Random Acts of Awesome

I am sitting on the patio, watching a storm roll past. There is lightening in the clouds in front of me, and a bruised sunset off to my side. I'm watching bats and hawks swirl through the air, lightening lit clouds their backdrop, visible for a moment and then gone, only to reappear moments later feet away. Magical birds, magical sky, magical air. The wind is blowing in fitful bursts, smelling of pennies and flowers and sun warmed rocks. I am drinking a cup of chrysanthemum tea, the flower at the bottom of my mug a complex sea creature waving with every sip I take. I ate good food tonight, that I made myself with love and effort. I drank a cocktail made from quality ingredients that tasted like ingenious human engineering. I smoked a cigar that made me lightheaded for a moment, and I drank water that soothed my tongue and my head. I swam for a bit, and then rested my arms against the side of the pool and read a good book while my legs kept up a gentle but steady movement. I spent...

When I think about losing weight, I don't think about being a model. I don't think about being skinny. I don't think about hip bones jutting and collar bones you could kill someone with. I don't think about food, honestly. I think about movement. My lose of weight isn't a loss of weight, it's a loss of fat. I gain muscle quickly, and I rarely actually lose weight. When I was 24, I was sick for a month and a half. The kind of sick I should have been hospitalized for, because I was hacking up blood and unable to drink anything but chicken broth with ginger and garlic. For, literally, at least a month. I lost a LOT of weight. I remember, the first time I had left the house in forever, I went to a female friends house to hang out. I was still deathly looking. My hair was lank, my skin was grey, and my eyes were shrunk in pockets of blackness. I looked sick. But there was a man there, a man I'd known for a little bit, and he looked at me in shocked admiration. H...

I got an email from a former lover this morning, catching me up on life and love. It was a beautifully worded letter, full of things that made me so happy to hear. It's such a lovely thing when the person at the end of a connection you thought you lost plucks the cord that still exists between you and plays you a little tune. He ended the letter with: Blue smoke in moonlight, Cicadas stirring, fireflies lazily drift, ping frogs hop and… How many can say, as we may, "we met in a collision of poetry"? "We sail tonight for Singapore." ----------------------------------------- And I got this incredibly happy. This knowledge that the memories you create with people, these seemingly ephemeral connections that come in and overwhelm you for a heartbeat, till they fade away, are not shallow. The moments that stick like taffy to the sides of the mercurial pool that is human experience, they are connected on the other side to the person you shared them with. T...

My little brother just had a baby girl. And, outside the awesomeness of that fact, it's bringing up all these issues around family and connections. Actually, they've been making themselves felt for a while now. I chose to go live with my brother and sister-in-law for a couple months after their wedding, before coming down to Arizona. And it rather sharply highlighted some serious deficiencies in how my family handles connections. My mom was worried I was getting too attached to my brother and his family. She thought it might not be so healthy to spend a couple months living there, that it would make me... what, I'm not sure. There are aspects of that which are not wrong. I have a tendency to over-care, to provide too much to the detriment of the person on the other ends ability to be independent and responsible. That is absolutely true, and has been true for much of my life. With my brother and his wife, though, it was more about falling into a needed family connection. T...

Those moments when you wake up in the middle of the night, with your heart racing and your mind frantically running through disaster scenarios... those are rarely pleasant moments. For me, they tend to be fueled by alcohol. If I've had even slightly too much to drink, I inevitably wake up between 2:30 and 4am, and spend a good chunk of time obsessing about everything that is wrong in my life and with me. But sometimes it's not so bad. Sometimes your brain has a chance to work something out, to tell you something tangibly that you might not have known for a good long while. Last night was one of those moments for me. I woke up at 2:30am, light headed and unhappy, scared of myself and for myself. I hate it when I drink too much. It feels like the worst sort of weakness, like I'm giving in to the absolute worst parts of myself and I'll never be healthy again. But thinking about my own weakness led me to thinking about how I could control that weakness. And the first thin...

In the past almost month that I have been in Arizona, I've been trying to steer a sea change in myself. There's a cascade of events that need to happen in order for me to happy, healthy, and whole for the rest of my life. And I've been trying to gently kick start them. That sounds a lot more orderly and structured than it really is. I have a vague idea of what is wrong with me (well, of what is holding me down and stopping me from many things), and a vague idea of what is needed to make it all better. The jumping off point has been judgment. I have stopped judging myself while out here. Mostly. This is a hard one to break. But I have given myself permission to let go of the need to regulate through judgement. And by god, it is freeing. The constant fear I have lived with for most of my life mysteriously disappeared within the first week of being here. I sleep well, when I eat well. Which isn't always. But that's ok, because I am stripping away my judgment of self...

There are points in my life where I can make sex transcendent. Any sex. With anyone. I watched a man walking across the street just now, directly in front of my stopped car. He was a bald black man with wide shoulders and a beer belly. He was handsome, and tired, and... And there are these two sharp realities. In one, we are both desperate. Sex is tawdry, sweating in a trailer that smells of cigarettes and microwaved food. There are the underlying emotional realities that everyone refuses to acknowledge. Fear, of being alone Nd left behind. Fear of being ignored by life and people. There is anger, and self disgust, and need. And then there is this other reality. The one where everything is acknowledged. Fear is out in the open, even if it's still hoping to be ignored. Anger is incorporated, becomes sensual. Self disgust is gone, soothed away by touch and kisses. Sex is sacred, in its own earthy way, it has a purpose beyond simple gratification. It's just as valid a reality....