Sailing the High Seas

When the pandemic first hit (the good ol’ days), I found myself watching my friends livestream baking loaves and loaves of sourdough bread and texting our group chains about binging “Tiger King”, or some shit, and I truly have never related to peoples lives less. And thats saying something because I’ve spent my life working for actual famous people. But this sort of weird coping mechanism folks had - where they turned into Mormon Mommy Bloggers circa 2010, growing yeast starters and drowning themselves in throw-away streaming content in order to buffer out the horrors, was just so far removed from me, sitting in a tiny, empty, Brooklyn apartment with my dog, a mattress and TV on the floor, evidence of my knack for moving at the absolute worst time possible, finding it impossible to block the never-ending sounds of ambulances whipping down DeKalb over and over and over again. Its not that I didn’t want the ability to be able to knead some dough and feel some sort of ease in my soul, or whatever the fuck it did for people, because that would’ve been grand.

I’m not some sort of elitist who looks down on weird ways to cope - like watching garbage to try and make you feel a little better, a little less lost, it was just the fact that my brain would not let me just…be. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s my anxiety. It’s a way of life that manifests in me always having to  be “at the ready”. Unless the good Lord (and klonopin) bless me with a snooze on an airplane, the rest of the time is sitting on edge of my seat, ready to count rows to the nearest exit while mentally prepping myself to inflate those life rafts at any second, baby. I can put on a movie, but I never actually watch it. I can’t read books, or write, because the idea of focusing on something else takes my body out of “Safety Mode”. Heaven forbid disaster strike while I’m in the middle of a viewing of “Something Borrowed”. Would I be able to snap into reaction mode? Maybe. But then my brain says, also, maybe not. So, I feel like that’s my go-to when things get hairy. I just kinda exist. I’m “deadman’s floating” until something happens. Biding my time until shit hits the fan, I suppose? So during lockdown, when I wasn’t working remote, I would spend that time until I fell asleep alternatively staring at the wall and then at my phone. I was like Han Solo when he gets flash frozen in the carbonate - alive, sort of? But I don’t know if Han Solo actively worried about getting scurvy from the lack of vitamin C and then would call their friends in a panic asking them if they too worried about scurvy (they did NOT) and then get mad because they said I might getting a little too worked up over nothing. Nothing?! You can still get scurvy to this day and let me tell you there was nary a fresh citrus fruit to be had, baby. Fucking nothing my ass. It’s all fun and games till your gums start bleeding and you’ve got blue shins.

I guess the early pandemic scurvy worries and dead-eyed zone-outs while sitting on the floor of my empty apartment were a sign of how I would handle things to come. But, I’ve gotta be honest, at the beginning of last year, I was living high on the hog. I had quit my job, some savings in the bank, and was planning to take a touch of time for myself. Some real self care shit - just a 40 something lady finally getting her garbage life together and having a touch of, dare I say it, fun in the process? I boxed, I cooked, I made up for the pandemic darkness and let myself binge some shows - specifically Finnish crime procedurals - which lead to me becoming obsessed with learning Finnish. Which, I think I need to admit *might* have been egged on my Doc upping my antidepressants, which I realized fairly quickly was akin to being on speed, and that was awesome, obviously. But it also explains the pace at which I consumed the Finnish language. Anyway, speed aside, I was going on drives. I was reading. I was writing. I was engaging with life. Sure I was also purchasing a small fortune of “go-bags” and potassium iodine pills for the impending nuclear Apocalypse, but it kinda felt like an even trade off? For the first time, if I’m using the plane analogy again, I’d liken it to me being able to watching “Something Borrowed” WHILE preemptively inflating everyone’s life-vests. Multi-tasking at its finest. Thanks, 300mg of Welbutrin!

Then, ya know, shit actually hit the fan. But it didn’t feel as intense or scary as my fear of nuclear war or choking on my own lung fluid (a real worry in March 2020). I’m not sure what that says about me or my intelligence, to be honest. But it’s the truth. So when cancer came a’ knocking I went into “lizard mode” again. My somatic therapist let me know its actually “freeze mode” - but I like saying its lizard mode instead. It sounds more exotic. Like I’m basking in the sun like a fucking Komodo dragon. Anyway, the point is, when I go into lizard mode, I can’t focus on anything. It’s like being on the plane, but the plane never fucking lands. The plane is MH370. I was able to plow forward with Dr’s appointments and arrangements. I inexplicably continued with my Finnish lessons, but otherwise - I lived in a void. I didn’t watch tv. I couldn’t read, unless it was late night radiologist reports. Boxing lost its luster - I wasn’t able to channel my anxiety into anything really. I was just doing the deadman’s float again. I was just existing. Until the night before my mastectomy, when I decided to destroy my apartment in some sort of stress induced desire to organize everything just in case I croaked. Because I didn’t want people going into my lair and thinking, “what a dead-ass slob loser”. You can be dead. And a loser. But a slob is a bridge too far.

So I pulled an all-nighter and made a mess, and then attempted to clean said mess before I had to head to the hospital at dawn. And while I acted like a fucking maniac, I threw on something for background noise. I can’t tell you why I chose “Below Deck Yacht Sailing” - I’m no stranger to Bravo, but those shows are not normally my jam. The dudes are never hunky enough to tempt me and the plots seemed repetitive. But the high seas beckoned. I abandoned my cleaning pursuits ( much to the disappointment of all of those people who had to enter into this coffin of an apartment to deal with my disgusting drains and surgical wounds) and I realized there was only one thing I cared about: The motherfuckin’ Ocean.

I binged Below Deck until it was time to leave for my surgery, and when I came home, it was the only thing I could tolerate on as background noise. It wasn’t that I liked the show - I really didn’t/don’t? It’s repetitive, like a procedural set on a boat slip in Majorca. It’s more the idea of sailing the high seas that I enjoy. Do I personally want to swab the deck every morning and have to spend my days tying and untying knots? Absolutely knot. Zing. But then, because I’m an absolute lunatic, shortly after I was out of the hospital, in the dark of the night, I decided that it was imperative that I figured out where all the boats from the Below Deck franchise were moored. Could I have spent what little energy I had on something more, I don’t know, sane? Sure, but what fucking fun is that? And because I’ve worked for an actual billionaire or two, I know that ships, like planes, have call-signs of sorts which allows you to track them. Cut to like, twenty minutes later and sure enough, fuckin’ Murder She Wrote over here had tracked down every single boat featured on the show. I realize you’re probably thinking, “Gurl, this sounds like an undiagnosed disorder”, and to that I say, “no shit”. During my searches for the Parsifal III, MotorYacht Home, etc etc - I came across my now favorite app of all time, “MARINE TRAFFIC”. This app combines two of my favorite things - ship shit and maps. Because something else I’ve always self-soothed with is maps. I realize this adds a lot of flavor to the thought that maybe I’m on some sort of spectrum, but you know what, if you’re feeling a tad on edge, open up an atlas or google maps and I swear to God, zooming in on all the rivers and estuaries and little inlets and islands and mountains and canyons is really comforting!

So this app - I’m pretty sure it’s meant for actual mariners, and it’s a giant ass world map that tracks boats (pleasure craft, tankers, cruise liners, yachts, shipping boats and fishing vessels) in real time! And for pleasure craft, if it’s been registered with a name - well, you’re in a for a fucking treat. Because if you really want to kill some time, zoom in in in in in in in on the coastal areas where marinas might be and its a fucking treasure trove of bad puns! Some personal favorites: “Knotty N Nice”., “Cheaper 2 Keep Her”, “Ships N Giggles” “Byte Me” (some tech bro, I’m sure), “Getting Chummy”, “Sir Fish A Lot”, “Knot Zen”, “Reel Trauma”, “Heel Yeah” and honestly a fuck-ton of yachts and boats are christened, “Enya”. I guess there are a lot of people who enjoy the sea breeze in their hair while Orinoco Flow plays. I can’t fault that. But like, you can lose HOURS of your day, just zooming in and out of each port (you’d not be surprised that Florida has a wealth of dumb ass boat names) and just looking around for weird stuff. You can click on the bigger boats and see their ports of call, the speed of the boat, etc - but the absolute best part of this app is that, if you pay a little more, it unlocks the weather layers!

When I had to go to the Cancer ER for C-Diff (because of course my side effect would be almost shitting myself to death shortly after a mastectomy) and they could’t get in my IVs because I was so dehydrated, it honestly sucked a whole lot, but I just sat there with one finger scrolling to see what the barometric pressure was like over the Sandwich Islands. You can see the wind direction - track the wave heights and crests, see the swells, track the sea temps and then immediately stop looking at the sea temps because its a reminder of how absolutely fucked the planet is and thats a bummer that we truly do not have time for - not when you’re tracking wind-speed in the South Indian Ocean (don’t sail there, btw, it looks like a nightmare and always has horrid weather conditions #CaptainClinesSailingTips). But this whole obsession of mine is truly wild, because while I do love the ocean, being near it, enjoying its majesty, and the occasional boat adventure, the idea of like, being on an old timey Brig trying to cross the Atlantic makes me want to die? Like I HATE that? I would just crawl into the cannon tube or whatever its called and ask them to blast me out with the next Pirate attack because no thank you? Absolutely not.  I do not want to be thrown into giant swells. I do not want to be caught in the cold churn and then sink down down down down down. I once had a panic attack on a plane because they were showing “White Squall” as the in flight movie to London (it was the 90s, baby) and I thought about being over the ocean and what if there were giant waves down there just waiting to suck a boat into itself - or worse, a plane - but now look at me, I’m the fucking Gorton’s Fisherman! I lose my goddamn mind every time I open the app - “what do the seas have in store for me today”, I say, as I straighten my cable knit sweater and light my pipe!

I think maybe I’m able to tolerate the boat stuff, even though at my core it terrifies me, sort of like how when I was a kid, there was a time where every sleepover meant we’d be watching some truly heinous horror movies, which I was not great with watching. You’ll not be surprised to know that I have a little bit of what you call an “overactive imagination” and things like ‘Poltergeist’ literally sent me to the therapist. So, of course I wanted to participate in the sleepovers and be a cool girlie, but I also wanted to not end up having electroshock therapy like Dorothy in ‘Return to Oz’, so I came up with a solve. I’d try to always be the one to pick the horror movie, and I would always choose “Jaws” - the original or the one where they’re at the water park. Everyone else was freaked out, but me? Nope. Why? Just don’t go into the water bitch, problem solved. To me thats much better than I dunno, trying to hide from ghosts because you built your house on an Indian Burial Ground, or getting your Achilles heel slit by the little reanimated demon from ‘Pet Cemetery’. If you don’t want to be chum, don’t go in the ocean. Simple facts, king. And so now, while I don’t want to be on a fucking vessel circumnavigating the world, dealing with storms and heeling too hard and supplies going overboard….I can kinda loose myself with the idea of it all. I like the fact other people are doing that, bless ‘em. So, I don’t know why tracking boats became my thing, or why it brings me joy, but all I do know is, it’s the only thing that has opened my scrambled egg head up and unlocked a little more bandwidth.

So, last summer, I waited until after I was cleared by my surgeons and then I took a road trip up to Prince Edward Island with my dog. I hit up all the Anne of Green Gables hotspots of course, but I also drove to EVERY. SINGLE. LIGHTHOUSE. on PEI. Every single one! And what they don’t tell you is that while there are a lot of them, they are almost all very small, comically small, and very boring. But I saw them all the same. I stopped at the bookstore in Charlottetown and picked up every book I could about all the shipwrecks that litter the North of the island, in the Gulf of St Lawrence. I bought a fucking poster that has all the shipwrecks listed. A POSTER. I am forty fucking three years old and I have a poster of shipwrecks up in my office (next to my Baby Boom poster and a clock that has Tom Berenger on it), and you know what, I guess I question a lot why no one has snatched me up and married me, but as I’m typing that sentence, it makes a little more sense. Anyway, slowly, slowly, I was able to crack open a little more energy here and there. A little more of an ability to focus. It ain’t much, but it’s something. It also helped me direct energy and anger I can’t process.

I can’t cry (save for my Pioneer Woman inspired 20 second weep about a year ago, ya girl is bone dry), and I still don’t have the focus to sit through much unless its ‘A Perfect Storm’. But, whatever it is with zooming in and out of my little sea app, seeing the swells and wind direction, it’s helping? A while back I attempted to get out into the real world again and had a job where, I knew from the second I touched foot in the office, wasn’t the right fit for me. I was very much the odd-man out. Which wouldn’t have been so terrible if they hadn’t also made it known that I was the odd man out. I am not exaggerating. For the first, three? Four? Weeks, I would speak to maybe, MAYBE, one person a day (in an open-floor plan, everyone back in and ain’t no one working hybrid type sitch). From 9am - 6:30pm, I would just sit at my desk. SIT. No one would speak to me or give me direction and I would find myself staring at a blank computer screen that had gone to sleep minutes ago? Hours ago? Who fucking knows. It was honestly hell. I would try to joke about it, but there’s just something about being a middle-aged woman, ignored, while having to be masked and no one else is, that just makes you feel like a real piece of shit. But, just when I was like, I really can’t take this anymore of this and I would consider self immolating to prove a point (which they’d probably just ignore too) , I remembered my old friend, the Maritime App. When I hit my wits-end, I would pull up the app on my phone and then use that to cross reference on the bigger google map on my computer - win win, because then it looked like I was doing work. Which I was, I suppose. I’m basically Americo Vespucci, but hopefully much less problematic. These assholes around me thought icing me out was a way to get me to leave quicker, but nope - I just sat there, checking the barometric pressure and seeing what sort of shit the boats in the Drake Passage were in for that day. Anytime someone lobbed a low blow (a superior asked me, knowing damn well my medical history, if the mask was for my protection or theirs…. To which I said both? And also, thats an HR violation? Or asking me to frame a pile of actual vintage dick pics) - instead of setting myself on fire, or throwing a chair out of the window in anger, I’d just smile and go back to “working”.  Looking for more ships christened Enya, heeling in the wind, sailing to some destination, at the mercy of the elements. Living life like a fucking Jimmy Buffet song.

I’m not sure how long this obsession is going to last - I mean, I’m still studying Finnish, so my worry is thats it’ll be around forever? Like, I realize I should just pick ONE weird thing to build my whole personality around, but what fun would that be? Maybe I need to join a dating app for cartographers or sailors? I dunno. But I do know, you gotta do what you gotta do to get you through the shit. Maybe it’s baking bread. Maybe it’s watching all seasons of Frasier for the third time. I can’t and shouldn’t judge, we all handle life and curveball differently. So, my thing is learning a language that is completely useless and looking up ship coordinates, even though I’m scared of the open water. When the world is on fire, and your life is a dumpster in said fire, you sort of just have to figure out a way to deadman’s float that doesn’t leave you totally catatonic. So if you need me, I’ll be searching the South Pacific to see if there are any atolls I’ve not discovered yet, and how many boats from Australia are named “Sheila” (hint: a LOT).

May you have fair winds and following seas.

Weepin' with Ree

You know know in movies when a character is told some sort of life changing information - reading the telegram that tells them Jimmy didn’t make it back from ‘Nam/Emma Thompson opening the Joni Mitchell CD realizing Alan Rickman is a cheater/ or any movie where the character is told they are sick or are dying….the camera pushes in so that the audience can see their face. Really see their face - drink in the recognition that from this exact moment, everything changes. The chin quivers. The eyes fill with tears. Maybe they angrily wipe them away, refusing to believe the truth, the change. Or maybe the character gives in (I see you Emma) and breaks into a million little pieces. Quickly trying to put themselves back together for the sake of everyone else, but knowing it’ll never * quite * fit back together the same way again. And because I base all my life lessons and human reactions off of pop culture, I assumed that if I was confronted with some sort of CAPITAL “L” LIFE-CHANGING news, I too would have the camera push into my face and show the world the tragedy unfolding inside of me. Only, that’s not what happened when I was told I had cancer. I responded with a chipper, “Ok” , like that fucking Pete Davidson character. There was no emotion. No quivering chin or gulping of air while the guttural sobs come. Nope! Nary a tear. I felt some anxiety here and there along the way, but the fucking weeping and emotional response wouldn’t come…..until The Pioneer Woman was able to help me blow off some emotional steam.

A few months ago, having been recently freed from the shackles of work, hyper focused on ME (!), with days full of boxing and my newly acquired obsession of learning Finnish, I had what you might call a bit of a “French Press disaster”. I’m not sure why I’m using quotes as it was actually a disaster, not quite the Hindenburg - maybe closer to the time The Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped raw sewage onto a boat under the bridge below them - but not a good situation any way you slice it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how many fucking years I’ve used a French press for coffee, ya girl will never, ever, ever, grind the fucking beans to the right consistency. The coffee is either too thick, too watery or, the press gets all out of whack because of said grinds, and then it ends up creating too much pressure, which makes its impossible to press-down. So, instead of trying to figure out where I was going wrong with the process, I said “fuck it “ and gave up on ever safely making coffee that tasted good. Which meant that when I encountered the ”too much pressure” issue, I would just put my full weight onto the press and FUCKIN’ P U S H. As you can imagine, this is not an intelligent plan by any means. But I’ve been committed to it for a long while now and if ya girl is good at anything, it’s doubling down on bad ideas and maybe not so safe behavior.

I did learn some tricks to minimize collateral damage tho ( or so I thought). One time I burned my forearm real, real good and realized it was important to wrap the top of the French press seal to minimize the explosion. I ruined a lot of dishtowels, but it kinda worked at containing the damage. I need to be very clear - this method did not produce “good coffee”, but when you’re stubborn and have a lack of patience, dealing with a coffee pressure cooker yielding shit results is honestly par for the course. Anyway, I’ve had multiple burns and accidents since the big forearm burn, but then came the disaster that started this whole long journey, a trip that somehow winds up on the windswept prairies of Northern Oklahoma, on the ranch of one Mrs. Ree “The Pioneer Woman” Drummond. Rock bottoms come in all shapes and sizes, my friends.

On the day of this particular disaster, it was a very sunny spring morning and I had just come back from two hours with my boxing coach - which meant I was cranky, sore and soaking wet (somewhere in my late 30s I started sweating HARD when I worked out and its a wild look - real Swamp Thing vibes. Fully drenched and hot pink from head to toe.) and was in desperate need of java. I had learned the hard way that if I had coffee prior to my sessions, there was a solid chance I’d barf (probably on my coach who is a former pro-boxer) when sparring. Safety first, in all things but coffee making. Anyway. I did my normal routine, which meant I just haphazardly ground beans, put them into the press, poured in boiling hot water, started to plunge and of course realized there was a pressure issue. Because there was always a pressure issue. And on this fateful day, instead of using the tried and true “dish towel” safety method, I was riled up from the blood lust and felt extremely powerful. So I put the press in the sink and violently pushed down with all my might….you’re not going to be surprised to know that I created a Mt Vesuvius sitch and my right tit was Pompeii. Instead of the normal 360 degree explosion, for some reason (Divine Intervention I’m assuming) - the boiling water and molten coffee ground mixture shot out of the spout directly onto my right breast. Because I was so sweaty, the ground concoction hitting my sports bra created a napalm type scenario and I hooted, hollered and howled and ripped my sports bra off (which us ladies know is a FEAT ) and saw a big old burn mark on my bare breast. Breasts are tender, sensitive beings - so I will definitely say, 10/10 do not recommend burning your boob with coffee, but what can you do. Since life is a highway and no one has time to tend to tit burns when Finnish class awaits and coffee calamities™ are a regular occurrence, I went about my life. Until a few weeks later, after having worked myself into an absolute lather thinking I had skin cancer. Because of COURSE I’d find out that I have cancer when I was just trying to live my best life ya know? Like, things don’t go “right” for me on the regular, so I’m always assuming disaster is lurking just around the bend. And since I’ve fried myself to a crisp more times than I care to recall, I assumed that would be the thing to take me out. But, fate is funny like that, and it wasn’t skin cancer, the moles were normal, but the Dermatologist did take a peek at my breast and asked if I wanted some ointment to keep that French press burn from scarring. Sure, of course - gotta keep the breasts tight and right because I’ve got a trip to Finland planned and wanna make sure they’re looking good for sauna culture! Anyway, when I got home and started rubbing the ointment on my breast, I felt a lump. I assumed it was something to do with the burn and would go away once the skin started healing…but of course, it didn’t. So I went to see my OBGYN, who brushed off the lump off as scar tissue, but of course it wasn't. So mammograms and ultrasounds were ordered. And you don’t have to be fucking Colombo to figure out something is amiss when your nurse has zero chill and keeps saying a little too lightly/in too high of a pitch, “just going to pop over real quickly to chat with the radiologist” each time she took an image with the ultrasound.

And thus began a litany of tests. First came the breast biopsies - which aren’t horrible, but let me tell you something that medical professionals won’t - the device they use to do the breast biopsy sounds like, and very much has the sensation of, someone using a 3-Hole punch on your tit. Imagine punching holes in your knocker so it could be looped into a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper. That’s the overall vibe. Not a huge fan, tbh. Of course while I was waiting for those biopsy results to come back, I did some late night sleuthing on my medical portal and happened to scroll to the veeeeeeeery end of the radiology report (do not give me access to this shit if you don’t want me googling the FUCK out of every line) and spied this message: “BI-RADS 5 SUSPECTED MALIGNANCY”. I immediately looked it up and saw that it meant there was a 95% chance of it being cancer, and let’s be fucking honest, as someone not exactly known for good luck, I knew then and there that I had Breast Cancer. And sure enough, I did.

Because my radiologist was very much like, “its cancer, its early you’ll be fine there’s nothing to worry about”, (pretty sure that’s the actual conversation she had with me, if not shorter), I shrugged it off. I didn’t cry. I didn’t have that feeling where the air is sucked out of the room. Or that realization that everything would be a little different. I’ve honestly had much more emotional and angrier reactions to my bosses coffee order being wrong. Sure it was a bummer, but nothing to worry about. I just went into assistant mode. I needed to get appointments set and logistics handled and this just felt like a hiccup but nothing to really derail the train. I made a few calls to friends just to let them know what was happening, but the reality was, it was no big deal in the grand scheme of things - we’ve had friends who have had the worst of it with cancer, and it was a heartbreaking thing to know how much they (and their families) suffered. That wouldn’t be me. I may not be the luckiest, but I was going to be ok. It’s early. No room for emotion, you know. People have it worse. So I made some jokes, kept it light and plowed forward with more tests. And also, it’s probably important to note that I tend to be a little…..reserved…when it comes with emotions. Ice queen. Hardhearted. Stoic. So this was very on brand for me - but even so, just in case you find yourself in this situation, not feeling things like worry or fear or sadness, or whatever, can inadvertently freak people out. Especially people who care about you. It’s really unnerving. So, maybe fake a little tear or fear here and there for your friends. Trust me it’ll make both of you feel better.

Anyway, much like my brain, my breasts are also incredibly dense (zing! try the meatloaf its fantastic!) - so the only way they could see what was happening in the old gals was to do an MRI. Let me tell you a little something about breast MRIs…..so, you know how in a normal MRI situation they have you on your back and then you get slowly sucked into the machine head-first? Well for breast MRIs you are face down, ass up. But wait, it gets better, your gown is obviously open to the front, so you crawl onto the gurney and kneel, then open the robe, facing the window into the little control booth area filled with Radiologists, and then you have to sort of shimmy your body down so that your tits fall through these two open holes on the MRI gurney thing. Just face down with the gals hanging fucking loose - swaying like pendulums in the breeze. I would say, mortification level 8 just based on getting in and out of that position alone. 10 when you view the images and realize how much those girls were HANGING.

Those results said more shit in the tit, so another 3-Hole trapper keeper showdown on my other breast and then an MRI guided biopsy - which I’m 99% certain was designed by a shop class full of preteen boys. Much like the 1st MRI, you’re face down, ass up in the machine - however, after say, 15 minutes, they bring you out of the tube but you CANNOT MOVE A MUSCLE because they’re doing a biopsy all based off the calculations taken in the machine. So the gurney thing is out, you’re face down with your one sick tit hanging loose through that hole below you, and then, I am not making this up, the doctors wheel UNDER you like they’re at fucking Jiffy Lube to do the biopsy while you are above them. I’m not kidding. I’m surprised I didn’t hear the ding of the bell that cars make when they roll over the little cords. So they are under you, I’m assuming in a snazzy little jumpsuit from Madewell, wiping their brow w a dirty bandana, giving your jugs pokes and jabs and then back into the tube you go! But DO NOT MOVE!!! And then you’re hearing over the PA system that “you’re breathing too heavy its making your breast move”…sorry I’ve got world class knockers that heave like a romance novel character, Doc. SUE ME! Also, a fun thing that happened was that they use a vacuum sounding thing for that biopsy over the 3-hole punch when you’re doing the MRI, which is much better for the most part, except that they hit a spot where the lidocane hadn’t numbed and I finally realized how a cat can jump straight up in the air - my body almost levitated off the table like I was possessed, but was kept in place by a nurse’s vice grip. After about an hour, the whole process is over and because I tend to bleed a bit, I then get to sit with the nurse &/or doctor’s hand on my breast for a solid 5-10 min applying pressure. Super chill. Not awkward, and much like an oil change when you’re a woman, VERY EXPENSIVE.

While this was happening I also engaged in speed dating oncologists. I chose from three doctors, two who were incredible and one where I made a Physicians Assistant cry and the Surgeon seriously rethink her career and then was sent home with a prescription for 5 deep-tissue massages because “I seemed tense”. I’m not kidding. Look, I’m fairly even keel - I know I have a hard time with emotion and whatnot, but the reality is I’ve been trained by some of the meanest folks in showbiz, so I know my way around making people feel like actual shit. So please do not cross my ass - for example: come into an oncology consult asking if I know I have cancer because you didn’t bother reading my fucking chart or have a front desk full of nurses who are very obviously sick with Covid in a fucking oncology waiting room, because I will destroy you in ways that years of therapy will not remedy. I’m not proud of this, but I would do it all over again if given the chance. Anywho, I finally picked my surgeon because he reminded me of Bill Pullman’s character in ‘Singles’ (the plastic surgeon who needs a new hair part and talks Bridget Fonda out of her breast implants). Oh and I also chose him because during the initial exam he asked if the beaded necklace I had on was made of emeralds (lol, bless) and I said, “who am I the Queen of Sheba” and he laughed, so that really sealed the deal for me.

“Hello billing - my patient is very wealthy and has many gemstones. Charge her for everything”

In the end, Dr. Bill Pullman with the kind eyes let me know I was gonna need a mastectomy and lymph removal - I had the appointment to discuss the plan on a Monday and by that Friday the old tit was lobbed off and I was lounging in my room in the very chic breast cancer wing, recovering with a view of the East River and Roosevelt Island Tram. I would warn folks that people in cancer wings - specifically after surgery - don’t do a lot of laughing or yuckin’ it up. So if you find yourself in my position and also happen to be someone who cracks a lot of jokes at inappropriate times, like say, me, it’s just really important to keep this in mind. Like, lets say your machine with the vitals accidentally turns off overnight, don’t ask the nurse tasked with the 3am shift if you’re dead and then make jokes about how maybe it’s hell instead of heaven and that would explain the food. I can’t even blame pain medications, because I was so stubborn that I was just taking Tylenol and Motrin and the nurses had to strongly recommend that I dipped my toe in the oxy water. I told them it’s not that I’m against pain medicine, I’m not, I just know that an opioid addiction is a bridge too far for this gal. I don’t have the energy to be down a tit AND having to score smack or whatever off some street corner in New Hampshire. Anyway, just you know, reign in the overnight Comedy Store tight 5 set you’ve been work-shopping until you’re at least dealing with the morning shift nurses. By the time I was getting discharged I think they had gotten used to me, so when my nurse was snapping a photo of the sliced and diced right breast area, where a glorious knocker once stood, but was now hollowed out and stitched back together with drains and tubes pumping out what looked like concentrated Hawaiian Tropic out of my chest cavity, I asked if she could send me a copy of the pic she took so I could use it for sexting. Luckily, she laughed. Then I was kicked out into the real world, titless, and still not crying.

For someone who is used to being alone 99.9% of the time, having to rely on others is a real challenge. Not because my friends weren’t incredible - they were. They made sure Linus was walked, I was eating, medicine was being taken at the correct intervals, I wasn’t falling in the shower while taking a whore’s bath (Porky Pig Style - trash bag on top, cinched at the waist, naked below) and that I was, in general, ok. I slowly hobbled around the block with them on walks to get some fresh air, and then twice a day we’d engage in “milking” my drains. Which is basically just stripping out the blood and fat into the little bulbs and then you note and measure the liquid. Real twisted Mr. Wizard shit. It wasn’t too long after being home that I realized that the breast juice collecting in the bulb part reminded me of those Juice Barrels you’d see at convenience stores in the 80s and 90s. I will never, ever be able to drink fruit punch again.

