Is It 💩 or Is It 🥇

 

“I need to do something about this.”

Ok.  Here’s “something.”

I want to preface by saying this is in no way a “New Year’s Resolution.”  I don’t do those, for obvious reasons.  I have a REALLY hard time with failure.  This is the chief reason my life has been mostly about not challenging myself overmuch.  I never want to start something I don’t have at least a 75% chance of completing without trying very hard.  No New Year’s Resolutions for me.  365 days is just too long to promise (and fail) to keep doing anything.

Back to “something.”

I’m going to start posting regularly.  Not because I have this backlog of wonderful, thoughtful, stupendous commentary swirling around in my brain (though by all rights, I SHOULD have...)  But because it’s a helluva lot more stimulating than playing four hours of solitaire every day. 

Or hanging around Twitter, where I am reminded daily that I am merely an insignificant pimple on the colossal ass of social media.

I’m going to spend the hour between 10:00 and 11:00 AM writing.  Something.  Anything.  And then I’m going to post it.

It will either be 💩 or it will be 🥇.  Or golden shit.  Or shitty gold.  Maybe I’ll even give each piece a rating when I post it.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my first attempt.

    

This Didn't Go Where I Started Out To Go...

 

A thought came to me this morning.  It went something like, “Why am I letting this historically awful set of circumstances bombarding our everyday lives derail me to the point of taking away what used to be one of my greatest pleasures?”

Why can I not write?  If there were ever a gold mine of things going on to inspire an arm-chair political opinion writer, this should be it.  Shouldn’t it?  What happened to the indignant fire that used to course through my veins?

I’ve come up with a theory... 

Back in the infancy of social media, I was a voice in a crowd.  Small, faint…but audible.  I commanded the attention of maybe two dozen other people who would comment and engage, approve or argue.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough.  Enough for someone whose voice had echoed around only in her own head for the first 48 years of her life. 

A couple of decades later, I’m not even a voice. I’m a mouse scratching at the door of a coliseum overflowing with screaming, crying, roaring voices…all talking at once, so loud and so incessantly that no one really hears or understands any of them. 

Without my little audience, I feel like Puff the Magic Dragon. 

 

“One gray night it happened Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff the Magic Dragon Sadly ceased his fearless roar

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain…

So Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave…”

 

I need to do something about this. 

 

 

1/6/2021

 

Goodbye, 2020! We Knew Ye Well!

 

So here we are, watching one of the weirdest years on record crawl out the back door.  It’s odd to write “weird”   about a year that’s not just personally weird.  It has been a globally weird year. Hardly a soul on the planet has been unaffected by the pandemic—the hype, the fear, the sadness, the illness, the death, the economic disaster.

And here in the US, we have had to pile Trump and MAGAts and all their antics on top of the pandemic shit heap.  And the way those antics have multiplied the disaster of the pandemic a hundredfold.

Yep. 2020 has been a shit sandwich.  And all that shit has piled up and sat on top of my brain and my fingers and my keyboard, and made it impossible to write more than flurries of 280-character tweets.

Looking over 17 years of “Coming to Terms,” I noticed that my all-time low of posting seems to have occurred  in 2014.  Thirty-seven posts in an entire year.  No idea what happened in 2014 that was so much more interesting than writing.  Or that might have been so heavy and horrid…or “weird”…that made it so I couldn’t write.   I’m never happy with all-time lows when it comes to writing.

And, lookie here! Only 36 entries for all of 2020!  I could do it!  I could hit a new all-time low!  And there would be no year more deserving than this shit sandwich of a pandemic, MAGAt, Trump-ridden, rotten-ass year.

But, no.   

I’m going to write a post.  This post.  And I’m going to stick it out there.

Because, in spite of all the shit that is 2020, I have things to be grateful for.  A lot of things.

We still have a roof over our heads, food to eat, vehicles to drive.

We have stayed healthy.

We have our  “children”—even though we’ve lost 3 in the space of a year.

We have family, who also have roofs over their heads, food to eat, vehicles to drive.

We have rejected, as a nation, a sick old snake oil salesman and his mob of criminals.

