HOORAY! Daddy’s here! I was feeling much better by Friday night when I went to pick him up from the airport. I’d actually had a pretty decent day on Friday up until I heard DJ AM died. That was a big shock, and it was hard news to hear. I was really angry for awhile. I was angry to have lost him to the disease of addiction. I know how hard he fought against it. I guess addiction is like any potentially fatal disease — no matter how hard you fight it, sometimes you lose.

My father is the kind of person who arrives in a city and then wants to spend the rest of the time driving to everything in the distant vicinity of that city. So today we drove three hours each way to and from Ocean Shores, Washington, which is this tiny Pacific Ocean beach community on the southwest corner of Washington. We took Leo, of course.

On the way there, we drove through Aberdeen, where Kurt Cobain grew up. The city sign said “Welcome to Aberdeen: Come as You Are.” The town itself is small and kind of sad, the main roads lined with ship-shod houses with faded paint and overgrown lawns. For a kid, there’s nothing to do there but find trouble. It gave me new insight into Cobain’s life.

Ocean Shores is beautiful, but it’s small and there’s not a whole lot to do. As a result, it seems like everyone flies kites. There were like 30 kites in the sky. Very cool.

The beach was gorgeous, and they did horseback rides up and down the beach. Unfortunately, none of the horseback tours were leaving at a time convenient for us, but this did not prevent Leo from grabbing a huge piece of horse shit in his mouth and running around the beach with it as my father chased him and we all yelled at him to drop the horse poop. Now, Leo knows not to eat poop, but, as my dad pointed out, horse poop probably doesn’t smell or taste like cat or dog poop. It’s probably much more grassy, and Leo didn’t realize that it was poop. We spent awhile talking about this. We also have pictures of Leo running around with the horse poop, but they’re on my dad’s camera so I don’t have them yet.

Today was supposed to be my berry-picking day, but we didn’t pass any berry farms on the drive out there. So on the drive back we just pulled over into a blackberry patch and started picking. Picking blackberries in a naturally occurring blackberry patch is much different than doing so on a farm. The blackberries fight back. I was severely injured by the thorns. OK, not severely, but it seemed severe at the time. But we got enough blackberries to make pie tonight, so that was fantastic.

As we were leaving the blackberry patch I saw a snail that looked like a poop. I know, I know. It’s a slug. It still looks like a poop.

We drove home (3 hours!) and made our pies and watched Valkyrie and I made a Holocaust joke on Twitter and so far I’ve only had one person lodge a complaint. Not bad for a day’s work.

Oh and then there was a giant party on my apartment’s rooftop deck. Everyone’s revolting because the stupid new management at the complex (The Neptune) fired the only guy there who actually helps us, so it was a Fuck the Neptune party. They had a DJ and everything. After Daddy went to bed, I went up there and hung out with my neighbors. Our complex is across the street from a big Marriott, and every now and then we get a delightful guest over there. Tonight there was a fat old man masturbating on a chair facing the window. You can kind of see him in this pic:

And then he noticed us watching and went ahead and stood in the window while masturbating. He dimmed the lights, though, so I couldn’t get a good picture.

And then we all took turns wearing the decorations as a wig:

And then the cops came and everyone went home. Except for the really drunk people who are still in the courtyard being extremely loud. I’m sure the cops will come for them eventually.

I’m off to bed because Daddy wants to leave for Vancouver, Canada (sigh) by 9 am tomorrow. I expect that dream will be shattered in about, oh, 7 hours.

OK. I think I’m getting sick. I have been feeling like total ass all day, and of course since the doctor told me I had “pre-diabetes” yesterday I spent the entire day wondering if there was something wrong with my glucose level. Now it’s nearly midnight and I have a screaming headache and my whole body is on fire and I’m nauseous as hell and so I’m pretty sure I’m just getting sick. Which SUCKS because my dad’s coming into town tomorrow and I’ve been SO EXCITED for this and if I’m sick the whole time I’ll be really bummed. We’re supposed to go to Sequim on Saturday to go berry-picking! I’m going even if we have to throw me in the back of the car with a 102 degree fever and a pillow. I will crawl out to pick my blackberries!