(FYI - You can change the Nelly song “Pimp Juice” to “Tit Juice” pretty easily if you’re on Oxy and Lorazapam and have two friends pulling at the tubes coming out of your chest cavity to make sure all the tissue and liquid is draining….lightens the mood)

Even though asking my friends for help was difficult - made even more difficult by the fact that they had to look and touch my breast area to make sure it was healing ok - something that was wildly, wildly uncomfortable for me, even then I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry when we realized one of the drains was sitting on nerve, so anytime you “milked” the damn thing it felt like you were plucking it raw. And speaking of nerves, I didn’t even cry when the nerve pain started. First was when I would sit up and would feel like someone had doused my right chest with lighter fluid and then set me on fire. I didn’t cry when it then shifted to feeling like someone was stabbing me dead center in the sternum, Pulp Fiction-style. I didn’t cry, but I did violently cuss. I didn’t cry when my friend kindly washed my hair and accidentally sucked it up into the blow-dryer moments later. I didn’t cry when my mother, for some reason, thought it appropriate to text me obituary notices as FYI’s for people I peripherally knew in my hometown, despite it being a tad…..morbid. None of that phased me. I did however come close to my breaking point when, about six days after my surgery I began to get very, very sick. After two days of, gonna be honest here, violent diarrhea and energy that went from a solid 60% despite the recent mastectomy, down to about a 5%, we knew something was off. I ended up having to call the after hours surgeon who sent me to the Cancer ER that my hospital has (honestly, perks of having cancer, a dedicated ER). That’s where I almost lost it - being dehydrated meant they couldn’t get IVs in, and having a lymph removal meant they couldn’t use my right arm because of lymphedema worries (which, if I thought being an oxy addiction was a bridge too far, having a Beefy-giant-lumpy Popeye arm from Lymphedema ON TOP of being down a tit and single is - whats a longer distance than a bridge too far? Cause I will fucking blast myself into the center of the sun if I have to deal with that - I am NOT in the mood). So at one point I had 4 IVs in my left arm, the fucking blood pressure cuff on my Right ankle, and kept getting up to go to the bathroom between CT scans, while being in a hallway full of people who were really, really, really sick. You know why people don’t make dumb fucking jokes like I did while I was in the hospital? Because they’re too sick to joke, and the people around them look scared. And as I was sitting in a wheelchair around all of that, it made me feel just awful. Awful for being there in the first place, but truly awful because I was lucky despite all of it. Lucky because my best friend from growing up is a doctor and was talking me through the results over the phone as they came though. Lucky. Lucky. Lucky. But even lucky people can potentially shit themselves to death, I guess. I was diagnosed with C. Diff from the antibiotic that was keeping my chest cavity safe from the drains that were potentially bringing germs into my body. I was weak, dehydrated and now hyper contagious to the very friends who were tasked with helping me. The ER doctor asked me if I had a spare bathroom and I said, “oh of course not - I live in Brooklyn, who do you think I am the Queen of Sheba”. Only this time neither of us laughed. So while I was waiting to be discharged I booked my friend a hotel room to be safe. I white-knuckled my uber ride to the pharmacy (you don’t know terror and the power of prayer until you can’t stop shitting and have to sit in an uber for 45 minutes in stop and go traffic from the UES, down the FDR, across the river and into Brooklyn). At the pharmacy I was told the insurance was disputing the need for the C.Diff meds and so I had to shell out $500 out of pocket for those. I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry when it started pouring rain and what would be a 10min walk home turned to almost 30 because I felt so awful, my breast and drain areas aching, the nerve pain kicking up as a real “Fuck you”. But I didn’t cry. I wanted to, though.

And then I got home and I was alone. For someone who is so well-versed in handling things by herself, someone who had such a hard time asking for and receiving help, the shift to being alone when I felt well and truly awful was abrupt. I gingerly dragged my pillows and blankets to the couch one-handed. Set up shop close to the bathroom and in an easier area to move around, while still hindered from the surgery and lack of mobility with my right arm. I geared up to milk my own drains and add another pill to the every 6-hour regimen. And I ordered bone broth and stared blankly at the TV. Oh, a strange side-effect of this whole ordeal is that I’ve had zero concentration. Can’t read. Can’t watch movies - not even old favorites. Most of the time the best I can do is zone out while I have Below Deck on in the background (don’t ask why the high seas adventures of Yachties are soothing) or scroll for hours on the “Marine Traffic” app I found while in the hospital where I would track the movements of cargo ships, sailing vessels and pleasure craft, zooming in to see how big the swells were and how many knots these craft were up against. Oh, that reminds me - based on my newly acquired maritime knowledge, don’t EVER go on a boat in the South Indian Ocean - that shit is a NIGHTMARE weather-wise. Swells like you wouldn’t believe, my friend. Anyway, yeah. Needless to say - I’ve been a bit of an emotionless zombie. Until…

Later that week, a few pounds lighter, crankier and much more over-it, after having to venture back to the city to have one of my drains removed (which, again, something they don’t tell you is that they don’t numb you or anything - they just YANK OUT THE DRAIN -PULLING IT OUT OF YOUR CHEST AND YOU CAN FEEL IT SORT OF BUMPING AGAINST YOUR RIBS) and then back home, again, using up all of my prayers and cosmic goodwill to pray for my stomach to behave for the journey - I was back on my couch, curled up, nursing some bone broth, when I accidentally switched from BRAVO over to Food Network. Here’s something about me - I don’t like cooking shows. It’s like window shopping - whats the fucking point? Why get my hopes up if I can’t taste the food or buy the dress I’m coveting? The only exceptions are the old PBS show The Frugal Gourmet ( pretty sure he was a pedophile, but my nostalgic mind glosses over that) and Wok with Yan. I still think his pun-aprons are fucking hysterical. Other than those shows, I really don’t care for cooking TV. So, I was a little surprised that my zombie brain kept it on that channel for a few minutes longer than I should’ve and inadvertently got sucked into an episode of “The Pioneer Woman” - someone who ticks off multiple “why I hate them” boxes. Number one, it’s a cooking show. Number two, her faux folksy ass “I’m just a big city girl living out on this ol’ ranch out here” when in reality her husbands family has a net-worth of 200 million without her Pioneer Woman enterprises and they’re also like the 23rd largest landowner in the fucking United States. This ain’t some backwoods bumpkin ranch. Number three, her voice and overall vibe unnerves me. And number four, she used to call her husband “Marlboro Man” haahaahhahaaha. Honestly, burn in hell, Ree. I’m not a fan. At. All. So you could color me shocked when I found myself truly engrossed in Ree explaining to the camera that on today’s episode she was going to make spicy carnitas for their Ranch-hand Pete. See Pete had been working on the farm for over 20 some-odd years - he’d been there longer than Ree had, and was part of the Drummond family. A simple man who loved working on the combine, fixing the combine and spicy food. Ree announced with glee that he carried a bottle of hot sauce in his glove compartment box! Normally I’d react with anger - liking hot sauce isn’t something so terribly novel, and also, for some reason when she describes it, the whole thing sounds mildly racist. But instead, I found myself…WEEPING. Just pure, uninhibited weeping. There was something in that dumb segment, with Pete talking about the pride he had in his work and his love of fucking hot sauce that opened something inside of me that had been jammed since all this shit started. My shoulders were shaking. I had to wipe the tears from my eyes and then, I swear to god, I turned to my dog who really looked at me like he was worried about my mental health, and then I said out loud to him, “ that’s really sweet”. And you know what, IT WAS SWEET. Do I think this man is underpaid, undervalued and probably living in a sort of fucked up weird indentured servitude around low-key racists? Yeah, I do - but Pete seemed very kind and grateful and a little bashful at the attention he was getting, and for one brief fucking second, the smallest little moment, I sat there, walls down, crying while Ree screeched about pork butt in the background.

Ree and Pete: Or How My Grinch Heart Melted - One Spicy Pork Butt At A Time

The cork was back in my emotions long before the episode was over - even my cold Grinch heart has it’s limits - and apparently that limit is some sort of bullshit cowboy cheesy refried bean casserole. Just because you live on a fucking ranch doesn’t mean you have to cook like you’re handling the Chuck Wagon on the Chisholm trail, you fraud. But for a brief moment, the tears fell and it released a little of the pressure thats been building up in that space where a breast used to reside.

I’m still in recovery mode. The breast itself is healing well and all the drains are out and now it’s just a bit of limbo. Waiting on more pathology and dealing with filling the expander that’s a place holder in my chest. Which again, I’m 99% certain that everything with this process was made by a man, because if a man had to deal with these horrors, they’d be on that Michael Jackson twilight sleep shit for every procedure. Instead, you go to the Plastic Surgeon where they find the little port on the expander in your former tit via a magnet and then stab you in the chest with a giant syringe and slowly expand out the breast - little by little. No numbing. Just shoving needles into you left and right. Making your chest feel more and more tender and bruised the larger it gets. And then the gift from all of that is that you get to do another surgery. This time to get the implant in and to match the other breast to the new one…and then comes the conversation about nipples, which I can’t even have at this point because nothing on this planet, save for parasites, grosses me out more than the idea of someone twisting tissue into a faux nipple that may or may take when its attached to your strange, scarred, Barbie breast. But I’m truly ok. The C.Diff has been the worst part, honestly. And I guess it’ll take some time to get back to normal. For now, I’m just taking it easy. Going on walks. Tracking pleasure craft with funny names in and out of tropical ports, imagining the adventures random people are having on the high seas. I’m waiting on more pathology to solidify the rest of my treatment plan, and will cross whatever bridge I come across, but save for my brief moment with Ree and Pete, I’m one again “ok”. Seemingly unfazed by it all - I’m sure at some point the walls will come crashing down and the floodgates will open……but maybe not? Maybe that was it - watching a man who deserved some recognition getting warm carnitas and fucking casserole brought out to him, camera team in tow, maybe that was all I needed to get out. All I know is that life is surprising. I never anticipated having my breast removed - but even that seems more logical and inevitable to me than crying over the fucking Pioneer Woman. I guess if my life was a movie - when the news came about the big life changing event, when they pulled back from my weeping face, it would reveal Food Network on the tv in the background, with Ree Drummond chattering on screen about needing to feed the men hearty hunks of bullshit , and then The Talking Heads would start blasting, “And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?” while the camera pulls back and back and back and back and back and then we’re just a fucking speck in the cosmos.

Everything is going to be ok.

Tween Witch

The path to controlling my anxiety continues. A few sessions ago, after listing off a laundry list of my worries, woes and a few anecdotal childhood stories, my therapist (a man of few words who rakes in a small fortune with discreet head-nods and uses 5 of his 15 total uttered words to to say: “well, looks like thats time”) said it sounds like I always assume I’ll be punished if something good happens to me. And I nodded, that yes, of course. He said that my cause and effect mindset seems like I subscribe to magical thinking. At first I scoffed, but then when I really thought about it, I realized that for me it’s more of a really, really intense belief in karmic retribution. Much like The Rhythm, Instant Karma will also get you. And for that I blame my childhood need for salvation and being inundated with stories about being punished.

I was raised in the bible belt - North East Texas. We lived in a dry county, run by Baptists and Pentecostal men and women with giant bouffants, lacy prairie garb and frosted makeup. A town that had MTV taken off the air as it was deemed too scandalous to be allowed in Lamar County. Paris in the 80s and early 90s made the town from Footloose seem pretty cosmopolitan! But, seriously, the town really did snatch MTV away from us in ‘88 or ‘89, around the same time our HS Football team won state - a real underdog tale - and we didn’t get MTV back for another decade - until my senior year of high school. Just in time for The Real World: Boston and Hanson’s “MmmBop”! Side note, a small victory for the #youths, our town wasn’t able to successfully pull BET from the airwaves, and you know those ghouls wouldn’t lay a fucking finger on the country station which was then TNN (the Tennessee Nashville Network) - so there’s a solid chunk of the Gen Xers of Paris, Texas who were reared solely on Rap and Country music. I got one year of “Remote Control” - more than that? I wasn’t able to see Jon Secada’s “Just another day” video when it came out, or describe the sexual tension felt when Eric Nies did white boy tai-bo during the Grind as it aired, or what Liquid TV showed late at night during the school year - BUT! I can fucking tell you EVERY SINGLE Infomercial that aired between 88-98 (I’m still waiting for my mom to buy me that fucking DiDi-7 tube), can recite all the lyrics to John Michael Montgomery’s “Grundy County Auction”, and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the videos that ran on BET in the early to late 90s. It feels like a fair trade, especially given that I was able to binge (and I mean BINGE) MTV every summer when I went to visit my Grandparents outside of Seattle. There I drank in the grunge scene like a fresh Frutopia and made notes to take back to my friends (oxblood Mary Jane docs are IN! Seven Mary 3 isn’t as cool as we all think! Yes, everyone is horny for the teen alt boys from Silverchair!). Anyway, I fared ok, but being around that type of region was A LOT and it permeated everything in my town. Everything.

Despite you know, it being illegal, we fucking prayed as a stadium before each football game. We prayed at assemblies. On Sunday’s every fucking restaurant opened at 12pm, just in time for the church lunch rush and closed early so everyone could make it back to the evening service. Even Jesus has to pull doubles on Sundays in the Bible Belt. And for a solid chunk of my childhood Paris was subject to Blue Laws, these would mean that you couldn’t purchase frivolities on the Lords Day (toys- and in non-dry counties, booze). But we were already dry, so ya know, there wasn’t a ton to limit. Look, it wasn’t a bad place to grow up - we had BET. I could tool around the town on my bike in safety. I could track tornadoes on the time and temp channel and chase fireflies between bouts of wall-clouds rolling in…

While my mom and Aunt weren’t religious, everyone in my extended family (and friend circle for that matter) was. My great-grandma, the world’s sourest sour-puss, the woman who could one up Debbie Downer and would never fail to let you know exactly what sort of woe could befall you at any given moment (She famously made a comment when I went to Europe that, if I DID manage to survive the transatlantic flight, to remember that Paw Paw was shot by the Nazis in Italy and hid for weeks in the woods, and that she really didn’t think I had it in me to stay safe. I told her I’d keep an eye out for rogue WW2 Fighters still out there waiting in the woods. Amazingly I made it through Italy without being taken captive by a Mussolini sleeper cell). As a kid, being sick was the WORST punishment because it meant I had to go and stay at her house during the day - a place of actual horrors. Despite it being sticky and hot in NE Texas, she she kept her little wall heater in the living room, inches away from where she’d make my pallet on the floor, cranked on HIGH. So high the fucking blue flames would lick out of the ceramic frame of the thing, so close that you’d have to be careful not to knock your tissue box too close or roll over if you were trying to sleep. And you know, coming from a fairly recent house fire, there was truly nothing more scary to me than sleeping next to an open, untended flame….well, maybe the big spare room was close second. In that room, which was chock full of random stuff - spare furniture, boxes, doll houses from my mom and her cousin’s era - there was also a large wig collection she had housed on those styrofoam heads. And let me tell you, if you were a child who watched Return To Oz, there was something extremely unnerving about a row of heads all lined up for you to accidentally stumble across. But the the worst part of a sick day with her wasn’t the fact she’d force feed you chicken and dumplings when you just wanted a Popsicle for your sore throat, no it was in regards to what she’d let you watch on television. Every child knows that the best, BEST, part of “feeling puny” as she called it, was being allowed to view the magic window of television that aired during school hours - watching people lob hams into shopping carts on ‘Supermarket Sweep’ and win a beautiful new dinette set after killing it on Plinko! And don’t get me started on the cartoons - no seriously don’t, because I wouldn’t fucking know! I know that The Smurfs aired at like 7:30 or 8am and I wasn’t allowed to watch those little rascals when I was there. Why? WITCHCRAFT, BABY! Gargamel was a fucking wizard and magic would NOT fly in her house, let me tell you. And don’t think this moratorium on magic was limited just to little blue Belgians, no way, this also extended to my favorite rerun, “I Dream of Jeanie”. Again, witchcraft. I tried to explain that I just wanted to watch Larry Hagman (even as a child my brand was HORNY). Obviously “Bewitched” was out, I mean, it’s literally in the title. So, I was relegated to watching Channel 2, the Time and Temp/Doppler Radar channel and then, ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Look, I loooooove Pioneer shit. I played Pioneer Girl 24/7 - I even once famously hung bacon strips on a clothes line while attempting to make jerky and instead attracted every fucking grackle in greater NE Texas - it was terrifying. I blame this on being a latch-key kid and left to my own, very questionable devices, for the majority of my childhood. Anyway, what I’m saying is, it’s not that I don’t like pioneer stuff, its that I was being force-fed fucking Half-Pint along with my dumplins cause it was M O R A L and I just wanted to watch witchy shit. She also let me watch Judge Wopner and The Peoples Court (because this it was real life). Cool.

Anyway, as you can guess, Toni, her name was Rose Lee but my mom decided to call her Toni when she was a baby and it stuck and then when I got older I would jokingly call her Toni Kitaen, which no one else would laugh because they sucked, was a very, very religious lady. The majority of my family are varying degrees of Pentecostal, but Toni was the type of Pentecostal that wore vaguely “sister-wifey” dresses - lots of florals and doilies connected to it, and then she had her hair ALWAYS set like she was Barbara Stanwyck on “A Big Valley”. While the rest of my family attended more “normal” churches, she went to one that was real intense with revivals - the works! If you told me she had handled some snakes on occasion, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. The church she attended happened to be Pastored by “Cousin Ralph”. Ralph was…a lot. He and his wife fancied themselves the small town Pentecostal Jim and Tammy Faye. Only his wife looked like fucking Piper Laurie from Carrie. Ralph had his sermons broadcast on the Time and Temp channel and if you were lucky enough, some Sunday’s you’d catch him “healing” people. This consisted of him praying at someone, squinting his eyes real tight and then screaming in a very East Texas accent, “YOU ARE HEALING! YOU ARE HEALED” while he whacked them on the fucking forehead with the heel of his palm, throwing them backwards into the waiting arms of the ushers. I LOVED IT!!!! It was so wild and dramatic! Ralph was also a grade-A creep with the soft hands of a ghoul and at my Grandmothers funeral a few years back, he rounded the receiving line in front of my grandmas open casket (and the giant spray of flowers my celebrity boss had sent and caused me to break into a fit of laughter), and when he got to me, he grabbed my hand with his creepy, creepy old man claw and said very loudly, “Why Morgan. Everyone thought you were dead”. I laughed thinking he was joking since I don’t go home often, but no, he was fucking serious. And there was a very, very long pause where I realized most people there didn’t recognize me and maybe also thought I was dead? So I said, “well, Ralph how did you think I died???” and he just shrugged his shoulders and hobbled away.

But as child in the bible belt, even without my mom taking me, I ended up going to church most Sunday mornings. This was because if you spent the night with someone on a Saturday, that meant you better be prepared for Sunday School AND church the next morning. You were basically captive till about 1pm, depending on if the family went to dinner (lunch in East Texas) after or not. I think my friends parents viewed me as a little lost lamb, so I got invited to spend the night A LOT. Because of this, I got a sampling of East Texas churches. I knew when the majority of services started and ended, which ones pushed past the hour and a half mark, etc. The breakdown was that most of my friends went to either First Baptist or First United Methodist. I preferred the latter for multiple reasons. For one, the sanctuary is really lovely - it has a big stained glass dome that you could stare up at for the duration of the service and get lost in - and if you really tried, you could pretend that the heavens were lovingly looking down on you. They were also way more lax, less damning and the Sunday school classes were much less rigid. More felt stories about the friendly beasts and Noah’s Ark. If you went to the Baptist church, you better come ready ‘cause those bitches didn’t care if you were visiting or not, they’d put you on the spot and force you to try and answer questions about Zacchaeus and Lot and his dumb wife and I didn’t like not knowing the answer and looking like the heathen I was. So after being caught off guard a few times by being forced to participate in “Bible races” (where you see who can flip to the chapters of the bible the quickest), and getting the sinking sensation that I was being shamed, I asked my mom for a bible and taught myself all the tricks so I could be the fastest to Judges. I’ve been called a tad stubborn before, don’t worry. Anyway, because I was doing so much church hopping and kept getting told by old white men who smelled like Shower to Shower baby powder that if I, a fucking CHILD, wasn’t saved by their church that I’d go to Hell, something started to brew in my young, anxious noggin’. See, I’m a problem solver by nature - I always, always have contingency plans on deck. I like to try and find control in this buck-ass wild world! Sitting there Sunday after Sunday I was hearing the same shit from every Pastor, maybe some versions were less aggressive, but they all came down to one thing: you needed to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your savior OR ELSE. And thats when I formulated my plan. I would just shop around for salvation. When I tell you I went to A LOT of churches, I mean it - had there been a Synagogue or Mosque in Paris, I would’ve gone there too. She is openminded, fam. Anyway, the point is, my plan was simple - I’d get saved by all the big denominations, the ones I felt had more clout with the fella upstairs. This meant I accepted the Lord as my savior many, many, many times over, in many, many different sanctuaries. This also also resulted in me deciding to get baptized in a few different churches…just to be safe. I got sprinkled twice and then I really decided to secure my place at the pearly gates by going to a fire and brimstone evangelical Baptist church in 7th grade. That one wasn’t my ideal church, but I liked that if anything it was more interesting than First Baptist. I figured if I sealed the deal there, getting full-blown submerged in a gross hot tub at the front of the church, I should pretty well be locked into the afterlife. I realize this sounds like I was trying to trick God….and I was. I fully thought seeing my name on multiple church ledgers would distract him/her from the fact that no matter how hard I tried or prayed I didn’t feel anything. This plan really shouldn’t be surprising as it came from the same genius that, after sneaking up to watch tv in the middle of the night, caught a viewing of “Helter Skelter” and was so scared that I became convinced that Hippies were going to break in to murder me in the dark of the night. I thought that hippie murders happened because people didn’t subscribe to the “hippie lifestyle”….so, the solution was that I would get up in the middle of the night each night and sleep on the hardwood floor in the living room, waiting for them to arrive. Then each morning I’d sneak back into my room - living to see another day. My thought process was, if I could let them see how bohemian I was (sleeping on the floor and all), then I could explain that it wasn’t ME who wanted to live a square life with “the man”, it was due to my mom. So maybe they’d let me go and kill my mom instead? Look, there’s a survival instinct in us Clines and I’m not, NOT proud of our ability to save our own hide. We wanna live baby and I’ll throw my own mom under the bus if that means I escape being hippie murdered. So yeah, I formulated a plan to trick the creator of the Universe, and I still think it’s a pretty solid afterlife work-around!

So this church, ugh. The real issue was, that no matter how much they tried, Hell never seemed all that scary. Look, I didn’t want to risk going to Hell, but all and all…I just don’t think they leaned into the overall fearful aesthetic. If they really wanted to scare the shit out of people, why not make your church more Goth- slap some paintings of Satan flaying men alive, while like, fallen angels eat un-saved babies or some shit? I’m just spit-ballin. But fuck, this place was lame. It was dark and dreary, with the lowest ceilings I’ve ever seen in a building, but it wasn’t creeeeeeeepy or imposing. It was just an ugly building with bad lighting, dark red carpet and wood paneling. And while my entire town was conservative, pretty much everyone agreed that we could all enjoy the wholesome Christian pop stylings of Michael W Smith (“Place in this World” is an absolute BANGER), and even Amy Grant, the harlot, but not these folks. Nope! They enjoyed the fun musical stylings of weird christian siblings singing in three part harmony about salvation. I once found myself having to ask my mom to drop me off at “Living Water Christian Bookstore” in order to procure a cassette single of the lamest song of all time: “You’re the Only Jesus” so that I could sing a duet in front of the stuffy, gross congregation. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty stubborn, but good God, there’s nothing like watching a bunch of tweens hanging out and talking about the Rapture while wearing t-shirts tucked into their Umbros that had a drawing of Jesus’ bloody hand with a big-ass nail in it and the words “His Pain. Your Gain” emblazoned on the back to make you second guess your eternal grift.

I know that a big reason that I was drawn to this church was because I spent A LOT of my free-time watching channel 14, TBN - The Christian Channel. Specifically the televangelists Pat and Jan Crouch. She had lavender hair and made Tammy Faye look like an Upper East Side Socialite. Her style could best be described as “Jon Benet meets a pekinese”. What started out as a fascination and a gag, flipping to the channel to piss off my mom, laughing at the shows and the preachers asking for money, it didn’t take long to become a full-blown obsession. I didn’t buy anything these creeps were saying, but I LOOOOOOOOOVED the pageantry!! Oh the spectacle and the begging for tithes! What glorious performance art! So when I stumbled into this specific evangelical church one Sunday after spending the night at a friends house, and the preacher started condemning everyone to Hell - talking about all the suffering and perils that befall you for eternity if you stumble off the path - I was IN!!!! Again, yes it seemed pretty lame, but as far as the spectacle goes, it was fairly elevated for Paris, and the only other alternative for real performative shit was cousin Ralph’s church, but even I have limits.

But I really didn’t realize exactly how lame it really was - it was the kind of lame that was exhausting because it was full of…simple people. Now, I’m not saying I’m some sort of genius, I’m obviously not by any means, but I am saying that if a 12 year old girl is able to manipulate an entire youth group (leaders included) to do her bidding, something is terribly lacking with the congregation to say the least. And when I say I manipulated and bent them to my will, I mean it. Truly it started out kinda innocently. Boredom is a helluva thing, and I needed to bide some time - you know clock in juuuuuuust enough time to get saved and let the ink dry before I skeedaddled. So, because I was bored, I started testing the waters to see that they’d believe. And because they weren’t real imaginative, so I could make up these wild backstories about how I came to find Jesus and watch them wide-eyed. I’d created dark tales about my family in the Pacific Northwest. I created an alter-ego that was sweet on the outside, but had a bit of an edge about her - just enough to make people think I was one slip away from a catastrophic fall from grace. I made a point to remind people that I came from a broken home (at the time that was practically unheard of in my friend group), which meant I was being reared by a - gasp! - SINGLE WOMAN???? WHERE WAS MY FATHER FIGURE? I’d smirk and say in the sky and they’d all nod and I felt the power in that lie….the power in realizing my energy could have a real deal effect on these backwoods lemmings.

The first time I decided to manipulate in earnest started with a crush - again, I was like 12….but there was a guy who must’ve been 16 because he drove this beat-up truck and he sorta followed me around. Which looking back is real problematic. He sorta looked like a blond Luke Perry from 8 Seconds and that was enough for this tween. Anywho, one day I told him I wanted to go to the movies but didn’t have anyone to take me (being an only child of divorce and all) . He of course agreed to pick me up and take me (where was my mother and why did she allow this? WHO KNOWS!). This was like very, very early October 1992, so I pretended I wanted to see The Mighty Ducks, which had just come out and I had already seen, but I knew it would work for my plan. It wasn’t until we were at the ticket booth that my real motivation came out - I pushed in front of him and told the ticket fella that we wanted two tickets to “Last of the Mohicans” (I had been dying to see it and was turned away the week before because it was PG-13 and I was but a small impressionable child) and when the employee started to say no, I wasn’t old enough duh, I pointed at the guy I had conned into taking me there as my escort and said he was my brother who specifically brought me with my parents consent because it “was a historical movie”. And that dumb god-fearing motherfucker nodded, and then I got to go in and get super horny over Daniel Day Lewis and mouth along when he screamed, “No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you!”, which I had obsessed over from the trailer. Anyway, he never called me out about the lie and I knew right then and there that he was under my diabolical control. I was fucking high on my power!!

I upped the ante pretty hard-core not a week later. I’ve always taken in strays and injured animals, but around that time I was REALLY REALLY good at finding creatures that needed rescuing. The nature lady, the woman who helped injured wild animals, knew our land-line number and knew that 90% of the time it was just me calling her, unsupervised, to tell her I had another wounded squirrel or bird I needed to bring her asap! Then I’d ride my bike with a shoebox in the basket housing whatever poor soul I had managed to scoop out of the middle of the road. I was a feral menace. So, given my history, it’s no real surprise that when I saw two stray puppies milling about outside of the skating rink one night, I went and bought hotdogs from the concession stand and made them give me rope (??) so that I could tie them up and keep them safe until my mom picked me up from the rink. And when she did, I let her know that I had two dogs I was bringing home so that she could take them to the no-kill shelter on Monday. By that point I’m pretty sure I had drained every ounce of energy out of every member of my family, so I was mostly met with a shrug and allowed to continue with my schemes.

Well, Monday rolled around and I happened to have the day off of school, some sort of teacher work day, but because my mom taught a different school district, she had to work. So, on her way into work she tried to drop the dogs off at the no-kill shelter but they were full, and extremely frustrated with the situation and now running late from work, and again, very much over me and my bullshit, she took the dogs to the pound and went on with her day. That was the wrong fucking decision, let me tell you. Because, l ate a pop tart and then hopped on my bike and road out to the no-kill shelter to play with the dogs. It wasn’t the first time we had brought them dogs I had found off the street, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but they were used to me rolling up, and so when I arrived the lady came out explained what had happened. That they were full and so my mom had to take the dogs to the pound, where they normally just killed them after a day by the way, and so I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. I rode back home in a lather, called the pound, figured out the steps needed to get the dogs back (I think it was something like $35 dollars per dog and then I needed my guardian with me) and I started my mission. The first step was the money. That was easy. I rode my bike to all my friends houses, collecting spare money, change, allowances, whatever we could find, and then pooled that with the money I went and grifted from my grandma, lying and saying my mom had left me without lunch on my day off from school and boy I could really use some Braums! She bought it, palmed me the cash, and then it came time for the biggest challenge. I needed someone to be my guardian. I still don’t truly know how I pulled off the next step in my plan, but I’m equal parts proud and terrified over the power I wielded as a tween. Anyway, without hesitation I rode to my youth ministers home and somehow convinced his wife to a) drive me to the pound which was out on the business loop and b) LIE AND SAY SHE WAS MY MOTHER SO I COULD TAKE THE DOGS HOME and then c) drive me and the dogs back to my house. I guess, now is a good time to mention that I’m not convinced I’m a little bit evil. See, remember great-grandma Toni? Well HER mom was a woman they called Big Momma (#South) and she was from Appalachia and after some digging into wild stories about her (she saved a mule by laying hands on it and whispering scripture after it ran through a barbed-wire fence and was bleeding out/ could breath into the mouthes of babies with the croup and breathing issues and they’d be cured), we became convinced she was what they called an Appalachian Mountain Witch. Now, I’m not saying thats true or not, but I am saying every photo I have of myself as a child looks like I'm the main character from “Fire Starter”. So, there might be some dark manipulation in me, is all. Anyway, the pastors wife followed my plan and I was able to get the dogs home without any issues. None. She didn’t tell me it was wrong to lie. She didn’t tell me I was being deceptive or misbehaving. Nope! She got her car, lied and said she was mom and I was able to pay and leave with the pups! Sure the fun reveal of me in the bathroom giving the dogs a flea bath when my mom came home was really something, but I never faced any consequences from anyone at the church. At all.

