• NaPoWriMo,  Writing

    When Midnight Comes

    (a nonet form poem…for you dad.)

    I thought we’d have more time together
    but the minutes felt like seconds
    as they slipped from my fingers
    stealing your presence from
    tomorrow’s memory
    with each bitter
    Tick…Tick…Tick
    of death’s
    clock

  • NaPoWriMo,  Writing

    Water

    Whoever said blood is thicker than water
    obviously didn’t know my dad.
    I was only three months old when he cast genes aside
    and chose to be my father

    It was love at first sight he used to say
    Not with the 20-year-old divorcee he found dining alone
    the woman I call mom
    but with the infant bound and sleeping silently beside her
    unaware of the father she didn’t know or the one she was about to.

    My dad fell in love that day with a child that wasn’t his
    He fell in love with me
    And even when a sister came later who shared his DNA
    our bond ran fathoms deep
    His fatherly ocean seeping into every crack and fissure of my life
    in a way blood never could.

    My veins bleed the crystal clarity of his love
    Rivers of calm, sparkling pride I now pour into my own daughter
    A daughter I too chose

    And yes…

    it was love at first sight

  • NaPoWriMo,  Writing

    Life in Winter

    I’m late to the NaPoWriMo party due to a bad fibro/depression double whammy that hit last week. Finally crawling out of it no so here’s my first poem for this’ year’s event. I gave the Blitz form a try (50 lines with strict rules about repeating words) and was quite blown away by both the simplicity and the depth. I haven’t checked any of the prompts, so this one is all me. tomorrow, maybe I’ll follow the prompt…maybe.

    Life in Winter
    Watching tv
    Watching life
    Life faded
    Life unlived
    Unlived dreams
    Unlived joy
    Joy fleeting
    Joy denied
    Denied connections
    Denied purpose
    Purpose unfulfilled
    Purpose lost at sea
    Sea of waves
    Sea like storms
    Storm battered ships
    Storm easing sleep
    Sleep like babies
    Sleep like thunder
    Thunder shaking souls
    Thunder calling heaven
    Heaven answers
    Heaven accepts you
    You, in queue
    You still waiting
    Waiting on dreams
    Waiting for the camper
    Camper bought, then sold
    Camper never used
    Used tissues
    Used prayers
    Prayers for a miracle
    Prayers unanswered
    Unanswered call
    Unanswered goodbye
    Goodbye too soon
    Goodbye, Dad
    Dad fought, lost
    Dad now flying
    Flying the coastline
    Flying kites
    Kites with strings
    Kites tied to fingers
    Fingers touching yours
    Finger growing cold
    Cold seeping in
    Cold like winter
    Winter claims the dead
    Winter freezing hearts
    Dead
    Heart

     

  • NaPoWriMo,  Writing

    And Death Derailed Her

    When I decided to create this website almost a year ago I didn’t realize the amount of work it would be to bring my wild vision to life.  What I thought would take only days quickly became weeks then months of research and educating myself on how to build a professional-ish WordPress website.

    I ignored much of the worn advice that literally everyone with a writer’s blog seemed hellbent to regurgitate ad nauseum in posts like “The Holy Mother Effing Grail of Creating a Freelance Writer’s Website – Niche up!” Instead I threw caution to wind declaring “screw the mandatory niche, all you blogging Karens!” and dove in head first.

    After months of blood, sweat and tears I finally launched in early August. And for a short while, I was excited. Beyond excited actually because, for the first time ever, I had a purpose and a plan!   

    If only I had known all that hard work would be so easily derailed thanks to a pulled back muscle, a trip to the ER, and a single phone call that haunts me still.

    Pooh, they found something in my xray…”

    I lost interest in writing after that call.  Everything just felt pointless and trivial once my dad had been given an expiration date thanks to stage 4 pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to his liver.

    He died December 6th, 2021.  Part of me died that day as well. 

    I now know that the cancer wasn’t just suddenly there overnight, but had probably always been there, living twisted and hidden in dad’s DNA like a ticking time bomb, watching, waiting for that perfect moment to show itself when the emotional fallout would have the greatest impact on all of us. It waited quietly through his early years serving as a Navy Frogman. It sat silent through his knee replacements and countless dermatological skin lesion removals and even waited through a quintuple heart bypass surgery in the 2008.

    It waited patiently through covid and the entire year he and my stepmom lived in hyper isolation from the world to stay safe and healthy.

    What it ultimately waited for was the camper – the one purchased in May to celebrate receiving their 2nd vaccine doses and their all clear to start living again.  The camper they finally stopped dreaming about and made a reality to fulfill their lifelong dream of travelling the country together during their twilight years.

