A crown of thorns.

Crone. 

It's a weird word, a single harsh sound with some sort of baggage attached. You think wizened old witch, bitter shrew who lives in the trees and doesn't want to be bothered and-

Wait, that actually sounds perfect. 

It's the triple goddess, the final life boss, the aspiration of a women who has cheated death and lives to tell the tale. 

Maiden, Mother, Crone. 

Before menses, then the fertility years and then the end of those years, counted off in three hundred and sixty five days without bleeding. 

And here we are, May 22, 2025. I began bleeding at the age of nine, and so we have a perfect forty-five year circle here and we're done. No more babies (there were not going to be any more babies anyway, I've written that story to death), no more expectations of those sorts, no more stupid hormones, no more surprise mood swings or accidents, in which someone would helpfully wrap their flannel around me and hang out in a t-shirt until we could leave and I always looked as if I loved grunge fashion and I was always overheated, flush and tripping on long trailing cuffs. From the first midway night when I thought I was dying and Lochlan explained what was happening, using a Judy Blume book that he read out loud every night for a week when we were together until a week or so ago when my doctor unhelpfully suggested I try synthetic hormones. The first domestic chore I ever learned was how to get blood out of a Levi's button down. I'm still really good at getting blood out of clothes. It's a useful talent, okay?

No, thank you to the hormones. I much prefer to ride out the swings, the hot flashes and freeze outs, the inability to sleep at all anymore, past three or four hours, tops. Rides are better than watching from the sidelines, as always. I prefer to figure out the food cravings and the anxiety and the sheer anger. I prefer to slow down and heal instead of pushing through the leg pain and phantom cramps and wild headaches. 

And the freeing, delicious, extravagant lack of care about anything that doesn't interest me. 

Pffft. 

Especially when it comes to being weird, as I said already. I spent an awful lot of years trying to fit in, trying to be who Cole wanted me to be, trying to blend into the woodwork in the best way possible and be supermom and a fashion icon and a smart cookie. Who isn't trying to be every woman all the time? 

Exactly. Now? The uniform is patchwork overalls or a mended dress and a homeknit sweater. Sometimes also handmade socks and clogs. My hair hasn't been cut in months but it's growing into the cutest mini shag/bob thing. Makeup? I don't know what that is. Nail Polish? I threw it all away though we keep a dark blue for Benjamin because he looks better with his nails done than I ever did. 

More dresses, less pants. Big bags because I like to have all my stuff handy. Painting a mural on the fence because it's MY FUCKING HOUSE. Cake for breakfast? Of course, but then again I always did that. Champagne on a Thursday at four in the afternoon because it's a party and I had to google rituals to celebrate this very solemn, very important milestone in my life. No one talks about this. I live in a house full of men and I think that was part of the issue, the person who taught me to be a lady was a boy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still a routine-based girl. I still brush my teeth before bed, pay all the bills on time and have a calendar entry to reload the toilet paper on the shelf in each bathroom because no one else can ever remember. I still make sure all the beds and towels get changed weekly and I keep on top of everything to make sure everything is up to date and all our work is done. But it's whimsical and magical and a little bit off somehow. The way I always wanted it to be but I no longer have to fight for it because I have arrived.

Am I smart? No. I'm logical. I'm practical and I'm empathetic to a fault. I'm weird. And I've hit the third level so now I AM the final boss. Congratulations to me. I did it. I survived. 

Five hundred and twenty-four periods. Ish. That's almost thirty-six hundred days of bleeding and she still walks and talks and breathes and hasn't killed anyone (on purpose). 

Go me. 

Cheers.

(And a huge thank you to my boys for never making it seem like it was a defect or a weakness, even when I yelled at them to go get chocolate and stop breathing so loud, but especially to Lochlan for being a really good big sister about all of it when Bailey had already flown the coop).

