Little Fattie Gangsta Penguin

I have like, no joke, 6 or so drafts in my email of things I keep writing and then chucking. TW/CW parent death

I’ve been kinda having breakdowns about everything because, and I can’t stress it enough, going through all this stuff literally and metaphorically is extremely emotional. There are days where I’ll find baby pictures of my parents that I’d never seen before and just feel so gutted that life did not seem fair to either of them. Just seeing those pictures of them so full of hope and promise, basking in safety and love, I just want to reach back in time and keep them safe from the monsters they’d encounter. I was talking to one of my closest, who is in a similar life place as me, and she said, “being an only child and an orphan is rough at any age” which I hate for both of us.

Sometimes I’ll be going through my mom’s stuff and I will just kind of feel sick to my stomach thinking about what happened two years ago. I never wrote about hospice and I feel like maybe I should but that also feels like I’m invading her privacy. But I also kind of feel like it gives context as to why I’ve been such a mess throughout this? (Also Shannon, I am pretty sure it’s just you and me here which is not as bad as posting it on Facebook)

In the beginning of 2020, pre Covid, we’d been preparing to move back to LA that summer. My mom and I had talked about whether she wanted to sell her house and come with, and she thought maybe she did. She was also curious about the right to die laws in WA vs CA, as she was worried about dementia and if that day arrived she wanted to be able to end it. So I told her we’d work on it and talk to her lawyer but then the world stopped. I realize now she was probably seeing some small signs of slipping and wanted to get ahead of it.

Summer of 2023, while I was in Philadelphia, my mom, had a stroke or a series of lacunar strokes in her thalamus that left her cognitively impaired. Basically lacunar strokes are small and you don’t want to have strokes in your thalamus because that can cause basically everything to go sideways, so even if the stroke is small the effects can be monumental.

She was super delusional and paranoid and as the summer went on, it all got worse, the delusions became increasingly violent, any change in her daily habits would send her into a tailspin that would require tons of Ativan and late or all nights at her side, it was a nightmare for everyone. Because she’d had aneurism surgery in 1996 she could not safely have an mri (per her surgeon) so we were flying blind (An unsafe mri would’ve ripped the aneurism clips out of her skull) Because of the brain damage from her aneurisms and craniotomies (which I found the reports for, I don’t know why we had a copy but god surgery is brutal) she was already at a disadvantage and when coupling that with whatever Covid had done to her brain, it was a perfect storm we could never get out of. We tried rehab, she consistently failed out of everything and was deconditioning while in rehab. The head of the rehab LITERALLY said the most effective thing he felt he could do was pray for her and that he didn’t understand why she’d even been sent to rehab. She proved him right the next morning by forgetting she couldn’t walk, trying to get out of bed, falling and landing in the hospital. Again.

She had lengthy stays at multiple MGH/Brigham hospitals and they were all awful and basically no answers of expectations for anything getting better ever came up. It didn’t help that a lot of this was hit by the death month/july effect which just meant everything got dragged the fuck out because everything was a teaching moment for all the residents. After that it eas back to rehab which was a total bust.

She had a really strict advanced directive for the type of care to revoke if she ended up in a situation where she would not improve or have a meaningful quality of life, although I sometimes feel like “meaningful quality of life” could be debatable and unfortunately not something i could discuss with the person I needed clarification from who was often talking to her dead brother who was sitting next to me on the floor. Her dead brother who had come back to life because he refused to die or maybe she was dead and that’s why they were talking. I would sit there and smile and nod while all this was happening while just digging my nails into the palms of my hands.

She also had an MDRO which we could not knock out of her bladder no matter what we tried, which included surgical intervention and all of the antibiotics, oral antibiotics, iv antibiotics in hospital, lots of fucking antibiotics. Between the stroke and the constant UTIs her life just deteriorated and it deteriorated quickly. Her living will directed that if she ended up where she kinda seemed to be, to withdraw everything *including* antibiotics. I remember sitting with her when she was having the document written up, and finding it so odd she asked her lawyer to stipulate antibiotics along with surgery and feeding tubes, just because they seemed so minor in comparison. Little did I know.

When she entered into hospice, which was in my mind at the time just going to help us keep her in her assisted living situation and out of the memory care unit. Because of the MDRO my mom could not share a restroom with anyone, because she was highly contagious. The assisted living facility that she was at had shared bathrooms in their memory care unit. They had one open bed in a suite where the other patient was on a catheter so my mom would’ve essentially had her own restroom, but that other person was dying and once they died, we probably would’ve been on the hook for both bedrooms. Which we could not afford long term. But with the extra nursing care from hospice, we were able to keep her in the regular community where she had her own bedroom and her own bathroom. Dignity.

