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I have said before that I am a Gemini Wood Tiger.

Chinese astrology is a 12 animal/year cycle. Dragon being the luckiest and Pig being the worst apparently. According to this I get along well with people in signs of Dragon, Horse and Pig. I’m not compatible with Ox, Snake or Monkey people.

The year of our Lord 1998 I turned 24. T’was the year of the Tiger for the second time since I was born. Probably coincidentally but it was a really good year. I recall my 12^th year on the planet to have been a rather pleasant one as well. Not sure if this is a thing, but it felt like it. The year I turned 36 wasn’t so shit hot, but I feel like if I look back it was probably the best of the 7 surrounding it. I’m not going to look back. I was married then and everything sucked huge monster balls. I think that was the year I left hubby for the Ninja and spent time away from the farm, so…ya, better.

I am looking forward to 48. I have a good feeling about it, just like I did with 42, and I have not been wrong.

I have also stated that I am not overly comfortable writing about my current relationship, and yet I do. I think about him a lot and my brain spills easily and frequently onto my keyboard.

In an attempt to stop this, I started thinking back…way back.

I have had some weird shit happen to me in my day, and I find that sometimes, in here, I tend to focus on the negative. Not the really cool, bizarre movie moments.

I say with great frequency when dragging the lake of my past, you can’t make this shit up. I also say I am not the girl I used to be. Both of these things are true.

So here is a little story of the year I turned 24.

To tell it I have to start at 22.

Once upon a time I met a boy on a bus.

I was traveling with my then one year old son. Kidlet was fast asleep and I snuck off the bus for a smoke. Said boy gave me a light and we got to talking. By Christmas we were dating, by Valentine’s Day we had broken up.

I was a little shit. I really was. I was also crazy insecure and boy crazy. The only way I felt any self-worth was by being wanted.

I still speak to said boy. We have remained friends, which is a testament to how amazing he is.

I pulled a dick move, one of many that year.

We were sitting in a coffee shop at a huge table full of his friends. I felt warm and welcomed. A friend of his showed up and pretty much the entire table saw the lightning bolts of lust that passed between us. I held fast for a period of time and then ya…I cheated. Ended up dating the second guy for the better part of a year. We moved in together. Long story short that didn’t work out either.

He moved out on Halloween. I’d had my eye on another satellite friend. He wasn’t part of the group, but kinda floated in an unpredictable orbit around everyone. Made cameo appearances at varying functions.

Second boyfriend had failed to transfer the lease to my name and me and my new roommate had to do a midnight move to another apartment on Halloween. We were poor and didn’t have much stuff so it was easy enough. Afterwards we went to a going away party for one of the core members of the original group.

‘He who orbitted’ pulled me into his lap and asked me what I was doing for the next six years. When I said I didn’t know he replied ‘being with me I hope’. The embers hadn’t stopped smoldering form the last funeral pyre.

What he failed to mention is the extreme game of come here go away that would be played for the next year…yep my 24^th.

I’d like to find a better way to put this, but I can’t. Truth is I stalked the fucker, from Halloween till my birthday. So 7 months. It was a tiresome time. I’d wait till he got drunk and follow him home from the bar. I’d get laid, then a foot in the ass and cab fare home.

Then this boy named Mark came along. My Gemini twin, also my roommate’s obsession months prior. I ended up hooking up with him for a few weeks just to have the Satellite crash back into my bed. The night I dumped Mark he ended up getting shitfaced at a bar, picking a fight and having his lip split open. In a strange turn of events, years later I found out it was ex-hubby who knocked him out that night. Stranger than fiction. Or on par at least.

Roommate stopped speaking to me and stopped paying rent without my knowledge. 3 months later I opened the door to see my landlord taping an eviction notice to the door. I paid the balance owing in cash and kicked her out in one deft motion. I decided to move anyways.

Then along came Jesus. Who my friends called Mount Matt. He saved the day when my movers showed up drunk by strapping my futon to the roof of his Ford Taurus and helping me lug it up the stairs to my new place.

Everyone was so sick of the Satellite and his bullshit they were conspiring to get me and Jesus together, anything to get me out from under the other. And it worked. I was ready to leave Satellite for Jesus but he wasn’t ready for me.

So, brief recap. In the same area of town, the same coffee shop really, within the same extended group of friends I had now slept with/dated 1. Bus boy 2. Second boyfriend 3. Satellite 4. Mark and now 5. Jesus.

One crisp fall afternoon they all played basketball together. I was on the patio at said coffee shop and heard about it shortly after. Apparently it was fairly vicious. Satellite had some rather substantial road rash when he met me the next day. Turns out he saw Jesus as a threat and it was finally time to lock me down. Almost a year to the day after he’d began the world’s longest game of hide and seek.