Happy Mother's Day

My beautiful children both greeted me with hugs and celebratory exclamations and cards and more hugs and extra hugs from newer honorary children in the form of their significant others and then we made casual dinner plans for later and they took off to spend the meantime on their Sundays as always because it's sunny and everyone is free so please, go and enjoy the day. Dinner will be fun. 

(It was, and now it's very late and I think it's been close to eighteen or twenty years since I've opened a tab at night to write. I actually sat down to work on PJ's sweater (he requested a knit! FINALLY!) and watch La Dolce Villa on Netflix because the Oklahoma Bombing documentary was too harsh for me today and I need a good horror or a Christmas hallmark and it started and I was like is that Scott Foley? You know, from Felicity that was actually on television last time I wrote at nighttime, around twenty years ago and I'm thinking he's old now, playing the dad of a grown daughter who is in Italy and about to buy a villa and then I was like oh, right. 

He's my age. 

Did I mention three days ago I went to Shopper's Drug Mart to pick up some things that never seem to be at the grocery store and the clerk helpfully gave me the discount. You know, the 10% off senior's discount?)

Um. 

CHRIST.

Jacob is laughing somewhere right now, up in the clouds, while I lament the continued unstoppable trainwreck of time itself and Scott Foley should be frozen in time somewhere and my children should not be adults showing up to tell me of their travel plans and their First Home Savings accounts and their pets  that they raise and care for and their cars and their opinions on politics and why is Caleb so FUCKING difficult, though I must point out here that Ruth is a bull in a china shop when it comes to Caleb, able to put him in his place with an eyebrow raise. She is a barracuda and he is her prey and she is out to protect her mother at all costs and luckily she will never know the real prices that have been paid because I've always protected her from that.

And Henry doesn't want to deal at all. Henry just keeps Caleb at arms length or beyond, instead leaning in towards Lochlan as his anchor father and he is professionally polite but warm and logical and also can be as cold as ice sometimes. I'm sure Jake sees this too and is proud of Henry. Henry is as tall as Jake now and has the beard and the long hair and the doesn't-give-a-fuck outward attitude that makes me warm and fuzzy inside. 

Dinner was big, in any case and afterward, maybe after at least several glasses of wine, Caleb practically knocks me over with an aggressive forehead kiss and a proclamation that my children are incredible humans because of me, and that I did a wonderful job in spite of the challenges, in spite of everything, in spite of him. 

I know. I say it softly. I am two very large glasses of wine into the night and oddly feel as if I want to cry. Which is a daily thing, and not a big deal anymore but I also don't want to give him that window into how fragile I feel suddenly again after not feeling anything at all for so long when it comes to him.

Why didn't you go? I ask him and suddenly realize I wasn't clear. 

But he knew exactly what I meant. 

I couldn't, not when everyone else already had. I didn't want you to be alone. I didn't want to be alone. But we could be alone together. 

Yep. I don't know what else to say. It's possibly the saddest conversation we've ever had somehow but we put it away and finished our wine and went to bid the kids goodnight as they took off, with more plans still for the evening ahead. 

I say Woah.

Our dancing, James Bondesque Prime Minister won this week and I'm breathing a slight sigh of relief. Still pissed off because 1/3 of the country seemingly couldn't be arsed to get out and vote, even though they had from Easter to the 28th of April to get it done and there are no excuses but it was an amazing and thankful boomerang from the stress surrounding politics and the seeping stress we're absorbing from our neighbors to the south. I feel as if I live far too close to a border now. I used to be a ten hour drive, and then a four hour drive and now it's really easy to just whip down to a southern facing highway and BOOM, signs for the United States pop up everywhere. Trader Joes, oh so expensive, oh so close but nope, Pomme will suffice. Same stuff mostly, it seems though not Trader Joes branded. I don't know. I don't care. I feel somewhat safe again so let's let the politics die back in favour of spring. 

Happy Beltane. 

