Stopping and Watching the Leaves (Cimbrian Women)

 

I bought a big Christmas wreath today at a neighborhood Christmas tree lot. I was driving around the big shitty, thinking about the coronavirus and the vaccine and why people are so stubborn yet so hopeful and my tiny little mother mind™ whispered its disappointment in the spoonful of sugar mentality of my countrywomen and men who are most if not all all geared up to be cured by this thing and my tiny little mother mind™ is just sighing and trying not to let the old ghosts run down its labyrinthine corridors with all those little doors behind which are all those little experiences. My tiny little mother mind™ thinks gently about the idea of Terrible America being capable of pulling something like this off given what’s just happened in the last ten months, gently because twenty-five years have taught me to approach gently that which is impossible, the better to hold and bear it along with all the good and beautiful. 

To read more please go to my Substack.

Power to the Peaceful

 

In reaching deep I discard let go of all the old things but not for new things new ways new anything. This place where I find myself is not the flip side of light or the flip side of dark but the point where the flip happens. It was foggy this morning, the sun orange through what might be smoke from the Bobcat fire to the east and I think of what's burning what's burned how we take it all in to our bodies face lifted. The little yellow green birds that splash in the blue fountain. That thin strip of decay the yellow tulip will bow                       

 over 

tomorrow. A thin strip of fabric veils our bodies, 200000 dead despite. The mediocrity of evil. Each dust mote and the way the way it moves in air.

Watch this video.

What I think about when I think about guns

That photo of me during what would become the peak of my adolescent geekdom is at the top of the fourth most viewed post on my blog, titled "Let's Talk About the Gun." Approximately 32,000 people have found it since I posted it in 2014 shortly after I posted the photo for the first time and was deluged with inquiries about "the gun." 

Again, it isn't a gun. You can read about it if you click on the link.

People love guns in this country or google the words a lot.

I was reminded of it tonight when I read about a group of Trump-loving fools riding up Ventura Blvd this weekend in some kind of caravan. I believe shots were fired, but who did what is unclear. The POSPOTUS, of course, tweeted  The only way you will stop the violence in the high crime Democrat run cities is through strength!, which I guess means guns. A friend from Michigan reminded me of the Trump-loving gun-toting cowards who stormed their capitol, fully armed, to protest masks or something or other, their foolish faces screaming into the masked soldiers standing at arms outside the legislative body's door. Those dudes didn't blink, their mouths still behind their black masks, even though there was a bunch of Covid 19-laden spittle hovering in the air. Afterward, I guess the White fools went home and ate some terrible food cooked by their wives who had shopped for it, ignorant that it had been picked and packed and slaughtered and quartered by the immigrants they hate and other sufferers of the fake virus. I was thinking about that hateful White 17 year old fool murderer who drove twenty miles to protect some property in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killed a couple of people and then walked right on by a bunch of cops. I was thinking about those two tacky fool lawyers in pink and khaki and stripes who came out of their faux chateau in St. Louis, Missouri, fully armed as peaceful protesters strolled by, eventually lauded by the POSPOTUS himself at his hateful foolish sycophant fest. Good for them! I heard someone say about them. I started thinking about how people I know keep guns in their house to protect myself and my family. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to get trained using a gun and then to carry one around in anticipation of or just in case you'd need to kill someone. And then I thought of the brilliant quote by writer and deeply Christian thinker, Marilynne Robinson. It's been over there on my sidebar since I plucked it out of an essay some years ago -- an interview she had done with President Barack Obama. She said, 

Normalizing the idea that we should all go around capable of a lethal act at any moment is completely corrupt and crazy. I wouldn't carry a gun. The reason I wouldn't carry a gun is because it is an immoral act walking around imagining you're going to kill someone. It's a recipe for a completely deranged society. It's grotesque.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed that one silly blog post of mine, and I know it's not because of my gingham dress. We're a completely deranged and corrupt society in the big fat ugly year of double twenties in Terrible America. We are grotesque.

