#made me exit out of my Partner’s Blog because i got this ad twice in 2 minutes

[ghostcasket]

tumblr. tumblr what the actual fuck is this.

has anyone else got these ads. i’m lucky i’m not photosensitive or sensitive to flashing lights but if you are that’s what these ads are; big boxes of rapidly flashing colours that take like 3 solid seconds to scroll past.

so again i ask you, tumblr: what the Fuck is this

[queencatherynerhys]

Stuck With You - Chapter 1

Summary: Neal Caffrey had met his fair share of interesting women over the years. Once or twice he thought he had known what love meant. But he learned what being in love was like when he met her. Now he must face a future without her. How will he survive?

A/N: I know I haven’t been non-existent in Tumblr world and TRR fandom. I’ve been working on this story for a while. I was looking through fanfiction stories and realized there’s never really been a Neal/Female OC angst story that caught my eye. I just don’t know why, so I decided to write one of my own.

The character’s voices might be a little different than you’ve come to know if you’ve watched the amazing show. If not, I highly recommend it. White Collar is one to binge through these uncertain times we live in. I’ve rewatched it several times now.

I apologize for any errors. I feel like I didn’t capture it very well. But please leave a like or better yet a comment if you like it and I will post the next chapter.

Disclaimer: Characters mostly belong to Jeff Eastin. OCs and the plot concept are mine.

Tags: @devineinterventions2 @madaraism @theroyalweisme @drakewalkerwhipped @drakesfiance @hhiggs @hellospunkiebrewster @alicars @mrswalkerreynolds @mfackenthal @simplyaiden-blog @hopefulmoonobject @blackcatkita @cocomaxley @boneandfur @lizeboredom @crayziimaginations @umccall71 @zarina-x-zig @writtenbycandy @ranishajay @heatherfilliez @drakelover78 @indiacater @pens-girl-87 @katurrade @speedyoperarascalparty @greyeyedsmile14 @barbaravalentino @zilch3 @mynameiskaylabella @darley1101 @blznbaby @trashbagfullofflannels @bella-ca @highlyselectiveextrovert @kacie-0156​ *I just used my usual tag list. Let me know if you want to be taken off if you don’t want to receive notifications about this story. Also let me know if you want to be added.*

Four days earlier...

Earlier in the week, the FBI caught wind of an unidentified man that came into the city in the hopes of selling a stolen Rembrandt painting in New York. It sparked their attention because the particular piece hadn't been seen or heard for at least two decades. The storm on the Sea of Galilee went missing in 1990 and now it has resurfaced.

Peter and Neal followed the trail of clues and they managed to set up an appointment with their mystery man in Gramercy Park. As per protocol, the FBI staked out and waited for their man to show up from the confines of a worn utility truck parked two blocks away from the meeting site. Peter, Neal, Jones, and Diana all took a screen of their own and watched for anyone suspicious to show up.

"There," Neal pointed on his screen as an anonymous man sat down on one of the benches. He was a young man in his late 20s to early 30s with brown hair, but what caught Neal's eye was his demeanor. His knee was bouncing up and down, his fingers were fidgeting, and his eyes kept glancing and looking around nervously. This man was no art thief. He was just a young man. He looked at Peter to tell him, but from the looks of it he already knew what he was going to say.

"Guys, I don't think this guy is our man. Just look at him. He doesn't even come close to the profile of an art thief. I don't think this guy can steal a candy bar from a gas station. I think we are looking for another guy. This guy is just a middleman," Peter told his team.

"I agree, boss, so what's the plan?" Diana asked.

"We send Neal in to find out what he wants, and go from there," he answered. He watched as Neal stood up, fixed his tie and suit, and flashed his signature, smug smile before exiting the van.

Neal confidently walked towards the bench the man was sitting on, but before he could even come near him the young man glanced at him, ducked his head, and appeared as if he whispered something to an earpiece. Guess that confirms the theory of this guy being just a patsy, but now Neal knew he'd been made. Without showing realization, Neal kept walking acting as if he was just taking a stroll through the park.

He made a big loop back towards the van and informed the others when he got there that the still unidentified knew who Neal was and he informed his partner, or employer, of him through the use of an earpiece.

"By the looks of it, he knew who I was. I don't think this plan is much of a plan anymore, Peter," Neal said.