To celebrate, I smudged myself and then walked the property tucking sunflower seeds under the soil every foot or so. I spread some grass seed on the few bare patches that didn't bounce back after winter. I made Dalton tackle the spiders and sort out cleaning the sauna and the pool shed and we drug everything out and pressure washed it. Well, he did and then Sam came out to help. By then I had retreated inside because the sun feels so strongly now and it almost hurts. The year my newest acquisition is a UV jacket to pop on when I'm gardening or spending a lot of time outside. I don't want faded tattoos because I'm not redoing any more of them. It's starting to hurt, finally. I think I've had my fill, though everyone else says I'm down to do the scary painful parts, having run out of room everywhere else so these parts just hurt. I don't know about that, but I could be done? The list keeps shrinking, the available area grows smaller every year and so the UV jacket is a must. I may order a second one for walks. Something with pockets. 

Things seem more normal, anyway. I'm trying hard to sleep and rest and organize. This morning I had a huge iced coffee from take out (someone always goes in the morning so why make it? No, we don't do gig services for food delivery, we are the food delivery but it's a regular thing that someone heads down to get something), I cleaned all of the windows and watered all of the plants, and then I did the budget (this is a twice a week thing) and organized some drawers and finished with the outside and now I'm going to knit and continue playing catchup with my shows and movies. 

And Demon Hunter has a! New! Song! And I love it! And the sun is shining but the rain will move in this evening and so maybe a swim late tonight and an ice cream sandwich and maybe a sauna first? Maybe a five hour hot tub stint. Maybe I'll just go to bed at four pm. Maybe I'll finish my book (Reading the Curve of Time right now. Local and vintage!). This weekend the big home show and psychic fair is out in the valley and I am definitely going. There's amusements and food trucks and it'll be bad weather which works fine for me, thanks. Otherwise at this rate I'll have to graduate from a UV jacket to a whole portable UV bubble and I'll end up on a British science show. "The Girl who was allergic to the outside" because it's mostly true at this point.

Irritated but caffeinated!

Just a quick side note here as I spend the next fourteen hours manifesting a Big Daddy Carney win for my country tonight. We need the grownups back in charge, in Canada and in the world at large, because according to the newspaper the president of the United States thinks he runs the world, and um, sir? YOU DON'T.  You're actually somewhat of a joke to the rest of the world and don't minimize that thought. The rest of us are out here trying to make the world a better place, trying to fix what's so horribly broken and you, well, go off into the dark never to return. I'm still amazed when bad people soldier on and good people disappear. This is a whole big allegory for Jacob and Caleb but whatever. Today is about politics. 

I'll talk to you about that on the other side though, because this is hardly a soapbox, this little dim, dusty corner of the internet where no one reads because I don't have the patience any more to do anything productive, it seems. I clean and garden and keep fresh batteries in every random shelf clock and game controller and the bills are paid on time and there's a spare of anything you might need tucked away. Your towels are fresh, the green onion roots are trimmed short, the planting pots are ready for seeds and the tops of the ceiling fan blades are dust-free but can I think? 

Sadly no. 

I am going to head out in a couple of hours with PJ and do an apocalypse run. That's when we stock up on things like his favourite pop and toilet paper, medications and MREs. Then we come home and evaluate our stocks and go bags and plans. It's a spring tradition now. He loves to prep and I sleep better at night somehow. Or maybe it's just me letting go of the extreme need to Look After Everyone. Henry will be twenty FOUR this summer. Ruth twenty-six in the fall. The dogs are all gone. The cats are all new and weirdly independent and the boys have all settled into a seemingly content early retirement, something I never expected as it seemed like I would fight through every last moment looking after my Collective all the while they were looking after me too and the only way to manage so many years of extreme stress was to write it out. 

The stress now? It comes and goes, like my writing, sadly. I've spent all of the years since the pandemic trying to organize my anxiety into something manageable. I've got a dozen letters for labels and I'd rather be nameless and unknown. I've got time and money and no need for the complications of either anymore. 

I've got big plans and they involve running away, as ever. Usually that signifies an extreme case of cabin fever, but it's not, it's something else and I don't know what, exactly. 

