spiritual

Hi Guys,
It’s mid-summer and the tourists are out in full force here in LaLa Land. Unfortunately, some of them stick out like sore thumbs and it isn’t the white socks with sandals or the acid washed jeans (although I’ve been told they’re coming back in style, and I’m in denial)—it’s the stingy tipping. I know tips are built into the bill in Europe, I also know Texas is in the United States.

Please tip generously. And enjoy your weekend!
xox

“Never trust any who treats a waiter badly.” ~ Anyone with a soul (Also my number one rule for choosing friends.)

I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. I worked my way through my twenties as a cashier in a supermarket while many of my friends waited tables, catered and tended bar. Based on our nightly bitch sessions, I can tell you without hesitation, that selling people their food and serving it to them are two completely different experiences.

Food service is grueling work. And it can be absolutely soul-sucking if people aren’t nice. Nobody has to lick your face or nibble your neck—just your standard-issue, basic-human-decency nice would suffice.

I’ve sat at the table with snippy divas. Women who are prickly, easily annoyed—on the lookout for trouble. It has always been my belief that if you’re lookin’ for trouble, trouble will not only find you. Not only find you, it will pull up a chair, order a drink, charge it to your tab, and over-stay its welcome.

We all know these women. They huff and puff and send stuff back. They act indignant, disrespected. Like me when I get carded by a millennial named Brick.

Maybe she doesn’t like the look of the lettuce. Or the ice is too cold or the coffee tastes burnt, so she shames the staff. Seriously?  The only time I ever sent something back was when my wine glass had a lipstick stain on the rim and I hadn’t sipped from it yet. And I apologized so profusely my husband had to shoot me some stink-eye just to shut me up.

Listen, I’m not particularly judgy. But be forewarned. I WILL judge you harshly for treating people in the service industry rudely.

That includes being a cheap tipper. I’m not even sure this has to do with generosity. Some of the lousiest tippers I know are extremely generous in other areas. They are the first to donate to disaster relief or send money to get a three-legged dog a prosthetic paw. Why do you think that is? Maybe they’ve forgotten what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck.

Lots of folks supplement a crappy base salary with commission or tips. It can be the difference between making ends meet and having to pick up a second job. Please, think of that the next time you’re tempted to hand the young man who ran three blocks in the rain to fetch your car—a lousy buck.

I’ve seen that.

One measly dollar. You know what one dollar buys these days? Uh…nothing.

The same is true for the young man or woman who spends twenty minutes hand drying your car at the car wash. I saw a lady the other day hand the guy ONE dollar after he not only hand dried her vehicle, but at her insistence spent extra time polishing the fancy chrome rims on her giant SUV—in ninety-degree heat.

Lady. This man is not your personal chauffeur, nor is he your indentured servant. You guys, I could smell the stingy. What is that anyway? Entitlement? Bad upbringing? I don’t care, just don’t be that lady. 

Get change for a twenty if you have to, but please be a decent tipper. Trust me, if you’re well off enough to get your car washed, eat at a restaurant, or use the valet—that person needs the cash a lot more than you do.

All this to say; this seems to be a polarizing time of me or them.

I might suggest that we find some common ground. Like hard work, industriousness, and hustle—and the fact that we’ve all been there. Then we’re just us.

Right?

Carry on,
xox

“A unique astrological energy fills this summer that you may well be feeling! On one hand, FIVE planets are retrograde in the heavens, bringing back old, sometimes ignored issues from the past to be reviewed, faced and cleaned up once and for all before a big, new cycle starts in autumn.” (This makes me want to vomit.)

For many years after my first divorce, more than I care to remember, I lived without air conditioning in LA. Many a hot summer was spent in that no-mans-land, north on the 405, otherwise known as the San Fernando Valley. 

Spoiled rotten after being raised in a home with central air, I roughed it in my twenties and thirties, too broke to afford a place with air-conditioning.  Many a night I braved the triple-digit heat naked on the floor in front of a fan, spraying myself with ice water. And I swore that when I had a few bucks I’d NEVER LIVE WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING AGAIN!

