#i think we should put out a bounty on everyone who said that album was bad. its so good. it is perhaps the best album of theirs ive heard

[readymades2002]

she's the one i'm running wiiiith....she's the one i'm running wiiiith....

[trixcuomo]

I'm Not Petty (Like You)

((Next on Desperate Alt's Lives! Night Elf Sharpen helps Trixany lay a trap for Sig Nicious to date her... WILL Siggy fall for it???))

At the Daily Mail Dalaran studio...

Sharpen: Relax, Trix. At least this is a faction-neutral interview--

Trixany: I told you I was socially dead and this was a bad idea. The Orgrimmar studio threw me back out onto the street, Stormwind had already put a bounty on my head...

Sharpen: Yeah, sorry about that, by the way. I am a hunter after all. Guess I was the expert tracker at the top of their list. Oh well, I was the one who found you first, so not -that- bad?

Trixany: *voice very stressed* Well, living in a hole in the wilds of Stranglethorn Vale for three days wasn't so bad. At least I got to sleep while you doubled back and left a false trail for the Stormwind City Guard.

Sharpen: *picks a stray leaf out of her blonde hairdo* We live really weird lives, Trixany.

Trixany: By the sunwell, this is still so horrible. Ugh, I should just let my career die. If you can even call it that. All day, day in and day out, it just feels like I'm dodging Haris Pilton's lawyers banging on my door to deliver more courtsubpeonas.

Sharpen: Is she really still doing that? What a waste of space.

Trixany: This time, Haris says I copied her eye color.

Sharpen: Her eyes are fel green, like yours! It's because you're both Blood Elves. Are you kidding me?

Trixany: Hard to tell because she never takes off her shades, though. *intones* You know, I actually think she's high on bloodthistle half the time. Bet I'm right, too. I should bring it up live on air today and slam her! That pet-stealing witch. Keep your own damn dog and leave my baby dragon whelp alone...

Sharpen: Trixany, focus. You're to go in there, looking casual, being helpful. NO gossip. None. When they ask you about Sig, remember, you...

Trixany: Shrug and say those magic words. You sure I can't flirt with him on air? Being subtle isn't my style... I like to think of myself as a classy girl, but--

Sharpen: You're not a classy girl. Sassy, maybe.

Trixany: *narrows eyes* Look at you. You're assy. Always wearing such fitted pants like not everyone with a Tumblr account hasn't seen your Succulent Tart butt pic yet.

Sharpen: In that artwork, I epitomize the words 'succulent tart'

Trixany: But nobody can even see your face.

Producer: *walks up* Alriiight! We ready to go on, Miss Cuomo? We're thrilled to have you here in Dalaran, it's been so long. When was the last time again?

Bev Collarbane: *Worgen drawl* T'was when her singer-slash-street-gang attacked an innocent man on the Gnomish Tram to Ironforge. Shakin' their collective bums and singin' about cola. *producer adjusts his tie, pats down the lapels of his black suit*

Trixany: *nervous* I... I don't think I was actually there for that one. My agent kinda complained to me about the bad press coverage, though.

Bev: *growls, leaves them backstage to start the show*

Sharpen: Hrm. For a Worgen, he's cute--

Trixany: Not now, Sharpen!

Sharpen: *winks* I'm just sayin, nice tail. And that joke works eventhough I know Worgen don't have tails.

Trixany: *crosses arms, ignores him*

Producer: *looks Sharpen up and down* Oh, he's camera gold! Look at those muscles...

Sharpen: Yes, I do. *glances down at his bicep*

Trixany: He's just my emotional support Night Elf himbo friend. All the starlettes have them these days. *nudges Sharpen to cut it out*

Sharpen: Hey, I arranged this whole thing for you. I'm a lot more than some--

Trixany: *waves him off* Sharpen just stays backstage mostly and holds my orange juice.

Sharpen: *finally looks disgusted*... Well. Now I see where I really stand with you, Trix. Fine. Good luck, or whatever. Go, on.

Producer: ...

Sharpen: ...

Trixany: ... ...

Producer: *checks her Gnomish headset* Sorry this is awkward. Bev's still warming up the live audience. It's not time yet.

Sharpen: And this is of course even more awkward now, after you insulted me Trixany. You should apolgoize.

Trixany: *narrows eyes* Uh, pretty sure I just low-key asked you for orange juice. Why are you still here?

Sharpen: *leaves, grumbles*

Producer: Alright Trixany, *she checks headset, then grabs Trixany by the arm, pulling her along* This it. *her voice lowers* Remember, we're looking for scandal, flare, the Trixany brand that launches cola sales.

Trixany: *looks back helplessly for Sharpen all of a sudden* But... my friend said I shouldn't... Do you think I should?

Producer: Hey, we here at the Dalaran Daily Mail have no problems with you ending your career here and now. Why not go down in a blaze of glory, live? I mean, you're Trixany Cuomo. Do you really know how to do anything else?

Trixany: Hey! You're pretty damn nasty for Human woman.

Producer: And that's why you all keep losing Warsong Gulch.

Trixany: Damn. These Alliance are on point lately with their similies...

Producer: Here at The Dalarn Daily Mail, 'We're above it all.' We can afford a scandal or two. Remember that when you get out there and see him. It might come as a shock, and we're okay with capturing that on camera *turns Trixany around a corner and suddenly they're walking behind a curtain. Noise of the audience and Bev barking laughter reachers their ears* Remember, don't freeze!

Trixany: Oh, I get it. 'above it all'. Because it's a floating city. Huh, that's clever...

Producer: *shove!*

Trixany: *stumbles onto stage on her red and gold stilletoes and white 'I am not scandalous' dress that Sharpen helped her pick out. But the helpful Night Elf is not here now. Her long blonde eyebrows raise, as she notices who IS seated next to the tough-as-nails Worgen host Bev Collarbane.

Sig Nicious: ...

Trixany: ...

Sharpen: *somewhere off stage* Shit! It's actually, really Sig Nicious!!

Bev Collarbane: Please, Trixany. Be a good girl, sit. Sig Nicious was just talking about his next album when the topic of you two dating came up.

Trixany: I... it's something I'm familiar with actually.

Bev: *the worgen nearly barks at her* We're going to settle this here and now, once and for all. Aren't we, Siggy? Too many vicious women have been hunting you down of late, and I'm sure you want to settle it. Men like you and me, we have our reputations to defend, don't we?"

Sig: Well, yes.

Bev: Rrr... Why not use this as a chance to make an example for the rest? A free shot at Trixany Cuomo herself, on us.

Producer: Don't freeze...

Sharpen: *holding a glass of orange juice* Say something clever. Come on, Trix. Don't let them turn the tables on you, snap out of it!

