it.

I have been here before.

We had a bad cold snap and about 3 feet of snow fell overnight last year. I had to dig a maze through the snow in the backyard for Alice. But it didn’t last long. Melted within a week and made going for walks through the rivers of run off and melt really hard. She wasn’t walking far by then. And the poop maze was a blessing, she lost her balance often and instead of totally wiping out, the snow banks held her upright.

Last winter was one of the worst for me. Alice had a stroke, my boss died, I got insanely sick and there were microscopic bugs in my apartment chewing the shit out of my legs and torso. Never did figure out what was biting me.

Alice fell off the bed one night and hurt herself really badly, so the bed went on the floor. 

I originally thought I had bed bugs so I tossed the couch, and her and I ended up on an Ikea mattress on the floor in the living room. Me playing games on my phone and making jewelry. Doing anything to keep busy while being as close to her as possible, while she just got sicker and sicker. Our whole life was a vigil propped up on pillows and blanket nests for 100 days.

This January has also been a bitch.

But isn’t that just January?

-30 C when Giant barbequed me steaks on our first date and the sound the snow made under the cute boots I wore instead of being practical. 2015 was it? 2014? He left a week later. I was crushed.

The ice storm of 2013 and the fallout thereof.

Burst pipe in the basement of Milton house, but at least it was hot water and the floor actually needed a deep clean. Maybe not 2 inches of water over 900 square feet, but at least the floor sloped to the east and it didn’t reach the hardwood.

The multiple vortexes/vortices at Milton house wherein I ran out of firewood to keep us warm that first winter. I had a customer who would cut up hardwood pallets on his breaks at work and fill my trunk and back seat with banana boxes packed with burnable chunks of wood.

It got me through.

8 bush cords and about 100 boxes of ingenuity and kindness.

I still have one piece. A reminder that I am capable of doing hard things.

I have one incredibly vivid memory of that year. I went into town to run errands. It must have been the beginning of March, snow still falling intermittently and Mama Nature still throwing fits of cold after the deep freeze. I had a coffee and somehow a Marlboro cigarette, maybe the last of the ones I brought back from Arizona. The sun was shining, it wasn’t particularly warm out. But you know those brief moments where the sun touches your skin after a prolonged period of grey skies and you can remember what it feels like to be warm, and that spring is real. I opened the car door and the inside was actually hot. 

I just sat for a few minutes and my optimism came off of me in waves.

I think that has been what is missing these days.

Any kind of optimism about anything.

Life is expensive and terrible. I had an event at work last Saturday. 60th birthday party for a gentleman with Downs Syndrome. It should have been sweet and fun, and it was for them. 

But I made the mistake of opening my phone and they shot Alex Pretti in the back and I spent the rest of the day terrified for humanity in general, but mostly the pink coat lady. I had to excuse myself and I cried in the elevator on the way down for a cigarette. Eyes and chest burning form trying to hold in the kind of sobs that shouldn’t be sobbed at work.

I think herein lies my problem with getting back into this writing thing.

None of this matters.

Life is just one big cortisol spike after another.
For a few minutes here and there I can forget about the terrors. If I write things down I can remember lying in bed next to Giant listening to Postcard from 1952 with a belly full of steak and whiskey. 

Or the sounds of the trees exploding in Milton from the cold and ice while I fed chunks of fragrant wood into the fireplaces and Alice was still alive.

The sense of accomplishment that comes with traversing snow covered highways and side roads. Trips that would take 2 hours in the clear turning into 5 or 6 hour tours, tucked in behind transport trucks and plows creeping at 40km/hr just trying to get where I was going. And the relief of bare roads.

The journey from New Brunswick to the ferry when I spent 11 hours holding the wheel to keep my tires in the ruts left behind by truckers and just praying I would make it on time. I did.

If I go further back I can remember being wrapped in blankets in my childhood bedroom closet, in the cubby I had made with a little lamp and a pillow nest, reading the Long Winter by Laura Ingalls.

Dark winter mornings, eating my mom’s oatmeal and listening for the announcement that buses had been canceled. Childhood joy, hot chocolate and sledding with the neighbor kids on snow days.

Maybe we will get back there. Recessions and wars end. The dust bowl eventually became fertile farmland again. Evil men die or go to prison. Systems fail and spring will come eventually.

All we can do is stay vigilant, fight the good fight and allow ourselves some nostalgia for when things were better, and some hope that they will be again.

Today is probably not that day.

The kittens are off the schedule they have been on for the past month. Up from 6am to 11am, back asleep til 6pm, up till 11pm and so on and so forth.

The good/bad news is I slept in this morning.
I have been sleeping in a lot lately.
I like being up in the dark of winter and writing by lamplight.Coffee in hand. Smoke breaks in my slippers and pjs. Feeling like I actually did something while others were still asleep.
But what am I really doing?

Plus, if I get up early enough, uninterrupted showers are a bonus.

Alas, I was up late last night and committed the classic blunder of stripping and washing my sheets, then forgetting to make my bed before bedtime.
I did it. The kittens “helped” so it took a bit longer

The time between Christmas day and January 7th was spent with a minor hyperfixation on a  niche mass hysteria event, coupled with the fear of civil war breaking out while I slept.

Nothing can exist in a vacuum.

Multiple things can be the truth at the same time.

I have a few articles floating around my head that the muses have chosen to bless me with or that my brain needs to work through, but unless I make the conscious decision to wake up and not explore the world through my phone before the sun is even up and the caffeine has hit my veins, everything becomes tainted.

An article about Jail Bae and Prison Bae and my role as comfort girl for both of them.

But ICE is harvesting and murdering people in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

I wanted to talk about the loss of Alice and the healing process. About how I just pulled 13 cat toys out from under the stove while my kittens supervised and my second coffee percolated.
For a minute there, things were both comical and peaceful.

But Russia pulled diplomats out of Israel and the ceasefire is a lie.

I have snippets of the catharsis surrounding getting my implants removed and the physical and spiritual ramifications of this whole surgical/healing process.

But listening to anyone in the Trump administration or their supporters justify anything that has been happening just launches me back to a place where I was gaslit for years about what I knew was happening. Those 2 thoughts jive if I let them.

This is not cognitive dissonance, this is sociopathy. They believe the words they are saying.

I am thinking the only way around this is to get up and write. Keep the outside influences out for as long as possible.

But then there is the laundry list of “have tos” and “should be doings” that, funny enough, usually include laundry. And an event order for work and the litter boxes and ceiling tiles and that new shelf I bought and and and. I have to figure out how to silence those too. Or just hit pause, on those things that all need doing.

I spent too much time this month/year/decade glued to Instagram.

Recently because I fell for “conformity gate.” The Stranger Things conspiracy that nay nay, it wasn’t bad writing, it was a fake out of epic proportions. There is something in my brain that thinks I can alter the course of events if I remain vigilant. This was ever so prevalent during the plague.

I almost wrote there is so little joy left in the world, but that is not the truth. The scales that hold the balance between joy and pain have tipped hard…towards pain.
But there is still joy.
I am still capable of love. 

My kittens taught themselves how to play fetch, and they are girls so they trill constantly. I have nicknamed the combination of the two things “yelly ball”.
Darkling Daddy still exists. And coffee, and kids laughing. But they often get drowned out by sirens and I have to be careful what coffee I buy lest I exploit someone or accidentally fund a bullet that will kill a Palestinian child.

The Greek definition of apocalypse is “the lifting of the veils” between what we believe to be true and the truth.

It was nice to have something to believe in for a few days, nice to feel like a part of something. Nice to have that sense of community and commiseration about something that wasn’t a real atrocity.

Darkling Daddy was sending memes and videos about it even though his emotional investment in the show was zero. He never watched it.

“Give the people bread and circuses, and they will never revolt” Juvenal

But the wheat is poisonous and my favorite circuses have massive plot holes, actors who are Zionists, and really shitty endings. Endings so shitty in fact that their entire fanbase imagined a hoax where there doesn’t appear to be one. It was all a dream Dallas circa Season 9 in it’s entirety. Or the jumping of the shark in Happy Days. Or Lost or Game of Thrones. The disappointment is palpable.

Got me wondering, why can’t we have nice things?

Well, let me tell you.

It all started back on the Titanic and the formation of the Central bank, or before that during the industrial revolution or when the sun never set on the Kingdom of Rome, or or or. We can keep going back. People have always been shitty and people with money and power are the worst.

I am half kidding.
But the Prussian public school system that teaches half truths and prepares graduates for either labor or war or prison if they choose not to participate in the latter 2 options also keeps the masses docile and illiterate.

And with the invention of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle and the owning of the media by a select few here we are. 4th grade reading level, less comprehension and the attention span of a goldfish.

Television shows aren’t smart any more because writers and producers are being told to present storylines in a way that we can consume it on the medium screen with the small screen in our hands. 

During the first part of the plague I made a decision to finally watch Game of Thrones all the way through. Hadn’t watched it past season 3 episode 4 I think. Google has corrected me, season 4 episode 2, Joffrey died and it made me happy.  But that was 2014, then Young Un the First left and it was our show and I just never watched it again until 6 years later.