My tenure at said church ended not too long after that - once you realize you can manipulate that many people, it sorta looses its luster. Oh, also, I was the passenger in an accident where an underage driver flipped the car while we were out on some land for a church hayride. I realized, as I was being flung out of the window on the second or third rotation while Vince Gill was crooning on the radio, that these were not the people I wanted to associate with, crisis or not. I had my salvation, what more did I need? Certainly not to hang with a bunch of bumpkins who were as bad at driving as they were at being cool. I didn’t want creepy Christian music. I wanted Grunge. So I left, shifted back to the Methodists and their lighter version of religion. I had no need to use my powers for darkness, instead I lusted over the older boys who would humor us and take us for Dr Peppers at Taco Delite after youth group, all while blasting White Zombie’s “Thunderkiss 65”. I never felt cooler. Plus I turned 13 that Fall - I didn’t need some farm boy with an Ichthus and Fear Not! stickers on his truck windows to take me to see Daniel Day Lewis chase waterfalls in a loin cloth, I could do that on my own now, thank you very much!

It wasn’t the end of my religious experimenting, not by far. High School saw me in Bible Club and deeply into Young Life. I secretly loved the Aussie Christian Band “The Newsboys”. Hillsong wishes they wrote, “Take Me To Your Leader” . I worked at Young Life Camps. I went to church well into my late 20s. I fasted during Lent. I just wasn’t chasing salvation anymore. I had locked that shit down long ago. But despite my best intentions and wishes, I never felt “it”. I was always an observer, not an ardent believer. I could worship the stained glass and daydream about the idea of an powerful force, but I never felt the sweet embrace of the Lord or the desire to put my hands into the air and say things like, “This convicts me” or some shit, no matter how hard I tried or wanted to believe. Some people might think it’s because I never really allowed myself to give into the feelings, always held back truly letting the holy trinity into my heart. Nah. Honestly, I think there is a much more obvious and realistic answer. I’m pretty sure I’m either a Witch or Witch-Adjacent. Maybe that shit from Big Momma skipped a few generations? Laid dormant until I came into the world that rainy November, and the energy was like, ah yes, this kid seems like the perfect vessel! Only instead of using my powers for good - whispering scripture into the ear of a dying beast only to have the creature’s bleeding stop and it make a miraculous recovery - I used it to see fucking Last of the Mohicans and trick the Lamar County Pound. I guess we all make choices. I think God would understand.

Worth it.

An End Time Hobby For The Woman Who Has Tried It All ™

It’s not lost on me that just when I’ve finally, FINALLY, after what, 42 years, learned to establish boundaries and not tolerate people being shitty - when I’ve decided, after a few false starts (*cough cough Vermont), that I’m really truly trying to, and excited to, get my shit together, but for real this time, and not by trying to live some sort of homemade apple sauce/vet fucking Nancy Meyers fantasy. No, no, I’m attempting to be an adult and handle life in a mature way by facing things head-on. And boy if that’s not fantastic….well it should be fantastic if this “new year new me” vibe didn’t somehow come just as we’re on the cusp of World War Fucking III. Those two hour training sessions loose a little luster when you assume that you’ll be reduced to a radioactive husk of charred flesh and puss in a week or two (FYI, don’t google what an A-Bomb does to bodies outside/but close to the blast zone. Trust). But ya know, impending nuclear winter can’t stop this flow - thanks, Wellbutrin! Speaking of, I realized it might be a smart idea to have someone ya know, like a proper Doc, figure out if we should tweak my meds so that this old goat could have a tad more energy and will to get out of bed in the morning. And that friends, is how I ended up on a delicious dose of what is more or less legal speed, binging a Finnish procedural I found on Netflix at 4am.

Look, binging Netflix shows is nothing new to me or anyone else at this point. We’ve all melted into goblin people with scrambled eggs for brains who are one hand-job at Starbucks away from living in “Idiocracy”. But, plowing through 16 episodes of a Finnish show in one day might be a bit much for even for me. What can I say though, the siren song of two mismatched detectives solving extremely Nordic crimes (one involved clean energy wind-turbines and another drugs coming from Estonia via Ferry-smuggling) was just too much for this old hag to resist. The heart wants what the heart wants - and apparently, my heart wanted to watch “Deadwind. Well, that’s what it’s called in the states, in Finland it’s known as “Karppi”, named after the rogue, wild-card lead, Detective Sophia Karppi, a recent widow, come back to Helsinki and her old job, much to the irritation of the team. The other character is a young, handsome, seemingly by the book detective, Sakari Nurmi. He likes driving fast through snow (which stresses me the fuck out), snacking, making espresso, and a backstory that involves a lot of Bolivian nose-candy. You know the drill - opposites who initially butt-heads and then, what is that?? Could it be… .the beginnings of a spark?! Add the drab Winter hellscape and characters that don’t smile and I’m in!!

So, I think it was maybe around episode 4 that I noticed what I first thought was just a tick of the two leads - some sort of Nordic dry humor that I didn’t get - but then realized all the characters did the same thing. There’s this way that everyone says “okay” (“okai “) - it’s very monotone with even women sort of dropping their voices into this lower octave and delivering the most non-emotional “okay” you’ve ever heard. Sometimes it’s so low-energy that you don’t even realize they’ve said it at all. Just a whisper into the cold Finnish air. And this delivery by the way, is used for any situation - You could say “Hey Karppi, your sauna is broken” - okay. “I’m hungry” - okay. “Hey Nurmi, you just ran over a little kid holding a baby bunny - they’re both dead, guts seeping into the snow” - okay. Doesn’t matter what they’re responding to - its just this flat “okay”… and I love it? So I did some digging and in Finnish there’s a concept called “Sisu” - there’s no equivalent in English, but the best I can describe it is a sort of stoic fortitude - guts and gumption despite the circumstances. I feel like the closest we have in the states are New Englanders - they’re the type of people who refuse to say they’re cold even when they are cold as fuck. It’s those grumpy pilgrim genetics - hard to escape. Anyway, I think the “okay” is a manifestation of Sisu. No matter what information is being divulged - be it joyous/life changing/heartbreaking/mundane - you just take it on the chin and quietly, quickly say “okay” and move the fuck on, ya know? I’ve decided to start incorporating it into my own life: “Hey, Morgan - the radiation exposure pills you purchased are on backorder and probably won’t arrive before d-day” - okay. It’s weirdly liberating and I now know how it felt to be my ex-boyfriend who once responded “ok” to me saying I loved him for the first time. It makes you feel VERY powerful and mysterious with minimal effort.

Karppi ja Nurmi ovat suomalaisia Sisun kanssa. Okai. (Karppi and Nurmi are Finns with sisu. Okay)

So, obviously the next step after watching all 2 seasons of Deadwind in one day was to throw myself whole-hog into learning Finnish. You know, an incredibly useful and in demand language here in the States and worldwide, really. And I know what you’re thinking, “Morgan there are like, literally one thousand other hobbies you can take up that don’t involve having a notebook full of fucking umlauts” - well, two things, first NO SHIT and also, newsflash asshole, those aren’t even fucking umlauts - they’re vowel phonemes, fuck-faces. But guess what? If there was a hobby, I fucking dabbled in it while living in Vermont. I got into magic candles and charging crystals. I made whimsical terrariums with little woodland scenes for the old folks home in town that I changed seasonally. I sculpted little critters with children’s air-dry clay. I started collecting records. I got real into birding, which is a super sexy pastime for a single lady of a certain age. I began to hand feed and defend the fucking chipmunks in my yard. I hiked. I read. I painted. I drew. I learned to French-braid my hair and went on long meandering drives through the Green Mountains. I turned taking multiple hot baths a day into a hobby and not a major depressive incident. I taught myself the choreography to Aaliyah’s Rock the Boat video. I learned how to make soup for breakfast. Soup for lunch. Soup for dinner. Trust me, I have tried everything - except - learning Finnish.

A cursory glance told me that Finnish is an extremely hard language to learn for English speakers, so I thought I’d just do the easiest entry point - Duolingo. And truth be told, I assumed that like most hobbies, I’d tire of this after a few days and go back to my normal routine of googling black box flight recordings from plane crashes before bed - I really didn’t have high hopes for this sticking. But the thing is tho, if your timing is juuuuuuuuuuuust right, you can take something that might’ve been a passing fancy and turn it into a full blown fucking obsession pretty quickly! I just so happened to start the Duolingo course on what would be the last week of a job that had been taken as a transition and very quickly revealed itself to not be a good fit in the slightest (the wild thing about boundaries is that once you define yours, you really, truly won’t tolerate shit ever again. Whoops) and that gave me the time to learn with the added bonus of Russia waging war and threatening nuclear attacks, which meant a LOT of pent up anxiety that needed somewhere to go - and it decided to go to Lapland, apparently.

One of the shittiest parts about the outgoing job was that despite the work being 100% able to be done remote, they made us commute in every morning so we could go sit in a little glass closet they rented us in one of those apocalyptic co-work spaces. The amenities of the space were great - never-ending La Croix, various snacks/etc and lots of plants to try and take your mind off being in a giant aquarium - everyones every movement on display for all of the little worker drones. Late Stage Capitalism is a nightmare, baby! Anyway, since I knew the last week of work was going to be slow and painful - my coworker who I actually really liked was set to be out of the office, which meant it would just be me sitting there for 9 hrs per day solo marinating on my impending death, I decided to take the road less traveled and cannonball ass-first into Finnish. For those last days I would go to the office, make a coffee, grab a seltz and fucking go! When I say I was plowing through lessons, I mean I was moving at a truly breakneck pace. I will again remind you that I’m fairly certain I’m on a form of speed, so that might explain how in one day I went through 4 lessons, managed to also complete an expense report for my job and when the clock struck 6pm and I was allowed to leave the office, I could easily call my friends, family and dog a “Wizard” and roast them for having a cold sauna. And that is really something that they force you to say and translate a lot - Velho/Wizard. I have been on multiple forums to try and figure out why this is the seemingly most important word I’ve learned in Finnish (next to Sauna)- but I’m not mad. Like, if anyone would need to know how to say Wizard, it would be me. And while others in the forum might not be able to think of a time that they would need to use that word while visiting Finland, I really can’t think of situations where I wouldn’t want to call someone or something a Wizard. So, it was just me in a glass cube, EarPods in saying, “Tervetuloa” and “Hyvä” over and over for hours, running out the clock on the job while the world started burning. Some people might feel this is an end-times mental break, but I call it living my best life. Because I cannot remember the last time I had to really learn something new and study - and I don’t mean pretending to gyrate on a catamaraln prior to a small plane crash from the safety of my Vermont home while Aaliyah crooned in the background. No, I haven’t used my brain in this way since probably college? I dunno - I wasn’t what you’d call a prize pupil, so it might’ve been high school? The point is, it’s been a long time since I’ve worked my brain in this fashion and my noggin is snorting it up like it’s implied that stoic detective Sakari Nurmi on the hit television show Deadwind snorted up yayo.

I’ve become so invested that I’m taking a Finnish Beginner 2 zoom class that starts in a week. The instructor thinks that since I’ve got some basics under my belt I could probably jump into the 2nd level. Which means I’ve doubled down on studying. I made flashcards. I have sticky notes all over my apartment with the Finnish word stuck to the appliance and door and mirror and I’ve started calling my dog “Olet tuhma pieni velho” - a naughty little wizard! I really do like learning Finnish, but I’m also extremely scared of being the idiot in the class that mispronounces something and then gets roasted by my classmates. I have that coming karmically and I’ve been waiting for my punishment since about 1995. I went to high school in East Texas so our pronunciations and accents are rough at best - I’m putting myself into this category, too. We have a weird nasally Reba-esque way of speaking and it can make a normal mispronunciation absolutely unhinged. The incident that I’ll pay for one day happened in Mrs Giffords honors English class while we were doing presentations for our poetry unit. Each person had to get up, read the poem and then break it down. Normal shit. But then my classmate, name withheld to protect him - but he knows who the fuck he is - goes up to the podium and says, with the confidence that only a wealthy, attractive, white 16 year old boy can: “This poem is called: They Say That 'Time Assuages” - Only that last word? He pronounced it as:

AH-SAUSAGE-ES

AHSAUSAGES!!!! I screeched. I literally screeched like a fucking Vampire having holy water thrown in it’s face. I don’t think I meant to be such an asshole, but I truly couldn’t stop laughing. I was laughing so hard that my friend Hannah also started laughing. The Sausage King of Paris, Texas snapped back asking if I thought I was a genius and I said through tears no, I did not but I also didn’t think that time was a sausage. I’m pretty sure that lead to a stint in the hallway for me to “get it together”. But it didn’t help, every time I thought of it, I’d melt into a fit of church giggles again. To be fair, I think being an asshole about pronunciation is hereditary, because my cousin always tells the story of a guy in her class referring to Poseidon as: POSSE-DON. Bless. Anyway, I fucking roasted the Sausage guy then and I still laugh about it now, almost 27 years later. But my fear is real - and I know that my karmic payback is coming. Sure, maybe I can say Velho….but what about: Lyijytäytekynä (apparently the word for mechanical pencil). I’m gonna be fucked and a bunch of little zoom heads will be church giggling, but ya know, I’ve got it coming.

But until I’m either vaporized by a thermobaric bomb and/or fluent in Finnish, I’ve had to take something into my own hands. See, while you can only stream 2 seasons of Deadwind in the US, there is a 3rd season that aired on Finnish TV but isn’t available here. And season 2 ended on a fucking cliffhanger and I am VERY invested in these stupid detectives and their stupid Nordic crimes and so, I did what anyone would do. I downloaded a VPN on my iPad, changed the location to Finland, figured out what TV network the show aired on, downloaded said app and with it thinking I was based in Finland, was able to watch the 3rd season. But, as you fucking guessed, there was a hitch in my plan as there aren’t English subtitles. I tried using the speaking tool on google translate, but it seems to only catch every few words and that just won’t do, so, I’ve taken to turning on the Finnish subtitles and translating it line by line. Its not a super smooth process but I’m stoked to see how the season ends in like, 2038 when I’m done with the translation. The things we do for love.

Oh, and speaking of timing - I bit the bullet and booked a trip to Helsinki in July and then another trip in December to go up to Lapland to see the Northern lights/reindeer and then to Helsinki for Christmas. Figured I’d put this Finnish to good use and to see if there are any Beefs roaming around (I’ve seen Tom of Finland, okay). Wanna know when I booked those tickets? The morning of February 23rd….like, right before Russia invaded Ukraine. And you know, not sure if traveling to a country whose entire Eastern border is with Russia is going to be in the cards at that point, or if anyone will even still be alive. And those fucking plane tickets aren’t refundable. But what can you do? You just sit back, translate a few sentences about a person getting murdered at an old animal testing facility so you can get to the good parts where the odd couple detectives maybe smooch, you practice saying that “Otso has a small but comfortable sauna”, and you wait for the end of days. Maybe this is all just me rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but it’s something. Okay.

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel meh.

Yesterday while zooming with my therapist, he asked how I was handling the current state of the world, lol. Like, bro. So I just shrugged and said I was feeling a little anxious, but ya know, hanging in there. He asked me what I did in order to manage my anxiety, and aside from being filled to my gills with pills, I said, “oh you know, I like to feel prepared, it helps me sort of manage my anxiety in a productive way”. And then he asked the question I knew he would, a question that I had been preparing my answer to while in the shower - starting at my hair mask and body wash and kinda shrugging, giving a little laugh and saying, “you know, the usual stuff”. Hoping of course that my v chill and cool girl vibes would stop the conversation and we could move on to another topic.

My performance of course didn’t fool him. I would be winning no Oscars for my portrayal as “Totally normal woman who doesn’t suffer from crippling end of the world anxiety”. My faux-casual demeanor sent up some big old red flags, which lead him to asking me point blank to walk him through exactly what I was doing to prepare. Which meant I had to sheepishly list off the items that recently arrived on my doorstep. As I explained to him, I consider these things a starting off point and will, as I see fit, continue to add to my “D-DAY” collection.

So far I’ve ordered:

• Space Blankets

• NOAA Weather/emergency radios w/ hand crank

• Solar cell/computer chargers

• Headlamps/mag-lites w/ extra batteries

• Industrial Walkie Talkies

• Gloves that you can use in case you need to like, punch through a glass window or grab barbed wire

• Goggles

• Masking Tape/Rope (honestly no idea what I’d use that for but seems like it might come in handy)

• Knives (protection and just, you know, they’re useful)

• Potassium Iodine pills

• 2 Stocked Go-Bags (one for apartment/one for car)

• Water purifying system

• The SOS Survival Book

• Gas Masks (made sure to order a few extra for my besties!)

To his credit, he really truly tried to keep his face devoid of any reactions or emotion, but whoo boy, the Potassium Iodine and the Gas Masks - those made them eyebrows to shoot up into the stratosphere quicker than he could control them. And I get it - I even added a disclaimer before I launched into my stockpile - something along the lines of, “I realize this sounds insane, but go with me on this” and then tried to sort of convince him that we live in the biggest city in the country and of course shit will hit the fan at some point from some thing, be it the Russians or civil war, so isn’t it better to be prepared just in case? And then, because I can never NOT make a joke about my fucked up life/behavior, I said - you know, if I don’t end up needing the gas mask, I can use it for a Halloween costume or something (I’m 42 years old - what the fuck would I be dressing up as that needs a gas mask?). He really handled it well , insofar as he didn’t immediately have me 5150’d, which I appreciated. But while this behavior might be shocking to him, the level at which my anxiety commits to being a living breathing thing in my life, it’s not shocking to anyone who has ever known me. To know Morgan, is to know her anxiety. We’re like those girls - remember those two-headed twins who were in the news, bless them, the ones who would be happily playing softball or talking about crushes and its like….I’m happy for them, but its a lot - just a lot to process? And like them, interacting with me and my anxiety makes people a tad uncomfortable, even though it shouldn’t - it’s their shit and inability to deal with it, not mine. But ya know, I get it to a degree. But me and my lady A have a symbiotic relationship, and after a while, if you know me, you come to expect that at some point my anxiety will be whispering in my ear that, “while you’re at it - do you need a bow and arrow or some sort of camping kit too? You know, just in case?”.

I would like to say I don’t know when the anxiety started, but I do - maybe there was some before it, maybe its naturally in my DNA, but for the most part, I’m assuming the bulk of my anxiety sprung from the fact my house burned down as a child. From what I can remember, I was a little kid, I think I was around 3 1/2 or 4 - we lived in a little logging town in Oregon, my parents had recently separated, so it was just me, my mom and our dog. Our house was a two story place that had been converted into upstairs and downstairs units. We lived downstairs, on a dead end road, with hills packed with evergreens and other trees that would eventually be logged and the beauty of the little town cut away with it. Our upstairs neighbor was a younger guy - probably early 20s - who was a logger and had a new puppy. Because he had to get up very, very early for work, he left a lamp on for the dog so it wouldn’t be in the dark. One early morning, the puppy somehow knocked the lamp over and started a fire. We were downstairs, oblivious and sleeping , while the fire started first as little spark and then engulfed the entire top floor. Our next door neighbor was also a logger and had to get up super early as well. He must’ve been running behind that morning, thankfully, because he spotted the flames and pounded our front down so my mom, the dog and I were able to make it out ok. The puppy upstairs did not, despite the firefighters best efforts, he was just too scared to go to them.

It’s all snapshots of memories, really. Me sitting at the neighbors kitchen table being fed some sort of sugar cereal - I think it was the blue Smurf cereal, the kind that was like giving kids uncut cocaine to snort, while the glow of the red flames flicked through their kitchen window. I remember being doted on by the family while my mom stood outside watching it burn- nothing like being young, broke, newly single with a kid and now having no home. After the fire was put out, I remember looking in our windows after - windows that once housed the celery stocks put in cups of water with food coloring to watch them change from green to blue and avocado pits skewered over a glass on the sills, waiting for the sprouts to come, but now the glass was broken and everything seemed to be covered in soot. But what I really remember, the most vivid memory, is seeing my play dough tubs melted, with the innards of the dough having sort of exploded out of the little yellow containers due to the pressure from the heat. I remember thinking I wished I could go and touch it to see how it felt and see if it still had that same weird slightly chemical smell. But I couldn’t go back inside because it wasn’t safe for a little kid - not with the upstairs that wasn’t structurally sound or all the glass and god knows what littering the floor. Remarkably, they were able to save a lot of personal items. My rocking chair, toys, baby blankets, weirdly records and other things. Being downstairs helped, most of the damage was from smoke - some photos of me as a kid have this weird dark haze on them from being exposed to the heavy smoke. My grandparents came down to bring a few things and I remember being outside with rain boots on sort of angrily stomping a rain puddle and my grandmother saying I looked like the saddest little girl in the world. But, I was lucky and I wasn’t the saddest little girl in the world by a long shot. But what that experience taught me at a young age was, your worst fear can come true. And those fears can sneak up on you in the dead of night, when you should feel safe enough to wander into a dream world, but they don’t care. None of us are safe. Life isn’t safe - there’s always some catastrophe or illness or horrible accidents, or series of events lurking around every single corner. And you know, had I been put immediately into therapy, I’m sure I could’ve avoided my current “Doomsday Prepper” vibe, but what fun would that be?

No, instead I was allowed to cold turkey my fears - be jokingly called a worry-wart and then left to wallow in all of the scenarios that my overactive brain could come up with at any given moment. Oh, that’s also a key ingredient to my personal brand of anxiety - an overactive imagination. Oh baby, you think you can imagine all of the ways something can go sideways? I’ve got news for you, I can think of 50 more AND some of those scenarios will involve androids.

Directly after the fire I became one of those kids who had a lot of stomach aches - the doctor chalked it up to growing pains. Lol. No, that was anxiety. And while I could come up with my own worries - for a while I had reoccurring dreams about a “good Chewbacca” and a “bad Chewbacca” and in my dream, I needed to get somewhere safe but I never knew if it was good or bad Chewbacca helping me, and I would only recognize at the end of the dream that it was the bad one and I was about to die. There were also external things that really helped amp it up to a 12 on the old dial. Some were completely me just being a little too imaginative - for example, right after the fire I became terrified of werewolves. I called them “bear-woofs”. And if there was a full moon, I’d get scared that if we didn’t get home in time, the bear woofs would get us. I thought the Hall and Oates song “Maneater” was about werewolves. I also, genuinely thought that Bob Seger was a werewolf. I think it’s because he, well he fucking looked like some sort of feral creature, but also because his backing musicians were called “the silver bullet band” and what kills a werewolf? Yeah, a fucking silver bullet. Werewolves are clever as hell. And it just so happens that the same year on Halloween, the year I went as a culturally insensitive “gypsy” (which I realize now is not ok, but I challenge you to NOT find a kid in the early 80s who didn’t go as one for a halloween or two), anyway the kids across the street had kind of made it a haunted house and would jump out of trash cans and off the roof when trick or treaters would come up the sidewalk. Honestly, I would’ve still been scared, but the icing on the cake was one of the kids who jumped off the roof had on a werewolf mask and that caused me to fucking DART across the road and under the front porch to hide.

So yeah, I had my own overactive imagination coming up with things to be worried about, and then you go and throw in my dumb-fuck deadbeat Peter-pan ass dad, who thought it would be cool to plop his weirdo daughter in front of the tv with those pastel colored mini-marshmallows (the ones that looked incredible but that were more than likely made of toxic dyes and probably asbestos) so she could watch the miniseries “V” with him… when she was four years old. FOUR!!! Nothing like being panicked that everyone is a lizard person come to steal our saltwater and eat our guinea pigs. That same genius also let me watch “Poltergeist” who led me to hating Jello and also legitimately turning catatonic when I would get scared. I also ended up having to plug my ears and hum when the commercial for Poltergeist 2 would come on the tv.

Other ways it manifested during my early childhood?

A truly insane fear of being in buildings (stores/restaurants) too close to closing time. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but I would lose my mind if someone tried to take me into an establishment within an hour of it closing. Thankfully in the 80s you could just leave your hysterical child in a car outside for an hour or so and no one batted an eye. I was also, understandably scared of fire. I had a full fledged panic attack while being an acolyte at church - I stopped halfway down the aisle and walked backwards back out of the sanctuary while trying to pull the little handle down to extinguish the flame. That ended my acolyte career on the spot. I was scared of hospitals. I was scared of elevators. I became extremely scared of robots/androids. I was scared of Russia (to be fair - was young Morgan Nostradamus? Cause this bitch was onto something!). I was scared of being possessed. I was scared that if I accidentally lingered too long while drying off from a bath or shower, that God would think I was being inappropriate and would give me AIDS as a punishment (I would like to point out that I lived in deep east Texas and I fully blame whatever hideous, horribly backwards and intensive and bigoted religious shit that was spouted off about that disease on the asshole Baptists in my hometown. That one was at least not on me). My pediatrician had a letter I wrote him when I was around 10 framed in his office - it was all the things I did not consent to them doing to me at any time. The list included spinal taps, bone marrow transplants, chemo, this weird thing I saw on some after school special about a kid living with Cystic Fibrosis. I was just covering my bases and making sure they understood my boundaries and they thought it was a real hoot.

Then came the fear of tornadoes. Look, if you live in New York or Seattle or LA or Vermont or I dunno, Lapland, you can be scared of tornadoes with very little impact to your life. Maybe you watch Twister and think, thank GOD I don’t have to worry about that. Unfortunately for me, after the fire, we eventually went back to where I would be raised from 6 years old - on - East Texas, specifically in Tornado Alley. And boy if people don’t LOVE to talk about the tornado of 1982, which really was an awful and terrible experience for everyone in our town. But like, you keep telling these stories around a kid with anxiety who, multiple times a year, had to deal with tornadoes rolling through, and the potential for tornadoes being constant, well, you end up with what I became - a fucking maniac. I became obsessed with doppler radar. Our town during storms would change the time and temp channel, channel 2, which normally just ran a ticker with community announcements, to a very 80s janky radar, so we could see what was coming towards us. Hearing the “bleeee bleee bleee” of the emergency broadcast announcement still sends shivers down my spine. I had a working knowledge of all the counties in North Texas and SE Oklahoma thanks to knowing exactly what town and county was under what watch or warning. Our house didn’t have a basement, most in East Texas don’t as the ground is unforgiving. Only some of the older homes had them, and luckily one of those houses was across the street from us. So, when the sky darkened and Channel 2 turned to the radar, that was when Morgan kicked into fucking gear. I was a 9 year old with a fucking go-bag. I had a backpack that had some first aid stuff in it, a flashlight, I think a Casio walkman - cause you know, still gotta rock out to your Debbie Gibson cassingle as you’re getting impaled by 2 x 4s flying through the air, and then the real kicker was my bike helmet. Because, my dead-beat dad by that point had morphed from letting me watch horror films to making a fucking pretty penny on what we later found was trips to South America living his best smuggler life. But the positive of that was, I started getting some really kick-ass gifts in an attempt to buy my love. One of which was a teal Peugeot mountain bike with a matching helmet - this was the late 80s, so no one used bike helmets, we liked to get our brains scrambled thank you very much, which allowed me to repurpose said helmet as my Tornado Bonnet. If anyone spent the night and a storm was coming, they knew the fucking drill - you put your shoes neatly by the door so that in the event a tornado was coming, we would run be prepared to put on our shoes and run across the street and into the neighbors basement. Neighbors who, to their credit, didn’t seem to mind a strange, hysterical child running into their basement unannounced at breakneck speed multiple times a year. I still have friends who joke about the shoes by the door, and it is funny and weird - the image of me demanding that people follow my safety protocol - like, thats wild? There were no adults telling me things were going to be ok - because deep down, I knew they didn’t know if it would be ok and wouldn't have listened to them anyway. I knew I’d have to take shit into my own hands If I wanted to come out the other side, and that meant being prepared. Then, after tornadoes came a 10 year stint where everything merged into a crippling fear of flying.

But this anxiety has served me well in a lot of ways. Do I wish that I wasn’t constantly expecting the worst? Yeah, I feel like life would be a little more fun. I think that you know, maybe I wouldn’t carry so much tension in my neck that my boxing coach said I have the shoulders of a heavy weight fighter. Maybe I wouldn’t have cracked a tooth from clenching my jaw due to worry. On the other hand, do you know why I am very, very fucking good at the jobs I do? It’s because I think ahead. I’m the person on the plane counting the seats and looking for the emergency exit and thinking about who I need to step over in order to pry that fucking door open and get to safety. I can anticipate my bosses needs. I can anticipate the ways things will go wrong - because I know that everything can go wrong at any point. Nothing is perfect and no outcome guaranteed. And because of that, I am a master of logistics. Master of contingency plans. I can turn something from a disaster into controlled chaos.

