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“It’s Not You, It’s Me.”

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Ever heard this line? – “It’s not you, it’s me.”

I’ve heard it many times myself. In the past my typical response was usually, “Bullshit, you dick. Grow some balls, coward. I’ll do better. Fucker. Liar. Please don’t go. Bastard. Stay. Asshole. ” These utterances were usually followed by a week or so of tears, some cuddle time with Ben & Jerry watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie, a few tattoos so that I could feel the pain inside in a tangible way on the outside, the eventually donning of my Superwoman cape, heading out with my friends, my first few laughs post break-up, tequila, Jagermeister, Beam, Stoli O and cranberry juice with slivers of an orange, flying kites in thunderstorms, swimming in fountains, stealing tractors, sweaty soul train dance parties, and Journey concerts. Hey, everyone has their own personal process. Read more

Soul Mates: Fact or Fiction?

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I need your guts.

Ladies.

Gentlemen.

I need your gut instincts, your intuition, your introspection on a subject that keeps coming up for me.

Soul mates. Fact or fiction?

You see, I met a guy about ten years ago. I had no interest in dating at the time. I had just left a ten year marriage and was sewing my wild grains with a top o’ the line industrial sewing machine, threads of sinew, and my liver.  But I felt inexorably, inexplicably drawn to this person. We went our separate ways after our first meeting but we kept running into each other. Over and over and over. It was like “moth to a flame” shit. I would think about this Dude. Every. Single. Day. And… according to him, his words, his experience was the same.  It made no sense to either of us. When I looked into Dude’s eyes I was lost in some time-space continuum of I don’t know where or when. But our relationship was rocky, dysfunctional, messy, overwrought, too much. It was like Disney on an icy glacier after a couple bowls of meth. Read more

Glimpse of a Life Through Lyrics

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So I speak to you in riddles
‘Cause my words get in my way
I smoke the whole thing to my head
And feel it wash away (1)

Words speak and choose
make sense and lose
capsize the tall tale, but always fail
words speak and choose, make sense and lose
forfeit the tall tale, I always will (2)

I am colorblind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready
I am taffy stuck and tongue tied
Stutter shook and uptight
Pull me out from inside
I am ready
I am fine (3) Read more

Battery Power Low! Otherwise Known As God’s Little Voice Box

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I don’t want to freak you out or anything but God has been speaking to me through my fire detector.

It’s true.

Some people have vivid, colorful dreams of weathered hermits riding royal purple Yaks and wake up feeling inspired and motivated around their life purpose. Others make an omelet and see the face of Jesus in the burnt, crusty bits of Gouda and head out on a pilgrimage. Moses had the burning bush.

But, nope. Not me. I have a Kidde fire alarm. Read more

The Rollercoaster of Life

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“You know, when I was nineteen, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster. . .  Up, down. Up, down. Oh, what a ride! I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so. . . so frightened. So scared. So sick. So excited and so thrilled all together! Some didn’t like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing.” ~ Grams on “Parenthood.”

Some have said I’ve been on one hell of a rollercoaster ride this year. I would argue that it’s been more like the Millenium Force at Cedar Point after three corn dogs slathered in yellow mustard and a large plastic baggie full of blue cotton candy. In the past seven months my rickety car has climbed toward the sky, stayed suspended at the top for a few moments in time, and plummeted down at lightning speed – taking my breath away. Read more

My Life as a Colonoscopy

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“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ~ E.L. Doctorow

So, yeah, Doctorow was talking about writing and, while I’ve certainly felt that way in penning my own novel, right now these words are encompassing my whole life. They’ve niggled into every corner of my existence and, while I know, “you can make the whole trip” with not but a set of headlights, it’d sure be nice if I weren’t driving a rusted 1971 Pinto, exhaust dragging the pavement, and a Gulf size oil leak.  Don’t even get me started about the headlights themselves.  The bulbs are cracked and covered with a layer of deep red clay dust. I think one is definitely on the fritz because it’s blinking like a firefly’s ass on a sultry summer eve. Read more

The Royal Wedding: Fairy Tale or Fucking Fromage?

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I was driving to school yesterday listening to what BBC coined their “Royal Wedding Disco” when the DJ pulled out Journey’s classic “Don’t Stop Believing.”

I almost ran my little Beetle right off the road.

How apropos. You see, I myself stopped believing in fairy tales when I was fourteen. My mom had recently married a man who would wake me each morn by yelling, “Wake up and piss, the world’s on fire,” through the railing of my bedroom loft. I would roll over and wonder what my mother saw in this vile man whom, with bitter irony, would get so plastered drinking Milwaukee’s Best that he’d forget where the bathroom was and piss next to the coal burning stove. That pretty much put the royal kibosh on any romantic idyllicism that I had up to that point. Read more

How To Be Alone

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I’m about to get real, folks. Really real.

I like to be alone. I’m not simply saying, “I like my alone time.” Nothing puny like that. I’m saying, “I utterly love being alone.” I take a lot of flack for this — from society, from those whom I love, from therapists around the world spouting “connection” and “human interaction”. I have frequent conversations with myself wherein I ask, “Am I normal? Is there something wrong with me?” When I allow myself to buy into society’s spigot of “norms”, I’m pretty certain that I’m whack. Except then I feel that rush of joyful bliss that makes me giggle out loud when I’m all by myself and all of those theories flush right down the drain.

The How

Make Thanksgiving dinner the night before Thanksgiving because you simply cannot wait and you’re not expecting company anyway. Prepare only the foods you love, mainly those with a sauce of some sort. Prep your $1100 mattress for a canvas o’ culinary goodness and feast on roasted turkey with sage, whipped mashed potatoes drizzled with real butter and smooth, creamy gravy, baked yams with bubbling brown sugar sauce, and Waldorf salad swimming in sugar syrup, minus the gross bananas. Watch Disney movies while you eat and spill blobs of said gravy onto said mattress. Lay there after your gorge, feeling like a sixteen year old boy who just lost his coveted virginity in 3.2 minutes. Sleep in the wet spot. Read more

“Living” with Endometriosis

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Before you go running for the antibacterial wipes I just want to let you know that I’m not contagious. What I have is not catching. What I’m about to relay will not travel through your computer’s innards as a deadly Trojan virus or spread through the air like an uncovered sneeze. It’s called stage IV endometriosis and according to the information traffic jam, over 70 million women around the world live with it every day and, I’m guessing another 50 million or so women don’t even know they have it. Those women are probably lying on the bathroom floor right now, gritting their teeth, clutching their wombs while saying, “What the Fuck!?” and praying for the strength to live through the next couple of days.

So what is endometriosis?

I usually tell people, strictly out of exhaustion, that it’s a “girlie” disease. This comes from being raised in a household where you don’t talk about stuff like this. If by some circumstance of extreme horror a particularly cute boy asks, I worry that he thinks I have funky bacteria of the hoo-ha and imagine him running home to Google. A medical professional might say something resembling a foreign language like, “endometriosis is a disease in which the lining of the uterus grows outside of the uterus so that when one menstruates this displaced tissue bleeds as well, but has nowhere to go, thereby causing pain, infertility and various other problems.” Read more