Little Fattie Gangsta Penguin

In 1997 I went to see my first big electronic show, Aphex Twin and Sneaker Pimps. I had gotten SAWII at some point in high school and teen me knew that this was an important piece of music even if it didn’t totally land with me at the time. I was very excited because it was so far afield from stuff I usually listened to. Most of my clubbing was either to see live music that tended toward rock or hardcore while dance clubbing was mostly spooky music. To go see something straight up electronic had my curiosity piqued, especially in a time where the lurid mdma soaked stories of having-not-yet-done-a-murder Michael Alig and his club kids had held my attention captive for years….the whole tragedy of being a bridge and tunnel kid with a curfew, so close to the action but not close enough to be part of it anywhere near enough.

So I went to see Aphex Twin with two guys who were far more ensconced in the Boston goth AND electronic scenes than I was, being as it was the first week of my sophomore year of college. I was still a novice to all of it, basically a scenester puppy hanging out with the exponentially cooler older kids, one of whom was my cool older boyfriend. That show was absolutely “techno on hard mode” in terms of basically everything. Actually Sneaker Pimps were accessible and fun but no really techno. I remember they had lots of projections and I don’t think I’d seen a show that had utilized them to the extent previously. It’s not like I was some country bumpkin, I went to tons of shows but so many of them were overly earnest alternative rock or diy punk bands and I can’t see Sonic Youth or Ramones going hard for over the top visuals in the early to mid 90s.

For the main event, Richard D James hung out on a couch doing live remixing and drinking corona while body builders in thong bathing suits and people dressed as bears danced around stage. Being as the extent of my aphex twin knowledge consisted of one album that this experience was nothing like, i was kind of perplexed, but i was more perplexed at how not like SAWII everything was. My concert compatriots HAAAAAAAAAAATED the show, and I assumed they had to know what they were talking about since they were older and had been to raves. It was a trip and I bet I would have appreciated the show more if I had been tripping.
There is a recording of the show here:

https://archive.org/details/AphexTwin19970908USAMassachusettsBoston/Aphex+Twin+-+1997-09-08+USA-Massachusetts-Boston+-+10+Digeridoo.flac

Looking at the setlist I don’t know why we were all so cranky as in hindsight this looks really good. Maybe the bears or bodybuilders were too much. But it was a relatively legendary show to be at and I wish I’d appreciated it more at the time. Ethan was at that show but I didn’t know him and he was nowhere near my horizon yet.

In 2019 we went down to New York to see Aphex Twin and I fucking loooooooved it. I had gotten cat scratch disease earlier that day and my right hand was swollen up like a balloon and I was on antibiotics and had had to have a ring cut off in the emergency room and my feet were tired from running around the museum of natural history, but despite all that I danced my face off.

In 2001 I went to see autechre at the Middle East and fucking haaaaaaaaaated it . I think Autechre had been having an uncharacteristically popular moment after having been name checked by Thom Yorke of Radiohead as inspiration for either Kid A or Amnesiac, and the show was oversold and horrible as a result. I think Radiohead was the biggest band on the planet at that point so a bunch of their fans showed up. It sucked, there’s no “oh maybe I was too young to get it” hesitation, I had had a headache, it was hot, it was loud, and I was tired. It was so disappointing because I loved them, but that show had been an endurance test I failed. Ethan was also at that show and maybe a little closer to the horizon but not by much.

This evening I went to see Autechre again (with essentially negative expectations), at Vicar Street. Vicar Street is bigger than the Middle East, it was never a bowling alley, so the sound is really good. Andy Maddocks, the founder of Skam records, opened the night (for us, we were a little late and missed the first opener) with a blistering dj set. All sorts of great glitchy music, the crowd was vibing, it was great.

Autechre is one of Ethan’s favorite bands and I love going to shows with him because as much as I like to draw parallels between live music and church like experiences for myself, it is something more for him and the convocation around live music makes almost every show a pilgrimage. It’s really beautiful to see and as we get older and have less time ahead than behind, I find myself wanting to immerse myself in moments like that more, and also to try to eke out any enjoyment where I can as opposed to finding ways to pithily hate on things. I unabashedly love stuff that early twenties me would’ve been shitty about and I just try to keep an open mind about everything if I can help it. A couple years ago I did a lot of ketamine in conjunction with therapy and I kind of wonder if that didn’t help get me to this place. Either way I’m glad to be here.

