Get On With Your Life...

 

I’ve been reading #1619Project for one day and a stranger has already told me to “forget about slavery and get on with my life”
It seems bad that I don’t know what that means, not just because my life was slow before the pandemic, and, at least the most personal and individual bits have been vaguely submerged since.(I’m not sure I’d ever be able to treat life as some kind of giant freeway where there’s just a few of us in each car, pretending we’re alone.)

Not a task for a woman whose tagline used to be “Life is my Adena Watson case,” anyway, though I won’t go  full-on Bayliss and try to solve race relations by and for myself.

One Way I Know I've Gotten Older...

 (Besides busy single-lady December picking up slack at work)

A few weeks ago, I got a haircut and on the way home, the Shit I Listened To When I Was Twelve station took a lurch  forward into the nineties and played the Red Hot Chili Peppers crying with LA...still know the words but not the title. Part of me is singing along and part of me is thinking "Man, I've lived here my whole life and never worked up the feels for it."
But then another voice said "If you were on as much heroin as them in those days, you could write poems about Phoenix, too."

Got A Real Reporter's Dream Last Night...

 Not sure which ink-stained wretch that I am likeChris and Bernard with but one thing did feel familiar in the dream: that sense of "Why are you being so difficult about answering such a simple question?", only because I've been Features Girl pretty much always("real reporter" was a bit dismissing of self, though in the dream I was asking about something nobody'd really send me out for) the simple questions are a bit more basic.  Like "No, I can't just use your nickname and not your real name." or "Why are you being so weird about your age?"

It's a draft!

 Had a writing instructor in college who told us we could only have victory laps about our work making copies for class at Kinko's.  Since I don't do that, anymore...taking a moment...and we're done.

Well, not exactly. Still haven't decided how momentous(or cynical) I want the very end to be...I still have a few choices to make. But, still, this time last month, this idea was a bubble of pique and a dream.

Sometimes it still blows my mind that I can do that, even if sometimes I wish this all had more solid underpinnings than how much I hate that my senior Senator isn't who I thought she was.(To put that mildly and without the Milch glossary)

Stacey Abrams can do (almost) everything...

 From producing a readablethriller to paying off Arizonans' medical debt, you can almost see why they thought she could save Terry McAuliffe.

My Quarterly Melania Moment....

 Sometimes, I wish they'd shut up and give us the damn money.Playing our song...

The Best Thing I Wrote In Yesterday's Flash Workshop...

 One was...kind of intimate, and the one about our history? Sadly,"Almost got shagged, cup of tea," covers it more than it doesn't, absent a few flourishes. But I can share this, despite it being more of a gag than a story right now.

If it needs a title, call it "Her Shit Together"

Randall hesitated with his daughter’s emergency key in his hand. One day Michelle would have to learn that he wasn’t going to be here forever. Get her shit together a little bit. Still, it wasn’t really like her to be late, and he heard a muffled moan that made him think she may have fallen out of her chair and hit her head or something. He moved forward with the key, almost wishing that he had to do something heroic, like break in. “Hello?”
As he approached her bedroom, the noises and rustling got louder than stopped. He hoped she hadn’t been calling for help for too long. He hesitated for only a moment; it was still a lady’s bedroom, even though his little girl was…timeless.

“Fuck!” His usually careful language failed him as he saw a shirtless, freckled abled man sitting on his half-dressed “special” daughter’s lap.

“Well, Daddy,” said his daughter, either shaking with a spasm or suppressed laughter.  “Not anymore.”

God, I Wish I'd Been More Wrong...

 may this be my last word on Manchinema.

Hate to be wrong...hate them more.

Is It Still A Miracle if the Best Part Takes Forever?

 

The week of my birthday is a weird week to think that I was born bigger(and more ready to breathe) than Kate’s miracle baby on “This Is Us” (I was 3 pounds 5 ounces, young Jack 2, 8, but of course with 45 years more technology, more awareness that things go wrong, and the cultural sense that my life is too much of a bummer for a show that prides itself on crypoints per episode.

Fuck you, too, "This Is Us".

This birthday feels a little bit more like an accident anniversary than some of my previous ones. Even though I’m creeping back into some of my things, the slower-than-usual pace of life with corona has given my life a somber cast.(Maybe it is a true triumph of the human spirit, even though I don’t believe I’ve ever said that not being sardonic- that I was ever able to get excited about my birthday at all.) I’m not Jewish, but I wonder, if I had been how it might have affected my personality to have been born in a season so concerned with righting wrongs and setting things right…maybe it did anyway.(Would I have been more grateful if born in November as expected?)

This is the second year in a row that I couldn’t possibly fit in a year’s worth of  bucket-list worthy cool stuff in the last two weeks so it feels like I’ve Lived.(Appreciate losing this pressure, not loving the societal slowdown that made it likely.)

This year is the first year I can maybe play the dozens on a third-grade level and sometimes enjoy an unofficial role as #SimonsLittleHelper(Because he can’t be there every time some jerk’s mother needs mocking) but I’m pretty sure some  West Baltimore kid could get one look at my big teeth and the wheelchair with the tape on it and take me down a peg or twelve.(learning to do that shows me I talk about Actual!Mom a lot, which  is why she’s actual mom nowadays, though I sit before you as one of the few people on this seaboard who could find out one of those Mrs. Robinson scenarios is true and have her life make *more* sense, instead of less.(But, alas, it’s not)

48 seems like an impossibly huge, mommish or professorial number, though I never really got close to being either of those things. Kind of hard to talk about what I am, cause at least at my level, “writer” and “activist” feel at least as generic as the other one I have a tiny shot at, “social media influencer”(Even I read all those things, about me or anyone else, and halfway think ‘how nice for you!” so I would like to blame you if you think that, but I can’t.) I do have an audience, and David Simon reads my stuff sometimes, which is absolutely like  having a kvetchy Mikey eating my cereal at long last, and would totally be a bullet point on my resume if HR departments were all run by Wirefiends, especially since he did tell me something I’d completely misread the first time we “met”(I misread the question…did it stop me? For once, no.) but I’m not a shitsquib. Yet. Plenty of loyal, if farflung enough friends and family to keep Carole King's "So Far Away" in my head at least once a week, but I get by with their help all the same.

I have had more “In another life…” moments than “How YOU doin’?” moments.(if there’s something to be done about this, I doubt there’s an algorithm to solve it.0