Same As It Ever Was

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say yourself, "My God! What have I done?"
-Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

I was promised as a child that if I worked hard, studied hard, believed in God and never gave up, I would have a good life, a good career, a nice little place to live, and someone to love me.

While the 80s had the best of intentions, I was fed lies for sustenance of formative years of my life. A friend called it "Immigrant Attitude" and that people whose parents move here from other countries and "make it" teach this mentality to their kids and those kids never learn to ask for help because they are taught that they just need to work harder rather than ask others for help. I don't believe his assessment is correct. I believe I just haven't found the right key to unlock the right door and I just need to try harder to find out where it is. Although I fully realize I'm more than likely acutely proving his point.

The bible says not to work yourself to death trying to become rich but the American dream says if you don't work yourself to death, you'll die of starvation anyway. It's a lose-lose situation. But only if you stop trying. Who knows, maybe my entire life is a joke; a waste of time. Maybe I was never supposed to be born and all the "hard times" are just God's way of trying to convince me I'm long past the point of needing to give up.

On the other hand, despite the terrifying current aspects of my life, I think I've done pretty well for myself. I've lived on my own or with roommates for the last 15 years, I've never had to move back in with my parents, I've never filed for bankruptcy, and while I'm pretty close to losing everything right now, I've never had to actually live in my car.

The future is so uncertain. I've been waiting for 2 and a half weeks to hear back on jobs I've applied for and still I'm getting nothing. I have used almost my entire savings and at the end of this month, I really have no idea what will happen to me. It's terrifying. But if you flip the coin over, it's also the most thrilling and exhilarating feeling of my life.

A friend of mine who fell off my radar for about half a decade recently came back into my life and told me how he spent 2 years living out of an RV and traveling the country. He said it was scary but also the most freeing experience of his life.

For me, it all comes down to a matter of faith. They say you have to practice something to master it. It's easy to practice faith when you have everything you need: food, water, shelter, clothes, a JOB. But when those start disappearing one at a time, faith becomes a lot harder.

But faith, when you try hard enough, always comes through. A friend of mine lives on a huge piece of property with his family and they have extended their planted crops to me, allowing me to grow my own food there and share in the harvest their other trees crops yield. Another friend brought me a bunch of fruit over the weekend from a farm she works on. Between the two, I have been able to eat and make food I have then used as bartering tools with other people to obtain other goods and services I need.

If I can minimize my possessions enough, my ex-boyfriend has generously offered me the entirety of the storage unity we shared when we were dating, at no cost. It's pretty small so I'll have to work hard on deciding what to keep and what to give away but it's a new challenge I am excited and nervous to accept.

The friend who brought me fruit has offered me a room to rent in her house (assuming my cat can get along with hers) and even if I had to surrender all my pride and work fast food, I could still survive on such meager wages because my cost of living would be significantly lower.

I have to wonder if it was this terrifying for Moses wandering the desert for 40 years. If there were any frivolous possessions he was forced to give away, if he had the same selfish desires as me to just find a place to live and settle down and be happy for ONCE in his life. If he got tired of people looking to him for guidance or if he felt as completely unqualified to guide anyone to anything like I feel.

We hear these stories of displaced people and in the aftermath, we shape them into nearly fictional heroes. "You escaped tyranny from a corrupt government and moved here to start over and now you have a house and car and family? Awesome! You're a hero and inspiration and proof that anyone can do anything." But that can't be the whole reality of things, can it? Where are the stories of the days THEY were afraid? Believing others overcome such things without any struggle through fictionalized heroism only makes the reality of one's own struggle all the more terrifying: this wasn't part of the original plot. Or was it?

There was a time when I was so poor all I had to eat for 3 days was leftover cake a friend gave me that he got from a party his friend had. It was a massive and lavish party with a cake so big that I only had a small portion of the leftovers and it fed me nine meals until I was full. I saved up for months to buy a computer a friend made for me out of spare parts and I put it up on 4 garden cinder blocks and to planks of wood. I sat on the floor and I used my parents' aol dial-up account to fill out paperwork to get into college and find a safer place to live than a 9x12 attic room in a boarding house full of drug addicts and some of the scariest men I've ever met.