There is much to be thankful for.

So here are a few paragraphs, just to let the Universe know that I appreciate that 2020 could have been a lot worse.  And I am forever grateful that it wasn’t.

Goodbye, 2020.  You weren’t the worst.  But still…don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

 

Brighter Days Ahead

 

Thoughts on a Pandemic Holiday

 

 

What will I miss about this year’s non-holidays?

I don’t know. 

The past several years, my holiday observance has mostly consisted of decorating the crap out of the house (for my own enjoyment only, since we have no friends and I don’t entertain); buying a few presents for family (who don’t really need or want anything); attending holiday concerts or plays or some other entertainment (though these have become more rare, as time has gone by and tickets to such things have become prohibitively expensive.) 

At least the decorating has gone on anyway.  It’s not like I have to go out and GET decorations.  And I will say, decorating for the holidays has been the first time since March that I have actually felt NORMAL.  It’s the one thing the pandemic hasn’t tarnished, spoiled, or taken away.

Gift shopping has become more of a chore than a joy, so I won’t miss that.

 Concerts and such are so expensive, and the ones we can afford kind of…suck.  So I can take a pass on those this year without too much remorse.

Still, the holidays are a bit…flat.  We passed on Thanksgiving entirely—cooked up hamburgers and fries for the holiday feast for the two of us.  And we won’t be gathering with the family for Christmas, either.  We text, we Zoom; but I’m not comfortable with spending many hours in close quarters indoors with…well, anybody.  So that’s not going to happen.

But I got to thinking the other day:  There is one thing…a thing that actually disappeared more than a decade ago…that I will particularly miss this holiday season.   Because a pandemicly challenged Christmas would have been the perfect time for it.

And that is…

AOL j-land.

 

I remember those days, particularly the holidays of 2004 and 2005, when Journal-land was in its heyday.  We had such a lovely community, and we had a mostly good time getting to know each other and sharing traditions, pictures, games, stories, memories, and sometimes gifts, with people all over the country or even across the world.

I remember being so stoked about instant messaging with a journal friend who lived in the UK on New Years’ Eve 2004.  It seemed like such a miracle of technology…the very best this newfangled “internet” had to offer.

Social media in its infancy.

What a glorious couple of years!

And then social media grew up.  And became…well, we all know what it became.  Hardly bears thinking about, how quickly the human race turned what seemed such a bright and hopeful gift into a shithole.

I had to wade out of the Facebook cesspool over a year ago, mostly leaving behind the few friends I had left from the original AOL J-land.  I keep banging away here on Coming to Terms, but the old friends don’t come around much.  Or if they do, they choose to leave no trace…  And to add insult to injury, recent shifts in the blog continuum have erased the names from the comments on posts transferred here from AOL and rendered them all “anonymous,” so when I go back to visit the old neighborhood, it’s peopled with nameless ghosts.

But…yeah.  I thought about AOL J-Land the other day, and how its comfort and wonder and innocence would have been perfect during what promises to be a strangely detached and lonely holiday season.  Those connections were a treasure and a lifeline 15 years ago.  What a nurturing miracle they would be now!

Anyway…

Happy Holidays to any of my old Journal-land friends who may stop by.

Stay safe, stay healthy.  Get the shot when it gets around to you.

I miss you.

One Too Many Goodbyes

 

It’s been more than a week since we sent our sweet Alvin back to the Spirit.  It was his time, I know.  And I know we’ll meet again, his spirit and my own…because we’re really just fragments of the same spirit.

But…I miss him SO MUCH.  Probably moreso because he was the last of our three orange boys—the two brothers who came to us as tiny babies in 2004, and the moon-faced foundling who adopted us in 2009.  All gone from us, now, within less than a year of each other.   

I try to express my gratitude to the Universe every morning—for keeping us safe and well and more or less financially solvent during these strange, difficult times.  For blessing me with a good, solid partner. For planting the urgency in us that drove us to downsize in time to meet this crisis. 

 But I can’t help but feel that the loss of our three boys in such a short period of time has been...perhaps, unnecessarily brutal.