Peter had his thinking, planning face on. Then, a brief look of hesitation flashed on his face. No one else would have caught it but Neal was a master at detecting facial expressions, subtle or otherwise. He saw it. When Peter turned to him, he saw it in his eyes. He beckoned him to talk outside the van so he followed.

"What's up, Peter?" Neal inquired.

"I was thinking. This guy came to New York out of the blue to sell a valuable, stolen painting. What does that tell us? He's desperate to get the piece out of his hand, so he needs to find a buyer fast. What if we put a middle man on the table?" Peter explained.

"A fencer?" Neal questioned although he knew it was the right answer. "Where are we going to find someone good enough to act as an art fencer? Diana? She's good, but I have a hunch this guy is going to need someone more well-versed in the world of fine art. I would suggest Mozzie but he's been...occupied...since the Cape Verde fiasco. So who else is there?" Neal explained.

Peter looked at him with a look of hesitation with just a dash of regret. It dawns on Neal why he was looking at him that way.

"Oh, no. No. No, Peter, No. You are not bringing her into this," Neal began to object to his friend's idea.

"Neal, listen, she's the only chance we have of catching this guy. With her background in situations like this, who could be more perfect?" Peter tried to persuade. Neal was still not convince. He did not like this at all. Not one bit. Peter had one more card to play to try and get Ryne to do it.

"Well, how about we ask her opinion on it?" Peter slowly asked. He had come to know the young woman well in the year and a half she's been in Neal's life. He knew if anyone could change Neal's mind, it's her.

Neal had always been the romantic. Peter had seen him fall too easily and get heartbroken and dealt with loss no one should ever have to go through. He truly thinks that Neal loved them in his own way, but not the way he loves Ryne. Of all the women he's seen come and go, Kate, Alex, Sara, even Rebecca, in his friends life she's the only woman he was the most protective about. He could admit that seeing his friend care about someone the way he cared about Ryne gave him hope that Neal could have what he has with Elizabeth. A home, a family, love, happiness, contentment on where he is and what he has.

"Fine. Come by the apartment later," Neal gave in and walked away but not back to the van.

"Where are you going?" Peter asked him.

Neal turned around and a flashed a bright smile, "To make my case before you show up." He arrived at June's house and as he does everyday since he moved in he went to say hello to his beautiful, kind landlord before making his way upstairs. He looked everywhere on the lower floors for her, but he figured she currently wasn't home so he headed upstairs to his apartment.

The rich tones of a lively piano music being played gradually became louder as he ascended the narrow stairwell. A grin began to form on his face as he remembered the animated conversation they had about bringing getting a piano to his apartment.

"Come on, babe. It's all I'm asking. Everything else in the apartment is yours. I just want one thing that's for me. My own mark on Neal Caffrey's perfect apartment," she said in almost whiny, but endearing voice.

"Ryne, I just don't see the practicality of having a piano in here. Do you know how hard it will be to get it up here? And where would we put it?" Neal reasoned while tying his tie in front of the tall mirror beside their bed . He turned around to face her after he finished fixing himself.

She sashayed toward him slowly, enticingly, until coming to a stop in front of him to fix the lapels of his designer jacket.

"There's plenty of room in front of the bed," she suggested, almost pouted, and looked at his blue eyes with her big, hazel one pleadingly. The only thing missing was batting eyes, but she was not a little girl begging for candy. She's was a sophisticated woman who knew that the man in front of her would give her the world if she asked for it. He couldn't resist her, and she knew it.

"Ugh, fine, you can have a piano in here," he gave in and laughed when she jumped for joy at getting what she wanted. "The great Neal Caffrey tamed by big eyes and pouty lips. What have I become?" He looked down and shook his head with feign disappointment.

She lifted his face by the chin and flashed the brightest of smiles before she closed in and gave him a passionate kiss. One of his hands held the back of her head while the other wrapped around her waist to bring her closer to him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and threaded her fingers through his brown locks.

Had he no plans of meeting Peter, he would have gladly had his way with her on the apartment they now shared. Funny, even though Sara lived in his apartment for a brief time he never considered them sharing his home. It was always his, and Sara was there conveniently due to circumstances at the time they were dating. That's not the case with Ryne. She's different. He wanted to share everything with her, to be with her, to spend every waking minute of his life in the comfort of her arms. It was at that moment he realized he wanted to be hers forever.

