past

Often, when I go into the dark recesses of my blog’s analytics, I can see whatcha all are looking at.

Having written close to 2000 blog posts, what happens next is I see titles of posts that I don’t remember writing.

This was one of them.

And when I went back to read it—naturally, since it was written way back in 2016 (which in Earth 2.0 years is like a thousand) I started to edit–which bascially turned into a re-write.

That being said, this is just a long-winded way of saying, Happy Friday—and I plagiarized my own work.
Carry on,
xox

Oh, Holy Christ on a cracker is that ever true!
We just had a Capricorn new moon and that my friends, facilitates jettisoning all that is not working in our lives.

We get a cosmic do-over. A universal re-write (the best kind of re-write there is).

Wait. This all feels eerily familiar. That’s because, if you’re like me, we’ve done a full, life-retrospective every damn year around this time.

Anyway, some years look better than others. They just do. But for those jinky ones, the ones that make me cringe with regret, (You know the ones) I relitigate the past. And when I do, because I’m me, I play the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

Then I move straight to the special effects department and I whitewash the mutherf*cker with some heavy-duty gauzy filter.

In my heavily CGI’d version, I’m so much smarter, prettier, and wittier, I have the most epic ideas, rebuttals and comebacks, and my hair looks impossibly, hatefully perfect—even after a nap.

In one version, nothing is my fault. In another everything is. It depends on which chapter you come in on.

In my dreamy, rom-com version,  I get chased by a horrible dragon, captured by a giant cyclops, and saved by a naked, brave and handsome knight (we know he’s a knight by the chain mail codpiece he’s wearing and his very…long…sword). That scenario is the only way I can introduce all of the magic that permeates my life—otherwise, nothing would make sense and nobody would believe me.

But I can’t justify how I got to where I am any more than you can. Sometimes shit just happens.

Often, when I look back I feel bad for her, for me. She simultaneously appears to be the heroine and the villain of her own story and that is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes I want to warn her, “Hey, idiot! Watch out for that guy, he’s a …oh, there goes the bra…nevermind.” At other times I try to congratulate her. “You, yeah, you. Ya did…okay. Next time try to suck less.”

Most of the time I want to duck tape her mouth shut and put her in the corner with baby.

All of these years later I realize nothing good comes from looking backward. It’s all water under a rickety bridge guarded by angry trolls. It’s all ancient history, filled with faded Polaroids and lots of bad clothing choices and the worst part of it (besides a stint with eggplant purple hair) is that focusing on my past, however riveting, keeps me distracted from where I’m headed.

Someone once said, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Well, I think quite the opposite is true. Selective amnesia is our friend AND those who look in the rear view mirror MUST be driving in reverse. I know I was. Also, and of this, I’m quite sure—Most of those lessons are learned and besides, my best times are not back there, behind me. They are ahead of me!

A few things that may be included while I create my future are (In no particular order): chocolate, naked knights, truffle almonds, dog kisses, a creative use of filters, and predominately minding my own business and looking dead ahead because the future I envision for myself doesn’t resemble my past IN. THE. LEAST. (except for maybe the good hair).

What about you?

Carry on,
xox

“What if your intuition was your future informing your present?”
~ Me

Man! That’s a hard lesson for me.
And lately, revisiting a situation in the same old manner I’ve done in the past just. Isn’t. working.
It’s insanity. Truly. Or in plain speak, it’s crazy making.

Thursday, I tried something different, something new, and I found my way out of crazy town. I know I’m not alone with my over-stamped passport and resident’s visa to crazy town so I thought I’d share what happened.

Things in my life have been going really well. Better than well. They’ve been magorific!
The writing is fun as hell, the possibilities on the horizon — endless. I have found myself happier than I can ever remember being.

I know that saying that out loud is deemed a subversive act, but it comes into play here—I just can’t help it—and besides, wtf’s with THAT?

Anyway…I’ve begun to realize inside this massive reinvention of my life, that my past comes into play pretty much…NEVER.
Nothing I’ve done in my life up to this point, besides learning to read and write, has made a rat’s ass of difference in what is transpiring these days.
That at once feels daunting — making me feel like a complete novice in my mid-fifties where you’re supposed to know shit — and liberating — like I want to take off my bra and run topless down the beach like I may have done as a girl.