I’ve learned that my anxiety is as much a part of me as my love for 80’s dad style divorce rock. You really can’t separate the two - no matter how much I wish or the people around me wish that we could. It’s just who I am now. So, instead, I’ve had to learn to channel my anxiety into ways that I can at least feel like I’m attempting to meet the darkness head-on. I’m used to the uneasy laughter when I list off my doomsday supplies. I know that people are worried about me when I try to kindly give them a heads up about the potential of a cyber attack on the power grid, and how we have to be as prepared as possible for that. I know the look in my therapists eye, and I know that he’s going to have a LOT of notes to share with my psychiatrist, probably questioning if it might be smart to put me on a higher dose of something. Are Quaaludes still a thing? I get it though, I sound slightly manic and over the top. But the reality is, the bad shit will happen. Someone said that if the train is going to crash no matter what, why does it matter when it does? Just enjoy the ride. And I think most people are wired that way. That does sounds refreshing. But then there are people like me: shoes by the door, who still believe Bob Seger might be a werewolf, and who google how to survive a nuclear winter. To each their own, I guess. Until whatever happens, happens - I’ll just be listening to We Didn’t Start the Fire on repeat.

Oh and PS - I have extra Potassium Iodine if anyone needs some.

Look What The Cat Dragged In...

Well, well, well….look what the fucking cat dragged in: The girl who tried to Baby Boom herself into a new life, failing miserably, only to move back to NYC on February 10th, 2020, to work in the industry she left, three weeks before the Coronavirus made its debut appearance in NYC, baby! What a goddamn fucking idiot.

All those long-winded navel-gazing posts about how I was ready to change it all! Throwing away the woman who would bend over backwards at jobs and would work herself into an early grave! The woman who would embrace the wilderness and hike her way into a new life! The woman who didn’t need to fill her days and would be content to roast root vegetables and make terrariums for the local old-folks home. HAHAHHAHA. Yeah. Uh. So. About that? It’s amazing what acute isolation, a shattered wrist from the snow, an asthma attack that culminated with me in my underwear in 13 degree weather at 5am attempting to shock my lungs into breathing, and daily trips down a ice gauntlet hill will make you reconsider. And, reconsider I did, friends. I was plucked from my maple-syrup hibernation and brought back to the world I left behind! The best way to describe it: imagine if Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka, after whatever terrors happened “while juicing” , decided to go BACK to Wonka’s factory and fucking chomp on that three-course meal gum AGAIN, knowing full fucking well what would happen to her. That’s me!!! I did that! Only I did that and there was a virus that decided to descend upon the world at the exact same time.

When people said, “ you know, it really takes a special person to move all the way to Vermont when you don’t know anyone” - well then it really takes an EXTRA SPECIAL person to move back to New York during the start of a pandemic. I’m not sure what that says about my mental health or my fearlessness when it comes to putting myself in the path of danger, but I’m sure my therapist will have some insights. What I will say is, if one does decided to move from a Hallmark channel fever dream, make sure you fully commit to the move. Do not, and I mean this seriously, do not say “I’ll start the job and come back in 3-4 weeks to get my furniture moved down”. Because, what will happen is that the virus that was once worlds away, will be strutting through the streets of NYC like a Rhinestone fucking Cowboy, and you, you dumb, dumb, dummy, will be in a new apartment without ANY MOTHERFUCKING FURNITURE WHEN THE CITY GOES INTO GODDAMN LOCKDOWN. Friends, I was eventually able to get a mattress, tv and one ONE!! chair. And that is how I spent March - May of 2020 in a little Brooklyn apartment. Sitting on the ground, doing zoom calls and pouring bourbon into my coffee at 10am. The past two years have been a ride. If I thought Vermont was a strain, well, this was something completely different. There will be time enough to tell you about how I got arrested, or ending up working from a Hosptial gurney with the “flu” at the beginning of the pandemic, or how we shot a tv show for an entire year next to a dump. But those are for another day.

Anywho, here I am. Living back in New York and the walking embodiment of what happens when you try and “eat pray love” your life, but instead its just a lot of crying in snowdrifts and making soup. Hey, At least I gave it a fucking shot, ya know?

Too Stupid To Live - Keepin' Thanksgiving Horny w/ Becky Feldman!

I had a wonderful time chatting with Becky Feldman on TOO STUPID TO LIVE - her podcast where she reviews romance novels of a certain price-point. The book she picked for us to review is the timeless tale of a super horny, very insane, Thanksgiving romance, where the turkey ain’t the only one gettin’ stuffed. It was absolutely bonkers and I loved getting to chat w/ Becky about my love of erotic pioneer stories, hatred of public declarations of love, and the horniest tv show of all time, Silk Stalkings. Check out the episode here:

Over The Hill

Feeling Fit. Feeling Flirty.

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 40. F O R T Y. 40! I mean, what the hell even is that number? That’s middle fucking age! People have children leaving for college at 40! I’m closer in age to getting my goddamn AARP benefits than I am to my 21st birthday. That is insane, and honestly, I’m not ok with it! I’m not. There is something about this specific birthday, this specific age, that has thrown me for a fucking LOOP. I’d like to tell y’all that this is just a midlife crisis, but I think its more of an overall, “I’m hurtling through time and space, with a finite amount of moments left, and what the fuck do I have to show for it all” vibe. Good times. Great oldies.

The upside to a midlife crisis would be that, at least from what pop-culture has taught me, I’d be blowing my wad on an iROC Z and having an affair with my step-son/pool boy before being embroiled in a sexy murder (I watched A LOT of Silk Stalkings during my formative years). Instead, I’ve spent the ramp-up to 40 comparing myself to others. Which, again, kids - do NOT follow my lead in any aspect of my life. Because once you start down that path, especially as a single woman who just threw her career into a food processor, with her the window for childbearing closing like a booby trapped door in an Indiana Jones movie (maybe I’ll be able to grab my fedora before the proverbial stone slams to the ground, but probably not), well lets just say the compare game at this point is a journey into darkness. I mean, I compared myself to E V E R Y O N E. My former bosses. Friends. People I see on Instagram. The dickbag assistant I worked with who I once clocked in his perfectly square jaw with a piece of German Christmas candy from a Wolfgang Petersen gift basket my boss didn’t want, after said assistant asked me with a straight face, “what sort of sick beats” I had been listening to …knowing damn well it was Steve Winwood. Oh yeah, I went down that rabbit hole hard. This same assistant had zero interest in film, but loved making money. He used phrases like, “crushing it” and had the most handsome, fucking punchable face. He had perfect posture. Wore perfectly pressed and crisp dress shirts that were tailored to his very lean, but oddly muscular frame. Once he was lifting something above my head and his shirt rode up and I realized he had those “v” muscles (cumgutters are I believe the scientific term) and that was NOT fucking fair. I wanted to kick him in the dick, but also deeply kiss him. Awful combo. He religiously read the GQ gift guides and would send me gifting suggestions. When a coworker would send out an email with a mistake in it, he would take it upon himself to hit reply all and then give a quick lesson on professionalism and how every!! mistake!! matters!! He once told me that, as he choked back vomit looking at my car, that he couldn’t believe I had the balls to valet my Toyota Camry at CAA. I had to fedex orange Gatorade to South Africa for him to give to our boss because he called me in the middle of the night in the midst of a breakdown because he couldn’t handle said boss complaining about how the South African orange tasted different than the American Orange anymore. Anyway, he just produced something with Zac Efron, so he’s doing great. My journey into the lives of others produced similar results. It felt like everyone I came up with in the industry were thriving. They had produced their own shit. Had blurbs about their successes posted on Deadline. They own homes in the Hollywood Hills like a fucking Bob Seger song. They got married. Had kids. They’re in that midlife that people dream about. They’re the characters in This Is 40. Folks from where I grew up? Fuck, I mean they seem to be on their 3rd or 4th McMansion. With kids getting close to graduating High School. They sling Beauty Counter products and spend their time crafting signs that say shit like, “Wine a little, Laugh a lot” and shit. They go to church. Don’t seem to be having an existential crisis and live what I call a blissfully unaware existence. For example, the Trump presidency/Impeachment/Global Warming? None of that seems to worry them. They go about their day to day routines, losing their shit over Pumpkin Spice Latte season and craft deals at Hobby Lobby and life seems, if not amazing, fine.

Once I had exhausted all the research on people I actually knew, I went and did something REALLY fucked up. When my middle of the night insomnia would hit (2am on the dot, nightly) I would google how old the actors playing the parents were on my favorite shows growing up. I am warning you now, stop reading if you don’t want to be absolutely SHOOK. Meredith Baxter Birney, the mom from Family Ties? THIRTY FIVE when the show started. Michael Gross, the father from Family Ties and who every man in Vermont slowly finds himself morphing into, also THIRTY FIVE. Judith Light from Who’s The Boss? 35! I’d google how old Henry was from Punky Brewster, but with my luck it would say the dude was like, 34 but “playing older”. Sure, Alan Thicke was 38 when Growing Pains started, but homeboy was supposed to be a successful Psychiatrist and also have three kids and that big ass house. BY 38?! I STILL EAT TOP RAMEN! Once I didn’t want to clean my room, so I just started sleeping in the guest room! For months! That’s where I’m at mentally right now. And these folks were supposed to be settled! Settled enough that they could worry with precocious kids and not about the meaning of life/how they were going to pay their heating bills? Fuck me.

So yeah, I went into my 40th birthday with all those comparisons rattling around in the back of my head, reminding me that I’m behind the 8 ball as far as career and family goes, not to mention feeling a little bit adrift out here in Maple Syrup land. It’s a weird thing to hit what society deems “the big one” and not have a bunch of really close people to celebrate with - it feels indulgent. Like, “hi I know you peripherally from the farmers market and we enjoy grabbing drinks sometime, would you please come and celebrate ME!?”. It just feels…off. And while these people are my friends, they haven’t known me for years. Which for me feels strange. And, I’m just going to say it - I don’t like planning shit for myself. Again, it feels indulgent and presumptuous. But seemed like all of my friends who hit 40 did big shit. They took incredible trips. Had surprise parties thrown where people from all over came together to celebrate them. Some had multiple events! Everyone seemed happy. In good head-spaces! Excited to celebrate! As embarrassing and self-centered as it sounds, I wanted that too. I wanted someone in my life to basically take the reigns so we could celebrate what a fucking trip it is that my sorry-ass has somehow made it to 40. Despite the vendetta Vermont has against me. Despite the stress and woe and my overall bad luck. Despite that, I’m still here. And I wanted that to be worth celebrating. But, that wasn’t exactly the case. Life happens. People have their own shit going on - understandably. And my woes are my own. So I spent my 40th birthday eating a salad and having a glass of wine by myself. I had some birthday texts and very funny well wishes that warmed my Grinch heart. I came home to a snowblower that some friends pitched in to get me so that I’d hopefully make it out of 2020 in one piece. I’m extremely excited to create snow crop-circles with that beast. Another friend tracked down my favorite flower lady in Vermont, off-season, and had her deliver an arrangement and some wine to my door. And another friend sent me a print of a woman walking serenely though the wood, based on a Mary Oliver poem. I know I’m loved, but the isolation out here is tough. And spending my birthday with all that other shit weighing me down has been a lot to process. It’s been a bit of a bummer. Though, it could always be worse.

While working with the beefcake assistant, our boss at the time decided he would like to treat me by sending me to set since I was the one coordinating EVERYTHING. Mind you, the majority of the that film shoot had been in Hawaii. Just tropical waters. Sexy actors. Sun-kissed bodies and the joy of film-making. That would not be my gift. Instead, I got to go to the stage/green-screen portion of the shoot. Which was being done in November in a weird facility outside Baton Rouge. During this time, my flying anxiety was still VERY real and I had to be VERY medicated to get on a plane without losing my shit. My travel was set for my actual birthday, and the plan was once I landed in Baton Rouge, I’d go with the hunky assistant out to a nice dinner on the boss. Some real wine and dine shit. And as much as I LOATHED that prick, spending the evening looking at his 80s movie villain mug, wouldn’t be all that bad. Yeah, that wouldn’t be the case. After being filled to the gills with anxiety meds that could knock-out a Rhino, boarding the plane and preparing to depart, we learned that somehow the cockpit door had become jammed after a pilot had walked out to get something, and he couldn’t get back in and the other fella couldn’t get out. So, we sat on the tarmac for about 5 hours. My meds slowly wearing off so that by the time we did make it airborne, long after we should’ve arrived in Louisiana, I could feel every fucking emotion. Just pure fear and adrenaline ratcheting through my body. The birthday gift I never wanted. The real icing on this shit-cake was that due to the delay, it meant I missed my connection and instead had to grab the last tic-tac from Atlanta to Baton Rouge. Which, was my actual nightmare. Un-drugged and flying on what are known to have the highest commercial crash numbers. Oh, I also spent a lot of time feeding this fear on websites dedicated to compiling the last words of pilots from black box recordings, so just know I was truly freaked. I will not go into the details of the mental break I had on that small plane, but lets just say I won’t show my face on that leg ever again. I finally landed in Baton Rouge around 11pm. Dinner was obviously a no go. My luggage was lost. So I spent that birthday eating a lunch-able I purchased from one of those weird concession rooms at a Courtyard Marriott. And that wasn’t even close to being my worst birthday! In college a couple friends decided to throw a few of us a joint surprise party. Two of us being celebrated figured out the surprise, and in the process learned that they had invited almost everyone in the Oregon Greek System. The entire bar area of a restaurant had been reserved to handle the amount of attendees!! Reader, you see where this is going right? We arrived to find that out of a couple hundred invited, maybe 12-15 people showed up? I’m not even exaggerating. It was a letdown to say the least. The girl who hadn’t figure out about the party prior to the event had a fucking great time, though. See what I’m saying about being blissfully unaware? Live your life like that girl - ignore the blatant signs around you that a party is being planned, and just go with the fucking flow. But still, STILL, that’s not even close to the birthday I celebrated while working for Harvey.

On my birthday while working for HW, it landed on a Saturday when he was coming back from some trip and had a small window before leaving again. And that meant I had this one shot to get checks signed. So, I got up early and met his plane at JFK, and hitched a ride with him back to the city. The plan was that on the drive back, I’d get him to sign checks, and some other documents, and when we got to his house, I would get out, take an uber to the office, drop that shit off and spend the rest of the afternoon day-drinking like I was an extra in Sex in the City. Instead, like most situations with Harvey, shit went sideways. I ended up spending the entire day with him, going from meeting to meeting, sitting in his house helping to take dictations, while he ruined everyone’s weekend, inventing work that needed to be done RIGHT NOW! At one point, late in the afternoon he went to a meeting at Monkey Bar, or one of those places, and we had been stuck in Times Square traffic for a long time. The car was stuffy, and he had been traveling overnight which meant he was farting up a fucking storm. And I’m sitting in the back seat of a too warm Lexus SUV, while this goblin farts all around me. Attempting to type dictations and not get car sick. The smell of car leather, farts and his chocolate protein shake that I had to make a pit-stop to make for him, was a terrible, terrible combination. I couldn’t tell if I was about to barf on him or have an asthma attack - but the asthma attack won. So as were sitting in traffic, I rummage through my bag to find my rescue inhaler, pull it out and go to take a puff, and the second I’m done shooting that medicine down my gullet, I feel his hand fucking whoosh past my face and swat the inhaler out of my grip and it ricochets up to the driver’s seat, as he screams, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT!!!!” I do not know what scared him about the inhaler….maybe it just startled him? Maybe he doesn’t like aerosol shit? I don’t know, but I do know is that he was VERY freaked and angry. So I start laughing, which makes him angrier. When we pulled up to the curb for him to get out, he said for me to never do that again (breathe? not sure). Then I got to twiddle my thumbs for another hour or so, waiting for him to finish his meeting. After spending the entire day, from dawn till dusk, trapped in the back of the car with him, around 8pm he finally told me I was done for the day. His driver, being braver than most, hollered after him as he shuffled to his house, “Aren’t you going to wish her a happy birthday?” and Harvey just laughed and kept walking. I rescheduled my birthday drinks for the next morning at some hipster dining on the Lower East Side. I was ready to go BIG! My first birthday living in NYC. I was Working Girl! I was Party Girl! I was a hip, hip lady with a wild ass Hollywood job and I was ready to cut loose! We hadn’t even gotten the first round of mimosas before my phone started ringing off the hook. First was my mom. I hit ignore. Then was my estranged dad. I hit ignore. Then my mom again. And then my dad. And then a cousin. It was around then I realized something was wrong. Oh, no biggie - just my family calling to say my fucking Grandma had died the night before, on my goddamn birthday. So, yes, I am well aware, spending an evening alone with a glass of wine and locally sourced butter lettuce salad with tamari roasted seeds is not the worst it can be. I’ve already experienced that. But its all relative, and in a certain head space it can not feel great.

I woke up this morning feeling a little better about the whole thing, well if not better, resigned I suppose? And I have Nancy Meyers to thank for that. No, seriously. Last night, I put on BABY BOOM as I fell asleep. I guess I’m hoping that somehow leaving it on while I sleep will cause me to absorb JC Wiatt’s trajectory, thus causing me to SECRET a handsome vet and a Jeep Grand Wagoneer into my life. But instead, when I awoke, as usual, at 2am this morning - I decided to google someone else. I googled Diane Keaton’s age when she made Baby Boom….Forty ONE! FORTY ONE! Ok! Now we’re fucking getting somewhere. Sure, that character was a corporate bigwig -a wall street dynamo with a very cold, very 80s modern apartment that she shared with Harold Ramis (lol), and yes, she bought her house in Vermont outright….BUT! That baby? She didn’t have it with her 41 year old womb. She inherited her! And It didn’t matter if she owned the house or had a corporate background, she still lost her absolute mind and ended up spending her days making applesauce. Mental breakdowns for women trying to live their best life can happen at any age! But as Diane proved, you can really hit your meltdown sweet spot at 41. And the vet? I haven’t met him yet, but there is still time! I’m only 40! Diane Keaton was 41! And don’t come to me saying, “Morgan that is a fictional character living fictional events” - do you think common sense has ever stopped me from basing my entire life on a stupid movie I watched as a child? No fucking way! Baby, I moved to Vermont based on this nonsense, its way too late to stop now. So I’ve got a year. One year to really just figure my shit out. One year….seems tough. Seems like an uphill battle. But ya know what was tough? JC Wiatt playing at a man’s game in the battlefield that is the boardroom. You know what’s an uphill battle? Making fucking applesauce from scratch and selling it to yuppies coming to weekend in Stowe! And saying no to a big box store payout and your corporate life back in NYC? THAT’S HARD! But bitch, COUNTRY BABY AIN’T FOR SALE. So for the next year, instead of wallowing in my woes and my lacking, I’m gonna nut-the-fuck-up, embrace my inner Keaton, and use this time. THIS IS MY NANCY MEYERS JESUS YEAR. And I’m going to figure my shit out.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put my snowblower together and see about some canning supplies.

Robert Frostin' It

Last week, that rascal Winter came a-knockin’. It seems like we’d just gotten over his bullshit, when lo and behold he shows up again, much like that shitty ex-boyfriend you somehow convince yourself might not be as irritating as you remember. Only instead of being an emotional vampire who expects you to wash their dirty boxers, Old Man Winter came in the form of 15 inches of snow in Central Vermont. Which honestly, I’ll take the fucking boxers. Because at around 6pm, as I was attempting an ill-advised commute home in the middle of a winter storm warning, with it straight pissing ice and snow onto my Jeep, causing me to slap on my hazard lights like a geriatric, while white knuckling it down the highway at a top speed of around 35 mph, pledging an allegiance to Satan in order to keep me from skidding off the road and into a ravine and my death, that I realized that I did this to myself. I’ve got nobody but Morgan E Cline, Esquire to blame for this shit. Because for the first time in my adult life, I made a decision to stay someplace, not because of a job, or the promise of something better. I stayed just to “be”. And in that moment, I began to deeply regret my decision.

 I’ve always known that at some point in this, my Vermont journey, the time would come - my “Robert Frost” moment. A time when two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I’d have to make a choice. In my case, one road stayed in Vermont, disappearing around a bend that meandered through the green hillsides and Hallmark channel backlot villages. I couldn't make out its final destination, but I could see that there were caution signs dotting the lane before I lost its path. The other road careened West, as I watched the Vermont roads turn into the 10, and then the 405, which turned into the 101 N, which would eventually lead me back in the land of the living, endless summer, and the lifestyle that I once knew. 

I’d say that for the better part of 2019, I’ve been going through what the kids these day call, “some shit”. In my experience, “finding myself” has been a painful, long journey, which I would honestly not recommend. Nope. Just live in denial of what a garbage person you might be. Be blissfully unaware of all the time you’ve lost to bad decisions and people who didn’t love you or respect you. Just keep plugging ahead, baby. Because I can’t tell you what the benefit is from ripping off the scabs. For me it’s been fairly awful. Reliving past relationships, both working and otherwise, and accepting my culpability in the situations. Realizing all the opportunities and people I let slip away, not understanding what I had until it was gone. Trying to learn how to forgive myself, while still not really feeling as if my personal experiences warrant the amount of woe that I’ve felt over them. People assume the Harvey thing was the breaking point, but it wasn’t! Isn’t that wild and terrible?! But once people are aware of my résumé, something that is super fun and has happened at least ten times is that folks will ask me, point blank with no buffer, if “he hurt me” or  say, “he didn’t rape you, did he?”. Just like, wow nice résumé, were you raped? When I try and laugh it off and say something like, “well he was an asshole but no, he didn’t rape me”, they seem… let down. Like they asked that question hoping for something salacious. Which is fucking gross. And then I find myself thinking, what the fuck am I upset about? I wasn’t raped. It was just a Lemony Snickett’s series of bad jobs for bad men. Other people have it way worse! Which leads me to start diminishing all of the negative, sexist, belittling experiences I’ve had, because I don’t feel like I’m worthy of the anger I’m feeling. WHAT FUN!! So would I suggest that someone else follow my weird-ass Nancy Meyers quest for the good life? No. Fucking. Way. I thought I’d be over here canning applesauce and banging the ruggedly handsome vet! Instead its more like a Jane Austen novel - you know when someone gets a cold and they decide to bleed them out in order to rid them of a fever. The past two years have been bleeding me out, just to the brink of death, in order to try and cure me of myself. The results have been iffy at best. But there have been pockets of the incredible! Lovely friends I’ve met along the way. I mean, I’ve got a pack of truly badass women in my orbit. Just wonderful moms and partners and friends, who have embraced me and try to include me in their Vermont life. I’m thankful. I’ve also had some of the most transformative experiences walking through the woods, driving into the unknown, stumbling across waterfalls and patches of wildflowers, swimming holes, horse farms, you name it, but it causes something wonderful to bubble up inside of me. Once I saw a black bear bounding across a back road, where it plopped down into the tall grass full of wildflowers at the woods edge, and then peeked its head up like a periscope!!! I had to pull over because it caused me to sob. It was just fucking sweet!! But I’ve also had moments where I’ve very openly questioned my own sanity, and I’ve said multiple times that I’m not sure if Vermont is the best or the absolute worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I really can’t tell, and any given day can cause the scales to tip in either direction. 

And this year in particular has been tough. I’ve had quite a few medical set-backs that have thrown me for a loop. Asthma, two bouts of pneumonia, and then the whole shattered wrist and surgery shit. It’s really not been fun. And to top it off, my job was starting to wear thin. I was working seven days a week. And even though I was told I didn’t need to work seven days a week, it was very clear that if I didn’t, shit started to fall through the cracks. And it started to dawn on me that I was doing the same thing I’ve been known to do - martyr myself for someone else’s success and well being. There’s only so far “up” you can go, and I was realizing that the things I needed to do for ME, the reasons I came to Vermont - to sleep, attempt to be creative, and learn to have a life - weren’t happening because of the nature of the position. And then, in the middle of all that realization, a job lead popped-up out of the blue. A former coworker threw my contact info over to a head-hunter looking to fill an EA role supporting the matriarch of a family of very successful celebrities/business women. Like, you know the family I’m talking about. They’re a monster dynasty. And in my opinion, everything that's wrong with the current state of media. This was not a job that I would’ve ever, EVER, ever, have sought out on my own. But...there was something about the weird cosmic timing of the job that made it feel like I owed it to myself to find out a bit more. Her team kept telling me that we had to move fast. There was no time to second guess. Not even kidding, in the span of 45 min, I had learned about the job for the first time, had a call with the recruiters, and two calls scheduled with the team in LA. It was a whirlwind. The package wasn’t too bad. The salary to most would be considered quite high. The clout was certainly there. The recruiter and this woman’s team kept reminding me that it would be working for the best of the best. It would be a role I would be lucky to have. I’d never get another opportunity to work for someone so dynamic! Blah blah. What interested me most wasn’t the family, or the role - it was that it would afford me a chance to pay off some debt, and most importantly, be back among friends and people who “get” me. I of course immediately sent texts out to all my friends about the wild-ass job lead, assuming I would receive messages back with all caps “LOLS” and snarky responses about what a family of shit-goblins they are and how they knew I would never consider taking that sort of job ever again. But I didn’t. I would say, 97% of the people I messaged and spoke to about the job said, without hesitation: take the fucking job. Take it. Take the money. Get out of Vermont. Be back around friends. And few folks in the know even told me that they knew the family and that they are very kind and decent to their staff. Which shocked me a bit. Everyone’s confidence threw me for a loop. Because while they were gung-ho about relocating and getting me out of this haunted Maple Syrup forest, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was...off. 

The recruiter was relentless. It was non-stop texts asking how quickly I could move if the job was offered to me. ASAP is what they required. I had zero time to process or to figure out if this was even something that would be a good fit for me. The train was leaving the station with me on it, whether I liked it or not. I was being called out of assistant retirement. Like some sleeper agent, just waiting to be reactivated so I could spring to life, booking private jets and screaming at Fed Ex agents in order to expedite the shipping of new Egyptian cotton sheets that HAVE to arrive by Tuesday, do you fucking hear me?! Because shit had been so off recently I googled, “how to know if there’s a hex upon you”, I definitely felt that maybe I was supposed to just take the job, even though I felt in my gut that it was going to be a bad move. On one hand, I’d cease being in self-made exile. Which, you know, would be awesome. Human interaction is rad! But on the other, I’d have to live and work in Calabasas. Which, Jesus. Going from Vermont’s green vistas to the dry, brown wasteland that is the Agoura Hills/Calabasas area, ravaged from wildfires and dotted with mansions, would be a real shift. And if you’ve ever lived in LA you know, I might as well live in San Francisco in relation to LA, being based there. It’s not like I could pop over for a quick drink with pals or a spontaneous bite in Silverlake. It would be a slog. Hours worth of driving. And, the most important part, the part that I know with every fiber of my being would be the real issue, is that when you take these jobs, your life is not yours anymore. They are true 24/7 positions. Not just working seven days a week and not having time to be creative. I mean, you’re on call and your needs do not matter at all. Its living and breathing and burning the midnight oil for someone else, while being told how lucky you are to have the job and reminded that there are people waiting to take it from you, if you need to take a weekend off, or go to a funeral, or have a sick day. And, what I’ve realized over these last two years in Vermont, taking stock of my career choices, is that I lost my thirties to work and the pretty intense depression that came along with choosing to work, and praying for the payoff that never came. And that’s fucking tough, and that’s on me. While my friends spent the decade falling in and out of love, eventually settling down, having kids, working their way up or at least into better situations in their respective fields, I spent that time working my ass off for people, and ignoring my own shit . I just gritted my teeth and kept going. Kept being belittled and condescended to - until my desire for the “payoff” was replaced with bitterness. And it created a shell - an exoskeleton made from bullshit and regret and embarrassment. Maybe other folks are made from stronger stock, but for me, being offered another job like that, when I’m almost 40, is the Universe testing me. Its offering up a poison apple on a silver platter. A supposed escape plan. But the thing is, I’d just be going back to more of the same. And these two years, and all that time I took ripping off scabs and wallowing in my own Morgan-ness would be negated. I would’ve taken this breather only to jump back into the fire for something I’d only be doing for money, and at the expense of my well-being. Which, yikes. There are some jobs you can do that with and it pays-off. But busting your ass, in a role you don’t want only ends in disaster. Look, my current reality is not, by any means, great - but its also not living that hell again, either. As fate would have it, while the Hollywood carrot was being dangled in front of my face, I got another offer from a local Vermont company. It was not an ideal salary. Or location. Or industry. But its fine. And it makes up for what it lacks in giving me a chance to extricate myself from another situation that was sucking the life from me, without having to make a pact with someone who might be a harbinger of the end times.

So, I accepted the Vermont job in the big city of Burlington, and took my hat out of the race for the other gig. The recruiter was not happy. She said I had “lead them on” and that it was unprofessional of me to back out of contention, and that I would never get an opportunity like that again. Her reaction was enough to reinforce that I had made the right decision. And so I chose the much less cool, less known path. The new job comes with a pay-cut that really, really sucks. I’m commuting an hour each direction. Which in good weather is amazing. I can get a cup of garbage coffee (what up, Dunken D!) and then listen to Kenny Loggins, while winding through Central Vermont! In the Winter its an actual nightmare. But its a choice I made for myself! The easy thing would’ve been to nail the interview, take the money, and move back to LA. To throw myself into a job I hated, losing more time. More chances at actual living. But I tromped down the other path. The rockier road. The fucking unknown. I decided to stay someplace that hasn’t been easy - but it has provided me with beautiful scenery and enough fodder to write 1,000 Hallmark holiday movies

Then again, this could’ve been the stupidest thing I’ve done yet! I mean, on Friday it did take me over 20 min to walk 2.5 blocks from the parking lot to the office through an ice gauntlet because, surprise! I’m terrified of slipping again! I’ve developed this horrid little wide-stance shuffle, where I tap my right foot in front of me, like a blind person’s walking stick, to see what sort of surface I’m dealing with. Tap! Tap! Tap! I look insane. And as I was creeping down the sidewalk, an elderly woman walked past me so quickly it kicked up a wind. I’m a mess! But I’m also the Pollyanna of Dumpster Fires! So I just keep shuffling ahead. Tapping my way down the street like a Whitesnake song! The Tawny Kitaen of icy sidewalks. Maybe I’ll shuffle myself towards a life that brings me contentment. Or maybe not. LIFE! But for now, I’m here in Vermont, on my terms. For better or worse.