So that’s my story.

I look back at that girl I was with the same nostalgia reserved for old sci-fi movies with their outdated special effects.
Seems silly now, but at the time it was magical.

I used to watch a lot of Sex and the City.

(Tell us something we don’t already know Sarah…)

Of course I identified with Carrie. Loved her little apartment, could do without the shoes and couture, I prefer to be barefoot and shop at thrift stores.

And LA over New York, always.

I almost published an article in the late spring called “Too Many Samanthas” my girls were slipping sideways leaving me to be Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte all by my damned self.

I used to hang out with a Polish stripper a few years my junior who I affectionately referred to as BabyWhoKitteh.

I pretty much lived at her house. Had keys, rented a parking space in her undergound, had a shelf in the closet that was mine.

I think my marriage lasted longer because I had a place to claim sanctuary.

But we knew all this too.

I have this weird feeling my muse has already packed up and gone to Florida without me. I have the same few songs and phrases playing on loops in my head. No new boys to speak of, the old ones are just being themselves so here, but not here. One foot in my world and the other in their own.

My mind is already at the ocean too, body and soul soon to follow.

I know I will heal exponentially when I am there.

Last year’s trip was a right off, kidlet left early and I was on a train to crazy town with fake soldier boy not knowing how close it came to derailing and blowing me up in the process. I got off with one stop to spare. Plus The Hulk wasn’t working. The roller coaster, not the man.

The same trip the year before I spent my time in the long lines for rides filthy sexting with an old friend, but still stuck in a relationship I didn’t want to end over skype. My sexting friend doesn’t get mentioned here much other than to say sometimes superheroes drive big black tow trucks. The way I spoke to him and the amount of fun I had doing so gave me the courage to leave that last draining relationship and I am forever grateful. He has saved me in more ways than I can explain.

Out of all the boys and men I mention with regularity I do wonder.

Are any of you pulling for anyone? Is there a dark horse from my past that anyone hopes rejoins the race?

I posted an article about the Giant Returning. I didn’t go into much depth and detail as to what we spoke about because a) I was drunk and so was he and b) I am scared to message him and fact check.

I do think I remember him telling me that he never did have the talk with Not Becky that he once said he did. I think I recall him saying he missed me every day and I know he said he loved me, more than once. I know he does. It’s not a secret.

The above mentioned article got shared 270 times in under a week. I forget sometimes that other people read what I write. I always tell the truth this really is the story of my life. I had to stop talking about some of the men in my past because I had to stop thinking about them, it hurt a lot. I don’t understand how someone can love someone else and not even try. I wasn’t built that way but lordy-lord that is exactly who I attract.

So everything gets left, unrequited, open-ended and a general mess until I decide to stop. Which is usually long after I should have quit. And even then, one word, one mention and 3 more articles ensue.

I guess I am wondering if everyone who reads this has been following the continuing saga of this one or that one. Especially the Giant.

Mr. Big was the main character in Carrie Bradshaw’s life. We were all secretly and not so secretly pulling for him. Sure Aiden was great but he lacked the spark, the Russian was interesting but passionless as well. I know there were other players, Berger being one, the one who dumped her on a post-it, but beyond them…I cannot recall.

I write more than I want to about the Lumberjack. It is nice having something calm and soothing that belongs to just me. When I spill bits about him here I feel … yucky? He doesn’t want to share me. I don’t want to share him either.

There is no point to this post really. Just turning a pebble over in my head, wondering why that article got shared so very far and wide.

If I am being honest…parts of me are pulling for the Giant too. Not sure how or why. The fact that he didn’t clear breakfast/sex/dinner with Not Becky before we went out like I asked him to and held the lie for 10 months makes me see with alarming clarity how I would be treated if I was his girl. That and the fact that we cheated on her for the first month after they made it official. Part of me would trust him regardless, shit.

This isn’t a TV show, or a book. It’s my life.

I am bound by the choices I make. I was just speaking to the Stripper Whisperer just now and said out loud that “I can see two paths, continue on with the army of fuckbois and commit to hoe life, or be with someone I have a future with. But I don’t want it being 2 years from now without it moving forward, that is the only thing that scares me.”

I needed a fuckboi break anyways, made for good writing but a lot of tears and fucked up situations that left me exclaiming “I can’t make this shit up.”

Maybe I should start writing fiction, now that my existence is blissfully no longer stranger than.

So, once upon a time…

It’s been a long time coming,
It’s been a long time runnin’.
The Tragically Hip

Yes to both.