Alvin.  The soft, round, roly-poly orange-and-white.  He and his brother were so tiny when we brought them home…barely five weeks old. 

  

 

They bonded with us so completely that we used to joke that they were “hand-tamed parakeets.”  They loved us, they loved everybody.  Guests or family, any hand was good for petting.   Alvin was so happy to be carried around that, when you tried to put him down, you had to make sure his feet were under him and would be the first thing to hit the ground.  He was so sure that you would carry him around forever, he never learned to “lower his landing gear.” If you just carelessly dropped him—like you might with any other cat—he was likely to fall on his butt or his back, then look up at you like, “Why did you do that?”

  

Alvin loved water.  He was the guardian of the water dish—any water dish.  He would climb up in the sinks—bathroom or kitchen—and suckle on the faucets as if they provided golden drops of life's most precious elixir. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was good at consuming things that were not food.  All his life, we had to keep him away from toilet paper and paper towels. He didn't just unroll them and make a mess, he actually ATE the paper.  And ribbon!  One Christmas, he got under the tree and ate every piece of ribbon he could get his teeth into. He ate so much that I thought he might have killed himself.  Luckily, what didn't come back up as technicolor barf made its way out the other end eventually. But from then on, we watched him like a hawk on Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries...an day there might be presents around.

And, Alvin was always good for pitching in on home improvement projects.  

But most of all, I think, Al loved his brother Theo.  They were two halves of a whole for their entire lives.  When Theo died in June, I wondered how much longer we would be able to keep Alvin going.  As it turned, out, it wasn’t very long.

 

Sleep well, my boys!  Then romp among the stars until we’re together again!

Ow Goes to Join His Brother

 

The Fateful Day

Four years ago, I went out on a wildlife photography expedition to get away from the election day hype.  I was 85% confident that the American people were not stupid enough to elect an idiot snake oil salesman to the highest office in the land.  I went to Sauvie Island for the afternoon...it was a beautiful bright blue autumn day, and I was enchanted by an amazing up close and personal encounter with a very accommodating barred owl.

I only wish the owl encounter was the sole reason that day will be forever branded in my memory.   

Because, of course, I returned home that evening to witness the horrifying debacle of Trump's victory.

In that turbulent time, after the initial shock had worn off...as much as it was EVER going to wear off, we at least had the slimmest of hopes that it wouldn't be as bad as we thought it was going to be.  That Trump might actually rise to the occasion, and become, at best, a mediocre chief executive, rather than the dumpster fire his campaign performance indicated he would be. 

That hope was stubborn, and raised its demented head every time Trump faced a challenge that needed to be met with the temperament of an adult human being.  After about the sixth or seventh such incident within the first few months of his "reign," we all realized he was exactly who and what he displayed during the entire 2016 presidential campaign, and he was not going to miraculously change or learn or step up.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

And, we watched, horrified, as the rank and file GOP lined up and endorsed the Dumpster Fire President. The dumpster fire has raged unchecked ever since.

Now, it's four years later.  After a year from hell, an entirely fitting preamble to tonight's proceedings,  the moral fate of the United States of America will again be up for grabs.  And despite all the polls and all the hype and all the "resistance," I can't think there is one human being in the entire country who believes the result of the election is sure...in either direction.  We all saw what happened last time.  We have all witnessed the ever-increasing insanity of THIS campaign season. The only thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that shit is going to hit the fan tonight.  We don't know which way the shit is ultimately going to blow.  My guess is that a fair amount is going to fall upon both sides.

In contrast to Election Day 2016, I creaked out of bed late this morning.  Rose later than I have in, I think, years...because I spent two hours in the middle of the night tossing and turning and stressing about today's events.

The day is cloudy and still...like it's holding its breath against the events of the evening.

I won't be going out to the wilderness to seek solace and distraction.  I don't think I could do that if you held a gun to my head.

Instead, we are slated to be releasing the spirit of one of our sweet feline companions to join his lately-departed brother to soar among the stars.

I can only beg the Universe to let this horrible year, this horrible day, usher in a result that is also as completely opposite of that day four years ago.