Here I go again.

HGTV EROTICA PART 2: LOVE IT OR LUST IT

Homeowner Edie watched as David flashed his wicked goblin smile at her and began…

 “Edie, I didn’t get to be a top selling Canadian realtor by just finding homes for my clients. I find them a new way of life…and after being with you today, I can see that there is something you need more than granite counter tops or new copper pipes…”

The air was heavy with everything left unsaid. Edie felt David’s beady little weasel eyes pour over every inch of her body. It felt like the first time a man, a goblin man, had LOOKED at her and it shook her to the damn core.

 “You’re as cold as a Toronto winter and I want to warm you up”, David hissed.

With that, he took his lizard-like claw and gently wiped a stray droplet of chocolate martini from the corner of Edie’s mouth. She inhaled sharply, and David just smiled, drawing his thumb to his mouth and licking off the chocolate. Every ounce of her womanhood was set aflame. David stood and drew her out of the booth with him –  the pulsating Caribbean beats of Sade’s sensual music blared from the jukebox. He pulled her close, drawing her into an embrace, where she could feel his elfin manhood pressing into her thigh. His raw animal desire pulsed to the beat of the music. He could smell the want and longing on her – he knew this was his moment. He grabbed her, and wordlessly dragged her to his car. They spent the entire car ride in silence, the only sound was the rain on the windshield and their heavy panting. They both wanted this.

When they arrived, Edie couldn’t help but be in awe of David’s place – it was exactly what you’d expect from a top realtor – it was modern and had ALL the upgrades. She knew he must pay a pretty penny in HOA fees, but that only made her lust for him more.

With a flick of a remote, David clicked on his fireplace, and Michael Buble began playing over his PA system. He winked, and walked over to his bar where he poured them each a shot of Malibu Rum. They gulped it down, staring into each other’s eyes. Before she knew it, David grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him…

Her heart raced. His mouth found hers, and Edie’s breath hitched as his reptilian tongue darted out to trace her plump lips. He parted her lips, and it forced its way into her warm, inviting mouth. Their tongues tangled and darted and before long, their hands began groping and tearing at each other’s clothes. They stumbled closer to the fire, and David pulled Edie down onto to the cream Berber rug. Edie was fully under his spell. Whatever momentary guilt she felt for this indiscretion, was immediately put to rest by the growing, wanton lust, she felt in her womanhood.

 Edie wasn’t sure what came over her – she had always been reserved in what she wanted, but whatever this was with David, this, was different. She wanted EVERYTHING. And she wanted him to give it to her now. Edie knelt before David on the sensible, yet chic rug, and ripped her blouse open, revealing her pert breasts. David’s beady eyes drank it all in…and before he knew it; Edie was ripping off his sport coat and his nicely pressed Kirkland signature stripped shirt. They both sat in front of each other and the fire, panting and filled with Canadian horniness. Neither could wait any longer to fulfill their growing passion. In a heartbeat, the air was filled with a frenzy of arms and the remaining clothes being ripped off. They writhed on the ground, allowing Edie to drink in the sinuous, pasty, figure of the sex troll laying in front of her. She laughed to herself – she was staring at a top Canadian realtor in all his naked glory. How was this her life? David took that pause as hesitation and brought his thin, lizard lips up to her ample bosom. He was going to convince her that this was the right thing to do.

 As his thin lips and forked tongue found her hard nipple, he realized he wasn’t going to have to convince her at all. She was totally game for everything he wanted to offer. He licked and suckled her breasts like a possum fresh from the womb. She moaned and writhed and felt her desire grow. She was frenzied and she needed him inside of her. David, sensing her need, flipped her beneath him. He rose before her, showing her his goblin staff – which was purple and pulsed with its own need.  He spread her milky thighs and entered her. She was so wet and full of want. Her womanhood felt like the warm waters during the summer in Nova Scotia. She squealed with delight as his thin, throbbing manhood rammed into her…Edie NEEDED this. She needed this more than a finished basement and a formal dining room. His ramming brought her to life.. All that existed in the world was David and his dick.

 David grunted and thrust and Edie cried out and they came together - David’s milky seed filling her to the brim. They laid together, sweating and panting in front of the fire, satiated and happy for the first time, in a very, very long time.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Two Years in Vermont

Time flies when you’re living in a Hallmark movie fever dream! Two years ago this week, I up and moved my sorry ass to Vermont. Two years! Thats exactly the amount of time I spent working in Atlanta. The same amount of time I spent in New York. Vermont feels both shorter and much longer. It’s a weird thing to move someplace when its not connected with a job, or relationship, or to be closer to friends. I moved here to be nearer myself. Which, whoo boy, I would NOT recommend. Not if there is even the slightest chance that you might be a shithead. Because, I kinda suck, and its been a lot of introspection and intense feelings. A lot of MORGAN. Too much Morgan, to be honest. I apologize to anyone who’s had to spend long amounts of time with me, because I’m a fucking piece of work! But I moved here, and in true Morgan fashion, even when its been intense and awful, I just dig my damn heels in and commit to this nonsense. Because if you’re going to change your life based on a fucking Nancy Meyers movie from 1987, you gotta be willing to go big and double down.

There wasn’t much of a real plan when I moved to Vermont. I think I assumed I’d stay here a year, tops. And for some incredibly misguided reason, I thought I could get my shit together in that amount of time. That the relocation and nature and quaintness would allow me to just, VOILA! Be a functional human being again. That somehow, after ingesting Maple Syrup and watching the leaves change colors, everything would fall into place. I’d lose weight. Learn to sleep. Knock out a children’s book or two. Learn to love myself. Get well and deeply fucked by handsome fellas who knew how to chop wood and like, back country ski or something. And then I’d laugh and say ,“WHAT AN ADVENTURE THAT WAS!” And high tail it back to LA or New York, with everything figured out. I would say as far as plans go, thats been an abject disaster. Literally none of those things have happened. Not a one. Sure I got banged by a ski bum lawyer and it was alright, but it didn’t fuck me back to life, and I do not think he could chop wood, and said encounter required me to drive to fucking Rutland, VT - so that negates any positives out of that experience. So what I’m saying is, I failed. I failed at my Vermont experiment in such grand ways, in such incredibly disappointing ways, that its truly hard for me to quantify. Instead of losing weight, I maintained this fucking lardy physique. My insomnia is still there - comes in bouts - but I’m never, ever, able to seep through an entire night. Writing? HAAHAHA. Ok, so I did have a draft of a kids book, and then I swear to God, my new laptop, the one I bought after breaking the other laptop during a session of writing around magic candles broke, fucking crashed. I had to get a new motherboard and I lost everything. Like Carrie in Sex and the City. Then I finally get some momentum back, get some interest in this silly blog, and I up and go shatter my damn wrist. Nothing I wanted to have happen, happened. Not for lack of trying, no sir! I hired that personal trainer (who bilked me out of 6k and belittled me), but I did work out a ton. But the weight stayed on, sadly. And that self love? Well, thats not gone so well either. Have you ever stared at your reflection for so long that features stop making sense? Eye and noses and ears and flesh all seem like a Picasso painting. And then you think, how weird it is that our insides are kept inside just by flesh? BEING A HUMAN IS FUCKED UP! Well, thats what a lot of introspection will do. You start picking everything apart, and when you get down to it, its all a bit of a nightmare!!! So all and all, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything other than amassing an insane amount of medical debt and learning to appreciate the natural color of my hair.

And yet….its not a total wash. I mean, in the immortal words of JC Wiatt, the Tiger Lady of Wall Street, and creator of Country Baby Applesauce - COUNTRY BABY IS NOT FOR SALE! The idea now of moving back to New York is unthinkable. LA? Thats a little trickier. I miss my friends. I miss my support -network. I miss being able to hang with Erin, watching Newsies and drinking wine. I miss Dodger Games. I miss the excitement of the entertainment industry - where you felt like you were collectively working towards something interesting. But thats also the way I’m remembering it - in reality I worked on some really amazing things, but I also worked on Battleship, ya know? And most of the interesting work I did is buried in the mire by all the bullshit I endured - late night travel insanity. Running all over creation for the kelp noodles or specific brand of kombucha they needed to function. I once bribed a fucking kids magician so that he’d perform at Harvey’s daughters birthday party on short notice!! Having to carry a fucking Nespresso maker in my backpack in case my boss wanted a coffee. That was an actual thing I had to do - I’m not kidding. Do you know how stupid you feel when you have to open up a giant backpack with a COFFEE MAKER inside of it, when you’re at a location that ALSO HAS A COFFEE MAKER? And I was in my mid-30s during most of this! All of my friends? They’re fucking settled. They own homes. They have careers. They are like, getting into meditation and mindfulness and health foods. And I’m flushing my bosses toilets behind them because they can’t be bothered. So while I miss my social life and my friends, that is not something I can go back to right now. It literally broke me. Though, I’m starting to wonder if I was ever really whole in the first place. So yeah, I mean. Right now Vermont, with its wholesomeness and four seasons (even though some last longer than others) doesn’t seem like the worst place to stay for a bit. In fact, I’ve actually started to make friends. And friends that aren’t directly connected to my job. That’s been an issue for me, where my social life is intertwined with my work life. But these are friends I’ve made on my own. I inadvertently joined a book club where i’m the only woman without kids. The text chains can be insane during the school year (it devolves from book recommendations and who is bringing the wine an cheese, to after school care and play dates) but I secretly love it! I meet my mom friends for coffee or wine. I listen to their problems and they listen to mine. I’ve befriended shop owners and local dogs. I visit the farmers market every single Saturday and buy myself an arrangement of flowers from the same vendor. One day I was running late because I coudln’t get away from work and they walked an arrangement over to me! The record store dudes will slip me a free album when I inquire about some random hit of the 80s they were playing. I wake up and feed the chipmunks that live beneath my deck and it brings me actual joy. And then I’ll put out the bird seed and wait for the chickadees to fly by me. And I’ll look in the backyard and see all that stupid squash I planted, and that too gives me joy. And sure the Winter can really be tough. And my Jeep is feeling the effects of driving hard on the brakes and requires new wheels. And I can get really lonely. And small town drama abounds once you’re part of the community. But, right now, this seems like someplace I’m supposed to be. For better or worse.

So, in honor of my second year in Vermont. Here’s two years in Vermont by the numbers:

• Bottles of wine consumed while staring into the void and questioning everything: Honestly? Hundreds.

• Whole Roast Chickens (including skeleton) Linus the dog ingested: 1

• Ferret-faced trainers who bamboozled me out of 6k in order to cover their back-rent: 1

• Boxes of kitty litter used to soak up raw sewage bubbling up in the basement/work: 13

• Cost of two years worth of heating oil that is kept in a terrifying drum in the basement: $4,600

• Times brakes locked traveling down snowy hill that caused me to think I was about to die: 30+

• Hookups at a Rodeway Inn down at a ski town with a lawyer met on Tinder: 1

• Days I’ve spent enduring my friends in LA roasting me for said encounter: >25

• Violent falls in the snow/ice that lead me to denounce God: > 15

• Violent falls that lead to a shattered risk, emergency surgery and a new bionic arm: 1

• Being ghosted by a man who said he moved out of state when he actually still lives with your bosses ex husband up the street: 1

• Crushes on big-dicked Hunks out of state: 2

• Times I’ve embarrassed myself in front of the handsome farmer that does a pop-up market behind my place of employment: Literally every single time he’s been there.

• Binge Rewatches of entire series: 12- Newhart/Frasier/Wings/Friday Night Lights/ Battlestar Galatica/X Files/Vanderpump Rules/Fortitude/Kimmy Schmidt/ The UK Office/ The Mighty Boosh/ Spaced

• Times I watched Baby Boom: > 15

• Times I’ve sobbed in the dark seriously questioning everything: > 20

• Nights where Sleep Paralysis has lead me to believe my house might be actually a little haunted: 3

• Trick or Treaters at my door: 1

• Times I’ve accidentally driven down a VAST trail and only realized it wasn’t a rode after having to drive through a creek: 1

• Times people warned me I’d be mistaken for a Moose while hiking, so I should wear orange (which is RUDE!): 4

• Black Bears seen frolicking: 5

• Moose seen: 0!

• Hikes in subzero temps that have lead me to question my own sanity: 13

• Hikes in the beautiful Vermont wilderness that made me grateful to be alive: 20

  I have no idea what the rest of this year will bring. I’m honestly terrified. I feel like I’m either going to get struck by lightning or I’ll win the lottery. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between for me. But, I’m here. And the weather is turning. And the mornings are crisp again. And tonight I’ll rewatch Baby Boom in honor of this anniversary. Then I’ll crawl into bed, cradling my inhaler and a cheesy romance novel, with two dogs curled up at my feet, and get ready for another day of work in the morning. And while its not exciting for me. And I feel stifled in a lot of ways. And there’s definitely no incredibly sexy Vet/Mayor hybrid that is lurking around, ready to woo me and bang me back into the land of the living. There’s also no Harvey. And no backpacks full of Nespresso makers. Or late night phone calls belittling me and questioning my intelligence. Or emails saying my trip to Cannes has been cancelled because I didn’t have the right “look” to be seen with my boss. So yeah, it may not be great most of the time, but it definitely could be worse.
  
  

HGTV Erotica

I’m attempting to do some cleaning out of old files and such, and completely forgot that there was a period of time when I used to write erotic stories about HGTV hosts. I apologize for nothing.

For your reading pleasure - this short is called:

HOLMES INSPECTION: RUNNING HOT

…. The crew had packed up their tools and gone home for the night. Despite the weather delay, and the fact that the termite damage was much worse than expected, Mike Holmes felt great about how much they had accomplished that week. Most nights after a long reno, Mike would head home, crack open an ice cold Molson, throw a couple tanks into the wash, and settle in for some Dateline and much needed rest. But tonight, well tonight, there was one last thing he needed to wrap up before he could consider this project done.

Mike pulled a bottle of Old Spice from his tool-kit, splashed it on his neck, grabbed his trusty thermography camera and went back in to do one last check in with the home-owner, Gayle.

 Gayle was plum tuckered out from all the heartache over her faulty renovation – the renovation that Mike and his team had come to correct.  She had poured her savings into trying to fix the damage, but both she and the property felt too far gone – financially and emotionally. The strain over the reno had torn apart her marriage, leaving her alone and living in shambles. Of course the help of Mike and his team would be a huge godsend as far as her living situation went – but there was one last thing that needed to be done in order to “Make it Right”….

 The backdoor was cracked, so Mike walked in, where he found Gayle on the chaise with a well deserved glass of Moscato. Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years” quietly playing on the stereo. She didn’t notice him come in, so he stood in the doorway, watching her – eyes closed – sway her head to the sensual music. Gayle was world weary, but behind the furrowed brow and stress, he could see the woman she really was.

The floorboards gave him away as they creaked beneath his weight. Gayle, roused from her thoughts, turned to see Mike leaning in the doorway, looking every ounce the Canadian beefcake that he was. She bashfully smiled up at him. “I thought your team had already left – everything okay?”, she asked. Mike, with a glint in his eye, smiled back and said quietly, “There’s just one thing I needed to do…..to make sure everything was property handled….”. He slowly lifted up his thermography camera, wickedness dancing on his ruddy face.

 “I always like to check the heat flow – to make sure I did my job and nothing is running too hot”….He lifted the camera up and began triggering points around the room. Each reading registered the correct temp. “Just one last place to check” he said, as he pointed the camera’s sensor at the special place betwixt Gayle’s legs….the camera beeped….Mike whispered as he sauntered over to her chasm, “Oh dear…..looks like someone is running way…too…hot”.

 He stood above her. She shuddered with longing. He placed the camera on the chaise and slowly undid each clasp on his overalls. The straps fell around his waist. He slipped his white tank over his head, revealing his pink, freckled, barrel chest. Gayle sighed and fanned herself. She’d have to be made of stone not to be turned on by his strip tease. Mike giggled, slipping his overalls around his ankles, stepping out of them. He was just in his white fruit of the looms. Gayle felt as if her loins were afire. Blood rushed through her body. But Mike wasn’t done yet. He hooked his thumbs into his skivvies and slowly pulled them down, his erect member springing to life after being freed from the confines of his underwear, like a Canadian Mounty saluting Trudeau. “Oh My” Gayle whispered. Mike leaned over Gayle, hooked his meaty finger under her chin, lifting it up to him and said, “Let me make”…he kissed her deeply…”It”… his tongue slid into her open and receptive mouth…”Right”….

 Mike peeled off Gayle’s track suit like it was a layer of drywall in a historic Ontario home – he couldn’t wait to see what sort of antique wonderment laid beneath. Her body didn’t disappoint. Though she had seen better days, he knew with a little spit and elbow grease, he could bring that lady back to her prime.

 His calloused hands ran down her bare skin. She shuddered with want. He smelled of wood glue and maple syrup. He was a man through and through and it had been so terribly long since she had been taken by a real man. And take her he did. 

He caressed her breasts and kissed every square inch of her body. When he reached her pleasure zone, her body reacted by bucking like a well worn circular saw. She squealed in delight - he was driving her crazy. He kissed and licked and gave her love box the complete Mike Holmes inspection. She cried out as she came, and he looked into her eyes and said, “Now I made it right”…

The Pollyanna of Dumpster Fires

For someone who has been plagued by a Lemony Snickett series of Unfortunate Events which have somehow spanned my entire 39 years, I’m always surprised by my wilingness to truly believe, deep in my festering heart, that somehow, by some Grace of God, shit will change and that “this time things will be different”. Jobs, dating, my finances, the ability to walk down the street without tripping and falling into a ditch filled with toxic waste. Whatever the situation, I just have this lil spark of hope inside that pushes me to dream of a day when everything in my life doesn’t have to be fodder for a good story. Because it is exhausting having your life be a “good story”. Sure its a great party trick and people seem to enjoy hearing about all the hijinx that any given day seems to throw at me. But I want to know what life is like for people who are able to live “normal” lives, go about “normal” tasks, and not somehow end up having it turn into a situation where you’re driving back from a hike and end up in a ravine helping extract a man from a car that flipped over and is precariously hanging upside down above a creek. And while extracting, a tree branch whips you in the mouth, blooding your lip and causing your postman to ask if you were in an abusive situation. That literally happened to me when I first moved here!! Its really hard to maintain even a semblance of sanity, when everything being thrown at you is insane. And yet, here I am, hoping for the best! I can’t stop myself, even though I know its not going to probably end well, I just have this need to see the good in the situation and believe it’ll be better on the next go around. I’m the goddamn Pollyanna of Dumpster Fires, baby!!

So its with that weird desire to somehow Secret my way out of my garbage existence, through sheer willpower, and the dumb idea that my luck has got to take a turn, that I thought it might be, maybe, possibly, the right time to dip my toe back into the proverbial dating pool and reapply to an intensive writing program in Italy I’ve been turned down for before. I figured, fuck it! I deserve good things! Honestly, this might’ve been my boldest “it gets better” thought yet. To my credit, the writing program did tell me to apply for the next round, which I took as a sign. That maybe my ass was supposed to be in Italy writing at a vila in October instead of April. And obviously, if i’m at a villa in Italy then I’m one step closer to reenacting Under The Tuscan Sun. And maybe it was with that Tuscan horniness and unearned confidence that I thought dating might be a smart idea. Never underestimate the need for human connection, friends. It’ll cause you to gloss over the fact that your dating history has been on a sliding scale from AWFUL to NONEXISTENT. I’ve not had a great experience with dating, like ever. My last serious relationship was about 5 years ago. Before that, it was a lot of wild crushes, short lived romances, and sweeping defeat. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Moving to Vermont, I tried out Tinder for a bit. In brief, it was not the best. But see, I had moved to this new place and needed to meet people! I felt like I was well and truly getting my shit together and reclaiming my life. I wasn’t working. Learning how to sleep again. Boxing and working out everyday and I honestly felt good. Not great, but like I was on the right path, right? And if thats the case, why shoudln’t my newfound freedom and self respect translate into getting a hearty bone-down from some handsome Vermonter? Sadly, despite many, many first dates, this was not the case. I went on a date with a man who talked to me about his anger towards his mother. I went on a date with a farmer who gave me some real specifics on butchering hogs. I went on a date with a 27 year old law student who didn’t know what a fax machine was and liked to point out how much older I was, which was super fun. The worst though was the Doctor I went on a date with before his rotations. He is a pulmonary dude, so theres no way he’s not going to have to fix my busted lungs at some point, and whoo boy that will suck. If it had just been a drink, I would’ve been able to scramble home with some semblemence of pride instact. It’s easy to peace out after a drink. Instead it was full blown dinner, and I had to drive to Burlington to meet him. I walked up to the restaurant, he took one look at me and I saw his face fall, and the air in the room sucked out. Not in a romantic way. Like in a way that he was trying to remove all the oxygen so either he or I would die in order to escape having to have dinner with me. It was VERY obvious he was not feeling any of * gestures to my beefy goblin physique * this. But homeboy had to eat, so eat we did in the most stilted, painful way. The conversation did not flow. He asked me nothing. Nothing. And I knew there was no spark there, so I basically just tried to ask about him. Ask about the weather. I asked about his gym and what sorts of workouts he did. Y’all I was trying for something, anything, to just get us through the meal without me running into the street so that I could get plowed down by a fleet of Subarus. But he wasn’t engaging. And when the meal was over he insisted on paying in a way that made me feel like he pitied me and that really didn’t feel great. And I realized then and there that sometimes “it being a good story” is better than a really bland, bad date. I can handle people being mean or saying horrible things that I can rail against. But someone being so underwhelmed by me and forcing me to sit in their disgust with them was a bridge too far. I got in the car and sobbed the entire way back home. After that, I had almost come to terms with being a lonely spinster hermit, but the long winter got the better of my judgment, again and I went out for one last hurrah. Thats when I drove an hour and a half to a Rodeway Inn, where I met up with a way out of my league ski-bum NYC lawyer that I had been talking to for a few months, but never had the guts to meet. In a classic Garbage Pollyanna move though, I decided to give it a shot! The odds of him being disgusted by me where pretty high, but life is short and Vermont Winters are long, and who knows, say it with me kids - MAYBE THIS TIME THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT! So, I went for it…and it was totally fine, mostly fun, but also made me feel pretty bad afterwards. And I never heard from him again. I’d like to believe he got swallowed by an avalanche and died, but I think he just wasn’t that into me. Which, fair. So since that point, I’ve been solo. I’m not seeking anything out, because my pride can only take so much rejection and I’m just out here trying to survive. Which, given this year, has been an uphill battle. But, last fall, I did make a new friend. Which is awesome! There’s nothing that a lonely, weird, pushing 40 hermit needs more than a friend. Well maybe antidepressants and some really good La Mer skin cream. But friendship is right up there. We met through some mutual pals. He was recently divorced and sorta trying to figure out all the new things in his life, and I think probably with me having moved here to trying and figure my shit out, we had stuff in common. We hung out quite a bit when he was in town - we’d go on hikes. Bowling. Drinks. Dinner. He met me at a weird “World’s Fair” in Eastern Vermont and helped me wrangle the three kids I brought with me. Sure most people thought I was being nice, volunteering to take the kids to the fair solo, but the reality was I really wanted to go to the petting zoo, which I had heard it was top notch, and there’s nothing weirder than a solo adult hanging out at a petting zoo alone. Lots of red flags. Lots of questions. So I brought the kids. And this fella met me and helped me wrangle them and divide and conquer on the rickety carnival rides. We also inadvertently wore matching outfits for an outing into the woods where we shot cans and jugs and targets. He took me to dinner afterwards and the waitress wouldn’t stop remarking on how adorable we were. But nothing romantic ever happened, despite basically going on friend dates all the time. He told me he was moving out of state for a fresh start this spring. Which totally tracked and made sense. And the last I saw of him was right before I was diagnosed with pneumonia. We had gone out for a drink and with my lack of oxygen, two glasses of wine did me in and I went home, exchanged a few texts a couple days later, then never heard from him again. I had assumed he had moved and honestly, I was battling my wrist surgery and more pneumonia and I figured Godspeed, friend. I had bigger fish to fry. I did send a text a month or two ago, recommending a restaurant in his new town that a friend of mine raved about and I wanted to pass it along. But no response. I figured he was living his new life and didn’t think much about it…..until last week.

Last Monday I woke up, really feeling my inner Pollyanna, and decided that it was a new week and a new me! I downloaded all the stupid dating apps and told myself that after work I would give it the old college try! And speaking of work, I wasn’t going to let the stress thats enveloping me drag my ass to Hell. Nope! I was going to just force the day to be better. Plow through the sludge and make it out the other side with a smile on my face! And while I was at it, before I left for work, I checked the website of the writing workshop I had applied to, because damnit I was feeling good! Maybe I’d play the lotto, too? Who knows! Everything was looking up, despite it all! And then I saw that submissions were closed and they had already picked the students for the course…which meant I was not one of them. I was bummed, truly, but tried to look on the bright side. Maybe Italy was due for a bad quake and this rejection would be saving my life. Maybe they just don’t like humorist memoirs. Who knows. But I tried to not let it get me down. So I drove down to work. And since I’m still sans a parking spot, despite my Winter foibles, I had to drive up the street, past work, to the free parking area, lest the evil parking gnome boot my car (again). And while I was parking, I noticed another car coming up to park. And that person was the friend that I thought had moved out of state. And after a series of urgent texts to my mutual friends while I circled the block, I found out that lo and behold, he’s been here this ENTIRE TIME. He never fucking moved. I got ghosted by a man I’ve never even kissed in a town of 7,000 people. He must do some serious maneuvering to stay away from me, since this is the first time I’ve noticed him since he “moved”. And since my pride is skating on thin ice these days, I did what any normal, totally functional woman who happened to see a man who disliked her so much he lied about moving to another state would do at 7am while trying to park her car….I waited to see that he was looking at his phone, leapt out of my car, and ran towards work as fast as I could, only stopping to take a puff of my inhaler after I had rounded the corner out of his eye-line. I’m not mad as much as I am confused? Like, how hard is it to say “thanks for the restaurant rec, move was delayed a bit but I’ll check it out soon”? Pretty hard I suppose. So that was a shitty way to start the morning, and the stress I was trying to plow though? Aside from the general chaos, I also had an ornery old man get real mad because his biscuit was cold, and he decided the best way to show me was to put his half eaten biscuit in my palm, TWICE, to prove to me its warmth. It took everything in my power not to lob that gummed up biscuit across the room into his smug face. The nonsense caught me like those sad-sack Wooly Mammoths in the La Brea Tar Pits. Only its me, instead of a giant beast, being bogged down by work and crazy people and indecision. And as I slowly sink into the mire, I remember to take my phone out of my pocket and delete tinder and bumble because, LOL. If being small town ghosted aint a sign not to do it, not sure what is? And in case you’re wondering, I was still, STILL, convinced something had to go right after that hideous turn of events. You see where this is going, right?

After work, I put on a hair mask, because self-care when your life is a cespool is imperative, and decided to pop down to the store at the bottom of my hill for seltzer water and a lottery ticket. I decided not to walk, lest it triggered an asthma attack on the walk back up. I was being smart!!! RIGHT? Wrong. As I was waiting to check out, the man in front of me was obviously on something. His eyes looked like he had double pink eye encased in two inches of ice - he was gacked out of his mind, hands shaking and couldn’t use the credit card reader. When he walked off, the cashier said, “Jesus I hope he’s not driving”. Reader, he was. And as I walked out to my car, wearing sweatpants, holding my seltzer and a lottery ticket that I just knew would turn this shit around, I witnessed Double Pink eye reversing very quickly into my car. He somehow managed to basically parallel park his car directly into the side of mine. I started screaming, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK” at him. The cashier started screaming at him. And surprise, he didn’t have any ID or paperwork, and said he needed to leave to get it. The cashier called the police while this was happening, given his state of mind and how he was driving away. We both didn’t think he’d be coming back. He, to his credit did, ID card in hand and with a tree branch sticking out of his driver side door jam(?)…he also decided to high tail it before the police arrived. So I had to stand, in my sweats, with a hairmask on, giving my statement for 30min to the police, while another officer tracked him down to see if he was ok. While I’m talking to one of the officers, the other lets me know that since he came back, its not a crime and they can’t test him for drugs. And then, I swear to god he said, “I think he’s just real slow. Like mentally”. And I responded, “Are you telling me we called the police on a slow person and not someone who is on copious amounts of opioids?”, to which he said, “ITS HARD TO TELL THESE DAYS!”. And with that, I took my seltzer back to my house and decided that maybe I should call it a day.

Because y’all, that was just my MONDAY. One fucking day. Thats my life in general. Any given day is filled to the brim with strange events and disappointment. Maybe its because I’m looking for weird/bad/exhausting things to happen, that they do. Maybe the shit I’m putting out in the universe is causing this nonsense to materialize. Maybe the weird stuff has to go somewhere and I’m the best person to handle it - I’m like that old commercial where they say, “Give it to Mikey, he’ll eat anything”. Maybe thats it! Maybe karmically I’m taking one for the proverbial team. Wouldn’t that be lovely? I hope thats what it is and not that I’ve got a hex on me. Some sort of slow burn witchcraft that will eventually drive me mad. Nope, I’m going to hope for the best. I get the weird because I’m the best person for the job! One day, shit will be different. One day I won’t get ghosted. One day I’ll be able to tell my friends about the Italian writing workshop I attended. One day I’ll scratch off the lottery ticket and see that its a winner. Until then, despite it all, I’m gonna just keep plugging ahead.. And just to be safe, I’ll take a lesson from Pollyanna and won’t climb any trees after a church bazaar. Because the last thing I fucking need is small town paralysis. Even Pollyanna had her limits.