Cut to: Friday of last week. Extreme heat advisories were issued as the temps set new record highs—rising to 113 degrees. I watched from the comfort of my air-conditioned home as the heat scorched all of my hydrangeas, caused the squirrels to loiter in my fountains, and shocked several of our trees into dropping all their leaves. 

Sitting in the cool, dry fabulousness of my home, I felt real compassion for all the suffering this extreme heat was causing. Been there, done that, I thought as I sipped a freshly brewed ice tea. Then, a few minutes later, I felt the tiny droplets of sweat form on my upper lip.

 Huh, that’s curious, I thought. With great haste, I made my way to the thermostat to see where it was set. You see, sometimes, when I’m feeling energy conscious, I set the thermostat to the recommended 78 degrees. But that happens so infrequently that I feel like I’m fibbing to you when I tell you that there was even the slightest chance that it was set at 78. 

Can we speak frankly? 

I’m fucking sixty years old. And I only mention that because I’ve been burnt alive from the inside out for the past decade or so. I guess you could say I “run hot”. But that’s a colossal understatement. That’s like saying volcanos “run hot”. Truthfully, I’m being burnt alive from the inside out! Luckily I have it under control. That is until it gets over 100 degrees. Then my body turns into a series of rolling wildfires. 

When that happens I’m not nice. I get short with people my husband. My tongue gets sharp like I ate glass for lunch.

And I most certainly CANNOT be anywhere that isn’t 72 degrees. So that was just the long way of telling you that our thermostat was set to 72 degrees. Do NOT get in my face about this! Trust me, it’s a preemptive measure because if I overheat I can do great damage. Seriously, you could weaponize me. 

So you can imagine my horror when I checked the thermostat and it was going in the wrong direction!

It was 79 degrees! 

I checked the vents. They were blowing tepid air in my face. 

WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD?!

I collected myself and calmly phoned my husband.
“I think the air conditioning is broken,” I chirped.

I know, that he knows, that if I know it’s not working we’re all fucked—so I pretend I’m not sure—when I am—sure that we’re all fucked. 

“I’ll call my guy,” he said. Then he hung up.

His guy. He has a guy—and he’s gonna call him. He’s gonna call his guy. I felt reassured. 

Cut to: Saturday afternoon. In an 87 degree room in our house. 

    “FUCKING FIX IT!” I screamed. 

And when I say screamed I’m not engaging in hyperbole. I was screaming. At the top of my lungs. 
What can I say? My inner heat index had reached DefCon 5 and I was about to blow. 
There was no reasoning with me, believe me, the sane part of me was trying. 
I watched our little brown dog run for cover, terrified.  We don’t scream in our house, well…ever. 

“FUCKING FIX IT NOW!” I continued to scream as if my husband possessed the superpower to shoot frost out his ass.

“I have a call out to all my guys; they’re swamped. Everybody’s air is breaking.”

Not everybody. All I had to do was stand next to one of the windows we had flung open searching for a breeze. But there was no breeze to be found. You saw that coming, didn’t you? Anyway, they were letting the hot breath of Hell superheat our house while I could hear a thousand of our neighbors cooling units happily humming a chorus of You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

SOMEONE NEEDED TO DIE FOR THIS. I was fully weaponized. God forbid a technician shows up now. 

“I swore I would NEVER live without air again!” I said.

“I know. You’ve screamed that at me a thousand times,” he said.

“Why aren’t you doing something? Aren’t you hot? Why are you fucking with your computer!!!” I screamed.

“I’m putting you in a hotel,” he said.

That’s when the technician showed up. As a favor to my husband. He’d made the time to squeeze us into his impossibly overbooked schedule. Because he likes my husband and they do a lot of work together.

I thanked him profusely, offered him a cold glass of lemonade and watched hopefully as he fixed our air conditioning. 