The very day I was reveling in this realization, my past came to visit me. To test my resolve.

The City of Los Angeles wanted more tax money from my long since dissolved corporation. I’ve been sending e-mails and faxing paperwork to them for a couple of years. My corporation ceases to exist which means… I owe them nada.

This is the perfect time to say: I have little tolerance of bureaucracy, even less for bureaucracy when they bug you for money, and none at all when they aren’t entitled to the money they’re chasing.

Meanwhile, they’ve gotten creative with their estimations of my imagined sales and have compounded the penalty interest daily. I’m sure you know what that feels like.

It’s like arguing with an obstinant, deaf, assholish elderly uncle — who hates you.

When I saw the envelope my stomach sank. It sank so deep they were going to have to send James Cameron back into the inky blackness of the bottomless Marianas Trench in search of my poor stomach. Then the pit turned to venous victimhood, which is the thug cousin of regular, generic victimhood.

It takes me down the dark allies of shame and lack, places I am VERY familiar with.

My knee-jerk reaction was to rip it up or light it on fire, which is pretty much my knee-jerk reaction to everything
Instead, I called my accountant and basically said, “Make this go away.” She barked back “It’s tax season, I don’t have time for this”, I think I heard her take a sip of beer or a hit off a crack pipe. “You’re going to have to do this yourself. Go to their Van Nuys office in person and take care of it.”

She may as well have suggested I jump into a pen of wild tigers while wearing Lady Gaga’s meat suit.

I hung up, ready to have a cigarette with the thugs in the alley of “this is not fair”.

“Damn. I’ve been so happy”, I lamented. And that’s when it hit me.
I’d rather stay happy than go back into those OLD feelings of victimhood and shame.
My past has NOTHING to do with what my life looks like now. This is NOT going to take me down! I will gather up my own stomach out of the pit of despair, go deal with the bureaucrats myself, and take care of this thing once and for all.

Are you with me?! Can I get an AMEN?!

But first I’ll eat a chocolate chip cookie, look at the paperwork with fresh eyes, see a phone number I’ve never seen before hidden on the back — and make a call.

Due to extremely high caller volume, (from people who were obviously much smarter than I was with much fresher eyes), I was asked to leave my number and they would call me back. “Bullshit!” I sneered and started to hang up. But that was the old way I always dealt with The City of Los Angeles. This new me left my cell phone number cheerfully on the recording.

By dinner time, I realized they hadn’t called me back but instead of fuming I just went back to Plan A.
I will go to Van Nuys and speak face to face with a human being, something I probably should have done years ago. There was no stomach pit, no malice, just anticipation of releasing an energetic albatross that’s been around my neck for years.

I woke up this morning waiting for the sinking feeling I’m so used to. Even as I was reminded of my impending visit to the land of bureaucracy, I felt only relief. That was HUGE for me.

At 9 AM, on my way out the door to the gym, I glimpsed the pile of paperwork I would need for my visit to Van Nuys, and I remembered leaving my number for a callback. “You better take that with you, what if they call you while you’re at the gym?” Before I could start laughing at the absurdity of that thought, the phone in my pocket started ringing.

It was The City Of Los Angeles. I’m not kidding. I can’t make this shit up. No one would believe me.

Mrs. Garcia (I love how when I asked her for her name she told me, Mrs. Garcia. I was in middle school all over again), was all business. She asked me a couple of unanswerable questions before we found some middle ground, I stayed light and shameless, and in the space of ten minutes, a chain of pain that has been severely knotted up for several years — fell away.

Turns out I owed them nada. (Here’s where I want to scream I told you so!!!)
Thank you, Mrs. Garcia!

And thank you happiness for the giant attitude adjustment.
And thank you past, for teaching me this valuable lesson.
And thank you chocolate chip cookie for just being delicious.
And thank You Guys for reading.

