Harborwatch Books, Beaufort, South Carolina, upstairs in the used book room.
I love bookstores more than most places. After a few days solid with a bunch of people it was really nice to spend too much time in this space with shelves and shelves of old books.
Karen finds beautiful things every day, and I am not shy about telling her that through her words and images I find inspiration.
I stumbled a little post-NaBloPoMo, not sure what to do for December quite yet, and since I've been away from home for a couple of weeks I've been a little more uncentered. This is scary because I'm in a largely uncentered period to begin with. She shared Hippy Urban Girl's December Views project, and I immediately decided to join in. I have a few days to catch up on but I think I can do it. I like the idea of an image a day anyway. I've been doing pretty well with posting photos more consistently and it's more fun to do it with other people.
I'm off to Charlotte to see my other Laurie, another person whose eye I admire and from whom you see all sorts of pretty and just plain awesome things every day. I'm sure I'll share a view or two from there, too.
December 2, catching up:
I'm late with these birthday posts. I'm late with life. I'll catch up this week - with the posts anyway.
This year we had the Thanksgiving holiday at the beach we usually go to in the summer, because it was your 50th birthday and it was what you wanted to do, and when other people started saying they'd come down too it kind of all just came together.
It worked out really well. It wasn't very warm at all but the sun was shining anyway, rather nonstop, and your kids were there and your brothers were there and to me those were the most important things, both because of this milestone birthday and because of the year it is otherwise.
I chose to go because of all the reasons I could have been anywhere else, including face down on a couch by myself (which in so many ways would have been fine this season, really, no hard feelings) you are really very important to me. And it seems like my reasoning anymore is fundamentally tied up in the question of what will I be sorry I missed the most? What will it make the most sense, looking back, to say I did?
Showing up down south was in this case the answer to both of those questions.
And even though I wasn't excited about the seven-billion item dinner buffet on Thanksgiving and my back hurt so badly it was difficult to walk (seriously) and any number of the usual mindless complaints one can have about a day or a trip or a life, when you hugged me in the restaurant and thanked me for coming all that way for you and I said that I wouldn't have been anywhere else I knew I meant it long before I said it out loud.
I'll always be a little pissed at you for those days when you stumbled into the house at all hours and then the next day picked me up off the couch and pretended you were going to throw me down the very steep stairs in the way a youngest uncle will do, but not really. Because since then you asked me to stand up for your son 20 years ago, and you took me to a parking lot and taught me how to parallel park so I wouldn't fail my test for the third time. I've cried while I watched you graduate from college, and Rumours is still one of my favorite albums three decades after I laid on your bed and memorized the lyrics off of the record sleeve you taped to the wall. I'll never, ever forget you tearing up a little this summer over my tattoo, because we have loved and lost the same people.
You have been my friend for a very long time and for that reason it was at the same time no big deal and also very important that I be there at the beach on your Thanksgiving birthday. I'm a fan of the easy decisions, particularly the ones that make things even clearer than they may have always been.
Last year I brought you Moose Munch and a green fleece jacket for your birthday before I left for California, where on your actual birthday as it happened I stood in the parking lot of a winery and cried and screamed into the phone at Mom because all of a sudden you were being transferred to a nursing home from the hospital where the assisted living had sent you the day after I left.
You didn't know what Moose Munch was anymore but could still comprehend "original milk chocolate" and, more vaguely, your birthday.
A month plus a day later, just over the threshold into the new year, you died.It's crazy, really. One month we're talking popcorn and chocolate, and the next we're not talking about anything at all, because we can't.
Seriously? So weird.
It still sucks, the missing you part. I can see back now, to the photos and the videos I've got and the images in my head. I can comprehend how frail you were, how hard it had become to navigate the world, how there were gaps in comprehension and engagement that weren't there the birthday before, the one where a bunch of us went to lunch and you dove face first into your sundae when they didn't bring you a spoon.