I knew it was coming.

Just a tiny taste that I still exist in someone else’s universe.

The Hulk sat on my porch in the fall and mentioned he and a friend had been talking about me, I had a thinking out loud moment where I said “I forget I exist to people when I am not around”.

It’s true. I carry all these memories and there is some kind of disconnect where I do truly believe they are just stories I tell myself. That I never mattered and still don’t.

Every once in a while something happens that reminds me this is less than true.

The the Giant showed up at work, said he thought about me every day.

I was down to about once a week with him. Always lyrically/musically triggered.

Then I walked into the tattoo shop where I got my crotch branded with the Poet’s words, took a quick look on insta and lo, there I was.

I stopped looking, for a good long while.

Something whispered in my ear that it was a good time to peek.

I was poised and ready for the alternate piece of footwear to succumb to gravity. Wolfling and Gelfling been haunting my insta too. Random hearts on this or that. S’okay. One of them I know has a new girl and the other…I hope so. He needs consistent, unconditional love more than me even, and we all know that is a metric shit tonne.

Never did know how to run from them…him especially, the Poet him. Always just stood my ground, truth be told it was never my ground. I just stood still. Figured someone like him who had never known home needed something steadfast and familiar to return to when he got tired of running.

But I never had that either.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

For every trauma there are two possible outcomes. Become what hurt you or become what you needed.

I am what I needed.

I am home.

He emulates Oppenheimer I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

He is the eternal pessimist. I am the optimist.

I love.
He runs away from home.

But you held your course to some distant war
In the corners of your mind

Did you hear the notes, all those static codes
In the radio abyss?

It’s my new earworm. Angela by the Lumineers. It is leaking into everything I write, think and do.
I keep listening to this over and over. My head messes with the most important lyric…

Home at last becomes hope it lasts.

I’m the first to admit, I am damaged from before. I can feel us so clearly in another universe where this worked out and we lived happily ever after that the separation is felt heavily in this one.

But it’s not this one.

In this one I have been left to write my own endings.

In this one I love one more time, and find myself home at last.

Hear ye, hear ye all within the Kingdom of Sarahland.

A proclamation from the Queen.

Let it be known throughout the land that at about 3:30 pm on the day of our Lord November 24, 2016, I tripped in the feels real hard and fell the rest of the way.

I had my head on his chest and he was telling stories, I wasn’t prepared.

God dammit.

All I wanted was tacos and snugglefucks.

And now this…

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed
is here in my arms.

Always loved that lyric.

First snowstorm of the year curled up in bed with my mister bliss.

Words are very unnecessary … (Depeche Mode)

(Except we curled up naked in my bed and talked for hours.)

Heard it in grade 9 I think. I think it may have permanently scarred me and my dating life.

I wanted to love and be loved that way. Didn’t happen for a long time. If I got what I wanted, it was bad for me. If I got what I needed, it was bad for me.

I was not very self-aware. I couldn’t have sat down and given you a list of what was important to me. I didn’t feel important to anyone. So any little bit of attention got me hooked, like a fish yanked from the water and gasping for air.

What I needed to do was spend some good quality time alone and figure myself out.

And what I learned is this.

I want simple things, forehead kisses, being called ‘my girl’ or ‘good girl’ depending.
I have lived so many lifetimes in this one, I need someone who has done the same. Someone that can say ‘I used to do those things’, or I tried that’.

Belly laughs are paramount. I can do most of the rest myself.

‘When the soul is ready, its mate appears’.

Nah.

I have had enough of magical, mystical, soul tethering and tearing love for a lifetime.

Gods and monsters can’t tell time and they don’t stay.

I tried loving wolves and I prefer my lumberjack.

I haven’t been writing lately. It’s probably only been a week but every time this happens it feels like missing limbs.

I did 2-12 hour days, a 14 split shift and an 11 hour work/tear down all in a row. Yesterday was spent sleeping til noon and procrastinating, then back to work.

I just reposted an article called ‘What Gods Do’, it remains one of my favorite things I have ever written. It flowed so beautifully. I said what I needed to say with eloquence and humility.

I fucked my share of gods and monsters, I admit it and I am proud.

Do fuckbois have some kind of internal timer that goes off every 150 days or so?

“Time to check the Sarah”
Does it take them that long to realize I’m gone?
Were they once normal boys who now have cyclical amnesia?
It’s been a “sup” fest in all my inboxes/life this week.

The grand army I amassed and released back into the world returneth.
Not in any semblance of formation, they are all fuckbois, they just do what they do when they do it.

Alas my darlings, there is no more Sarahland to conquer. I have become smitten in your absence by someone who stayed.