Nah. That’s not what happened. 

I annihilated him. I didn’t even let him descend the ladder before I laid into him. Remember, I was fully weaponized.

          “What do you mean it’s broken BECAUSE IT’S HOT! THAT’S WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR!  IT HAS ONE JOB! 

            WORK. IN. HOT. WEATHER!”

Then I caught myself and apologized with all my heart.

Nope. That didn’t happen either.

The guy came down the ladder—and quit. 

So here I sit on Tuesday, day five of a brutal heat wave with a crapped-out air conditioner. 

I LOVE a five-planet retrograde. And I really think I’m clearing out some of my old issues from my past, don’t you?

Carry on,
xox

The innocence of this post from 2014 makes me want to cry. And march…and VOTE! Now, more than ever!
Carry on,
xox

Dear America,

Home of these United States.

Happy Birthday, Girl!

I am eternally grateful, even after traveling the world, make that especially after traveling the world, to have won the cosmic lottery by having had the good fortune to be born in your golden state.

I have traveled this country, sea to shining sea, mostly on the back of a motorcycle, and I’m here to testify that it really does have purple mountain’s majesty and amber waves of grain.

It is gorgeous.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen the trash, graffiti, and poverty through these rose-colored glasses of mine, but by and large, this country is a heart-swelling source of pride for me.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That last pursuit, the pursuit of happiness?

We are unbelievably blessed that Thomas Jefferson had the wisdom and foresight to write that into The Declaration of Independence. No other country in the world gives its citizens the RIGHT to happiness.

Who knows what that even means, what happiness even looks like?

To them, it meant emancipation from British Rule.

Happiness means something different to everyone, but we, WE are entitled to it thanks to that sacred declaration—and by God—we go for it.

The American people I’ve met all want the same things from life: Love and a good cup of coffee.

Americans are hard workers. Some of the hardest in the world – don’t argue, check the stats.

We love our pets
Damn, we love our kids.
We are an irrepressible bunch. We are gregarious, outgoing and LOUD.

We are innovative, curious, quick-minded and clever.
And we don’t take NO for an answer. (Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, my nephew.)

We are MacGyvers. Most of us are industrious enough to fix pretty much anything with gum, a paper clip, and dental floss. It’s in the water.

We willingly give directions to people who look lost.

The Americans I’ve met, will help a stranger in a heartbeat. They are generous and kind.

The United States is only as great as the sum of its parts; in reality, it is only a landmass with man-made borders.

It is the people who make it great and make me grateful to have been born here. 

Don’t agree? Travel outside the states and you’ll share my appreciation for :

Clean water
Indoor plumbing
Hot running water,
A toilet with Real toilet paper
Things that work as expected
Ice cubes. Cold anything really
Decent French fries
King size beds (not two twin beds pushed together)
Street signs that actually give you correct information.

7 eleven (the ability to buy tampons or Motrin or band-aids at 2 AM)

Personal space (other countries don’t have the same personal boundaries that we do).
Story: We were standing in some line in Europe (where they are big on lining up for things to which Americans would say “No fucking way”) when my husband looked over at me with the saddest mix of incredulity and humiliation. The old man behind him was standing so close that if he even so much as puckered his lips, he would have kissed the back of my husband’s neck.

It freaked him out and he’s French… So yeah,  personal boundaries.

A relatively dependable police force and fire department.
A somewhat workable bureaucracy. (Just try to get your VAT tax back.)
Real cabs that don’t have hoodlums for drivers
Soap
Pillows that are thicker than 1 inch.

CUSTOMER SERVICE. DEAR GOD, CUSTOMER SERVICE!

I’m serious, these are things we take for granted that some other countries just haven’t figured out yet.

Happy Birthday, America. I do love you. You don’t look a day over two hundred.

My birthday wish for you on this momentous day is a big fat cake with tons of candles, heaps of vanilla ice cream, and the most badass fireworks display ever, complete with marching bands and a flyover by the Blue Angels.