Even with that additional care things were just eo hard. Basically every night we’d need to go to give her supplemental medication, and she kept getting utis since dementia does not help with that so it just meant this repeating cycle of antibiotics/antibiotics bothering her stomach severely/3 days max of clear urine before her delusions would get way worse signaling the start of another wave of increasingly stronger drug resistance bacteria in her bloodstream.

So after the third infection in two months post hospice discharge where each infection had multiple week courses of antibiotics, I was forced to look at what was real vs what I wanted the outcome to be. I remember I had gone with my friend Barb to get my nails done in Boston, and Ethan called her and then texted me to let me know that my mom had tested positive for another uti. I remember standing on boylston street in the middle of the street when there was no traffic smoking a cigarette (my quit had a brief hiatus during this, I’m surprised I didn’t pick up drinking) wanting to put my fist through a car window just so I could feel basically anything other than what I was feeling in that moment because nothing could be worse than that. nothing. Just that awful fucking realization.

I sat down with her living will and her nurses and ethan and spoke to her friends about it and finally accepted we had done everything. At the best I could keep her alive in the middle of a failing body and a failing brain for maybe a few months where things would just deteriorate, I could stubbornly try live in hope or I could admit anything I’d be doing would just cause her more pain because there was no coming back from the ledge I was trying so desperately to get her back from.

So I withdrew her meds and started her on comfort care so she wouldn’t feel the last infection when it progressed to whatever would be the end. Honestly the stroke helped with some of that since the thalamus helps you process pain and she basically wasn’t feeling much. But yeah, I had to sit and watch her rapidly decline while knowing I could turn things around, and god I wanted to do that so badly, but I had to remind myself I was following her wishes, wishes she’d been very explicit about since 1996. I still carry a copy of her living will on my phone because sometimes I have to remind myself I didn’t dispassionately let my mom die and that this wasn’t my choice it was hers and as much as I hate it I was respecting her wishes and her autonomy. The last conversation where she was closest to lucid she could he she had affirmed this was what she wanted and that she didn’t see how she’d come back and didn’t want to be how she was.

It didn’t happen super quickly either, so basically every day was getting her whatever food she wanted (pizza was a frequent one, which she’d comment it had been so long since she’d had) or regional stuff off of Goldbelly. The last meal was lobster rolls and she seemed disinterested but had some. I had been cranky because wind had knocked down all our Halloween decorations. Ethan was worried about the not eating and clandestinely called to have a hospital bed delivered to the house that evening. Later that day we had an ambulance bring her home, and we all just hung out on the first floor. My mom slept pretty much entirely, Bones slept next to her basically the whole time, and then 6 days later she left while we listened to Adele, a later in life favorite of hers, and the other worst summer was over.

I know in my heart that I did what she wouldve wanted me to do. That is why I was her healthcare proxy and that is why she had a living will. I know she had wanted to pursue right to die if she had cognitive issues, I know she felt such horror and pity about my dad after his stroke before cancer stole him, and his mentation was significantly better than hers. I know all of this but it’s so antithetical to our drive to survive and to fix things and beautiful hot summer days just remind me of all of it and that’s BEFORE also going through all sorts of photos or medical records or legal documents.

I lowkey kinda want to find someone who hates me to be my healthcare proxy so that if or when I end up in a position I would find untenable that they would have no issue pulling the metaphorical plug and not end up feeling traumatized after. Because as much as I know I did the right things and that I did everything I could by her, there are moments where I feel immensely guilty. All the grief counseling in the world and that one is still gonna take some time

Is there a word in *any* language for the feeling seething outrage at an unjust world that may not harming you directly at the moment, but regardless leaves you with such a feeling of anger that it's almost palpable?

A million years ago I went to an art exhibit that was focused on how context can redefine physical objects and did so by showcasing a bunch of mundane artifacts owned by Goethe, but doing so in a way that everything felt more important. The whole thing was very meta and very much embodied his whole idea that “seeing leads to consideration, consideration to reflection, reflection to combination, and thus it may be said that in every attentive look on nature we already theorize.” That really stuck with me.