Small sidequest here. The evil in GOT didn’t stop just because Joffrey died. 45 will be the same. It’s the hydra, chop off one head and Erikkka Kirk appears to take it’s place.

My point is, I made a pact with myself to watch one or two episodes a night depending on my level of tiredness and my attention span and to plug my phone in on the other side of the room. So I actually could focus. And it worked.

But, it took some effort, self awareness and self discipline, which is sorely lacking among the general public. And myself if I am being completely honest. And I am, that is what this blog is for.

Everyone curates their own algorithm, it’s all an echo chamber and I firmly believe reality has been split in two. Everyone doom scrolls for their own brand of doom. Christians think they are being persecuted and the rest of us know they are in a cult. Trumpers think he is the second coming and the rest of us know they’re in a cult.

I heard the term Tragedy Tourism. And it encapsulates everything that has been happening since Harambe and the clowns from 2016.

I am not really on Tik Tok anymore. Instagram, yes. Ir’s been 5 years and I still miss that one Facebook feature where they would let you look back every day at the same day in years gone by. Made me feel like I actually existed.

Panda is back and that helps. Someone with the same memories as me from a time when the world didn’t feel so fucked.

And therein lies another revelation.

It was always fucked. I just didn’t know about it.

I knew some things.

Eric Garner died in 2014 for selling single cigarettes and it broke my heart. In the late 80’s I had a child’s understanding of the apartheid in South Africa. In the 90’s there was Rodney King and Rwanda. 

But I was insulated and I see that now. I technically still am. Nothing I am doing or not doing is aiding anyone anywhere.

I am safe in Canada. I can feed myself and pay rent.

It’s been 2 weeks and I am over the let down of Stranger Things. Apparently the wife was carrying a lot of the weight talentwise without being credited, and they divorced so there’s that then. Shocking, I know.

 I am going to keep writing. I have always said, they can’t all be diamonds. And maybe I am digging in the wrong places. But if I keep at it, maybe I can find my rhythm and my voice again. Provide a bit of serotonin for you fine folks here and there.

But for now, the plants need watering, kittens need feeding and I have to get to work.

I did it again.

Woke up early today which is good. But we are somewhere between Civil War and World War 3 and they might be a double feature, which is bad.

I doom scrolled for just under an hour looking for hope. Couldn’t find any.

It’s not my poop towel for the record.

I did have to have a stash of rags under the bathroom sink before my dog died because her balance was really bad and 3 outta 5 poops she’d end up stumbling backwards and stepping in it. She always looked devastated by the poop foot, so I kept the clean up as dignified as possible. Lots of warm water, soap, love and reassurance followed by a pupper burrito and some cheese to appease her wounded ego.

God I miss her. I wouldn’t trade a minute of my life that she was with me, poop foot, double strokes, bad breath and all.

Saw something on Instagram the other day. A very average person’s idea of being rich.

It’s not yachts and white parties. It’s the ability to walk into a grocery store and not have to worry about the check out. It’s about our kid’s cars breaking down and us being able to say, “don’t worry, I got you.” It’s about having the money to ease your pet over the rainbow bridge without worrying about rent or your next meal.

I am in a lot of debt. Alice died last spring after a prolonged and expensive winding down process. I took a lot of time off work last spring to look after her. And the spring before to move and facilitate the sale of Hess house, went out of pocket hard on that little project, and 9 months later, the bank took it. 

My rent was way more than I could afford because I chose an apartment based on a salary I was promised, but my GM died on New Years day 2025 and the raise never happened. And one fun aspect of the aftermath of Covid was everything getting way more expensive.

Apartments that were $1000 in 2020 were suddenly $1600 and up.

There was a shortage of used cars, so when my old car got hit and I needed a new one, I overpaid for a lemon. 6 grand to buy and another $8000 in repairs over the next year. My credit cards are pretty maxed. I don’t even carry them on me anymore.

None of this is a tragedy. Losing my boss and my dog within 79 days of each other was rough.
I definitely wanted off the mortal coil when Alice passed. I still break down on a pretty regular basis. I miss her.

I am doing my best to recover and recoup. The moral and ethical thing to do right now is to not spend money, so that works.
I haven’t stepped foot in a Wal-Mart or made an Amazon order since 2020. Had a brief relapse over the summer at McDonalds for ice cream. Starbucks too, but those ended in August. My conscience couldn’t abide.

I think I have stated that I am living in an apartment that feels quite a bit like a cathouse. Minus the strippers, cheap body spray lingering in the air, and glitter in the carpet.

Built in 1941 and probably not upgraded this century. The electrical is mildly frightening and I have 1 outlet in each half of my room.

I have a plug in oil heater and I have to keep pretty much everything else off to maintain a decent room temperature or the breaker for my room goes and I don’t have access to the basement to turn it back on. The oven is either all the way on or all the wat off because the last tenant used to crank it on high and leave it on the warm up the house. It’s okay, makes me have to be creative with what I make for dinner. But grocery prices are insane and my glasses are both the wrong prescription, and broken in 2 places, being held together with nail glue. It’s really good nail glue.

It is the 89th of January, this too shall pass.

The walls are paper thin, the toilet gurgles 2.5 seconds before the shower turns nuclear power plant skin melting hot.
The heat comes and goes.

There are 2 kids and 2 adults above me and they are not soft steppers. The boys are 6 & 9, I think and they play like 6 & 9 year olds.There’s a disgruntled short ‘king’ downstairs who believes this is HIS house and we are all just staying in it, he thinks he has to provide the soundtrack for the whole house, so my glass knick knacks vibrate to old Chevelle track or sometimes Biggie and Tupac.

I can set my clock by the blender going off upstairs at 6:32am and the kids running around getting ready for school. And unless I get up at 5am and shower before 6, I have to wait until after 8 to shower because they each have to flush the toilet at least twice every morning. It is worse when the downstairs neighbor is home, I think he flushes maliciously. The only “aggressive” he knows how to be is passive aggressive.

It’s -18 here today, 0 degrees Fahrenheit for my American friends.

I don’t have to work today, but I have laundry to do.

Yesterday I managed to finish tiling the bathroom ceiling, something I started back in July of last year. That was good for a skooch of dopamine.

Everything else is terrible.

It is hard to get motivated to do the small things when the world is ending and this hell is literally frozen over. Which reminds me, I need new tires. I almost slid into traffic from my solid iced over driveway the other day.

I wish I could be protesting, or handing out coffee to the protesters, carrying first aid, opening my door to people who need it. But I barely fit here.

The state of the world and the weather has me feeling really doomsday preppery.

Not much I can do with my current financial state and limited space.

I have a roommate that came with the place.

It’s not great.

I lived alone with Alice for over a year, which was good for me and bad for her.
My upstairs neighbor was kind and relatively quiet. He did sing to himself when he was cleaning but he had a lovely voice.

There is something amazing about coming home from a long day gone and having everything the same as when you left it. The attic at Hess was like that at least. And my giant room in Newfoundland. But the rest of the house never felt like mine and there were always dishes in the sink that I hadn’t used and some random bit of housekeeping that needed doing.

I also stumbled on something recently that has me slightly worried.

The poop towel and the consequences thereof.

I see the roomie maybe thrice a day. Yesterday afternoon he emerged from his den with a towel in hand. I had plans on dying my hair and asked if he was jumping in the shower.

He said no.

It took me a minute, but then it dawned on me what the towel was for. He uses the bidet, then…ya. No toilet paper, just poop towel.

When I first moved in, it hung over his door, never thought much of it, then I painted the hallway and doors and it disappeared.

This roommate has questionable hygiene, and is either sleeping or sitting for 16-22 hours a day. I have been on my work break for a month and home for 99% of it. He has worked maybe 4 or 5 of those days. Showered the same number of times, maybe less.

His laziness, finances and cleanliness are not my problem as long as the common areas stay clean, he keeps his door shut, and pays rent on time. Which he does for the most part.

The problem is the poop towel and the placating monster of comparison. 

Once upon a time at the farm, way back when, I got up in the morning, had my coffee, let the dogs out, did my chores, checked my Facebook and by around 10am, I settled down on the couch to watch Maury Povich, Jerry Springer and that guy Steve for about 3 to 6 hours. If those weren’t on, there was always TLC which had become The Ludicrous Circus by then instead of The Learning Channel. Always a house on Hoarders that was worse than ours. Always a guy cheating worse than hubby was on Cheaters..
Always something worse. 

I could sit back and feel okay about how great my terrible life was in comparison to the scripted chaos I was feeding myself.

I orchestrated a lot of my own brainwashing.

Found ways of coping with what I should never have tolerated.

I realized a million years ago that the relationship before that one had lasted longer than it should have for the simple fact that we played Goldeneye and I beat him constantly. All the aggression and angst I couldn’t articulate manifested and somewhat released by blowing him up with a virtual rocket launcher.