Summertime in Vermont

Summertime in Vermont truly is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever witnessed. Maybe its not as grand as seeing the Tuscan hillsides absolutey covered in sunflowers, it’s not as showy. But to me, its the most beautiful. I grew up in Texas, and summer in Texas meant Brown. Dead. Sorched Earth. Eyes stinging with chlorine from the pool. Thighs burnt from sitting on a metal bench in shorts. Insane amounts of AC. Summer in California was no different than Spring or Fall or Winter in California. Perpetual sunshine. Groundhog Day. Brown mountains dotted by rich people’s houses and pops of green, here and there. Smog. Palm Trees. Never having to wear anything other than sandals. But Summer in Vermont knocks the wind clean outta ya. Its green. Every where you look, its a deep verdant green, lush and bursting forth with life and bounty. The air is filled with sounds of birds chirping and bugs buzzing in the lazy summer sun. The chipmunks under my porch happily nibbling on the little treats I leave for them in the morning. My back yard springs forth with plants I didn’t even know where there - raspberries and wildflowers and patches of forget me nots that clover the ground in a delicate blue carpet. The air smells sweet. Wholesome. Summer in Vermont is the apology note of Seasons. The makeup sex after the harsh Winter. Here to remind you that things can be lovely and easy and, for at least a few months, the least of your worries will be slipping on ice and shattering your wrist, sans insurance. A momentary respite in the storm.

Summer in Vermont is what roped me into this whole thing in the first place. I had quit my job with a very, very A list multi-hypentate, and had zero idea what I was going to do with myself. I got top recruiters and while looking at different industries, the jobs were more of the same. True 24/7 positions where you’re supposed to live and love to serve, like some monster. Your personal life would be on the back burner, again, but hey!, its six figures and you’d get to travel. I mean, sure you’d have to pack and unpack your boss, sneak in and of of the hotel rooms, making them think somehow the magical fairies knew exactly the pair of pants and folders you needed for the meeting. Waking up at 4am to triple check reservations and drivers and dop kits and if there are the correct chargers in the car and in the restaurant where they’re doing one of their seven meetings today. And then, even though the boss is long asleep, you’re up past midnight checking off things and double checking for the next day, just to face the same insanity again. But sure, you get to see the Acropolis in passing. And got to enjoy running though the cobblestone streets of Paris to YSL because your bosses dress shirt got fucked up by the hotel dry cleaners and you better get a replacement before they notice. And all that should be worth it, right? You get to make some money you’ll never be able to enjoy because you work all the time, while living in the most exciting city on the planet, but you’re unable to have a social life, so you feast on resentment and bitterness until you eventually have a stroke and die. And thats where I saw myself. And after an interview where I emphatically told the recruiter I would NOT work for a Murdoch and they then pitched me a job with George Soros, I realized I was stuck. And I went home, stopping for a bottle of wine and Thai food and watched Baby Boom. And the next morning I was in a rental car with my dogs driving up to see a house I saw on Craigslist at 3am. And the further North I got, the quieter everything seemed. The roads meandered like streams, not seemingly to follow a straightforward path, silently telling you to just follow it wherever it lead. Don’t worry that your cell has no reception. You’ll be fine, because the countryside was dotted with old barns and happy looking cows, grazing and basking in the sunshine. And the tree branches were heavy with apple blossoms. Quaint little towns with quaint little general stores appeared when you needed them too, and then faded away as you drove down the quiet roads, North, North, North. And before you knew it, without realizing really why, you’re babbling to the owner of a little house on a little hill about how you just need a change and to get away from it all and had he ever seen Baby Boom? And you can tell he thinks you might be a little nuts - with your spiel about apple sauce, and the fact you recently bleached your hair solid white, which looked quite chic, but also meant you were going through some stuff. But when you tell him you’ll use your inheritance and cut him a check for the entire years rent, and with that, whatever reservations he has go out the window. And you’re now driving back to New York to pack up your life, again, and hope that the green and goodness of this weird, quiet, special place will fill whatever is missing in your life.

But after moving here you realize that just because you’re in a special place, it doesn’t mean the bad things won’t follow you. And despite the air being filled with leaves rustling and chipmunks chirping, and the two years you’ve been able to distance yourself from the noise and chaos and anger, you’re still you. All those bad habits are still there. You still don’t know how to live your own life. So you bury yourself in work. You get up and go into work every, single, day, even if just for an hour. Focus on your job so much that you don’t have the energy to do anything else. It worked before, didn’t it? You were able to lose years of your life at those jobs, and never once really understood what you were missing out on until you left it all behind. You may be a fuck up in every other aspect, but by God, you work hard! You worry about everything. You’re worried about fucking stuff up at your job. Worry about the cancer you’ll inevitably get. Worry about when the day comes that your dogs die. You worry you’ll never, ever meet someone and you’ll always be alone. So alone that you can feel it in the marrow of your bones. You worry you’ll never lose the weight and that you’ll always hate the person starting back at you in the mirror. You break your wrist and can’t write for months and worry about all the deadlines you’re missing. You worry about money, all the fucking time. You worry you’ll never be able to sculpt again. You worry that if you actually tell people how you feel, how adrift and lonely you are that then they’ll start worrying. You spend so much fucking time worrying, there’s no time left. So your entire plan of getting your shit together and getting a life is one big ruse. Because you’re doing it again. Maybe its because you don’t know how to live for yourself. You’ve spent your entire adult career catering towards others, that you forgot to take care of you. Maybe its that weird East Texas thing your family raised you believing - that doing things for yourself - was somehow indulgent and selfish. Or maybe the whole thing is that you don’t actually believe you deserve something good in the first place. So you chose a career and bosses where you were constantly demeened and it created a self fulfilling prophecy. You shoot yourself in the foot and wonder why you’re bleeding. And now that you’re out of it all, you have no idea how to cope. So you break out your old methods, and while worry feels awful, its better than hoping for something good and it falling through. The rug being pulled out from under you. So you hold all those worries close, like little Talismans. So you won’t trick yourself into thinking this place, with its beauty and decent people, could be the place for you. You keep yourself at a distance from it all.

But.

On this morning, with the sun shining and gentle wind blowing, as you water the flowers and drink coffee on the front porch, You’re forced to remember that first drive up to Vermont. And wonder if this place isn’t a little magic after all? A lush, wholesome mirage that transports people who need some time to figure it all out, to this place. A place where you’re able to fuck up and be flawed and not have to do it surrounded by concrete and chaos. You can be a mess and trying to figure out how to be human, and this strange little beautiful land, will be your buffer. It won’t abandon you to the grime and brown. It will let you fall down and then scoop you up and drape you in a cloak of forget-me-nots while you tend to your wounds. And I guess, if you have to worry somewhere, isn’t it better to worry here? Where you can dig your toes into the soil as you water the squash, and make little fences to keep out the woodchucks who like to nibble on the lettuce. And where, if you need to cry or contemplate, there are so many secret, quiet rivers that you can confide all your secrets in, and they’ll slowly drift away. Never gossiping with the trees or the bees. They’ll take your secrets and meet with other creeks and rivers, and other peoples worries and woes, and it will all blend together and wash away. Because this is a place people come when they need to change. Whether they realize it or not. A little Xanadu for the worries and people who need to shed their skin. And while the Winter forces you to change in harsh, beautiful ways, the summer is there to salve your wounds and kiss your cheeks with sunshine. And when the Fall comes too soon, as it always does here, you’ll be ready to slough off the old bad bits that are still there, and start the process anew. And hopefully, in another summer, you’ll see a change. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe the worry will still be there. And the sadness, too. But so will the morning glories and fireflies. And I think thats a fair trade.

BULL DURHAM'IN

There are many things I’ve come to embrace over this last year and a half in Vermont. The ability to make Patagonia clothing fit even the most formal of Vermont events. Appreciation of the fact they put maple syrup in E V E R Y T H I N G here. Food. Drink. Motor Oil. If its in Vermont, its probably made of maple syrup. The deep, deep screams of pure terror/regisnation that bellowed from my soul as I skidded down my driveway on a daily basis during the Winter. I’ve even found myself thinking its adorable that every single citizen drives a Subaru. Live dat sensible life, Michael Gross! But the one thing I’ve really gone whole-hog on, where I’ve not just doubled down, but allowed it to become part of my cellular structure, is embracing the hornless that is being a single woman on the cusp of forty. I’m sure that would’ve happened if I had stayed in New York, or even gone back to LA, but being in isolated, rural Vermont, where the men wear flannel and build shit with their rugged hands, has basically poured fuel on my horny fire, and I AM OUT OF CONTROL, BABY! It’s like that movie BACKDRAFT, but in my vagina. Jason Gedrick getting burnt to a crisp in my loins. So, its probably no wonder, that in my horny spinster haze, I’ve sought out a pastime that merges all of my interests: beer, hot-dogs and handsome baby-boys. I’m talking about my town’s summer baseball league. I thought it was minor league, but then realized its a summer collegiate league based in New England, and honestly, thats the best thing my horny heart could imagine.

Growing up in East Texas meant that football was, literally, the only game in town that mattered. On Friday nights, all the radio stations in our area would stop playing Taylor Dane and Mark Chestnutt and would switch over to live broadcasts from the high school games. Old men would bring folding chairs to the sidelines of the pee-wee football games to scope out the kids and speculate about future prospects. Hell, I cheered at those games in elementary school! My town was like if Friday Night Lights had a baby with Footloose, but that baby ended up being extremely un-cool. So, I grew up with Football being pretty much the most important thing next to God. And I haaaaaated it. I spent every single Fall Friday night from elementary school through High school at football games. I was a member of the Blazettes, which is the drill team, in High School. That meant I wore a sequin bathing suit with a mini cowboy hat and boots, while doing high kicks while our creepy youth minister ogled me from the stands. Even taking away that bullshit, the bottom line is, I find football to be incredibly boring. I don’t get the excitement unless someone literally runs the length of the field for a touchdown. It’s a snooze. Also a snooze are the outfits - how the fuck are you supposed to sexualize men if you can’t see their damn faces?? And my disinterest in sports really runs the gamut. My grandfather used to have golf on in the background all the time, and that monotonous low volume “par 4. and he’s on the green. birdie for Phil” creepy chatter makes my skin crawl. I played indoor soccer in high school, but couldn’t tell you anything about professional players of that time. I could’ve cared less. Until college, when I developed a deep, deep appreciation for basketball. Well, not basketball in general, but more specifically, Vince Carter. Holy Moly he was/is such a babe. That awakening was when I got to thinking that, hey, maybe sports being full of beefcakes and all should be something to grab my attention. But it wasn’t until I worked at my first Hollywood job and started going to Dodger games that I realized how enjoyable objectifying men on a field could really be!

During those years working for truly the best folks in Hollywood, I went to an obscene amount of Dodger Games, thanks to their Dodger Suite. It started innocently, me accepting the invite to the suite because there was an open bar and free dodger dogs, which, I mean, who can pass that shit up when you’re a poor 26 year old? Then I started going because I realized it was an incredible way to impress dudes you’re interested in dating. I’d meet a guy in a UCB class and casually invite them to a game - then BLAMMO! Fucking best suite in the stadium. A list actors ! Dessert Cart! Tommy Lasorda coming in to say hello! The works. I was the cooooolest when I was able to take dudes on dates to the games. Eventually, I took over control of the tickets, which meant I had to go to all the home games and handle getting tickets to talent/executives/family. And amazingly, thanks to the copious amounts of free drinks and and that weekly processed meat high, I found myself getting, unintentionally, kinda into the actual, ya know, game. I enjoyed watching the bases get loaded. I liked when the innings dragged into the night. Or when there was a fly ball headed straight for some idiot jr exec’s noggin in the box next to us. But what I really found myself interested in were the Hunks - specifically Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier. I collected their bobbleheads. I googled their significant others/wives. I analyzed every aspect of their beef. And thats when I realized how brilliant baseball really is - not the sport part of it - but how they really, truly, market it to the folks looking for hunks. Why baseball is so smart, is because it really showcases the beef. The only time you don’t see baseball players faces is when they’re up to bat &/or the catcher - and in those instances, they project those handsome mugs right up on the Jumbotron for your horny, ass! And baseball uniforms are great - jaunty, breathable, and allowing us to see the two B’s: Biceps and Butts. The only quibble I have with the baseball aesthetic in general is their weird affinity for Oakley Sunglasses. Which are known to many as birth control - because they flatter NO ONE. Tom Fucking Hardy could be naked with a bottle of champagne, ready to bone down with me, and if he slapped on Oakleys, I’d be out the door, in my car and driving straight into the nearest, deepest body of water, ready to end it all. They are hideous. JNCO’s for the face. An indicator of a love for “PISS ON..” stickers and Kid Rock. But aside from that, baseball has got it figured out! And for five wonderful years, I got to bask in the glow of the hunky Dodgers faces and enjoyed every second of it. But then I changed jobs, and started working seven days a week, and then moved to Atlanta and lost track of my love of the 7th Inning Stretch and peanuts and at-bat songs. And my horniness was replaced with bad bosses and bitterness and a lack of sleep so intense that it caused my hair to fall out of my damn head. Until Vermont.

I’m not sure what actually, physiologically, shifts in your body and hormones when you’re a single woman in your late 30s, but it is INSANE. You know how people talk about Baby Fever? Thats me, but with handsome dudes. I want them ALL. I want to feast on a buffet of prime-time dick and I will not be appeased until I have it. A smorgasbord of hog. All you can eat, hunks. I can spot a hunk or a beefcake a mile away. I started listening to One Direction because of my horniness over Zayn. I once interviewed with Zac Efron and thought I’d have to consider turning down the position because of how hot he was! It’s INSANITY. Apparently you hit 35, and if you’re not married with a kid, your circuitry shorts out and all the blood in your body is replaced with pheromones. You’re literally ruining on pure horniness 24/7. Somehow your body recognizes how close you are to death AND the fact that you’ve not procreated, and so it makes you crave hunks and beefcakes and petite handsome and the works. I hit my mid-thirties and everything changed. I went from being a normal lady to some sort of sexual predator. I started reading romance novels. I would openly, and unintentionally, gawk at passing Handsomes. My horniness is totally out of control and consuming my life. And being in Vermont, with a limited selection of ANY men, let alone USDA certified beefcakes, is tough. There’s only so much googling you can do, when you really need to see free range Hunks, out in the open, in real life. So, imagine my excitement, when I stumbled upon our towns summer baseball league. I was originally drawn to the event as I’m drawn to most things here, due to equal parts boredom and amusement. I wanted to see how quaint a small town baseball game could be - and the answer is, its off the fucking charts. The stadium looks like something out of A League of Their Own. Its tiny, with red white and blue bunting everywhere. The “beer garden” is actually just a cooler, with a little table and the local bartender flipping a sign with the score on it each game. The mascot is….incredible. Its a fucking mangey looking Woodchuck named Skip, with creepy Graves Disease eyes, and who is absolutely terrifying. And each game during a break in the innings, he dons rollerblades (!!!) and skates behind a golf cart that has been modified to look like a little baseball hat. Kids walk around selling raffle tickets, and most of the time you can get away with not even paying the entrance fee. And then there are the nights when they do fireworks - which are what seem to be Roman candles launched from the outfield, freaking out unsuspecting patrons of the “beer garden”. It’s incredible. It’s hysterical. It’s quaint. And its become my favorite thing during the Vermont summers. Due to the things listed above, and also because, and this is the important part, all the players are all 20 year old college baby boys who are F. I. N. E.

Tell me these goblin Woodchucks aren’t gacked out of their critter minds on New England smack.

Yes, I should be ashamed. I should realize that ogling kids who are young enough to potentially be my children (had my late teens/early 20s been a bit more exciting). I should be, but I’m not. Because I’m a red-blooded lady who is sliding closer to death each day and apparently the only things giving me joy are beefcakes and realizing that you can stream the PBS version of Anne of Green Gables online now. So I do what any lady who realizes she needs to feast her eyes upon prime-time D would do, I go to these baseball games. My goal is to become the Susan Sarandon of Central Vermont. Just scooping up these Lil Hunks and teaching them shit - what I will teach them has yet to be discovered. I’d like to say I’ll teach them important stuff about chasing your joy and not letting yourself work for bad men, but honestly, it’ll probably just be me bitching about how much I have to shovel in the Winter and then introducing these baby beefs to bad 70s Sci-Fi. Nothing sets the mood for some Cougar action more than forcing a Petite Handsome into watching multiple episodes of Buck Rogers: Man of the 25th Century. But this is my life now, a baseball aficionado due to my love of Hunks. I figure there are worse things I could get myself into here in Central Vermont - opioids, specifically. Scoping out hot ass seems like a much safer, albeit less exciting, route. The only issue is, I’m apparently not the only lady who has these aspirations. I witnessed another single lady around my age on some sort of date with one of the baby beefs, and I’ll be honest, I was jealous - she was putting into action what I’ve only hoped for - but I also have to remember there are around 40 of those dudes, so there’s more than enough hog to go around for us ladies. So, tonight I’ll do what I do most night the team is in town, I’ll head over to the rec field, take a seat on one of the park benches in the “beer garden”, and objectify some dudes while cackling like a mad woman at the mangey Woodchuck rollerblading around the area. I guess this is my version of living my best “39 in Central Vermont” life.

Living out my Teenage Nightmares

Recently, while waiting for the doctor to see me, I read that New York Times article decreeing Gen X a mess. The timing of that article could not have been more fitting. Because it truly feels like I’m regressing at a Benjamin Button pace. Somewhere along the line, I veered off course, my car caught on fire, then took another sharp turn, went careening down a cliff, aflame, with me screaming inside, like something out of a 70s action movie. But instead of blowing up and incinerating me on the spot, it landed in a pit of my own making, slowly burning me alive like Paul Walker (RIP), surrounded by all the bad decisions in my life. Every student loan payment I ignored, everything I put off until tomorrow, all the indecision that rendered me inert, all the self-imposed hibernation, the reminders of my own stupidity and inability to behave like an adult, have come back to be the kindling to the fire that is currently consuming me. I’m a hot garbage mess that feels like a teenager again. Not a teenager insofar that I’ve got the metabolism of a God and my entire life, free of blemishes, in front of me. Nah, girl, I mean teenager as in living a waking nightmare with every day filled to the brim with shame, embarrassment and terrible decisions. I’m spending all my free time loathing myself, and having to relearn all those life-lessons that didn’t stick the first go around. I thought the whole thing with life was that you grew smarter as you got older. Like, thats the payoff? If not smarter, at least wiser? Well thats not the case with me. I certainly don’t feel like that wise old owl snarfing down a tootsie pop, sassing the youth, while wearing his cap and gown. Nope. I’m back to 13 year old me, all while trapped in the body of an almost 40 year old bitter woman who still enjoys the fresh, unisex scent of CK ONE. Woof.

See, Teen Morgan was a lot of things. She was equal parts outgoing and incredibly strange. She was neurotic. Mooney. Hyperaware that she was different. Aside from just being weird in general, I also went through an existential crisis/depression at the tail end of elementary school. A situation which required a lot of therapy. There were different therapists. I had a school therapist. That one was just some Baptist lady doing counseling in her free time, so that she could use those sessions as a way to spread the word of the Lord. She also used a dolphin puppet named Duso to help her drive home any life lessons. It was awful. Then there were the other therapists, trying to calm me down and pin all of my issues on my parents divorce. The adults in my life needed the divorce to be “the thing” that lead me down this path of mental destruction. If it wasn’t the divorce then I was just questioning the world and that would not do! Because If you’re not already aware, adults in the Bible Belt tend to be real freaked out by children who question the nature of reality/eternity/our souls purpose, at a time when they should be pouring over pics of Corey Haim in Tiger Beat. There is nothing a Southern Baptist dislikes more than someone questioning God. Well, actually, they probably dislike gays, women, free choice, and people of color more than that, but depressed children are up there on the list, thats for sure! And so, while my friends were trading their Barbie’s for Cover Girl frosted eyeshadow, I was pretending to be “normal”. Because telling my friends what I was going through wasn’t an option, I really didn’t want to add social pariah to the long list of ailments, I decided that assimilation was the only course of action. So, I sought out advice from the experts. Experts being teen entertainment sources. For social guidance, I chose cinema as my spirit guide. SINGLES shaped what I expected my future to become, and as dark as that is, it aint far off from my reality. I’m a more highly functioning, less talented Cliff! PRETTY IN PINK reinforced how I felt socioeconomically in a town where all my friends were rich, coupled with my inability to get a crush on someone that knew I actually existed. I lived my life like Andi before Blaine came groveling back to her at the Prom. For only child stuff, I read FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC. Not that it taught me anything (other than not eating donuts given to me from my gamma), but it reinforced my opinion that people with siblings have some real fucked up dynamics! And while most of the shit in my life was hot garbage, at least I wasn’t fucking my brother, ya know? And then for the real nitty gritty - the specifics on fashion, culture and most importantly, secret girl health stuff, I turned to the Mt. Everest of “Teen Truth” - tween magazines. Specifically SEVENTEEN, YM and, if I was able to find it in my neck of NE Texas, SASSY. These magazines provided me with all the information I needed on how to present as a “normal", with the added bonus of allowing me to see what life was like outside of the pine curtain of NE Texas. And that was very important given my hometown took off MTV, deeming it too Satanic. I’m not kidding when I say the Baptists ran our town less a like fun, less jazzy, FOOTLOOSE. ,

The B-I-B-L-E, yes thats the book for me!

YM and Seventeen allowed me to get the answers I needed in a neat and tidy way. I didn’t have to out my inner turmoil to my mom, or my friends, or my therapist. Instead, I opened the pages to those glorious magazines, and was given the blueprint as to how I was supposed to behave as a red-blooded Gen X teen. Wanna know what color of Docs would make all the grunge boys swoon? Oxblood, baby. Wanna know what sort of face wash to use to clear up my burgeoning pimples? It’s clean, clear and under control, girl. What to do with your hands when a boy kissed you? Who fucking knows, but you probably shouldn’t keep them rigid at your side like a nightmare Nutcracker, the way I did when I kissed Matt Bean next to his creepy Trans Am. But those geniuses at the mags knew EVERYTHING. All the shit I couldn’t figure out because I was too busy worrying over the fate of my soul due to past life behavior. But what I really took as the word of fucking God, the gold standard of advice, were the articles about girl health. It should also be noted, that at this time I was also operating as a low functioning hypochondriac. Which was super cool and very chill and I would absolutely recommend being a straight weirdo who was clinically depressed AND worried about death 24/7 by age 13. I can’t imagine why I was such a late bloomer since I was such a hip chick! Regardless, I needed to get my medical fix, and since I had exhausted my doctor, and I didn’t have the sort of relationship with my mom that allowed me to have “those” types of conversations, I felt it was best to leave any “girl questions” to the experts at the mags. I guess I assumed all the questions sent into the magazines, from scared, weird girls like me, went to some desk and were opened thoughtfully, one by one, by a white-coated Doctor who’s life passion was to make sure people all over the world had their very important questions answered. Now that I think about it, I bet it was just some rich girl on a summer internship from Smith fielding those super personal notes. Reponses written in between binging Zima’s on the front stoop of someone’s parents brownstone in the Brooklyn Heights. Whatever the case, I took what those magazines said as the absolute facts. When one of them told me a horror story that pre-ejaculate could get you pregnant by like, traveling into your vagina due to a combo of dry humping and underwear shifting, like a hideous game of Oregon trail, with the pre-cum fording the river into your vag, and all the oxen inexpliably surviving and getting your ass pregnant, I BELIEVED THAT THEN, AND HONEST TO GOD, I PROBABLY STILL BELIEVE IT NOW. I will never, not think about that when fooling around with someone. The magazines were really into scaring you straight as far as pregnancy went, probably because they knew a lot of kids only had those articles as their sex-ed. The other thing they drove home was period safety. And specifically Toxic Shock Syndrome. Every month there was some terrifying story about a girl who left her tampon in, got toxic shock AND DIED. And thats not a romantic death. Thats period death! And period death, as every teen knows, is awful and embarrassing and I worried every month about getting TSS. I worried about tampon strength and time said tampon was left inside me. I worried about inserting a tampon on top of another tampon, which was deemed a fate worse than death. And all of those articles and health tips have stuck with me through the teen years, into my twenties, and now late thirties. Which is why I found it so ironic to be reading the article about GEN X being a bunch of directionless hot garbage monsters, while sitting in the Planned Parenthood waiting room because I had inadvertently stuck one tampon in on top of another and forgot about it….I was living a YM “It happened to me” letter to the editor. And I was losing my fucking shit.

I will spare you the nitty gritty, but let me tell you, having a tampon left inside of you for the better part of a month at age 39, with 25 years of tampon use and fear of TSS drilled into you by those aforementioned magazines, is fate far fucking worse than having it happen at age 15. Aside from general, overwhelming mortification, I also had to endure eight tries with a speculum to get to the rogue tampon freed, to no avail. Eventually, after about a half hour of trying to pull Baby Jessica from my well, the doctor had to throw decorum aside and use her hands to fish that fucker out of the sideways position it had taken. A position where it was blocking my cervix and had set up a nightmare pop-up shop. I didn’t give a shit what it felt like, because when I realized I was running a low grade fever, I just knew the next stop was TSS and PERIOD DEATH. And Jesus Christ, with everything that has happened, Period Death was a bridge too far. So I didnt care the method, I just wanted that fucker out by any means necessary. The examination table and area surrounding looked like the set of a SAW movie. By the time the doctor had sent that thing back to Hell from whence it came, we had both seen things that I never, ever, want to think of again. If ever witness anything like that again, I’ll off myself right then and there. I don’t give a shit if its inside a Barnes and Noble, in line at Panera, at children’s dance recital, if I see or smell that again, I’m blowing my brains out immediately. And when it was all done, with my voice hoarse from saying, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry” over and over again, the doctor, who was my age, and I shared a laugh about how this truly was my teen nightmare come to life. And how, despite everything being fine, no TSS, no weird stuff (other than a tampon having been lodged in my cervix), this fucked me up way more than my bionic arm surgery, or second bout of pneumonia that hit a few weeks ago and cause me to chip a tooth from coughing so hard, did. Me having to live out my worst teen nightmare feels like insult to injury at this point.

Because, the reality is, this isn’t the only thing I’ve dealt recently with that feels very “High School”. I’ve gotten terrible crushes on men who definitely didn’t dig me back. I’ve accidentally face-timed a man via the Instagram app, not realizing that was possible, and in my panic, threw my phone across the room while screaming. I’ve had bouts of hating myself and being so insecure about my looks that I’ve refused to be in photos for over two years. I keep thinking its regression, but maybe I actually never grew up in the first place? Maybe I am a directionless Get X monster, and having to reliving all these scenarios, at different points in my life, is the punishment for not behaving like an adult? Maybe being stuck back in the worst part of my teenage years, replaying the same drama and woes and worries, as BEFORE SUNRISE quitely plays in the background, is my version of Purgatory? I dunno. All I know is that this year is only six months in, and I’m terrified to see how the rest pans out for me. I’m either going to win the lottery or be swallowed by a sink-hole. I dont think theres an in-between for me. So, I guess I’ll just keep my seatbelt fastened, douse myself in CK One, blast The Cranberries, and strap in for the rest of this fucking trip.

Vermont Is Trying to Kill Me

Me after this Winter.

Vermont is trying to kill me.

I wish I were kidding, but it doesn’t take Jessica Fletcher to realize that Vermont has it out for me and will stop at nothing to have me dead. And when I say “kill me”, I mean actively kill me dead. Vermont has come to play and I’m just out here trying to survive, man.

First it was the pneumonia. Something, despite all the years with my garbage lungs/body, I had been able to avoid. Even while living in NYC, a place thats basically the inside of a grease trap filled to the brim with botulism, somehow, even there, I managed to be healthier. I now live in the damn land of milk and honey, er syrup, and I’m fucking trashed. Its a wild-ass ride, life. Obviously the pneumonia was a bummer, but I figured this was my “big shitty thing for this half of 2019”. Then, like, two weeks after that, death comes a-knockin’ again.

It was a normal Monday morning, with me just trying to leave the cozy confines of my house in order to go to work, a place where things have been very stressful and decidedly not cozy, when things took a bit of a turn. See, in my attempt to walk down the staircase, I forgot I was wearing socks and that the stairs are steep, old and slick, and I ended up very quickly losing my balance and falling violently down onto the staircase. Where Linus, my trusty little pup, had unfortunately positioned himself below me. My ass hit Linus’s body hard, wedging him between my body and the staircase. I started screaming in fear that I killed him. Linus was squealing, squished below me. And Winnie was running in circles, freaking the fuck OUT about all the chaos around her. Somewhere between the first and third stair, Linus, got himself free and shot away from me, yelping. I spent the remainder of the fall, which lasted for another 4 steps, screaming, “I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY!” over and over. It was a legitimately awful and traumatic experience. Thank GOD he was ok, but I have never wished for Xanax more than when I had to drag my crumpled body over to peer under the couch where he was hiding, to see if he was hurt. Because if he had been seriously hurt, it would’ve been due to my ASS. Think about that - my ass. There’s no way to get around that. I would have killed my dog with my fat ass and that is probably the worst way you can accidentally kill something. Imagine carrying the fact that you squished your beloved pet to death with your giant, killing machine, ass! Even just considering that outcome has me wanting to call a therapist. But, he was ok, albeit freaked out and very leery of me, but ok. So after confirming he was ok, I did what any 39 year old who had almost crushed their dog to death would do, I curled up in a ball, tried to ignore the pain shooting through my back and ass, and screamed into the rug to no-one/myself that I “hated everything”, before having to pry myself off the floor and limp out to the fucking driveway. The rest of the week seemed to follow that days lead, which is just rude. A few days later, a pipe in the ceiling above the bar at work had a leak. And not just any leak, nah, it showered us with pure, rusty, old, urine from the public bathrooms in the upper levels of the building. True Story. Having a golden shower rain down upon me really should’ve been the indicator that something was amiss. That I had definitely angered the wrong Gypsy, and whatever hex had been placed upon me had definitely been activated. Little did I know all that was just the amuse-bouche to this Winter’s shit-feast. A horn-of-plenty’s worth of absolute fucking nonsense.