Too much? Nah, we’re Americans!

*Addendum: there are some things that other countries do that kick our ass.
My husband was riding in the middle of the Namibian desert last year and he had cell phone service – like four bars – four bars is unheard of in LA.
The electricity was dicey, but he was able to FaceTime me every night.
So, yeah, they’re killing it with cell phone service.

Want to wish her a Happy Birthday? Put it in comments below and I’ll forward them to her.

Much love,
Xox

This is a 2017 rant. It was before family separation at the border, the Muslim ban and other Trumpian greatest hits, so it is ranty in a regular way and is not to be confused with a 2018 rant which is fueled by a year of hopelessness and rage and can go sideways real quick. 

xox

“Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
~ Bobby Kennedy

This morning dawned bright and cheery and I was in a good enough mood after my meditation to turn on the news.

Big mistake.

Dufus had just caved to the conservative religious right by Tweeting his most recent policy shift (you know like most Presidents do), banning transgender people from the military—yet another step in his never-ending quest to send us back into the dark ages.

As I sat there I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck these old white guys are so afraid of?

Strong, opinionated women?
Transgender folks? (Listen, any trans person I’ve ever met just wants to pee in peace and be left the fuck alone.)
People of color?
Democrats?
The Media?
Educated Elite?
Sick people?
Poor people?

Then it dawned on me. It’s diversity. All of those groups are the ingredients that make up the soup that is America.
It’s what makes us great!
It always has you whiny, fearful sons-of-bitches!

Anyway, as I tried to get my head back in the game of life, I remembered this video of well over half a million people in London singing along—IN UNISON—With harmonies—to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. You guys, they even sang the guitar solo, duh.

Here it comes, a stream of consciousness…

So that got me to thinking about the fact that humanity can move me to tears with its inherent goodness, about how proud I felt to know that I could have stood in that crowd and sung every fucking word of that song at the top of my lungs—with a British accent, about music and what a unifying force it can be, about the potential of Kid Rock running for office, red states and blue states and the fact that we, as a nation, need to become more purple. More integrated. More unified. To feel proud of our diversity instead of afraid and then I remembered that purple is (among other things) not really My color, but it is the color that represents royalty and royalty brought me right back around to—you guessed it—Queen!

Is any of this making sense to you? It’s blowing MY fucking mind!

Then my sister sent me this:

And I knew the Universe (or Freddie Mercury) who I could feel in that gorgeous London sky, was trying to tell me something.

“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality
Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m easy come, easy go, little high, little low
Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me”

And suddenly, all was right with the world. Are you with me?

Carry on, you diverse ones you,
xox

*If you follow me on Instagram you’ve already seen this but it is worth sharing.

“If you can’t say anything nice—come and sit by me.”

I know, I know, that runs counter to everything our mother’s taught us as children, otherwise known as the “Don’t say anything at all” rule. 

I was the poster child for this way of thinking as a kid. But the minute I realized, around the age of twelve, that the girls who didn’t adhere to this dictum were so much more interesting and fun, well—you get the picture. 

Us “nice sayers” were a boring bunch. We helped in the convent, populated the honor roll, made cupcakes for the bake sale, wore horizontal stripes on free dress day, and our blue and grey plaid skirts always touched just below the knee.

Our less well-mannered classmates were a raucous bunch. Ragtag and rebellious, sassy and cheeky, they were smart girls who talked openly about taboo topics, made up funny nicknames for all the nuns, and generally seemed to be having one hell of a good time. 

Listen, if you can accomplish that in an uptight Catholic school, during the “duck and cover” days of the cold war, über repressed 1960’s—I have to tip my hat to you.

Secretly, I wanted to be just like them, flaunting the norms in favor of fun. It wasn’t unkind or hurtful. No one went home crying and nobody’s parents called the school to complain. 

I hate to use this tired cliché but nothing fits better—It was good, clean, fun. Don’t confuse nice with kind. They’re not the same thing. 