I'll figure it out and let you know. In the meantime, vote for the good guys. We need THEM to run the world.

Struggle busses and who is watching a Star Wars what?

 If it's been a month it's because of Caleb, who decided the internet is a terrible thing and just shut it off for me. Which. RUDE. Ben and I are caught up and still watching Border Security and I had just started Andor on Disney which is so good and Ben suggested Caleb stop fucking with me for once in his life and as promised, I'm back now. Disney's back, Drudge Report unfortunately is back and what in the hell is happening in the US, other than so many kids around Henry's age being snatched right off the streets and most of them are in the United States quite legally and how terrifying?

So escapism it is! It's the order of the day. I haven't watched a live news report in months. I deleted everything that wasn't entertainment but of course you see things, you hear things, you know things and it's better not to. Henry and Ruth have been happily forbidden to leave Canada for the time being, and we all are, though my favourite Teflon Jesus is headed out of the country shortly here and no one could talk him out of it. I'm sure the next time I see him will be on some documentary about a far flung supermax and I will nod at the screen and whisper told you so. 

I think the boys, lead by Big Brother Duncan are about to tie him up and leave him in the shed until his flight expires and maybe that will work. 

Am I playing? No. I'll shoot out your car tires. With what? I have a shitty crossbow. It was Henry's when he was twelve. I've sharpened the plastic arrows and I can hit a tree at almost seventy feet. I feel like Katniss or Legolas or hell, Artemis on a good day. 

But he's not going and I don't care what he'll miss. 

In other news, we voted, I got to choose crappy local Chinese Food (my favourite) for dinner last night and Easter is a wash. We got some rain, some tomato plants and two hundred and twenty pounds of manure that I added to the gardens today. Lochlan wanted to do it but then he realized if I did it by myself I might sleep someday, ever and so I spent the better part of three hours gardening my little heart out and now it's good and the tomatoes are in pots and will remain where they are for just a few more weeks but I'm way ahead of schedule because why not?

Eight days left and I'm holding my breath until we have a new Prime Minister and hopefully things will iron out everywhere else because it's just getting worse and worse everywhere. 

Makes it hard to be positive but I'm looking forward to tomatoes, and looking forward to lilacs and looking forward to better news, eventually.

Banana bread in the oven and x-rayed coats on the television.

It's been raining since 1955. 

Or so we keep saying. Making a game out of the longevity and endlessness of these rivers in the atmosphere. Driving has become a white-knuckled extreme sport as I hydroplane into town to shop and back up the highway in the dim, soaked to the skin. Listen, I'm not going to lie, I love it. I love the smell of the petrichor, I love the way moss is growing on virtually everything, and I love the tiny warm fairy lights lighting up every room and outside too, on the porch, on the patio and in the gardens to make things cozy and warm. 

The grass is growing and there are big juicy green buds on all of the trees, a smattering of blossoms already on the cherry trees in the orchard and I think I have mushrooms growing on the backs of my boots. The peony shoots are popping through everywhere. It's going to be so pretty.

I bought a whole bag of sour candy tubs from the Superstore today, because rain means reading and reading requires candy. It's a present activity, unlike watching shows, which can be fulfilled while doing other things. Knitting, surfing, walking on the treadmill, talking. I miss a bunch of stuff, but when do I not? I must say, I MOWED right through four seasons of Yellowstone thinking I would finish up only to sadly discover there is another season that's not even on Netflix. I have like four different streaming platforms, I'm not subscribing to any more so I guess I'll have to wait. 

In the meantime, I'm watching Love, Meghan. 

Which.

Well?

I want to like her so badly. I don't know why. I'm a huge royal watcher, I love it when new blood is injected into old tradition, I adore the protocols and the pomp and circumstance of it all and I get that this was touted as a modern-day Martha Stewartesque type show but..but..

GAWD. 