I don’t want to be a person who has turned having dead parents into a personality trait, but I am still very much processing the trauma all of that loss while simultaneously processing the bulk of their respective belongings and trying to do it at breakneck speed because of this move. It’s harrowing because I’m looking at stuff that was part of the backdrop for so many moments throughout my life and now seeing these things in different surrounds is just jarring and weird and makes some things lose all meaning and purpose and gives others even more, making the whole process a thousand times more painful. Just like, a little statue that sat on my dad’s desk for decades is now on my kitchen counter and it feels wrong, like I stole it and need to return it because it just doesn’t belong there, on the inverse there is some crystal that never got to shine since my parents typically had the shades drawn and in my living room with all the windows it glistens like it’s been given a new lease on life. But right now the first floor of my house is just like an off season non culture vulture ofrenda to all the people lost form mine and E’s families. Photos and clothing and documents, stuff I wish I could discuss with my mom or dad because some of it is confusing and there is no one at all who can help me and not in the maudlin and often self afflicted way of my youth.

Between now and the end of October I need to sort the belongings of me, my parents, and my grandparents into five categories; keep but leave in America if/until we buy a house, keep but bring over at some point sooner(?), keep but move to Ireland quickly, keep and move to Ireland immediately, or throw away. Oh I guess there is a 6th category of “don’t keep but try to figure out if this is worth selling” While doing this I also need to get the house I live in into shape to be rented. (Apparently I’m ignoring the massive truckloads of stuff we’ve donated and oh god we’re gonna have to get rid of so many Halloween decorations)

All of this is difficult on its own but it’s really compounded by the fact it’s all happening at once and it’s all happening over a move that sometimes feels so goddamn short sighted and reckless I can’t even really wrap my mind around it and I really can’t wrap my mind around the fact I’m not the driving force behind it like at -all- since usually I’m at the wheel when we do questionable shit.

Ireland is having a serious housing shortage AND they are also having a serious healthcare crisis both of which are centered around Dublin. So clearly two middle aged people, one of whom has a chronic small c cancer but what is *still* a fucking cancer with mutated mast cells that do occasionally and anomalously band together and show up in organs and then needs to be dealt with (the scars all over the right side of my body where I have had not insignificant pieces removed from my lung and breast which is a whole other thing) illustrate that whole debacle pretty well, should totally pick this moment in time to move there. Maybe when we were younger or if things were less chaotic over there, but not now, not any time in the foreseeable future. Obviously logically I know we couldn’t have done this earlier I’m just venting.

I get why E wants to do it, he wants to stay on good terms with the company he works for and really wants to continue working there. Sometimes I feel like that’s loyalty they did not earn considering they laid off most of the remote employees *including* him (even though they rehired him immediately) I also get that he wants to stay in the FAANG because it is bonkers money, but it is way less bonkers in Europe which is why Dublin is seeing lots of senior engineering jobs moving over there to save money. Still all my harping aside I get it and I respect his reasoning and long term if this all works out it will be a really solid and smart career move but it’s also way terrifying.

Just like, and I know this sounds tacky as fuck, but with housing we were like “well we can kinda throw money at this problem” which NO YOU CANNOT WHEN THERE ARE NO APARTMENTS. There are some but they’re really pricey for tiny crummy little places and they get scooped up immediately. We do have an Airbnb booked for when we land and I forget how many weeks that is for, but obviously priority #1 is getting Irish banks set up and then priority #2 is finding an apartment. Ethan spoke to a doctor office today that he liked so maybe that is something.

I hate how pessimistic I feel. That’s usually not how I used to be at all, I’m just so fucking divorced from basically everything. the first couple years out here it made sense since we were drowning under the collective weight of taking care of family and the pandemic but when you vanish, you eventually entirely do. I get it, I do, and it’s so easy to just fall into this life with just E but it’s getting rough and then us moving to a whole ass other country isn’t gonna make that easier ;)
“Oh I miss friends and doing stuff so I am gonna move to a little island bye!” Solid

It’s been forever since I’ve even tried writing in a journal and I don’t necessarily see myself sticking with it. It’s a shame there isn’t more community here because Facebook feels like a sinking ship full AI bullshit, bots, and tired memes. It’s exhausting and isolating in so many ways. In a post Covid world, as someone who is immunocompromised, I’ve come to rely on online stuff because in person stuff isn’t as safe. I still haven’t gotten Covid, after losing my mom to complications of long covid and losing my dad in law to acute covid, it’s hard not to be extra terrified. When you factor in how poorly my trying to get vaccinated went (myocarditis!) and how seemingly not on everyone’s mind it is anymore, it’s hard.

BUT. If I’m being honest it goes back before that. We moved back to New England to take care of Ethan’s dad and my mom. Ethan split his time between CA and MA, and I went to California with him as much as possible rendering the whole arrangement even more ridiculous. I had a casual-while-still-being-work situationship with someone from the past that I gave a little too much priority to when I *was* around, and that was a whole thing in and of itself that I partially want to write about but I’m not trapped in the undertow on nostalgia like I used to be. Go me, I can learn.