I have no idea what is going to happen with this one, but there is a massive lack of angst and a level of communication and comfort that is shiny and new.

I heard another song just after he left, Angela by the Lumineers.

I belong,

I believe

Home at last.

I am catching flack on my Facebook page for posting political things.

Tough shit.

I am a delightful combination of love, light and ‘oh my god we are all going to die’ right now.

It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I (don’t) feel fine. _REM

I am torn between being sanctuary and speaking my mind, bringing some light into the darkness so I am just doing all the things.

I have the On This Day app telling me that a year ago right around now the Paris attacks happened and I am feeling the same feelings. Unrest, fear, anger, hurt, and this overwhelming responsibility to be a voice of reason, but I have no idea what to do or say. I didn’t know then either.

It’s gone from bad to worse.

Also, that was right around the time I met the psycho fake soldier and that triggered a series of unfortunate events that are still affecting me.
Thanks for the reminder Facebook, could you the fuck not?

It’s out now, might as well deal.

I met psycho boy in November and the Giant in December. I was punch drunk and hand shy from the first and pushed the second away. Fuck, if I am going to lay it all out, my entire dating history dictated I keep everyone at arm’s length, especially the young un’s, but I digress.

I have worked 10 days since May. Stripper work I mean.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.”
Genesis 1:16-20

Apropos really, my fourth day back at work went about the same.

Two great lights in the darkness marking sacred times.

I think it was a Wednesday. My hair wasn’t washed I was trying to pull off a less than smooth transition from yesterdays winged eye liner to tonight’s smoky eye. I kinda looked like shit, maybe not like shit… but I know I can do better.

Fourth day back and I had already fallen back into old habits, mild political debates with the regulars at the bar while I drank some liquid courage and steadied myself for a stage show and talking to people. I do better at both when slightly inebriated, otherwise I am shy.

Stepped out for a cigarette round about 11pm and my phone made noises. The happy kind that denote a text…had to look twice as to whom it was from.

Him: Sarah………..

(This can’t be, he said my name so it isn’t a mistake)

Me: _______?

Nothing for 90 seconds…
Couldn’t figure out why now. It’s been months of no contact, which was to be expected. I didn’t really pull any punches after he left in here. He said he stopped reading this, but I wasn’t sure. I was hurt, mad and sad, never a good combo for me. I’d die before I told him I missed him. There was that whole wedding debacle and the debauchery that proceeded it.

Why now?

Him: Come chat after your cigarette?

Oh that why now.

He was at my work. Fuckery.

Some of my old work habits had died, I had stopped looking for him in every tall guy with a beard and a button up shirt. Stopped glancing in the direction of the chair I found him in way back when.

Rookie mistake. Been making a lot of those lately.

You know that feeling when you are in an elevator and it goes a little below the floor you are supposed to be stopping at so I does that extra little up/down? You, my stomach did that.

Didn’t hurt, just fluttered and flipped a little. Butterflies migrating en masse.

I got about 6 feet away and said loudly “if you leave room for Jesus when you hug me I am gonna kill you.”

He didn’t.

He left very little room for anything, not doubt or fear or anger. Just two old friends catching up after an absence and a little post mordem on past events. I forgot about Trump and the world ending. For 2 and a half hours all I did was smile and say ‘are you really here?’ with alarming regularity. We were respectful of our respective relationships with others. Just picked up where we left off or where we started or something, I am not reading too much into it. He tells me not to with alarming regularity.

He also told me not to write about this, but baby I gotta talk about something and besides. I love the fuck outta you, dummy.

I pride myself not on my strong beginnings in these posts, those are hit and miss, but I almost always know how to wrap things up with a neat little bow or a joke or an innuendo…funny enough…

I don’t know how to end this. But I am not reading too much into it.

Dear America, this is your circus and these are your monkeys.

I posted a property listing that a real estate agent friend of mine has for sale.
8.5 million dollars, 167 acres, several livable and legal dwellings, and 8 acre pond. I joked that I wanted it in case the zombies come. I didn’t want to say ‘just in case Trump wins and my vulnerable American  friends need somewhere safe to live’ because I didn’t believe it was possible.

My sin was pride, pride and the ensuing blindness to a world that I had decided didn’t exist.

I can see it now.

It looks like hate and division.

I feel like there are politicians sitting around in Washington trying to figure out how to fix this without burning everything to the ground. Quite possibly the worst time to be a politician, there is real work to be done. All joking aside, I do not envy them.