Eventually, I jumped ship, and by high school, if you couldn’t say anything particularly nice—you sat with our group of girls. 

Now, at the risk of sounding like someone who waxes poetic at the memory of the ten-cent phone call—at a payphone—or music embedded into the grooves of acetate discs, these days of social media have taken “Not nice” to a whole new level. To me, it looks a lot like, well, hate.

Let me be blunt. People seem fucking MEAN. 

If you don’t look, speak, or think like me—or live where and how I do—I fucking hate you.

What?

Not only do I not want to sit next to those people— I don’t want them anywhere near me!

It is my experience (which I admit at this point includes a minimum of tweeting and more just looking at the comments of the brave people who do) that Twitter is a cesspool filled with all of the ugly vitriol that repressed people who should have flown their fucking freak-flags back in middle-school should have already gotten out of their systems.  

I’m just gonna come out and say it—I miss civility. I miss the days where all of the people with horrible ideas still lived under rocks. I miss the days where nicknames happened on the schoolyard, not in the President of the United States’s Twitter feed. I miss peaceful protest and bands of rivals, and humane politics (if there was ever such a thing). What has happened to civil public discourse over differences of opinion free of name-calling and public shaming? And when did cruelty get to be a thing? I miss the days when the majority of us could agree on what was cruel and what wasn’t—and we didn’t quote Bible verses to justify it.

And I really, really miss vinyl records. 

Enjoy your weekend and carry on,

xox

“Character shoes are among the unsung heroes of musical theatre. They are comfortable, versatile footwear that makes a dancer look great without distracting from her form. Practically invisible, they are meant to be worn on a wooden stage. 

Performers often wear character shoes during auditions to be ready in case the director invites them to go into their dance.”

(Gahhhhhh!  That last sentence makes my butt pucker.)

If you look closely, you can see my black “character shoes” hanging at the window above my desk, next to the waving Liz. I keep them within my purview to remind me of the fact that I’m a character.  I know to you that seems pretty obvious, but when I’m holed up inside my little she-shack disguised as an office, I need to be reminded that I’m more than just a person who writes. Once upon a time, I donned those very shoes to sing and move in a way that resembled dancing if you squinted your eyes just right, or removed them altogether—along with any preconceived idea of what you thought “dance” should look like. 

I’m also a person who has friends, which is why I have all of the photographs of the people I love scattered around the space, so I don’t forget to call them or tell them I love them for no reason at all, which I’m prone to do—because I just glanced up to see them smiling back at me. 

I also have little pieces of nature, like driftwood or a couple of roses from my garden to remind me that I even have a garden and that maybe this afternoon, I should take a break from writing and walk around barefoot in the grass of that garden which lies on the other side of the fence. (Which is there to keep me from staring out the window at my garden all day.)

I have hundreds of inspirational quotes placed here and there to inspire me, although they’ve been there for so long they’re like visual white noise and I don’t really see them. Hence, I’ve been known to sit here for hours, surrounded by inspiration —feeling completely uninspired. 

Right now I’m staring at a stack of six journals, each more gorgeous than the next, with about two sentences written on the first page. They’re all gifts. I would never buy myself a journal because I don’t write shit down. I never have. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, which continues to make the fact that I have a blog so incomprehensible to me. 

All of this to say, we are so much more than we claim to be. 

I may be a writer, but I’m a character too.  We all are. Some of you are parents but trust me, that’s just a fraction of who you are.  We pigeonhole, build a box and give ourselves labels and then we try our damnedest to conform to fit them.

I have no idea why we do it— if I knew, I would write a helpful handbook with instructions on how to escape that trap and then buy myself an island and never give any of this a second thought. All I know is that we do it—I know I do it. But it’s getting harder for me as I age. Too much water (or dance/spazzing) under that bridge. No identity crisis here—I’m hopelessly schizophrenic—in the best kind of way. 

