Little Fattie Gangsta Penguin

As we do almost every night we went down to the Dodder to see the wildlife. We started in March or April, it’s close and it’s always pleasant, it feels like one of the few really awesome parts of Dublin that isn’t overtaken by tourists that we know about so far at least. The Dodder actually significantly runs through the town I live in, and one day we’ll follow it for as long as we can, but in the evening usually we go down to the Lower Dodder in Rathfarnham as it’s become habit, but also we’ve had really good luck with the fauna.

A few months ago a friend passed suddenly, we were not super close, but close enough they’d been to my wedding and enough so that we were excited to be on the same side of the Atlantic again because maybe we’d pick up a thread of our loose friendship and shepherd it into this decade, and in the wake of that tragedy I could not sleep. A few weeks prior we’d been trying to figure out how to fit the city the lived in into a trip for later this year and now they’re were gone and it hurt, it hurt to see other friends hurting, I was just not great at reigning in my emotions so I woke Ethan and asked if he could take me down to the river around 5 or 6am and there at the base of a waterfall right where we arrived was a great cormorant standing resplendent all inky black magnificence with both wings outstretched to dry its feathers after a dive. In Ireland the cormorant carries a great deal of significance and omens, one of which is that they are guardians of the hereafter as they navigate so deftly and invisibly in dark water they must be able to traverse between here and what is next with the same effortless agility. It was beautiful and not that I am one of the people who the universe should have been sending signs to in that horrible time, but it still felt like something I needed to see in that moment. A few weeks later a friend came to visit and this was the first place we took them after picking them up at the airport and we were greeted by a big beautiful red fox bounding around before it vanished over a wall. That’s some of how the Dodder feels magical to me. If we were to buy a home not in the woods I’d want it to be there. There are magpies and kingfishers and wood pigeons and dippers and black birds everywhere, there are otters and stoat we haven’t seen yet and it just feels so secluded and wild even though it’s not. But I love it.

Like much of Europe and the planet, we are in the midst of a heatwave and dry spell. Not historic but only falling short of that by a slim margin and parts of the island are on fire. It has made walking by the river more interesting as with less water we can see way more fish than usual as well as some detritus, including a computer keyboard that has bee driving me nuts. I saw what I think is a European eel snuggled amongst some weedy sediment and it was adorable, with a little snout like a puppy. We can make out all sorts of trout and minnows and maybe salmon and loaches, in addition to the fish sometimes we’ll see the family of foxes that photographers throw food to to entice them to come out for photos I have mixed feelings on that, the fox I mentioned earlier was out organically, that encounter wasn’t forced) , there’s a single Sika deer who we’ve gotten to see grow a set of antlers over the months. But the water levels being so low is disheartening. It’s supposed to rain this weekend and I really hope that’s the case.

Today though, we were talking to a photographer about our having emigrated here and how it all was going and how we liked it, he was super friendly and excited for us and we were engaged in conversation and then a family of 4 came down to the water with an inflatable boat which was just brilliant and something we’d never seen anyone do before. There’s no rule saying we can’t bring rafts or go swimming in the river, like most things here there are warnings and suggestions but you also kind of take your fate into your own hands. So there we all were and the parents just helped the kids into the boat and they were off. Since the river is so so so low there’s basically no current so this is definitely a time where it’s safe to do something like this, the river was also dotted with people fishing while standing in the water so again this was not high risk. The boat might get mangled by rocks but the passengers would be fine since they could just stand up. We ended up having a great long conversation with the parents, they told us where they got the boat (Aldi! For €30!!) we ended up working together with the kids to get the keyboard out of the river (yay!) and we talked about signing up for this action group that cleans the river and its banks. It was just a really solid and pleasant conversation. The dad comes from the same town as my grandmother so we were both excited about that. It was just a really pleasant chat that definitely felt like it ended with “see you later” instead of “ok bye!” So we’ll see if anything comes of it. But between them and the photographer both interactions felt more friendly and welcoming and that was really pleasant.

On the way home we went to Aldi and bought a boat.

When I was 10, my mom got my dad the Traveling Wilburys debut album as he was a big Beatles and Bob Dylan fan. Being 10 and therefore not remotely the arbiter of good taste, before hearing it I proclaimed the album would be trash and called them the Traveling Has-Beens, as I was apparently not down with the idea of a super group. 10 verging into 11 year old me has some strong and uneducated opinions. Then I heard the album and decided that Tom Petty and Roy Orbison were phenomenal and would go on to steal my dad’s Wilburys, Full Moon Fever, and Mystery Girl tapes.

This was around the same time as my burgeoning Metallica fandom (and shitty metal too, my taste was absolutely impeachable) and for the first time music had begun to really deeply resonate with me far beyond “yay dance around the living room time” as I was listening to lyrics and having big fucking feelings like only a tween can. Also it felt like it was mine, which I think is why I stole my dad’s tapes as opposed to just copying them. There was tons of stuff I listened to with my parents like Madonna or Michael Jackson or Eurythmics, but this newer to me stuff was mine and it felt almost sacred.

I started recording MTV in hopes that I’d see music videos by the bands that I liked that weren’t their top 5 singles, and I’d found leaving the vcr recording overnight was the best way to find less popular stuff since 3am was way more interesting than 7pm (this holds true in life as well) which is how I discovered The Cure. I absolutely loved Lovesong and Fascination Street, so I went out and bought Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, an album that is famous for not having either of those songs on it. I didn’t care, I loved it. Then when it was released a few years later, I immediately got Wish which also didn’t have those songs on it and became completely obsessed. I also finally got Disintegration. I loved the Cure and that was that.

When I got to college I was a mess. My mom has just been released like 2 days prior from her months long stay in hospital for her two aneurisms. 6 months before that my grandmother, one of my favorite people who in addition to being someone I adored also lived with us, had died. I had wanted to defer my first year because I didn’t feel ready or stable enough to just move to another city and take on college but my parents (mostly my dad, mom wasn’t up for big administrative choices) felt that if I deferred I’d never go, which was ludicrous, but whatever, I was that fledgling chick getting catapulted out of the nest into a fucking wall.

Because my mom had only just gotten home and needed full time care and home care hadn’t been ironed out yet, my dad drove me up to college a couple days early to drop me off at the dorm. Looking back I am surprised they didn’t just put me on a train. My roommates weren’t there yet as my floor wasn’t moving in for another day, freshman activities hadn’t started yet, and my dad had dropped me off with my luggage which wasn’t even luggage but garbage bags filled with clothing and bedding and turned around to go back to New York. Oh no actually he went to cvs and got me coat hangers and then left. It was not a heartfelt hallmark experience by a mile.