Trixany: Oh... um... but when we were talking backstage before, I... uh...

Trixany: *Slowly turns to the camera, trembling* This isn't the deal I made.

Producer: Did she just...?

Sharpen: Anything -except- sounding like evil Queen Azshara in this situation!!

[purghhappenings]

Do you have any headcanons for an alternate universe where Mihawk is Zoro's biological father?

*busts through wall* BOY DO I 

TBH its totally gotta be canon at this point i mean if it’s not, someone will have to pay me for every dead parent/child in one piece

Here’s some HC’s for you! I hope you like them!(sorry it took so long my phone was being dumb and I decided I wanted to write them on my laptop for you)

Mihawk has always been a single dad and when the kid showed up on his doorstep he only had a few questions

1) is this another one of red hair pranks?2) Is it mine?And last but not least(not really a question)3) Fuck.

He panicked when Shanks didn’t jump out immediately, because he just accepted the offer to be warlord of the sea how could he raise a fuckin kid. A kid with Green hair?! “He’s gotta be important” Shank’s had screamed which just made Mihawk scream and right now he was talking to Benn about childcare and why didn’t Mihawk let the fucking baboons eat it?!

“What are you gonna call him Hawky?” Shanks questioned as he stood over the little one’s crib.

“Definitely not after me, it’ll cause him issues later on”“Doesn’t help what you’re gonna call him. Oh! How about SJ, Shanks Jr-”“Roronoa Zoro.”“What?”“It’s a powerful name, from a character I read and I found him in November which is the eleventh mon-”“Nerd shit, got it Hawky.”

He was bad at first. Like really fucking bad. He uh, thought it would be a good idea to take the kid with him everywhere, which in turn means he showed up to a Shichibukai meeting with an infant strapped to his chest and Boa, life long friend(at this point a new friend) was like, what are you doing.“This is a kid who was left on my door and I unfortunately could not leave him there, so I am acting as his guardian.”“No I assumed that from the everything about how shitty you look but, why isn’t he wearing anything more than a diaper you’re sailing with him in the hot ass sun, what the fuck mihawk?!” and Mihawk honest to god thought it was okay to do something like this.

To be fair all Benn told him was “it’s like Shanks is naturally but it can’t talk yet” so Mihawk knew the basics, keep him fed, clean, safe, he can’t hold a sword properly but he’d be there soon, and well, that’s about it. The man was a master swordsman and couldn’t remember the specifics of his childhood.

With a shit ton little help from Boa, (her calling everyone she knew, he got a more extensive idea of child raising) After a few crash courses from none other than A marine by the name of Sengoku and Monkey D. Garp(mihawk prayed for those children) he became perfect

He took Zoro with him everywhere, and when they found a pink haired little girl at the ripe age of 4(zoro was still an infant) Mihawk said “Sure i guess this one too)

He took his two children everywhere and hell be damned if they ever came home with a scratch. No not after the first pirate crew that kidnapped both of them and they were just… Gone.

As Zoro and Perona got older Mihawk personally trained them( he was only in his 20′s when he found the little ones but damn those were his kids)

Zoro expressed interest in swords while Perona was more of a free spirit(haha get it, cause she uses ghosts???? I’m sorry)

But they were both trained on hand to hand combat, the world, anything mihawk could give and teach them was theirs. He taught them responsibility and honor and he was very much a doting parent when it came to Warlord meetings

“not only are they still alive, but Perona just went off to join her first crew” he threatens Moria sixty different ways from hell that if he gets his little girl hurt he’d had better hope he was already dead

Zoro still wants to kick his dad’s ass, but he really can admire the man who can fend most off in his sleep(he’s watched him do it and didn’t challenge mihawk for a full month out of fear for his own life)

When Zoro went off to join his crew Mihawk talked about it for days 

He also worried a bunch, especially when he saw the bounties just. keep. going. up

During the two year time skip Mihawk says “Zoro, do you remember your training when you were little?”

“Yeah, it was hell.”

“I am going to make you the strongest swordsman in the world, or at least throw you onto the path a little harder than before. Can you guess what this means?”

Perona: Bye Zoro, it was nice to have a little brother for a few years.

A father can worry about their child and still kinda want to let them know they’re weak and have a long way to go right? Mihawk thinks so

In an alternate AU Mihawk definitely teaches and trains his kiddos in krav maga along with other hardcore fighting styles and even though his BF Monkey D. Luffy is a crazy good fighter, god have mercy on the man, woman, or grandpa that decided to fuck with any of Zoro’s friends.(Or Peronas)

I said he went from Shit -> Perfect, and I meant it.

Mihawk was on top of school, emotional support, and discipline like it was a career! (His actual career is mob boss enforcer but we won’t go there) 

He is an honest to god lowkey mama bear like, he lets his kids fight his own battles and this is for the safety of the people around him. Shanks one time questioned Mihawk on a decision about Zoro and the rumor is Mihawk broke his arm in three different places before the end of the sentence was out(a rumor that was started among the ranks but it was effective at keeping people in line(shanks actually tripped from a prank Zoro and Perona were pulling and he was too proud to say that))

He’s lowkey because he has a permanent resting bitch face, Dr. Trafalgar has already pronounced it incurable, and when Perona and Zoro are excitedly talking about something his face doesn’t change to the natural human eye, but if you’ve been around him long enough he completely opens up and his small smile is like a shining beam of sunshine

He is always proud of his kids, but not like in the “THEY CAN DO NO WRONG” more of a, they always have a solid reason(or they better, he raised them that way!) and stand their ground, and that’s noble to him it really is, so while he doesn’t always agree with Zoro or Perona, like a needless fight, he knows if they’re honest to god fighting, there is a good reason that they feel they should stand by

He’s also raised them that if they fought and then learned the reason wasn’t that great to admit it to themselves and work on being better

Mihawk never hit any of his two kids and all he has to do is look at them and they behave not from fear but from respect and it’s terrifying to watch the man just command a room, also murder people and then just be a dad in the end like mihawk is a force

Mihawk was a big fan of self reflection as a person and he brought that into his parenting. He’s like “i get you thought it was a good idea to put gum in your sisters hair because she was being a ‘doo doo’ head but why was she being a ‘doo doo’ head”“Cause I kept antagonizing her” “so what do you think needs to be done about this?”And if either one had no clue, he’d tell them it was fine to not know but they should at least sit and think and try to figure it out, or if they needed help he’d help themor if they knew “I need to apologize”“if they don’t accept?”“it’s all i can do to rectify my actions” and man to see that parenting in action???(dont yall fucking wish?)