I would like to think that I am not like that anymore. But in times of sadness and duress, old habits come creeping back.

And the old adage is true, comparison is the thief of joy. And this roads goes both ways.

I find myself with my phone in my hand way too often. I didn’t go anywhere yesterday so I didn’t shower and I know I stink. But at least I put up the bathroom tiles, and at least I worked on Saturday and at least I don’t use a poop towel.

I want so badly to live alone. Roommate’s lack of physical movement has manifested in a lack of ability for physical movement. Amazing how that happens huh?

I am terrified one of my kittens is going to slip past him and bolt outside and he will be apathetic as well as unable to do anything about it. I have expressed this, in writing and conversationally, repeatedly.

The main hurdle is money, and here is where I will ask, humbly, for anyone who is able, to subscribe to my Patreon for a couple bucks a month.

https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch

I am reminded of the old commercials for UNICEF, “for the price of a cup of coffee” a month. And that is all it is. No one is coming to save us, so we have to save each other.

The plan is to move the 73 articles that I was forced to hide over to there once I can get it sorted, they are juicy. Might be worth it. I at least have to ask.

Apparently I somehow accessed the old old Our Lady of Lust and Grace and it threw me for a fucking loop.

I think we’re back. But this is too funny not to publish as is. False starts and all.

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Well fuck.

Below the line is the article I intended to publish this morning.

That line from Kill Bill is riding the carousel of my inner dialog right now. Or my paraphrased version of it anyways.

Lucy Lui : Silly rabbit. You didn’t think it was going to be that easy did you?

Uma Thurman: You know, for a minute there, I kinda did.

The irony being, it wasn’t easy. Not for her, nor for me.

I did the obligatory changing of the password to get into my WordPress dashboard and damn. Nothing is there. Nothing recognizable anyways.
Can’t find any old articles, just one blank and something I know I didn’t write.

No stats, no subscribers, no way to access old articles.

I am glad I decided to write first, worry about the rest of it later.

I have zero clue what to do here. I truly believed I would just have to go through the headache of updating some plug-ins on muscle memory and poof, away we go.

Not learning a new language, just remembering it.

This is all Greek. Greek tragedy.

I think it has been updating on it’s own, into something unrecognizable.

The good news is, the website does still exist. I still have access to the corresponding email.

All is not lost per se. I just can’t find it right now.

Just gotta add this to the list of shit to do. Or reroute all y’all over to Patreon.

I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, please attempt to enjoy watching me shake the rust off.

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Choices.

We all make them. From the infinitesimal to life changing. Sometimes those are one in the same.

My choice this morning was to get up and write. No checking my phone, no putting on the same mediocre show I have probably watched a half dozen times in the last 4 years. I haven’t enjoyed it, don’t know why I keep doing it.

It’s been 84 years since I wrote for you fine folks, minus 80. I think.

It’s kinda off-putting to know that all I have to do is log on here and I can see exactly the last time I did the thing I love the most. I haven’t done that yet. I am disappointed in myself for so many things, one of them being all of the time I have lost.

I have been off work for 21 days and accomplished very little beyond survival and getting a china cabinet. Finished Stranger Things, ate comfort foods and did the 12 days of Christmas burn-a-wish tradition.

This is the wish I am responsible for.

Step one was getting this old laptop up and running again, which I did, last September. Next logical step would be to update OLLG and all of it’s plug-ins, as well as this 7 pound tank of a thing. The right hand side of my screen is demanding so many things right now.

Remind me later.

Remind me later.

Remind me later.

My executive dysfunction, task paralysis and imposter syndrome still exist.

But there is a much bigger, worse thing. 

Isn’t there always?

I don’t know who I am anymore,

I can tell you who I was before I stopped writing, I wrote it all down. And I wrote the truth. 

All of it. 

Ugly or not.

I know my name. 

I have a straight job.

Alice came back and then she died.

The amount of time that elapsed while she was missing was the exact amount of time I got her back for. But that is a story for another day.

I have 2 kittens, Zoe and Violet. They don’t know their names.

I moved, twice.

This most recent house very much feels like a cat house.

Built in 1941, 3 storey split in 4. One water heater so I have to wait my turn for the shower unless I wake up at 5am or stay up until midnight. Walls like paper and not near enough outlets.

I have a roommate that I see once or twice a day, maybe.
But the rent is crazy cheap and I am heavily in debt.
And it feels kinda haunted, so that’s good.

Arizona replaced Florida as winter sanctuary.

But anywhere in America is off the table for the foreseeable future thanks to the cheeto in charge and my inability to keep my mouth shut about human rights.

Dave went crazy. But in retrospect, he might always have been.

Wolf is long gone and Darkling Daddy is still here. Which, in itself, is some kind of small miracle.

I remember those. I remember living a blessed life. I remember being more than what I am now and I miss her. I miss the muchiness.

Giant got married, I think, and I still talk to the Hulk.

Panda came back. And that seems the best place to start.

380 ish words and I got there. Not my best but not my worst.

She is so many things, but a touchstone and a testament is what I needed.

Initials carved into a tree to tell the world I was here. She’s the tree.

She met all the boys I used to write about. 

Mostly.

I understand that the past is just a collection of stories we tell ourselves. But I have the added bonus and responsibility of telling literally everybody, why else would you be here?

Panda though, she makes it real. Not just tales I told.

Those people, places and things were real.

She lived in the houses I called home and she herself was home for me. Shared memories with different perspectives. She was in Newfoundland on that first trip. I finally got to tell her that I didn’t make much effort to get us out of there when she asked. Among 100 other confessions and apologies.

I quit vaping and went straight back to smoking after Alice died. It’s fine, the world is ending anyways.

Stopped at the same convenience store every morning for a coffee and a pack of smokes, and one day, there she was.

I had been dreading it. My straight job is right around the corner from where I knew she lived. But 3 years went by and no Panda in sight. To say my guard was down would be a staggering understatement.

7 years ago we ended things. It wasn’t pretty. I lost things that were important to me and she laughed. I was starving and instead of sending me the money she owed me, she got a tattoo. Her revelation of “ I haven’t liked you for a while now” rang in my ears for years afterwards.

How did I not know she felt that way, and if I did know somewhere deep down,why didn’t I stop it somehow, either by leaving sooner or making an effort to fix what was wrong.

The answer is simple now. Because it went the way it was supposed to.

Everything does.

Just like this.

Choices. Some small, some life altering and some just promises scribbled on burnt pieces of paper.

And honestly, none of it matters. All we have is here and now.

I have to work today. First time in 3 weeks where it has become unavoidable. I didn’t do any of the things I was supposed to on my time off. And even this is so on brand for me, waiting until the last minute to do the one thing I promised the universe I would do.

I have more things to burn and I missed the full moon, tomorrow is Epiphany, that’ll do.

As for Panda. We had living and growing to do that we couldn’t do together. It is near impossible to describe what it is like to relearn someone wrapped in the comfort of familiarity while simultaneously experiencing the intrigue of meeting the new person they have become.Maybe it’s like a cover of a song you used to love and forgot about for a while. Not same same, but not new either, some other thing.

I know this isn’t a great article.

I am going to publish it anyways.

Just like the books I wrote that suck really bad, I published them anyways.

Sometimes you just have to jump and see where you land.

I think the last time I tried this I made a bunch of promises that I didn’t end up keeping. 

I won’t do that now. I have some ideas, and that is enough.

I have some hidden articles that I should probably move over to Patreon.
The subjects no longer need or deserve protection.

But for now, I am going to make another coffee, feed the kittens and pray no one flushes the toilet while I am in the shower.

Author’s note:

I wrote this a year ago tomorrow, with the intention of pulling out my laptop and publishing it. i am navigating the twists and turns of a new laptop, bought last May and not cracked open until December.

It isn’t a diamond. I suspect there will be a lack of those until I figure out a new routine.

But I am trying.

________________________________________________________________

Well.

It seems I have hit an interesting point in my life.

I just stopped dealing with trauma.

I once wrote, and still believe, that I will always come to a point in the future where I have accepted the traumatic events in my life and learned how to work around them. I can choose when that is for myself.

Apparently, that process is now as instant as Nescafe.

I don’t believe we should examine our kinks and fetishes too deeply. Sure, scratch the surface a bit but no vivisections allowed. I mean you can if you want. I prefer not to. For the same reason my level of sex work always stopped at stripping, I love sex, I don’t want to do it for a living, nor do I want an in-depth analysis as to why being degraded in bed makes me into a happy little wet puddle of a girl shaking from multiple orgasms. Too much of a good thing and it stops being good, this includes information. I don’t want a why, I just want him to choke me and love me.

Which begs the question, should I really take a deep dive into why I, the girl who is/was known for crying way too much and being super emotional suddenly just accepts change, death and loss as a part of life?

I can cross reference almost anything at the drop of a hat and predict future behavior patterns. It’s a trauma response to unpredictability and abandonment. The abandonment also lends itself to hyper independence, and I feel like this is a layer of that.