Truly though between all the travel and wanting to spend the little time I had with Ethan *with* Ethan, taking care of parents, spending a lot of time with one foot here and one foot in LA, I never put anything remotely similar to roots down when I came back. Everything felt transitory, liminal, and I was okay with that and that’s on me.

In January/February of 2020 we’d begun packing up to move back to Los Angeles with a plan to do so in the summer.

That didn’t happen.

Now I am trying to pack up a giant old beautiful house that I love for an adventure I am kinda terrified about but I’ll come back to later.

When your parents die, or when your parents die and you have no siblings, suddenly you own a ton of stuff. You own a ton of stuff and you hold onto it because she was so excited to give or receive that, you hold onto it because his book still smells like tobacco smoke from his den, you hold onto stuff because no one else will care about those photos spanning back generations and countries. No one else will look at the baby pictures of you or your mom or your dad or your grandmother and wonder what happened to change that baby into the adult they became. No one will look at the weddings and family reunions and wonder what they were thinking with their future laid out before them. You hold onto stuff because you’re the last person who will truly care about any of this. You hold onto it because you need to, because if you don’t it will feel like a betrayal to your past or the people in your life who are gone. You become the caretaker of the memory of an entire family that will die with you and it’s simultaneously very daunting and makes you realize how trivial it all is.

So Ethan and I have been going through decades literally a century of photos, scanning them, sorting them getting rid of them, trying to find ones that are missing, and it is a lot. It’s a lot looking at young me, young parents, young grandparents. Everything is so different, there’s so much I wish I’d done differently, so much dumb shit I was preoccupied with. I assume my midlife crisis has decided to intersect with all this so that’s good.

This post is going to have spoilers so if you haven't seen the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, just keep on scrolling.
( cut for spoilers )

man i still can't get over how good this week's episode of Game of Thrones was. I think it might be my favorite of the series quite possibly, just because it was fewer, longer segments instead of 5 minutes catching up with the 800 million characters. also no matter what the sigur ros cameo was just golden since i think they are my favorite band ever. here's their song from the episode. i also like how even though it was sort of stunt casting it was handled really well. i wish they had done the complete song, if only because it's so novel to hear jonsi singing in english.

in other news, i have just had it with hollywood, or at least the area we live in. i can't tell if it's the area we live in (which while incredibly interesting is also incredibly tourist overrun) or LA in general. it's hard because this is clearly not a city to live in if you don't drive and it's also mind numbingly terrifying to even think about relearning to drive here because it's fucking madness. i know people throw a lot of shade at boston drivers, but they seem like saints compared to everything that goes on out here. plus honestly, at this point i would just love to live in a city that is wholly walkable again, even if it's frigid for 3/4 of the year because i really am starting to lose my shit when we end up in the car for 90min to travel 10 miles. i think i've just developed a serious aversion to being in the car.

i am weird that way. on one hand i deal a lot better with structure but on the other i tend to go bonkers when things get too repetitive. so now that being in the car for long stretches of time is essentially the norm, i want to blow up the car.

i think the earthquakes have been getting to me as well. the first couple years we lived out here, it was apparently an earthquake drought but in the past month we've had a few moderately strong ones. it's bizarre because i've experienced thunderstorms and hurricanes and dealt with half my town flooding (since we generally had flooding/freezing issues every winter even prior to sandy) but earthquakes are something completely different. it's funny, because i play with fire and i know that that's sort of not a terribly adaptive behavior since instinctively we're not supposed to be ok with fire. (and as I mentioned in a previous post I have little doubt that that added to the abject horror of Ander's passing) but for whatever reason i've always been ok with fire. i like, i respect it and i know it can kick my ass, but there's some modicum of control between picking the right fabrics to wear, having a safety, it's all done in a controlled environment.

earthquakes are a whole other issue because no matter what you do, what you wear, where you go, the earth is just doing things that it clearly shouldn't be doing, or can't be doing while the inhabitants on top of it feel at all comfortable. the response to earthquakes feels almost primal, just this "ok this could be big, this is really wrong, this shouldn't be happening, oh christ the tv is going to fall on the dog" and it doesn't feel like anything is safe until it's over and in those first few seconds you have no idea how long it's even going to take. it's bizarre and i don't like it and i don't see myself getting used to it any time soon. it just feels unsafe, like the earth is either trying to swallow you or eject you depending on the severity of the quake or your proximity to it.