"You are not behaving like a decent person, and I do not respect you."

You are not behaving like a decent person. 

I do not respect you.

Gabrielle Blair, The Consequences of Your Actions


I hope you'll read the above link, because in this post Gabrielle, otherwise known as Design Mom, writes literally everything that I think, on a nearly daily basis, as I struggle to maintain relationships even in my own family. It's incredibly exhausting and debilitating to all involved, I'm sure, even as I acknowledge how it pales in comparison to my fellow human beings who are fighting for their lives.

A lot has happened in the last week or so since I've been here on the old blog. I tested negative for Covid, thank goodness, and I'm sorry I didn't let you know earlier. I took Sophie to the beach for the first time in years -- down to the water -- in her new beach wheelchair that my parents bought for her. I think I'll leave you with these glorious pictures. Having access to the beach again is transformative and brings me to my knees in gratitude. Sophie was so happy.

Schoolmarm

I don't think I can express to you, dear Reader, how grateful I am to have a job teaching and how much I love my students and the place where I work. I teach at a school that uses a one-to-one model, and we went virtual back in March after a week or so of Windexing our rooms and wiping down surfaces to ward off the beginnings of the plague. Sigh.


That seems like forever ago. It was forever ago. The transition to virtual was virtually seamless, to tell you the truth, and while I miss seeing my students and colleagues in person, and Zoom can be exhausting in a weird way,  teaching English literature is doable. I had only a few students all summer long, but the fall term is picking up, and next week I have a nearly full schedule with about 12 students. They range from a darling sixth grade Language Arts guy who bounced up and down all through our fifty minutes together, to a young woman and young man in their last semesters of 12th grade English. I'm also what we call a Tutor/Mentor to a couple of students who struggle with reading. Each student is like a miracle, to tell you the truth. They show up on this weird platform and we work together to learn about literature and writing and life. I am encouraged by their and my own sons' general resilience to #weird world. The term ahead has Catcher in the Rye, Macbeth, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Anne Sexton, Little Women, The Laramie Project, Anne of Green Gables, Out of the Dust, Roald Dahl, Flannery O'Connor and so forth. There's really nothing better than back-to-school for geeks like myself.

In other news, I've been doing a little bit of art these days. I've taken a couple of Zoom classes and dabbled a bit in a handmade book with collage, via an old blogger friend of mine, Suzy Banks Baum. I also ordered an embroidery kit.

This morning, I spent an hour doing paper cut-outs, Matisse style, via Zoom and the London School of Drawing. The instructor even had a jazz playlist on Spotify for us to listen to, and damn if it wasn't the best hour of quarantine that I might have spent.

I feel somewhat at peace of late due to meditation, I guess, and turning things over to a higher power. Just kidding on the higher power. Sort of. Things had gotten so bad that I sort of broke into my higher absurd dark-humored self. Or she came around again after taking a hiatus. Praise Jesus. Even today, for instance. I've been feeling covidy lately, so this afternoon I made an appointment and went for a test. I paid big bucks to stand under a tent with a guy in full PPE who handed me a swab and told me to first cough hard a few times into my mask and then wipe the swab on the inside of both cheeks and on both tonsils. You'll know you've gotten the tonsils when you gag, he said. I then dropped the swab into a test tube and went on my less than merry way. I'll find out by midnight tonight. I don't mean to be glib. It's hot as shit here and northern California is burning. There are people in Terrible America who believe the virus is a hoax, and there are people I love who still support Dear Leader. There are, quite obviously, two Americas and who knows what will happen? I'm struck by the ease with which I got a Covid test, by how much it cost and by how quick the results come in when you have the money to pay. This is not right. This is totally fucked up. But like I said, I'm feeling more at peace these days having surrendered in a small way to all the fuckery in my own world and the outer world. We can only live in the now, as they say.

