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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A man and a woman sit down at the table beside mine at my favored cafe. Prickled by their presence (I’d purposely sat near the back corner of the place to focus on writing this post) I tried shutting out their conversation. Sometimes I want to listen, especially if they seem to be on an awkward first date or about to erupt in an argument unbridled by their public stance, but these two seemed to just be traveling partners, co-workers or colleagues talking of the flight they were catching next, and then talking incessantly of absolutely every stupid thing they could possibly think of to fill the silence, not leaving time for a single deep breath between them.
I doubted that they were married or even semi-attached – two people who can’t spend a few moments in silence together are usually two people not at all at ease around each other. It’s the couples who sit in unbothered silence, happy just to be next to each other, who are usually in it for the long haul.
The two people next to me couldn’t stop babbling. Even when the guy got up to use the bathroom, the woman continued. I turned around with a quick dirty glance because she was still talking to herself when the bathroom door closed – she was literally responding out loud to whatever she was texting or doing on her phone. Noise for the sake of noise. I know people who have to live like that – well, who choose to live like that – and part of me always pities them. Their baseline of peace is in the noise and chaos – they probably don’t even notice it. When they do notice, and what seems to upset them the most, is silence.
Quiet.
Stillness.
How wonderfully different we all are, I think, with a little more forgiveness and kindness than the tone of this post would have you believe.
Trying to makes sense of the world – this world at this particular moment – is probably a fruitless endeavor, but if we can’t get a fruit, perhaps we can at least coax out a flower or a few.
Will spring temperatures arrive this week or will we continue with this miserable winter? Mercury in retrograde is certainly proceeding as infuriatingly unplanned, and a newly war-torn path with higher gas prices looms dismally on the horizon. Meanwhile, we do our best to carry on and keep calm amid all the chaos – here’s the weekly blog recap in all its messy glory.
You can look up how to make your own batch of moon water the next time a full moon rolls around, though after this you may not be too eager. Made by the light of the bloody Worm Moon, my jar of moon water sat in the window where it was mostly made when I remembered it the night after the full moon appeared. A tad too timid to down the entire jar (I’d save the bulk for our Norfolk Island Pine) I only took a few sips before bed. I wasn’t manifesting anything as much as cleansing, and there was no reason to wet the bed by drinking an entire mason jar of water. Still, it was enough to work its mystical machinations.
At 2:18 AM I awoke in a tearful state of whimpering sadness. A dream, bordering on a nightmare so disturbingly difficult, jolted me up, my own cries loud enough to break through the sleep. It was about my Dad, only he was not in it. It was about his Absence – Absence as its own central character, Absence as the main villain. And I was mad, my tears falling from anger – anger at my father, anger at his leaving us.
If that’s one of the stages of grief, I don’t think I ever went through it, and even as my tears were just starting to dry, I thought how childish and silly it was to be angry with him over dying – as if he chose to do it.
Even at fifty years old, I felt like a little kid. Some men have claimed they didn’t feel like grown men until the day their fathers died. I used to wonder if that was as stupid a thing to say as it was for my younger self to hear. Now I know for certain it’s a crock of shit. I’m no more or less of a man now than I was when Dad was alive. The men who said such nonsense obviously had other issues in reaching their manhood. My own was re-confirmed with a quick run to the bathroom in the hopes of expelling any remaining moon water that might be manifesting such an emotional night of fitful sleep.
Most of the time these blog posts are written in advance of their posting date as I’m an anal Virgo who abhors being behind. That means the actual time these words are being written is approximately 2:34 PM on Saturday, February 28, 2026. A lot can happen in the time from now until when you are reading this. One sick quasi-fantasy that occasionally runs morbidly across the mind is that one day I may die unexpectedly but this blog will still be posting new entries on pre-scheduled autopilot for a week or so after my death, freaking people out as if I’m still in touch and communicating from beyond the grave.
With all the astrological mayhem predicted for the next week ahead (the one that will have already passed by the time you read this) who knows what might transpire?
Take nothing for granted.
Take everything with a grain of salt. (It just tastes better, even the sweet treats.)
Climbing out of a warm and cozy bed at 5:30 on a Tuesday morning in March should not be anyone’s idea of a good time, but there I was pulling on a pair of sweatpants and some fuzzy slippers to make a quick journey outside to see the moon. A lunar eclipse was happening, and at that time it was still supposed to be visible, which is what had me setting the alarm and rising so very early in the morning. I pulled on a coat in the quiet. The house was still dark. Hushed reverence. Solemnity.
My steps were lighter in deference to the full moon. I’ve learned that even if it’s just superstition, better to err on the side of caution and not rile any potential problems, especially when so much of life is already stacked against us. Carefully opening the front door, I stepped outside and turned around, seeing nothing but dim gray sky and obscuring cloud cover. I’d forgotten the warnings that clouds might get in the way, and now I was standing outside at 5:34 spinning in blind circles, unable to locate the moon. A faint light glowed around the place where I thought it would be, but I couldn’t be sure if it was the moon or just another dawn lighting that section of sky.
During this specific full moon, I’d read that it was best to let things happen as they happen, not to force circumstances or try to push them a certain way, even if you feel it’s the right way. That’s difficult for a Virgo to do, particularly challenging for my own misguided mode of living. I am, however, taking it into account and doing better when it comes to letting things go. Like the past.