I know in large part that grief is selfish, but that's not anyone's fault, how it's felt, how it moves.
If we didn't love people so much it would have no origin or purpose. It's the constant push-pull, the crap reality of death.
I wish I believed in a situation that would even allow me to allude to things that people of faith allude to, like "birthdays in heaven," but I don't, and it's not even that on this count I'm that cynical or bitter. It's just that I don't really operate in that sphere. It's not something that feels genuine to me. Still, I honor the birthdays you were here and the 89 years total its been since you came to be a person.
Your birthday kicks off the holiday season for real, like it always has. It's Advent, right, the practice of waiting for someone new, for something new too, maybe, I don't know. I love it more than Christmas, really. It's one of the Catholic things I hold onto for some reason. There is nothing not beautiful about it, to my mind. It's so separate, to me, from theology - because it's the practice I love, not the reasons why, really.
As part of its beginning and of your day itself, I drove towards water. I thought of you, but not the whole time, as much as I knew what day it was all day. I remembered just as much as I thought you'd want me too, if I could guess, and I ate a full fat dinner.
I love you more than I can explain to anyone but myself. I miss you so much it's sickening and for that reason these are things I will always do. I will try to write about it and to talk about it when it makes sense because I think it should be said, how much people can affect our lives for the good, so much that we can carry them with us for as long as we live.
These things about you are things I will always remember, as long as I can remember things.
PoDone.
What I did not purchase at Walgreen's yesterday that I wanted to purchase :
I'm sure there's an amazing amount of symbolism inherent in the fact that I'd like one of these for work AND home, but nah, I'm not going there, except maybe to say less is more? Sure.
Since I left Maryland two days ago, I have...
Had the best solitary I-95 road trip of my life.
Stopped at the Aquia Target, again. I love the Aquia Target, but that could just be because the traffic from Springfield (ugh) almost to Richmond can be so ridiculous that by the time I get to Aquia (Phoenix?) it's impossible not to stop and try to think some happy thoughts. This time I bought three miniature Slinkys (from the dollar bins), tights, a clearance blouse that is totally too big but I can't return it because I ripped the tags off in a fit of Thanksgiving dinner clothing hysteria, shampoo, and an Icee.
I did not, however, buy an audio book, which is what I told myself I was going into the store for in the first place, because the two people who worked in the book/music area did not know what those were but they were pretty sure they'd not seen any there.
Stopped at South of the Border because I haven't been there in years and I thought it would be fun to shoot it at night and holy shit, I was right. I love those pictures. I'll have to upload them someday. I also found Blenheim's ginger ale there, which shouldn't really please me as much as it does. Unlike Kristen claimed she did earlier today, I did not see any bongs. Pedro sells bongs. Crazy fucker.
I did get some shots on the phone.
Been in excruciating back pain from that pinchy nerve spot (or whatever it is, it's from hell, I tell you) such that no Vodka can touch it, nor can four Aleve in an hour, or the ice pack I jammed into it to try to work out the issue. Seriously, my back is a wreck, in just this one place, and it's enough to make it an effort to walk. I am currently lying on a tennis ball to see if that helps. It's supposed to. I shudder to think what will happen when the 39 hammer comes down next month. Locusts. Fires. Sciatica.
Spent an honestly great holiday with most of my family, celebrating my uncle's 50th at a restaurant wherein the buffet was housed in, oh, five separate areas, all shaped like schooners. This was slightly alarming to me not because I necessarily expected Captain Jack Sparrow to jump up out of the bin of sweet potatoes but because I'm a snob about maybe three things and one of those things is dinner. Buffets freak me out. I eat too much, even if I don't like what I'm eating. My ADD goes into overdrive because I don't know where to go or what to get or what to look at first. There are five year olds who could handle this situation with their shit more together than mine is.
No matter. The important thing was not my buffet issue.
IT WAS EVERYONE ELSE'S. Y'all born in a BARN?
(Just kidding, I just felt like saying that. Back to my list.)