SO yeah he was a good single dad,

made all the appointments, games, recitals, plays, parties

He won’t admit to most he was shit at first, but he totes keeps updated pictures in his wallet of his two kids, and even has photo albums of stuff like “Perona’s first makeup” and “Zoros first recital” all of it. He has in his room. And after his two kids are moved out, he’ll just drink some really fancy wine, and look at the albums of his two surprise children and thank every star in the sky he was found by them

I hope you like these!!!! Dad!Mihawk makes me feel warm and fuzzy because while he’s a fucking monster to fight, I feel like his parenting skills are just on point because of how cool and collected he is, plus it’d be nice for more than three of them to have wonderful familes

Dont hesitate to ask me questions!!!! I was thinking about playing an ask game, so let me know if you think it’d be a good idea!!!!

Again, I can’t thank you enough for the ask, my heart has melted from Dad Mihawk( I self inserted Perona also being his kid so I hope that’s okay)

Thanks a bunch! Come talk to me ya’ll!!!

[suredahlia-arc]

hello hello ! i’m daisy ( 19 // est // she/her ) and my mind has been tricked by florence into thinking it’s 7am when it’s actually,, 4:30pm. i’m in the mountains so we shouldn’t be having it as hard as other places, but everyone is still worried abt falling trees and such ! all my suitemates decided to go be storm-chasers ( every single one of them ? ), so i could be living my best life rn, but i’d rather be writing up an intro for a character i have tried to play over four times then the rp died after,, like,, a day. bless. more below !!

♪ { MARINA DIAMANDIS. FEMALE. MARINA (AND THE DIAMONDS). }Oh shit. Is that BUY THE STARS by DAHLIA ANGELIS on the radio right now?! I stan, omg. SHE’S that INDIE-POP solo artist who’s TWENTY-SEVEN years old. They’ve been in the game for EIGHT YEARS and have THREE ALBUMS out right now. I think they’re very VERSATILE and INTUITIVE, but for some reason they come off as OBSESSIVE and CYNICAL in the tabloids. You mind if I turn this up? daisy. 19. est. she/her.

first, i feel inclined to say why i put “and the diamonds” in parentheses bc without context i either look super uninformed or like a total douchebag?? basically she’s going by just “marina” now but i didn’t know how wide-spread that knowledge was yet and technically all of her work still has “and the diamonds” so i was like “hm. parentheses.” and there’s ur explanation ! onto the intro:

BACKSTORY

TRIGGERS: extreme misogyny, brief mention of gaslighting/emotional abuse, briefly implied physical abuse

so i have been waiting to play a bitch inspired by the stepford wives for forever. if i ever actually finished books that weren’t assigned, wbk i’d read that bitch. but we settle for the 1975 movie. there’s ur preface.

i often get way too caught up in the story of the parents and wind up making just intros like,,, a novella, so i’m gonna do my best to skim over them and go more in-depth when i write the bio later on!!

so dahlia’s mom is inspired by neely “i’m a BIG STAR!” o’hara from ‘the valley of the dolls’ and her dad is, ofc, inspired by walter “no fun quotes or super extra™ monologues” everhart from, you guessed it, ‘the stepford wives (1975)’

just as a very brief explanation as to why “i’m a BIG STAR” wound up in the neighborhood she would, typical fall from glory, first manager whisked her away, “fell in love”, moved to a neighborhood where 95% of the women only found joy in cooking and cleaning

maybe if you HAD a fucking business...

i’ve made this joke so many times i’ve memorized this entire scene.

only one person irl has ever genuinely laughed.

it was my mom.

through a series of gaslighting, emotional manipulation, and groupthink, dahlia’s father gradually got her mother to buy into all of it and have strong opinions on the best laundry detergent.

so this was a strange place to raise a child, amirite ? i mean, you got women discussing tide vs. bounty while baking cake, you got men being treated like kings – we over here in the stereotypical 1950s. 

they stanned super small neighborhoods in wales, but should they have ?

so she had a very skewed idea of what was acceptable and what wasn’t. the boys were treated extremely “boys will be boys!” like – like... more than they are when we talk abt the problem with that sentence – and the girls were all wives in training.

it was acceptable for boys and men alike to do whatever they wanted without asking the other. it was acceptable for boys and men alike to complain over anything they wanted. it was acceptable for boys and men to do all of these things that, if we heard about them today, we’d be like “jail??” or, at the very least “leave.”

it was all good and well though!! but one of the four (4) duties dahlia’s mother had was taking care of the child (the other three were cooking, cleaning, and pleasing)

you see, she was used to dahlia’s father blowing things out of proportion when it came to herself – it was normal and healthy!! but she was not used to him blowing things out of proportion on their child, aka dahlia (you see, this is what happens when i start talking about the parents too much)

the first time just warranted a brief “hey, maybe don’t.” the second time warranted a conversation that ended poorly. third warranted an empty threat of leaving that ended poorly. fourth warranted an actual threat that ended poorly. fifth and a bitch was like “ok where r we and how do we get out!!”

after finding her way out, she settled with dahlia in a rly crummy motel, but what else are u gonna do when u only have the few dollars u managed to steal from ur guy??

y’all see i’m already talking in perspective of the parents i hate myself

so dahlia’s mom phoned so many old friends and relatives. unfortunately, as a previous neely “the whole WORLD loves me!!” o’hara who just seemed to drop off the face of the earth, almost everyone was like “bitch tf no you ain’t stayin here”

the last person she phoned was her mom, aka dahlia’s grandmother, down in athens. reluctantly, a bitch was like “fine.”

so dahlia was ~13 by now. her mom found work as a maid bc she was rly good at cleaning and also had no clue how she would ever get a good acting career back (although, mind you, you know a bitch went out for some community theater plays). her grandmother was able to live off the inheritance her late husband, dahlia’s grandfather, left behind – however, she also had a work ethic that drove her to just... do whatever she deemed the right thing to do at the time. 

an old woman doing some odd jobs?? you know it!!

dahlia learned how to speak greek which is great bc you know what?? i duolingo’d that bitch and that owl is a jerk who wouldn’t let me get past “ο άντρας” even tho i spelled it!! right!! i had so many ppl compare what i spelled and what the answer was and i’m still bitter!! 

anyway.

so like,, wbk a bitch has some unresolved problems. when you grow up in the equivalent of stepford (copyright 1972, ira levin), you gonna have some things to work thru!!

but she was also basically trained by that community to keep everything inward??

this is a musician rp so you know what she did??

SHE TAUGHT HERSELF TO PLAY PIANO AND WROTE SONGS!!

was a myspace queen tbh. technically speaking, she has more work out there than the three listed albums (i mean, we got mermaid v. sailor, the crown jewels, etc., etc., bUT)

decided “bitch i’m gonna make smth of this” and,,, did. so when she was 19 ‘the family jewels’ was released and,, like,, she decided “wow time to go be an american!!! i love bald eagles!!!”

so i figure the rest is kind of history?? i think i’ll be going in chronological order with the albums (in that a few years after that ‘electra heart’ was released, then ‘froot’, then a hiatus which we do NOT stan, then coming back with a leak ksksksks. BUT i may switch up electra and froot i’m not quite sure yet??)

ya! 