and then of course with all the focus on boston this week i've been ten shades of homesick. it's been even harder since mishak has been posting all of these awesome old photos from 10+ years ago and it just reminds me of what used to be. this of course makes me think that i'm more homesick for a time period vs the city itself, which is obviously a difficult issue to fix since i have not yet perfected the art of time travel. i just know that i don't want to spend much time being nostalgic since that's always a pratfall of mine, and yet i'm not entirely diffing living in the present. i know people here, but we're all doing our own things and i haven't yet found that feeling of cohesion that existed back in boston...we know tons of awesome individuals who have no ties to each other so it just feels kind of scattered. though it also is great to see how much ethan is digging his job, so there's that, and it's a big thing. i just sort of feel over LA, like maybe i should've moved here when i was younger. while i think it's great that i moved here with my spouse, i think that having him as a constant safety has made me less adventurous in some regards. some of the best times i've had ever were when i was single and WAY out of my safety zone because those were the times that i pushed myself the most to try new things, experience new people or places, but when you have someone to work out with or slack off and watch tv or play videogames with, it's almost too easy, especially if you, like me, are kind of lazy or low energy to start off with

LA is ridiculously awesome on so many levels that don't even need explaining...but healthcare out here is atrocious pricewise (especially when you have a rare disease that requires you see specific doctors instead of just aiming for ones that fit within a certain price range) and housing has gone completely out of control if you're a renter. even just in the few years that we've been here, seeing the gentrification that has been taking place is really astounding. when we moved here, DTLA was this scary place you kind of had to be hardened to experience, what with skid row and so many vacant areas, and now condos are going for over a million dollars...

though i think this spring is just kicking my ass. it's been in the high 70's/low 80's pretty much constantly (sorry boston friends) and it's fucking tiresome. we are having this massive drought, it's dry as hell, and the pollen count is through the roof which is driving my masto absolutely insane. so when i see footage of rainy boston i get all nostalgic as hell. even snowy boston looks pretty.

on the upside, even though my masto has been going crazy, at its peak i'm doing LEAGUES better than i was a few years ago. at this point it's been over a year since i ended up in the ER, and even then it was because i'd blown my eardrum flying, which was wholly unrelated to the masto. so my track record is getting stronger and stronger which means i want to start looking for work. i was offered a job as an exec/personal assistant but i don't think that's going to happen (mostly for a bunch of issues on my part i may write about later) and i've been looking into some work from home thing. Plus since Emerson's LA campus is nearby I've been checking their course calendar to see if there's any social media/new marketing courses i can take to brush up on my skill set since so much of what i learned 10 years ago (!!!!) is essentially useless now, or completely outdated. so there are totally positives in life, a bounty of them honestly, i'm just being cranky at the moment.

we will be visiting NY/Boston in August though. my brother-in-law is getting married and we're going to try to spend some extra time in each city/suburb to see what our thoughts are on the east coast, if things have gotten better, if my mindset has shifted to one where i'd be more appreciative of a smaller city again. because if there is one thing i know about me, i always romanticize the past, so clearly spending time in places where the past took place would be a good idea before being all "hey fuck it, let's move to boston" because honestly that is essentially how moving to LA happened, and to some degree that was not the best idea. because really our move out here was kind of insane in terms of how deciding to move and actually committing to moving took place within a matter of weeks. it's funny because i'm impulsive as all hell so my actions don't surprise me as much, but ethan is such a pragmatist and for whatever reason we were like "yeah fuck this place, let's move across the country to a city that we spent all of 3 days in, RAAAAR" and just did it. though i also think that's kind of awesome but is not something we can sustain forever obviously.

so right now i sort of feel like there are two solid options:
1) move to west hollywood which is WAAAAAAAY lest touristy/violent and see if that's tolerable. ethan will have a shorter commute, it's more walkable to things that one actually wants to walk to, it could be a good change

2) ragequit LA this winter. which of course would be kind of stupid since i'll have gone from years of sun and heat to moving to an east coast winter which might drive me out of my skull

my dream would still be to move to new orleans but i just don't see that happening any time soon being as while i'd actually be able to find decent healthcare there, job opportunities would be scarce.

i almost feel like this relates to that whole phenomena where people get paralyzed by having too many choices. we don't have kids, we don't have a strong social network here, we can do anything and go anywhere, and that just makes it even harder to have half of a clue what to choose.