I really think I make myself sick with stress. I’ve also been cleaning my carpets so I may be sick from breathing in the chemicals all day. It could be either, really. I’m trying to get the house all perfect for my dad tomorrow, but it’s far from it. The guest bathroom smells like pee. I don’t know if it’s dog pee or cat pee or some other pee. It has smelled like pee for quite some time now, despite repeated scrubbings of the floor and tub. I don’t understand why it smells like pee. I got a freakin’ blacklight to try to figure out the source of the pee, and it didn’t find anything in that bathroom. (I also tested it on my bed, just for kicks, and it didn’t find any “spots” there, either, so I think it may be broken.) Seriously though. WHY DOES MY GUEST BATHROOM SMELL LIKE PEE? It’s completely stressing me out. I don’t want my dad to have to use a bathroom that smells like pee. And I’ve been using the guest bedroom as a storage facility for awhile, so I still need to clean that stuff out, clean the room, and get a bed in there for him. Hosting guests is like the most stressful thing ever. I kind of just want to get us all hotel rooms for the time he’s here.

I also hate having carpet and I want hard floors. I’d be fine even with just cement. Carpet is extremely hard to maintain when you have four animals. I’ve toyed with the idea of just ripping up my carpet myself and living with whatever’s underneath, but when I tried to pull up a bit in the closet just to check, I found it was nearly impossible to get it up. How do you strip carpet?

Anyway.

I had a long phone conversation with one of my ex-boyfriends today. We lived together for awhile in LA, and then he dumped me, and it was devastating, and I thought our relationship was irreparable, that I could never even think his name without seething with anger and envy. That happened about three years ago, and a lot has happened since then. He got engaged — I was devastated. He got married — I was devastated. Six months after that he and his wife split up, and he called me — for the first time in years — when that happened, and I found I was able to be a friend. I could empathize with him. I didn’t have to gloat — that wasn’t even my instinct. My instinct was to support and help him, and that’s what I did.

He’s been a part of my support system this past week. When I was sitting next to my friend’s bed in the hospital all day, crying my eyes out, he was texting me jokes. Some damn funny ones, too. He’s been DMing and Facebook messaging me all week to check up on things, and then today he called to see how I was holding up between all this shit and the diabetes shit and we just ended up talking forever and it was really good, really friendly. It didn’t open any old wounds for me. There’s such a relief in that — he was the one person I just never, ever thought I’d be able to have in my life without it hurting. But he’s back in my life, and he’s not my boyfriend, and he doesn’t want to be my boyfriend, and I don’t want to be his girlfriend. We are friends. It doesn’t hurt. So, ya know, anything’s possible.

So tired. Too tired. Tired where you get a little crazy.

I’m in a place emotionally right now where it’s like for the most part the sadness and the fear and the anger drapes my body loosely, like a linen shirt. It’s not an ideal way to exist, but I can move around comfortably. But every now and then it hardens, widens, and waves itself through my torso, starting at the bottom, like a magician as he halves his assistant. I know this will pass. I know that it will. I don’t know when. And I don’t want to live through the days in between, really. I will, though. This is the human experience.

Turns out I have pre-diabetes. The doctor described that by explaining I was on the road to diabetes, but I could still make a U-turn. She made some vague suggestions about eating habits and told me to do half an hour of cardio a day. We’ll retest me in a month. Oh and then she told me I needed a tetanis vaccine or something and I needed to go down the hall and get it done, and I haven’t really slept more than a couple hours a night for most of the past week, and I was like, “I hope you understand that there’s no way I’m going to do that right now” and she was like “Well you could get whooping cough and then you’ll cough for six weeks straight” and I was like “That sounds way better than my life right now.”

Regardless: Thank you to the many of you who called, emailed, texted, Twittered and Facebooked with your well wishes and with your own stories of diabetes. It meant a great deal to me.

I sincerely wish that my pre-diabetes was the heaviest thing on my mind these days.

And then because God wanted my week to get a little shittier, Leo and I got stuck in the elevator in my apartment building (second time this month) and when the technician finally showed up to fix it, he shouted through the elevator door, “Are you stuck in there?” Like, no, I just pressed the panic button and had a five-minute conversation with the operator because I’m old and lonely. “Yes. I’m stuck.” And then, immediately after, came this mind-boggling question: “Were you bouncing in there?”

This is the point at which I lost my shit.

I screamed at him “NO I WAS NOT FUCKING BOUNCING IN HERE. WHY THE FUCK WOULD I BE BOUNCING IN HERE? I walked into the elevator and I pressed the button and the door closed and then the elevator wouldn’t move and the door OF YOUR ELEVATOR wouldn’t open. WHY THE FUCK WOULD I BE BOUNCING? BOUNCING? What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

Sigh. When he finally got me out, he was like, “I’m sorry you got upset with me. Last time I was here it was three drunk guys and they’d been jumping in there.”