PERSONALITY

VERSATILE: ok so she never really does things quite the same ? alexa, play ‘can’t pin me down’ by marina (and the diamonds) dahlia angelis. musically speaking, she really loves experimenting with different sounds. overall, she is still considered indie-pop, but we had some good new-wave pop in ‘the family jewels’, we had some good electropop in ‘electra heart’, we had some good general versatility in ‘froot’ (compare the song ‘froot’ to ‘immortal’ like we were boppin then we were havin an existential crisis). does not like keeping things the same in her music. does not like being compared to other artists bc?? everyone!! is different!! generally speaking, she’s just a very?? open person?? not as in emotionally open, open book – all that, as in willing to try pretty much anything?? as long as it’s not her actual routine, if a wrench is thrown in her plans, a bitch don’t care as long as the wrench ain’t smth dumb. here for a good time, not a long time.

INTUITIVE: ok so she got really into trying to read people and tbh psychoanalyze them ( alexa, play ‘savages’ by marina (and the diamonds) dahlia angelis ) after leaving that. town. with a name she doesn’t even recall?? wbk a bitch would speak up abt it if she could so that all of the women could be fckin saved but she j doesn’t remember anything abt it!! other than the environment in general!! what’s the name?? besides somewhere in wales, what’s the location?? she doesn’t know!! mainly bc i don’t!! and also for the sake of her not actually saying anything abt it willingly!! anyway!! she really does her best to read people and situations in order to analyze like?? the safety aspect, the other person’s stance, etc. doesn’t always work, but she tries. is pretty good at it, but no pro.

OBSESSIVE: ok so y’all see up there me talking abt routines?? there are two (2) ways in which girly is obsessive. first, a literal manner. routines that need to be done so the world doesn’t fall apart. i mean, we stan obscured brain chemistry, but we also stan horrible environments that just exacerbate it, even into adulthood, in the end ( alexa, play ‘obsessions’ by marina (and the diamonds) dahlia angelis. ) (also, i feel i should clear the possible iffy-ness this would have by saying that i’ve got ocd and will, therefore, be portraying it in a manner similar to mine so that it doesn’t come across as offensive to anyone else who may have a different form?? but most of the ‘routines’ won’t be very prominent in interactions). second, music!! when she gets started on a new project, -the mask vc- try ta’ stop [her]! -end vc- . will live in the studio until everything is complete and perfect. will spend her free time writing lyrics she knows she’ll never use bc?? why not?? gotta get that practice in!! can also apply to any other project types, but ofc the main ones would be music related so??

CYNICAL: ok. who’s gonna have a positive worldview after growing up where she did?? ( alexa, play ‘hermit the frog’ by marina (and the diamonds) dahlia angelis ) who’s gonna stan that?? that said, there is not a single genuinely good person in this world ( alexa, play ‘savages’ by marina (and the diamonds) dahlia angelis again ) if u ask her like?? not only did she already have that view after coming to her senses but?? now she knows about terrorists, about people from the usa who are SUPPOSED to be the good guys killing innocent ppl from ‘enemy territories’ for fun, ppl assaulting and killing minorities just bc they’re not like them, etc., etc., etc. convinced no one is inherently good. rly has a love/hate relationship with life ksksksks

HEADCANONS

a lot of these kind of tie into personality tbh?? 

literally knows everything about every cleaning product ever. ask her about the pros and cons of any and she will tell you. she’ll also tell you when it was manufactured, the ceo of the company that created it at the time, what went in it to make it, etc., etc., etc. knows so much.

kind of going off of that, actually really good at cooking and baking?? she rarely does it willingly, but will make a hell of a chocolate soufflé.

TRIGGER: IMPLIED SEXUAL ASSAULT -  i don’t want to go too far into this bc it’s very triggering content to many ppl (and even to ppl who it isn’t, it’s j?? not good.), but.... i mean.... the boys in her formative environment were literally encouraged to do whatever they wanted and they didn’t need permission?? END TRIGGER.

i have a whole-ass routine already figured out. there are a lot of facets obviously, so i’ll just mention a few?? but count them all as one headcanon to be fair. 

sets an alarm to get into bed at 1:11am bc it’s a good number but 11:11 is usually too early. sets an alarm for 11:11am to wake her up. will chill in bed if she’s awake before then but it has yet to go off. only exceptions are when she’s working on something she deems urgent.

that said, good numbers are 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, etc. no rhythm to it, but i wasn’t gonna go?? up until?? infinity??

if there are two doors that are both available to be opened and closed (aka not one of those “enter through this one, exit through this one”), will always enter through the right and exit through the left. 

we don’t stan sidewalk cracks!!

a lot of superstition plays into these. but?? loves black cats. they’re chill.

i have a stats page coming that has more so!!

during the eh era, be it the last one or the one before that, decided to method act while she was still writing the songs ksksksks. that’s going to go into some of her more specific connections.

a bitch will both fight and not fight. got ‘the family jewels’ attitude back and we stan!!

was obviously able to write the ‘housewife’ archetype songs from her own personal experience ksksksks. didn’t rly have to dive into the stereotype. j knew it already.

more?? later??

CONNECTION IDEAS

so i have a few specific ones that are attached to a different blog (u kno one of the ones that died) that i’ll be moving over here, but here are some of the ones that stuck out more than others – also, all are open to any gender!:

UPDATE: wc page is here!

during the eh era while she was ‘method acting’ (we hate.), she knew this muse was in a relationship but was still like?? “hey let’s go have a meaningless ons” bc we stan "homewrecker”! (can have a number of muses!!)

a relationship that really didn’t work out in the end. the other kept trying to make things better so they would stay together. inspired by “buy the stars” (one muse)

the first celebrity whose discography or filmography she got really into before moving to america. would’ve had to have been around for longer than eight years. slightly inspired by “hollywood” (one muse)

ok this one. makes me laugh. literally just someone who always gets her mistaken for someone else – it doesn’t even have to look like her. 100% inspired by “hollywood” ( oh my god! you look just like shakira! no, no – you’re catherine zeta! ) (open to two muses)

she’s not known for a good reputation, but she’s also not known for a bad one. this muse wants to turn her to the dark side and make her become everything she never wanted to be?? so very similar to ‘the bad influence’ connection, j w/ a slightly different connotation on dahlia’s end. inspired by “oh no!” (open to two muses)

these bitches were either friends or love interests once, but things fell apart (either mutually or on the other’s side like?? i don’t want to godmod but for the song’s sake). dahlia is,, bad abt forgiveness,, but there have been enough apologies. inspired by “forget” (open to one muse)

dahlia has a very keen interest in this person. whether it’s infatuation or literally just interest, god only knows! obviously goes deeper than that but i’m horrible at explanations. suffice it to say, inspired by “immortal”

ok!! so now j some general ones!!

best friend

ride or die

drinking buddy

fwb

ons

exes

enemies for whatever reason

frenemies

collab partner

muse for any of her songs?

etc., etc., etc. !