finally - weightlifting. ethan is sort of being my coach at the moment and i equally love it and hate it. i've been doing a bunch of kettlebell stuff (really i wish i was still tracking on fitocracy) as well as free weights and bodyweight stuff. this in addition to running on the elliptical and doing the paleo thing has made some interesting changes in my body. i have a LONG way to go to get to where i want to be, but it's interesting seeing areas tone up. i just need to work on getting leaner too. running is at least meditative and a good excuse to listen to music i haven't listened to in ages (angry industrial RAAAR)

so yeah. that's life at the moment.

so this might sound shitty, and it's not meant to, and i'm not stating things as absolutes, just how i observed them.

i wasn't really friends with anders, acquaintances yes, but even that was inconsistent at best. we had some very difficult conversations that were really more like arguments over the years on FB and LJ that tended to revolve around her vocal disgust for overweight people, ugly people, hippies, extreme dieting, (occasionally) muslims, feminists, people on welfare or any social program...our ideals just didn't jive on the most basic of levels. at the same time i was fascinated by her, maybe because she seemed so aggressive or maybe because i'm fascinated by people i don't get along with, or maybe because i always feel like it's somehow my fault if i don't instantly like someone, that it is some shortcoming on my part, or maybe i was just fascinated by the fact that she truly didn't seem to care about her detractors, i don't know what it was. she was always nice to me but i couldn't look past my own issues and i assumed that her niceness had more to do with the fact that my being a dj in "the scene" than any value i held outside of that (and my scene value was pretty low to start off with anyway). but really when it came down to it, i owed her, my first not-college-radio-or-lounge djing experience was doing the first Darkside Walkers thing in Arlington.

i had a lot of respect for her work ethic though, because she -never- gave up. she promoted her shows like they were all headlining gigs at the boston garden, she promoted her friend's bands or her students from School of Rock as if they were all Motley Crue. It was amazing to me because she'd work so hard and pretty much got lambasted a lot. I remember alternately cringing or taking part in some of the insane flame wars she provoked on the b0st0n community or on the noise blog...and for all the shit she got from people, she never fucking gave up, she never seemed to crack at all, which is really pretty remarkable. her passion for what she did was just that strong, her skin was just that thick, she believed in herself and in the boston music scene enough that she didn't care what people thought of her, she just wanted to get people to go out and see live music...i couldn't have put up with the shit she dealt with for a day, let alone over a decade. but her dedication to her muse was just that strong. even though she was often met with a lot of resistance and not always a lot of respect, she always carried herself like a rockstar.

i'd kind of forgotten about her (which is fair because i moved across the country and haven't kept up on boston scene things) until pretty recently when we got into a discussion on a mutual friend's FB wall and it was the same old banging of heads. she'd sent me a friend request and i deleted it because it felt more like she was just collecting people vs having any real interest in knowing me, and especially after i'd moved, especially after FB made it next to impossible to even see friend's postings, i'd been spending more time deleting people vs adding them. but then i felt sort of like a dick about it, like who am i to decide that someone isn't interesting enough to know on the internet, that the word "friend" in livejournal or facebook is sorely overused and undervalued. it bugged me though, that i'd deleted it, it felt arrogant or something. because no matter what i felt about her politics or the way she sometimes carried herself, i still respected how much she worked her ass off, and i always felt like i really owed her for that foot in the door.

then she died a truly horrible death.

the news broke yesterday and i watched as people who i'd previously seen completely rag on her any time she'd put herself out there suddenly sing her praises and act as if they'd lost a best friend. on one hand it made me happy because yeah, regardless of anything else, she did a ton for a scene and a city she cared for and that is what she should be remembered for, that is how she'd want to be remembered, she wanted to make boston her empire. she tried and she tried really really really hard. she was relentless and passionate and those things totally deserve commemoration.

but it also kind of pissed me off in a weird way. i don't know if it was her young age or the horrific circumstances under which she passed, but something about seeing people who vocally disliked her or didn't know her talking about going to her funeral, going through all the sorts of very visible signs of public mourning...it seemed disingenuous on some level. where was all this love when she was alive? i mean hell, in the wake of her death i've probably thought more positive things about her than i ever did during her life...why the fuck is that? why do we just take people for granted while they are alive and then the minute they are no longer with us, the moment they may never be able to appreciate or acknowledge these positive sentiments, that is the exact moment that those sentiments are overly abundant?

