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  • the osprey and the hearing test

    i see an osprey today as i’m drove to go get a hearing test because i’ve been dealing with tinnitus and pain following a particularly nasty bilateral ear infection.

    god, i love birds.

    i see him sitting up high on a streetlight and he’s watching the drivers below. i wonder what brought him away from the river, his home full of fish. i wonder what brings him away from the nest today. i call him, “baby!”, as i drive by.

    i call all the birds and animals i see in my travels, “baby”. “hi baby!” i shout and i want to pet them all and even if i can’t pet them, i want to just watch them, because they are beautiful to me.

    i got lost on a phone call talking about how i love that moment when i’ve been watching a hawk for a while – they usually sit up high on the poles of this trail looking into a big gully, and they scan and scan with their sharp eyes looking for a little mousey or some poor little bird, and then there’s this moment, and i swear it’s this breathtaking heart stopping, feeling your breath in your asshole kind of moment when the hawk pushes off the pole, spread his wings, and for a moment is this weightless suspended image of nature’s most beautiful killing machine, and then he dives and god, it’s like in that moment you feel like you’re seeing something so so beyond yourself, like god himself is talking to you.

    truly, i feel in such a close proximity to god in those moments. my own entrance, for even the briefest of moments to the divine theatre of life. such a gift to see something so perfect.

    i always end up teary eyed and with a dry throat.

    seeing the osprey is no different – this big beautiful creature looking a little lost sitting on the streetlight. did he see me as i saw him?

    i want to know what he knows.

    what does it feel like to dive towards the water? to snatch a fish in flight?

    what does it feel like to take something in your claws and tear it into pieces?

    holy. fuck. i. love. animals.

    i google osprey waiting around for my hearing test to see what’s causing my tinnitus.

    i sit in the space age 1950s soviet union ass looking ass sound booth and press the button and repeat the words and the whole time i’m thinking about feathers and claws and eggs and nests.

    i want to ask the nice lady who tests my hearing what her favourite bird is, but i don’t, because that’s probably fucking weird. but she tells me my hearing is fine. i said all the words and heard all the sounds and i still have tinnitus and it still hurts.

    but i got to see the osprey.

    the hearing clinic is right by a thrift shop i like so i go inside and find a vintage sterling silver navajo made turquoise ring for $12 and i feel really really lucky.

    turquoise is sacred to native people – representing good luck and protection.

    my father used to wear a turquoise ring, when he was young and still had all his hair and wore bellbottoms and had mutton chops. he had this big buckskin jacket with fringe, too.

    my dad talked to the birds, too. he liked to admire them, just as i do.

    i think about the osprey, and turquoise rings, and my father and tinnitus.

    it tries to snow on the drive home.

    i’m emotional today. i don’t know if it’s because i will menstruate this week, or because of the osprey, or because of the cold weather.

    i regret not asking the hearing test lady what her favourite kind of bird is.

    what’s your favourite kind of bird?

  • bible study with joyce meyer (vhs tape)

    i’ve gone back to digitizing random vhs tapes i find all along my travels.

    i pulled this particular tape of bible study with joyce meyer from the shelves of this religious thrift shop i often find myself in and thought i would digitize it for my youtube channel.

    on and off, for several years now, i digitize random vintage tapes i happen to find interesting and put them onto youtube for people to enjoy. it’s interesting to me how people find my videos and the comments they leave. some of my uploads have triggered a lot of nostalgia for people, similar to the nostalgia triggered for me in finding and watching these old tapes. like old memories from a bygone era.

    i won’t comment on the contents of this particular tape. i know some people aren’t fans of christianity. i was raised in a home where televangelists played regularly on the tv, right alongside jerry springer and the young and the restless. for me, tapes like this one feel a little bit like home, though i remain ambivalent on if this is a good thing or not.

    anyways enjoy and let this severe looking lady in a cunty pantsuit read the bible to you, or turn it into drops for EDM songs i dunno.

    truly though, she seems kinda cool as hell – she said on her website that jesus once had a party and gave everyone nose piercings?