Then we add the plague and minus the man I believed to be the love of my life and here we are. Nothing fucking phases me. It feels both like a superpower and a double-edged sword. I am waiting for the alternate article of footwear to succumb to gravity. Like is this gonna hit me all at once and put me into an emotional coma? Am I already in an emotional coma?

Who am I and what is happening?

I remember the girl I was like a character from a comforting TV show that I watched endlessly before bed until I didn’t.

She cried a LOT. Like to the point where my roommate/bartender/DJ in Newfoundland would call out loudly, “somebody grab Sarah, she is going to cry” every time he played a sad/triggering song. Which begs the question why did he play those ones?

That is another story for another day, or never. It is done.

But how did I get here?

I haven’t felt the “same” since the DMT. I had to rebuild myself from the rubble of an earth-shattering ego death. Did I leave out the part where I react to things when I put myself back together? I still feel overwhelming comfort and joy, often actually. I remember the day of a million rainbows, a day where I had to drive to the city from the farm and I followed the tail end of a storm front and there were too many rainbows to count over lush farmer’s fields and winding roads and my heart swelled with the beauty of it and my soul felt relieved after 72 days of rain. I remember feeling profoundly grateful to be alive in that moment, grateful for my car and my license which were still relatively new. Grateful for the task at hand which had gotten me out of the house and out on the road to bear witness to something so magnificent as the juxtaposition of black rainclouds, sundrenched wheat fields and prisms in the sky.

That was my first lesson in core memories and living in the moment.

Have I perfected this?

I mean, I know all we have is now. I suspect that time is an illusion, and everything is happening all at once. I stopped being a prisoner of my past simply by recognizing that I don’t live there anymore. Memories are not tangible, they don’t have words that hurt, they don’t throw keys or punches, they only exist in my mind and that belongs to me and me alone, so why would I hurt myself.

When I speak on past trauma, historically, I have always done so in a rote, even manner, no emotion to it, just an itemized list of facts and events laid out with the dashes in the point form audible in my voice as I start at the beginning and end at the ending. There are no pregnant pauses where I collect myself, I am collected. I am a collection. But as the curator of the museum that is me, I keep what I want and footnote/archive the rest.

I still don’t know how all of this adds up.

I recalled, earlier, the story of Giant and how I was so enamored of him that for several visits to a diner called Big Top, I failed to notice the mural of a circus on the wall. I remember being the girl who was vexed and hurt when he chose someone that wasn’t me, then validated when he came back, crushed when he left again etc. etc. ad nauseum. It wasn’t an overly dramatic period in my life, more inquisitive if anything. He left and I summoned the courage to ask why. Which lead to continued communication, a solid friendship peppered with sex and a pot rack both made with love. But what I am questioning now, and cannot for the life of me remember, is why I got so worked up about it. And why, in the time since then I stopped getting worked up about things.

Newfoundland tides were higher from the tears I cried. I was depressed and drunk, and I had outstayed when I was supposed to be there. The place that made my soul feel good, stopped doing that thing and nevertheless the girl I was, persisted. I get that now. When something stops bringing you peace, get out, get rid of it, it isn’t going to get any better. You can still visit, but pull up your roots and boogie.

Then there is the matter of Wolf. I think I started mourning him before that first fateful text message a month and a half after our fateful meeting.

Maybe the girl I am who can predict the future, somehow already knew it wasn’t going to work.

I still had hope. Hope can be a beautiful thing, but like all good things, in small doses.

Parts of me absolutely mourned versions of a future that I created in my mind that never came to fruition.

But when I boil it down and distill it, our entire relationship was 100, 000 amazing emails and a few good days in the Palisades. He was there, who he always wanted to be, and it was glorious. Now he is who he is. They are not the same person, we both know this.

But let us backtrack a paragraph.

I mourned versions of a future that I created in my mind that never came to fruition.

I stopped doing this.

This might be a eureka moment, in real time.

I started this article as I have started 90% of every article I have ever written. With zero clue as to how it was going to turn out. I just let it flow, type as fast as I can and try to stay on some kind of track, but anyone who has been with me for long enough knows that never happens. And anyone (talking about me right now) can attest to the fact that life is exactly the same way.

I always assumed I had to keep breaking my heart until it opened, and maybe that is a part of it.

Total loss of my self, and total loss of what I had curated to be the epitome of love.

But it wasn’t, or it would still exist.

That is as broken as I have ever been.

I was wrong.

About both things, and also creating versions of the future in my mind and attaching hope to them.

The future doesn’t exist anymore than the past does.

I think that is it. I don’t play out fantasies of how I want things to go, I just let them unfold as they will.

I am still here.

I love. I am loved.

Had you asked me in 2019 where I would be right now, I would have given you some hopeful romantic story about a trailer on a cliff overlooking the ocean or a condo in Texas.

Had you asked me in 2020 how long I was going to stay in my attic, I could not have given you an answer exactly, but I could not have predicted traveling here there and everywhere all of 2020 and 2021. It was illogical. Still is. But I have plane ticket stubs to show, yes, I was there, I did those things. And as weird as it feels to type this, I am still in the attic.

A year ago, this past Christmas would I have said I’ll have a straight job, won’t write much anymore and Darkling Daddy will still be around?

Nope.

But here I am typing this out on my work laptop because mine needs repair (again) and in 5 minutes when I wrap this up I’ll go back to doing laundry and sending him memes.

And I think the Zen of it is just succumbing to the mindset that I have no idea what is going to happen next. This is the same idea that kept me alive all those years of misery on the farm, that there had to be something better, or even just different if I could just hold on long enough. Or in my teenage years where everything was dark and terrible all of the time until it wasn’t.

I held on long enough.

I have a life now that I don’t feel the need to avoid or escape from.
Spent years building it all by myself. I have done brave things, and foolish things, survived all of them.

I don’t know what is going to happen with Darkling Daddy, I can make a couple of educated guesses based on past experiences, but why bother. I have cherry picked the extra good memories, posted a few pics on Instagram to remind me of moments, and he has blessed me with a folder full of homemade porn.

The thing is, I have never wanted to know what is going to happen with him. I have attained the ability to just enjoy what is. Instead of cultivating some fictional future with him in it. And so far, the truth has been better than anything I could have imagined.

I am comfortable and I am calm.

I like feeling like this.

There is a deep, soul soothing satisfaction in knowing that the bad days end and another one starts.

Today is not the best of days. PMDD is hitting hard, cramping, bleeding, sad and mad in unpredictable intervals. But I have this calm detachment about it, I know this won’t last. Better days will come and I’ll probably fall on my face again at some point.

Is my life perfect? No, but nothing ever is.

But this is pretty fucking close.

I wrote this long winded article about how I am hurt because I didn’t mean as much to someone as

1. I thought I did
2. As they said I did

Thing is, it doesn’t hurt. Am I annoyed? Yes, sometimes. Confused? Definitely.

But just like every other thing I cannot fathom doing to another human being, this will just have to be something I never really understand.

I have a layover in Houston. I am not looking forward to it.

I know the airport fairly well, but I have less than 20 minutes to get from gate to gate and while I do know the airport, I doubt myself.

I also know that if I miss the flight I am meant to be on, there will be another, and I can deal with it. This isn’t a metaphor, just experience and logic.

The last thing I wrote about this (2 days ago) had no direction or clarity. I struggled to find the lesson.

Then my dude sent me a meme which stated the following…

“You feel bored because you are safe. For the first time in your life, you have no problem to solve. You are addicted to the chaos.”

Um, excuse me…sir…Sir, I feel a little called out here.

Thing is, I admit freely and openly that I definitely was addicted to the chaos. The drama was life. The ups and downs of a “passionate” relationship. Love must be work to work. If it wasn’t crazy love, it wasn’t love.

To be fair, the last thing I wrote stated that I took responsibility for looking too far ahead in my previous relationships. Planning ahead. But can you really blame me? Ex husband said ‘you never have to move again’, I have lived in 2 different provinces and half a dozen places if not more since I left him. I moved out several times during the relationship for fuck sakes.

The kid in Newfoundland who said we could start looking for places as soon as I got there vanished before I got there, but the wheels were already in motion. (Bullet dodged, but still that was a long way from home.)

I do wonder what that path would have looked like, had I stayed.

Wolf who asked me to move to Texas 9 times because I said I needed to be invited more than once. He finally left and left his wife. I wish him well in his future endeavors. But I am still here, confused and annoyed.

Still, I will take blame for believing their words and not watching their actions. For making gargantuan life changes for someone other than myself. And for not listening to my gut.

But that all leads back to this chaos theory.

I thought I left that all behind at the farm, but I didn’t.

I know I am getting better.

There was a quote from Michelangelo in his 80’s I believe that stated he was still learning. 

I believe with my whole heart that this is the only way to truly live.

But what about unlearning?

I think I am getting better at that too.