I worked hard, I put in my time, I graduated college got a car, a job in my field, made a nice little life for myself... and then it all got blown away overnight. I assessed the damaged, I rebuilt, and I started to thrive. Then it happened again. And again and again. I am really getting tired of wandering the desert.

Right now I am left wondering if I'm one of those people who never made it to the promised land. If I followed in blind faith and died on the journey. But the good news is that Schrodinger studied the probabilities of life and death, not joy and sorrow. I might make it, I might die trying. But that doesn't mean the journey dependent upon my success in life. It doesn't have to regulate my ability to find joy in even the smallest things. I have food to eat, I have more food growing, I still have a car that is actually really comfortable to sleep in when I've been on road trips, and I have a free place to put all my things for the time being. Things could be a lot worse. Things have been a lot worse.

The problem with the fractured dreams I was raised to believe is that, after a certain point, it becomes such a fundamental part of who I am that the very fabric of my being becomes dependent on hope. No matter how many things I lose in life, hope is the only thing I'm completely unable to surrender. I've tried. It's like voluntarily giving up my sight. Even if I tried to walk the rest of my life with my eyes closed, I would still be imagining what things looked like based on how they feel. If you handed me an apple, I would still see it in my mind. And maybe that's a crippling defect to some but for me, it's all I have. And it works.

I am completely and utterly terrified of what the future holds. But if God were to tell me "Step out onto the water and walk upon it" ... who am I to not believe? The worst that could happen is I'd get a free bath. Who knows, maybe even free dinner if I reach out and accidentally grab a fish.
Things could always get worse, but they could also always get better. You just never know. And I think that's quite possibly the most exciting part of life.

Things You Can't Say Around People

My friend posted this picture online a while back and hit the center of my heart in a way from which I still have yet to recover.

What's worst of all was that I spent the last hour and a half writing a carefully thought out assessment of all the things I feel the need to apologize for being excited about... and then I deleted the entire post. Because even though nobody reads my ridiculous online journal, I'm still afraid someone might randomly stumble upon it one day and think "My GOD, will someone PLEASE shut her up??"

Thoughtful Regrets

Last night, my friend's little brother performed in a Doctor Seuss rendition of Hamlet at the local high school.
It took me back to so many memories I felt I was going to drown in them.

I remember being forced to read Hamlet in high school before we could get to Romeo and Juliet and all I could think was how boring this guy's family drama was and I just wanted to get through it. Don't get me wrong, Hamlet is a great play, but nothing is more fantastic a story than two star-crossed lovers fighting against all odds only to still lose love in their last breath. It's fucking tragic.

Almost as tragic as standing in a high school auditorium realizing I was the same age as my friend's little brother in an equally small high school in an equally small town twenty years ago. And now, all my friends have kids in high school. The surrealism is overwhelming. What the hell have I done with the last 20 years of my life?

I remember being fifteen and wanting nothing more than to be pretty and popular and have a boyfriend. Embarrassingly, I was foolish enough to actually try out for cheerleading even though I didn't stand a chance in hell. I dressed up for all the spirit days, I ran for student council (and lost), I was in the marching band, and I bought a ridiculously expensive $130 designer gown for the big winter formal dance only to be humiliated and turned down by my crush, ditched by my best friend who got the flu the night before the dance, and I showed up alone. In a designer black velvet dress that I still have packed away in a box somewhere under my bed.

I wrote love poems for guys who barely knew I existed and now those same guys are married with multiple kids, a 401K, a house, two cars, a dog and  cat... and they stay in touch by "liking" the pictures of my cat on instagram.

I'm not entirely sure where I expected to be by the time I hit my mid-thirties but I certainly didn't expect this life. Which is not to say it's all bad. I have a fabulous couch, a hilarious cat, and I've almost finally completed my vintage Cinderella gooseberry Pyrex casserole dish collection.

I have pictures of me and my sister hanging just outside my kitchen from our sophomore year of high school. I'm pretty sure even back then we knew with certainty that we were never going to be cool, but I'm also pretty sure we were okay with that.

