I spent a lovely weekend in Seattle with a friend from my original college days in Fort Collins, CO. New friends are nice, but sometimes you want to talk to someone with whom you (a) have a deep history, (b) share a gender, and (c) are experiencing similar issues related to your age and gender, […]

“Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them.” – Charles Bukowski This city is so full of suffering. It’s a huge problem in Portland, if you didn’t already know that. I described it elsewhere as “a tightly closed fist of pain”; a place where […]

Well, it’s been a week. A couple of weeks. OK, it’s been a fucking year, really, full of uncertainty and misgivings, misunderstanding and heartache. I’m really ready to be done with all of it. I’m ready to move on, get straight, feel things other than pain alternating with numbness and fear. I know these things […]

New Year’s Eve, 2021. Portland, OR. Quality Bar. 6 pm. This morning I ran 5 miles through my neighborhood and along the banks of the Willamette River. I pushed myself a bit, really tried to reach up, unweight myself, and push the speed, so that my footfalls became foot-feathers and the action was more like […]

I’m back at my haunt, with my candle and my iPad, waiting on some pizza. For some inexplicable reason, the 20-something bartenders in here are playing Nitzer Ebb. Not just one song, they’re playing That Total Age in its entirety, a cassette tape I played until it literally shredded in my hands…in 1987. I’m learning […]

In which our fearful protagonist navigates the treacherous waters of a social life, and the even more duplicitous depths of meeting herself. There are days when I think I might be losing my mind. Today is one of them. I can’t concentrate on anything. I can’t focus on work for more than a minute or […]

So the rollercoaster is chugging uphill again. From the pit of despair to the halls of Valhalla, we go up and down, round and round. I wish that it could just stay on the way up for a while now, like maybe a year or two. That would be great. The qualms I had about […]

Now I’m down in it. I’m trying to understand whether or not I’m depressed. I don’t think I am. I mean, I’m mostly an optimist. I’m getting out of bed in the morning. I’m exercising regularly. I laugh with friends. That being said, some shit in my life is really doing its best to drag […]

It’s been a weird week. I mean, they’ve all been weird since almost exactly a year ago, when I finally made the firm decision to leave a relationship that had, for all intents and purposes, been dead for the better part of a decade. Ever since that moment on Christmas Day, the second that I […]

Is honesty always the best policy? My entire life, I’ve operated under the impression that it is. I mean, except for when circumstances warrant a more subversive approach. Like when your parents ask you what you did on your date. Or someone asks you when you’ll be done with your thesis. Or your roommate gets […]