A Long Absence

I never meant to be absent from this blog for so long, but the year 2018 has decided to take no prisoners. If 2017 felt like one long siege, that was the death rattle of our dysfunctional family, 2018 has been the ground zero. I have no idea when I will truly process mom's finally …

A Delicate Balance

The unknown expanse swirling below and a nothingness of sky above. It is that feeling of complete calm that comes right before you start plummeting. To hang in that pregnant silent moment of expected injury and painful demise, for untold eons lasting seconds or hours? Why do I keep hanging - here - now  feet …

I Have Lost My Stars (A Poem)

My body and mind used to contain a heavenly vault of constellations and spinning galaxies. No matter what this world chose to put upon my wild shoulders - neglect, indifference, or abuse my heart flew high, a blue white star free in an endless sky. No lasting hurt or scar could ruin my detailed maps, …

The Summer of ’76

It is something that has to be talked about. I am so glad for these times, not for the violence but for the conscious openness about this entitlement toward other people's personhood and free will. This my #MeToo.     I was in my seventh year, mom had given birth to my sister and was dealing …

Not A Love Story

Father as a young man from Alabama, joined up in the Navy. He got a little bit early, for a couple of reasons the first of which was trying to kill his new step mom. Somewhere along the way as so many country songs go, he "knock up" a neighborhood girl and was forced to …

The Snake In The Garden

Jehovah's Witnesses were the answer to her unspoken prayers, in nineteen sixty nine a young lady knocked on mom's apartment door in California,  and left a blue 192 page "Truth" book. This was the start of an off and on dabbling in and out of witnesses until nineteen eighty three when totally spun out and …

And She’s Gone

As I said good bye to 2017 with a bitter sense of relief, I fool hardily believed we get a breather from the catastrophe avalanche. I couldn't have been more wrong. Sometime around January 1st mom had what her hospice RN believes was a stroke in the night. By evening January 2nd mom had been …

First The Fall, Then The Crash

If life before Twenty Thirteen had been an poorly formed but destructive tornado of pain, guilt, duty and emotional turmoil, then what followed signaled the crashing end. Twenty Thirteen and those that followed were quite literally washed in shit. Mother received surgery for a problem long neglected and antibiotics to stave off further infection, the …

To Begin is to End.

As I sit here finally taking the steps that I knew one day would come, I feel strangely peaceful and empty. Over the course of this life I've seen much, heard much, felt more and kept it all tucked away in the nooks and crannies of of an over burdened mind. With long practiced clarity …

Just So You Know

This blog story will not follow a simple path. This is the unraveling of a complicated life, at turns an unburdening of my personal pain and experience. At other turns the cataloging of family stories brought out into the light for the first time. It is a way to evict some of the squatters who …