Neowise

Yesterday, on an excursion to a place called Grassy Hollow where Carl and I headed for some much-needed nature, I read an article on the worldwide webs about the enormous hardship of our migrant workers, how they are bearing the brunt of the pandemic, even as they pick the food we eat, pluck the chickens we roast, slaughter and package the meat we barbecue. I won't regale you with the statistics, but it's gross. This country is foul.

How do we unhook from this culture?

This morning, I lay in bed thinking over-thinking wondering lamenting the usual morning fare. Professional basketball players are housed in what's being called the "Disney bubble," quarantined together with their families, at Disney hotels, kept safe and fed and tested constantly for the virus even as they are getting ready to finish the season of basketball that was so abruptly stopped and that fans so desperately await.

Do can will basketball players play without anyone watching? 

Does a tree make a sound when it falls if no one is there?

I'm reading an article in the newest New Yorker by Lawrence Wright titled "Crossroads." The subtitle is "A scholar of the plague thinks that pandemics wreak havoc -- and open minds." The scholar is Gianna Pomata, a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University who has returned to her hometown, the old city of Bologna, Italy. She compares Covid-19 to the bubonic plague of the 14th century -- "not in the number of dead people but in terms of shaking up the way people think." She says, "The Black Death really marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of something else." We know that something else was the Renaissance. Pomata also says, "Chroniclers of the plague describe the crumbling of the family. At the same time, human beings are creative. They react to this perceived moral decay by creating new institutions." She's less optimistic about what's going on in our country, a country that she loves, where she lived in and worked for over thirty years. "What I see right now in the United States is that the pandemic has not led to new creative thinking but, on the contrary, has strengthened all the worst, most stereotypical, and irrational ways of thinking. I'm very sorry for the state of your country, which seems to be in the grip of a horrible attack of unreason. I'm sorry because I love it, and have received so much from it."

I just can't help thinking about the migrant workers picking my fruit and the basketball giants in their bubble. I can't stop thinking about those who are both ignoring the necessary actions we need to take and those who want to "get back to normal" or "learn to live with it." I am aware of the absurdity and privilege of my own lamentation.

Again, how do we unhook from this culture? Maybe you don't want to. Tell me why?

After wandering around Grassy Hollow, Carl and I drove to La Cañada to try to see the comet in the northwestern sky. We parked on a street called Sleepy Hollow and walked up a dirt trail to a peak that looked out over the entire Los Angeles basin. We watched the sun go down in orange flame, a thin crescent moon rise, the lights of the downtown skyline appear out of a thin haze and then the Big Dipper. There, Carl said, just to the left of the ladle. I saw only a very faint smudge, my night blindness preventing any real recognition.  There was the comet, so aptly named Neowise, just barely visible to the naked eye, a cosmic snowball made of ice, rock and dust. I read that there are about 13 million Olympic swimming pools of water in Comet Neowise, that it's nearly 3 miles long and travels about 40 miles per second. When asked what she wanted to do when the pandemic was over, Gianna Pomata said that she longed to see her mother who lives in Sardinia. She wanted to swim there again. "Older people need exercise," she said. "I don't spend time at the beach gossiping with friends. I don't even take the sun. I just go immediately into the sea."

On Carl's super-camera, Neowise was a green blur with a fuzzy tail, 70 million miles away from the Earth where we stood.

I am grateful for my life. For life. I marvel and mark my own insignificance in this world. And I love the world and its people. But how do we unhook from this culture beyond going out into hollows and onto peaks to bask in and gaze at its mystery?


Here's a poem:

For the Sake of Strangers

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Dorianne Laux (1994)

It's Not Too Much To Ask You to Wear a F*^king Mask and Stay Home

I'm just going to repeat that:

It's not too much to ask you to wear a fucking mask and stay home.

