Time Is Pretty Cool When It Isn't Forcing You to Exist Continuously Through Another Terrible January

This is my middle-of-the-night stream-of-consciousness post that I am not going to allow myself to delete later. It's a good exercise. It loosens up the blogging fingers and let's me freak out a little about something not related to my imminent death.


This is me in the tub with my kitty, Oskar, who is ridiculous and likes to be
extremely close to, but not actually in, hot water.

My death is not actually imminent, but it's January right now, and January is when I am pretty sure that my death is imminent anyway. I am sure that I will get cancer again and that my mid-winter weight gain is a symptom of a thyroid condition related to that imaginary cancer, and then I watch a documentary about breast cancer and pink-washing, and I end up walking around the apartment feeling myself up repeatedly and wondering if that spot I keep poking is going to be the cause of my imminent demise or if I should just cut back on my caffeine intake.

I like the way caffeine is spelled. I always say it caff-ay-inn-ay as I type it out.

That's when the visual migraine thing I sometimes get kicks in, and the whole world starts to sparkle in blinding patches like it's all turning into a disco ball, and I worry that it's actually a sign of a brain tumour or probably a stroke, because the visual migraine is usually accompanied by some facial numbness, and I realize that I haven't showered in a day-and-a-half, and, if I am going to end up in an emergency room with a stroke, I want to look and smell better while I do it, so I get into the shower and don't realize until half way through that I am possibly the dumbest person having a stroke ever, so I get out of the shower and drip all over the floor so that I can inspect my face for asymmetrical drooping, and, being that there isn't any, I decide that I'm not having a stroke and finish my shower, after which I take some Benadryl and have a long, therapeutic nap.


This is what crap I looked like before that shower.

The good news is that I'm not dying! The bad news is that I could be, but so could we all. Oh, January. I cannot quit you, at least as long as time keeps functioning the way it does.

Yesterday afternoon, during one of my therapeutic naps, I had this terribly involved dream about smoking pot, those outdoor hamburger figurines from 1970s McDonalds, baby tigers, and the nature of time. It was fantastic. In my dream, time only seemed to function in a linear fashion for those who didn't understand it, but, once you began to understand the true nature of time, it would function more in accordance with its true nature in loops and pockets and waves, and it all resulted in me getting really stoned by accident after having been mislead by a plastic, anthropomorphic garden hamburger in Alabama, and I ended up cuddling baby tigers soaked in orange juice with my aunt, who, not understanding the true nature of time, disapproved of the fact that they were being kept in giant hamster exercise balls. Poor baby tigers. They were sticky.

Time is pretty cool when it isn't forcing you to exist continuously through another terrible January filled with death anxiety.

Somehow, this is all making me think of Edenland. Hello, Edenland! I hope you are having a fine evening, or morning, or whatever time of day you are having over there in Australia.

The End.

Parenting This Sobriety Baby Is A Real Bitch

Sometimes I feel like someone just picked me up from one place and time and plopped me down someplace else.

This feeling denotes a laziness in my character. It's a deflection of the acknowledgement of my responsibility in the stream of my own life.


This is my friend, Starcat, with whom we visited in Saskatoon last weekend.

I always feel like this after I visit my hometown of Saskatoon. I drove away one day, got married just outside Regina Beach, and then drove on to my new city and my new married life in Regina.


This is an old roommate of mine from the late 1990s.

I was in one place with one life one day, and then I was in another place with another life another day.


Mary!

The older I get, the more I feel like a time traveller. I travel back through memory so easily, so completely, that I often forget that I am 38. I think this is why I struggle with my age sometimes. My sense of narrative leaps around from period to period.

Maybe if I stopped dragging myself through my past so often, I might learn to step more lightly in the present.


No gay pride parade is complete without robots.

At the same time, I want to write it all down, every year of my life.

I want to write down my life at five. That was a big year for me. I figured out mortality. I learned that not getting to do what you want right then sometimes means that you will never get to do it. I learned that I could think up my own answers to hard questions.


There was much wearing of the short shorts at the gay pride parade.

My attachment to my hometown seems to have grown over the last year. It surprises me, this heavy affection.

I think this attachment stems from a great, deep, wide, yawning well of regret for how I handled the last ten years of my life. I felt happy. I drank. I felt sad. I drank. I felt bored. I drank. I felt inspired. I drank, and every time I drank, I forgot almost everything.

I barely remember the names of anyone I met over the last ten years, because I was drunk when I was in public seventy-five percent of the time. Hell, I barely remember the names of more than half the people I drank with at that pub I parked my butt in day in and day out.

There were a lot of regulars and semi-regulars there, but still.


Mrs. Wilson and I had coffee.

I drank quite a bit when I lived in Saskatoon, but it didn't hound me then. It didn't interfere too much. At least, it didn't until the last year that I lived there.


When babies dance, the whole world dances.

It's not that times were easier then. They weren't. I am a happier, smarter, and more fulfilled human being now with a partner I would marry again and again and again. There is nothing in my life I would give away at this point.