When asked what I do I say I’m a writer, but in the next breath I want to explain that in addition to that I’m someone who loves music, food, motorcycles, foreign travel, and dogs; books, twinkle lights, Christmas, walks in nature, the beach, anything sparkly, and whiskey. 

But by that time, the person who asked has usually made an exit just this side of running. People don’t really want you to answer that question with anything but one word.

“Doctor, I’m a doctor.” 

“Oh, you are? Listen, I have this pain…”

The poor woman. She probably wants to jam a pen in her eye, or claim she sells tires—when all she has to do to end the conversation is start listing all the ingredient in her famous coq au vin.

I’m rambling now, trying desperately to avoid getting back to my real work. I suppose I could have written all of this in one of those beautiful, empty journals—but what fun would that have been?

Carry on,
xox

I had my laptop balanced on my knees furiously NOT working. I was busy trolling the internet for false eyelashes or any derivative thereof—if you must know!

I had the cable news on low because I’m writing a screenplay with a more political bend and it’s basically research. But these days the 24/7 news cycle has changed from the Russia probe complete with all of the creepy villains with borscht in their teeth and shady as fuck business practices—to the appalling stories of kids being separated from their parents at the border. 

Now usually, I can compartmentalize all of the shenanigans taking place in our nation’s capital, I have to stay sane and write humor after all!  But this—this with the pictures and audios of children wailing for their parents, well, it was too much. It was unignorable. 

I happened to look up right at the end of The Rachel Maddow show because I felt something weird happening. Sure enough, she was breaking down on camera, unable to complete the report that had just broken about small infants and toddlers being set to “tender age” shelters in south Texas. 

Slowly, I shut my computer and proceeded to sob for a good ten minutes. What is happening to my country? What has happened to common decency? Why the cruelty? 

I have tried to keep this “situation” in perspective which has proved to be a Herculean task. After all, what can I do besides send money, sign petitions, call and make the lives of everyone in Washington who thinks this is a good idea—miserable? Just the same, in that moment I felt about as powerless as I’ve ever felt in my life and well, emotions are emotions and sometimes you just need to cry your fucking face off. Especially when you observe the sorry state of affairs unfolding day in and day out in our country without so much as a chance to take a breath.

Afterward, I sat there like a nimrod, checking to make sure I hadn’t cried my lashes down my face and into some no-man’s-land—otherwise known as my cleavage. 

Then I made dinner.

By the time my husband got home the entire incident had gone on the back burner right next to the cauliflower mashed potatoes. He had a particularly spectacular day so we shared a Spanish Rioja and grinned at each other a lot. 

About an hour later I heard a loud humming sound. It was so low decibel it hurt my ears. Was it a low flying plane? Did our air conditioner (which wasn’t on) have bronchitis? Or had the blender finally decided to lead a meditation class with the toaster and the coffeemaker in the pantry? 

So I did what you do when shit like that happens. I muted the TV.

“Can you hear that?” I asked my stubbornly deaf husband who thinks he can hear a pin drop—but couldn’t hear a piano if it were dropped from a ten story building. 

“Yeah,” he replied. “What is it?”

We both got up and walked toward his office where the ceiling had turned into a waterfall. I kid you not. Water was pouring from the ceiling, flooding the concrete (thank god) floor below. 

But at least the humming had stopped.

Right above his office is the attic where our water heater lives. Suspecting that it was the culprit, up a ladder he went and into a cubbyhole he disappeared. I began throwing towels down and putting buckets in place while our dog slept through the entire ordeal. 

“Yep. It’s the water heater.,” he confirmed as he carefully backed his way down the ladder. 

“The intake hose has a leak and the pan underneath which is supposed to drain any water that leaks, well, it isn’t connected either. A double failure at the same time which is rare.”

“How rare?”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“And what was the weird humming—oh wise one?”

“Dunno.”

Huh. And no big whoop. It was just a hose and a pan thingy. 