Spent the day yesterday with a relative whose health challenges are rough and felt about a hundred different things about it that were at a few points in time very overwhelming, but mostly amazed at our human ability to carry on through what can be crushing adversity, and a very particular kind of gratitude for the time we all got to have together.
Sat on the beach where it is sunny even if it's not 80 degrees and read an actual book and drank actual aforementioned Vodka and aforementioned ginger ale praying it would seep into this pain in my back and remove it, and thought about how little it actually takes to be happy if you're with people you care about who care about you, and how what makes me happy is to be very calmly on this little patch of earth.
The rest is just sort of Whipped Lightening and sunshine, in no particular order.
And I don't know exactly what happened to the ocean here, all crooked and whatnot, but today was a really great day.
My pictures do my best talking sometimes, especially lately. And I don't mean because I'm a technical or a composition genius. What I mean is that they tell the story of my life and the people and events in it much more concisely and in some cases more thoroughly than words can.
I'm so psyched to be at the beach with my family for Thanksgiving. When I got in very early this morning I was road-wired and couldn't really sleep yet, so I started going through my photo stream from last Thanksgiving until today, and made a set of any picture that resonated gratitude, in the broadest sense of the word.
It took longer than you'd think. It turns out it was a really, really good thing to do.
The mosaic only holds 36 photos. There are way more than that in the set.
A quick scan will show that I am lucky to have a good number of awesome people in my life whom I love very much.
I have opportunities, and a voice, and an itch for travel that takes me to places I would really miss if I never went anywhere. I have a fairly functional sense of humor and a love of shiny places and things. I know myself better now, I think, and while I still have a long way to go, I think I am kinder. I think I am more honest. My life is full of food and music and general every day shenanigans.
I am wearing flip-flops in November in one of my favorite places on Earth.
Jonathan Swift is credited with saying, "May you live every day of your life." I may not always get it one hundred percent right, but there is something to the daily practice, I have to say.
Hey! It's a mess of a Thanksgiving post ahead, written while I'm dying to get out of my state.
Last year I had this wine for the holiday.
This year I will not. I will miss it. I thought of drinking the remaining bottle last night that I have been hoarding since I brought it back from California this spring but decided against it. It's more of a birthday sort of thing to do than a Thanksgiving eve eve thing, I think.
I just realized that it will be my second Thanksgiving in a row in a coastal city (this time the right one) with some configuration of my extended family. I may be having trouble with a general sense of gratitude at the moment, as I noted below, but I'll be glad to be with them tomorrow. Life is basically a series of choices and activities, moving on from one thing to the next in the best way we know how, and I'm very happy that we have all chosen to be in the same place tomorrow.
I just hope I can scrounge up a relish tray, because without one on Thanksgiving I'm not sure I can carry on.
I wrote a much more articulate Thanksgiving sort of post two years ago and I enjoyed re-reading it today.
I'm praying for wireless in the place where I'm staying because tomorrow I'm kicking off a month and change of birthday posts. I can't even tell you how many people I know who were born from the last week of November through the first of January. It is a crazy number, and it just so happens that this span of time includes the birthdays of some of my very closest friends and family. It's weird.
And because I'm not such a fountain of joy and light myself as much as I just reflect it back from people in my life who rock, I thought I'd spend the holiday season talking about them. This isn't a revolutionary idea. There are other bloggers who do it all year round (I'm personally a fan of Mr. Lady's birthday posts for her people,) and I'll gladly thank them for the idea in the first place. But this year it has special meaning for me. I will be eternally 39 on December 27 and I know a lot of people in transition. It just seems like the right thing to do.
I'll start tomorrow, assuming that stretch of coastal Carolina has it some Internets.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I am leaving town tomorrow for a week and a half. I am so excited about this.
It's been a rough sort of month.