It's awful. I mean it's pretty, in a Chef's Table kind of way, the 'set' is gorgeous, the little snippets of DIY are great if not maddeningly simple and they make everything look easy. What I hate are the fourth-wall breaking, constant reminders that this isn't her house (who would ever have known if they weren't pointing it out all the time?) and the fridge full of pre-measured ingredients. She's trying so obviously hard to be laid-back and chill and competent and is coming across removed and snobbish. Like it's not working and I can't figure out the energy. There are glimmers of hope and then right back to whatever she's trying to be. 

On the other hand, Ben and I are RAPT watching Border Security on Youtube. Never have I ever enjoyed a show this much. See? I'm easy to please. Give me candy, rain and boys. 

Asking for a friend: Any dragons out there for adoption?

Woke up this morning strangled in Lochlan's elbow. The light looks weird. I get up and see that there is frost on the ground and everything is iced up, there is steam on a line at the bottom of the balcony doors and Ben is bundled in most of the blankets on the bed, which explains me waking up early, slightly chilled. 

The papers are doom, gloom and incredulousness. The unhelpful tips from financial institutions (ratehub, I'm looking at you) are so useless, I hope no one bites. 

Build up an emergency fund of six months worth of expenses. Okay, how, when a can of generic store-brand hot chocolate is EIGHT dollars? And also, we should all have this fund already. But then they go on to say to use it to deal with the rising cost of living. Oh, so spend the emergency fund on hot chocolate? Got it!

The next tip to manage your money is to buy Canadian! Right! On guard for thee! But the Canadian generic hot chocolate is EIGHT dollars and the US made an hour from here is FOUR dollars. Gotcha. Spend double. My emergency fund is depleted in three months. Am I doing it right?

A third tip goes on to say we should snowball debt by paying off the big interest rate items first. Ummm, that isn't what a debt snowball is. The snowball comes from paying off the smallest owings first and then rolling that payment into the next biggest one and then boom, you're hitting the biggest thing with more payments and getting rid of it faster. Does it work? Heck if I know. If you have that many bits and pieces of debt that you need a hierarchy for them the smart thing to do would be start a niche porn channel and get that shit paid off. Or better yet, stop buying things you don't need. And if you do need all those things, then...

Marry rich. 

YEESH. 

Maybe I'll start a financial newsletter of my own:

Step one: Be incredibly risk-adverse and hoard all gold (procured from the Rich Man, with my charm) in my cave up in the mountains. 

Step two: Hire a dragon to guard it all. 

Wow, that was easy. Right?

Right?

It's all so stupid.

What else is happening? Oh, the neighbours finally had it with our tattoos and motorcycles and fire and...collectiveness and put their house up for sale. I hope our new neighbours are cool but only a select group can afford this area so odds are someone overseas will loophole it and it will sit empty. Yay. Why can't a nice family move in and we can exchange pie recipes over the garden fence? 

I think I need to move back to Nova Scotia. 

Except I white-knuckled it through the snow and I guess the winter was harder than I thought and it was only two weeks long, so imagine me back in a place where it's winter for nine months straight. 

*Cues up Matthew Good on the car stereo and hides everything with an edge*

Yeah, maybe not. Maybe just a few more years here while I try and glue my head on straight. This stage of my life (menopause, family pets dying, kids growing up and no longer needing me at all, boys busy with whatever boys do) is kicking my ass all over the point and I feel a little bit helpless and a little bit fragile but also a whole lot ridiculous. 

I look around and everyone else is doing great. I know, look closer. My therapist (that would be August) says everyone has the same problems and they also worry. Somehow that makes me feel better. I'm so glad I don't pay him though, because logically I know this already. It just seems weird. August says if I got out more (he snort-laughed when he said it), I would see that I exist in a fish bowl (JUST KEEP SWIMMING), an echo chamber, if you will and I don't know how people deal with anything because I'm surrounded by Capable Men. 

How do I get Capable Woman status? I ask him, never wanting something this badly before in my entire life. 

You already have it. I don't know why you don't see it.  