Carry on,
xox

“Activate in your mind only the things in your past that you want to see in your future.”
~Somebody Wise

I can’t remember who said this, Joseph Campbell? Rumi? Oprah?
Doesn’t matter. I think this is the BEST advice I consistently forget to remember. THE BEST.

Have you ever thought of someone from your past, a friend, an old co-worker or that crazy-ass woman who used to sell seashells down by the seashore? And then, out of the blue, or so it seems—they call you?

“Hello, Janet, this is Lunatica, I’m down here at the shore and I have some really great overpriced seashells to sell—and I thought of YOU.”

Ah, fuck.

I had an old luvah contact me around Christmastime. But first he had his special-needs little sister feel me out on social media.
Can you say, Schmoe?

He is someone who inhabited that very special place in my heart — the place where people go after they take my heart and break it into a thousand tiny pieces, then grind it down with the heel of their shoe into sand and blow it into my face, blinding me into thinking that I lost something special and precious. And this blind-eyed, bullshit belief caused me great suffering. For years and years. Five to be exact.

You know what I’m talking about.

I had a hard time being objective.

I wanted answers.
I wanted closure.
I wanted an apology.
I wanted a time machine to carry me back thirty years so I could ask all of the right questions I didn’t have the sense to ask at the time — and then I wanted to punch him in his squishy man-parts.

He wanted to reminisce, to catch up. After we talked I was like, “OMG, dodged a bullet!” He was like, “This was great! Let’s talk again, soon!”

Ah fuckity, fuck, fuck me running.

How in the name of God has this happened and what am I going to do about it?

Once I stopped running around with my hair on fire, I figured out that since I’d been in the process of jettisoning a ton of excess jetsam from my past that he had somehow received the unspoken, psychic memo on his way to the trash heap and just like Lunatica, he wanted to say, Hey!

I spent days writing about it. Hours of activating all of those old emotions of loss and heartbreak, bringing them out through my arm, onto the page and right back into the present.

Hello, 1986, I’d like you to meet 2016.

All it made me was more confused. Re-opening a thirty-year-old cold case and grieving the loss of a twenty-three-year-old boyfriend does not jive with gray hair. It just doesn’t.

Don’t I get to choose who comes back into my life to torture me?

Then the older, wiser, part of me, the sagging boobs and soft belly part, reminded me that YES! dammit! Yes, I do!

It reminded me of that phrase I always forget (and the fact that I need to get to the gym more often).
“Activate in your mind only the things in your past that you want to see in your future.”

Ah, fuck.

My wise friend Kim saw me spinning, on fire, and had the decency to put it into perspective for me. “Don’t waste one more minute of your time on this guy. Your life is great. Remember what that situation gave you and move on. Pronto. Like right NOW!” then she shoved a piece of chocolate into my face and gave me a slap on the ass.

That night I made the choice of exactly what I wanted to bring into my future.
I had started my spiritual practice in earnest after our break-up due to the complete bankruptcy of my self-esteem. It set me on my life’s path and brought me to where I am today.

Hey, not too shabby. Resilience, self-worth, ability to love, forgiveness, bravery, self-discipline, resolve. That’s the part of my past I’ll carry forward—the rest of it can go to hell!

When I freed up some emotional bandwidth and stopped the angst over what to do — he stopped texting.

Now I just have to set Lunatica straight.

What part of your past, if any, do you want to bring with you into your future?

Carry on,
xox

“What an astonishing thing a book is.

It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

If only Carl had been around for computers, lap tops, the internet, and AMAZON; now that really is magic.

The other day I was trolling the internet for quotes.
Like you do — you guys know I love me some quotes, I have a whole page devoted to the brilliant musings of others.

Anyway, I came across this one by a hero of mine, Carl Sagan, and it stopped my little scrolling hand, and made me think.

I love him and I so admire his big…brain, his expansive, (and ahead-of-his-time) thinking, and his book Contact is still up there as one of my all time favs.

You see, if you know me (which you do) you know that eclipsing my love of writing, and even my love of singing, may be my love of Science fiction. (I’ve actually started writing some.)