I’d thrown on a ratty Cure shirt and jeans to set up my furniture in the room and decided to wander the dorm and see if anyone wanted to watch television (I did not have a television. I also didn’t have a computer, our lab wasn’t open and our common rooms were only outfitted with couches) or if anyone wanted to go for a walk and smoke lots of cigarettes (it was 1996 this made sense) My epic solo wandering session lasted about 3 minutes, I had decided to go to the top floor (my dorm was on the 8th) and work my way down checking out common areas. In the 10th floor common room I ran into a bunch of guys who looked like they should’ve been putting together a zine or waiting to audition for a Danny Boyle or Gus Van Zandt movie. Achingly, effortlessly, cool and more alternative than thou, I remember feeling like they’d take me for poseur dork with my mainstream band(tm) shirt. I apologized for intruding and started to back away saying I was gonna go outside to smoke when this absolutely beautiful guy, with big brown eyes and chin length brown hair, the first one I’d noticed like he was in technicolor and everyone else sepia when I’d walked in the room, stood up and asked if he could he join me and maybe we could talk about the Cure as they were his favorite band, and being from rural Maine meeting fellow fans was uncommon. We ended up walking all over back bay all night, at some point I’d gotten cold and he gave me his sweater which I forgot to give back when we returned to the dorm, after I was thankful for the excuse to hunt him down again as I was already feeling a little besotted. The feeling was mutual and we hung out all the time, he was at the center of all my core introduction to Boston memories (which was not so great when we broke up at the end of the semester, hooray).

While I could wax poetic about this very stereotypical college infatuation, and how brightly it sparked and quickly it burned out, he isn’t the point. One of the more important things about Justin was that he was in the honors program, which was its own microcosm inside the small and disjointed world of Emerson, and he introduced me to two classmates from his cohort, Ann and Margarita, people I may not have met otherwise, definitely not that semester and probably not that year as they lived in a separate dorm (at Emerson the dorms were super cliquey) and we didn’t have any classes together. We connected pretty quickly, three only children with complimentary personalities and interests, we would eventually start going clubbing together, hold drunken movie night in my dorm room every Friday, spend way too much time at Deli Haus together, and eventually share a way off campus apartment together. Margarita would take me to a shelter party where I met a bunch of people I’d later become friends with, a party we walked home from in the middle of the freezing night singing “Edge of the Deep Green Sea” from, and I can trace all of it back to one night wandering around wearing one specific shirt from one specific band. I am not sure how many bands I feel like I owe so much in terms of how their music has spoken to me but also the places it’s landed me

( Looking for something forever gone But something we will always want )

First off today I found out I don’t have endometrial cancer and I felt like I could relax for the first time in almost a month.

A few days after a friend had died of a brutally fast ovarian cancer, my Obgyn called to tell me I needed to have an operative hysteroscopy as soon as possible because in addition to the abnormal bleeding and cramping I was experiencing, an ultrasound had shown significant uterine thickening. Since I have PCOS and had a precocious puberty that stuff always needs to be taken seriously. While they were able to get me in quickly for surgery it took a while to get all the results back and I was getting very very very very anxious. But this is just the wonders of perimenopause wrecking havoc. While that was great news I am gonna meet with my doctor to figure out what’s next, like if we’re gonna just eject my uterus, because my quality of life is kinda sucking but I don’t want to rush anything either since while I’m menstruating even if it’s chaotic it’s still protecting my bones


I was in some Gate gifted and talented program between grades 3-6 and because of that my parents left me pretty unsupervised when it came to my media consumption. This was great since I was an obstinate little kid and it was also the late 80s when we still all ran around like we were feral anyway, but it also meant that I got into some very not age appropriate stuff like Anne Rice and all her other noms de plume, excessive horror movies, and metal music. Again late 80s so none of these should be too concerning (except maybe Anne Rampling which was s&m smut and I was a kid. 😬). But they didn’t try to make me like stuff that they liked, they kind of let me run wild at the library any chance I could get.

SO I got into Metallica when I was 10, their single One was all over MTV, and I loved it. In addition to their music I was fascinated by their album artwork and merch. We had an indie record store one town over called Looney Tunes where they had a whole wall of rock band t shirts that faced a wall full of live bootleg cassettes, it was heaven. The art for Metallica was particularly fascinating and terrifying for me, most if not all of it from that era was done by Pushead and I assume in hindsight that it either was inspired by or inspirational to Joel Peter Witkin. It had skulls so I was transfixed if a little unnerved. I have always loved skulls so their visual aesthetic was right up my alley as was their sound.

So little 10 or 11 year old me was all about Metallica (and Tom Petty and the Cure) while my friends were mostly into New Kids on the Block. I remember sleeping over at my friend Natalie’s house so we could watch the 1989 Grammys together, the night when Metallica lost to Jethro Tull for best metal album, the first time that category happened. The fact that they were performing at the Grammys made it seem like they all but had it in the bag and then to lose to a progressive blues flautist who was in the wrong category? Kid me was furious as I assumed awards were really meaningful and …And Justice for All was this great anti war album created by a band who just suffered the absolutely horrific loss of their bass player and managed to come back from a tragedy that huge, and the fact it was overlooked just made me irate on their behalf but also made me like them more (kid me was devouring Rolling Stone magazine at the library and going through microfiche to learn more about bands I liked). I was kind of put off by a lot of the glam metal that was misogynistic and focused on partying and being cool while Metallica were writing about the government and mental illness and the industrial war complex and to a kid who sometimes got woken up by the noise from their dad’s ptsd fueled war nightmares, that spoke to me more than songs about getting laid or going to stripclubs did. I took pop culture seriously when I was little, I still do, it is basically what I studied in college so it makes sense before we take my being a consumer whore into the equation.

( as is typical when I like something I go hard )

I’m watching the livestream of Nine Inch Noize while I write this because goddamn this is so good. I haven’t been this excited about Nine Inch Nails since the first time I heard Pretty Hate Machine in jr high. These fresh revisions of old songs with Boys Noize are just fantastic. I wish they’d tour with this, it’s so fun and fresh.