Later that night in bed, because I’m me and nothing can ever be accepted at face value, I looked up the meaning of a water leak. The first thing that came up was “emotional turmoil” which I dismissed immediately since things around here, emotionally speaking, are pretty chill. 

Feng Shui says it’s money leaking out but that didn’t feel accurate either. 

Hey…Wait just a minute… 

Hadn’t I been sobbing my head off in despair just an hour before the waterfall appeared?

OMG.  Had I made our house cry?

You be the judge.

Carry on,
xox

Go here if you want to help in some way:
https://togetherrising.org

“Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. … They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.”

When you read that story, about the train and the Alps, how does it make you feel?

Are you thinking, Why do I care about a train in Europe? I have three job interviews this week!

Are you more practical, like How fiscally irresponsible is that to build something that no one can use?

Or… are you more like me?

As you’ve probably already guessed, that little anecdote gives ME goosebumps the size of Montana hail, a lump in my throat, and every time I read it my boobies tingle a little—because that’s just the kind of inspiring, real life, stranger-than-fiction, magical nonsense that makes me excited to get up in the morning.

That passage is from a favorite movie of mine, Under the Tuscan Sun, which if you haven’t seen it or read the book, (which is marvelous) is about a woman going through a profound life change whose purpose, timeframe and final destination are completely unknown to her. Day after day, terrified and miserable as fuck, she just keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

Like we all do. Even people who aren’t steeped in faith find a way to carry on. Maybe they get it from stories about trains.

If you think about it from my very Pollyanna Perspective, every great work of art, creative endeavor, and scientific accomplishment started with some track building. I’ll take it a step further and insist that we all lay down tracks we can’t use until we flesh out our ideas from start to finish.

I do it every freaking day and so do you!

A dear friend of mine has gone back to school to get her degree. There’s no job lined up yet, no clientele or guarantee of employment waiting for her at the finish line. Nevertheless, I see her working her tail off—laying the tracks.

From the age of thirteen, Misty Copeland would practice up to eight hours a day, barely listening to the naysayers who insisted that she was too dark, too curvy and had started dancing too late to have a real career in ballet. She was too busy laying tracks for a position that did not exist before her—the first African-American principal ballerina for the American Ballet Theatre.

Steve Jobs imagined the smartphone, a technology so innovative that it didn’t exist before he thought of it. I’m sure plenty of intelligent, well-meaning people told him not to waste his time or money on what must have seemed like an insurmountable amount of track building. But he did it anyway.

He gave us something we never knew we needed—that now we can never imagine living without.

Like a train across the Alps.

What tracks are you laying right this minute for that thing you know will show up one day?

Carry on,
xox

A written invitation?

“Yes. Yes, I am. That would be lovely. Except can you also make sure you send me an email reminder because—brain farts.”

I don’t think I’m any different from you guys. I see your Insta accounts!

I too have a virtual factory full of creative ideas inside my head that are clamoring to get out. A real David Copperfield meets Industrial Light and Magic warehouse of the mystical, odd and wonderful. The only trouble with my idea factory is that it really didn’t show up until I was close to fifty.

Hey, has yours shown up yet?

I have an excuse. In my early years, I was too busy to entertain a creative thought. 
I liked to eat, so I had a job. 
It was a real slog. 

I spent twenty years slaving like a diamond miner.  *sniff. Who am I kidding, I bought and sold gorgeous diamond jewelry in the land of swimming pools and movie stars. To be honest, my job was more like the life of a protected baby seal, basking on a warm rock while being fed tiny chocolate covered squid—by hand.      

Anyway… after I turned fifty the creative juices ratcheted up a notch (while all of my other juices took a hiatus—if you catch my drift) until now, at sixty, they’re in full, maximum, overdrive!

What the fuck? I have the best ideas of my life while I struggle to keep my tits from sliding over my knees?

How is that fair?
That seems like a huge mistake. 
A cruel joke. 
A cosmic fuck-up of epic proportions! 
Someone screwed up, right?