“The past promises us nothing but this: it will abandon us. Leave us orphaned. Unless we abandon it first.” – Gregory Maguire, ‘Elphie’
I could not see the moon on this morning, only sense it, the way certain animals sensed blood.
Standing alone in the sunlight of a downtown Albany afternoon, the snowman stared without eyes or expression – an expression in innocence and terror at once. Bereft of company, forlorn of animated spirit, the snowman stands still, stoically unmoved by the shifting wind or diminishing light. We do not know if it will last the night – people tend to destroy that which brings others joy – one of our more miserable failings as a species.
Stuff of childhood imagination, stiff of nightmarish winter-scapes – the snowman offers no explanation to its existence. He wasn’t there one moment, and the next he was. He will be gone again in much the same infuriating fashion. There one moment, not there the next, and absence erasing all, better than any melting thaw might do, and more complete than any destructive marauders who would fell a snow crystal creature.
The snowman saves his secrets, pocketing them in invisible pockets, sublimating their worth from ice directly to air, not bothering to wade through its watery, melting bloodline. Ancestry of a snowman is quintessentially tricky to determine, so scattered does the lineage break and branch. Molecularly, all must be related – anything beyond that, anything deeper, is too difficult to determine; the cloudy obscurity of winter, this winter in debilitating particular, refuses to clear up its mystery. All that I’ve tried to bring into relief and focus falling apart like the flimsiest emotional constructs.
The gray grid of winter streets attempts to put order to madness. Even with such structure, winter defies borders and containment. New York in January can be brutal, and because of that there are usually decent tickets available for Broadway shows. I remember a particularly frigid night when we saw ‘Grey Gardens’ – Andy and I hunkered down at Gallagher’s for a classic steak dinner before rushing along in scarves and coats to the theater. Thankfully our hotel was nearby as the walk back was horrendous.
Suzie and I also saw a show in the wilds of winter – the revival of ‘Follies’ with Bernadette Peters – and I was staying at what was then a Kimpton hotel on Columbus Circle. Another freezing night that ended when the show ended, and I indulged in a very hot shower with some L’Occitane Lemon Verbena bath products – a temporary but gratifying experience of heat and steam and pleasurable fragrance – before diving under the bed covers again. Winter is all about quick and furtive movements in service of comfort and survival, navigating how to get from a towel-clad state of post-shower bliss to the cool environs of a bed waiting to be warmed without losing all the heat in the process.
Photos from a former winter, because I’m too lazy to take new ones from the current winter. The past and present bump up against each other, and it’s not altogether unpleasant. Still, echoes are by their nature less; the more there are, the less impressive they become.
Once my hair turned more gray than black, say in the last few years or so, I began to detect a discernible difference in how I was being perceived. There was a slight deference in basic one-on-one interactions with strangers, a little more respect and used of ‘sir’ from servers and waitstaff, and the slimmest shift in meetings with people who had previously dismissed or discounted me. It wasn’t anything huge or dramatic, just a gentle, sloping tilt in what I felt from other people. It’s possible this is all in my head – that’s always possible – but I’m usually pretty perceptive when it comes to reading a room and its reactions, and it felt like my gray hair was giving me some sort of ancient authority that wasn’t there when I speared much younger.
At the same time, it also relegated me to near invisibility in certain social scenes where youth and beauty still reigned supreme. A strange sort of trade-off, another confounding paradox. Respect and invisibility, deference and dismissal – and somewhere in the middle of it all a head of wavy wolf’s hair trying valiantly, desperately, to embrace the autumn of life.
Today marks a full Blood Moon – the Worm Moon – along with a lunar eclipse and Mercury still in retrograde motion. Astrologically speaking, particularly for Virgos, this is said to be a combustible combination, and I am taking all necessary precautions, mostly just to keep my cool and not lose every last bit of shit that’s barely holding me together. Is it working? Somewhat.
I’m still hitting all the red lights, still tripping over all the computer and phone cords, still wrestling with malfunctioning lights and humidifiers, still dealing with infuriating texts from friends and family who are suddenly unable to read or remember anything – but taking it all in stride, and, more importantly, not lashing out or forcing my well-intentioned (and often-proven-correct) ideas for improvement upon all the people who never wanted them. Getting slightly better at that, better at letting people pick up their own messes, and allowing them to make their mess in the first place because they were never going to listen to me anyway. I was just about to remark about how annoying it was to see people ignore a Virgo’s advice, but that’s very Virgo of me, and at odds with the meaning of this post, and the grace I’m trying to achieve or at least work toward.
Instead, I will focus on clarity and clear communication, sans judgment and ridicule and condemnation. I will endeavor to let others make their own choices, to go along with their suggestions, to be amenable and genuinely peaceable to another way of doing things. This full moon is said to be an opportunity for growth and transformation, and letting go of things that no longer serve you. My critical mind, while helpful for myriad moments in my life, is of no help to others who need to learn their lessons in their own way. I’m also painfully aware there are myriad lessons for me still to learn, not in the quest of a perfection that doesn’t exist, but in the journey to improvement. Shedding control, letting the universe nudge me and heeding those nudges, are my methods for making it through this full Blood Moon moment. I am trying.