2 weeks ago we went on an adventure to find Coolalingo Waterfalls which are absolutely beautiful and pretty hidden. Only we basically couldn’t find them, ended up on multiple wrong paths and then when we kind of did find them we were on an embankment on the other side of a swollen river from them. We decided to jump down the embankment so we could find a place to cross the river and get to the other side. Only there wasn’t anywhere to pass safely (I need to be more cautious since osteopenia) and ended up trying to climb up the embankment we’d jumped down which was very harrowing because the ground was wet and gave easily. I’m new to this and not in great shape and climbing up was brutal, but the only way out, falling would be like 10ft onto rocks or trees that would hopefully stop us before hitting the water, it was *awful* but we both were able to get ourselves up and back onto a path, it was the most scared I’ve been when not on an airplane, but that same sort of terror of “why am I here, why did I decide to do this” so that was a good time. My big takeaway is that I need to work on upper body strength.

Today we returned to the scene of the crime because we figured out how we’d screwed up finding the path to the waterfall. It was a lot easier than the hell path we’d done last time and the payoff was phenomenal. I absolutely freaked out at the beginning and wanted to turn around but I figured if I did do that I’d never see the waterfall and I’d just stay scared. So we did it and it was so absolutely worth it on every level. We’ll have to go back in the summer to go swimming. I also need less rigid shoes maybe? They’re really good for a lot of things but I don’t feel like I have as much control as I could with shoes with thinner soles? I’m totally out of my depth with this stuff. But it was wild how the lizard part of my brain just freaked going back to a place where I’d been so scared. I’m just glad I was able to push through it so it doesn’t become a phobia or something. I just need to remember to get out of my own way.

The scope of things can be so subjective. My freshman year of college I dated this kid Justin who was from the middle of nowhere Maine. It was a Friday night early in the courtship and we had stopped in Copley Square in the shadow of the Hancock, and I remember looking around at the overall lack of skyscrapers starting to think I’d made the wrong choice opting for school in Boston instead of in Manhattan, and basically at the same time we expressed our respective awe and dismay over the size (or lack thereof) of Boston. It felt to me like a city where your past would be inescapable. Later I’d get a real lesson in your past being inescapable when me and Justin broke up and had to live in the same small dorm together which was painful. I decided quickly after that to not date classmates. Sometimes I wonder about all the things that hallmarked my moving to Boston and how much pain there was, the kind of pain only an 18 year old can feel, and if that contributed to my lack of love for the city. In the end it was just never a good fit, one I just struggled to make work, something I’d be guilty of in a lot of other arenas.


When I first came to Ireland in the 90s I was similarly whelmed. I had met up with some friends and we backpacked around the west coast staying with their extended family or friends of their extended family or friends of friends of friends of their extended family, exchanging work for housing in some cases, and it was dreary. Most of the places we went were quite poor, higher education wasn’t a thing people aspired to, and thus seemed uninspired and often drunk. Happy, but isolated and ok with it and it was something that teenage me couldn’t relate to at all, I was so intent on looking forward that I was often ignoring my present, and it was especially bad the summer before I moved away for college. I just felt at the time that I kinda got why my family left. I came home to my mom and the aneurysms so I don’t remember a lot of the trip but I remember it being kinda eh, I have tons of video I shot somewhere, I should find it.

When I first saw London in 2001 I was awestruck or starstruck or something inbetween. It was beautiful and simultaneously modern yet honoring its grandiose history. I immediately knew that I’d want to come back on a student visa after I finished college. It was so metropolitan, so effortlessly chic, so grungy and bougie and I loved it. I hated the presence of the royal family and I was put off by the testament to colonialism that was the British museum, but I was also totally enamored with the Tate and the Globe and Slimelight and all that stalls in Camden. I’d go again less than a year later with an entire gaggle of friends and again just loved it. Two years later when I lived in Cambridge I went a bunch of times and it never lost its luster. Prior to getting laid off, Ethan had been in the process getting transferred to a team in London, our plan was to move there for a year or two before Ireland just to have fun and be metropolitan. We figured we’d try living in Barnes or Richmond and it would be an adventure.

Now, in what feels like many many many many lifetimes later I find myself digging my toes into the ground around Dublin while finding myself kind of very overwhelmed by and disinterested in London. London may be the only city I’ve been to that just feels significantly bigger compared to when I first visited. All cities change they are basically living organisms so I get that, but I’ve never felt so outpaced.

So the past weekend was about indulgence, a much delayed trip, with two things in mind: eating at a specific restaurant and picking up a bougie bottle of perfume that was meant to be a Christmas present at Harrods.

Somehow we’d found out about Hind’s Head in Bray. It’s now a Heston Blumenthal restaurant, but it’s also a pub that has been around since the 1400s. I’m pretty sure it’s the first Michelin star restaurant that I’ve been to, when I got to a point in life where I could afford fancier stuff, my bone marrow rebelled and reigned in my formerly adventurous palate, which was quite rude. I don’t even remember how we found out about this place, we’d gone down some YouTube rabbit hole about Irish and British cuisine and found a video about Blumenthal’s recreations of historic British cuisine and from there found out about the Hind’s Head and their famous fish and triple cooked chips.

I know someone who manages a finer dining establishment and they often write about their frustrations with accommodating people with food allergies and truthfully over the years it got to me and made me even more apprehensive about contacting restaurants to see if they could accommodate me since I’m complicated and I don’t find it fun to deal with, I doubt most restaurants would, and seeing someone I know, who knows me and people like me, kinda dragging “difficult” customers just made it less and less appealing. Plus when I’m traveling to places like London, that used to include trans Atlantic flights, so fucking around and risking a possibly trip derailing reaction seemed even more terrifying. But now this is like, a *45 min flight away, maybe it could work for a long weekend?

It turned out basically nothing on their menu was me friendly BUT, since Western Europe is actually phenomenally good about food allergies, leagues ahead of America, and they were eager to make me a meal that I could safely enjoy. They made me my own batch of fish and chips and a wasabi beetroot salad that was heavenly. I also got a delicious virgin mojito. Oh and we shared bread and cultured butter. Everything was just the best version of that thing that I’d ever had which I assume is par for the course with Michelin star places. It was all fantastic, no one ever seemed remotely frustrated with me, and it was all a delight. The only issue was since I rarely eat out, the heaviness of the meal was kind of a shock to my annoyingly precious system, but it was so totally worth it.

Before dinner was our trip to Harrods to see their insane perfume halls. In the 90s I used to just get perfume oil in St Marks or Times Square, then in 2004 I got into Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a small perfume oil house out of Los Angeles. I got more intense about it the more I started dropping more significant but unhealthy vices and also seeing my diet get more and more restricted. I think it was a way to still indulge in something decadent. There’s also a whole long and storied side quest with Lush products. But I started to get more into actual perfume in 2014 after my dad died when I lived in Hollywood. That morning I walked across the street to Sephora to distract myself and stumbled upon Theirry Mugler’s perfumes which were weird and unique. Later I’d try LeLabo and all the stuff I couldn’t afford at The Grove. It was an on and off again thing that went in tandem with BPAL until a few years ago when niche houses just were getting more interesting and BPAL less so. Plus the pandemic made us all get weird about hobbies which is a whole other thing.