    They never got to use that camper.

    You might think I’d be angry at the disease for taking dad from us. But truthfully, jokes on the cancer.  It finally chose to pounce when people all over the world weren’t just getting sick. They were dying en masse and they were doing it alone – separated from family, forced to spend their final days in isolation with nothing but the hiss of a ventilator to keep them company until the world dimmed and they could no longer hear its voice.

    No, I’m not angry at cancer.  How could I be?! That malignant beast, with all its putrid intentions, was a blessing in disguise and the war it waged against my family became the greatest gift we never knew we would someday need…

    …the gift of knowing that every moment spent together would be the last of its kind.

    And the gift of goodbye. 

    I feel like I still have so much to say about my father. I’ve been mourning for almost 4 months, but I still hurt like the loss was yesterday.  I cry every day and still have moments where it doesn’t seem real.  I feel like I’ve been drowning for months and I’ve grown so tired trying to reach the surface. 

    My dad’s last words to me were “You’ll be a success, Pooh.  Just keep writing.”

    And so I will. 

    I read yesterday about NaPoWriMo and thought this might be a good way to not only jump back in, but do it with a focused theme.  I need to purge before I can heal so for 30 days I’m going to try and write poetry for dad. I hope I can do it. For him. We’ll see how long it lasts.

    Wish me luck.

  • Writing

    The ageism of Romance Novels – 40 is not too old to love

    It happened again.

    I opened the pages of a new paranormal romance novel and was attacked by my old foe – the uncomfortable “1” as the first digit of the heroine’s age.

    A freakin’ ONE and it wasn’t even a YA or NA novel.

    Toss….NEXT!

    I only recently started reading romance (less than 5 years now) but I’ve read enough to know there’s a problem with the genre. Of the hundreds of books I’ve read, I can count using one hand the number of books that had a leading lady over 30 and only one finger the number over 40.

    I’m not saying they don’t exist. But the number drops off drastically when that first digit is a “3”. And if it a “4”? Well hell, you can just forget about it.

    Don’t get me wrong. The age thing doesn’t stop me from loving the genre but it sure makes it hard to like it from time to time. What I’ve learned is 40’s are too old to sell books but 20’s are too young for the mental acuity required for the female leads, so the authors compromise. They write them like they’re 40 then compress all that wisdom into the more marketable body of a nubile 20-year-old.

    Nothing ruins a book faster than a 21-year-old heroine with the deep introspection, personal awareness, and advanced sexual skills of a woman twice her age. I’m sorry, but only those of us who’ve been around the block a few decades can think, love, and fuck the way many of these books describe. 

    We’ve got to normalize the sexiness of middle age. We don’t turn to dust at 35. We still have a swing in our hips (though we might ache more now) and a swagger in our step (that might require lower heels) but we still got it!

  • EDM

    An Intro to EDM: Deadmau5 – When the Summer Dies

    Ladies and Gents…presenting this week’s Song on Repeat by Deadmau5 (in case you didn’t know, its pronounced “Deadmouse”).

    I felt this tune was the perfect transition song from last week’s tamer selection. We’re baby stepping our way up to artists like Excision, Peg Board Nerds, Toby Green, and so many more. 

    But don’t think this means Deadmau5 is mild!  Far from it.   

    Beware the couple of F bombs. They pop up unexpectedly but make for a fun listen if you ask me. So grab some headphones, crank the volume and hit PLAY!

    Oh, and you know that feeling you get at the 2:52 mark? That’s your moment of frission – The Drop! That feeling is why we’re here folks. Embrace it now because we are just getting started!

     

     

     

  • Small Space Living

    Giving up space – why I downsized to a 500 square foot studio apartment

    We’ve all had a really bad year and a half.  We barely made it through an election nightmare, we’re still battling a pandemic, and we’ve lost friends and family along the way, either consumed by the disease or cut from our lives due to the politics of masking up and vaccinations.

    In the middle of all this, I found myself starting over from scratch for the second time in as many years. 

    Starting Over – Round 1 

    The first time I started over was early 2019 when I separated from my then husband of almost ten years.  We reconciled a year later which involved me moving three hours away to his new home in Tampa, Florida…two weeks before covid lockdown.

    I know. Bad timing, right?

    We became a COVID statistic – the one monitoring the rise in divorces due to quarantine. Our situation was too delicate to survive being stuck together 24/7.  We were emotional and raw and found ourselves fighting as if we’d never separated to begin with. 