My life doesn’t look like it did way back when. When I was juggling farm and mistress and all the other crazy. It doesn’t look like Newfoundland either in the girl’s house which was the epitome of chaos nor when I got my own space in my friend’s house. But there was a lot of crazy there too. Some of the roommates were amazing, some were not. Plus I was drunk and disorderly every night. Even if I had a routine, it was full of fuckery. Dating a drug dealer who was in jail = chaotic and he wasn’t the worst of the dudes I crushed on. 

Then landing here in this house I am about to leave after 4 years. Covid should have kept things sane, but I decided dating a married guy in Texas was the right way to go so I traveled extensively during a global pandemic and here we are, coming around full circle.

So maybe it isn’t that he made promises he didn’t keep. Which was never where I placed the blame anyways. Maybe it wasn’t that I planned too far ahead with him…that was a bad idea for sure, not saying it wasn’t. Maybe I was/am a chaos addict. I mean in a few short yet rambling paragraphs here I have laid out quite a bit of clusterfuckery and I barely scratched the surface. Planning ahead with a married guy is kinda the dictionary definition of insanity isn’t it?

Even after Covid, I had a revolving door of people staying with me and still somehow felt justified in my annoyance of not having the peace I both wanted and needed. I have never lived alone here. I haven’t lived alone since Milton and even then, a few friends here and there needed a place to stay and who was I (with my 4 extra bedrooms) to say no to them?

And wasn’t the Milton house, in all that time alone, where I first found myself?

Well ya. That is when I started talking to you fine folks. I had so many plans. Monetize this blog, renovate an RV, travel. None of those dreams have died, but they did go on the backburner.

And those are the things I constantly crave and return to. Somewhere deep down, I crave peace and independence. Having something no one can take away from me. Anti chaotic. And, now with this move, I have made decisions that will ensure that, as long as I am mindful and do not open the door to any mayhem that may come a knockin’, I should be okay.

Even with a straight job, I can carve out time to write even if it is in the darkest hours of the dawn. I did it before.

One thing I am not is bored. 

All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never ever be boring.
Chuck Palahniuk.

I will add to that and say I believe being bored on this planet in this time of human existence is a sin.

I am not worried about being boring, nor being bored. There are too many miracles and delights in the minutiae of living. I love the small things.

I might appear boring to some. I prefer to be at home than out in social settings and that is okay. I spent most of my life working in bars, the shine came off of that decades ago. Give me a good pub and some good company if we have to go out at all. 

Even when I managed to attain some kind of inner peace and a lack of discord in my life I would always gravitate towards helping friends in need or rescuing stray boys. And then making mountains out of the molehills of feeling they had for me. And then falling down the mountain and describing every bump. scrape and broken limb on here for all y’all.

I am in love, have been for quite some time. And it is anything but boring.

It is calm love, peaceful love, trusting love.

I cannot foresee a future where the novelty of that wears off. All this time spent searching for love, looking so hard and seeing it in every kind gesture and word then being shocked when it dissipated. Constantly making something out of nothing and the nothing always showed through.

This is better.

I don’t plan anything at all, not even the next visit.

Felt strange at first. Awkward goodbyes with no “see you on Tuesday” to hold onto.

The goodbyes still feel awkward, but in a playful way.

Without planning ahead we still manage to see each other often. He has his life and I have mine, sometimes we go a week or 2, sometimes as long a month. But it doesn’t matter. I will see him when I see him. I make the effort, he makes the effort and no one keeps score.

I do realize that I built this blog on chaos. The thrill of the crushes, the despair of rejection, the internal dissection of everything that went wrong.

I think that is a huge part of the reason i haven’t written in the past couple years.

Not the entirety of it, but a good chunk.

I don’t know if anyone would want to hear about how I am at peace with another person.

About how crazy it isn’t.

I think the juxtaposition of having such utter comfort with another human being, in a situation that has always been my main source of drama and discord has made me realize, there is no reason why the rest of my life shouldn’t feel that way too. My job (which is beginning to feel like a career) is stressful at times, but not when I keep it in perspective. My home is about to be somewhere totally new. I did truly miss the catharsis of purging and the exhilaration of setting up my sanctuary in a new space. I am looking forward to being alone, starting over and challenging myself to invite as much tranquility into my life as possible.

I haven’t used my personal laptop in so long that it took me almost half an hour to get everything set up and running. Totally lost all my documents, then found them again. Forgot passwords. Forgot where things were.
Once upon a time that would have sent me into a panic spiral rivaling a black hole of despair. But it is what it is. And I am where I am and that is here, talking to you fine folks.

The last tab I had open was Netflix, couldn’t tell you when or where I had it last. Like zero recall. I must have been away somewhere, but where?

I suppose it doesn’t matter. Past has passed.

And, very unlike most posts upon ye olde bloggarino, that is exactly what I wanted to talk about. I didn’t meander off the path for a few paragraphs and then go through a bumpy transition. 

I must be changing.

I mean I know I am. We all are. Everything is. The only constant is change.

I still see Darkling Daddy on a regular basis. And it is good.

It is actually better than good, but I am saving the good stuff for my equally neglected Patreon account.

I usually need to know why I do things. Or in this case, didn’t do the things.

I didn’t tell him what I have been through.
Not in my usual avalanche of words and phrases, peppered with eyerolls and clichés, delivered quickly in a chilled monotone. If I speak in a flat voice, without inflection, it keeps the emotions out of it and I am just recalling facts. I suppose it is disconcerting to whomever I am speaking to. But I have no desire to relive those things.
Which is EXACTLY why I tell the new ones what the old ones did, in hopes hey won’t be a little bit of history repeating.

I never had a negative experience regaling new boys with old stories.
Quite the opposite actually. Young Un the First treated me tenderly and with kindness after I told him why I needed the bedroom door open a crack.
Wolf almost snapped a chair in half, but no anger was directed at me about it.

Not pity, only protectiveness.

All of them did. They claimed to understand at least.

But they aren’t here.
I was clear about my abandonment issues, and they left anyways.

I am fine now, I see that all of that was for the best. I like where I am and I regret very few of the people I have shared my time and body with.

I would like to believe that is why I kept everything to myself this time.
That the past has passed and has no power or weight here, now.

Yes, I lived through the things. I performed autopsies, sometimes from an emotional state, but eventually the post mortems became clinical and professional. I learned what I was meant to learn, my path changed in the way it was meant to, no harm (well some harm) but no foul. and I had stuff to write about.

Maybe that explains the lack of words flowing out of me and onto here. I don’t need to write about my life because I am living it.

That’s totally not it but it sounds better than the truth which is my new job is taxing as fuuuuuuuck.

My body is here and now, and while we might argue from time to time, my brain follows.
I have learned to be present.

I have so many concrete and horrific examples of what happens when people wear their past as a mask, or a cloak or a ball and chain. So many chains.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to forget. I mean I need things to write about. I use past experiences to navigate the here and now, like a filing cabinet. Just pieces of old documents, photos and plane tickets, and beyond the occasional papercut, they can’t hurt me.

I change ringtones and playlists, I archive emails so they are not in plain sight. I move on.

I am detached I suppose.And to tell you the truth I don’t hate it.

I used to cry constantly. Forever in a state of mourning what was, especially what wasn’t anymore.

But I think when you survive the cataclysm that is the love of your life becoming a stranger, nothing else matters.

Akin to reading a book about someone who resembles me, finding some comfort there in the familiarity of it.

They left, she lived. And sometimes they come back. 

The guy who wrote Fight Club said “Your past is just a story”.

Until it isn’t.

Until the giant from Twin Peaks takes up residence in my head and just keeps repeating “it’s happening again” in his unique timber and strange accent. Ad nauseum until I can’t hear anything but that, or worse, the vacuous thrumming of dead silence and nothingness.

The above was sent in an Instagram message to a friend yesterday. I was stuck at work and doing anything but actual work work on my designated work laptop is forbidden. I don’t even play solitaire.

But the words felt like flowing, so I let them.

It did happen again.

An abrupt disappearance. And I did not handle it great.

Not as bad as before. I didn’t disappear into a deep depression which ultimately led to me moving 5000 km away from home and subsequently drinking and making bad choices for 3 years. I still make bad choices, who I am tryna fool? (smirk)

I vacuumed, did the dishes, cleaned my room, folded laundry and acknowledged that I was very very frightened and not processing things well. I decided I should probably go back to therapy, or in my case, writing about things.

You see dear readers. I did something kinda brave and foolish. I had to.

I drove 3800 km in just over 60 hours to go get my dog, Alice. We were separated during Covid and I selfishly decided that it would be easier to travel and figure my shit out without her. I regretted this, but it was too late. Until it wasn’t.

I didn’t tell anyone where I was going, except kidlet, work and Darkling.

On the third day, I spoke to him in the morning.Drove for 12 hours to get home.
Told him I was home, safe.

Nothing.

Nothing the next day.

And on the third day I started to panic.

I should pad that. I had a friend in from out of town, I did say to her “he probably went last minute camping and has no wifi”.

That was the pervasive thought. Camping or broken phone or both.

But the rowdy unreasonable and quite frankly ugly explanations showed up.