Neal Caffrey was smitten with her. He knew he had never felt like this with anyone before. Sara had been close to capturing his heart, but she demanded a life he couldn't give her. With all the women that came to his life, she's the only one that didn't want anything from him. She didn't demand him to change, to be less the conman and more the honest-living-type-of guy. She encouraged and loved that he needed to live an almost free-spirited life. She simply loved him, Neal Caffrey, and all his facets, no more and no less.

"I love you, Ryne Beneventi, more than anything in this world, more than the finest art or jewelry. If you would have me, I want to be yours forever," Neal proclaimed as he pulled away from the kiss and looked deeply into her eyes. He held her closer to him. Neal had never in his life said those three words to anyone but her.

Kate knew he loved her, but he never said the words aloud. It was always implied, assumed. Alex was a spontaneous relationship. They had something, but not enough for those words. With Sara, he came close. He realized he fancied the "domestic" life with her. He cared for her perhaps a bit more than the others. He even proposed to her as part of a job they were doing. Rebecca, she, was a different case. A loose canon not worth mentioning.

But Ryne, she was the light in the darkness. She was his compass when he felt torn on which direction he should go. She was the breath he needed to live.

"I love you, Neal Caffrey. And I am yours as much as you are mine. Forever," she replied with a bright smile as she caressed his cheek softly with a warm, soft hand. He leaned to her touch and kissed the back of her palm before pulling away.

He would have loved to have stayed with her the whole day, but almost in cue his phone began to ring. His leash beckoned.

In the present, Neal shook the memory away and proceeded up the flight of stairs towards their apartment. He opened the door quietly as to not disturb her. He leaned by the doorway mesmerized by the picture painted in front of him with Ryne lost in her world of music simultaneously filling him with joy and contentment he never knew he could feel.

[jessgartner]

2018 Life Olympics

Let's get one thing straight: 2018 was not a year. 2018 was actually a decade in annum's disguise. Things happened in January or February 2018 that I would have blindly guessed had occurred at least three years ago. The Winter Olympics, for example. How do you measure a year? In heartburn, in wrinkles, in gray hairs, in stress disorders.

Have you ever had a moment when you come face-to-face with your own specific brand of crazy? (I know the answer is yes because you're reading this and all of my friends and casual observers are a little bit crazy. It takes one to know one). Anywho, the other day I sat down to do my annual reconciliation of goals that I set this time last year... all 32 of them. 32 goals. What the what? What sort of lunatic sets 32 annual goals? Even several days later, I can't even type this without laughing at myself. Some of these goals are things like "Raise X million dollars" - a months-long affair involving dozens or hundreds of tasks. 1/32! I tallied it up and I somehow managed to hit 20 of these crazy goals, in a year that I had written off as "terrible," "horrible," "no good," and "very bad."

Coincidentally, my word for 2019 is "boundaries" - may I set them, may I respect them.

2018 Life Olympics Recap

Career - Bronze

By objective measures, Allovue had a pretty good year. We are now supporting over $10 billion in school budgets for about one million students - milestones of which I'm very proud. We added terrific people to our team, we made huge improvements to the product, we hosted an awesome Summit, and we brought on exciting new partners.

Personally, I just didn't feel like it was my best year. This is partly because I set insane expectations for myself and then felt disappointed when I couldn't match them. My attention was divided across several core functions, which made me feel generally frazzled and unfocused for large swaths of the year. When I get stressed, my instinct is to double-down and work harder, which catalyzes a vicious spiral of overwork/exhaustion.

At least twice this year, I dismissed serious health issues as "probably just from stress" and I got sick more than I have in the past several years combined. Next year, I'm putting boundaries in place to help me focus on the goals that really matter to me and to do so with a clear head and a healthy body.

Home - Did not place

Ooph. The gods of hearth and home were not on my side this year. I had an attempted break-in at my rental house that resulted in someone smashing through my backyard fence Hulk-style. My second-floor ceiling caved-in from water damage. Tenants made a mess of the house, resulting in three months of deep-cleaning and painting (and income-loss). My basement flooded. I discovered (because I smelled gas one night) that the gas line in my house was too small (who even knew that was a thing?) and had to be entirely ripped out and replaced. My taxes increased 300 percent. And to top off the year, a new roof. Throughout all of this, I really tried to exercise gratitude for having house(s) in which things break, but it still sucks to write those checks. I'm praying that all will be quiet on the home-front next year. Please.