    Starting Over – Round 2 

    By September 2020 we knew it wasn’t working so, only a few short months after I had arrived, I found myself once again packing my life away into cardboard boxes.  

    I was starting over for the second time.

    Due to the relocation to Tampa, I had exhausted all financial resources and couldn’t immediately afford a place of my own. Thankfully my sister and her husband had a spare bedroom in a new home that I was told was mine rent free as long as I needed. 

    The room was small, measuring only 10ft by 12ft wide. And with no other option available, that’s how I found myself and everything I owned crammed into only 120 square feet of living space.

    For the first few months I was depressed, rarely leaving my room to socialize. During this time the walls felt like they were suffocating me and each day, the untouched boxes crammed into nearly ever corner grew and expanded impossibly. Soon it felt as if the only breathing room I had was on the queen mattresses my sister had given me to sleep on.

    I assumed I needed to eliminate even more stuff to stop the sensation of being strangled. But after unloading a few boxes into the garage for storage I realized that awful drowning sensation wasn’t happening to me…it was happening within me.  

    Emotions constrict more than walls – healing and adapting 

    It wasn’t the square footage or my stuff that was suffocating me.  It was the unmanaged emotions of losing my home, my family, my husband and best friend of ten years. It was the stress of two major moves in less than a year. And it was the fear that I might never be happy again.

    Shortly after that epiphany, I finally began to heal. And as each day brought a little more sunshine than the one before, a strange thing began to happen. The walls of that tiny oppressive room suddenly breathed. They took a step back, giving me the space I needed to exist, embracing me with a cozy protectiveness I had mistaken for imprisonment.

    During the remaining months I lived with my sister, that tiny room became my oasis.  After  eliminating some of the useless junk I clung to and adding a little storage creativity, I was able to keep all of the items most valuable to me and still had plenty of room to function. 

    I wondered why I had ever thought I needed so much space. Could I live like this permanently?  I decided to find out when I learned a new studio apartment building was being constructed downtown within walking distance to my day job.

    Taking the plunge – giving up space for convenience 

    So in August it did it. I took the plunge and moved into my own place – a brand new 500 square foot studio apartment, only half of which comprises the open living space. The other 250 square feet make up the kitchen, bathroom and a massive closet.   I probably could have bought a small house for what I pay in rent but no house could provide the location and amenities I was looking for.

    After starting to purchase the furniture I needed, I began to worry what I was buying wouldn’t fit. But thanks to a lot of preplanning, an awesome app, a killer DIY room divider (with a turntable TV!), and numerous other items and tips acquired along the way, I’ve mastered downsizing to a science. I conquered “small space living” and made it my bitch!  

    Now I want to help others who may be in similar situations so I’ll be sharing what I can in future blog posts under the category called Small Space Living

    Hopefully I can help someone like me navigate the stress of downsizing and make the impossible feel possible for them.  With a little flexibility and a lot of creativity, anyone can do it!

  • EDM

    The mid-lifer’s intro to EDM…It’s not just for the young!

    I’m in my late 40s and I love EDM music 

    I didn’t always love it though. My whole life I associated it with late night raves and kids high on drugs so I never gave it a chance. Instead I stuck to local top 40 pop or classic rock radio stations and when satellite radio finally came along I gravitated to Hair Nation for my 80s nostalgia fix.

    No matter what I listened to though, something was always playing in my car. Driving in silence was unfathomable to me…well, until it wasn’t anymore. 

    In early 2018 EDM saved my life. That story is one best suited for another post but since that day, EDM is all I listen to and now I’ve made it my mission to introduce the genre to other mid-lifers like me. 

    Why? Because I’ve discovered its not just for the younger crowd and it has something to offer all ages that runs deeper than twirling glow sticks at music festivals.  I’m not a raver or a weekend warrior. I don’t dance to EDM all night at parties or in clubs. Hell, I don’t even go to any parties or clubs!

     I listen to it all the time; at work, in the car, working out, it doesn’t matter. It has an antidepressant effect that surprised me on that first listen back in 2018. It swept me away like no other music has and I’ve been a loyal fan ever since.

     I promise, I’ll explain what I mean in a later a post. For now, let’s just get to it!  Allow me to introduce this week’s Song on Repeat

    Illenium is a great intro into the genre because he teams up with incredible vocalists to create truly memorable tunes. He is an EDM god as far as I’m concerned. This tune is very tame but its been on repeat for a few weeks now because of how amazing it is.  You’ll be seeing Illenium pop up repeatedly here for sure. 

     ENJOY and welcome to EDM!