I was like “I was not jumping. Wasn’t bouncing either.”

And he was like, “Yes, that’s obvious now.”

I was like “Your elevators fucking suck. They do this all the time.”

He nodded and was like, “Yeah, yeah. They do.”

I feel like I must be going through a huge emotional growth period right now, like God has all these lessons he wants me to learn right now. But it’s happening so fast, and so many things are causing me fear and discomfort, and I can’t parse out what the lesson is or what the lessons are. I don’t understand where I’m being guided or what I need to internalize before all of this can end. Because I know from experience with my God that this shit WILL NOT STOP until I’ve accepted whatever it is I’m supposed to accept. This could take awhile. For now, I’m going to bed. Hopefully I will see you all like 12 hours from now.

The boys enter your life. It is not a stready stream; the stream moves in currents, splitting itself along landforms and cold fronts and deep dives and occasionally arms of it splinter and die until they’re picked up by someone else’s current.

At some point, one boy from your current reaches your life. The exact details surrounding his initial arrival are unimportant. He may come with others. He may come alone. In the way that humans do, you and he make an agreement that you will share a physical bond and that you will select one of any number of sorted-by-intensity emotional bonds to accompany the physical bond. Note that these choices are made individually, although in the end one bond-type will also be chosen as the standard party line for the team. This arrangement will change repeatedly. The negotiations surrounding the arrangements are handled by multiple camps and in a broad set of venues and via many assorted media. There is no clear process in place for these negotiations, although there are guidelines. But they can sometimes veer askew, with responsibilities delegated to small terrorist cells, and one hand has no knowledge of what the other is doing or feeling.

And by the time these negotiations have ended, one way or another, there is another boy exploding out of the current and into your life. Again, the details surrounding his initial arrival are unimportant. You’ll move side-by-side through the aforementioned process. But what has happened to the first boy?

He has moved out of the current and into the woodwork. There is plenty for him to do in the woodwork. He is not bored. He likes the woodwork just fine. He is just waiting, although he’s not sure for what. But usually what happens is that his woodwork girlfriend dumps him or he drinks a little bit too much of the woodwork tequila, and then he decides to crawl out of the woodwork and into your life again.

Since the initial set of negotiations has completed, you get to show each other your cards. “I never told you this,” the boy says, “but I had an ace. I didn’t play it.” You tell him you had three queens. “I had the fourth,” he says. You begin negotiations again, more tenderly and feeling safer. You are older now. And the negotiation reaches a resolution, which holds until it doesn’t anymore. And then the boy returns to the woodwork, and another emerges. Sometimes they crawl out in packs and you have to hold negotiations in separate, sound-proof rooms.

Once in every many years, a boy will return to the woodwork leaving you heavy, empty, with a piercing through your chest which you just know is the sticking point for the invisible string that connects to his heart. You run your fingers over the woodwork, trace the caves and concaves of the mahogany chairs and the walnut dresser sets until they’re worn through past the varnish, and you can feel him in there and you wonder if he can feel you too. If the string still connects to his heart. If it ever did. And when he comes out and you see him and it’s clear both your strings have strengthened but then what the fuck was he doing in that dresser set all these years? Negotiations at this point are foreign and terrifying and cannot be delegated. You wish you could cut your string but it’s not that kind of string. You know he can’t stay. You can’t keep him. It can’t work. You hope he’ll go back into the woodwork and stay there quietly. He won’t, of course, because that string is stuck in his heart too.

The boys in the woodwork are listening. “She needs a break,” one of them says to the other. And they agree to send one — maybe two — back out of the woodwork and into your life. The simplest ones, they choose. The easiest. The kind of boy who will take your hand and carry you to bed and make love to you on a backdrop of his corny jokes when you need it, and the kind of boy who will choke you and slap you and pull your hair as he fucks your body when you need that, and you will never in that time feel that string start to form, the string that would end at those boys.

But with him tugging on that string and with you tugging on that string and with the woodwork boys rubbing on it and smacking at it and cumming all over it, the string weathers. It’s still there and it always will be. But it’s lighter now. It is split from him. Although you know that it belongs to him, you can carry it on your own now. You no longer have to carry him as well.