The pandemic isn't "over," and life is not "going back to normal." What is "normal" is the craven irresponsibility of the privileged and even the not-so privileged. This is the high school that I graduated from back in the Stone Age. It was basically a one-room school-house then (hyperbole intentional since privilege was rarely recognized in the Stone Age) but is pretty much unrecognizable now. You can read the story here. 

My take on this shit-show?

(Anonymous commenter -- you'll have to forgive me my anger as I know it offends you, makes you "exhausted") This pandemic is demonstrating with crystal clarity that the lives at risk are expendable. That if you are a person of color, a disabled person, an old person, a person who takes care of another, an "essential worker," you are EXPENDABLE.

WE are expendable.

The rest of you are "free" to do -- in what seems to be the most grotesque interpretation of freedom I've ever understood -- whatever the hell you want.

All is transactional.

So, go on with your best self, as they say.

Have a party.
Travel!
Get your hair cut.
Go bowling.
Go to the beach.
Go to church.
God will take care of you. 
You've got to start somewhere.
Don't muzzle yourself. You're free.
Social distancing is a hoax.
Bill Gates is out to track all of us.
Get back to normal.
Make America great.


I'll say it again. America is terrible and exhausting.

Sometimes, it's not. Read this:
It Just Burns Me Up

Terrible America

I should probably change that sign to "I bake and I know no things," because lately I'm just feeling mostly that I know very little if nothing at all. For instance, why is the rest of the country (other than New York City and greater Los Angeles county) getting back to what they deem normal? Who were those people in those bars in Wisconsin, for example, that bunch of burly white bearded men getting beer on tap, piled up in booths with blondes? And who are the people driving across the country to their beach houses? Who is my son, actually, getting ready to fly to the east coast to spend the summer in South Carolina where life is back to whatever normal is in South Carolina? We are still wiping down our groceries before bringing them into the house, rotating through the masks that lie, now, everywhere, making sure that we wash them before putting them on again to step into the dystopian world outside. We're looking at a fall with school still virtual, with even colleges and universities heading toward 2021 that way, even as other states are opening up their gyms and planning for football. Black men, women and children are gunned down doing normal things while being black even as men with submachine guns strapped to their bodies (and their adoring women because let's not leave out the women) protest for their freedoms in public places. Their idle white faces.

I'm confused, so confused.

Children are beginning to die in New York and New Jersey from a rare neurological/immunological disease related to Covid-19, but there are legions more protesting against their tyrannical government, peddling conspiracy theories and refusing to wear masks in the name of freedom. We've got Dear Leader spinning spinning spinning his lies and venom, health insurance companies diving back into states that they'd pulled out of one year ago, piling up record profits to reward their shareholders and executives, while the disability community faces the spectre of cuts in services, the usual sacrificial lambs at the altar of mammon.

We are divided, disunited.

We were encouraged to go outside and look up into the skies today as military jets flew through in a show of aerial support for healthcare nurses. Thunderbirds. Blue Angels. Who are the people that thrill to this kind of thing? I do not understand them, but I know nothing. I am confused. I put on my mask and go for a walk, my lips tight underneath, my glasses steaming up. Don't touch your face.

America is exhausting and terrible.

Day 60

I've been ordering fresh produce from a local cooperative, and yesterday's delivery was a bonanza of greens and lettuces, radish and baby broccoli, a scattering of herbs and lemons, a grapefruit, some blueberries and onions and a couple of tiny worms. The rendering -- the washing the drying the organizing the storing -- of all this fresh produce gets my tiny little mother mind™ thinking about convenience and waste and the myriad depressing ways a lot of us live, saying we're too busy or can't be bothered or whatever. Whatever. I'm no farmer girl, no rural girl, no grower of my own vegetables nor do I have any desire to do any of that. What I do love is fresh food, recipes and cookbooks and puttering around in my kitchen doing domestic things. I also like fancy things -- half and half in a glass bottle, tiny little jars of pot de creme from France, a weird Italian green that tasted salty like the ocean or what I imagine a cactus (it looked like one). I don't have much to say other than I've been depressed in a way that I can't remember being depressed and I'm very much aware of the luxury in that statement and the unoriginality in the condition. I'm angry, too, but I'm made of anger in no small part and as the gray takes over my hair I will try to be as exuberant as unapologetic because it's all about letting go letting god letting.