ANYWAY while I’d been to Harrods a few times I’d never been to the perfume halls, which are beyond insane. Which is really saying something because Harrods is insane on its own, it is just this absolutely repulsive monolith to overconsumption. It’s enjoyable in small bits but when you step back and look at it all it’s so gluttonous and grotesque it seemed only fitting when we were walking out someone pushed past us to outside and started vomiting copiously outside the Prada cafe. While I feel awful for them because norovirus is all over the place and throwing up absolutely is horrible and I hope they’re ok, it just kinda fit the overall vulgar vibe. There’s just a level of privilege that, to me, is disgusting and I think that’s the level of privilege that really shops there, it goes beyond getting a fun bougie treat and just dives into what I assume is some bonkers entitlement. I know I know a lot of well off people but none of them were “go buy baby clothing by Gucci” rich or if they were they hid it. Because that kinda shit is peak conspicuous consumption and is gross.

We secured the bottle of perfume we came for and a jellycat shaped like a raindrop with little galoshes. We also hit the food hall so I could get Ethan a ton of fancy chocolate because he’d never get it for himself and also for Valentine’s Day. So that part was fun because Ethan is impossible to shop for but chocolate is a sure fire win.

I had honestly been hoping for something more sensory exciting and less tacky extravagance perfume hall wise, which I found at a niche store in Covent Garden. There they sat with me and went over notes and brands that I liked and kind of understood my goal of smelling like a piece of vanilla cake inside a burned out church, (which sounds sacrilegious and edgelordy but I like vanilla, incense, and smoke and want to smell like or just smell those things all the time) , and sent me packing with a bunch of decants. This will be fun and something I can dive into for a while since there really isn’t as much a perfume scene here. But that’s ok because not feeling the need to buy stuff is also pretty great.

London itself just felt so beyond overwhelming this time around. We also went to the museum of natural history, soho, covent garden, Liberty (as insane as Harrods was this was more like the quiet luxury cousin) Selfridges (which honestly was worse than Harrods, I feel like people who shop there are probably at the “in the Epstein Files” or “hunt other people for sport” level of extreme privilege related sociopathy), and just plain old meandering, but between Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year, and the 89 thousand protests going on that shut down massive swaths of the city, it just felt difficult to navigate and massive and somehow I found myself feeling more like more of a country mouse visiting now that I live in another city than I did when I last visited 2 years ago and lived in the burbs. Which surprised me because this isn’t a city I’d consider myself unfamiliar with, but suddenly I am.

For now I love my little city where I can see the mountains from my porch and i think some of my values and wants are adapting to this life, something that never really happened in Boston OR Los Angeles. Those were situations where I felt like I was constantly trying to make myself fit the city and felt pressured to be someone else, here, at least for now I just am and I am happy.


*(SIDE NOTE: 45 min flights are great but the planes are smaller and you can feel gravity nipping at your ankles and it’s totally terrifying, so that’s a whole thing I’m gonna have to learn to deal with bleargh.)

I need my golden crown of sorrow my bloody sword to swing
I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology


This is gonna be a long and winding stretch like you’d think I started taking yoga.


When you get diagnosed with a bullshit disease like mastocytosis you end up hearing all sorts of horror stories about how the disease itself may not kill you but you will probably die from some stupid avoidable complication most likely a reaction to medication. You learn Christopher Reeve had it and how it seriously diminished his treatment options leading to paralysis. When you get diagnosed with a stupid bullshit disease 20 years ago and most of the information on it is still written by fellow patients you end up with bonkers pamphlets like, ”what you don’t know about anesthesia will kill you” since we’re almost all allergic to opiates, and you live in terror that everyone is undereducated about this dumb disease.

A couple years after moving to Los Angeles, we returned to Boston in the fall for a wedding. It was a lovely event full of tons of friends, and multiple times I got big hugs from enthusiastic people who then said they’d just gotten over being sick. I was so happy to see people I didn’t care much but my the third or fourth time I kind of got a pit in my stomach. Upon arriving back in Los Angeles after our weekend in Boston, I realized I’d picked something up from someone and was ready to lean hard into self care. Then my dad had another heart attack or something I can’t remember, but it was enough to get my parents who never told me about his health debacles to call me to tell me I might want to get home so I immediately did. Flying back and forth takes it out of you under the best circumstances, but when you’ve got a sinus infection brewing and then go on multiple cross country flights in rapid succession, the pressure changes wreak absolute havoc in your sinuses. Especially when the inflammation from the disease coupled with the inflammation mastocytosis causes end up creating an imperfect storm where the infection is trapped. Which is what happened to me. This went on for months of testing different antibiotics, steroids, and antifungals in an attempt to get that thing out of me before resorting to surgery. During this we had to abruptly move out of our townhouse in Venice due to some severe plumbing issues that were a major healthcode violation. While that place had kinda sucked, the location was great and we didn’t want to move, we had to.

So my world in LA was getting smaller, we had moved to DTLA where walking around wasn’t remotely the easy option it had been on the West Side, my cat Luna had been diagnosed with cancer and was winding down her time here, my new but ever present headaches were a delight, my balance being off from my sinuses made firespinning a no-go, seeing all my Boston friends so briefly made LA feel lonely, it was all just exhausting. I’d gone hard with watching tv as an escape, never a good sign, and been watching this surprisingly good sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother”. It was super gimmicky but had some really poignant moments (and Alyson Hannigan) especially with music. One episode ended with “Shake it Off” by Florence and the Machine and I was immediately smitten. It was a song that turned from sad into anthematic, throwing off the shackles off the past, recognizing it for the burden it can often be, it just found me where I lived, it felt redemptive and hopeful which was what I needed at that point in life.

On the drive from DTLA to UCLA for the first of the many many many many surgeries it would take to remove that infection, (the final being in 2021 which is insane how entrenched that fucker was in my skull) the first major surgery after my masto diagnosis, I sat curled up in fear in the passenger seat listening to that song on repeat in the pre dawn hours, her voice surrounding me like a warm blanket. It made me feel safe when basically nothing else could.
——————————————-

Tonight, pretty close to exactly 14 years later, I ended up absolutely bawling, straight up ugly crying in Belfast while Florence Welch stood about 30 unexpected feet away from me singing that song and it was shocking the intense wave of emotion that rolled over me as it was the first time I’d ever seen her live. I don’t even know how many concerts I’ve been to, it’s gotta be in the hundreds, and I’m pretty sure I can count the amount of times I’ve cried on one hand. Maybe two but I kind of doubt it. But I did this evening and it felt only like joy.