I have purchased a bottle of Stoli Vanilla and I plan to go visit my surly friend at the Myrtle Beach General Store from whom I can potentially purchase Blenheims spicy ginger ale to mix with this tasty stuff to make the best beach drink ever, even if it's not going to be 85 degrees on my beach like it usually is when I'm there. I will pretend. I love that beach hot or not.
I have new tires and an engine that should (please please please) work following ridiculously overpriced service yesterday, so in spite of the fact that I have to drive late into the night tomorrow I won't be as in denial nervous as I usually am about my poor little car.
I have, in my possession, all cameras, plus chargers, and also lenses, that I need to function for two weeks, both still and video (this is huge.)
Two of the sweetest little girls I know are waiting to make their birthday cakes until they get back to Georgia from Disney so we can do it together. Please to see the state of my two-sizes-too-small heart before I heard this:
And kind of what it felt like after:
I'm not very overwhelmingly grateful right now, I'll admit it. I'm very focused on lack, and what isn't going right, and how I'm disappointing people and not succeeding in ways I'd like to. I'm all "my back hurts," because it does, like every day, and "I'm not losing weight like I want to lose weight," and "that person..." and "he...." and "Oh God I need coffee."
I need not to care about that, any of it (except I can't not care about coffee) for a week. I need to drive on other roads and think about other things. I need to figure out what's next while not thinking specifically at all about it.
Isn't that when it's supposed to figure itself out?
It occurred to me as I sat on the couch tonight and processed my current state of mind that NaBloPoMo makes me a little bit nuts, above and beyond any existing and constant state of nuttiness, of course. And I may be grasping at straws here, but whatever. I thought it was time for a little tour of the archives of Novembers past.
If you are new to this ridiculous magical mystery tour of my life, this will point out that there was life before you, which can be fun and enlightening, or it can just be boring as hell, your call.
Here, I made myself laugh with this bit from November 21, 2006, wherein I rationalized my ongoing and conflicted relationship with yet another 80s cheese rock band.
And now all of a sudden "wacked out and posting" reminded me of the line from REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Lovin' You", a song I've heard repeatedly in random places lately because God hates me, although maybe I should be glad it isn't holiday tunes, because those have taken over most places already. Anyway, you know, the REO song with the line that sounds like it goes, "Instead you left stealin' the rent/ALL HIED UP AND LISTEN'" but it doesn't. It really says "Instead you lay still in the grass/All coiled up and hissin'", which is just weird. And it's important to add that though he knows all about those men, inexplicably he don't remember. Cause it was her, baby, way before then, and they're still together. This in spite of the fact that he's a fucked up stalker with memory loss who compares her to a snake, which I know is how I like my men. Especially the ones who insist that they're gonna keep on lovin' me, and are apparently going to go on cocaine binges to avoid sleeping to do so, even after I've told them to get the fudge out cause I'm watching Montel. Those are my favorites.
Sorry. Decompressing. I will admit that "Take it on the Run" is one of my favorite songs of all time (and okay, I like "Time For Me to Fly" too, but not as much), which doesn't allow me to bring the hate on REO Speedwagon without that full disclosure, but one of the best and most humorous stories that Casey Kasem ever spat into the mic (could they not get that man some water? A lozenge? Some freaking hot TEA?) involved the DECADE that it took Kevin Cronin to write "Can't Fight This Feelin'". A decade to come up with "You're a candle in the window on a cold, dark winter's night," and to rhyme "longer" and "stronger", and "show" and..."show." Scary.
And because this is how my brain functions, this post only makes me wonder how I have never written about Damn Yankees?
Don't worry about it, ma'am. Just them Damnnnnnnnnnnn Yankees.
I know. I can't help it. Seriously, scary visceral memories associated with this song, especially considering I'm a little fuzzy on some of the details of what happened yesterday. Jack Blades (haha, Jack Blades) in mom jeans FTW. IT'S NEVER OVER. (I really really love this song. I'm dealing with this right now.)