as much as i try to be an easygoing, stretch your wings and fly type... i just can't stop trying to burst people into flames

a card that a beloved sent me



People I'm Currently Trying to Burst Into Flames In No Particular Order, Except for the First Three:

Donald Trump
Mike Pence
Mitch McConnell
Men with submachine guns
Men who assault women
Men who kill black people
Men who shoot children
Men who beat up women
Men who make stupid jokes
Men who harass women
Men who are religious zealots
Men who date girls
Men who refuse to apologize
Men who can't get their shit together

Feel free to add to the list.

Conversations in Quarantine

I can't do it anymore.
What's happening?
I can't do it anymore.
Where are you?
I'm driving.
Where?
I don't know. Anywhere.
You should pull over.
I can't do it anymore.
It's too much.
Yeah.
It's too much for all of us.
Yeah, it's always been too much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The yeah yeah yeahs.





How's Sophie, he texts.
Fine
Then,
nothing.





A nasty toxic red tide we see during the day on the beach in southern California turns into a glowing blue -- what? Phosphorescence. Some people call it magical. I'm transfixed less by the blue emanating from dolphins and water in moonlight than the transformation itself. The smell of decay masked by light. It doesn't seem possible so I guess, magic.






How's Sophie, he texts.
She's running a fever. No other symptoms. I will talk to the doctor tomorrow.
Then,
nothing.






People on cell phones bore me. The people I can't see and the people I can see. The head low like a horse without the velvet nose. I'd like to see some teeth, the huge yellow ones biting an apple.




Anger.




Red tide. Decay. Stink.

Phosphorescence is light emitted after exposure to radiation.
It's produced by something that doesn't flame or heat.

(BTW, Sophie had a fever last week for three days with no other symptoms. She also stopped having seizures which is always the case for her. I wondered if she had The Virus. I wondered whether she'd die, but I wonder (this) (whether she'll die) every single day. The parenthetical. My powers of dissociation are strong. I had my first tele-health meeting with The New Physician. She took up 1/2 of the rectangle that is my phone screen. She wore a white lab coat and stood in front of an examining table with a blood pressure machine on the wall behind her. I wondered if it were a backdrop, one of those screens you can put up behind you while you Zoom. My students do that. One of them has the Tiger King guy behind him, the stripes playing light across his face. Wavy. We're reading The Crucible. The student can't believe I refuse to watch Tiger King. Why not? he asks.  Why? I say. What's a crucible? he asks. A container that holds high temperatures, metals melting. The doctor says, I wouldn't test her because it's so uncomfortable. I imagine driving in a line of cars into Dodger Stadium with Sophie in the back of the car in her wheelchair. Would someone open the door and have to swab her? I read somewhere the nasal swab felt like it touched my brain. 
)




How's Sophie, he texts.
Fine.                                                                  (I am, too.)
Then,
nothing.



I'm outside today picking mint from the garden. I rip it up take a huge bunch inside and wash it in the sink. The apple tree has blossoms and every succulent has a bloom. The sky is blue and a velvet hummingbird sideswipes my nose, I hear it coming. Hear it here.

Driving Toward Oblivion

Here's a poem:

Biophilia

Most of us hungry at daybreak, sleepy by dark.
Some slept, one eye open, in water.
Some could trot.
Some of us lived till morning. Some did not.

Jane Hirshfield, Ledger
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It's Not Funny

Huntington Beach, CA
Yesterday

In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.”