  • don’t fight the wind (on radical acceptance & aesops fable ‘the oak and the reed’)

    let’s talk about radical acceptance. this is therapy talk, so forewarned if that’s not your particular type of topic of conversation. however! i’m going to look at this kind of therapy as something akin to one of my favourite fables from aesop – “the tree and the reed”, which is more commonly known as “the oak the reed”. i found this really interesting 1980s colouring book with these amazing aesop’s fables illustrations inside of it, and it’s had me thinking about this wisdom, ancient in nature that remains worthwhile today.

    radical acceptance is a cognitive behaviour practice which involves “fully acknowledging and embracing the present moment, including its difficulties and discomforts, without trying to change or control it“

    sounds a bit hokey, right? if you’re anything like me, you might find this shit kinda downright insulting. this was introduced to me during a particularly shitty portion of my personal work journey. everything was awful – i was traumatized, horrified, betrayed, sick, and on the verge of complete mental collapse. i was deeply offended when a therapist brought this up to me, and i immediately became defensive, very defensive even. “oh just accept how shitty it all is?” i remember saying.

    but that’s not what radical acceptance is.

    radical acceptance is a verb, it’s an action, and it’s a practice that is done constantly, all day long, and constantly changing. for me, the more i would fight and stress and worry and claw my skin and mind and heart raw over things, the more pain i found myself in, both emotionally and physically.

    but when i began to accept situations for what they were, as they were, the ones i can’t control or fix or do anything about – aka my strained relationship with a close friend. before i began doing my personal work, i would fight frequently with this friend. screaming matches over our differences would punctuate cute selfies and girls’ nights.

    once i began doing this work and accepted that i can’t fix things for my friend – that only she can do that work for herself, and that fighting her on it, is pointless and causing me only heartache.

    so, you know what happened? our friendship, as long as it had been, dissolved. we grew apart.

    i hold no malice to her about it, either. i loved her and still love her now. i understand that we grew into two different people on two different paths. i accepted that her values and goals and priorities were not in alignment with mine. i didn’t hang around our friendship anymore like some jaded cop trying to get a fucking retirement pension.

    and i’m not here to say that it didn’t suck – it sucked. i lost a long friendship, one that i thought would last forever. and even while it sucked, and even while i grieved that loss, i accepted those situations as they were. i still accept them as they are.

    our friendship ended. it was really great when it was really great.

    so before we get too far here, let’s look at the aesop’s fable:

    it’s similar to what radical acceptance asks of us.

    don’t fight the wind, move with it.

    kinda profound, right?

    accepting that things that are beyond our control just are, and will be and we must deal with them as they are. we can make boundaries, we can make plans, we can try our best to move with them, and we may need to adjust it all as we go.

    i’m reminded here of some lyrics from an artist called schur, found in his song “cactus” which is about doing personal work by using psychedelic plant medicine to gain perspective.

    i should
    meditate in traffic
    i could
    vegetate in my hatchback
    hit the
    dmv for practice practice
    waiting in line under hospital lights

    i find this pertinent to another experience of mine. i live with a couple chronic illnesses that flare into episodes requiring occasional trips to the hospital. i used to rage and lose my shit and get so twisted up about it all – the betrayal of my own physical body, something i couldn’t control. i would sit fuming in those shitty hospital chairs in the trauma informed rooms that smell vaguely of piss and cleaning supplies.

    and now, i know that i have to get checked out, it’s for my health, i can’t choose it or control it, it’s the luck of the old genetic lottery, so imma have to pack up my book and my bag and water bottle and go sit under those hospital lights and wait my turn. the task is no longer something i’m forced to do kicking and screaming against my will, it’s something i get to do. i live in my body and respect and value my body and i need to take care of it thusly and so i do. i just do.

    and now? i feel a lot less fucking stressed. like yeah sure, when i’m barfing up my asshole, things aren’t great, but that’s just how it be sometimes. i can’t change that. i try to sit in the hospital and just know that i’m doing what needs to be done. a hospital trip isn’t a rage filled stress induced crash out for me anymore. it’s just another thing i have to do that day.

    radical acceptance, for me, has also been simply accepting that all that self reliant, self righteous shit i’d been mainlining for years, was actually harmful. it isn’t a badge of honour or point of pride to walk around slung through with slings and arrows to appear tough or cool or hard.

    me before radical acceptance tbh

    i accepted that this label of “ice queen”, and the actions that go with it, aren’t helpful. i try to not give my past self who used all this edgelord shit as mega copium too much shit.

    obviously i’m not some asshole in yoga pants sitting on a $200 meditation pillow they got from indigo thinking i’m levitating above everyone with a crystal jammed up my asshole, sorry, sacral chakra. this is something that’s really helped me. maybe it will help you too, maybe it won’t. maybe it’ll seem as hokey to you as it did to me, and seem totally bullshit, and that’s cool, man.

    hey, we don’t all walk that same road and we all reach our peace through a variety of different modalities.

    i just really try, god, i really do, to not fight the wind anymore.