But back to Hamlet. I remember all my friends having crushes on Mel Gibson in his rendition but I was always partial to the version with Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles. She was the perfect Ophelia and I loathed Hamlet for turning her away because they would have make the prettiest babies and had a perfect family and a perfect life. Juia was my favourite actress... and ironically, tied to a lot of Shakespeare covers that influenced my life in my teen and college years. She was in the retelling of Taming of the Shrew via 10 things I Hate About You which gave poetry writing girls like a chance to finally kiss the dreamy curly haired bad boy who serenaded her on the football field. Then she was on O, the retelling of Othello. And later in college, she was in that princess movie where she falls in love with the prince of denmark who poses as a foreign exchange student. And of course it's Denmark because it comes full circle back to who she could'be been in Hamlet.

I suppose though, just like with Romeo and Juliet, I'll never stop holding my breathe hoping if I read it enough times she might actually wake up before Romeo drinks the poison and they could run away together and still be happy.

I'm always chasing the rainbow at the end of that silly Utopian dream of a happy ending. Which is probably why I'm in my mid-thirties living alone with a cat and still writing poems. Perhaps it's just an unchangeable constant in my life that was set forth by the universe before I was ever born and in every conceivable alternate plane of existence, there is always a version of me living alone writing poems.. but with varying numbers of cats.

After the play we grabbed some burgers to go from what's apparently the only bar in the hole-in-the-wall city where my friend lives. The food is always good and the people remind me of home in a way that's almost painful. Listening to those drunk guys getting on stage singing Alabama and Alan Jackson on karaoke night reminded me of the dive bars my friends my theatre friends and I used to sing at in college. My roommate and I performed in The Tempest together my sophomore year. It was one of the last plays I did before graduation. Theater led me to a career in radio and radio led me here. And it seems, "here" led me back to Shakespeare.

Given that the play last night was written like a Dr. Seuss story, my friend asked me how accurate it was in relation to everyone dying and I explained that it was a classic Shakespearean tragedy. Sometimes life doesn't feel too far off. I mean, at best, more than a third of my life is over, at worst, I could be already halfway to my grave. I wonder sometimes if I'm destined to live the rest of my life in solitude, replacing cat after cat as they age, and when I finally expire myself, the neighbours will poke through my belongings at an awkward estate sale full of old paintings and dozens upon dozens of notebooks filled with hopeless romantic love poems and photo albums of awkward teenage girls from the 90s. Being a writer was never my choice. It was something that crawled into the center of my soul, took root, and consumed me whole. Along with this silly girly notion to fall madly in love like Ophelia, but not be crushed by the weight of my own heart beneath the surface of a nearby lake.
So much of Shakespeare's writing is wrapped up in tales of love. I have to wonder if maybe he had a cat too. And which side of the lake he was on when he left this world...

Open Letter to 2015

Seriously dude... what. the. fuck.
Did I wrong you in some way that made you so colossally pissed at me that you had to chase me for 12 months with a chariot of fire and destruction?

I mean, we've got a few good hours left in us so I'm hoping we can end on at least moderately peaceful terms but what the hell did you have against me? The only truly good things I got this year were a new couch set, a former prison guard, and a super hero best friend. But even then, yo managed to pry everything but the couch from my hands in the eleventh hour.

I can't say I was the most loving either, but at least I tried. I had a hope in you, faith that you'd bring me something better. Maybe I didn't give 100% to you but I at least hit the lower 90s.

It feels like all you did was take from me this year. You took jobs, took friends, took futures, took all joy from me when it was the only thing I had left. So I ran.

I chased the moon, I chased the deer in my backyard, I chased sunsets and I chased the windstorms out of my hair. Guess what? I still win.

You tried your best to destroy me and to be honest, you got pretty close. But there's still too much fight to ever give up even when I'm hanging by threads.

My house is a mess, my life is a mess and my immediate future looks about as uncertain as the piles of rubble across the street where beautiful buildings once stood. Yeah. You took the stained glass windows too.

