Fresh off his Oscar-winning performance in the should-have-been-Academy-Award-winning-film ‘Sinners’, Michael B. Jordan fulfills a long-promised crowning as Dazzler of the Day first so salaciously teased about in this scintillating post. It’s been a long time coming, as this tease will also attest.
Mercury remains in messy retrograde motion for most of the week ahead, but relief arrives with the coming of spring. This Winter Obscura has been precisely what it said it would be – a hazy, obscure, confusing season where nothing was certain, nothing resolved, and everything in flux. Let’s put an end to it with the weekly blog recap…
It began between the quiet blank lines.
White flower palette to match the snow.
Being normal is ridiculously overrated.
A gratuitiously naked Paul Anthony Kelly.
Meaning and beauty in these Wicked Fabulous bracelets.
Afterglow of a dinner party for two.
Soul-searching Sunday scaries.
Dazzlers of the Day included Harry Francis and Jordan Palmer.
Oh possum, how I feel your pain, how I get your predicament, and how I share your unbothered, fabulous brilliance in the face of the world burning down as you so eloquently foretold it would.
Burn it all down, I say, and fuck ’em if they can’t take the truth. As this crazy cold winter limps to its inevitable end, what was once hazy and obscure is starting to come into clarity and focus – and all that’s been hidden is revealed for a true reckoning. Our country made have given up entirely on accountability, but this blog hasn’t.
With that, I straighten my tiara, align my pearls, and watch it all unfold with a detached glee.
Sometimes I just want to play Block Blast without the Tai Chi Chair Workout offer.
Am I asking for too much?
“Wow.”
It was the last thing I said as we finished up my most recent therapy session. My therapist laughed a little, having just acknowledged that our session had been a lot.
A lot.
A phrase that has followed me for my entire life, one that I’ve only relatively recently learned to lean into and embrace. One that still stings when I suspect it’s meant in a pejorative manner. In this instance it was my therapist’s way of saying we’d gone deep and started the work on issues that went back to childhood. And it was a lot, as well as a beginning.
It’s been over six years since I began regular therapy, and I’m still reminded that things which happened for half a century won’t and can’t be solved in a few sessions. Or even six years of sessions. It’s humbling and daunting and precisely the sort of challenge that sets my mind to work.
Despite the carefully curated and cultivated image that most see here – an image of some dainty, hot-house flower of privilege that I’ve flaunted, taunted and perpetuated – I’ve always been ready to put in the hard work, and never shirked off a challenge, especially when it involves the possibility of self-improvement. I’m constantly on the prowl for such opportunities. It’s not all sequins and sparkle, feathers and fluff.
Sometimes, we have to go deep.
And sometimes it can wait until spring…
Tik-Tok sensation Jordan Palmer runs the JPalm Hairdressing Salon with their wife Alex, and thanks to an inclusive attitude and forward-thinking frame of mind, they more than earn this Dazzler of the Day crowning. Located in Omaha, Nebraska, Palmer’s salon is a refreshingly supportive establishment, particularly for often-marginalized communities. They make proper pronoun usage and terms of consent a matter-of-fact non-issue, gleefully rendering gender-affirming hairstyles as dictated by their clients. Jordan’s easygoing spirit and infectious enthusiasm works to pump up their client’s hair wishes and dreams in a way that is dazzling indeed. (You can make a hair appointment here.)
The runny golden yolk of an egg oozing into the middle of an egg, cheese and tomato sandwich is just… there are no words.
Back in the 80’s, the Amsterdam Mall had divided our small hometown literally and figuratively, but for my childhood self, a mall was a beautiful place to roam.
My favorite store, Smile-A-While (pause for gagging), sold novelty soaps, stickers, and the silly stuff that spoke to my very young gay self. In the center of it all was a little food court where Mr. B’s Best (a roast beef sub shop if I recall correctly) and an Orange Julius presided over a dracaena forest. For some reason we rarely ate there (our parents likely considered it too much like junk food to get us an Orange Julius) but I always felt like I would have loved one.
