Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

The daffodils are starting to arrive, as the shop's windows are beginning to show.  Well, hidden behind the layers and mounds of red roses for the upcoming lovers holiday the colors of spring edge through.  None-the-less, I found myself procuring my first daffs of the season as I near annually do.  As in years past, the rain and snow have poetically encapsulated the buy.  Yet, this year, I found myself buying them on a seemingly bright, sunfilled day.  In reality, it was all trickery, as the cold winter wind remained blustery and I could feel slithers of a sharpened frigid blast under the hem of my parka.  Daffodils are fleeting, and the moment of joy of their annual arrival is a glimmer into the wispy darkness that winter brings.  This year the hope and joy eluded me.  The bright flowers, filling my air with their welcoming aroma of fresh life, act as forgotten tchotchkes on the shelves around me.  Those shelves are holding ...

Last Year. There's a reason I went radio silent more often than not.  Let's just say six + rounds of prednisone, numerous ER ventures, a case of fucking elephant face, a damned surgery that makes me a matter for the colonies . . . I give you this. When the revolution comes, I’ll find myself in the colonies.* This assertion I am certain—as if being a college professor, a writer, or a divorcee wasn’t enough— the loss of an ovary certainly sealed my fate in the metaphorical stone. As to how I’d survive those colonies, I am uncertain, but as I wander through my life, I find myself accessing the carnage and the pain left in the proverbial wake I stop and stare. The pain of my ovaries began when I was young, and as the story goes, it has marched on with the beat of a drummer outplaying his companions, always calling out the show and demanding attention. Within the picture, 25 years ago (when I was 16 and young and fresh with plenty of dreams still unformed) I woke up w...

As I rock along the subway line, and pass with throngs of others up and down the stairs, escalators, and ramps, and pour onto the city streets, I can feel the hum of the urban hive.   Its rhythms, its rhymes, its pulse.   It's heartbeat.   These are the things I see.                On an average Monday, with mid-fall overcast skies and leaves beginning to change, billows of steam erupt from the sewers and rooftops.   Those from the lower domains carry the odors of the city, those that out of towners notice and I've long learned to ignore.   The ones from above, I look at them and wonder if they are the cast off dreams of New Yorkers awakening to find themselves in the cog again.   Or, I wonder if they are the cast off dreams of New Yorkers who find themselves awash in regret the morning after, in the middle of, or years into the game.   Are they the bellows of exasperated parents bemoan...

As September cools, and fall begins to awaken, I sit here looking back with a trigger finger gettin' lose and ready on the match.  September, far worse than August, was a surly little chic in too small heels.  Okay, that's a little kind.  She was a surly chick in too small heals needing carbs and a puppy for all the attention she demanded.  Y'all, September needs its own zip code for the love it needs these days.   August might have tried my soul, but damn at least she gave me some breathers and pleasant moments of remiss.  You know, like when the one-time beau met up with me in Denver with a lolli instead of flowers. Yeah, in an aside, pot is legal in Colorado--if you did not know--and so that lolli was a mango flavored THC laden fairy princess ride.  Of course, what I should also remind you is that when one consumes a lolli one should not partake of the entire thing at once and while alone.  Okay, you can . . . But, ya kno...

Twenty-five years marks a silver anniversary.  Someone, somewhere, owes me silver.  Why? 25 years ago, this week I take, I went to my doctor's office with an ear infection and easy bruising, and I came home with Lupus.  Just like that, life at sixteen changed. In that regard, as I sit here looking at a quarter of a century, more than half my life, and a sentence comparable to manslaughter I can't say I'm nostalgic.  I mean years of taking vitamins the size of chicken patties, years of staring down the gremlin bottles on my dresser, years of putting my feet on the floor in the morning and letting out moans and wails, years of endless doctor visits and blood draws, and years of wondering when the next friend will bail on me because the Lupus is too much.  That latter part: I called and left a message, the day of a meeting, that I couldn't make it.  Seven years later and I remember the spinning room, the adverse drug side effects, the trips to my p...

There's an adage about looking into someone's bathroom cabinet to see a portal to the soul.  The neatness of shelves, the products within, the nature of the hidden beast.  In theory, you'll find the not-so hidden caches of hillbilly heroin and combos of STD creams and fungal disinfectants.  I, like scores of others, don't keep my pills in the bathroom cabinet.  For reasons of science: the changes in room temperature can distort the little gremlins I pop daily to the fact that I keep them on a dresser to see when I first rise and last lie my head every day.  Though, that adage .  . . It's about the secrets, the components, and and the matrixes that make a life. Perhaps my medicine cabinet looks run of the mill.  Perhaps it's a tale of the weary soul . . . an ice bag, band-aids, dental floss, vapor shower tablets to breathe when the next round of bronchitis sets in, heat pads for muscles unable to move on their own, q-tips f...

Perhaps it is a pull of the moon, the extensive rain, or just luck itself but I've got a disproportionate amount of friends wearing tin foil hats as of late.  I mean, their local grocery runs out of white bread and it turns into a conspiracy to make them fatter and starve them out.  The aforementioned rain makes the wifi slow, it must be government spies looking in to see what they are buying online.  And then, while using an iPhone, proclaiming that we are all being controlled by machines.  Yeah, there's a relative tin foil hat parade happening around me. I look to my left.  I look to my right.  I've got a match people. Late last week I thought that, perhaps, I was at the apex of it when some ballsy assed mother fucker blew on my shoulder blades.  Why yes, while on the seven train and sporting a sundress on a 90+ degree day, I clearly needed a fucking burka.  I know . . . I know . . . I totally asked for it. That being said, I came up with ...