i mean, i'm not saying i'm -not- a part of this culture. even by writing this post i clearly am. i never wrote an lj post about her when she was alive, and here i am doing it now. and man, i just see all of the loving things that people are posting about or to a dead woman's wall and i can't help but wonder how much better off we'd all be if we were so open with our communication when the other person could actually response or at least hear what we had to say. obviously that wouldn't have had any impact on the fire or her death, but it would've made life just that much more awesome. why is it so hard? are we afraid that we cheapen the sentiments by sharing them freely? are we afraid of people getting overbloated egos? do we just not think about things until it is too late?

it's so easy to have a thousand friends on social media and still feel or be alone. it's easy for everyone to assume that someone else is being kind or taking care of each other...it's easy to just fall in amongst the masses and do the minimum to maintain some sort of social connection now, and on one hand it has its merits, but on the other hand it kind of sucks. it's so easy to feel like "oh yeah, we're friends on lj or fb so we totally know what is going on in each other's lives" but really that's rarely the case, in the same way it's way easier to eulogize people than to celebrate them when they're alive.

since i got sick, i haven't really been able to enjoy the convenience of food. we prepare most of the food we eat, rarely go to restaurants, prepackaged food and drinks are out of the question, when we travel i pretty much live on smoothies that we make since we travel with our blender...overall it's fine because i have enough other avenues that appeal to me senses, but sometimes it's a bummer to go to party and see everyone having delicious mixed drinks i can't have or even just do something as easy as stop at a convenience store or bodega to get something to eat. but it's also been 7 years and that's more than enough time to adapt.

valentines day (which ethan and i are hokey, and by hokey i mean awesome enough to make a minor deal of) is a total bummer because chocolate is something i'm super allergic to, so it's usually "here's some cool flowers and a bar of white chocolate" and it's always appreciated but it's also sort of a clear illustration of my limitations when it comes to food. like man, the idea of getting a box of mixed chocolates is something i am envious of whenever i get one for ethan (which i do a fair amount because he's a total whore for chocolate and i like getting to smell delicious chocolate, like for valentines day i got him this because scotch and chocolate) but again after 7 years of limitations you get used to things (even though sometimes you miss random stuff you never liked that much like soda or random gross food court samples).

this year ethan surprised the hell out of me by going to a candy shop and had a box of assorted white chocolates made up for me. this is the first time in years that i've had a box of candy where i could eat -everything- without having to repeatedly double check the ingredients. the candy was good, but what was far more touching was the sliver of normalcy that it injected into my life. while i have adapted to the new normal that my life entails, there was something so awesome about doing something so normal as just being able to eat candy, which was just such a phenomenal gift. it wouldn't have even mattered if the chocolate was good, it was just getting to enjoy something that everyone else kind of takes for granted. so i was incredibly appreciative of how thoughtful and personal a gesture it was.

so last night was pretty fantastic as we hunkered down with our respective boxes of sweets and started watching house of cards. this season is great, way more complicated and dense than the first season, which i didn't even think was possible. one thing that i've gotten a kick out of is a friend got to work as a consultant to flesh out the character of Gavin which is pretty awesome. it's not arbitrary as said friend has made a name for himself as an on and offline activist, but i guess it is sort of cool seeing someone from boston doing industry stuff, especially for such a good show.

so yesterday we went on the dearly departed tour of hollywood, because what screams birthday more than a morbid tour of your city. truth be told, the tour wasn't morbid at all, it was mostly about the history and the architecture of the city with some crime/scandal scenes thrown in. it was honestly a lot of fun though, especially if you like history & pop culture. it was also enjoyable because it wasn't "and here's so&so's house, and here's that restaurant everyone likes to go to" which a lot of the tours seem to be. being a tour guide seems like a fantastic job too, i mean, i didn't learn anything new since i am kind of morbid and fascinated by celebrity culture, but even still the way it was all described was just great. looking at the yelp reviews for the tour they have 3 guides, each of whom has their own take on the tour, which is pretty cool in that it allows you to do the tour multiple times, but also because you know that you're learning about what the driver finds fascinating (in our case architecture and building preservation) vs just reading a script written by some faceless person in an office somewhere.

the tour guide said that they try to make the tour enjoyable for both tourists and locals but that really at some point if your life you should try to see your city as a tourist, and it made a lot of sense. just in terms of seeing it how other people see it, but also seeing things you'd never know about, really arbitrary stuff like a hummingbird feeder that is considered the LAX of bird feeders, and it was truly just swarmed with hummingbirds and it's totally walkable from the apartment but i never noticed it. i wonder how much cool stuff i missed in other cities i've lived in.