Anyone who has been following this blog knows that once upon a time I was dating a boy and he ghosted as hard as any ghost has ever ghosted. ‘Good night I love you, see you in a few days’ on a Tuesday, to blocked on everything Wednesday morning. I waited from Thanksgiving until Christmas for an explanation. And by the following February, as I drove across the country to start over, he messaged me and asked me if we could start over. I can, I AM, and no you can’t come with me.

I was catapulted back to the first few days of confusion, self doubt and pain of that incident.

It fucking hurt. He talked about marrying me and then poof.

There is a line from a song I cannot recall the title of that says “live through this, and you won’t look back.”

I did live through it, and I found myself looking back.

Theoretically if I had spoken to a therapist in those moments they would have assured me that it is understandable that a sudden disappearance by someone I have physical and emotional attachment to would freak me the fuck out. I have muscle memory for this. I still have cells in my body that recall this happening. It was only 5 years ago. But, I am over it. I think. The last time he messaged, I just didn’t answer. Ah, there it is. I am over HIM, not IT. 

That is a massive and paramount distinction.

When I thought “oh shit, here we go again”, I also thought, “okay, how do we navigate this, we have a map.”
Last time the girls took me to Ikea and I cried on my meatballs, not the best idea. I also had an impending move shortly after he disappeared, so the colossal amount of work that I put into that house was a physical outlet. But, I made my space in his image, the things we had spoken about, pushed my bed up against the wall because that was what he liked, found the most soothing teal blue because he liked water colors.
I remember I had a sign across from my bed that simply said “there will be an answer, let it be”. There was, eventually. It just wasn’t good enough.

But I am already in my house, I like my house, I can’t move and change things. Not doing the best financially right now and have never been able to get in and out of Ikea for less than a couple hundred bucks. So that’s not it.

It took me months, 2 moves and a trip to Disneyland to get through that. And even Disney was tainted because we had spoken of going, and I wanted him there with me.

The map was no good, outdated. The landscape has changed because I have changed. And because of earthquakes and life experiences.

I still have the sign though.

There was an answer.

He went last minute camping.

I have decided, and rightly so, not to visit the mistakes of those that came before, nor the ramifications thereof, on anyone new.

I never mentioned to Darkling anything about that. Nor the Giant and his string of Becky’s and girls who ski. Nor Lumberjack or Muay Thai Fighter and their secret wives. Nor Wolf and his not at all secret wife. 

Darkling and I do joke that he has a secret wife and kids, which again, if you have ever read the blog, you know is a thing I was duped into once and also willingly walked into.  

It might not be a joke.

I have decided that I don’t care.

I don’t care where he is or who he is with as long as he continues to treat me as well as he does when I am with him. And it is very well. Jesus Christ it’s good, amen.

“I don’t care” is an overstatement. I hope he is happy, healthy and safe always. I care about him immensely. I actually think I love him but it is a foreign kind of love. Very calm, very comfortable, I might have finally found that “just is” that I was searching for all these years. And while I acknowledge that is has to be temporary, I am grateful that I am experiencing it.

I am a culmination of everything I have ever been through.

This current experience will be added to who I am at some point and this pleases me.

The Potato man I dated who told me he didn’t like hugging me or touching me because he felt like I was taking something from him scarred me for a while. Until I met Gelfling who thought it was ludicrous that I asked permission to touch him and said that I was allowed whenever I wanted, forever. Both of these things just make me appreciate the exorbitant amount of touching that occurs with Darkling.

I have ‘shared’ men before. Sometimes horribly, like when I was married, and sometimes willingly.

Darkling is 29. He wants kids eventually. I am not his forever person. I knew that going in and I have never once forgotten it. What I have chosen to do is spend the time I have with him enjoying him. His house has become sanctuary and it is delightful. His love language is touch and acts of service, exactly the same as mine, which has taken some adjusting to, being cared for in the manner I have cared for others. Just makes me realize how valuable I am and that I am worth being around.

The only constant is change. At some point this will end and it will suck, and I will cry.
But I am not going to waste the time given dreading the future, nor living in the past.

I know I will live.

But that is later.

I am just going to be here now.

It’s 6am.

I have been up since 4:44.

There are singing bowls on the Spotify right now and oddly that didn’t help lull me back to sleep either.
Almost time to switch over to something a little more lyrical.

I tried to quiet my mind and get back to sleep, but instead I changed a light bulb and made myself a cup of my precious Texas coffee. I have a bag and a half left so I am rationing it. But my boss is going to Austin and she said she would bring me some, I just have to make it to the end of March. This is every Canadian, every winter, in a nutshell, just gotta make it to March.

Last year I had just fled Mexico ahead of travel restrictions on the last flight out of Acapulco, so I didn’t have to wait too long before winter loosened her grip. Although my snapchat memories from today stated I had just dug my car out of 3 feet of snow. Today everything is melting and it is supposed to be warm and raining tomorrow. Sucks for my walk to the bus stop, but it is better than freezing to death.

Fuck, a lot can change in a year.

I used to get up at 6am at the beginning of the plague to write.
I guess that was 2 years minus 3 weeks ago.
Ex hubby gave me the mushroom capsules on March 2nd 2020 and I started writing that other book that I haven’t been able to get back to since I gave the mushrooms away, mind you I haven’t tried in a while. It was supposed to be about Wolf and I don’t know what to say about that anymore.
March 4th 2020 I was on a plane to Texas because tickets were insanely cheap and I sent a snapchat with panda eyes saying “I fucking miss you”. It is not hard to be nostalgic for those days, but fuck everything that came after.

I am actually happy to be awake. Technically, I wanted this. I have skipped too many morning work outs and lost too much writing time to the siren’s song of the snooze button. Mind you, I have been taking (non hallucinogenic) mushroom capsules and my dreams have been EPIC. Fucked Thor and Loki yesterday morning in the wee hours, and god bless my psyche, I remembered it vividly after I woke up. It’s the little things.

It was congruent sex, not simultaneous. Not that that matters, but Loki talked me into playing while Thor was away, we got caught and Thor wasn’t mad about it. I also was making cheese sauce on a rocky boat and spilled it. I was cleaning it up when I woke up. Not sure what that was all about but hey…I am not complaining.

My real life sex life has been…non existent. The Darkling still exists, but only in my phone.

Been down this road too many times already.
29th verse, same as…well same as the other ones who only lived in my phone.

I got an inkling mid January that he had started up something with someone else. I didn’t say anything, because honestly, I didn’t really want to know, plus retrograde was still happening. These are lessons I have learned and refuse to repeat. I think it was still the trifecta of Venus, Mercury and one of our more distant cosmic dads spinning backwards and causing discord. Uranus or Neptune. Not really sure. Doesn’t matter. The universe, or our corner of it, is spinning the way it ought to be until April. And I know, non believers will say it’s silly, but I have felt a lightness of being for the last lil bit. I am going to enjoy this while it lasts.

I enjoyed Darkling while that lasted too.
And I could be totally wrong here and just tainted by the ones who came before. But my gut is a pretty highly tuned instrument at this point and he just kinda changed, less attention and I haven’t seen him. I would prefer this conversation be face to face as opposed to our normal gif filled meme exchanges.

I am gearing up to ask the question I don’t really want the answer to. It isn’t exactly over yet, mostly because I haven’t decided that it is, but I am getting there. Too bad really. The sex was pretty fucking fantastic.

He was really good at giving me attention too. I needed that, still do really. I was weaning myself off Wolf. I guess that mission has been accomplished, somewhat.

The fact remains, I have a high IQ and an even higher sex drive and only one of those things is currently being sated. I am mildly astonished at how lackadaisical I am feeling about all this. I cannot tell if I am broken or fixed. That is a topic for another day.

I wandered off tik tok and fell into reels on Instagram. I don’t hate it. If I click on a plant reel I can fall into a rabbithole of monstrous monsteras and prolific pothos and propagation videos. If I look at yoga, same same. Meditation and manifestations galore. But somehow the other day, I ended up watching a reel about how for every 16 points above 100 a woman’s IQ is, she is some huge percentage less likely to get married, and the men that I am attracted to and would be content with only make up 1% of the population.

Awesome.

I am royally screwed. But not in the literal sense.

I mean, I am 47, almost 48. If it was gonna happen, it would have happened already and my two forays into common law marriage sucked so badly. The idea of getting married was never in the forefront of my mind. I remember watching Charles and Di’s marriage and the part I liked the most was the hats.

But, having not been laid in a month now…I dunno, I lost track, and my track record of the last 4 or 5 years of intermittent sex with a married dude from far far away and before that the jail bae being in jail for half of our time together, then more recently the fisherman who was away 3 weeks at a time and now this traveling salesman…just ugh.

It would be nice to have a person.

Maybe I will still get a repeat of 2017 as far as my sex life goes. That would be nice.

I probably have to go back on tinder. Although I would rather not. I kept Wolfling and Big Spoon on the backburner too long and they have slipped back into whatever part of the ether my lost boys go when they aren’t scratching at my door.