LIKE THIS OR HMU IF U WOULD LIKE TO PLOT !

u can also find me on discord @ john donne’s whore #5590

[autisticbobsaginowskiredux]

Don’t Let Us Get Sick

“So Mr. Magliacci,” Valencia said, laying the photos down on her desk, “I feel like you should know, most of my experience is with insurance investigations, unfaithful partners, things of that nature. Pretty much all of it, if I’m being honest.”

“And?” said Mr. Magliacci, who had close-cropped battleship-gray hair and the bullet shape common to middle-aged men who were muscular in their youth. “Is that a no?”

“No, no, no, not at all,” Valencia said, sitting forward in her chair. “Point I’m making, Mr. Magliacci, is this: by and large, people who hire me expect to turn up things they won’t like. More to the point, they’re sending me after people they’re prepared not to like. You seem like you love your daughter a lot, like you’re concerned about her.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“So I just wonder if you feel like my area of expertise will lead me to investigate this in a way you didn’t necessarily emotionally prepare for.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mr. Magliacci said. “Whadya, tie ’em up and beat a confession out of them?”

“Of course not.”

“Then cut the bullshit. My God.”

“Just covering the bases. Tell me what you need. Specifically.”

Mr. Magliacci hugged himself and scratched his right forearm. “So Ms. Valdez, my little girl, Angie, she’s 20, sophomore at Columbia, first in the family.” He said it faux-conversationally, trying to make it sound like something other than a brag. It was the verbal equivalent of Bugs Bunny disguised as a woman: ridiculously obvious, but it still worked on some level. “And, like, I ain’t blind. I know my little girl. And I see her on parents weekend and I meet this friend of hers, black girl, and, like, she’s a friend of hers, you understand?”

Valencia nodded, trying to propel this wherever it was going.

“And, like, I’m pretty old-school, most people would say. She’d definitely say. But that’s still my little girl and I’m not one of these pricks who’s gonna throw a fit over that. But I never told her I knew, and I can’t really explain why. Maybe she knows I know, who knows. Anyway, I still read the blotter, which is goofy, I know, but about a week ago, somebody killed this girl, this friend of my Angie’s. Had her picture and everything. Looks like someone took her wallet and when there were only credit cards in there, they got pissed off, shot her.”

Valencia nodded again, hoping to God Mr. Magliacci didn’t have her confused with a bounty hunter or a button woman but also not wishing to interrupt the kind of man who goes looking for one.

“Now, ever since, Angie’s been acting strange. Which, obviously, that’s kinda to be expected, but I mean a different kind of strange. I tried to visit her on campus a couple times, as a surprise, you know, but everyone on her hall said she was gone. Like, with a friend. That’s what they said, a friend. And the other night, I pulled up across the street from her dorm, I see her get into this car I never seen before, but I know this type of car, right? Pulled over a hundred like it back in the day.”

“You think your daughter’s on drugs.”

Magliacci sighed and his entire upper body shuddered forward. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I’m not good at intervention shit and I want her to feel like she can talk to me about her friend, but if she feels like I’m coming at her, she might close up, you know?”

“Right, sure. So what is it you want me to do? Just find out whether she is?”

Mr. Magliacci shook his head. “A little more than that. I want you to get the guy away from her. I don’t need to know how and I don’t care.”

“You don’t think she’d find another dealer?”

“She probably would. But it gives me a window when I’d feel better about talking to her.”

Valencia looked back at the pictures Mr. Magliacci had brought. Angie was a chubby dark-haired girl with a heart-shaped face and husky-blue eyes. “Tell me a little more about her. She have a job?”

“She’s a part-time production assistant at NBC. They’re pretty reasonable about her class schedule, so she’s there around 6 to 11 Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.”

“Okay. Anything else I need to know?”

Mr. Magliacci looked hesitant. “She’s, you know, she’s got autism, we’re pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

“I mean, we got her diagnosed when she was eight, I was just never convinced. You know, she talks normally, she finished school and all that shit.”

Valencia raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s, you know, it’s a spectrum, man.”

“So they say.” Mr. Magliacci shifted in his chair. “I’m just a cop from Bensonhurst, the fuck do I know?”

Valencia Valdez was youngish, photogenic and had never been a cop, all of which were fairly unusual for a private detective. This made her closer to people’s image of a TV detective than most of the competition, which was good for business. It gave her an advantage when her clients were cops, oddly enough; they allowed themselves vulnerability they wouldn’t when they felt like they had a bullshit tribal façade to maintain. Magliacci likely wouldn’t have told another cop Angie was autistic.

Along with the photos, Magliacci had included the clipping from the police blotter about Sophia, Angie’s girlfriend. As luck would have it (for a given value of “luck”), Sophia had been killed about three blocks from campus, close enough that an alert had gone out to all the students. Valencia put on his reading glasses and combed his undercut into something more befitting a bureaucrat as best he could. In a couple of Magliacci’s photos, Angie was with friends; he was able to identify one, Katrina Something.

Valencia was able to enhance the photo to pick out a uniform shirt under Katrina’s windbreaker; she cross-referenced it with a Yelp search and determined she was a waitress at the Side Door, a local restaurant that wasn’t owned by the university but whose clientele was overwhelmingly students (locals, as is often the case with such places, regarded it in a manner reminiscent of Romanian villagers discussing Castle Dracula).

Valencia called the restaurant and asked if Katrina was available; the manager said she’d be in at six that evening. Valencia thanked him and staked out the place from across the street at five, making sure to queue up albums she didn’t mind listening to in their entirety, like Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads” and Florence & the Machine’s “Ceremonials,” on her phone.

Katrina got off around 9. Valencia crossed the street and called her name. She turned and looked confused but not worried.

“Hey, Katrina,” Valencia said, jogging up to her. “You’re a, you’re friends with Angela Magliacci, aren’t you?”

“Sure. Can I help you?”

“My name’s Katy Carr, I’m a grief counselor. Now, I don’t know if she ever told you this, but Angela’s mother was murdered in a robbery gone wrong several years ago.” (This was true.)

“I did, actually.”