I can't open my eyes underwater, I point out helpfully, and he laughs again.

A little of everything, AKA nothing.

Inside of a week we went from endless rain and snow to rain and no snow and also an ever-present lingering threat of meaningful double-digit temperatures. Today was supposed to be twelve and it barely made it to eight, and we wore our coats on our lunchtime walk up the road and back again. I finally finished the mending pile, as I was angry about not being able to garden. Not quite yet. The snow's been gone for two whole days, Jesus. 

It's been twenty-four hours since my last meltdown. I fired a kiln full of porcelain goodies today. I plan to make it all pastel and pretty and simple instead of my usual over-complicated plans and glaze for days.  I feel as if this winter and spring is an existential crisis in full bloom and I keep thinking I'm through the worst and then I slide back to square one. 

Lochlan laughs at me in his rueful way. Always one-quarter disapproving and three-quarters encouragement, the whole part that I ignore and we argue about nothing and forget about the fight a minute later. I want to be a cowboy, thanks to Yellowstone but I want Costner's (sorry, John Dutton's) job of telling everyone what to do and being menacing but graceful, and spewing some cute little devastating quotes that stick in Bridget's head for days. We've assigned characters to everyone in the house and it's become hilarious here as we limp towards the end of Season four. 

Will we finish it? Who knows? I had to drop everything and watch the Gabby Petito edition of American Murder. Oh my God. Was Brian Laundry a forty-year-old loser or what? Yes I know he wasn't that old but what a weirdo. Like he wanted to be his own cult but his mommy issues were too great. His parents raised him in their image, I guess. If Henry killed someone I wouldn't help him dig a grave, JESUS ROBERTA. I would drag him down to the station myself. But let's be real, he would probably call me from there, because he does the right thing, which one should. I don't know. Call me a hypocrite if you will. I was up to some insane shit in my early twenties too, but not MURDER. 

Yeah so it's been a fun twenty four hours trying to act natural and even keeled and normal. You know me, those descriptors aren't even on my radar. I did some tax stuff. Ha. Only a little, don't worry. 

I did some spring cleaning. Also only a little. The older I get the more I realize my OCD and my anxiety are both leaps and bounds worse than I ever could have imagined but I'm also high-functioning about it, so there you go. 

I had a nice call today too from Batman, who said I should come over for hot chocolate tonight because while he was shopping he saw maple-flavoured marshmallows and bought some for us to have in our weekly hot talklot (which is what we call it). 

I'll let you know how they are tomorrow.

More fun less regular life.

 I'm visualizing being the luckiest girl on earth today, Manifesting good things into my life, letting my anxieties wash away in a torrent of heavy rain that has turned the ocean into a dull navy blue, a pre-spring grey field of fog and nothingness, a rare time of year in which I don't care how meaningfully the saltwater flows through my veins. It is Schrodinger's ocean today, neither here nor there. Neither alive nor dead. 

It'll be very much valuable tomorrow but today I am attempting to summon a level playing field in which I am evenly matched with my own mind and spirit instead of ridiculously underarmored. 

Will it work? Who knows? If maladaptive daydreaming saw me through the first forty years maybe this will work for the other forty, even though it's exhausting. I don't have a name for it but at least it doesn't have the obvious and overreaching flat stench of chemical calm. 

***

Good fortune finds me. Good things come to me. I have a skill in crafting a beautiful life. I am popular and people love me. I am strong. I am worthy BLAH BLAH BLAH. 

Jesus.

I am sick of myself. 

***

The rains need to wash away all the bad things. All the shitty memories, all the crap we've seen and done, all the crimes of the heart, all the dirt from the trucks, all the sand from the steps, all the chipped paint from around the side door where I so lovingly painted the trim only to pressure wash the siding and blow most of the paint right back off the wood. It's a losing battle on an exposed and harsh spot, however so no big deal. I'll be painting the whole door this spring anyway as I have a metric ton of front door paint left so my plan is to paint all of the exterior doors for fun. 