::Burns sage::

Health - Bronze

While I felt sick and run-down quite a bit this year, I still did some healthy things that I'm proud of. Early in the year, I made the decision to give up my car when the lease was up. I have always characterized my driving as "all of the adrenaline but none of the skill of Batman" and I think it's maybe safer for everyone if I sit in the passenger seat of cars. I anticipated that I would spend about as much money on transportation with increased rideshare spending, but thought the trade-off of stress and time spent driving would be a net good. I was wrong:

In 2017, I spent $5,067 on transportation. In 2018, I increased my spending on ride-share 1000% but it still didn't come close to the total cost of having a car. In 2018, I spent $2,791, which includes the remaining $550 balance on my car payments. If I take that out and factor in post-car ride-share spending, I'm still saving 50% or more on transportation costs. This is wild. One cost not shown here, since it's a one-time expense, is my new bike. I could buy and outfit a brand new bike every year and still only hit about 75% of my spending level with a car. I'm extremely pleased with this decision.

I also joined a new gym and hired a personal trainer this year. These costs probably offset what I saved in transportation, but I feel good about investing in my health. I exercised more regularly this year than ever before, even if it wasn't quite at the level of frequency I was aiming for, and I built a lot of muscle with weight training.

My biggest health fails this year were 1) eating like crap during busy travel seasons and 2) generally eating way too much sugar. I'm increasingly seeing studies about the long-term health consequences of processed foods and sugar. I don't do well with total elimination diets, but I want to dramatically reduce my intake of sugar, refined carbs, and processed foods, as well as managing my diet better when I'm on the road.

Soul - Silver

Shockingly, this was my best category this year. I hit the most goals in this LO category, which included time for writing, singing, traveling, theatre/concert-going, and other activities that make my soul happy. I saw some terrific performances this year, including Audra McDonald and Cynthia Erivo at BSO, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Wonder in My Soul at CenterStage, Waitress at Hippodrome, Ingrid Michaelson at the Beacon, Spring Awakening at StillPointe, Remember Jones at Soundstage, Wye Oak at Ottobar, and Once on This Island on Broadway. I didn't write quite as much as I had hoped (ya'll, I thought I was going to draft two books this year. My concept of time is WILD.) But I still had op-eds published in The Baltimore Sun and Forbes, as well as a few pieces in Medium and on my own blog. I also sang a lot of songs that I loved this year and played the piano more than I have in years. More of all this. I fell short of my 36-book reading goal, but still clocked in a respectable 32 - my second-best reading year since I started tracking in 2012. For the past several years, I've been making a conscious effort to diversify the authors I'm reading. This year, 53% of books I read were authored by people of color and 60% were authored by women. Only 15% were authored by men of color, so that's an area for improvement next year.

Favorite novel(s): Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Favorite poetry: Helium by Rudy Francisco, Felicity by Mary Oliver

Favorite business/strategy: The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath; Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Favorite memoir/essays: we are never meeting in real life. by Samantha Irby; We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union

Relationships - Bronze

I had a fun time engaging with friends and family in new ways this year. I hosted a wine-tasting night and piano concert at my house. I went on trips and to festivals with friends. I also made peace with letting go of some relationships. I spent time with my family and celebrated 21 years of our Boxing Day tradition with my Dad.

I'm taking a hiatus from dating through 2019; at least, a sabbatical from trying. The various apps and profiles have been deleted; my swiping finger is retired. I've been at this game for over a decade with very little success and there's absolutely nothing else in my life that I would invest this much time in for so little joy or purpose. A big part of my goal for 2018 was to retire old narratives that no longer suit me and I decided around November that this story of infinite first dates is just not working for me. For a while, it was fun, then funny. At some point, though, it turned into an exercise in drudgery. I cannot continue to invest this much time and emotional labor and hope into an activity that continuously drains and disappoints me. There is too much else far more worthy of my time and energy: myself, Allovue, my family, my friends - the true loves of my life.