In the meantime, it appears that the Amy Pohlers, Amy Schumers, and Tina Feys of the world have figured this out.

God bless them.

Meanwhile, it took me FIVE years to collaborate on the first act of a musical and put it up on stage so I could listen to actors say our words and singers sing our songs (which, btw was sublime and surreal I’ve gotta tell ya). 

But all I kept thinking the entire time was: Why aren’t I thirty?  Why is this happening NOW? You don’t start stuff like this at my age, besides…
FIVE YEARS! 
A lot of things can go down before Act Two ever sees the light of day? 

It would be like me having a baby a sixty. How will my body ever recover, who will raise it AND will I be around to see it graduate?

Question: In this chapter of my life how many of these deep-divey projects should I take on?

Don’t answer that! It was rhetorical because the answer is: ALL of them! Seriously, what the fuck am I waiting for? 

Here’s what I’ve come to know for sure that the Amy’s and Tina already knew:

If you wait until your ready — forget it—You’ll never be ready!
If you wait until you’re good—forget it—you won’t get good until you try!
If you wait until you have the time or the money—forget that too—there will always be something that will gobble that shit up!

So this is my cautionary tale. A Special Public Service Announcement from me to you. 

If you’re filled with creativity, no matter what age you find yourself at, DO IT!  Don’t wait another minute!

Carry on,
xox

Oldie but goodie…and it feels even more apropos in these crazy-ass times. Maybe because the antics we are seeing played out daily in our political discourse are extremely familiar if you grew up with a family or you know, interacted with anybody who didn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart. 

Stay strong out there!

xox

Judgment alert! There may be some judgment leveled here. Hey, I’m no saint.

How come the crazy ones never lose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out-of-place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society can close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

That will always bother me.

Why is that?
How can it be?

Case in point: The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one-hundred-year-old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium, I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into some kind of an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to tiny, baby, Chicklets. This left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

Once at the courthouse, the team of He, She and It, who represented the water company, entered the room laughing. Uproariously.
Like Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon had driven carpool.

I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the funniest joke ever told was completely lost on me. Was that their plan?

Upon closer inspection, they were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was permanently wrinkled, drenched in flop sweat, and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the Big Guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They gaslighted. They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts they made a pretty compelling case. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe almost anything. Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me, and in the most well crafted, legal babbley, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me! They made the accidental, midnight break of their water main seem like MY fault!

It was 2009. Business was slow, debt was high, banks were failing left and right and I needed out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

I know, crazy, right? But when we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.

The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a businesswoman, which was exactly how I felt at the time.
I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking into the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also over-rides all victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming and unflappable that she never breaks a sweat. And that bitch looooooves a victim, she gets off on them—they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But let me tell you something, Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
And sad victimhood? Well, that’s like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. If sadness felt like quick-sand, Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall and kick-boxed the toilet-tissue dispenser for nearly an hour before taking a walk around the building, coming to my senses, and finding my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devour her victims whole and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken frenzy.

I also remembered that there is no reasoning with Crazy, and nothing can get to her.  Nothing touches her heart. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

She acts as your judge, jury, and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake, the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember, Crazy is rested, ready and strong after her peaceful night’s sleep. How is that fair?
Because Crazy get a buzz off this shit and she doesn’t care about anything other than winning.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had taken over and hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that arbitration room. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier, and Craziest, whopping it up inside so I waited outside until I saw my attorney exit the elevator.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she looked surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.” We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

She reached into her bag for paper and a pen. “Give me the number you’ll you settle at,” she asked. She seemed relieved like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket. Just then the elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed in like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, turning me around. “This could end today,” she said with a hint of a smile, letting go of my purse as the doors closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake” I remember her saying in a distracted voice, she was already on to her next case.

I feel safe in saying that we all slept well that night.

Maybe some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

*And don’t get your panties in a bunch if I anthropomorphize emotions. We all know crazy is not female and rage is not male, so calm the fuck down.