when i lived in NY, I did some touristy stuff, I mean I went up to the top of the world trade center and empire state building and saw a broadway show, but that's about it. i mean, it's a totally different city now and i think i a) take myself less seriously and b) am far enough removed that it would be a lot of fun. I never did -anything- touristy in boston -ever- until my senior project where I had to write a proposal for the freedom trail foundation. even then I just walked the freedom trail with my classmates vs actually taking the real tour.

i remember years ago, standing by the eiffel tower with ethan and sort of griping about how everyone's vacations, no matter how hard they try to be unique, are probably essentially the same. we go to see cool things because we want to see them, whether they be super popular or off the beaten path (but not off the beaten path enough that we hadn't heard of them)...at the time it sort of felt weirdly melancholy, i don't even know if melancholy is the right word, just sort of like "whooo here's my picture of the eiffel tower that looks exactly like every other picture of the eiffel tower" but now i just sort of feel like that was being pretentious. because touristy stuff is fun, it's created to be fun, if it wasn't fun it would fail...

all i know is when we go back to boston this year i totally want to do a duck tour since that seems like the pinnacle of boston tourist. i also still have to sort out what i'm doing in new orleans (other than see neutral milk hotel) because that's coming up soon. going to NOLA is going to kind of suck in terms of being seriously restricted foodwise, but should still be a trip as i mean, it's new orleans and i'm gothy so i mean, come on.

so tonight we took bones on a walk. the santa ana winds are blowing across LA and have brought with them some horribly dry air that is at least somewhat enjoyable at night. some people call the santa ana winds the devil's wind and claim that they make people crazy.

This afternoon the PCH had a 2 acre fire that you could apparently see from miles away. there's nothing weirder than seeing pictures of the beach on fire.

since it was nice-ish out we decided to take the dog on a long walk...which kept getting interrupted by...weirdness on a level i haven't experienced in a long time.

we talked with this one guy Twist, who is a homeless guy we talk to a lot, he's nice and sober and I honestly am curious to his whole story, but so far we just tend to talk about dogs, LA, just kind of trivial stuff, but we hang out and he's really nice. he loves the dog and the dog completely loves him. tonight he was telling us all about the camp he lives in in the canyon and gave us an open invitation to come hang out some time. which was sort of unexpected and out of the norm but not weird.

a couple blocks later we ran into this guy who apparently knows us though neither ethan and i could remember him. he started rambling about ballet and yoga and then all of the sudden pulled a knife out (at this point i contemplated whether or not my epi pen would be a good defensive weapon) and instead of stabbing us (yay!) he started throwing the fucking thing around while doing ballet. we were sort of cornered into an empty shop doorway so there was really no good way to quickly get away with the dancing man with the knife so we just sort of let him do his thing. then he tried to sell us weed, then crack. once he realized we were not interested in drugs, he started telling us about the price is right (i still have no idea what was going on), how he wanted to punch l ron hubbard's brother in the face, and how we should tear down the scientology building on hollywood blvd and replace it with condos. i was just sort of astounded this was happening, and i think someone with a better survival instinct than i (or ethan) probably would've figured out a way to extract themselves from the situation way earlier, however i was just sort of transfixed by the bizarreness of the whole thing...

eventually we escaped and laughed about how bizarre everything was. usually walks with the dog are pretty chill in the evening.

when we were a couple blocks away from our apartment, we stopped at a bodega type place to get cigarettes. at this point i was walking around a parking lot with the dog and ran into a rather tall gentleman who was wearing what looked like catcher's gear, black leather gloves, and a construction helmet. at this point honestly nothing is going to faze me in terms of "bizarre shit people wear in hollywood" so i was completely unimpressed with this guy until he told me "i am going to kill you and steal your dog" at which point i was just sort of shocked. either this guy meant it, had a terrible sense of humor, was crazy, or some combination of all that. i was just sort of rooted to the spot, apparently an addition to "bridget has inappropriate reactions to serious situations"* staring at the guy who then pointed his thumb and index finger at my forehead (at this point i started backing up toward the crosswalk) and said "bang, you're dead, your dog did nothing to save you" and repeated this a few times until ethan (oblivious to this) joined me, and he again repeated, "i am going to kill you and steal your dog" with a big fucking smile on his face as if that was totally something normal you say to anyone ever. thankfully he did not follow us as we ran across the street.

when we were a couple feet from our apartment building we ran into another stranger who was totally nice and normal but i think we didn't know how to deal with him as he completely did not fit the narrative of our evening.

i am now starting to wonder about this whole santa ana wind bringing the crazy thing since after tonight....i just don't even know.

then about an hour ago there was an earthquake.

YAY LA!!!!!





*i have a track record of cracking up when horrible stuff happens.