Listen. I see you grinning over there, thinking, "Oh, this is it. Now that she has given up, love is just going to drop right into her lap." I think you've been watching too many Hallmark Holiday movies; this is not The Christmas Crush. This is the real world where men flake and cheat and ghost and zombie and ghost again and I'm all the way over it. Let me be. I can live happily ever after anyway.

Andddd that's a wrap on 2018. I can't say I'm sorry to see it go. I'm closing out the year in Mexico, binge-reading novels, listening to the ocean, doing yoga, eating chilaquiles, and setting a reasonable number of goals that (mostly) adhere to the confines of the space-time continuum. See you on the other side.

[cohesionarts]

This just in from Cohesion Arts

New Post has been published on http://cohesionarts.com/2017/01/02/whered-paul-go/

Where'd Paul Go??

I can’t really know if anybody besides me has been asking that question, but if you’re one of the regulars around here (the numbers may not be legion, but I know they are sincere…) you may have been wondering why the frequency of posts to this site dropped off dramatically in the second half of last year (2016).

At least, I hope somebody noticed, and even if nobody did notice, I’m going to attempt to explain the absence.

So, where did Paul go?

He sorta went into hiding for awhile. His innate tendency to be reclusive and withdrawn when things “go all pear-shaped” got the better of him for several months.

Or, rather, maybe, he just had the wind kicked out of him, and he’s been trying to catch his breath.

Or maybe he’s been thrown into the middle of a lake and is treading water, trying to figure which shore to swim to.

Yeah, that’s it. Treading water.

Chalk it all up to disruption on a personally cosmic scale.

– – – – – – –

I remember exactly when the fabric of my universe started to tear: April 29, 2016.

Ann and I were in Portland, Oregon. She got back in the car and said,

“They want me to start August 1st.”

At that moment, the Big Bang Theory went into full reverse and my Universe started to implode….

We were in Portland to visit “the kids” – that would be Ann’s two sons, James and Robert (they are by no means “kids” – I can never remember their exact ages but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of 40 years old), her daughter-in-law – Robert’s wife, Melissa – and, more notably, Robert and Melissa’s baby daughter, Ann’s first – and quite possibly her only – grandchild, Juniper Rae.

Juniper Rae

We’d gone to Portland ostensibly for Juniper’s first birthday. She was born in May of 2015, and we’d both flown up to Portland for that; Ann had gotten there within hours of the baby’s arrival, I followed a week later. Photos here.

Now we were back for the first birthday, and Major Changes were afoot. They’d started in earnest the previously fall, but really the fuse started burning toward an inexorable explosion as soon as Melissa’s pregnancy was announced back in the summer of 2014.

The fuse started burning with that announcement, but the first cherry bomb didn’t go off until a year later, when Ann let me know that sooner or later she was moving to Oregon. And that I could come… if I wanted. It was all about being a grandparent. Which concept I might not have been sufficiently enthusiastic about, owing in part perhaps to the fact that I’d never met the prerequisite of being an actual parent myself.

“I’m going to find a job and I might just pack up and move,” she said, back in November of 2015. “If you’d like to come with me that’s great. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”

Juniper was about 6 months old when Ann threw down that gauntlet.

Now here we were in Portland roughly another six months later, and the prophecy was coming true.

Prior to flying out to Portland for Juni’s birthday, Ann had started making… arrangements. Ann is a nurse, and for the past nearly two decades she has worked for a multinational corporation, a health care company that has offices and clinics all over the country. Prior to our trip to Portland, she started scanning the company’s bulletin boards to see what sort of opportunities she could find in the Portland area.

Sure enough, there was a new clinic opening in a Portland suburb, and Ann arranged an interview.

We flew to Portland on Thursday, April 28. The next morning I dropped her off for her interview and went off to a Starbucks nearby. She sent me a text when the interview was over, I went back to pick her up, she got back in the car and said “they want me to start on August 1.”

Cue the Big Bang Theory, only set it in reverse….

*

I have lived in Nashville (OK, I’m technically in Pegram, in the next county over, but who’s counting?) since February, 1994. It’ll be 23 years I’ve lived here come next Valentines Day.