The Republicans mocking the Democrats for protesting will take up arms and do the same. Only angrier because for the first time in a long time they felt heard and that is a hard thing to lose. I know this, every man who encouraged me to keep going when I’d get excited talking about something instead of telling me to shut up. That isn’t something I am willing to let go of.

There are options. Electoral College swings the other way. Anarchy.

Impeachment. See above.

Obama declares martial law until we can figure out what to do. See above.

Civil war and/or concede.

Let him have his way and see how bad it gets.

None of those seem viable but this is exactly what has happened and these are exactly the options.

QUINTUS: People should know when they’re conquered.

MAXIMUS: Would you Quintus? Would I?

(Gladiator)

Scholars for years have been trying to understand and articulate how Hitler rose to power. They’ve figured it out, we’ve been amply warned and it’s happening again. All that is needed for a fascist to take power is to leave a vast majority of the population under the poverty line and living in fear of affording their next meal/mortgage payment. Cut them off from the world, blame outsiders for everything. Eventually some charismatic madman will come along and promise change.

I wrote on Saturday how we all need to come together, listen to each other and heal, but there is still fear clutching my heart and it won’t let go. I don’t think it’s enough and I am afraid people are going to die.

The same fear I had when I watched in disbelief as the Republicans put forth Trump as their burnt offering for the Presidential Elect.

The fear that was fed with every debate, every news release, every episode of the Daily Show.

The fear was founded and it’s now all encompassing.

I rewatched an HBO series called Carnivale, set during the Great Depression. Basic plotline of good versus evil. But the charismatic preacher on the side of evil won the popular vote. Had a devout following of the masses. Because they were poor, hungry and scared and he offered them hope. The rhetoric he used made me jump out of my skin. It was a prelude, a warning and no one listened. Here we are.

The series was left open ended because it was cancelled, the writers and producers chose to just leave everything hanging instead of tying it neatly up with a bow. But that’s how life is. Sometimes we don’t get a happy ending.

There are plenty of fictitious works that tell us what happens when evil wins.

I have read the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood several times.

It was mandatory reading in Canadian schools for a long time.

I never handed in the book report that was due in 1991, I am writing it now because I feel like it’s happening.

Written in 1986 it was a story about a dystopian future somewhere/time around now.

The similarities to actual events are eerie and getting worse.

Nuclear accidents and poisoning of water have led to a lot of America being uninhabitable and most citizens sterile.

Paper money had been replaced with debit cards and the government seizes all money held by women.

Books are burned, walls are built. Militarized police force is used to ‘keep everyone safe’.

An attack on the White House has left the country under totalitarian, military rule.

Viable women are rounded up and used as breeders for the elite. Named Handmaiden’s.

Genesis 16:1-2
1 Now Sarai, Abram’s wife had borne him no children, and she had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar. 2 So Sarai said to Abram, “Now behold, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Please go in to my maid; perhaps I will obtain children through her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

Non-viable women, anyone not white or Christian, anyone opposing the new order are all sent either to their death or to clean up the mess in the middle, so just a more drawn out death while the elite/high ranking military live in a walled community called Gilead.

The story is told in a patchwork. Pieced together from audiotapes uncovered years after the rise and fall of Gilead. The story of a woman who was smuggled out.

She was part of the beginning, she has memories of the life she had before and holds them like treasure.

It is a common theme among post apocalyptic characters. The nostalgia for what was keeping some hope and sanity.

Change is coming. I can see it, feel it and it’s never easy for the first wave.

I had nightmares early on in the election when I heard the things Trump was saying, coupled with the Dakota pipeline fiasco that at some point soon women would have to be smuggled out of the states.

I woke up to that being a reality.

I am scared for America. Especially the women and minorities.

Bill Maher said “This is different, this is real. Once Fascists take power they don’t give it back.”

I think he is right.

I am going to re-read this book again. See if there are any clues as to how to stop it.

I don’t want the world to plunge into darkness before it sees the light.

I don’t want to leave it to our children to clean this up.

I don’t want them to be the ones that have to tear walls down. My generation has already been through this.

I am all for hope and love and light, what scares me is that it’s not enough anymore.

“Gotta kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight.” Bruce Cockburn

I am writing 2 articles today.

This one and an overdue book report on the Handmaid’s Tale that I should have done in 1991.

Then I am going to water all my plants and put away my laundry, maybe make enchiladas.

I have a vague semblance of a routine. I change my sheets and water my plants on Sundays. I ended up out for brunch and the bulk of the day with my best girl. Boyfriend was over on Friday and understandably I was not in a rush to get rid of the smell of him on my pillowcases.
So, I waited til Monday. I can’t remember what happened Monday but I didn’t make it to the laundromat. Same with Tuesday.