Cut to this day, when the temperatures were happily warm (false spring in full but all-too-brief effect) and I’m taking this Orange Julie Monkey smoothie for a spin at Professor Java’s. It’s their take on the original Orange Julius, and it’s just as lovely as I imagined it to be. It brings me back to the 80’s, when we roamed the mall, when our main concern and worry was in which sticker to select for the week, and where to place it in my sticker book…
When all the guests have departed and the fancy cocktail glasses have been carefully washed by hand and put away, a musical moment of calm descends as a song plays us into the end of the evening. The bouquet of flowers is still as fresh as when the night began; the candles have diminished slightly in height, and their smoke will soon be all that lingers in the air. It is a moment of afterglow, only ever-so-slightly tinged with remorse that it had arrived at an end.
The scent of a blown-out candle will always be gloriously imbued with ambivalence for me – sacred incense of good company and bonhomie, coupled with the sad yet full regret of a lovely evening having come to an inevitable close.
We are not granted an infinite number of such nights, and I have learned not to take a single one of them for granted – each is a singular gift, never to be replicated or repeated, never to be had again, so I do my best to be present and mindful for all of them.
When the heart approaches fullness we come closest to brushing up against the sublime, and the sublime is often best experienced with good company. At the end of an evening, when all the guests have gone and the candles have been blown out, I sit in the dim living room, listening to Andy finish loading the dishwasher, watching the kitchen lights go out. He is still my favorite company, my treasured comfort, and the very best way to finish an evening.
Talismans of protection, coils of crystals, and ropes of intoxicating intent line my wrists – pretty purpose and reiki-infused meaning, these bracelets from the Wicked Fabulous company are my new obsession. With every conceivable color and design, they offer infinite styling possibilities, along with a deeper and more profound manifestation, as each comes with its own reiki-infused intention – a reminder that we are all connected – to spirit, to humanity, to love, and to each other.
Having already espoused the wonders of the Wicked Fabulous company here, this is just a reminder of all that they have to offer. Their recent visit to Puerto Vallarta resulted in the glowing Corazon collection – a line of bracelets in vivid colors, crafted by an artisan named Alma.
Delivery is quick, packaging is vibrant, and their ‘Love Forward’ bonus bracelets have already brightened over 1769 orders – each order comes with a reiki-infused bracelet intended to be given away to a friend or stranger in a random act of kindness for a world where that’s needed more than ever.
Sharing love and propagating kindness are tenets that founders David and Marc have implemented at every step and stage of their retail experience, leading their products something deeper and more profound than the average supplier. With their penchant for giving back to various communities, and propensity for sending love forward, it’s an enterprise you can feel good about supporting, while decking yourself out in the most fabulous creations. Art, beauty, mindfulness and love – the very best of all possible worlds. Check out all things Wicked Fabulous on their website here.
While I’ve come a very long way in my appreciation of winter, I do find its stubborn refusal to relent a little rude, especially considering all the awfulness that currently swirls around us, as well as the consistently brutal cold weather this winter has already provided. We didn’t even get our customary January thaw. Like, throw us a goddamn bone with this weather please… the return to plunging temperatures is not welcome, even if it is still technically winter.
That doesn’t look to end soon, so here we stay, stranded in this purgatorial waiting room, somewhere within the last throes of winter and striving to arrive at spring. Mother Nature so cruelly reminds us who is in charge, and who will always be in charge.
Spoiler alert: it’s not us, it never was, and it never will be. In the meantime, false hope in a flower bouquet.
The African violet is heralded as either the best beginner’s houseplant or the worst.
As with so many extremes, the truth is probably somewhere in-between.
I’ve found that the main trick is patience and a pinch of pampering.
Right before our foolish country pushed the clocks forward, I was up early enough to capture two scenes of light. The first was the light from the window, the second was from the additional illumination from a single lamp. What light, what warmth, emanates from its fringed opulence, and what a luxury light feels like after such a dark winter.
In the stillness of this dawn, the light makes its own sound – not in the clicking of a switch or some crackling of electrical current, but in the soft shifting of its intensity and luminosity. It is the soft and muffled sound of a glow, like the whisper of a willow’s strands on the cusp of chartreuse.
Stirrings.
Beginnings.
And endings.
On the wind, in the light, the Springing…