That’s more than twice as long as I’ve lived anywhere in my whole life. When I was a kid I lived in Rumson, New Jersey, from age 0 until I was almost 12, when my mother and (new) step father moved us to a suburb in New Jersey that was closer to his office in New York. I also lived in Hawaii from 1980 until 1994, though the last two years of that residency was spent mostly in Los Angeles, going back and forth to Maui.

(Insert obscure Pop Culture reference here:

They even brought a neon sign!

In Hawaii, I lived near a line in an Eagles song:

You can leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina Just like the missionaries did so many years ago They even brought a neon sign ‘Jesus is Coming’, Brought the white man’s burden down, brought the white man’s reign

Yeah, that’s what I did in 1980. And I drove by that neon sign almost every day.)

So by any calculus, I’ve lived here in Middle Tennessee longer than I’ve lived anywhere. When people ask me “where you from” I will make a big deal about being from ‘Springsteen Country – Monmouth County, New Jersey.” But then I will tell them, “but I’ve lived in Nashville longer than I’ve lived anywhere, so I’m from here now….”

At the time Ann was living in Austin.  We’d met at a music festival in Texas the previous spring, and we maintained a “long distance relationship” until January of 1998, when she pulled up stakes and moved to Tennessee – to be with me.

Her nursing career had begun only a couple of years before. She was divorced (twice, but we don’t have to go into the second one) from the father of her two sons, who were in their early 20s and living with her and doing to school in Austin. When she decided to move to Nashville, she set ‘the boys’ out on their own and put her house up for rent. Then she put everything she owned in a U-Haul and with a friend made the trek from Texas to Tennessee.

The apartment I was living in at the time was tiny, and mostly filled with the CDs for songs.com – the online music service I’d started two years earlier. So Ann got her own apartment in the same complex where I lived in Bellevue, and for the next 18 months or so, we “lived together in separate apartments…”

In the spring of 1999 we bought a house together. When I’d first come to Nashville in 1994 real estate was still quite affordable, but by the time we started looking around in 1999 prices within Nashville / Davidson County were already inflating out of reach (never mind how much farther they’ve gotten out of reach since).  So we found a charming little ‘ersatz Cape Cod’ on an acre of land on a quiet cul-de-sac in Pegram, one exit off I-40 west of the last exit in Davidson County.

We put both or our names on the deed, and moved in together in May of 1999.

I sold that Internet music business later that year. At the very peak of the Internet Bubble Gaylord Entertainment came knocking and offered us stupid money for a tiny business. My partners (Tom Kimmel and Michael Camp) and I pondered the proposition for about 15 seconds and said “OK.” We closed the deal in December ’99, and the first call I made after banking the proceeds was to the bank that held our mortgage, which I paid off.

Perhaps due to some family history (my father died when I was 7), I’ve never been one for making or pursuing goals in life. But the one dream/fantasy/goal I’d ever had as to live in a paid-for house. I notched that one at the end of 1999. By the time that happened, Ann and I had already been living there for about six months.

Ann and I got married in September, 2000. We went on a two-week honeymoon to England and Germany. We got rained on at Ludlow Castle in the Cotswolds, and went through crazy King Ludwig II’s Fantasyland Castle in Bavaria. Then we returned to hour shared house in Pegram and settled in “for the duration.”

Once again proving that “everything is permanent… for as long as it lasts.”

*

Here is where, in the first draft of this reminiscence, I started to go into some detail about how Ann and I had moved in to the house together and the considerable (and costly!) improvements we made over the years. How the deal with Gaylord Entertainment went south within a year, and how I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up ever since.

How I went into a form of hiding in the days and weeks after Ann departed.

But that’s all a lot more detail than I need to go into for the purposes of this testimonial. Maybe another time…

Instead, we return to Portland in April and May. Ann and I stayed there about a week. Juni had her first birthday party, attended by children and their parents from Rob and Melissa’s community of friends. I took pictures.

And the wheels started turning toward Ann’s departure. I say “Ann’s departure” because from the moment she got back in the car, it was obvious that she was moving to Portland… and I was not. At least, not yet….

We came back to Nashville, and almost immediately, Ann started pulling things together and packing things up. Over the ensuing several weeks, things that we had shared for years started disappearing. Things like the steak knives we’d used since 1999. She stopped feeding the birds in the backyard. It was always little things, but it was little things that added up to a big thing.

If you’ve read this far, I think you get the gist.