The next Monday morning, I was already in a funk. I guess narrowly avoiding killing your dog with your butt, and having a stressful work week on top of getting a piss shower, of unknown piss from unknown people, can do that to you, huh? And I know I was in a grumpy mood because I broke out behavior from my past life as an assistant - I spent a solid 20 minutes of my morning looking up appropriate grumpy gifs to send as responses to anyone dealing with me that day. Its an important coping skillset I honed after years of bad jobs and bad days. So, after downloading all the gifs that I thought would encapsulate my feelings for the day (boy was I wrong), I headed down my hill and towards work. Now, the one thing I (and my coworkers) struggle with during the winter months is parking. Our establishment only has one parking spot and its reserved for the owner. Parking in our town is very limited, and free parking is a crap-shoot depending on when you arrive downtown. Before 7am? You’re good. 7 am and after? Who knows. In summer you have tons more leeway. The weather is nice. The roads are safe. A little walk in some fresh air can do you good! In the Winter? The air, if you’ve got busted lungs, even for a few block walk, will trigger an asthma episode. And the ice/snow create a “Storming the beaches of Normandy” scenario. You may make it ashore, but at what cost, soldier? Most of the time, I just save myself the trouble and park at a meter nearby. This is a problem for two reasons: one, I’m paying upwards of $14.00 a day to the meters, and two, I’ve got beef with one of the meter maids. One meter maid is lovely. She’s a spunky, middle-aged lady who wears blue eyeliner and is in a perpetually sunny mood. She’s chipper, she’s sweet, and I feel like makes the town a brighter place. The other meter maid is her polar opposite. She’s a fucking grouchy-ass woman who does * clap * not * clap * like * clap * me * clap. The first time I met her is when she booted my car last spring for unpaid parking tickets. Only, I had paid them online. There were no outstanding tickets. So I tell her there has been a mistake and show her the electronic confirmation numbers, to which she responded by screaming at me that I was lying and needed to take it up with city hall. Actually screamed, by the way. So I rush down to city hall, only to be greeted by some fucking backwoods Newhart shit. I get into a “who’s on first” back and forth with the woman in charge, who claims they don’t have on online payment system. I keep asking, well then who is operating your website because there are payment functions, and the woman keeps saying thats not the case. All the while I’m trying to pull up the website on my phone, but of course the cell service in Vermont is on par with a developing nation after a typhoon, so nothing would load. FINALLY after 10 min of arguing, she angrily gets up and walks out the door. Another five minutes pass and she comes back and says, “oh, you did pay. We just didn’t get the information from the people who process the payments”….I said, so, you understand that you do have online payment options? The grouchy “Larry Daryl and Daryl” woman responds with pursed lips, narrowed eyes and a “mmmmm”. Like a shitty, New England Slingblade. Reader I almost burnt the entire city to the ground at that very moment. The fact I didn’t shows incredible restraint on my part, if you ask me. So after all that, I have to walk back to my car to show ol’ Grumplestiltskin the paperwork so she can remove the boot, and boy that did not make her happy. I think me calling them on their mistake caused the parking department to pencil me in as EVIL RESIDENT #1. Since that experience, I’ve gotten another boot on my car, and been yelled at by the meter troll multiple times - like, actual yelling, not just curt tones. And this is a quiet town. Do you know how embarrassing and uncomfortable it is to have a little angry goblin hollering at you in the middle of the road? Its a lot to process! She’s my local nemesis. And she works Mondays. So on this specific Monday, grumpy mood and all, I knew that parking on the street would lead to another 10 bucks and a ticket/confrontation with the parking ghoul. So, I begrudgingly went a few blocks away to the free parking area. And, I immediately knew it was a bad idea. Bad because it was cold as fuck and my asthma immediately kicked up, and bad because there was ice on every single surface. Road. Sidewalks. Nothing was safe. In fact, the plows had been through and kicked up giant ice chunks that rendered most of the spots unparkable. But I ventured forward! And after finding a spot and beginning the march towards work, it was clear that I basically had to do a long-program ice-skating routine in order to make it to my destination. And somedays you’re fucking Oksana Baiul, ice- princess-ing your way to gold, and other days you’re Nancy Kerrigan getting your fucking leg whacked by a low-rent, white-trash hitman, screaming “WHHHHY” into the void. You can imagine which was to be my destiny that fateful morning, can’t you? Y’all I was really trying to be careful, but it was ice and I’m a klutz. And then it happened.

Cute candid of me on the sidewalk after shattering my wrist.

I didn’t just slip. No, sir. I did it up right. I fell violently sideways onto the icy sidewalk, throwing my left hand down to buffer myself/try not to clock my head on the pavement/try to save the laptop I was carrying a bag on that shoulder, and in the process shattered the fuck out of my wrist. Do you know the sound a corn-cob makes if you break it in two? That was the sound my bone made. I’ve always wondered if I would know if I broke a bone - like, obviously, if the bone is sticking through the flesh, yeah, but in general would I be aware of how bad a break was when it happened? Would I immediately know, “oh thats definitely broken”? I assumed not. The answer though, is a resounding, yeah. I mean, no question. I sat up on the pavement and my left wrist/arm was immediately equal parts numb and throbbing and limp. I let out the most feral, most guttural moan/scream of my life. It was, not a good look. I sat trying to get my bearings, while moaning, “fuck, fuck, fuck” over and over again for at least a solid minute. I was already in a terrible mood, and this was truly the icing on the strawberry shit-cake. And to make it all worse, I couldn’t get up. I mean, I wanted to get up, but between my arm, being splayed out on the ice, and trying to retrieve all the shit that went flying when I fell, I was in a bit of a pickle. It was 7am, on what I thought was an empty street, and I coudln’t figure out how to fucking stand up without falling again. So, I did what anyone in shock and lacking pride would do, I started scooting. I scooted on my ass, using my feet as little engines, through the ice, down the block, with my limp arm dragging beside me, and the good arm dragging my purse and laptop. It was about ten scoots in, that I noticed something out of my peripheral. A person standing outside the library, across the street from me, staring at me, mouth agape in wonder. And in that moment I snapped and screamed, “WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING LOOKING AT??” knowing damn well what they were looking at: They were looking at a woman who had “eat pray loved” herself into this fucking maple syrup nightmare. A woman who had somehow deviated from her Nancy Meyers plot line into Stephen King’s MISERY. Point: Vermont.

Once I scooted far enough, I was able to use my good arm to pull myself up with the help of a parking meter (irony), and then hobble the two and a half blocks into work, moaning the entire way. I was like Hansel and Gretel, only instead of leaving breadcrumbs to mark my path, I left little bits of my pride, and a trail of moans. Shortly after making it into work, a kindly coworker drove me to the ER. And, after a number of X-Rays, being forced to twist and contort my wrist, sans any sort of pain medication, the Doctors confirmed what we already knew, that I had badly shattered my wrist, with the bonus information at it would require immediate surgery. Oddly by that point, five hours in the ER, fielding calls and texts from work, I realized that the broken wrist/surgery wasn’t the worst thing I’d go through that day. No, the scooting and moaning and shattered wrists were just part of it. Even the fact that this all happened during a lapse in insurance, which of fucking course it did, wasn’t the worst. Nope, the worst part was having to field off well intentioned, but uncomfortable, requests to help me. There were a select group of people who wanted me to need their help like I was Shelby from Steel Magnolias. Shelby while she was in the diabetic coma after the kidney transplant failed, which we knew it would after she got that reactionary haircut. Y’all, that was a “I’m about to die, might as well do something bold” haircut. Anyway, news moves fast in a small town. So fast that, I shit you not, the man who delivers maple syrup to our establishment, sent me a get well text while I was still in the fucking ER. While I was also in the ER, I had someone come by and get legitimately angry with me because I wasn’t asking for, what they felt, was the appropriate amount of help. Instead of listening to me, an adult woman of almost 40, who has lived alone for twenty years and who has SEEN SOME SHIT, they decided to make it about them. And they decided it was pride clouding my judgment. And my independence was a character flaw. And when I politely declined some of the help they offered, help I truly didn’t need at that moment and felt uncomfortable with, they dramatically began crying and told me that I needed to listen to them. And they got right up close to me on the gurney, while angrily crying, and said that being around me is exhausting because I refuse to ask for help. Reminder that I was on hour 5 in the ER sans pain meds at this point, just trying to get through that shitshow with minimal stress. So I responded the only way I knew how, with a bemused, “I’m sorry?”. Because thats a fucking insane thing to say to someone. But such is life in a small town.

The “Spinster Delay” allowed me to be released from the hospital for a day so I could get my affairs in order and make sure my pups were taken care of while I was getting my Luke Skywalker wrist. Score one for the single ladies. On the morning of the surgery, a friend from work drove me to the hospital. While sitting in the waiting room waiting to be admitted, we joked about where my spirit would haunt if I happened to die during surgery. Because I have to admit, I was a tad nervous. Not of surgery, but of where I was having surgery. I’ve been really lucky to have had amazing care whenever shit has gone sideways. I have a bone tumor in my hip - I’m fine - but its a whole thing, and during the process of figuring out what was going on, I somehow ended up with one of the best orthopedic surgeons in California. No joke - it was me and a bunch of athletes and celebrities. I talked to Ryan O’Neal in the waiting room once! But, I’m not used to a rural hospital. One that, thankfully I didn’t learn until after, used to have a very bad reputation for killing folks. And of course my pneumonia decided to rear its ugly head again directly before all of this nonsense. I was not looking forward to going under with busted lungs. No, sir. My biggest fear was, if I died in that Central Vermont Medical Center - would my body be forced to haunt that area? Or do you get a choice? Because If you’re only allowed a specific area, I’m assuming the Hosptial, given its track record, is full-up on ghosts, so the next closest establishment is a “mall” that is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been. And I’ve been to Eastern Europe. All I could think of was haunting that run-down, empty rural mall for eternity - just floating up and down the halls, whining about how being a ghost sucks and trying to remind the customers about the BOGO sale at Bath and Bodyworks and doing my loops by the weird kiosk that only sells flannel wolf blankets and dreamcatchers. Occasionally pointing a lost looking soul towards the JC PENNY, depressed for both of us. That future seemed just bleak enough to be a real possibility, and therefore activated my anxiety. Luckily though, the pneumonia was able to be kept at bay for surgery, albeit with some creative fixes, and after a few hours, I came out of it all and was back home, propped up, and tending to my new bionic wrist. I’m now a very cranky, cusp of middle-age, cyborg!

Its been a few weeks since my surgery. I upgraded from the surgical splint to a hard cast. I’ve had this super fun thing happen where my incision (which goes from my palm down my wrist) feels as if its on fire for no reason. Which is awesome. And sure there have been some sleepless nights, and a lot of discomfort, and I legit sobbed when the stitches were taken out, but I made it through solo. Like I was most comfortable doing. And did it without taking the OxyCodone the doctor prescribed. Ya girl is already fighting an uphill battle in life, and the last thing I need is a debilitating opioid addiction on top of that, ya know? Could you imagine? Woof. So, here I am, typing with one hand and icing the other, while my two trusty pups keep me company. They’ve been such sweet companions these past few weeks - I think they even know Vermont is out to get me and are doing their best to protect me. Even if I almost ass-murdered Linus. And the thing is, in the grand scheme of everything, this Winter of bullshit is nothing. It’s a blip on the radar. I can complain about all the bad shit in my life and know, truly know, that everything will be ok, and that this move to Vermont, while proving to be a real son of a bitch, is/was the right thing to do. I can also say that I think this Nancy Meyers movie i’ve created for myself has taken a bit of a dark turn. The plot points have gotten a little more intense, and there has been a shocking, SHOCKING, lack of Sam Shephard-esque dong for my liking. I was looking for Baby Boom, and its turned into Somethings Gotta Give meets SAW. Lets lighten shit up, ok, the sooner the better. Karmically speaking, something truly has to give.

But the grass is going to be sprouting up soon. And the trees will be budding. And thats when I’m expecting my karmic payback for this shit. Thats when I’m preparing for my windfall. And what I’m preparing for is to be showered in Patagonia-clad fuck-daddy dick, and piles, and piles of money. Diving into a pool of them both, Scrooge McDuck style, and then retreating to my Nancy Myers inspired kitchen for a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta that mysteriously never allows you to gain weight. And as I lift the glass of Pinot Noir to my lips, I’ll glance down and see a faint outline of the scar on my wrist, the one hiding the metal plate and screws they implanted on my that fateful Winter day. And I’ll chuckle quietly to myself, and Sam, (that will be my Vermont boyfriends name) will look up from the Washington Post, and ask whats so funny? And I’ll say, “oh, I was just remembering that one Winter when Vermont tried to kill me” and we’ll both laugh and laugh, because its true, and also because I made it through, like I knew I would. And then we'll bang on the handsomely styled kitchen island, because I deserve that too, ya know? And All of this will be exactly as it should be, a fucked up chapter in a weird time in my life, that will lead to something better. As long as I stay true to myself and invest in a very expensive insurance policy.

So try your best, Vermont. I have seen some shit, you flannel clad, green-mountain motherfucker. I'm not going anywhere. I survived worse than this on any given day at my old jobs. I am ready for your nonsense. I survived Harvey. I survived East Texas and my childhood and a stint working at the Sara Lee snack cake factory. I will not fall victim to your Hallmark Channel-ass. I’m not going anywhere, fuck-face.

A Touch of the Black Lung: A Mid-Winters Tale

Cute pic of me totally thriving this Winter! xo

I believe that most women who are single and of a certain age are, like me, are for the most part, accustomed to being alone. Its not that we don’t want to have a partner, someone to go through the ups and downs of this wacky world with, its just that because God loves us less, and decided that we’re unworthy of regular bone sessions and unconditional love and support because we’re garbage people, we’ve become conditioned to take care of shit by ourselves. We’re the ones who drag the trash through knee deep snow drifts. We buy the groceries. Rush our pets to the vet in the middle of the night and handle those nightmares solo. We take the car to the repair shop and figure out how to get home in a rural area without a working vehicle. When the basement overflows with sewage, spewing from every pipe and causing you to have to buy 11 boxes of FRESH STEP kitty litter in order to soak it all up, we’ll we’re the monsters who go and purchase that. WE. HAVE. TO. HANDLE. OUR. OWN. SHIT. Literally. And most of the time, even If I lament my singleness to no end, I do know that, unless the right person comes around, I’m ok-ish with my reality. Because while my reality contains a lot of shit I don’t enjoy, it also means that I have my house and my stuff to myself. Which means I can do what I want most of the time. For example I can go to bed at 8pm, slathered in oils and potions hoping to ward off gravity and age, and awake at 4am to view Center Stage while making stress crafts. Now that I think about it, that could be why I’m single, but still! Imagine trying to do that with some hunk wanting to ravish you and shower you with love all the time? What a fucking buzzkill!! And look, its not a perfect life by any means, but I deal most of the time. Until I don’t. There are two instances that cause me to break the zen-like nature I’ve crafted while being an isolated, spinster. These are times when I well and truly lose my shit and it causes me to scream to the Gods, and curse them to the depths of Hell for never sending me a strapping carpenter, or Middleburry Professor who looks like Secretary-era James Spader. And those times are when I have to shovel snow or when I’m legitimately sick. Those two things break me in ways its hard to verbalize. And up to this point this winter, it’s been very, very heavy on the snow and the curses to the gods for making me shovel. Until now. Now I’ve gotten the double whammy. Insult, meet injury.

I think its actually quite surprising that I don’t get sick more often, to be honest. I’m not what you call a “healthy” person. Up until this year, I slept about 4 hours a night and my main dietary staple was a bottle of wine with a side helping of stress and repressed anger. Sure I boxed, but I don’t think anyone thought it was healthy to punch nonstop for two hours, fueled by rage. What I’m saying is, I’m amazed I’m actually still alive. Not only alive but somehow also with a functional immune system. Science! With that said, the thing that tends to remind me of what a sack of garbage I actually am are my lungs. I had asthma as a kid and into my teens, but it wasn’t debilitating by any means. And irritation, but tolerable. My grandmothers however both had horrible, horrible asthma and I watched in terror from afar, thinking of how awful it was seeing them gasp and wheeze and spend stints in the hospital, thanking god that I would never have to deal with that nightmare. HAHA. Jokes on my ass. A few years ago, my asthma came back with a vengeance. I went from not really worrying about it to sleeping next to a rescue inhaler and trying life hacks to, ya know, breathe. It became awful and exasperated by stress. Which, if there’s anything I’ve had in the past decade is stress. But even with the lung issue, for the most part I’m able to miss out on the cold and flu season. I never get stomach bugs, I’m not sure what my intestines are made of, but i’m pretty sure its that mercury shapeshifting indestructible metal shit that the Terminators foe melted into during T2, because I’m immune to all that nonsense. Sure I’ll get a head cold from time to time, and I’m always suffering from allergies, but an actual flu? Rare. Once every few years. Which is awesome. But I guess that also means when I do get sick, I get sick big. I go for the gold! And go for the gold I apparently did this year.

It started recently with my asthma getting worse at night - and before I knew it I had gone through a brand spanking new rescue inhaler with 200 glorious, lung opening puffs, gone in less than two weeks. That is…not good. At all. I would get winded and need to take a puff after walking from my car into work. I walked around the dining room filling coffee and would be winded so bad that I’d have to take a puff. Then the cough arrived. Now, this is not my first rodeo with a cough that makes people wildly uncomfortable. The last time my asthma got very bad, I was between working for Harvey and my last boss, and had taken an interim position with a billionaire on the Upper East Side of NYC. Like, an actual, real deal very billionaire-y, billionaire. He looked and behaved like Daddy Warbucks, but I actually didn’t mind him so much. I knew his daughter from a former job and wasn’t scared of his whole screamy-schtick. My coworkers however, were terrifying. The woooooorst. I worked in a bullpen with seven SEVEN 7!! other ladies - all assistants doing the same thing for the same man and trying to sabotage the others. It was chaotic, and remarkably, the first time I had been bullied by coworkers in a way that made me loathe going into work. Sometimes I would just sit on the subway and let it take me all the way from Brooklyn to the Bronx, before riding it all the way back, and then having to force myself to get off at the stop that would lead me to the office. As my stress ramped up, so did my asthma, and the cough that came with it. The cough was/is not really comforting to hear. Its like if an elderly woman who had been smoking since the age of nine and worked in a coal-mine since birth, caught tuberculosis. It’s unnerving, and I’m sure it was very annoying to listen to while you were busy trying to plot schemes against coworkers. It really put a damper on their evilness. But, because we worked in close quarters, I was told the sound of my cough was problematic and was sent to our in-house doctor (the perks of being a billionaire). The doctor was also concerned and convinced I had pneumonia and set me up with the best pulmonologist in the city. The appointment was a week later, but before I could go, I ended up in the ER. You know how I mentioned that being single means you have to deal with shit solo? Well in this case it meant I had to fucking uber myself to and from the ER and pharmacy in Brooklyn. There’s nothing like having a party Uber pick you up at 3am on a Saturday night, with house music blasting, as it scurries you to the closest hospital. I seriously considered ducking and rolling out of the car, allowing myself to die on the street, rather than the last thing I heard before being ushered into the underworld being some hideous house music with the smell of busted air fresheners wafting through the Kia Sorento. The upside was that after a few breathing treatments and heavy meds, I was better regulated and it wasn’t more serious. But you know what? No one came to fucking check on me after that. To make sure I was alive. I had to keep myself alive!!! What the fuck, ya know? So, this ain’t my first rodeo with black lung. So, when my asthma kicked up this time, I knew what to expect. Until the cough that I was used to also took on a seal-barking quality that added a level of awful to the sound that even made me shudder. It was bad enough that I chipped a tooth coughing and then barfed from gaging for good measure. Come and get me, boys! * wink * So, I spent two nights fitfully googling “whooping cough” symptoms, and then recording myself and sending videos of the sound of my cough to my wonderful friend Erin so she could give me some advice. And her advice was go to the fucking ER. I laughed it off. I had been down this road before. Everything was going to be fine. Until I coughed so hard that my heart started fluttering and I almost passed out. It was then that I realized, if I did die, who the fuck would find me? Maybe my coworkers if I didn’t show up to work. But honestly, I need to do a deep clean on my house first and I don’t want to die while its messy and have people tromping around through all of my bullshit. I need to clean before my time comes. So, the next day I begrudgingly went to the urgent care. While having a coughing fit in the waiting room, three (3!!) people got up and retrieved complementary masks from the receptionist. It was mortifying. The doctor could hear me outside and fast tracked the process. This time I did have pneumonia. Baby pneumonia. But pneumonia all the same. I was given prednisone, which I hate and antibiotics and told to take it easy.

And this is where I will totally cop to turning into a big ol baby. When I get sick, like sick, sick, and not some trifling cold, that is the moment that all my “eh this is my lot in life, I’m fine with being alone” bullshit goes straight out the window and I scream and curse the gods and wallow in my misery. You know why? It’s not because people won’t help you, its that you’re going to have to ask. And I do not want to ask. Because asking means you work yourself with the whole process - the worrying you’re overstepping, worrying you’re asking too much, worrying you’re asking too little, worrying you’re asking at all. And I loathe that. I loathe having to ask someone, when I already feel like hot garbage, to do me a favor. I want to be sick and have my medicine and some soup and someone to make sure the dogs are fed and ok while I sleep it off. And I don’t have that. I don’t have anyone who is obligated to just be nice to me without me having to ask for it. Without me having to go through my rolodex to figure out who’s schedule might align at the right time to do me a favor and who I can ask and not feel like its going to be “a thing”. But being single means you don’t have that option. And when you’re feeling crummy and low and you just want to fucking sleep, the last thing you want to do is deal with all the logistical and emotional shit that goes with needing help. So, you suck it up and if there’s soup there, then you’re good and if not, if you’re like me, you scrounge around and find top ramen and try not to think about what a pathetic sight you are. An almost 40 year old woman eating top ramen out of a mixing bowl because you don’t have the energy to do dishes, hacking away the best years of your life, while you look outside and realize thanks to the fresh three inches of snow outside you’re going to have to shovel, busted lungs and all, because there’s no one else to fucking do it for you. Yet again. And honestly, isn’t the biggest perk of having a partner being able to have someone to support you in times of need? Like, isn’t the whole point of being in a partnership having that person who will be there through thick and thin and who will help lift you up when you’re in a bad place. And you do the same for them? Goddamn that sounds nice right about now.

And by the way, yesterday morning I did get out and shovel the snow. And guess what? IT SUCKED. If you feel like I’m about to tell you the shoveling in the snow caused an asthma attack and I fell no less than four times, well you are correct. Because I did fall and I did have an asthma attack. And to make it all worse, a neighbor going down the road before me spun out and somehow ended up sideways, wedged between the guardrail and the hill, unable to un-stick himself. None of us could get down the hill (unless you wanted to attempt to walk down the ice, slide over the top of the Subaru like you’re in fucking CHiPs outrunning Ponch and John and then never be able to get home because your lungs won’t allow you to walk up the goddamn hill at the end of the day). So I sat in my car for an hour waiting for the wrecker to arrive, hacking and wheezing, with narrowed eyes - glaring at the snow and beauty and majesty. And in that moment I allowed myself to hate myself for being single and hate myself for moving to Vermont and hate myself for hating myself. The feeling passed, but much like my wheeze, it will be back. Its always there, hiding away, waiting to make an appearance to remind you that it exists. But until then, I’ll keep taking my antibiotics, and inhaler, and God willing, if I’m still here next year, I’ll have someone who will be there to quietly help without me asking. But I’m not holding what little breath I have. At least the thaw is coming, right?

SCREAMING INTO THE VOID

If you’ve ever awoken to a faint cry in the distance, the horrid sound of a deep, insurmountable pain, echoing through the ether, wrapping its sorrowful tendrils around you while you lay cozy in bed, sending chills down your spine, and wondered, “what mournful beast could be in such mortal peril?” - wonder no further, my friend, thats just me, attempting to shovel my driveway, solo, again.

Look at all that fucking snow

I’m sorry, I know I’m supposed to be a hearty woman who has SEEN * CLAP* SOME * CLAP* SHIT* CLAP * but the reality is, I fucking HATE shoveling. I hate it. I hate waking up, looking outside and it being absolutely magical, like some real snow-globe amazingness, with glitter coated cotton candy flakes everywhere, and instead of being in awe, my heart will immediately sink because I realize in order for me to get out of my driveway it will take approximately an hour of shoveling, four puffs from my rescue inhaler, and about 3 - 5 times of me falling on my ass due to the ice under all that snow. And thats just to get out of my driveway. Thats not even the hellish adventure that awaits when I attempt to drive down my street, which is one of the steepest in town. Most days my brakes lock-up about 3 seconds into the drive, and then its me skidding down a one lane hill, while I scream bloody murder and pray to Satan that the snow plow isn’t awaiting me at the bottom. Its honestly terrible. 90% of my snow related anxiety is due to that fucking hill. Y’all we’re only two months into 2019, and I’ve had to do a lot of fucking shoveling. And a lot of Dukes of Hazzard sliding down my hill. I’m exhausted. Exhausted from shoveling. Exhausted from the cold. Exhausted from looking at my bills and realizing I bought $600 of heating oil first of January and I have to buy another $600 this week. I’m exhausted from being single and having to handle all this shit by myself. I’m exhausted from pretending that living in this Hallmark fever-dream isn’t a little bit harder than I expected.

My 2019 started in stark contrast to how I spent the first couple weeks of 2018. This time last year, I had just gotten back from a trip to the West Coast. I went a few days before New Years to escape the polar vortex that was plunging the East into a Siberian ice-hell, and, looking back, to escape myself. By that point, I had begrudgingly lived in quaint isolation for around 4 1/2 months, and it was showing. And it ain’t a good look. I guess I didn’t have any real exceptions when I moved to Vermont, other than sleeping, walking through the Green Mountains and trying to figure out what the FUCK I was supposed to do with my life. What I didn’t anticipate was my former boss being outed as a predator, and everything that came with that news. The media. The stress. The reliving scenarios over and over again. The lawyers. The conference calls with former coworkers trying to make sense of it all. The people I hadn’t spoken to in decades coming out of the woodwork asking me extremely personal questions, chomping at the bit, hoping that I’d have some sort of salacious answers for them. And when I didn't , the same people would lob accusations about my complicity. And I guess I thought I could move to Vermont and kinda shake off everything that had happened to me like a snake sheds its skin, and emerge, not a new person, but a cleaner, refreshed, invigorated version of myself. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the introspection and reflection covered me in thousands of little paper cuts, that stung and burned and reminded me of everything I wanted to shed. And I also assumed I would lose the weight my doctor said I put on due to being stressed and in fight for flight mode for over 6 years. So I got a personal trainer/ boxing coach, and my full-time job was working out. I drove to Burlington six days a week to box, and row, and do pushups, and box jumps, and kettle bells, and cardio, and whatever else my trainer threw my direction. But nothing happened. I wanted to look in the mirror and see the old me coming back - I wanted to look in the mirror and see the bold, funny, yes, skinner, old me. The one who took risks. The one who laughed. The one who had an endless surplus of creativity. But she didn’t show up. And the weight didn’t fall off. And then, because the world is cruel and things tend to kick you when you’re down, my dumbass went and got a long-distance crush. As one does. And because it came out of the blue, it made me think that, by God, it was really supposed to happen! Why would that appear out of the ether if it wasn’t written in the stars?! I felt that somehow, this was the universe karmically (finally) paying me back! Maybe all that bullshit I went through led me to this. place. right. here. This place where I found someone who, while they seemed way out of my league, for some strange reason, actually liked my brain and personality? It was the perfect fucking Nancy Meyers moment! This was my out of the blue potential love affair that would reinvigorate my soul (and loins) and would catapult me into the awesome and deserved life I’m supposed to fucking have in this adorable little hell-hole! IT WAS FINALLY FUCKING HAPPENING. But, like most things, it was a mirage. And a cruel one at that. There’s something truly crushing about being given the slightest taste of something, something that feels good, something that you didn’t know you needed until you got a bite, and knowing you can’t have it. Having a fleeting moment of hope and then having that snatched away like Lucy pulling Charlie Brown’s football. And a lot of that was due to me, due to the piles of bitterness and shame that envelop me like a cocoon. Looking in the mirror and seeing some sort of lumpy, chubby, hobgoblin who doesn’t believe she deserves happiness or love or sex because it’s been withheld from her for so long. And so, it was with all that and the impending Winter weather hell, that I packed my bags for an extended trip to the West Coast and my former life.