Tuesday night I went to bed kinda early the election was close and stressful.

To quote Stephen King “It became unspeakable.”

Wednesday I grieved with my people.

I was trying to go about my day and the reality that Donald Trump was the president elect would creep up behind me and scare the fuck outta me, my heart would break again and I would burst into tears.

I watched Stephen Colbert address his audience with the air of a man who was trying to process a death.

Thursday was pretty hard too.

Friday was better.

I made it to the laundromat.

I have re-evaluated my position on this whole thing.

I am still terrified, but I am beginning to understand.

Every fear I have of him/them, they have of her/us.

How can I be justified in my fears and discount theirs? I can’t.

Just as we all fear for our way of life right now, being able to live out in the open as ‘different’, they have been just as scared of all things different.

We have treated them like a sideshow or monkeys in the zoo ‘aw look how cute’ until they start doing what monkeys do and flinging shit for being locked in a cage and stared at. We elevated Paula Deen and the Duck Dynasty boys to fame and then held public floggings for their political incorrectness. Which really only served to tell that massive portion of America that we love you, but only if you play by our rules.

Our all-encompassing love and acceptance for other cultures stopped short and didn’t include 47.5 percent of America.
We called them rednecks, idiots, yokels, racists, sexists, xenophobes.
What I really think they are? Hungry, tired, poor and confused.

No wonder they are pissed off enough to elect a President who shares their fears and has never held public office.

Flint Michigan still has no clean drinking water. The average yearly income has only risen $5000/yr since 1979. Politicians made decisions that created the real estate bubble bursting while shipping jobs overseas. Nothing has gotten better for them. They are trapped in a Walmart loop of 33/hrs per week, no overtime and food stamps. They truly believe ISIS is coming to get them like little kids believe in the boogeyman.

What have we done to allay these fears?

Nothing. We make fun of them. I flaunt my whorish/ungodly self in public and tell them to mind their manners and eat their opinions or else the politically correct police will attack them.

I stated in the last article I wrote that I was born and raised in a Democratic bubble. I was raised without religion and only vague notions of God. My personal belief is that there are miracles and universal energy and things we cannot see, fathom nor explain. I am comfortable with this.

Also, by my own admission upon this blog and in general I am a heavily tattooed stripper who has had a child out of wedlock, abortions and a lot of sex.

I am a heathen.

All my friends are heathens (take it slow) _ 21 Pilots

There was a Gallup poll in 2011 that shows Seventy-seven percent of the population of the United States of America believe in angels. Only 40 percent concede climate change is a reality.

Please re-read that last paragraph as many times as you need to. Let it sink in.

I get attacked on my page, I have been called a baby killer, a whore and all sorts of shit. My reaction? I laugh it off, hit block and delete or I argue and stoop to name calling. “How dare you tell me how to live?”

I realized Friday morning I am guilty of doing that exact same thing.

Yes, I believe in science and rational thought.

I have discounted the entirety of the United States of America except LA and New York and a few pockets of blue, decided that the entire red middle was worthless, sad, disillusioned creationists that were not deserving of my time, energy or understanding.

What have I done?

What have all of us done?

This isn’t how this works.

We can’t sit here on our ivory towers of education yelling down ‘inclusion for all’ and then shut out 47.5 percent of the population.

Remember as we all sat in horror and listened to Trump say he’d ‘think about it’ when it came to conceding?

Um, what are we doing right now?

I don’t think there has never been an election like this in the history of ever.
Now for one second allow yourself to think what would have happened if it had gone the other way? Clinton winning electoral (which still may happen) and Trump taking the popular vote. I shudder to contemplate that group mobilized in anger. Yes, we the democrats have kept it pretty civil, but again, if the Electoral College decides to go with Hillary it is going to get ever so much uglier in a way I am not sure we can recover from.

America is a big open wound and we have to stop picking at it.

So let’s circle back to the grief. I saw something that said ‘grief is just love with nowhere to go.’

We can’t grieve if our love has somewhere to go and it has many places to be right now.
First, with those at risk. I do not believe that every person who voted for Trump is a racist or a misogynist, but there are overwhelming reports that violent behavior is on the rise. Those who have felt leashed and muzzled have been given a voice and free reign. And that is terrifying.
Second, in starting a dialog with the people who felt that had no voice, felt judged and persecuted for their beliefs and way of life.

It’s time for Democrats to do what we do and move beyond tolerating these people and love them.

Louis CK said it best “When a person tells you that you hurt them, you don’t get to decide that you didn’t.”

They are hurt, whether we can rationalize it or not. It’s up to us to say okay ‘what can we do to fix this.’