“Right, okay. So the, ah, the shooting, near campus, recently, there’s concerns, sometimes, when something like that happens, it’ll trigger sort of a downturn, emotionally, for someone who’s had that kind of thing affect their lives before, so I’m just trying to find out if Angela seems like she’s been acting… odd, at all, since it happened.”

Katrina tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “The university has a nondiscrimination policy,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“Of course. What’s that…”

“So if you’re trying to ferret out queer girls, that’s illegal.”

“It’s nothing like that. Are you saying they knew each other?”

“Soph was Angie’s girlfriend, yeah.”

This was good to know. Magliacci’s intuition being right meant a lot of the rest of what he’d said was likely accurate. “So back to my question, how’s Angela taking it?”

Katrina pursed her lips. “It’s complicated.”

“How do you mean?”

“Angie’s not a repressed person. She lets you know when she’s happy, when she’s sad, when she’s angry, all of it. But ever since Sophia died, it seems like she gets tenser and tenser over the course of the day. Her suitemate, Carol? Apparently the first few nights, right around 10, she said Angie had some kind of attack.”

“Attack?”

“Like, almost like a panic attack. She sounded like she was trying to keep it down, you know, repress it? You know how if you’re crying and trying to stop all at the same time?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, that was how Angie was the first few nights. And we’d just been out that evening and she seemed fine.”

“So you said the first few nights. It’s been about a week and a half. Did something change?”

“She hasn’t been in the last few nights. At least not when most of us go to bed.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Honestly?” Katrina dropped her voice a little. “I think she’s on the rebound. Which I totally get, no judgment, you do what you have to do for yourself, I just at the same time get why she’d want to be discreet about it too.”

“What makes you think that? Just her absence?”

“No, I’ve seen him. Artsy-looking white boy, older. Maybe like 30. Drives a Caddy, looks like a douchebag. We have an evening class Tuesday and Thursday and normally after it lets out we’ll go have a drink or chill in the commons but the past few nights she’s said she’s got something to take care of and I saw this guy pick her up.”

“And around when is that?”

“Class lets out at 9:40.”

Valencia pulled a campus map out of her coat. “I haven’t worked on campus long; can you show me around where she meets him?”

Katrina pointed to an intersection on the map. Valencia thanked her and headed back to her car.

It was Wednesday. The next night, Valencia put on her black turtleneck and leather jacket and put her gun against the small of her back before driving to the spot Katrina had said was the rendezvous point. As was her habit, she was early, which was a terrible strategy for keeping one’s nerves steady.

The Cadillac slid into the intersection around 9:30. Not long after, Angie advanced down the sidewalk and opened the door. She had a weird, purposeful stride in her step, with none of the trepidation Valencia would have expected from someone making a drug buy. The driver, a skinny dark-haired guy with a goatee wearing a scarf over a cardigan over a t-shirt, did indeed look like a douchebag.

Valencia was lucky she had filled her tank that morning; Cadillac Douche drove all the way to Brooklyn, parking out front of a small storefront in Greenpoint. After they got out and walked in, Valencia waited a second before getting up and following. The door, as she’d anticipated, was locked, but she was able to jimmy it open with the slim jim in her pocket.

The lights were dim inside the building; as Valencia’s eyes adjusted, she realized it was the waiting area of a recording studio. There was no one in the live room but she could make out the outlines of Angie and Cadillac Douche in the control room. She slowly approached the door, keeping out of what, as far as he could tell, was their line of sight. She put her ear to the door.

“…five hundred,” Valencia heard the guy say.

“That wasn’t what we discussed.”

“That wasn’t what we discussed on Tuesday. It’s a pain in the ass getting this shit.”

“It’s not shit.” There was a ragged, primal edge in Angie’s voice, but it wasn’t that of a junkie; it was something else Valencia couldn’t put his finger on.

“Let me hear it.”

“Money first.”

“Don’t be a prick, Brett. I don’t have that much on me anyway. I’ll give you the balance next time.”

“Sure you will.”

“Have I ever stiffed you?”

“I don’t work on credit, little girl.”

There was a pause, followed by a deep, shuddering sigh, and Valencia felt like she’d caught a whiff of the barely-repressed panic Katrina had described.

“Take me back to campus, then. I’ll… I’ll deal with it.”

“Okay, let’s not go nuts. There are ways you can pay me upfront.”

“What? What do you want, my phone? I need it.”

Brett sighed. “Jesus Christ, you can be dense, you know that? Do I have to spell everything out?”

“In my case, probably.”

“Fuck’s sake. Okay, I will. You want this without paying me 500, suck me off.”

There was another silence, this one unpunctuated.

“You are fucking disgusting,” Angie said at last.

“That’s a nice way to talk to your ride home.”

“I’m not riding home with you. I’ll get a cab, something. Let me out.”

“Whoa whoa whoa.” Valencia heard the squeaking of Brett standing up in a leather chair. “Let’s… sweetie, I gotta tell you, you really don’t hold the cards you think you do.”

Valencia threw open the door, flicked on the light and held her gun on Brett. “Get away from her,” he said.

“Hold on, who the fuck are you?”

“I’m not Porky Pig, so I know for a fuckin’ fact I didn’t stutter. Stop blocking her path, creep.”

Brett stepped back, shooting Valencia the sullen expression of a child told he couldn’t ride his bicycle on the roof.

Valencia kept her gun on Brett and shifted his gaze to Angie, who was remarkably composed, from the looks of it. “And Angie, I need you to tell me what’s going on. What are you buying from Fucko McScarfneck over here?”

Angie sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Show him, Brett.”

Brett, still wearing that look, took a CD out of his cardigan and put it in the stereo. It began to play and an unaccompanied voice, a gorgeous, velvety one, sounding like a young Etta James, unspooled throughout the room and Valencia knew she was listening to the late Sophia.

“Don’t let us get sick, Don’t let us get old, Don’t let us get stupid, alright? Just make us be brave, And make us play nice, And let us be together tonight.”

“Sophia was trying to record an album here with Brett,” Angie explained. “Right up until she died, she was recording it. I was the one who told her she should record it because…” her voice caught for a second. “..because after we started to get serious, she’d sing to me over the phone every night after I got home from my evening class. Did my father tell you I’m on the spectrum?”

Valencia nodded.

“I have my routines. I need them. After Sophia died, I cried for nearly a full day, and once I was done, I realized I couldn’t sleep without her voice. I tried, God, did I try. After the first week, I reached out to Brett; I met him briefly when Sophia started recording. He was going to trash what she’d recorded but I told him how much I needed it, which, clearly, was a mistake. This is what men do, you know. They take advantage. Please tell my dad I’m sorry if I worried him.”

Valencia looked back over at Brett. “Hey, Brett,” she said, “just so you’re aware, Miss Magliacci’s father is a cop. Did you know that, Brett?”

“No.”