I embraced the Manifest Destiny of it all - I rented a chic hotel for my stay. I booked a private boxing coach because I didn’t want to lose my momentum with training, and I was still hopeful that I’d look in the mirror one morning and be happy with what was looking back at me. And I took general meetings, hellbent on getting back into the industry and back with my friends. Friends who had known me since my first job at Playtone and UCB and my move to Atlanta and then New York and now Vermont. And I went out to drinks with everyone I missed. And I drank oat milk lattes and pretending to like them. Pretended to fit back into my old scene. But my edges were jagged and nothing locked together smoothly for me. I felt like an imposter. But I’m fucking stubborn - so I just jammed myself into my old life - ignoring the discomfort. The little warning bells ringing in the back of my head, singing, “This isn’t good for you, Morgan”. Because being alone in the cold, didn’t feel good either. So I assumed it would be better to embrace the Devil I knew. And I celebrated New Years with champagne and merriment and when I woke up on New Years Day I felt terrible. And not hangover terrible, but I felt so profoundly blue. Something about the dawn of a new day and a fresh year felt like a scab had been ripped off and all that tender, oozing flesh underneath it was exposed. I went with a friend to get our tarot cards read that day. And it was one of the strangest, most intense experiences I’ve had. This woman said things that shook me to the core. And her main point kept being that I used to be a fertile valley, but in the process of nurturing and feeding and tending to everyone else, I dried up. I was cracked, brittle mud. And I had tapped all of myself for others. And eventually, with time and rest and self love and focusing on my own needs, I would be green again. But it wasn’t going to be an overnight process. I needed to work through my karma. Work through my sadness. Work through my pain, and when I was ready, contentment and joy woudl come. But It would not be today. Or tomorrow. Or soon. And I guess I took that shit as a challenge, because my dumbass went all-in and in the midst of all of this, I thought it would be a good idea to be bold and meet that person I had weird, unexplainable long distance feelings about. I joked to my friends that I felt like people were bellowing, “DEAD MAN WALKING” at me as I entered the bar to meet him, because we alllllll knew that would not end well. But, I did it anyway. Because at that point I still thought that if I fucking put the work in, if I worked out everyday and took chances and felt all the hard shit I had to feel, that there would be some sort of fucking cosmic payoff. And the dude? He was lovely and funny and very kind and very, very much not into me in person. Which I assumed would be the case, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t give it the good old college try! I was Bruce Willis giving my pals a thumbs up while going down to blow myself up along with an asteroid. I wasn’t going to make it back alive, but ya gotta give me credit for trying, right? And I extended my trip, because going back to Vermont was going back to reality. I think I knew deep down that I wasn’t going to move back to LA. That the jobs I was meeting about wouldn’t pan out. That blue that I felt was me realizing that my old life was just that. And LA couldn’t be my safety-net anymore.

So instead of escaping reality this year, I chose to, maybe not embrace it, but at least dig into it. I spent my Christmas solo. I spent my New Years Eve, curled up in bed at 9pm, listening to my sleep sounds app. I could’ve ventured down to the local pub, drank way too much and awoke on January 1st worried I’d made an ass of myself as I’ve been wont to do. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t polished off a bottle of wine while watching Bridget Jones Diary and lamenting my singleness, which I’ve also been known to do on a fairly regular basis. But I also didn’t do that. Instead, I did something that I needed. I slept. And I protected myself from the feelings of longing that nights like that can dredge up inside of your guts. Because I realized something about my trip back to LA last year, and why it needed to happen, and why I have to be careful about tricking myself like that again: that trip made me feel legitimately terrible. In my attempt to momentarily flee my realty, what that actually did was put into full view all of the things I missed out on while working myself into an early grave. I missed falling in love. I missed getting my finances in order. I missed having a family. Going on vacations. Spending time with my grandparents who had gotten very old while I wasn’t around. And I missed learning who I am as an adult. Because I just fucking pushed all my shit aside for men who would never appreciate me or my skillsets until I was gone. And thats on me.

And so, here I am - stir crazy and tired in Vermont. When I say I’m single, I mean that in a way that reinvents the definition of “spinster”. After my hideous attempts at online dating here, and watching men’s eyes fall with disappointment when they saw what I look like, which I assume is something on par with a tubby Swamp Thing, I deleted all those apps. Then, right around this time last year, due to the cold making me very cranky and very horny, I decided to throw caution into the wind and go and meet up with a ski bum lawyer from NY happened to be at a mountain an hour away. I had turned down his offers for months, but then figured the worst thing that could happen would be that he murdered me. Sexy time murder might be the best outcome I could imagine for myself here in Vermont. I literally have zero idea what I’m doing otherwise, so why not end up a Dateline special? With Keith Morrison staring quizzically at all my garbage art and stacks of romance novels and ruminating on what a sad life I surly did lead. All my friends getting to sadly shake their heads “yes” as Lester Holt asks if they saw this coming. Better than spending every day staring into the void, so I said fuck it and drove to meet this guy at his hotel near the ski slopes. An hour away, for the record. An hour that was used to remind me that every fucking minute I drove toward this stranger was a very stupid minute indeed. But I arrived at the hotel, and I use the word “hotel” loosely, as it was a Rodeway Inn and it was not what you would call “chic”. My friends now refer to any sort of boning down as “going to the Roadway Inn” - which is hysterical and also really embarrassing. My late 30s have been the Walmart version of Sex and the City. It’s all the grossness and regret, but none of the sensuality. I was definitely creeped out upon arrival at said snowy hovel, but the hunk of a hipster who met me at the door with a deep-ass French kiss, might’ve helped me gloss over more of the unsavory elements of a busted hilltop motel from the dark side of the 70s. This shithole seemed to be ok for the hipster lawyer, a man who liked to spend his money on helicopter trips to remote mountains where he could live out his K2 fantasies, and loved to French kiss, instead of a clean and non-panic inducing abode, but to each their own, ya know? And I guess I had to suck it up it in order for me to live out my “I’d rather not morph into Jack Nicholson in the Shining so I might as well get busy with a stranger fantasy”, so whatever. I’m not proud of this. I was also not convinced that this man, a man I drove over an hour to meet, woudln’t regent me upon site. I was so nervous I dry heaved in a Dunken Donuts drive-though 20 minutes away from the motel. I was convinced, obviously very healthily influenced by former experiences with beefcakes, that the guy would take one look at me and high-tail it up the Mountain, or lock the door and not let me in. But hell froze over, and he didn’t lock me out. He greeted me with a deep French kiss like a total maniac, but I stayed because, I mean - horny and cold and also over an hour from home. And you'll not be surprised to find out that true love did not ensue. Nope, I stayed, and it was awkward and strange and kinda great until I thought about it and then it wasn’t at all and I immediately felt REAL weird about being at a Roadway Inn. But life is truly is a highway and this highway let me to a budget motel and a handsome dude and some deep dicking that did not bring me back to life, but definitely made me question a lot of things. But y’all, . the winter months do weird shit to people here. They make you seek out murder by handsome stranger dick over spending another fucking night alone in your house, drinking wine and watching youtube videos of the making of Steely Dan’s AJA album. But that was last year. This year I haven’t reached that level of insanity, yet, tho I can feel it nipping at my heels. Its coming. This winter has been long. And I’m tired of myself. I’m tired of treading water. I’m tired of pretending that life here is easy and magical when most times its me looking out my window and saying, “what the fuck am I doing??” as I watch people snowshoe through the hills of my neighborhood.

The forecast is calling for another 2-4 inches of snow to fall overnight. That means tomorrow morning, at 5:30am, I’ll be dragging myself out of bed, into my boots and will then attempt to shovel my car out without falling and breaking my ankle or having an asthma attack. And then, after that, I’ll have to see if I can make it down my hill without killing myself or someone else. And, if I’m able to make that happen, then I have to go into work and stand on my feet for hours and have twenty-somethings roll their eyes at me when I ask them to do whatever task is needed. And then I’ll go home again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. For the duration of the Winter. So, when you’re trying to sleep and you hear that faint scream in the night, know that its me. Shoveling again. And hating it.

♪ Memories, like the corners of my mind ♪

I suppose, after a around foot of snow over the past few weeks, its safe to say that Winter has officially arrived in Vermont. And, because everything here is equal parts irritating and beautiful, one has to prepare for the onslaught of the snow and cold - you can’t just wing that shit. For Vermonters, this means switching over from their regular summer tires (used for all of a 4 months per year) to the more durable, and, very expensive, “Winters”. Preferably studded. One must also make sure their heating supplies are stocked. In my case, its ensuring that the giant, seemingly wildly dangerous, tank of heating oil that lives in my basement, is filled to the brim. Which is also so, so expensive. And, then there’s the whole pulling out of the heavy jackets, and the snow boots, and making sure your shovel is by the door, etc etc etc. All of those things are imperative to surviving a New England Winter. One that has, apparently, decided to make its entrance a month early. So, with Mother Nature a’knocking, I begrudgingly did all of the things mentioned above. Only I took my preparation one step further - I made an emergency appointment in order to get my rescue inhaler refilled. I did this before I would be forced to shovel my driveway, which would cause me to start wheezing, and inevitably, almost like drop dead like Annabella Sciorra in “THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE”. And lest you think I’m being dramatic, I’ve had some experiences that have caused me to keep an inhaler with me at all times.

I’ve mentioned my hellish bosses before, and alluded to one in particular, who has recently been in the news. It probably won’t surprise anyone to know that the person I was referring to is Harvey Weinstein. There’s a bit of a gray area around what we, former employees and assistants, can discuss. Our NDAs were revoked in order to allow those who needed to discuss certain aspects of the job and situations, to be able to do so without his team throwing lawsuits our direction. My lawyer seems to think we’re safe from his lashing out, but who the hell knows at this point? He suffers from, amongst other things, what I call: “Goblin Logic”. This logic causes him to care about and behave in ways that don’t make sense to normal, fully functioning, humans. And so, while I don’t think this specific story is going to come back to bite me, I also can’t be sure. Strap in for this nightmare coaster, pals.

I worked directly for Harvey as his personal assistant, and Harvey is, without a doubt, an asshole, misogynist, sociopath, and a vitriolic bully. Also a complete pile of fetid shit. Everyone in his orbit knew/knows that he was/is a dick. And I absolutely admit to taking the job knowing about his reputation of being a bully (the other allegations I absolutely did not know about). I naively thought that, given my long history as an A-List executive and personal assistant, if I took this job with Harvey, a man who was the pinnacle of filmmaking, I could suck up a year or two, get promoted, and never have to assist EVER. AGAIN. That’s how strong his pedigree was. And, like most things in my life, I was absolutely fucking wrong. So wrong. So, so wrong. Not only did I not get promoted, I left my fucking job with Harvey only to go on and work for other another narcissists, who not only broke my spirit but also crushed me into a million little pieces. Score! Editor’s note: never, ever follow my career trajectory, kids. Its a train wreck of epic proportions. Anyways, what I’m saying is, I knew, to a degree, what sort of person Harvey was capable of being. And, because I’m a mess, I also knew that my greatest skillset up to that point, had been dealing with difficult people. I’ve worked for some nice folks, sure, but I’ve mostly worked for really, really tough dudes. Grade-A assholes. Shitbricks. Fuckfaces. And those dudes, maybe didn’t care for me on the whole, but they tended to respect the fuck out of the fact I could always get the fucking job done. Even while being loathed by them and belittled at every turn. Which is why I was offered the job with Harvey, and why, despite all the red flags, I accepted said job and immediately relocated to New York from L.A. I can honestly say that the only upside I can find from my experience with Harvey and The Weinstein Company, is that the folks I worked with - the other assistants and low level execs - were super, super kind, intelligent, and good people. Those people, like me, just wanted to help make amazing films, the kind we grew up with. And I’m sure they, like me, never imagined that their career trajectory, that was part of their dream to make films and content that matter, would have them peripherally connected to a predator and monster. It’s an awful chapter in my career. But I will defend the goodness of those folks, my fellow assistants, until the end. I consider my former coworkers friends, and, despite it all, I’m glad I know them and that I shared some of the lighter experiences of that hell-hole with them. Even if some shared experiences now include depositions and lawyers.

Anyway, back to Harvey, the King of the Hobgoblins. Surprise, surprise - Harvey was, is, and always will be a horrible, horrible person. I wish I could tell you aaaaaalllllllllll the shit that lead up to the story I’m about to share, but I truly don't have the time nor the cash to preemptively pay my lawyer in order to roll that beautiful bean footage. Let me just say that, the blessing and curse of who I am, is that I don’t back down or let myself get fearful when men scream at me. I probably should have; I would’ve had a much better career had I fucking peaced-out of those situations sooner. But here we are. Anyway, looking back, the first couple of months with Harvey were uneventful. Well, I mean uneventful much like the boat ride up to the shores of Normandy was uneventful for those soldiers. Everything is relative. Sure, things were NOT going well, and they could see death on the horizon, but it also wasn’t a beach strewn with bloody body parts and men shitting themselves from fear…yet. I was sort of buffered from some of the direct path, category 5 hurricane Harvey bullshit. Mainly because they were desperately in need of a personal assistant, and one, who was a bit older. So for that reason, I was spared a little of the insanity. Until I wasn’t. Let’s just say that if you’re a goblin, you’re probably going to have a goblin family. And specific members of said goblin family may not like you, nay, they may hate you with the passion of a thousand suns. And that hatred will bleed into everything, and before you know it, the Goblin King will hate you, too. Deeply. And you’ll go from having a fairly stable work-life, to being a dying extra in Saving Private Ryan in no time. For example, I had two weeks where I wasn’t allowed to speak in the office, at all, because my voice was a “Cancer”. I wish I were kidding. I went from Harvey saying he wanted to make sure I was able to go home early, to staying at the office until 1am on Christmas Eve and same thing on Christmas Day as punishment for being myself. And, in what becomes an ongoing theme in my employment with Harvey, I was ditched. I was ditched in Connecticut at an event and had to figure out another way home. I was ditched at events in the city. I was ditched in the Hamptons. Harvey would get irritated with my intelligence, or my face, or whatever, and just, leave me. I’m not kidding, one time he had his driver peel-out, literally leaving me in the dust at 10pm one evening trapped with his elderly mother. It was incredible. For Harvey, location or time of day or safety of me didn’t matter. Once he was done with me, he was done. And I’d have to figure that shit out. Which, and this is my own shit, most of the time I found that funny. Not funny, “ha ha” but more like, “wow, this sure will be a good story one day”. Only I’d forget that I wouldn’t be able to tell those stories one day, because of said NDA. Also, and I need to remind you, I was a grown ass woman at this point. Someone in their mid-30s. There’s just something so specific, sad, and weird about ditching a grown-ass lady who works for you on the side of the road.

So, with that jumbled mess of a back-story, please join me on a crisp Winter’s day in Tribeca. It was a Friday, not unlike any other. I was tasked with getting checks signed and messengered back before the deadline, which had always proved to be one of the biggest pains in my ass with that position. It wasn’t just finding a window of time - it was planning said time in a way that wouldn’t cause everyone in Harvey’s path to get destroyed by any anger directed towards his bank accounts/me. I had to think of the collateral damage that would be incurred by said check signing - because that was his party trick - taking out his anger on everyone in a fucking two time zone radius. In this case, the checks were wildly overdue and we were approaching zero-hour on some very important things. That meant me doing whatever was necessary to get the checks signed. In this case, after badgering him all day, he decided to scream at me as he was passing my desk, en route to the waiting SUV below which was taking him to the Berkshires, to get my shit and follow him ASAP. The thing you have to understand is, Harvey didn’t say, “come with me”, and wait for you to collect your things, maybe use the restroom, and join him. NOPE! You had to literally go with him at that exact second or you’d be left behind/destroyed. And in this case, I had to get those checks signed, so in my mad dash to leave, I grabbed the checks which were in my laptop bag and nothing else. No jacket. No purse. Just my blackberry and computer bag. I ran to catch up with him in the elevator and could immediately tell that there was a mood a-brewing. This was confirmed when one of my male coworkers also wedged himself in the elevator with us at the last minute. This guy, who is just a doll, is also someone who I referred to as our “canary in the coal mine”. I’m not proud of this, but, it was my experience that IF Harvey seemed to be in a mood, you could always confirm or deny this based on how much he screamed at this specific assistant. Want to see if Harvey’s anger management session stuck? Send in the office Canary. Didn’t get those Oscar noms you thought were a given, and think Harvey is about to implode? Send in the Canary. So having this dude with us - who was dragged from his desk still wearing his headset for the phones - meant that we were basically sitting on a powder keg. He had panic in his eyes, and I realized that we were about to embark on an incredibly awful journey. I was not looking forward to being trapped in a stuffy SUV with a farting, screaming Harvey and us, his human punching bags, but I assumed it would be a quick trip. I knew I’d be eventually be ditched somewhere in the city, hence me not being too worried about a lack of a jacket or purse, what with Uber and all. What would normally happen is that you’d jump in the car starting at 365 Greenwich in Tribeca, and somewhere on the West Side Highway, between Tribeca and West 80th, after Harvey had signed whatever he needed to sign, he’d have the driver pull over and dump ya. From there, you were one Uber ride back to the office. Irritating, but fairly painless. And normally, having Harvey as a captive audience was a quick-ish way to get shit done and be on your way. This would not be the case.

In this case, we had barely gotten onto the West Side Highway, when it became apparent that Harvey was real, real, real, pissy at, I guess everything, but specifically me. He was mad that I needed checks signed. Mad I wasn’t getting one of his kids the right gifts. Mad my voice was grating. Mad. Mad. Mad. And no matter what angle I tried, I could not get him to focus on the fucking checks. His driver careened up the road and the other assistant sat silently while Harvey alternated between taking calls and batting away the checks I was trying to place in front of him. It was as we passed the last exit on the West Side Highway, that the other assistant and I started trading frantic texts, with each mile taking us farther and farther away from safety. And to make matters worse, Harvey had somehow gotten a hold of tic tacs. Harvey does NOT do well with sugar. Any sugar. Even microscopic little fucking tic tacs. And this teeny weenie little plastic thing of tic tacs had a seemingly unending supply of hideous, rage inducing, white mint hell-snacks. Mary Poppins bag couldn’t contain more shit than that fucking little jar of tic tacs. They just kept coming, no matter how many he was pouring them into his mouth. Just shoving them down his gullet with his fat t-rex arms, while screaming and chomping at the same size. The car was too warm and smelled like our fear mixed with his farts and peppermint. Barfs welled up in my throat as Harvey’s driver darted between cars at insane speeds, and sharp, wet shards of tic tac shrapnel spewed out of Harvey’s mouth, hitting me on my cheeks and arms, as he screamed at us. On top of this, I was the one taking dictations, since I stupidly bought my laptop. So, I was typing the sugar-rush dictions of a goblin, while being doused in peppermint spit, when I got a red alert text from the assistant still in the office. All hell was breaking out there too, but, worse, Harvey’s wife was calling, mad about something I did, and they were about to connect her into Harvey and needed me to be prepared. The conversation did not go well. And the subsequent freakout was intense and not fun, given I was trapped in a fucking car inches away from him, and, at this point, and hour and a half outside of the city. All of my texts to the other assistants were variations on, “IM NOT GOING TO THE FUCKING BERKSHIRES WITH THIS ASSHOLE. DO YOU HEAR ME”. And, to my credit, I didn’t. I did not end up going to the fucking Berkshires. Because, due to my incompetence Harvey hit his “Morgan” wall, and before I knew it, he was screaming at the driver and we were barreling towards the next exit. As we pulled into a gas station parking lot, I tried to convince him that I was a better choice to take along because I had my computer. Listen, I did NOT want to continue in the car with him, but I really fucking I hated to see my coworker being driven along in what could potentially become his own personal Bataan Death March. But my attempts were futile and Harvey was DONE with me that day. And it was there, in the parking lot as he was literally pushing me out of the car that he said:

“It’s been such a pleasure spending time with you, MOR-GAAAN” and snorted. To which I dryly responded “Likewise”.

Harvey got flustered, popped some more tic tacs, and screamed in my face, “I was being facetious!!!!!” and slammed the door. And in one of the few moments of real chutzpah, I ran along side the SUV, opened the door, and screeched back at him: “I WAS, TOO!!!!!!”. And before I knew it they sped away. And for a moment, I was really fucking glad to be out of that car. Until I realized what the fuck was happening. And what was happening was that Harvey had dropped me in the middle of a fucking snowscape in upstate New York, hours from our office, sans coat. I was wearing a long sleeved shirt, skirt, tights and boots - jacket was on the back of my chair at my desk, along wth my purse, phone charger, inhaler, etc. And I was cold and standing in a parking lot on the side of the highway trying to figure out where the fuck I was. After frantically attempting to order an Uber/Lyft/Coast Guard helicopter extraction/Car service, to no avail, I took the next step and called the office to enlist their help - only to be hung up on. Not once. Not twice. But three times. At this point, I was cold and very, very angry. What I didn’t realize was, the person hanging up on me, the only coworker stuck in the office rolling all the calls and keeping that shit on track, was being fired. Literally at that exact moment. Because only TWC would have an HR person who decided that mid-day, while the boss had abducted 2/4 of the office while the other assistant is en route to advance a trip, that it would be the best time to fire the only person there. So that person was, rightfully, losing their shit. So, with no options, I spotted what looked to be a train platform across a skybridge, that went across whatever freeway ran below. It looked to be about a 5 minute walk. In what felt like 20 degree weather. And at this point, anxiety, anger and the cold are setting in, so I start walking, then I stop, because the office calls back, apologizes and despite their situation, they’re working to get me a car. So I walk back to the parking lot. A few minutes later, as hypothermia begins setting in, I get another call saying despite their best efforts, there are no cars close, and the hour and a half on the train back to the city would be the best option. So I start walking again. And at this point, I’ve walked back and forth a few times, in the cold weather, sans jacket, and the last walk up the skywalk stairs starts to trigger my asthma. And that’s when it hits me, aside from not having a jacket, I also don’t have a wallet or my fucking inhaler. How am I going to get back to the city if I can’t pay for the train?! PANIC. I try to call the office again, but apparently Harvey has called the person who just got fired, and is now dictating to them and giving them tasks. Even though he just had someone fire them. It’s pure chaos, and I’m on my own. PANIC. I keep walking towards the platform, and at this point, I’m gasping for air. PANIC. Fun fact about asthma: something that can make it exponentially worse, and hit faster, is to panic. You know what causes panic? Being alone on an unknown train platform, sans money, or inhaler, and with a dying phone, all while trying to figure out how the fucking hell to get a train ticket back to the city. At this point, I start crying. I try and scream for help, but there is not a single person in any direction on this abandoned platform and nothing but a wheeze comes out anyway. I am pathetic. I thought I remembered seeing a pay phone, but it was back up the stair case and across the skywalk where I had just come from. There’s no way my busted-ass, garbage lungs would get me that far. And it was at this point that I inexplicably start getting hot and sweaty. Like, noticeably sweaty. Mind you, its 20 degrees outside and I’m in skirt and shirt with no jacket. So now I reeeeeeally panic, as I’m pretty sure my body is shutting down. And in my panic, I violently dump everything in my bag onto the platform AND strip off my long-sleeved top, so that the white camisole, which should never see the light of day, is the only thing I’ve got up top. Said camisole on Kate Moss in a CK One AD would be provocative, this camisole on my pudgy, sweaty, wheezing frame, with the bonus of all of my mascara running down my face in streams, made me look insane in ways that are hard to describe. l was like some sort of dying, feral, monster - clawing through the garbage dumped from my bag, scratching at the ground in search of something.

I’m just going to pause right here - because I want to note that, I’ve heard it said that many people have near death experiences and its in those times that everything becomes clear. It all just makes sense. An experience that is both life changing and life affirming. FUUCUUCK THAT. This was not that sort of experience. As I was digging through the loose change, tampons, pens, tubes of lip balm , hair ties, pay stubs, etc - mascara streaking my face, while wearing a fucking undershirt like an insane raccoon, the only thing affirmed was that I wanted to die very quickly. To be put out of my misery. I did have an out of body experience, though. I levitated above myself and saw that pathetic scene and said, “OH HELL NO!”. And then, in all that carnage, the assistant who happened to be en route to the airport (not the one still trapped on a Highway to Hell with Harvey and not the one who was fired) called me about something unrelated, realized I couldn’t talk, and tried to track my phone so he could call an ambulance. Now, calling an ambulance would have been the absolute correct thing to do. However, I had taken a wild-ass pay-cut to move to New York. Which, folks, never, ever take a PAY CUT if you’re moving to New York!! But, as you’ve noticed, I’m an idiot who makes bad decisions. And I really thought I could leverage the Weinstein gig into not ever assisting again(ha), and therefore living in abject poverty would be worth it in the long run. Wrong. And even in the midst of my impending death via asthma on a train platform, I had a bottom line, and by my calculations, it would’ve been cheaper for me to die right there on the platform, rather than paying for an ambulance and ER experience. I just couldn’t afford it. So I did what the other assistant did to me. I hung up. I hung up and threw my phone down. Lips blue. Scrambling for something in that garbage pile - when I found it!! A wad of cash! Enough for a train ticket, I figured. Only I couldn’t climb the stairs to where the ticket kiosk was located. And I really didn’t think anything could be worse than it was at that moment, but SURPRISE! First, my phone started ringing again nonstop. It wasn’t the assistant, it was Harvey’s wife. And she she was VERY mad at me and called and called and called, and even when I finally tried to answer but couldn’t talk because, impending death, she didn't give a shit and called again once I hung up. Death is bad enough, but death with a soundtrack of an angry goblin wife’s nonstop phone calls in the background is too much to bear. And then, it got so much worse. With the wife calling and calling and calling, and me wheezing into my pile of bag garbage, I saw movement coming down the stairs. I turned to face the coming evil and knew in my heart of hearts what it would be before I even saw it - Jesus Christ it was a gaggle of teens!!! Some real shitty, Gossip Girl looking fuckers! Teens are mean and judgmental and terrifying while in packs. And they were coming up on me like I was a wounded yak and they the pack of hyenas ready to laugh at my decrepit, sad body before snarfing me whole. It was all too much. I wanted to just hurry up and die, but it was obvious God had other plans. For some horrible reason, my survival instincts kicked in and I gestured at the teens with the wad of money - pitifully pointing to the ticket kiosk. One kid inched forward, grabbed the wad from my hand like I had a disease and went and bought me a ticket. All the teens snickered under their breath and eyed me with a mix of pity and disgust. Honestly, I felt the same way. If I had any sort of lung capacity I would’ve happily told them how embarrassed and pathetic I felt, and how chasing your dreams sometimes leads you to working for a monster and being in your mid-30s and wanting to die because this is where your life has taken you - to this exact moment - and whooo boy, ain’t that a bitch! But I didn’t say anything. I accepted the ticket and tried to catch my breath enough to function. And I did, eventually. I think having a group of people around, even if said group looked like the cast of Heathers, helped me to know I would be ok. And with the sound of the train in the distance, I scooped up all the garbage I spilled on the tracks and attempted to pull myself together. I put my shirt back on (to everyones joy) and picked up my phone. The wife still wouldn’t stop calling, so I text her assistant letting her know what was happening, and to please handle her until I was able to, ya know, breath. By the time the train pulled up, I was able to function enough that I could get myself onto the train and into a seat. I leaned my head on the window and just started sobbing. Well, it was more of a wheeze-sob, but you get the picture. Holy shit, I was so tired and mortified and over it all. But I had made these choices - the choice to work for a monster in return for the chance to never, ever be stuck doing this shit again. And as I sat on that train, slowly moving back towards civilization and my life, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew that I would continue to be put in situations like the one I was in, over and over and over again. I would never get that promotion. Never truly earn their respect. I was Sisyphus with busted-ass lungs.

I remember the train pulling back into the city, it was Friday night, and there’s nothing more electric than New York on a Friday night. The air pulses with promise. But, what I felt was an overwhelming sense of dread. I spent the entire two hours of the train ride vacillating between anger over Harvey’s actions and minimizing them. I also spent the train ride straght-up ignoring Harvey’s wife and her incessant calls. And I knew there would be hell to pay for both of those actions, just in different ways. So, I braved the throngs, grabbed an uber, and headed back towards 375 Greenwich. I stopped at the liquor store up the street first - bought a couple bottles of wine - and then went back to the office. The rest of the Weinstein Company had left for the night - the only glow of lights were coming from behind the door that lead to Harvey’s wing and our bullpen. My story of woe was just one of three that night. The male assistant had made it back to the city around the same time I did, he happened to have been ditched in an area a little further up the road, but closer to a car service. He had been through some shit the day. The fired assistant was still there, expected to work for another few weeks, despite it all. They had been though some shit that day. And then there was me. And I tried to make them laugh. And poured glass of wine after glass of wine. And minimized my own anger and fear and disappointment over how my day had gone. Because, I was 10 years older than them, and I was mortified that I had the sort of day I had. So we vented and some cried, but we all tried to laugh about the insanity of it all. Laugh and say, “boy won’t this be a wild story to tell”. And then I did my duty, wine drunk and numbed to my own anger, and called Harvey’s wife back and allowed her to scream at me. And I took a cab home at midnight, and picked up the phone when Harvey called to bitch about something else I had done, not bothering to stand up for myself, because what was the point? And the next morning, after a trip to the minor emergency clinic for a breathing treatment, I went into the office to catch up on the work I missed the day before, while being trapped in a car and sprayed with spit and tic-tac shrapnel.

It’s taken me another horrible boss, a move to Vermont, lots of self help books and introspection to even try and process what I put up with and subjected myself to while working in a deeply flawed and problematic industry. One that I desperately wanted to succeeded in, and I see now, I allowed myself to deal with more than I should’ve in order to make that happen. And it never happened, by the way. So now I’m here, in Vermont, living in a Hallmark Channel fever dream, and I still don’t have answers or feel totally at peace, but I do know one thing now. One thing that I’ll never forget: ALWAYS, ALWAYS CARRY A FUCKING INHALER ON YOUR PERSON!!!