One of my first childhood memories was a cold grey December morning.
I was 5 years old.
Normal Tuesday morning routine, I was in the kitchen with my mother, she turned the radio on and heard that John Lennon had been shot and she broke down. I don’t think I had seen her cry before, not like that. Weeping from her core.
I have a feeling that had I been home Wednesday morning, in my mother’s house, bleary-eyed in my pajamas when she turned on the news, her reaction wouldn’t have been much different.

I remember the Challenger blowing up. We were all in the gymnasium in school watching, it was a Tuesday too.

I remember where I was when the first Desert Storm happened, I was home sick from school on the couch crying, watching the missiles fly.

I remember 9/11, getting a phone call Tuesday morning from a hysterical friend telling me to turn on the news that “they” were blowing up America.

I felt the same way when I woke up November 9^th 2016.

My girl posted yesterday that she woke up in a bad dream.

It is a bad dream.

November 8^th I went to bed around 11pm. I had to get off Facebook, the panic was palpable.

I posted that I hoped to wake up to the first woman POTUS.

The polls were making me jittery so I watched an old HBO series called Carnivale about America during the dust bowl years. Woke up to that America come back to life. The last time the GOP was in full power like this = the Great Depression.

I remember Bill Clinton getting elected and how happy my folks were, I vaguely remember him being impeached. There was a lot going on with high ranking men and mistresses and most of what I knew about politics I learned from Saturday Night Live.

I think that might have been part of my problem. I wasn’t paying attention. I was listening to Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah. My Facebook feed is 98% liberal. My friends are poets.

I am seeing my 98% going through the stages of grief.

My parents were born and raised in Michigan, they moved up here in the 70’s after my dad got back from Vietnam, bought a farm and raised 3 girls. Our house was liberal, and not just tolerant, but accepting of everyone. We didn’t use the n word, we didn’t look down on the poor, women are equal, and immigration is necessary and diversity welcomed. I never knew the reality outside of this. I mean I saw it when I visited rural Georgia, there was rampant racism. I was hanging out with a bunch of straight white men that worked factory jobs. One of them had married a girl who has a biracial daughter, so to me it seemed like more ‘shit talk’ than action.

I spent summers and holidays stateside until I was 15. My parents kept their citizenship and live here as landed immigrants. The only people I’m related to that are NOT American are my 2 sisters, my son and my nephew.

I have always identified as the child of American parents, raised in the Canadian school system so I add extra vowels and think in Celsius in the winter, but the States is where my heart is and where I am happy. Every good moment I had as a child was on my Nana’s porch in Lansing, or my Aunt’s cottage in Houghton Lake.

My entire family, blood and otherwise are there.

I am in Canada right now watching my childhood home burn down and I don’t know how to stop it.

I was out with a girlfriend November 9th. Just a random visit, haven’t seen her in a couple years.
I walked into the coffee shop around noon, she was sitting on a bar stool sipping a beer, we looked at each other and instantly welled up with tears.

It was nice to be out with someone who understands why this is bad. To have the comfort of another human being feeling the same gambit of emotions.

I realized in speaking to her, that I was raised in a Democratic bubble.

I was blind.

I hear a lot of talk about him just being a figurehead with no real power. That is not the truth.

People are rioting in the streets. People are committing hate crimes because they feel like they can.

Half of America hates the other half and they have been gagged from being public about it with the concept of political correctness. The muzzle is off now, a sexist, racist, xenophobic man who ran on a platform of hate has been elected the president of the United States of America.

I sat back and watched, giggling sometimes as Democrats called Republicans stupid, uneducated…

It took this monumental disaster of an election for me to realize how is that different from the slurs they throw at everyone else?

It isn’t. We (the people) looked down on them, chastised them for being different instead of realizing that pretty much every human being on the planet has the same basic goals in life, food, shelter, happiness and a safe place to raise their kids.

It’s time to realize that to be open minded, you have to make room for them too. Or none of this works.

I think I am a fairly sympathetic person, educated, knowledgeable, caring etc…but I did this too.

Hate won.

“This is the war and not the warning.” 54-40

You are either with us or against us.

I am super tired right now.

Women are not safe. Haven’t really been for centuries.

Once upon a cave ago women were seen for what they were, the bringers of life, sacred, something to be protected.

In a hunter/gatherer society men hunted, women gathered. Our basic physiology dictates that’s the way things are. Women nurture, men protect. They’d go out hunting for food, we’d make sure they had a comfortable home to come back to. We used to be symbiotic, there wouldn’t be a human race without this basic principle. We have lost this.