When we found out we were moving to Ireland we had a LOT of mixed emotions. At basically the same time Florence + the Machine announced a new album and UK tour dates including one in Belfast so we went for it. If another job somehow materialized we could sell the tickets or maybe make a vacation out of it OR if we end up having to move at least we’ll have something to look forward to was how we justified it.

We basically drove up here, threw stuff in our hotel and ran over to the arena because I wanted to see the opener, Paris Paloma, who is also a really powerful musician singing against the patriarchy while allowing herself to be feminine, something her or Florence’s NLOG predecessors rarely let themselves be. I have to listen to more of Paris but so far I love what I have heard. Her song Labour has become a tiktok feminist anthem especially after Trump got reelected and MAN does that song hit different in a country where women aren’t losing our rights and don’t have open sex abusers in office. Labour is a really powerful anthematic song and it makes me really grateful that it doesn’t really apply much to my lived experience as most of the men I was involved with were fairly solid dudes who didn’t demand the traditional gender scheme level from their partners (or at least not me).

Florence was just transcendent. 9 songs were off the new album which I’m admittedly not as familiar as I’d like to be yet, since it’s new and I’ve been busy, but even without knowing every single song it was beyond powerful. She’s hypnotizing to watch as she runs barefoot around the stage, seemingly feral but really it seems tightly coordinated with other dancers, taking on a real theatrical feel. There was only one song I’d really wanted to hear that I didn’t (Third Eye) but the 2 hour set more than made up for that.

I know I say live music is like church to me but this show really felt like a spiritual experience basically from every possible angle, the exchange of energy between the performer and the audience carried a real weight to it that felt like more than what I usually experience at shows. I turned to Ethan at some point, my face all streaky with tears, and asked if he thought we joined a cult. I kinda think we did but I also think I am ok with it. Honestly I just don’t have words other than that it was amazing and I want to go back and experience it again and I hope they end up playing Dublin.

I also think I am maybe getting too old for general admission shows. I have lesions in my spine and hip and standing basically in place for 4-5 hours is getting to be a little much. It was fully worth it this evening but I know I’m gonna pay for it tomorrow while we’re tromping around all the sights we want to see. We’re going on a private tour with a man named Flip who was an extra on Game of Thrones. We were supposed to do it last year on our “everyone gets the flu” trip, so this is something I’ve been hyped about for a while.I’d very much like to get some sleep however there is a bar in our hotel and it’s a Friday night so even though the bar is closed all the patrons have now spilled onto the street and are singing. I am definitely too old for that 😬

I started writing this back in the summer when we were briefly trying to pump the breaks on the move.


Growing up my dad had a rifle and a shotgun that hung on the wall of his study, and while they were not loaded and were disabled, my parents put the absolute fear of god into me when it came to guns. Which isn’t a bad thing, but I am absolutely terrified of them to a crippling degree regardless of who has them. I remember in a post 9/11 Manhattan getting off the subway after one stop and walking the rest of the way to my destination because the subway car was full of national guard carrying long rifles and I didn’t like that at all. Or when Ethan and I went to Paris in 2004 and seeing all the cops around the Eiffel Tower with long guns and again being physically uncomfortable about it.

I feel like this is maybe maladaptive, not that I want to be armed to the teeth, or at all, but I can’t have this crippling aversion to guns either. So we’d planned to go shooting with a friend this weekend. Ethan got his LTC a while ago, he signed up for it after the inauguration that’s a whole other thing, part of me does feel like exposure therapy could probably be beneficial… when I had to fly all the time I was able to handle it. Also side note, Ethan looks like an absolute brute in his drivers license photo. He’s got sharp features and dark blue eyes which can be pretty striking and when you combine that with his neutral expression which is very cranky looking, he looks like someone you would not want to mess with. For his LTC card he looks like the most jovial person ever, what the hell man.

So we were gonna go shooting and then I woke up still feeling awful, which I think is gonna be my daily routine until I get my kidney cleared out. I was an anxious about going and at my absolute best I am completely unnerved and jittery about guns and I am not at all at my best right now. I worried I’d get spooked by a gun and end up throwing it which would be a seriously terrible idea, but also like something I’d do, so then I went back to bed to be antisocial and crampy while Ethan went out to have fun(?) although I feel like everyone involved also takes this stuff pretty seriously, as you should, so maybe it was not fun, but productive.

So yeah.

——————-

After the inauguration we privately and intensely discussed gun ownership. Neither of us were psyched about it but it felt inevitable. The seeds kind of got planted when a man tried to break into the house in 2023 and it took the cops what seemed like ages to show up while Ethan and I crouched on the stairs with our dogs freaking out while some tweaker was attacking the front door littering our porch with broken glass. After that we got pepper spray and aluminium baseball bats, which were a salve when dealing with fear over arbitrary tweakers. Fear of the government was a totally different story and we did feel like it was our responsibility to protect ourselves if necessary if the worst case scenario happened and while I can be fatalistic it seemed like a possibility.

As someone who had dealt with depression their whole life, this was a risky proposition but the prospect of civil war or the government collapsing or the need for genuine high risk disobedience seemed like a real and riskier thing. We’d talked it over and decided only Ethan would get a license and I’d try to get comfortable around guns and go to pink pistols meetings and whatnot, but whatever we owned we’d keep in a biometric safe that I would not have access to. Which to be clear, it’s not like I was simultaneously contemplating opting out while looking at guns, i hadn’t had that level of depression in probably just under two decades, but i have fought that level of my illness before and while that’s totally embarrassing it’s the sort of thing you need to be realistic about. Between my skittish form of anxiety and history of depression, I might not be a safe gun owner and it was worth addressing. Even writing this all out now it seems unhinged that we were trying to contemplate how to make this work, and I can see how when I was writing the earlier part out I was kind of trying to be ok with something I had serious cognitive dissonance about. But I do feel that the left needs to seriously look at how the leadership just isn’t there and that there’s a frighteningly growing prospect that people may need to arm themselves to protect themselves and their communities because pacifism may just be naïveté. AND AGAIN THIS IS INSANE I FEEL THIS WAY. I DON’T LIKE THIS.