Except.


She waved like the Queen at everyone within waving distance.

If I could, I would definitely give away the part where I have to be a recovering alcoholic now. I wasn't an alcoholic then. Or rather, I was, but I could still live comfortably inside of the misconception that I was just having fun.

I really did have a lot of fun. It's just that fun wasn't all I was having.


This cat pees in my footwear when I don't let him make beds out of our coats.

I was told this would happen. I was told that I would eventually fall into a sentimental nostalgia about my drinking days and, boy howdy, have I.

I want a beer tonight. No, let me correct that. I want several pints of beer. It doesn't help that all of my dreams last night had me hiding out in backwater pubs snuggling up to pitchers of cheap draft. It sounds sad, but it was also delicious. I woke up feeling ashamed and guilty.

Parenting this sobriety baby is a real bitch. It better get really good grades and do something amazing with its college degree that I can brag about in my elder years, because I feel like I'm doing all the work here.


This is my handsome father.

Tonight, my sobriety is being fed ungodly amounts of double-strong coffee while it feasts its eyes on movies that will totally leach all the cool out of our Netflix recommended movies list.

I wish I could show you the look on the Palinode's face when Netflix tells him that our main interests revolve around Sandra Bullock's early years and mildly homoerotic coming-of-age road trips.

Packing For Blissdom And Taking Pictures Of My Own Butt: Internet, I Do This For You

Okay, I haven't done one of these stream-of-consciousness rambling things in quite some time. Today's the day. I don't have time to think too much while I try to finish up some projects before I leave for the Blissdom conference in Nashville at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, and I'm kind of freaking out because I leave for the Blissdom conference in Nashville at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, so this is as good a time as any to produce a goodly shot of word vomit.

Mmm, word vomit. Dee-lish.



I am not the most relaxed traveller. Well, to be more specific, I'm not the most relaxed traveller when it comes to the preparation process. Once my plane is in the air, I'm good to go. It's the laundry and packing and gathering of identification and checking and re-checking and re-re-checking of the itinerary and memorization of the hotel address and never really believing that I've counted my socks and underwear correctly.

I can count to five. Just not when I'm packing, apparently.

Also, I will be rooming with a bunch of other women, my fabulous Aiming Low co-writers, and I don't own pajamas. I come from a family of naked sleepers, and I am a naked sleeper from way back except, for that period during which I insisted on wearing white tube socks to bed for fear of vampire bats and dark angels touching my feet. I don't know what I thought vampire bats and dark angels, whatever those are, would be doing hanging around an eight-year-old's bedroom in Saskatchewan, but I was certain for about six months that they had a distinct interest in my feet, and if there's anything I know, wearing white tube socks to bed will scare away just about anything that is interested in you. So, now I am cobbling together sleeping attire out of the most casual end of my wardrobe to save my co-writers the trauma of seeing a woman with all of her natural body hair in the buff.

I am also pretty much convinced every time I fly anywhere that my plane is going to just drop right out of the sky, and so I make sure to enter my next of kin with the airline and make sure that the Palinode's iPhone is full of juice and give all the cats their last ever Schmutzie cuddle and try make peace with my short life before I death march my way onto the airplane, close my eyes, and arrest my soul to whatever Great Divine might be out there. For someone who's made her peace with herself and arrested her soul to the Great Divine on several occasions, you'd think I would be a little more relaxed about the whole flying thing, but no, I am not, because DEATH IS EVER SCARY, YO.

Right now, I'm wondering when I will stop writing like I'm a fifteen-year-old. NEVAR.

Anyway, on with my travel neuroses.

One thing that is going to make this trip difficult is that the ever-calming Palinode is not travelling with me, and I am one of the fairly newly sober, so I can't order a drink on the plane to calm my jangly jangling nerves, which will leave me no choice but to do this calming thing I do where I massage my left thumb a lot, because I believe that somehow all the tension in my body can be released through concentrated thumb massage. While this calms me, this does not necessarily calm my co-passengers, because it doesn't make me look calm. It makes me look twitchy, and nobody likes twitchy people on airplanes these days. Funny, that.

I've been doing my best to nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnj STOP A FECKING CAT FROM MEANDERING ACROSS MY KEYBOARD.

I bought a new pair of jeans at the Gap for the conference, because it always amps up my confidence a bit if my butt looks good.



I think these jeans do the trick, but the next photo doesn't highlight the positive. It does, though, do the neat trick of showing a really unattractive picture of my butt ad infinitum. Infinite Schmutzie butt:



At least, my butt would be infinite if the picture were more clear. Humanity's been robbed. Robbed, I say!

So, by all this I mean to say that I am going to Blissdom! And I am going to be one of the event photographers there! If you see me with a camera glued to my face standing on chairs or creeping around on the floor as I am wont to do when I am photographing people, tap me on the shoulder and say hello. We can exchange cards and hugs and probably the conference flu, which seems to be catching at every conference I have ever attended.

I promise to take nice pictures of your butt.

Forward, ho!