“Okay, well, now you do. And what’s going to happen is, you’re going to give her everything Sophia recorded with you — everything, understand — or her dad the cop hears what you tried to do, but before that happens I’m going to beat the shit out of you and glue that gross weak-chin-concealing goatee to your dick. You got all that?”

Brett nodded.

“Go get it. Darse prisa, dipshit.”

Brett kicked aside a cardboard box on the floor and opened a combination safe set in the wall. There were several jewel cases inside, each with an unlabeled CD. He roughly handed them all to Valencia.

“Don’t give them to me, asshole, give them to her.”

Brett, rolling his eyes before he could stop himself, handed them to Angie.

“Angela, are you okay with me giving you a ride home?” Valencia asked, the gun still on Brett.

“Sure,” Angie said. “Thanks for asking.”

Angie didn’t say much as they drove. It was a beautiful, clear night; a stiff breeze was lingering from February but spring was still in the air, the warmth of newness palpable in the spaces between.

“You gonna be okay, Angela?” Valencia said as they crossed the Williamsburg Bridge.

Angie looked up as though she’d forgotten she was there. “I think so,” she said. “It feels different than with Ma. I… I miss them both so much, you understand, but Sophia and I, we were both new at this. I’m not trying to sound callous, but I have to deal with this on two levels: I miss Sophia the person but I also have the disruption in the way things are to deal with. And that second one is easier than it was with Ma, because we were just getting serious. The singing will keep me steady on my feet until I’m ready to really think about her being gone. Does that make any sense?”

“Oh, no, yeah, perfect sense.”

“Are you just saying this? I’ve never lost someone like Sophia. I have no idea how much of a heartless bitch I’m being.”

“Angela,” Valencia said, “I promise you, you are no kind of heartless bitch. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”

“Thank you. What are you going to tell my father?”

“He wanted to know if you were on drugs, and I’m going to tell him you’re not.”

“What if he wants specifics?”

“I don’t think he will. He’s not a guy who understands everything, but he understands what he doesn’t understand, you know?”

“That’s true. Thank you.”

Valencia pulled up to the spot where Brett had picked up Angie and handed her her card. “You ever get in any kind of trouble, let me know, okay?”

“Actually, Ms…” she glanced at the card. “…Valdez, I have a request. I hope it’s not too strange.”

“Shoot.”

“Does this car have a CD player? I can’t tell by sight.”

“It does.”

“Can we play the rest of that song? It’s a bit late. I don’t want to wake anyone.”

“Sure.”

Angie put the CD in the player and hit the skip button a couple of times, and that ethereal voice filled the car.

“The moon has a face, and it smiles on the lake, And causes the ripples in time. I’m lucky to be here with someone I like, Who maketh my spirit to shine. Don’t let us get sick, Don’t let us get old, Don’t let us get stupid, alright? Just make us be brave,  And make us play nice, And let us be together tonight.”

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part.

Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman.

When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot.

I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

Final approval of your loan is in progress…You have conditional approval on your loan application. We’re currently reviewing the remaining documentation required for final approval.

In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  

[rilenerocks]

When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.  I think that’s what most people do. Michael in particular wanted to build a space where our children felt totally accepted for who they were, where their friends were always welcome, a home that was a truly secure haven. So what was one of the first things we did when we brought our little girl home from the hospital? We put her little downstairs daytime bed right underneath the stereo in the orange room which was our combination music room and library. After ten years of rocking out at mega-decibels, we wanted to make sure she could get used to sleeping with the volume turned up. The photo above shows her lying there, angelically asleep, with Michael smiling as one of our dogs gazed at this novel little creature. I’m there, too, my top half missing from the shot. I’m sure the whole room was vibrating.

Our plan worked. We created a little rocker who fit right in with us. Her early musical tastes were focused on a lot of one-hit wonder tunes, like Mickey and Come On, Eileen. Michael, who through his record store had access to all kinds of music, started making House Favorites tapes and then, CD’s, first for all of us, and then eventually, just for our little girl.

In early 1983, a pop song named Whirly Girl by the group OXO was released and climbed into the top 30 records on the Billboard Charts. Our baby was crazy about it so we played it all the time. The other day as I was working out in the yard, it popped up on a random shuffle in my headphones. Initially, I was swamped with memories from that time but ultimately I focused on the song title because that’s how my mind feels right now – whirly.

There’s a certain amount of time I spend every day thinking about either the masks war, in which people absolutely refuse to wear a mask because doing so stomps on their individual freedom, or the fact that so many who do comply, wear them incorrectly. When I venture out into the world, invariably I run into either one or both of those types. I absolutely do not get any of this. Absent the financial means to afford one, I don’t understand how anyone who is a member of a community greater than one, treasures this freedom of theirs as more valuable than public health. I wonder how they’d have felt if they had to sew yellow stars on their clothes so they could be easily identified by their religion. I get pretty roily inside when I think about how small and selfish their minds must be. Especially when they wrap up their righteous rage in the flag or the Constitution. Grrr. Then there are these folks who are actually wearing the masks absolutely incorrectly. Their noses aren’t covered, the mask is below their chins or hanging off one ear. I find this particularly maddening when I go to pick up food from an institution with a big sign touting all the healthful protocols their business is taking to protect everyone’s health. Do these owners check on their employees? I mean, is slipping two loops over your ears as complex as solving a Rubik’s cube? Rocket science? Should I gently point out their mistakes? Or just continue to fume away about the level of stupid and selfish I see around me? I guess the pandemic is turning me into an intolerant, crotchety old lady. Or maybe that’s who I’ve always been without the old part. Of course, there is the daily dose of Trumpian dystopia which relentlessly  escalates, despite the feeling that each awful revelation from the day before is the zenith of his horrors. The bigotry and racism seemed hard to top, along with the denial of the Covid19 crisis,  but now we find ourselves in the midst of a new madness, which essentially put the lives of American troops into a dark marketplace of murder and headhunting for bounties. Do I feel incredulous? Sadly, no. Truly, this person seems utterly devoid of any interior moral foundation. He is the definition of self. I don’t know whether his simple fascination with tyrannical leaders is just wishful dreaming, or whether Putin really does have the ultimate blackmail item in his back pocket which he can pull out at any time. Right now I’m glad that the EU has banned travel from the US into their countries. Given everything, that action seems fitting.  My mind indeed is a whirly place.