Painting isn't fun but changing up the house is fun. I repainted some of our feature walls already over the winter because they seemed dark. Now it almost all seems too bright. We bought some new pieces and let some things go. We're ending what doesn't work but worked because good enough. Rarely can you get me to change up good enough for really good but here I am doing it. Surprise. 

The rain is threatening to wash away dreams, roads and fingerprints at this point so I gotta go and make sure the kittens are all cozy and the hatches are battened down. Why this falls to me I will never know. 

The Mourner's Songbook and my grateful ears.

(Weird. I just put in my Google Authenticate number to log in to write and had a symbol at the end of the numbers by mistake and it let me in anyways. Should I be worried? Does Google know it's actually me in the same way it knows to say sorry when I tell it to stop being so fucking slow turning off the lights as I yell to it to do so? 

Probably. We aren't private. We don't get to have these perks and still retain our relative anonymity. Life doesn't work that way any more.)

Don't talk to me about tariffs, the super bowl or the weather. All three things are pissing me off and I'm trying to avoid it all. It's so dumb. It's like the whole universe has become People Magazine circa 1982 and we're breathlessly immersed in one-dimensional pop culture while all the while looking over our shoulder to see if the sky is falling. In the eighties I was terrified of the ozone layer, quicksand, lightning strikes, my own jealousy over the large and seemingly perfect backyards of children in television commercials in which they played with their RC cars and GI Joe vehicles, and the Chernenko/Gorbatchev threat from the East in the form of a cold war that seemed to be at our doorstep, or so the newsman liked to make it seem.

Fun times. It feels just like that in the air, right now. Like when you smell the chill that means fall is coming. Like rotten leaves, bone-chilling wind and helplessness. 

(I was terrified of far more than that, but for the sake of this entry we'll keep things light because it's a happy time or something.)

I finished Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt. I hated it. Well, I love-hated it. The scary parts were so scary, and the campy parts OH so campy. The pacing was all over the place but it's a masterpiece somehow and I will chaulk up my issues to the fact that it was translated into English and maybe that's the reason it was such a hard read. 

I'm thoroughly entrenched in Season two of Yellowstone and I hate every last character. Wes Bentley's habitual expression (is it Wes Bentley?) is killing me and at one point Kevin Costner's character was half into his girlfriend's pants and made a crack about being sixty-three and I was like...wait, what? And then I remembered that's how old Caleb is and I guess I get it now but also not. Thank God my cowboys are all ex-hockey players and I'm still marvelling every single scene at how Cole Hauser is a completely different animal from twenty years ago. And then last night one shot with one song made me think of Sons of Anarchy and I discovered one of the actors in that show is the creator of this show and it makes sense. 

My pop culture is a complete circle, apparently. And since people have asked, sure, I love Taylor Swift. Like LOVE her. I love the sad songs. The slow ones. She is a necessity for young women. When I was that age I had Jewel. I wore out multiple walkmans and Jewel's album on cassette (Pieces of You) became a part of me. Part escapism, part romance, heartbreak, loneliness, comfort, you name it, it was in that album. 

I just found out she's coming to Vancouver (well, Richmond, I think) to play at a casino in March. At least I think it's March. No one will want to take me so I probably won't go. I don't drive at night and I don't even like to go out alone unless I'm going to visit Ruth, so I will miss it but play the album all the way through to feel twenty-something again. I'm old enough now that it depends heavily on the venue, the time of year and how many fans are in the house before I can commit to shows. I've seen so many.

But speaking of amazing pop culture, Dobber Beverly (the drummer for Oceans of Slumber, who were here last year but I didn't get to see them and I still have regrets) just released a solo album and I think I may have died and this is what heaven actually sounds like. It's a rich, gorgeous tapestry of talent that is unparalleled in this modern time, and perhaps he's a time traveller. It's a respite from every last breath and I can't get enough of it. Headphones on all day. Don't bug me. I'm busy listening as hard as I can.