Grocery stores and office jobs, the industrial revolution, free trade for cheap trinkets, factory farming and even the internet upon which you are reading this have all contributed to our downfall. Roles are no longer rigidly defined for the sole purpose of survival, which is  great and all, but this discombobulation has spawned a battle of the sexes and it’s really fucking ugly.

I’m ashamed to admit I had an internet fight with a friend.

I hate internet fights, even if you win…it isn’t winning. It’s a colossal waste of time.

What sparked it was a very leftist feminist statement by Lena Dunham calling for the extinction of the straight white male.

My opinion? She is not wrong.

His opinion? This statement was the death of the feminist movement. It was TOO extreme.

Now, I get his side, he is a straight white male and it IS an extreme reaction.

I tried to explain that women have been living under extreme circumstances for years.

Imagine if you will a dystopia where women are afraid to walk down the street alone for fear of cat calls and assault. Oh wait, that’s every fucking woman every fucking day.

So the answer is to not leave our homes unescorted?
I haven’t been to a bar in years unless I was very specifically on a date or in a group.
Fine, I get that, I don’t like it but I get it. It’s dark, people are drunk…still not okay, but I concede.
Herein lies the bigger problem. I can’t go to the laundromat, grocery store or post office without some man saying some damned thing. Unwanted, unwelcomed, uninvited, just because I left my house alone?

My straight white male friend’s initial comment? Well where are you hanging out?

Excuse me?

Let me further state that this is still a problem even when women are AT HOME if you count varying wormholes in the internet where the vilest of the vile can get through. Sitting at my laptop isn’t safe, holding my phone, having any presence on social media whatsoever. You can lock your shit down tight as a drum and somehow the dick pics and rape threats keep coming.

It’s not always so extreme.

I have had some random straight white dude who saw me on Tinder in July sending me two or 3 messages a month, via Instagram with no rhyme or reason, just ‘sup’ and ‘hey we should hang sometime’. Its’ up to about a dozen messages now, all unanswered and yet they keep coming. Chinese water torture.

I didn’t right swipe him for the record. Gave no indication of interest whatsoever.

I don’t understand the mentality of this. Mind you I won’t go to a party unless I have an invitation and permission in triplicate, such is my disdain and shame for being somewhere I don’t feel wanted or welcome.

So I am to think/believe that I invite this behavior because I exist?

And he thinks Lena Dunham is too extreme?

If you read her actual commentary she wasn’t calling for a roundup and mass cleansing of straight white males. Akin to the ‘Salvagings’ depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood wherein women live in a state of severe repression and their only outlet is these occasional public hangings and rallies where they literally rip a man to shreds and death for crimes against other women.

Considering the light sentences handed out to straight white men for violent sexual crimes against women, we could use a good Salvaging methinks.

Extremism breeds extremism.

She doesn’t want anyone dead. She is calling for the termination of an ideology. This straight white male privileged rhetoric that poses a threat to anyone who isn’t straight, white or male.

I furthered my argument by saying it is a straight while male problem. If I asked a black man or a gay man or any visible minority if they had experienced unwanted attention walking down the street the answer would be a resounding YES.

Any radical change to an oppressed people always begins with radical statements and behavior.

As a collective we have been saying ‘hey guys, stop’ for quite some time now. And it doesn’t stop.

What continues to happen is shit like Brock Turner getting 60 days in jail for really brutal rape, Trump on TV saying “grab em by the pussy” and it’s toxic as fuck. Lena Dunham is saying/doing something with the same blatant hostility towards the perpetrators of said behavior. I fail to see how it is offensive nor how she should be shamed for it.

I posted a comment on another friend’s page under a meme that was attempting to prove that Donald Trump isn’t a racist. I simply stated that yes, he is. Some straight white male went on a 6 hour rant about how I shouldn’t have kids, I should find a nice man to look after me, about how women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Nietzsche

I love Nietzsche, I am by definition a pacifist I don’t want to fight. But I am tired of being afraid.

I see no other recourse than women becoming monsters to fight this situation that has been created under centuries of patriarchal nonsense and oppression.

At no point do I believe Lena Dunham meant all straight white men.

I believe they are our only allies in this. When women speak, a lot of them don’t listen to us, but they seem to listen to others of their kind.

I was raised by a good man, I am dating a good man, I have spectacular male friends and I raised my son to be a good man.

I said before, the human race would have died out a long time ago if ALL men behaved this way.

But I am going to need some men to acknowledge that some other men do this shit.

And stop it.

http://heatst.com/culture-wars/lena-dunham-wants-to-improve-men-by-making-white-straight-men-extinct/