In the meantime, I have to buy a new car, one of my least favorite things to do. Horrible timing really. I am having massive financial insecurity with this new job. I know if I stick it out there will be a promotion and a pay raise, but the current pay decrease to half of what I am used to making continues to be jarring. I might need a second job. Unless all y’all want to subscribe for a dollar a month. Please?

At least my house is in order, for now.
I had to put a plant back at the store yesterday.
I wasn’t happy about it.
There is also a shelf I keep visiting to house all of my plant babies but it’s $300 and it is just not in the budget I now have.

I missed buying the giant bamboo during Lunar new year. By the time it got warm enough to carry it home, they were all sold out. I regret not driving there when I had a car to drive, but I despise underground parking and I am trying to get my steps in when I can, even if it means braving the arctic tundra of Canada in February. 15 years I have wanted that bamboo, and I finally found it, just to lose out due to a polar vortex that wouldn’t let go, and my own stubbornness. 

I am stubborn man. Like too stubborn for my own good. That is why I stuck it out with jail bae, married guy…why I moved to Newfoundland in the first place, stayed trapped at the farm, all of it.

Retrospect and her sister Hindsight are bitches man. 

The last 2 years I spent galavanting around North America I also spent a lot of money. 

And I don’t have regrets exactly, but I am shaking my head at myself.

Two grand on 2 rooms in Newfoundland that I will never go back to kinda sting a bit.

I will make it work, I always do.
Do what you can with what you have where you are. Theodore Roosevelt.

Life does have a way of working out for me. I always have what I need, I just have to work on getting what I want as well.

At least I am no longer wasting time. I am doing all the things I meant to do before, and they are working. My abs are starting to show through. I slipped and had a burger the other day and I will tell you with my usual blatant honesty, I didn’t enjoy it. It’s fine, I tried and now I know.

That is my life in a nutshell…I tried.

I don’t regret the burger, I just won’t do it again.

The last few years? No regrets. And again with the blatant honesty, I would do it again. Mayhap smarter, but I would rather live a life of trying and failing than just staying safe and wishing I had done something.

And hand to god, money issues aside, I fucking tried. My intentions were pure and my actions were profound. 

In the immortal words of Ani Difranco I never tried to give my life meaning by demeaning you, but I would like to state for the record, I did everything I could do.

Tomorrow is a day of magic. A cosmic palindrome. A mirror. Everything I put out there is destined to come back to me. Seems like a good day to reset and start over.

I have a new instagram account that I can’t seem to link to here.
bluecollarballerina2.oh if you’re interested.

It’s mostly food pics and memes and me documenting my life, same as it ever was really.

I decided in this last leg of the plague to do the things I hadn’t managed to do for the past 2 years. I used to do this all through school too, leave a project to the last minute, rush through it at the end and get an A. Nothing changes. This newest thing is ‘getting in shape’. It’s working.

We’re in the endgame now

I had a friend DM me and ask how I am losing weight.

Diet tips from an anorexic are probably as useful as travel tips from a shut in…am I right?

I don’t have a good relationship with food. Or maybe I do.

I see food as a necessity, as fuel. I have to eat if I want to move and live.

I want to do those things.

So I eat. Begrudgingly, mostly, but I am also a really good cook so that helps.
Funny enough, I absolutely love to cook, Always have.

I also don’t put gas in my car when it is already full, but I am not comfortable running on empty either. Especially since in my car, a quarter tank is actually empty. Found that out the hard way.

I like the act of going out to eat as well, but that is more about the pomp and circumstance.
I like getting dressed up and trying new things, or getting dressed up and revisiting my favorite things. I will go back to NOLA one day and eat that shrimp and grits again before I die.

When I was young, eating anywhere but home was a very rare occurrence and a welcomed change of pace, it denoted a trip or a celebration, so dining out has positive connotations in my head. Now it means brunches with the girls, road trips and dates. Still good things.
God I cannot wait to go out on a date again. Plague be gone already.
I wasn’t privy to fast food very often as a kid and I have been known to binge from time to time, or most recently, Newfoundland and the lack of time to prep and eat meals at home which had me skipping the dishes often and grabbing a Big Mary combo 3 nights a week for 2 years.

But going back to childhood…my mom is a spectacular cook, so is my dad. We ate very experimentally back in the 80’s even before watching Wok with Yan. My folks brought dishes from their childhoods into mine and we were friends with people from a myriad of cultures so my palate was pretty sophisticated, even when I was little. We had a respectable spice cupboard, I knew the difference between good feta and what we get at the grocery store here. My favorite thing about Christmas was the Welsh neighbor’s boozy traditional pudding with hard sauce. We stashed stacks of corn tortillas for tacos in the freezer on our trips to the states because we couldn’t get them here. And most of our pizza nights were both homemade and still unrivaled.

But there were things I couldn’t stand as a kid and still don’t like as an adult. Ground beef for one. I will devour a burger from A&W or Whattabuger without a second thought, but homemade hamburgers, nope. Meatloaf is just a huge no. I make amazing meatloaf, I just won’t eat it. Even something so humble and apparently delicious as a meatball, nuh uh. Cabbage rolls and shepherd’s pie too, I can make them and they’ll  knock your socks off, but I will not partake.

These were all staples when I was a kid, ground beef is cheap and feeding a family of 5 on a budget means ground beef. And growing up in the 70’s and 80’s (and probably before) you ate what was on your plate, all of it or you didn’t leave the table. 

It was a constant source of conflict and I think it coloured the way I view food. As a have to instead of a want to. I never want to eat, and I don’t ever feel ‘hungry’, more of an internal timer that says “too long since last time we had sustenance. Do the thing”

In my teenage years, after a decade of fighting to get me to eat and stay at the table, the option was given for me to make my own food and/or graze as I wanted. It was better for everyone really. A lot of the time I would just not eat and lie about it. Preferring the sanctuary of my room and my music to the traditional family suppers. It worked out, my sisters had tons of extra curriculars after school so meals became sporadic and I spent 90% of my time on the phone or brooding over some boy that I was too scared to call.

And at 15 or 16 I landed in the hospital because I fainted. I fainted because I hadn’t eaten in days.
I played dumb. Didn’t tell anyone what I had done and let them run in circles trying to figure out what was wrong. Plus I got out of school, so triple win really.

Unfortunately the connection was made that this
1. Got me attention that wasn’t negative attention
2. Was something I could control in a life full of things I could not

Number 2 is still a problem.

I know a lot of people who equate feeling full with comfort. I don’t, never have.

I know people who grew up with food insecurity and are the opposite of me.

I made sure my son didn’t have to deal with either. Never force fed, always given options and never being hungry. From the time he could walk and talk, the bottom crisper in the fridge always had healthy snacks he could access whenever he wanted. He has a good relationship with food. Parenting win.

Speaking of, I heard something once that makes a lot of sense so I am gonna drop it in here. If you feel hungry, eat an apple, if you don’t want an apple, you aren’t hungry.
There, that’s my pearl of wisdom. That’s all I got.

My roommate and I were having a conversation regarding my current war on carbs wherein she was saying I could cheat. I don’t want to. I retorted with the infamous Kate Moss quote “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Sadly this is still true, although I had a dream about an english muffin the other night.

I didn’t start my anorexic journey in my teens because I didn’t like my body, I mean I didn’t but I was missing a tit at the time, so that kinda overshadowed everything. I had a good body back then, no appreciation for it, but I was definitely very attractive. Still blinded by the lack of boob, but I can see clearly now.

Back then, and when my anorexia came back with a vengeance 20 years later, it was always about control. And coveting that empty feeling. It isn’t how skinny feels, so much as the power that comes with feeling clean and empty and in control. On the rare occasion that I do over eat, like a steak dinner or thanksgiving I literally cannot stand the way my organs rearrange and my stomach distends. I feel like a stranger in my body.

Which is how I started feeling lately.

Most of my friends struggle with weight, I never have. I don’t really engage in their conversations about it because I honestly couldn’t relate and they made a HUGE point of telling me how skinny I am.

But, the last couple years I have developed a pouch. Like a little pot belly that now lives where my flat stomach used to be. AND I FUCKING HATE IT. I can’t dress myself, I fixate on it, it makes me cry. It is not a cute pot belly and contrary to what she said in Pulp Fiction, it doesn’t feel good to the touch. Probably because it isn’t so much of a pot as it is a pouch. I am not a kangaroo ffs.

When it first appeared a couple years ago I just thought okay this is a “Newfoundland drinking a few bottles of whiskey a week and eating like shit” kinda thing. I can undo this.

And for a brief period, I did. The timing was immaculate. I was going to Florida for a month and vowed sobriety and no fast food or meat for 30 days. I did the thing. I ate beautifully and healthy, no red meat, one piece of chicken one time, no soft drinks and no booze. And I wore crop tops with low skirts, I walked 4 miles to town a couple times a week, I swam, I wandered theme parks and felt lovely.

