Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

  These days folks are reflecting on the changes we've embraced from the pandemic.  The losses of life and reality and the things we don't need in our lives are abounding.  Aside from the obvious things of more time and less stress, friendships are certainly at the center of this discourse.  I, like so many others, am no different.  What shatters me is how things woke--for lack of something better--and how the endless exhaustion caused within and after has left me.  As I wake in a reawakening world, and I set my feet back into patterns of semi-regularly, I'm left with new losses that can't be memorialized or precisely quantified.   I didn't hide the fact that ten months ago my sister passed, that eleven months ago a good friend died, or that family and friends died from age, life, or COVID-19.  I thought someone was dead, and I learned that he was merely playing dead for me and living his life happy along the way.  He doesn't understand ...

It's been a while, is an understatement.  Then again, those who know me remember last year.  2019 entered with double pneumonia and quarantine for a false TB scare, a month later I broke my foot and double tore the plantar fascia, the hits kept coming, and in December I had surgery to repair the foot and ended the year with influenza. Last year tried my soul, nearly killed me, and I was barely standing when it ended. Damn. I shut myself down, and I compartmentalized to survive, to find a laugh, to capture a sight, and to carry-on.  Then, by late February, I was finally coming out of the ashes, getting life back, moving again. I got back into shoes and some heels, made it back to pole dancing classes, but then the world stopped. COVID-19 hit. Well, it came. Hard. First, the suburbs of Seattle--my first hometown--and then it grew. Now, as the world knows, NYC is the US epicenter, and Queens is the epicenter of the epicenter. I live here. I call this ten-story town...