We were gonna go to London this weekend and punted it for reasons so I decided to go to a hiking store and look at some gear. I ended up getting into a long conversation with the manager about what a malignant waste trump was and how fucked this entire situation seems, and at the end of this conversation which was strangers just venting their spleens, he said, ”Im glad you’re here and I hope you stay, I hope you don’t go back” and on the surface it felt so kind, like “you belong here, you’re finally home” but it’s not like we’d made plans to go hang out or hike together, so I don’t know how much of the sentiment was that vs “your country of origin isn’t safe anymore”. We’d had a lovely chat though and I was happy with my birthday purchases and the experiences they will afford me, and then in the car park I got a notification that a man had been executed by ICE.


I can’t with this shit and I’m not even in it.

My ex Vin is one of my favorite people, and that’s saying a lot since I have known him for over 30 years now, considering the huge divide between who we are as teenagers vs who we are as middle aged people and being on adjacent pages for that long is impressive. We’re not in touch all the time but when we are it’s like we never stopped talking, it’s one of those friendships that neither of us is high maintenance and we fall into step with ease. I could write a whole thing about him but this is not that entry. I try to find ways to connect the past to the present with each entry and this is a really paltry attempt at that for this one but that’s life.

Years ago on Christmas Eve he texted me excitedly about how Glenn Hansard was busking on Grafton St in Dublin and how it was amazing because everyone was basically showing up and he sent me a link to a live stream on instagram or YouTube or something. We’d never talked about Glenn Hansard or the Swell Season, but he knew that would be an artist I probably already liked and he’d be right. So anyway we watched this guerrilla fundraising busking session and shot messages back and forth about it and eventually fell asleep or got distracted. It’s something I associate with him. The Christmas Eve busk has gotten monumentally bigger, remaining solely a charity event while also becoming a who’s who in Irish music, with people like Hozier, Bono, the late Sinead O’Connor showing up to sing and raise money for the Dublin Simon project.


—
When I moved to Dublin, the Christmas Eve busk was something I really wanted to do, however Ethan was working on Christmas Eve and even though it was a half day, the idea of getting to Grafton late just seemed like asking for trouble (if trouble meant being inconvenienced by 8 billion tourists, as if I remotely have any high ground when it comes to tourists doing touristy shit, but I don’t dig crowds in the best days and Americans in Ireland often also equate being really drunk so it’s not fun). Plus life had been chaotic for Ethan between running back and forth to the States on top of work, and getting settled so between that and the 80 billion tourists and the massive flu season that was overtaking Dublin we decided to watch the livestream warm and cozy at some instead.

Right off the bat I was absolutely transfixed by this kid Pádraig Macmahon. He sang one of his own songs toward the beginning and then just absolutely owned his verse in Rainy Night in Soho, but in this kind of, laconic is the only way I can describe it even though it’s not really accurate. There was just an economy of movement or vocal flourishes about this young man as he sang that provided a huge contrast the jubilant chaos that was the rest of the stage, and it was powerful. I ended up following his band instagram page immediately.

Yesterday they gave a last minute announcement he’d be performing at an event to raise money and awareness of the destigmatization of mental health treatment. The event was called Cistin and it would be him, a singer named Fiona Lucia, and it was hosted by a man named Kalle Ryan, who self effacingly apologized in advance for being a poet. Ethan and I jumped at the chance to get tickets.

Side note, I feel like people can tell you (or maybe just me) that they’re a writer or poet and it can be taken at face value. I feel like it’s one of the few art forms where someone can have little or no output but the understanding is there that they are a vessel waiting and open for inspiration or life to lead them to the path where something powerful will eventually be birthed. I saw it a lot at Emerson, these people existing in pupae states with the belief that that was in there somewhere waiting for the right catalyst, meanwhile I had hours of editing work I had submitted along with my application, delineating my interest in film as somehow more earthy and less ephemeral than my writing classmates tenuous relationships with their muses. No judgment, I just think it’s interesting.

ANYWAY, Kalle Ryan is not one of those writers and his self effacing nature while very Irish and disarming was not necessary because the performer I had assumed would be filler was absolutely captivating. He had a poem about being on the other side of losing both his parents which was brilliant and visceral. I spoke to him briefly at the end of the event and thanked him for those words and he gave me a copy of the book they were from, the price being i had to tell him something I was looking forward to.

The event was just amazing. One key element was that it was held in a mental hospital and maybe 1/4 of the people appeared to be patients housed there who had the choice to observe (or leave if they didn’t like it) and it was so great because aside from the lip service of “we’re working to destigmatize mental health challenges and treatment” by having the space shared by everyone without making a big damn deal about it or treating people who deal with mental health challenges as some sort of constructs or theoretical others. The whole thing was very powerful. Fiona Lucia Was great. Her music is not generally my bag being kind of white lady soul music which as a genre doesn’t do much for me, but her voice was amazing and she was incredibly personable and I’m going to check her out. Pádraig Macmahon was just absolutely awe inspiring. I strongly suggest checking out his stuff on his own and also with Belgian Blue.

I also just love how there is stuff like this going on all the time. Music, art, mutual aid, the city at times feels like it’s overflowing with it all. Obviously it’s easy to be happy not being in America because things are absolute chaos over there right now, but I feel like this runs deeper and I hope it’s sustainable.

Christmas Eve in 1977 my mom started hemorrhaging pretty intensely. She went to the hospital where they told her that neither her or her not-close-to-term pregnancy appeared to be in great shape, and that it might be time to discuss options which she was not remotely interested in. She has already endured losing a well beyond the point it should’ve been safe pregnancy catastrophically that resulted in surgery and an extended hospital stay in the maternity ward which seemed like an exercise in cruelty, though they at least didn’t insult her pain by giving her a roommate with a cooing newborn, instead she was alone in a room with my dad, their grief soundtracked by all the joyous families in the ward.

She didn’t want to rush into that again, especially not on Christmas Eve, to her that seemed too brutal. She was resolute that she was going to gestate that baby as long as she could, and in turn the doctor was resolute that she was on basically total bedrest. She was so determined to see the pregnancy though that when her house was broken into one afternoon, she stayed in bed while her dog, an enormous wolfhound named Seamus, a gift from her husband in an ill conceived attempt to try to quell the sting of their previous loss, chased the burglars out. She stayed in that bed terrified until her husband came home from work.

Despite her best intentions, she just fell short of a month before she ended up in the hospital hemorrhaging again, where she had an emergency cesarean section and delivered the little lanky golem looking creature that would be me after some more time baking in an incubator. She’d had severe placenta accreta, and doctor told her she probably couldn’t have any more children safely, but if she was committed to trying, she should plan on bed rest for the bulk of the pregnancy. I think he assumed between her almost dying, her baby almost dying, and the prospect of dealing with a toddler and bedrest simultaneously, that he’d scared her off of the idea of pregnancy.