Then I went back to St. John’s ate steak, got black out drunk and threw a huge sobbing tantrum because I was too inebriated to get my pink butt plug in and ya, that ended well. I did throw up the entirety of a $200 meal and $200 bar tab, so bye bye calories and dignity really.

We learned a valuable lesson about consent. Fun times.

I had to fly the next day with borderline alcohol poisoning.
Not the fondest of memories.

But it should be noted that I despise throwing up, bulimia, while popular in my high school was never my thing. Denoted a lack of control for me.

Then covid happened and life became both scary and sedentary, but I kept up with the healthy eating, long bouts of sobriety and for a while I was walking constantly. But…here we are 2 years later and my man pants don’t fit and I have a handful of fat where my waistbands used to sit, justy above where my hip bones used to protrude just a lil bit in the most delightful way. And 30 some odd years later my brain is wrestling with an eating disorder again. 

Eating disorders and addictions are never really gone, they just hibernate until we get thrust into survival mode and we revert and regress…or until we learn new coping mechanisms.
I am still learning.
Stress puts me in a cocoon goo state. Not much going on outside, but inside I am becoming.
It should be noted that my throat still closes up when I am stressed, I can’t even begin to navigate the mechanics of chewing and swallowing. They become foriegn things that I used to know but have lost.  But my old crutches of coffee and cigarettes don’t really exist anymore. I used to drink a pot a day, but now it’s a cup, maybe 2.
2 years of ‘nowhere to be’ kinda quelled my coffee addiction. Didn’t need an energetic boost to sit around and wait for the plague to end. I used to get hyper caffeinated and write, but I stopped doing that too.

It should also be noted that covid did give me a respectable booty. On my last voyage to the island, I showed up at Final Boss’s house and he had me spin around a few times and made good grunting noises about said booty and grabbed it often. Dat ass, I shall keep, and I never minded doing squats.100 a day lately.

I am going to skip over the part where 15 years ago I  dropped to 95 pounds during my marriage. I have seen the pictures, now you have too, I know what happened and I know my boss was the only one who said something and that is what stopped me. I needed someone to see what I was doing. I was fitting into child sized sweatpants ffs. No one said anything. 
I have better people in my life now and a better life. So there’s that then.

This trip on the skinny merry-go-round, instead of skipping meals completely which was so tempting, I cut out carbs.
I love carbs. Back in the day, if I ate anything in a day it was usually one piece of toast with butter. Or if they were around, one english muffin. I wasn’t counting calories, carbs weren’t the enemy. It was a volume thing. As little as possible to keep going.
This is still a control thing and a self denial thing, but at least I am eating.

I also added chia seed and lemon water to get rid of anything that wants to linger. Makes me feel cleaned out, so that is probably healthy/unhealthy, I never did get into laxatives, too scared of shitting my pants. And I started working out a lil bit. Just in my attic with my mat and free weights, I now have a bosu, like a half yoga ball thing that saves my spine during crunches. I went from 10 minutes a day 3 weeks ago to 30. 15 reps up to 25×3. I haven’t done it today but I will, then shower, then I get to go buy some plants. I need my dangling carrots.

When I don’t feel like working out, I shop online and see how I want clothes to hang off my frame again. And when I want a carb, I roast or mash some cauliflower. I am getting to the point where I might need a gym membership and a trainer because I have no idea what I am doing physically, just going off tik toks and memories of the time I dated a trainer and he had me working out 4 mornings a week, but he would fuck me right after, I am telling you, I need those carrots. We all do.

I also think some of us need to reevaluate our relationship with food and our bodies.

My body hurts more often than not. But it still gets me places. My step counter on the first game day at my new job had me clocked at 35000 steps in one shift. I had to really assess whether or not my legs were going to work enough to operate the gas and brake on my drive home, and I hobbled that night, badly, but I got up in the morning and I worked out. I also had a butter tart at work that night that tasted like a religious experience, but I also walked 9.7 kilometers fueled by nothing but a bento box of veggies and cheese so there is that then. I didn’t feel bad about the butter tart.

I don’t feel bad about any of it. Mostly because I don’t cheat. No one is holding a gun to my head saying I can’t have an english muffin. There’s actually carbs all over the kitchen. I just don’t want them. And when I do, I envision that flowy white skirt I found at a thrift shop in Texas paired with one of my plethora of cute crop tops and a sunny warm day wandering through Kensington market and skipping past the bakery.

I have comfort movies like other people have comfort foods.

Cold Mountain and Garden State got me through 4 months of severe depression after a mid term miscarriage.

Silver Linings Playbook and Beautiful Creatures always flood me with this fervent hope and contentment in the last 90 seconds. 90 minutes of build to a satisfying crescendo.

I say this next part without irony, and I have admitted it before, but the Twilight movies are among them.

This is not a source of pride or the opening for an argument. 

I know the implications and the anti feminist under and overtones.
It just is what it is.

Is Edward creepy af? Oh ya.

Do I want to taste/experience an iota of that steadfast decisiveness and commitment. Also, ya. 

She is so awkward and weird, and he wants her anyways.

He just decides she is his human and that is that., no waffling, no bullshit. I mean he leaves in the next movie and gets all broody while she engages in risky behavior, but it works out in the end and for 3 more movies and another book series.

No one ever decides on me and it fucking sucks. Or they do decide on me and they change their mind, which sucks so much harder.

I am left remembering unbridled enthusiasm and 9 invitations to move. And my heart makes Bella’s New Moon nightmare noises in my chest.

New moon in a few days.

I blew the full moon.

Whoops. 

I woke up with determination and a lot of venom. By the end of a very long day, it had waned. I wasn’t even mad anymore, nor sad, just numb.

And that scares me beyond reason and explanation, but I am kinda numb about that too. What the actual fuckity fuck.

Full wolf moon in cancer. 3 planets in retrograde including my papa mercury, patron saint of love mama venus and neptune god of all things salty, including the tears i cannot seem to muster.

Praying by Ke$sha came on my spotify list this morning.

Poignant song. Most likely from 2017 because this is all just a little bit of history repeating.
(yep, I checked)

It’s a good song, don’t get me wrong. But I remember all the basic sheeple people just gushing about how deep it was, how emotional, how brave. Yes, it was those things but have you ever heard 10 000 Days by Tool? Probably not.

And of course I put it on, I don’t know why I thought I could get through it without bawling. I didn’t. 

I digress.

They’re both break up songs for me.

I remember going out into the backyard of my Margueretta Street house on a snowy New Year’s eve and burning a 2007 calendar. The entire year was absolute shit. I remember the power welling up from inside of me, as kidlet and I both let out primal screams in the dark. I felt like very bit of angst, panic and sadness exited my body and dissipated in the smoke and flames

For 11 days I was as light as a feather. I really felt like I was going to be okay.

Please sir, can I have some more? 1000 days in the fire was more than enough. I want to go home.

Everything would have been fine. I was healing and dealing. The shooting happened at the club I worked at. We weren’t allowed to leave until the wee hours of the morning. I was tired and sad and I let ex hubby back in the house which led to 3 more years in perdition.

That is the history I would like to not repeat, the things I want to learn from.

If it is done, let it be done. Don’t linger.

I need a good epic scream and cry, but I can’t seem to muster it. Me, the girl who cries. Did I leave my tears in Newfoundland, I cried so often there it became notable when I didn’t. Even at Hamilton Strip a couple of girls woul;d do a mental health check before dancing to songs they knew might trigger me.
And Brian, also in NL, would tell someone to grab me and hug me when he played “The Funeral” by Band of Horses. I always thought that was sweet. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he could have just skipped the fucking song.

I started writing this article the morning of the full moon. We had an epic snowstorm and I had to modify my ritual. Well, that is an excuse. All the anger and angst I had u[pon waking up dissipated throughout the day. Roommate took the day off work and we did a boudoir photo shoot for her and she was so giddy, it rubbed off on me a bit and all the venom I had just went away.

I ended up asking for broken chains and peace instead of emphatically cutting the cord like I meant to. 

There will be other moons.

I have watched New Moon enough times that I am immune. She wails and I don’t anymore.

But, I watched Silver Linings Playbook the other day and…nothing. That scared me. Scared me enough that I almost want to see what happens with The Notebook and Cold Mountain.

Who am I now? What the fuck happened?

I broke, not in a cute submissive way, and I didn’t get put back together this time.

I think all of the old hurts prepared me somewhat for this one. I know I have survived everything that was meant to kill me before. I was heart broken before I even knew my heart or what love really was. I think the shredded brokenness of  losing Giant and Hulk a couple years apart and being able to maintain friendships with them were crucial in surviving this. We were kindred after all, still are. I learned how to love without possession and ego, the hard way.

Am I crying now, not really. But I have cried before, and this is the third or 4th time this has ended in a less than spectacular manor. At least I am home this time, instead of in another country sequestered in a shitty hotel room processing the death of a family member and the cruel words of someone who was supposed to love me. The only person who ever really loved me. Or at least that is what I thought.

Well, shit…

The venom is back and I have no waning moon to give it to.