I always say: In my next life I’m going to be a singing, Egyptologist – in space — who writes a blog on some crazy, futuristic device, about her adventures.

You know where I developed all these interests? In books.
And that’s why that quote really got to me.

Books are Magic.

Carl is gone, but when I read all his ideas about space and the Universe; his thoughts are suddenly in. my. head.

The Egyptians, with their hieroglyphics, are able to catapult us back to their time, and into their lives.

Napoleon’s letters to Josephine talk of passion and love.

Poetry written over one hundred years ago can move us to tears.

The words of Shakespeare can make us laugh or break our hearts.

The one thing all these works — these WORDS — have in common is the theme of the week — our commonality, the fact that even through the millennia, we are more alike than we are different.

Think about it. Books and words are like a time machine, they can carry us into the future, explain the past in the participants own voice, give us an intimate glimpse into a person’s heart — or let me speak to you from my lap top in LA.

That’s fucking magic you guys.

Carry on,
xox

Sally: He just met her… She’s supposed to be his transitional person, she’s not supposed to be the ONE. All this time, I thought he didn’t want to get married. But, the truth is, he didn’t want to marry me. He didn’t love me.
Harry: If you could take him back now, would you?
Sally: No. But why didn’t he want to marry me? What’s the matter with me?
~From “When Harry Met Sally”

We ALL have him/her. That “one that got away.”
Even if we were the ones that broke it off, when that someone moves on – we suffer.
“That could’ve been me” we whine into our wine.

Saying they wanted to marry you or that they weren’t the marrying kind and then GETTING MARRIED. For some, this person is extremely high-profile – I can’t even imagine how that must feel. Seeing that person captured by the paparazzi, on the cover of every magazine, having the audacity to go off and be happy…with someone else. Ugh.

It’s bad enough when you just hear it from a friend or spot the happy couple at the Farmer’s Market; as you duck behind the organic apples, in order to avoid eye contact, because you still have bed head and you’re wearing your baggy sweats, and they look like they’ve just jumped off the pages of the J Crew catalogue.

A mutual friend posted something a couple of weeks ago about one of my former boyfriends.
He was no George Clooney, but he was a large liver. Large liver’s are those guys/gals that are highly successful in high-profile professions, have money to burn and style to spare.

Seems one of his country homes was published in a prominent shelter magazine, so I stupidly went to take a look.
Do you ever google yourself or people from your past?
I never have, but I did, and I can tell you – BIG mistake.

This guy is living the dream. Beautiful wife, kids, homes all over the world, tons of money.
Part of me thought, ‘Hey, that could’ve been me’ then, as I read further, the rest of me slapped some sense into me, ‘Hey, that would NEVER be you. You still have nothing in common.’
Shit. That part has an epic memory and is always right.

We met on a blind date. Fixed up by a mutual friend.
By the third date, he was professing his love. Every time he told me he loved me I’d smile and say: “well, thanks, but you don’t really know me yet.”
I was at least that self-aware; something he didn’t appreciate.

He was nouveau riche, meaning, he had gone from making fifty grand a year to well over a million – overnight.
It became his idea of fun to spend the entire day on Sunday, trying to spend all of his money. He already had a house, a boat and a couple of cars, so, hey, why not.

We did have tons of fun and laughed our heads off. Did I mention he was funny?

Oh yeah, he was handsome, smart and funny.
He had an amazing job and was the hottest new wunderkind in his profession.

And you could tell – he was wife shopping.

It felt to me like he was taking a walk on the wild side by dating me. He liked the waspy prom queen types; I was way too bohemian at the time; all blonde hair dyed red, vintage clothes, new age, alternative music – me.

The truth was – we were completely incompatible.

He had a boat – I got seasick. I was Yoshi Yamamoto, he was Chanel.
He made fun of my bleeding heart liberalism, my altruistic nature, the spiritual books I devoured and all my flea market finds; not in a mean way, but enough to keep me off-balance.

We didn’t have a thing in common besides the great sex and our senses of humor, and I was seriously considering overlooking that…for the lifestyle.