That was not the case. She’d grown up in a huge Irish Catholic family and wanted one of her own. My dad, an only child who did not want his kid to deal with the isolation and loneliness he had, was totally on board, which was brave of him considering he wouldn’t be the one who was risking their life being pregnant. So she’d rely on her parents for help with me, which was convenient since they lived around the corner and neither of them were dead or an alcoholic, so it was a plan.

Obviously, as risky and one could say stupid this plan was, she also didn’t run into trying again immediately. But because there would be a spate of time where I’d essentially be raised by my grandparents, I spent a lot of time with them so I guess we could mutually feel each other out and determine if this was actually feasible, and to get us used to each other. Grandparents are always magical I think, mine definitely were, but be that as it may, they were not young. My mom had been their youngest child with a significant gap between her and her older brothers.

Obviously if you know me you know the plan of having my grandparents temporarily raise me while my mom endeavored to have another child ended up being unsuccessful, my grandfather had a massive stroke, so instead of them taking care of me, me and my mom were often at their house helping take care of him. His recovery was derailed when he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, the symptoms of which had been totally overlooked because of the effects of the stroke and the myriads of places they overlapped, so when it was found it was too far gone. I wish I could say I remembered him well but I don’t. I remember he was enormous standing something like six and a half feet, had very impish eyes, lots of tattoos, and was very kind if somewhat taciturn.

My grandmother was beyond fascinating to me. She’d lived in multiple countries, she had 9 siblings, she’d had a pet monkey and a parrot in England, she could crochet lace, and she’d make me laugh like hardly anyone could then or since. She had used our time together to try to start teaching me Irish, but I was young and obstinate and at times decidedly intellectually lazy, and she had tried selling it to me as being exotic, a nearly dead language, which didn’t really win me over because it seemed impractical. I think also I was starting to feel alienated from my peers and the idea of knowing a language none of them knew just felt like would speed that isolation along to its inevitable and unavoidable conclusion.

At that point in time I’d really only heard all the good stories of her life in Ireland and England, and didn’t realize her knowing Irish, being taught by her parents and siblings outside of school in Liverpool, was basically an act of rebellion against the crown that, not content with having pushed their country into famine, also demanded fealty by way of giving up their language and culture. I didn’t have any concept of colonization yet or how erasing indigenous languages is a huge part of it. I didn’t yet understand the violence and subjugation that drove her family from their home, followed them to Liverpool, and eventually pushed them to the United States. I would not learn the term diaspora for decades, and didn’t understand Fenians or black and tans were. I was a child still in the single digits and I’d begun my indoctrination into the belief of American Exceptionalism, so I assumed of course they’d want to come to America, who wouldn’t? Bleargh. The insane things I heard about happening in Graiguecullen didn’t resonate with child me as colonialism, again it just affirmed the elementary education that “America is great, everyone wants to be here, everywhere else is terrible and of course the British are” which I think i focused on more than asking why people didn’t want to stay home in a town with a dilapidated castle in the middle and a gorgeous river.


After my grandmother died, I picked up a few phrases from my mom and a few more the first time I went to Ireland back in the 90s since a lot of the areas we went to on the west coast were very politically invested in the preservation of the language (among other things. one house we stayed at involved a heated conversation between the owners and the garda about either a bombing or a bomb plot, me and my friends were for the only time on the trip loudly proclaiming “WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE ARE BACKPACKING AND WE KNOW NOTHING” that’s a whole other story, also said friends were both Irish) but noting significant. It was something that was important to me but wasn’t easily obtained, between college and life especially prior to the explosion of the internet. It felt like a really sad lost opportunity.

3 years ago I’d started Duolingo. I’d applied for my Irish passport and felt like it was throwing positive energy into the universe since my application had some issues surrounding names and dates and my sometimes superstitious self figured why not appeal to those cosmic scales, if nothing else being superstitious is very, very Irish. Around this time I started looking up Irish language movies (there’s a pretty simple one on YouTube starring a very young Cillian Murphy) and music as well.

Popular culture and my irishness was always a weird thing. I listened to some trad music which was ok but didn’t do much for me, U2 were mainly a generic rock band and their avoidance of their irishness kind of bugged me, as they picked up all sorts of celebrity causes while their home country was fighting colonization and poverty that they were kind of mum about. I was totally a sucker for the Celtic mysticism of Clannad or Enya but all of it was pretty superficial. Plus it’s not like “like Irish stuff” was a driving force for me. Reading and listening to art that could educate me was important, obviously, but I wasn’t hyper focused on it either.

Kneecap are a rap group from Belfast and are blindingly Irish. They sing in Irish, their merch is covered with Irish iconography, their lyrics run the gamut from Irish republicanism, council housing, colonization, and education in addition to more typical stuff like drugs and partying. They essentially made up their own slang for ecstasy, 3cag (trí chonsan agus guta /3 consonants and a vowel, kind of more elegant than molly). They’re a delight. Their music has a very 90s feel to it, with very drum and bass instrumentals and they can hold their own as emcees, they sound kind of like the Irish Beastie Boys, which I guess makes sense since it’s two trios. They came out with a fictionalized account of their success, which I hadn’t seen yet but which put them on my radar. They then gained significant international attention due to their being loudly vocal supporters of Palestine.

I had had tickets to see them this past October in Boston, which I’d bought before knowing I’d be moving, but they got into massively hot water due to their vocal stance on Palestine, and as such had to cancel their North American tour so they could go to court to fight terrorism charges. It sucked as a fan because they’re blowing up and I knew that was probably the last opportunity to see them in a not huge venue. Then suddenly we were moving to Ireland and it turned out they had a couple shows lined up at the 3Arena in Dublin with members of Fontaines DC (a band I’m obsessed with) djing as an opening act, so it felt like a pretty solid consolation.

The show was -amazing-. It was so fucking Irish and I live in Ireland now (I’m still wrapping my head around that one giddily basically every day) so literally everything I now do is by default pretty Irish, but this was just next level. Watching a band of kids perform to an audience of kids about the reclamation of their country and their culture (and as opposed to MAGA these are actually valid complaints from people in a country still dealing with active colonialism) was amazing, definitely not something I’d see in my lifetime. But it’s great seeing language making a comeback, it’s great seeing kids supporting the unification of Ireland while not resorting to the violence of the troubles. It was amazing seeing Irish being used in a contemporary context as opposed to the Celtic mysticism it usually gets relegated to in pop culture.