Autechre was honestly kind of similar to the first time I saw them, very dissonant and confrontational, the set being some serpentine entity that wrapped itself around moments or sounds from songs you maybe thought you knew, moving on quickly to embrace something else. They also turned ALL THE LIGHTS OFF. That was beyond disconcerting, it felt in the humid dark like there was nothing you could grab on to and staying upright became almost a challenge which got frightening a few times so I stepped into the hallway to catch my breath and I was far from the only one doing so. The second time I started talking to a guy who worked at the venue, just about how good their music was but how brutal this show was and how all I needed was something to hold on to, and he disappeared for a moment and reappeared telling me that he’d pulled strings and we could go to a ticketed area we did not have tickets for, and see if that was a gentler experience. Not surprisingly, it was a significantly better experience, less crowded, less muggy, there were seats, and the sound was way better. I have no feeling on the view since, again, ALL THE LIGHTS WERE OFF. But it was awesome and we danced and bounced around in the dark. So props to that guy because he absolutely saved my night from myself. I’m glad to have had a good experience seeing Autechre, just because that was a show that needed a redemption story like Aphex Twin and it happened.

I’m also 2 for 2 in terms of talking with staff at venues where I’ve had a rough time and instead of just commiserating, which is all I wanted, instead they were like “well let’s try to fix this for you” which is inordinately kind. Clearly ever concert I should just be all “hey I have the anxiety lemme watch from back stage” or something.

Concert wise I’m bummed, Ethan had Covid and we assumed I did, so we were quarantined and missed Cabaret Voltaire and Morcheeba. Womp womp. I didn’t get Covid, so I’m now 3 for 3 for direct or prolonged exposure without getting it so that’s weird. I am often at odds with my immune system but maybe it’s doing me a solid here.

25ish years ago I went to see Sigur Ros play at Berklee. It was a week or week and half after 9/11 and it was a very strange vibe. A ton of concerts had been understandably canceled, but somehow this little band of Icelanders decided to go against the grain and bring their not particularly joyous music to a country that was losing its collective mind, indescribable horrors against its back pushing it forward ten toes touching the precipice of its own reign of retaliatory destruction. They were honestly somehow perfect in that moment, the show was beautiful and I left a few songs before the end because I was uncharacteristically overwhelmed and knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with the crowded T or bus afterward, I wanted to sit with my very huge feelings and cry alone. Before I left, I remember feeling absolutely transfixed watching Jonsi Birgisson standing at the front of the stage like an angel, miles tall and impossibly thin, looking and sounding not at all of this world, thrashing at his guitar with a cello bow, and bathed in the current of all that surrounded in that moment it felt like things could still maybe be okay.

Exactly 20 years ago I married Ethan, who was at that show, but I didn’t know him yet. Half a year later in a bar across town, our first conversation would be about Iceland, I had gotten back from a trip there that morning and was exhausted and dying of jet lag and thought he was 19. We reconnected some months later via the online personals on nerve.com. Over beer and scrabble he told me he didn’t listen to music for the lyrics, something I found heretical, but we both loved Sigur Ros so I could overlook it since I don’t speak íslenska and their music touches me like no other. Truthfully it wouldn’t have mattered I was smitten and a few years later we were walking down the aisle on an unbelievably sunny day at a manor in Waltham to track #4, Njósnavélin, off of () and stood in front of our friends and families and proclaimed our intentions to continue to try to understand each other at our best and our worst. I think we have done more than okay and I hope we have at least 40 more years of really nailing it.

Last night we went to The Bord Gáis Energy Theatre and watched Sigur Ros perform with an orchestra. We had seen this tour in 2023 but had missed some of the beginning and much of 2023 is lost to a fugue state of grief, so last night we made sure to get there early. It was a more formal way than what I expect or prefer from Sigur Ros but it was predictably beautiful and illustrative of how music can be reverential. Jonsi was having trouble with his voice, something that I’ve noticed when I’ve had the opportunity to see them at the beginning and end of a tour (which I’ve done more than once) but even at his worst it’s like he’s channeling something resplendent. I sat in my seat and watched Ethan on the edge of his seat watching the show, I can stare at him for hours. We decided to leave early as we’d seen this arrangement before and watching a singer struggle is no fun even if at times it sounds beautiful, it also hurts. Before he stepped off stage prior to intermission I looked at Jonsi a few feet away from me and he looked strikingly human and old which made everything all the more remarkable.

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.
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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.

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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.


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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.