Unfortunately for you, I can still see Orion watching me outside my bedroom window. You can't move the constellations, and I still have eyes to see. You haven't taken the moon or Jupiter or Venus and I wait for the frosty nights when I can talk to them in orbit across my bleak horizons.

It's been a month of long Decembers but you underestimated me. I still have reason to believe. I'm still here. Tomorrow, you'll be just a fading memory, but I'll still wake up breathing,

Checkmate, motherfucker.

A Lack of Compuntion for Hating Winter

December 28, 1989: I had just purchased my very first cassette with a $20 gift certificate I got to The Warehouse in Orange County, California.
The Jets topped the charts with their album "Magic" and their hit single "Make it Real" was an all-too-relatable anthem for my pathetic 8-year-old heart.

He never eve knew I existed. 

And yet, I loved him.

Joey Gonzales' brother, Mike, was in the sixth grade, had wavy brown hair and he was going through a slightly chubby pubescent stage of adolescence. He was everything I'd ever dreamed of. I mean, he had a pulse, he had hair, he had eyes and a face and everything. He was tall dark and handsome because I was tiny little redhead with ringlet curls and was only a year away from discovering the first love poem that would forever change my life.

Joey was friends with my brother so I tried to hang out with them in order to be around Mike but I stood out like a blade of grass on a baseball field. Which is to say, not at all.
But oh how I loved him. The way he did whatever he did that I can't even recall 26 years later. I think he walked or talked or, maybe he just stood there breathing.
I had no idea what love was at that age.

And yet, I loved him.

The only definitive moment in all our nearly-real interactions was when I was too short to reach a red foursquare ball at the bottom of the ball cage on the playground. He came up beside me, reached down, grabbed the ball and placed it in my hands. For the briefest moment, he made eye contact and I'm pretty sure in those five nanoseconds, I saw our entire future together, complete with a wedding a house, a dog, and two cats. That was the first and last interaction we ever had.

The following year, I discovered Edgar Allan Poe and the harsh realities of unrequited love in tragic tale of the beloved Annabel Lee.

"I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee"

From then on, Love seemed to be an ever-dying mistress... a shooting star constantly fading from the night sky. Rolling tides of romantic cliches, waiting for boys to ask me to dance at awkward junior high social events and writing hundreds of sheets of notebook pages of poetry for boys who still never knew I existed.

As winter pushes in again with its hateful grey eyes, heavy black rain clouds and chilling temperatures, I have to wonder if maybe love itself isn't also a sepulcher of sorts. We fall into this tomb of darkness waiting for someone to be our light but each time love ends, the lid is pushed further shut until eventually we end up dying alone, in the darkness, waiting for someone to notice we're still here; we're still waiting. Waiting to be seen, waiting to be heard, waiting to be told we are beautiful and magnificent and worthy of all the joy in life we seek.

Sometimes ponder the chances that the weather has turned me to stone along with the rest of the frozen earth until nothing can penetrate my heart through layers of ice and cynicism. Nothing good can reach the roots such that, when someone tells me I look beautiful fighting with a tangled scarf and cup of cider, I can only roll my eyes and scoff the possibility of gaining attraction.

Perhaps there just aren't enough days of sunshine this far north to fully thaw out the land. Or maybe Mike Gonzales really did break my heart before I ever knew what to do with it. Life seems to be an endless two-lane highway of hearts in such tight propinquity and yet, miles from ever seeing each other.

At what point do we finally get to stop? At what point do we finally see each other for who we are?
At what point can we finally fall in love before the chilling wind of death takes us back to the sea?

I long for a life
with more love and less strife
unlike your sweet Annabel Lee.
And if I should die -- be a widow or wife
let my love not be quick, or sharp like a knife
lay with me down by the sea...
in a sepulcher finally set free.

Flying Cars and Falling in Love

I was eight years old when Back to the Future II came out in theaters. I remember how anxiously my brother waited to see it after reading the book, how he went on and on about the book being better and key plot holes due to missing scenes from the book during the alternate 1989 sequences. But most of all, I remember thinking I'd never live to be old enough to see the year 2015.