Also just how these kids are so into social justice and mutual aid was incredibly heartwarming. It was a huge show, lots of people were high, it was hot in the venue, and when people in the crowd passed out, they’d stop the show and wait til medics took care of the situation. I’ve been to hundreds of shows and I’ve never seen the band stop to make sure someone got out safely. But it went beyond grudging acceptance of an emergency on the part of the crowd. I expected these interruptions to be met with boos or heckling, but no, instead kids in the audience would shine their phone torches to let the band know when/where something was going on, it happened once near where I was standing, and seeing kids looking out for their peers and seeing the artist looking out for their audience even when that meant stopping the flow of the show, that was kind of a new one for me, something I hadn’t really seen since going to hardcore shows in the 90s on Long Island (but even then they still would not stop the shows). It made me feel like these kids were all right.

I mean obviously it’s not all great and there’s a chance you’re going to hear someone with decent politics saying tiocfaidh ár lá and be all “right on” and then you realize they are the Irish equivalent of someone with rebel flag hanging on their wall, and that I in fact may be their enemy as regardless of what my passport says I am an immigrant and I am not Irish. There’s also the whole very real concern of “are pro Palestine views really just a smokescreen for antisemitism” since there will be bad actors behind any cause.

This has run on long enough and is all over the place and I’ve been sitting on it for a while now so it’s time to let it go. Go raibh maith agat if you made it this far.

Today we ran around doing chores most of the day and the remembered we had concert tickets to see Jesse Welles. He’s this guy who writes folk songs about bugs, turtles, class warfare and the struggle of the proletariat in a world where we are lorded over by technocratic oligarchs, how everything causes cancer that we’re fighting a losing battle against, typical folk stuff. I got into him maybe a year ago? He started writing songs in response to what was going on in the news as quickly as he could and had written about United Healthcare that just blew up on TikTok. I believe it was after the CEO got shot but before his alleged shooter was captured. That stuff felt gimmicky but then he released stuff like “The Poor” or “Red” that were just brilliant. Between that and delving into his back catalogue I was pretty sold.

So anyway we’d walked all over the place and were tired and the show was in Temple Bar which is the tourist epicenter of Dublin so we were kinda iffy. We also should’ve walked but decided to drive over because it was just far enough to be a hassle and we were running late and it was raining.

So we had Waze set up to take us to the closest parking garage to the venue and it was full. So Ethan was getting stressed out trying to figure out how to navigate around (Dublin streets make Boston look simplistic) and I suggested pulling into the car park and turning around there. The parking garage looked like it used to be a prison or something. The attendant was super nice, I apologized for pulling into a parking lot that said it was full, and explained that we were just there to turn around, and he said to stay that it was all good, someone was leaving. Score!

So walk over to the Olympia Theater, knowing we’re running late but ot would be ok. We get there and the show is *packed* like probably oversold and being as we were late we were all the way in the back, literally the only thing behind us was the wall. Not the best but it’s more about hearing music than about seeing it so it’s doable. This is kind of the mindset you’ve gotta go into general admission shows with when you’re a woman, especially when you’re a woman who seems to go to shows where the audience is mostly men, otherwise concerts will be joyless.

The band was phenomenal and tore through the first set which was comprised mostly of songs that I love. Hooray! However I was tired and hot and my back hurt, so I wanted to go check out merch and regroup OR decide to leave, especially since tomorrow (technically today now) we’re going to see Dirty Three at Vicar Street (we have lots of shows on the roster and sadly had missed Lou Barlow last week due to fatigue)

So we head over there and there’s a shirt I wanted, so when I went to pay the kid he was worried that one of my euros was too shabby, and I just said, “can’t we tape it together?” and it was like a lightbulb moment or something because yes we could tape it back together, which we did, and it was fine.

At that point I was trying to figure out what I wanted from life or ant least for the rest of the evening, when I overheard these two guys talking about the song, “the book of love” by Peter Gabriel. Now this is our wedding song, and we picked that song because it was short and had funny lyrics, not because it had any great meaning to us (anything that had greater meaning was either too long or too loud or too obtuse and Ethan wanted a first dance so we made it work) but once it was our wedding song, it has gained greater meaning despite being played out as fuck, thanks in part to the Peter Gabriel cover. So I asked them if they’d heard the Magnetic Fields version, then we all started just talking about music, and one of them asked if we’d arranged a vacation around this show, and we explained that no, we’d just moved, and how exciting and scary it all was, and how we’d had concert tickets to a ton of shows before we’d even had an apartment. I made some throwaway comment about not being sure I had it in me to brace being smooshed at the back of the room again and next thing I know one of the guys hands is two VIP bracelets so we can go up to the front. WHAT EVEN IS THIS?!. I offered to buy them a drink but they said they just wanted to do us a kindness AGAIN WHAT IS THIS?!?

So we go from the absolute back of the venue to the first row and it was delightful. Everyone was singing along and everyone was jubilant and a few times they broke into that Olé, Olé, Olé football chant. The energy had been infectious at the back of the audience as well, but up front it was just a different beast entirely.

I just felt so blessed to be there in general, to just be here even, and then to have all these potential problems in the evening like parking or the bill being ripped end up being immediately and easily fixable, but to then have a stranger pull strings so that Ethan and I could be at the front of the venue was just next level awesomeness. I don’t know what about us triggered that kindness in that dude or if he’s just always phenomenally kind but it was so unexpected. I assume part of it was he was giving me a bunch of band and venue suggestions and I was writing them all down. The more I sit with my contrary nature when it comes to suggestions I have come to recognize if anyone is willing to share time or knowledge with me it’s worth at least paying attention, even more-so if it’s a stranger, so I’ve been taking notes during conversations so I can’t chalk it up to by sieve like memory (oh god it’s so bad right now, neither Ethan or I are firing on all cylinders - which makes sense what with the everything of life going on)

After the show we wandered around Temple Bar and took lots of pictures of Christmas lights, because I absolutely love them all the time any time of year and Dublin goes hard. It’s so beautiful.

Tomorrow we’re going to get our own Christmas Tree, maybe go to the gym in the building, and then wander Grafton St before the show. Sunday I get my new-used Peloton and I’m so psyched. Between the stress of moving and drinking less water and not riding my bike daily, my BP has gone up a little and I watch that like a hawk, so getting the bike back will be fantastic. We’re also going to try to go to IKEA to get some armoires.

Then next weekend Ethan goes to America to get Tulip and THEN we’re gonna try to get tickets for Kneecap. I feel at times like we’re maybe too old for this but fuck that.