It's been three years since I wrote this on November 10, and it's kind of alarming that I could still spit it out almost verbatim:
I over-gave, and it still kind of embarrasses me and makes me want to reach back through the pensieve of the past decade and yank me even further back, so I could turn different corners and tell people to fuck off when actually I said, "Yes, baby. Anything for you." But in spite of this shift inside of me, the one thing that makes a difference is my refusal to succumb to inertia, because even if I'm sitting on my very own single settee for the rest of my days, I want it to be in a cool spot. And I want to say that in the process of getting to be the rotten, hilarious-to-myself, intellectually overstimulated and completely batty yet endearing old woman I know I'll be some day, that I did not stop exercising my capacity to do cool shit, or to push myself to create or to make something better out of where I've ended up. I've been lagging for the past couple years, but it's safe to say that it'll get better from here. And thank God. I'm so on my own nerves.
I'd totally forgotten about this picture that went with the post. That's me on the day trip to San Francisco after my first BlogHer. Melanie Morgan took it. (Where have you gone, Melanie? Where have you gone?) I still dyed my own hair then, all four or more of the colors, poor little girl who never pays attention to the back of her head. It was pretty bad. I also fell in love with the city in those eight crazy hours. Besides going back for BlogHer last year I haven't been again, and I really want to go when I can just be there without the imperative to spend three days immersed in talking to so many great people I don't get to see all year long.
Sunshine and me, November 30, 2007.
I loved and I miss this silly little dog so much...Look at her with the big bug eyes and the kisses...That was the summer before we left and we did step aerobics and kickboxing every day, which tired her out and actually gave me some arm definition.
And I've never found a better hairdresser either. Damn.
I still haven't, and this picture was taken in 1999. (That's dust on the print, by the way. Didn't bother to edit it. LA-ZY.)
Hanging out with Andrew at an open mic on November 20, 2007:
Me: She's really not bad. But why must every girl who looks like that look like that in the same way?
Andrew: Yeah. The leg warmers. The argyle tights. The harshly cut bangs.
Me: I mean, it's like they go to the same school for it.
Andrew: The bangs.
Me: Those bangs look good on no one. And oh my God, she has him banging that tiny little drum. That's really unnecessary.
Andrew: I was just thinking that that drum was unnecessary. I love hanging out with you. We think the same things. We're the same. Except you like Dar Williams and I like German thrash metal bands.*************************************
Me: I just had the insane thought that I miss working for Restaurant Digest.
Andrew: Me too.
Me: Yeah, I miss those messed up times when Bruce was alive.
Andrew: Yes. There was a time when Bruce was alive.
Me: And how sometimes he'd give me money when he was alive. And I'd actually get it. That was nice. Maybe I just need money.
Andrew: It was better when he wasn't crying when he gave me money.
Talking to some students the day before, November 19.
Exhibit B:
"We have our list."
"Okay, who would you talk to?"
"Joe Francis."
"Who is that?"
"The founder of Girls Gone Wild."
"Oh. Really? Why?"
"Because he made a lot of money. I'd ask him how he did it."
(From across the room) "Isn't he in jail?"
(Me) "He's incarcerated? And you want to know how he accomplished that?"
"Yeah, but he's got a lot of money, and it's only for eight months."
"You can't interview him. I'm not signing off on what I'd have to sign for that to happen. Also, you'd have to do it through a glass window."
And finally, from November 26, 2006, Movin' On Up.
Note to self: First of all, good morning, sunshine. Second of all, when you get the bright idea to make the Jefferson's theme song your primary ringtone, please remember to turn it to Edelweiss or just fucking OFF before you go to bed, so when the phone rings at 4:00 a.m., you do not go shooting across the room in a crazed, suddenly-awoken frenzy. Thanks.
I have eight days left of this. Whatever shall I write about? No, seriously. WHATEVER SHALL I WRITE ABOUT?
I'm hoping the sun is out next week.
But if it's not, at least there will be an ocean-view balcony and beer. (Counting the minutes at this point.)
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