Ann packed up her Subaru SUV and drove off with her friend Evelyn (Thelma and Louise!!) and left for Portland on July 20.

http://cohesionarts.com/art/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_0805-1.m4v

  Amid all the other cosmic/global upheavals of the past 12 months, I have been going through my own fundamental disruption and realignment.

I have been to Portland three times in the 5-1/2 months since Ann moved there. She has yet to visit Nashville.

And I have been, for the most part, creatively inert. I haven’t written much, I haven’t taken any pictures, I haven’t played much guitar. I’ve posted only a few things to this blog, and there hasn’t been a “Weekly Digest” since the week before the election.   What little output I have made has been pretty much  confined to Facebook – which lends it self to short, quick, snarky diatribes that don’t require a whole lot of actual thought.

Maybe I’ve been quiet because it’s hard to keep creative energy flowing when all the energy you have is just going into riding the waves of an emotional roller coaster, when it takes all your strength to just hold yourself together when it feels like the world around you is falling apart. Like I told my therapist recently, “I’m exhausted.”

For as long as it has been – too long, really – since my business blew up in 2000, I have fully expected that I would find something to do that would spring from my own creative energy. First I wrote a book and got it published. Thinking I’d found my new calling as a “biographer of obscure 20th century scientists” I went on to write another. That turned into six years going down a rabbit hole in which there was no fucking rabbit.

After that, I turned my attention to photography, and even my therapist thought I was “on to something” when I first started creating the “Portals of Stone” from my trip to the UK in the spring of 2013. I started exhibiting at a gallery in the Arcade. I tried to own my identity as “an artist.” But mostly what I got was a first-hand education in how truly difficult that is.

Long and short of it, really nothing I’ve undertaken over the past 15 years has come to fruition anything like that company I started back in 1995. I’ve spent all that time as “an entrepreneur between startups” or “an author between books.” Or a photographer wandering among medieval ruins, looking for continuity in time and space…

But once I was living alone, I finally found a partial answer to the question I’ve been asking myself at 4:00AM every morning for the past 15 years, “what will I do when I grow up?”

I finally broke down and got a real “job.”

For the past four months, I have been working for Apple, at their store in the Green Hills Mall in Nashville, where I am a “product specialist.” It’s a glorified title for a retail salesperson, but I rather like the work and I seem well-suited for it.

I really have prided myself, over the course of my life generally, but of the past decade-and-half specifically, for never having worked for any giant corporations. The two previous exceptions where a brief stint as a securities peddler for the Maui branch of a Wall Street brokerage, and then my 10 months as an ‘executive’ for Gaylord Entertainment.

Neither of those situations was a particularly good fit. The Wall Street thing dissolved when I decided instead to go to Los Angeles and study music. At Gaylord, I was “the New York Jewish bull in Gaylord’s Southern Christian China shop.”

But as giant corporations go, Apple is a good one – at least from the perspective of a rank-and-file employee at one of their retail stores. The environment is stimulating and supportive; the hours are flexible and predicated as much on my own schedule  as theirs.  Since I get to spend the hours there talking about products that I use personally, that I know almost inside and out, it’s just the most natural fit I was ever going to find. And given what else was going on in my life when I applied for the job, I am grateful that they looked at my resume (…”What, you haven’t really had a job for 15 years?…) and said “OK.”

So for the past few months, I have been spending most of my waking hours seeking an unexpected refuge in the form of a conventional “day job” that I actually look forward to going to every day. As challenging as some of the customer interactions can be sometimes (“…Whaddya mean you don’t know your password…???”), it’s always a bit of a let down when it’s time to leave. And I really like the person I turn into when I go out on the floor.

So a lot of my time and energy over the past 4 months has gone into adapting to a very different reality from everything that went before.

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Earlier today I opened WordPress for the first time in weeks (months?) and posted two items. And I’ve been writing this gem all day. It’s literally the first time I have spent a whole day in my own creative space in several months.

So maybe there is something to this “dawning of a new year” business, even if it does mean that Donald-Fucking-Trump is going to be President for the next four years (or until we nuclear-annihilate ourselves, which ever comes first).

It feels like the fog is lifting. That maybe there’s some light at the end of this tunnel, though I suspect there could be more tunnel before I actually get to the light.

This will do for now.

But that’s where Paul went.