Things are no better with my friend. But here is the amazing advantage of not having really slept since Thursday: Everything I say and do is really, really funny. And I just get funnier as the day goes on. I am a riot! Everything I do is laugh-out-loud funny. I just sit at my computer and type things and laugh and then go over to someone’s desk and say something and laugh and then write an email and laugh myself silly with how goddamn funny I am. And then I go back and read the email over again and laugh some more.

I am thoroughly enjoying being around myself today. I’m a blast!

Plus the optometrist fixed the glasses I stepped on last night at no cost and now they look even better than they did before! Ohhhh, and then I got my favorite sushi but they had run out of to-go cups so the hostess put my Sprite in three little soup bowls:

IS THERE ANYTHING FUCKING BETTER THAN THIS, FOLKS? I think no.

And then my college crew from Arizona decided to go out drinking and realized how throwing back Jack Daniels shots at Four Peaks is just not the same when I’m not there to sleep with the bouncer (I love you, Smiley!!! You’re still in my phone!! As Smiley! I have NO IDEA what your actual name is!!!) and then they created the following montage of images, featuring me:

Thank you Marc, Roxy, Dacia and Katrina for this delightful evening surprise!

I think the only way to follow those photos are with these snaps of Trisha walking down the aisle, beaming with joy, and getting married to the man she loves.

Hello loves! I’m alive, I’m okay, I’m hangin’ in there. Friday was Trisha’s bridal shower and Saturday was her wedding. I didn’t take that many pictures because I was too busy taking it all in, but I’m sure everyone else will upload theirs to Facebook and I’ll be able to post some here. Her sisters did a phenomenal job with her bridal shower (just as they’d done with her bachelorette party), everything was so beautiful and perfect and she had such a wonderful time. It made me really happy because I know if/when I get married, my sister will do an equally amazing job. It just made me generally happy about the existence of sisters.

Her wedding was equally perfect. The ceremony was in the Woodland Park Rose Garden, which I’d never seen before but which was the absolute ideal place to get married. I promised Trisha that, although I’d been praying for rain, I would take a break from that for her wedding day, and she had the most perfect wedding weather ever. Not a cloud in the sky, not too hot, not too cold. Instead of doing a candle-lighting ceremony, they did a thing at the end where they both poured sand into a glass container of rocks, symbolizing their lives merging together on solid foundation. It was incredibly touching and exactly what I want to do for my wedding.

The reception at the Lake Union Cafe was also picture-perfect. I would expect nothing less from Trisha, but I was just so impressed with how classy and beautiful and wonderful and amazing everything was. And she was calm and joyful and poised and beautiful the whole time, as was her husband, whom I adore. They are just such a solid couple, and I know they’ll be together forever. Plus, it was the first time I’d seen Abby and Kortny since their (equally perfect) wedding day, and it was such a joy to see them together and married and in love. The phenomenal marriages my friends have created for themselves gives me so much hope that I’ll have one of my own some day.

The friend I mentioned in my last post is still not doing well, and that put a little bit of a shadow on the weekend for me. There’s so much I want to tell you guys about what’s been going on and what I’ve been going through, because I know it would help me to write about it, but I feel like it would be really unfair to him to expose his whole story here. It’s just so, so hard to watch someone you love so much have such a hard time and not want help. It’s frustrating, because I know I’ve been through really hard emotional times, and I know it’s been hard for my friends and family to watch, but I’ve been open to help — any help. I’ve asked for help and I’ve accepted help and I’ve gone to any lengths to get better. He is not doing that — his is a very different demon — and it just makes me feel so helpless and desperate and sad. But I think I’m done crying for now, I’m kind of detached from the situation now. I ended up leaving Trish’s wedding a little early because I just couldn’t keep my shit together and I definitely did not want to be “that girl” who the bride has to comfort in the bathroom on her wedding day (isn’t there always that girl???). I didn’t avoid it altogether — Abby was gracious enough to comfort the bawling mess of me in the bathroom, and then we fixed my makeup and headed back out and Trish never knew anything was going on, thank goodness. After that I managed to keep my shit together for the cake-cutting and the bouquet toss and the first dances, and then I peaced out and cried for awhile and then I was over it. There’s still a heavy lingering sadness, but I’m done fighting against whatever it is inside him that’s doing this. It’s not my battle and therefore I can’t win it. I’m letting go, but prayers would be appreciated.