Albert Camus, The Plague 

It's a privilege to be able to stay inside, quarantined, with enough food and supplies for weeks, a virtual job, a pretty backyard and neighborhood in which to walk and a pile of masks that an industrious friend has given me. Not once have I thought my rights and freedom have been infringed upon, and this, too, is a privilege. My heart goes out toward those who are truly suffering from the virus, from economic hardship, from uncertainty and fear about the future. Most of all, though, it's a privilege to do something for others, to have the capacity to quell panic and anxiety in myself and in others, to know that what I am doing is actually something. It's a privilege to meditate, to laugh at silly cartoons, to bake a chocolate cake for a beloved friend's birthday and to bring it to her doorstep, to stand outside her house with other beloveds, at a "safe" distance from one another and to sing her birth. It's a privilege to coach my son through a new dinner recipe that he's trying by himself, thousands of miles away, to see his beautiful face. It's a privilege to follow the counsel of those wiser and more knowledgeable and experienced than myself, and it's a privilege to be openly derisive and contemptuous toward the leader of this country and the idiots that support him.

I had to write all those things to quell my anger and make sense of my contempt. I would like to be positive or not too angry or even optimistic, but I am not. I am angry and feel contempt toward the zeitgeist of this country and the insatiable greed of the powerful. The inadequacies and injustices that have always been present laid bare and yet, and yet. Still. Always the transactional. I am not optimistic and don't believe optimism is a virtue which means I am not a good American. I don't know what I am, actually, but it's not about me, and that, too, is a privilege. I wish for a sea change, or as the great Seamus Heaney said... On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore. Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles. And cures and healing wells.

The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness. 

Albert Camus, The Plague 

I appreciate the sentiments expressed here, written by a New Yorker and posted on Facebook:

Dear protestors, 

Y’all realize that people in NYC have been holed up in tiny ass apartments the size of your car garage for twice as long as you guys have? They don’t have any beaches and most of them don’t know what a “porch” is. Restaurants being shut down means most of them have to cook in kitchens that are built for instant ramen at best. Almost nobody has a car so they can’t hoard toilet paper like you fuckers or escape to a nearby town to take a walk in a park by a lake. 

Yet they’re all making silly videos on FB, shouting thanks to healthcare workers at 7pm every day while you motherfuckers block the paths to hospitals, and they’re coming together like a community to defeat this thing despite going through hell. You know why? 

Cuz you guys are a bunch of fucking pussies. You snowflake ass Motherfucking pieces of shit need to whine about your rights getting trampled on cuz the government is telling you what to do with your bodies?! Seriously. Fucking puke in my mouth. And all those guns and ammo vests n shit? Who the fuck are you gonna shoot? The virus?! Doctors?! Put the fucking guns away, you psychopathic, insecure, ass hats. Go the fuck inside and stay there and stop fucking protesting. 

Bye.

It's really, really not funny.

Bodhisattva

I'm all over the place. Perhaps. (condition) Filled with vitriol and judgement and sadness masked by bitter humor. I know this in parts (not part). It must be irritating to listen to someone compare a disabled person and her caregiver to a pandemic's dictates. To constantly draw parallels. Parallels. One line tilts at some point must tilt at some point in this madness we call living. Sophie knows everything about isolation and confinement. Her journey is not mine nor are there parallels. But tilt. Because she is my heart I can understand how deep. Fathoms. Unfathomable. Unfathom is not a word, but I am learning unlearning to do it because of her. When she was a baby and screamed for hours I rocked her in a brown and cream-checked chair from the life before her, chanting Breathing in I calm myself, breathing out I smile.  Tonglen. Breathe in all the world's pain and suffering and breathe out good. When I forget -- tilt and the unfathomable depth of her eyes.

Dispatch from the Left Coast

Do you know the art of erasure? I don't mean the art of disappearing or being invisible or making something or someone invisible, although that'd be awesome. I'm talking about taking a piece of writing -- a newspaper, the back of a cereal box, a page in a magazine, an advertisement -- and whiting out random words to create a poem. You should try it, especially if you're tired of or hate doing jigsaw puzzles. I hate doing jigsaw puzzles, and I'm busy enough teaching and taking care of my family, but I do love the art of erasure. Let's all do it and report back tomorrow with your creations.