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In the midst of the outside big world jumble, I managed to complicate my life a little further. Back in 2012, when Michael got diagnosed with his cancer, we refinanced our house. We were looking to pay off outstanding bills, get extra cash for out-of-pocket treatment costs and enough money to take some trips. When you get a diagnosis with an almost certain prognosis of death, you try to stuff in as many life experiences as you can, especially the ones you thought would be part of a retirement that would stretch out for years, given the longevity in Michael’s family. The best-laid plans, right? During the five years that Michael survived, we took advantage of that strategy. After he died in May, 2017, I wasn’t in the mental space to give much thought to mortgages and the like. I was in survival mode. During the last three years, I’ve done my own traveling while trying to adjust to my highly undesired new life. But during this time of isolation, I have swung back around to the business of my big old house. I’ve done a lot of physical fixing. Noting that interest rates for mortgages  had dropped well below what we’d gotten 8 years ago, I decided to refinance, shortening the term and saving lots of money. Sounded like a good plan – everything was moving along nicely when I suddenly realized that an appraisal was required. After the sordid housing crisis of 2008, the lenders have tightened up the requirements from appraisers. They now take photos of every room in your house, all the mechanical items and even the basement and garage. Uh-oh. I’ve made a few sporadic efforts at cleaning the garage, Michael’s domain, which is full of intriguing stuff. The only time I go into the basement is when it’s time to change the furnace filter. It’s actually a dark, creepy cellar with awful stairs which is accessible only from the outside. Years ago, one of my son’s friends was making a horror film. He asked if he could shoot part of it in our basement as it was one of the scariest places in town.

What a nightmare. I spent hours down there, sweeping, sorting, finding a few treasures and mostly ancient junk like carburetor parts and old lawnmower engines. The garage wasn’t much better. This business-y idea turned out to be grindingly hard labor. I stashed aside some potentially salvageable 45’s and albums that were somehow overlooked when we divested ourselves of Michael’s collection. Most of everything else went into the garbage. The appraiser came and went. She said things were fine. If only she’d seen it all before my massive efforts. Ah, well. All that’s left is my exhaustion and a who-do-I-think-I’m-kidding-at-my-age hangover that’s making it hard to get up from my chair.

Whirling back to the outside, life in the yard is good. I have nesting house wrens, cardinals and robins. They’re making good use of my birdbaths and cubbies for raising their hatchlings. The monarchs have found the milkweed. I could do without the big influx of rabbits along with the omnipresent squirrels who’ve eaten too many plants, denuded blossoms getting ready to open, and vandalized vegetables for no good reason that I can discern. I’ve engaged them in a race for the black raspberries, though and have chalked up a minor victory.

The flowers of course are magnificent and bring me great joy. The labor involved in urging them out of the ground is worth it. Just looking at them helps ratchet down the constant whirling thoughts that flit from subject to subject in my clicking head. Today, I put my coping skills to good use by enhancing my personal relaxation space with an outdoor mini-spa for myself. I don’t see getting back in the water any time soon. This will do for the present. As the saying goes, “adapt or die.”

As I mull over this life, so different from what I ever thought possible, I did have one recent experience that was delightful and satisfying. One of the hardest issues I’ve faced since Michael died was the collective responses that people have had to me and my feelings about my future. I’ve always known that I would never want to have another partner. That attitude was met with different reactions. Some people thought my grief was too fresh for me to know what I’d want. They’d say, give it some time to go through the stages following a big loss. Then we’ll see if you change your mind. If I talked about the challenges of being alone, they’d say, but you have your children and grandchildren. And that means what? They have their own lives. We intersect, as always. But it’s not the same as climbing in bed every night with your best friend and lover. As the months have passed, I’ve concluded that there’s just a lot of discomfort in these kinds of discussions. Unless you’ve lived the same life as someone else, you just don’t know what will work for them. And everyone’s relationship with their partners is different. I believe mine was an aspirational love that was rare. I had it for 45 years. I’m still in it. I feel my relationship every day, deep in the core of me. I don’t believe I could ever have that again and anything less is irrelevant. I have a number of people, most importantly my kids, who get this.Often, I draw a blank stare. But I had a great thing happen with one of my oldest friends, someone that both Michael and I’ve known for over 50 years.  Our lives have been closely connected all that time.

Glenn and Michael met at college in 1967 and lived in the same fraternity house, although Michael moved out after a year. I met Glenn when I came to college in 1968, through a high school friend of mine. I didn’t meet Michael until 1971, but he and I both always knew Glenn. We all socialized, but initially, with different groups of people who ultimately became blended. Glenn and I had a date once – the most memorable part of that for us both was really enjoying the album we were listening to – Tea for the Tillerman. When I was arrested in 1971 at an anti-war demonstration, Glenn bailed me out of jail. All three of us worked at the record store which ultimately became Michael’s career for the 27 years before he became a history teacher. When Michael and I became a couple in 1972, Glenn would visit us on a regular basis to enjoy the verbal sparring and bickering we engaged in, very different from his non-confrontational style. Glenn told me he was afraid that I’d overpower sweet Michael with my combat-boot personal style, but that  never happened. We were with him through a series of his relationships up to and including his marriage which has now lasted decades. We shared life events together, from having kids to losing family members. He and Michael went on white-water rafting and canoe trips. We played Hearts and Spades together on a regular basis and wound up going to a lake in Michigan every summer for years with a group of old friends for family camp. Glenn worked for the city for which Michael was an alderman and later, head of the city’s planning commission. They were both involved with the local food bank. When we had our daughter, Glenn gave her more gifts for her first birthday than we did. Twenty-five years later, he became a certified wedding officiant and performed her wedding ceremony. When Michael was withdrawn into the last stage of his life, he saw Glenn once, the only person who got into our house besides medical professionals and our family.

Last week, I went to see Glenn and his wife Colleen for an outdoor social distanced visit, the first time I’d seen them in many months. We had a lot to catch up on, what we’d all been doing, what was happening with our kids, how we felt about the current state of the world. Glenn asked me how I was managing, going through this weird time on my own. I told him that I never really felt alone, as Michael’s presence is just here, all the time. In the most normal, conversational tone, he said, “you know, it feels like your relationship with Michael right now is a lot better than it was right after he died.” I was startled, delighted and I laughed a lot. I’ve been laughing about it periodically. I told him that I was so utterly drained and devastated after Michael’s death that it had taken me awhile to recover from the expensive emotional price wrested from me by those challenging years. Now I’ve had a lot of recovery time and the way I feel with Michael is like the majority of our life together, wonderful,  rather than those painful, stressful times. So, yeah, we’re good. Still arguing in some of my dreams, though. I was really delighted that for the first time, someone acted normal and accepting of me rather than awkward or judgmental. That meant a lot. I’ve covered a lot of mental turf in this post. As I said, these days, I’m a whirly woman. Actually that might always have been true – it’s just that these days, everything feels exaggerated. On to the next set of thoughts.

Whirly Woman When Michael and I were expecting our first baby, we spent lots of time talking about the type of parents we wanted to be, along with the kind of atmosphere we hoped to create in our home.