  • seeking, always

    i say to a lot of people – i’m constantly seeking. seeking, always. i’m always looking for more ways to understand not only the world, but also to understand ultimately myself.

    for years, i felt like everything was really out of control for me – i didn’t understand my own emotions or my own place within the world, how i related to other people, or how i understood my life, the things that had happened to me, and how to even make sense of it all.

    when people ask what i mean about this, i always say, “i’ve lived an interesting and slightly bizarre life” and i mean that. my experiences have been vast and varied. when i was only newly nineteen, my closest friend at the time was murdered – stabbed to death in the culmination of a love triangle gone wrong. i was not yet twenty when i was giving statements about the horrific and gruesome murder of my friend. i sat in a court room as a boy i knew was convicted of killing this other boy i knew. i never got any help for it, you know? there was no counsellors, trauma therapists, EMDR or internal family systems therapy talk, no blogs or youtube channels to check in with about it. the cops just sent all of us who had witnessed our friend die over and over on shitty CRT security footage over and over in that court room, just out into the world to figure it the fuck out on our own. just head on out and raw dog life. and i couldn’t vocalize how i felt, because i didn’t understand how i felt. i didn’t have the words inside me to say, “this traumatized me, this was horrific, this changed how i feel about the police and the justice system and fairness and life and god and this will impact me for the rest of my life and i don’t know it yet and i don’t know how exactly, but in that moment, i got extremely fucked up”.

    so, what did i do? i acted fucked up.

    i drank to the point of blacking out, i became aggressive and started fights with other girls at the bar, i started fights with boys and men much larger than me. i swore and yelled and got high for the first time and grew my hair into dreadlocks and stopped shaving my armpits and pushed people away and drank shitty champagne out of big bottles and wore angel wings and glitter to parties and made myself into a menace. i did all this because i couldn’t or at least, didn’t know how to stop and say, “i feel so lost, please help me”.

    i look back at that version of myself, in the fairy wings and flower crown drinking 151 proof rum straight in a van with strangers, and i just see a child wearing the horrors of the world alongside crystal necklaces and festival wristbands.

    i told myself at the time that i was honouring the memory of my friend, by doing the things we had planned to do together, but looking back now, i doubt severely he would have wanted us all traumatized and fucked up, drinking our guts raw and our minds into oblivion. i still wonder about some of the people in that group of us. i see a few from time to time, you know? we don’t talk about it. we don’t talk about the blood on the checkerboard floor or the fact that there was no plaque to honour our fallen friend. just silence and nothingness. i wonder what happened to all that evidence – the bloody clothes, the huge knife, the footage, the 911 calls.

    i did EMDR in 2021 for many sessions over my friend’s murder. i still feel kinda raw about it, but not as raw as before. next year, will be twenty years since he died alone on that gas station floor.

    i think about him sometimes. like right now as i type this. would we still be friends? would he have kids and a cute wife? would he live his dream of playing in a band? would he dance pow wow?

    so much went wrong on that day. i lost my friend and too, i lost my innocence, and myself, for a while.

    i know now that this all inadvertently led me to who i am now, but it is sometimes difficult for me to look back on those years of the grief, the loss, the sense of loss and being lost. i look back and feel grief for what happened to him, for what happened to all of us.

    i hope we all continue to seek and find ourselves. it’s really never too late.

    i’m walk the path to myself in the same filthy cotton dress from sweatlodge, my blundstones on my feet, blood on my hands and in my mouth, and i’m carrying a braid of sweetgrass..

    but i’m still the girl that sold coffee at the gas station, still the girl that sat in the court room with dyed black hair and bangs, still the girl with the dreadlocks and the champagne and the angel wings. i keep all those girls safe. the princess i’m looking for must be in another castle, and so i keep looking, keep seeking.

  • the eagerness of me

    the thrift finds haven’t been great this week, nothing too wild on my end, but that’s ok.

    i found a cool vintage music stand for some of the gaming gear for scott over at drunk in a spacehulk – kinda one of those super vintage ass “bartholomew meet me at my fainting couch” kinda pieces.

    i’ve been thinking a lot, gestating ideas and music.

    i threw together the above design and maybe i’ll make some stickers just for fun. i scanned this falling apart art catalogue from a fancy auction in paris and a vintage 1980s fairy tale book and cropped out the flower design. i think it looks cool. it’s kind of giving medieval times meets vaporwave “have you seen my lost mary?” kind of thing but i like that.

    i’m eager to see what hospital vespers becomes for me and this work of mine, and i want so many things all at once and i need to remind myself – patience patience.

    things happen as they do.

    anyways bye