It was "the future" and at the time, I cold barely handle the thought of Prince partying like it was 1999. In my world, 2015 might as well have been a thousand years away. And yet, here it is. In two hours, it will officially be Wednesday, October, 2015.

There are no flying cars, no hoverboards, no re-hydrated and no self-lacing shoes. The kids don't wear their pockets hanging out of their jeans, I can't stuff trash into my gas line to make my car run on rotting leftovers (though that would be cool and hella better for landfills) but on the other hand, we actually do have video chatting, google glass, smart phones, self-driving cars, satellite images of every inch of the planet and y'know that whole internet thing is pretty cool too. literally all the knowledge of the world free at your fingertips. I'm pretty sure that's better than a flying car.

I remember watching the Back to the Future trilogy endlessly with my dad and my brother and wondering what it would be like to travel through time. I'm sure Marty would disagree but if I cold go back to 1955, I'd probably never leave. The idea of meeting a boy for a milkshake and cheeseburger is pretty much the quintessential post-war Americana love story stuff dreams are made of.

And the music! What I wouldn't give to see Buddy Holly perform live, to be able to dance close with a boy as my pink chiffon dress shuffled across the floor and I closed my eyes tightly wondering if ever a day might come when he'd take that big next step and finally kiss me on the lips.

If I could go back in time to 1955 I think my first purchase would be a 45 record single of The Penguins "Earth Angel" and bring it back with me to present time. The single itself is worth far more than I could ever afford to spend on one vinyl issued song but it's such a perfect song of innocent love and romance. I can't explain exactly what it is about that song but it's just perfection.

Maybe in some alternate universe I already live there and life is pure bliss. But for now, I guess I'll just keep spinning the vinyl I have and settle for traveling through time with my eyes closed.

Stories Written on Reeds and Strings

I'll never forget the first time I heard Alex play the bass clarinet. It the late winter of 7th grade and as he opened with a solo to our middle school symphonic band's first piece with one half note and two eighth notes. In that moment, shattering the silence with the deep echoes off the cafeteria walls with the timbre of his vibrato against the reed, I fell in love.

Maybe I was misguided and only fell in love with him because of the music, but in nearly three decades of studying music, I've never been more in love with anyone than at that moment, with him.

From there, I fell in love with two drummers, three saxophone players, one guitar player, an a pianist. Through the years though, I don't think I ever felt another kind of "Alex" type of love until I heard the mandolin.

I still remember standing in the living room talking to him, our footsteps clacking across the wood floors as we made out way to the couch. His name was Jim and he had long blonde hair, just past his chin that curled ever so slightly at the ends, ripped jeans and a plaid flannel shirt that assured me I wasn't the only one carrying the 90s into the next decade. I can still remember the name of his cologne and the way his fingers moved so effortlessly across the strings of his guitar when he'd close his eyes and sing. His guitar made mine look like it came out of a crackerjack box but he seemed intrigued enough to want to write songs with me and play together in the front lawn on Sundays.

Ironically, I can't remember if he actually played the mandolin himself, or if I only heard it on the radio that day and have forever associated those feelings of love with the starving artist who, like so many other guys, saw me as another one of the guys. He told me of the girls he loved, the loves he'd lost, and the hopes he had for the future. As expected, I wasn't in his gameplan. I remember writing love poems about him that summer and casting wishful thoughts into the night sky that someday he might realize I was singing songs about him.

I haven't seen him in almost 15 years; our chance meeting was over almost as quickly as it began, and I undoubtedly evanesced  into the attic of his memories until even those were no more.

I still think of him every time I hear the mandolin. I wonder if he still plays music. I wonder if we would even recognize each other if we were to pass on a street corner in some small town neither of us lived in. I was nothing more than another sigh between chord progressions he'd pick and choose form to pass the time on the lawn after church but even still, I can't help but wonder if maybe sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, he hears someone play an A-minor chord on an old acoustic guitar and for the briefest moment, a light fog blows through his memory... something about a vegetarian hippie and a wide-neck Spanish guitar...
It would be a fuzzy memory at best, but it would make all the wishing stars worth the wait.