By the end of the first month together he launched the relationship into anxiety overdrive by asking me to go on a uber luxurious trip to Paris and the South of France with him for three weeks. I only had a week’s paid vacation time left, so he offered to pay my rent.
He’d also paid for my move to the city, to be closer to him. It was all making me extremely uncomfortable. He thought my squirming was cute.

One Sunday he took me shopping in Beverly Hills in that Pretty Womanish way: walking in, sizing up the joint, acting like a big shot, asking for champagne and pointing to the most expensive things in the store; while calling all the shop girls “sweetheart.”

It wasn’t sexy, or charming, like the movie. It was mortifying, and I had my first of many anxiety attacks in the dressing room, gasping for breath, watching through the curtain as the shop girls rolled their eyes at him.

Since he had Saturday and Sunday off, he immediately started to voice his disapproval of me working on Saturdays.
I was a jeweler, Saturday was non-negotiable. Hey, I was a shop girl…sweetheart.

He let me know he didn’t care for my roommate. He also disliked my friends and family, virtually isolating me from my old life. We only spent time with his friends, at his work events, on his boat or at his house.

His large life kicked my sweet little life’s ass .

Then the whispering started.
“He’s going to ask you to marry him in Paris” his friends whispered, giving me a head’s up…and a stomach ache.

Shouldn’t I have been elated? He looked amazing on paper, the anomaly every girl I knew was looking for; a wealthy, smart, thirty-something guy – who wanted to get married!

I sat in the bathroom staring at the bidet (wondering how it worked) that first night in Monaco, shaking like a leaf, experiencing another anxiety attack. I was thousands of miles from home, on his dime. All I had on me was the three hundred dollars in my wallet and a credit card with a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit. He was the only person I knew there, and not even THAT well.
ALSO
He had Henry Higgins’d me until I barely recognized myself.
I was acting like the biggest fakity-fak- fake, with the fancy clothes and the $500 bikini’s he’d purchased for me, smiling my big, white, toothy smile on the arm of this guy I barely knew, who I wasn’t sure I loved and was supposed to become engaged to.
For me, the fairy tale was unraveling.

The trip went…okay— long story.
Suffice it to say we did not get engaged. I told you, we weren’t compatible.
Yet, when things cooled off and he stopped calling and coming around – I was shocked and hurt. He was able to dismiss me as quickly as he fell for me. I kept asking myself, what had I done wrong? Why didn’t he love me anymore? It’s hard when the spotlight of someone’s affection shifts away from you when you have to return to your sweet little life, garment bags of gowns hanging sadly in the closet. I’m sure George’s former paramours can relate.

I hope they had fun and I hope they learned the lessons I learned:
1) When someone professes their undying love for you just days into a relationship – It isn’t real. I knew it, my anxiety was my indicator.
(My current husband used the appropriate vocabulary; he said he didn’t want to take me home after a date because he was infatuated with me, and that made me swoon.)

2) If your person isolates you, never wanting to spend time with your friends and family – run. He’s leading you away from all the people who take you by the arm and talk sense into you when you’re acting like an ass and a fake and making horrible decisions.
That would end up being a litmus test for future men. I would marinate them in my friends and my life and if they balked…I’d end it.

3) Really get to know someone before you leave the continent on their dime.
It’s all so romantic, but it’s a huge imbalance of power and you’ll feel it in your gut.
Don’t let the champagne override that, your gut is always right.

4) If it’s the lifestyle you miss – provide it for yourself. I realized I LOVED Europe and made it a priority to travel abroad as often as I could. On my own dime.

So, when you’re feeling that little pit in your stomach, thinking: ‘that could’ve been me’, you have to ask yourself: ‘Really? Could you have gone the distance with that person? Did you feel like the best version of yourself when you were with them?’

I believe not. Because I believe we’re always where we’re supposed to be, in every moment.

Deep down, Stacy Keibler knew things would never last. She obviously wanted to get married, which she did less than a year after the breakup with George, and now she has a child.
But when he got engaged I’m sure she thought for a second ‘that could’ve been me.’ We all did.
But, I know, just like me, she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.

xox