I told Mary Moon that I feel anger and depression in equal measure but what rules me is dissociation and its close cousin, anesthetized cheerfulness, because what better coping mechanism do we have than the ability to let go and smile? I've perfected the art of dissociation after watching tens of thousands of grand mal seizures over the last quarter of a century. I'm not talking mindfulness here, although it has a place right alongside the dissociation. I believe both are distant cousins of the stick your fingers in your ears and hum method. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I'm never cheerful. Optimistic, yes, but I can't stand cheerfulness. I really can't stand a Pollyanna. I prefer the darkly humorous and bitter people of the world who still manage to be incredibly kind. For instance, I'd rather be dying alongside someone who is sweet with a gallows sense of humor and dark view of mankind than someone who is sweet but claims to be a Pollyanna.

Who the hell is Pollyanna? I really, really, really can't stand the Pollyannas of the Pandemic. So much better to say, What the fuck? at the absurdity of waiting in line at the Costco for your giant jars of mayo than I actually LOVE the solitude and am enjoying making elaborate food for myself and then watching a corny chick flick! The queen of WTFs is my friend Sandra who has been posting her WTF lists on her Facebook page, recounting life in the Pandemic with a severely disabled kid. The thing is after the hilarity and dark humor of that, she tells us something for which she feels gratitude, and that gratitude is all the more beautiful for its WTF frame. She wrote come amazing commentary today about what it's like caring for a child with complex medical needs during the Pandemic. Turns out it's not that different than caring for him during typical times, something that we've been sort of Cassandraing about for decades. Read it here.


I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. I thought I might have caught the Covid on Sunday. I just felt OFF. Evidently, I don't have it, though, at least not yet, because I felt better on Monday and Tuesday after dosing myself up with elderberry syrup, Yin Chao and prayer. Just kidding on the prayer. I lay in bed for hours in the darkest hours before dawn making elaborate plans for when I got sick. I won't regale you with these as it'd be about as interesting as me recounting a dream. I did a lot of mindful panicking in my tiny little mother mind™ before I conceded to the powers of the earlier-mentioned dissociation and concluded the whole session with a dark nod toward imminent death and the cessation of present troubles. Last night I woke in the middle of the night with the most intense headache I think I've ever had. I stumbled to the bathroom and shook out two Advil (even though my mind balked because I've heard that Tylenol is better than Advil for the Covid) in the dark and then stumbled back to my bed where I lay for hours, wondering whether this was a precursor to Covid or a stroke, but I eventually fell asleep and woke embarrassed in the light at my earlier histrionics.

Reader, what's up with you? If you're wondering, that photo is Oliver multi-tasking. He went to CVS to get Sophie's medications while attending "class."

Rest in Peace, Charlotte Figi

We are all bereft, gutted, filled with sorrow. Charlotte Figi, the daughter of Paige Figi, died yesterday of probable complications related to Covid-19. Charlotte was patient zero in the cannabis revolution, and Paige a mother, a friend, a mentor, a revolutionary, a life-saver and inspiration. All of our lives -- all of your lives -- has been changed by this young girl and her mother. That Charlotte should die of this cruel virus that seems to be just picking people off is bewildering and even surreal. In the epilepsy community, Charlotte's death is particularly tragic as so many of our hopes and dreams and certainly our gratitude and love is wrapped up in this child's soulful eyes and sweet smile. She is our child, too, and I think I speak for many when I say thank you to Paige and Greg and Matt and Max and Chase for sharing Charlotte with us.


Molta forza e coraggio to Charlotte's brave family. We will never forget your girl, the garden you planted, and the flowers that bloomed from it. We love you and hold you with our community -- Charlotte's web that you so beautifully spun and whose strands are stronger than loss and grief because they are made of love.