Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

One of the labors of love I am most proud of, but which is mostly unknown to people who know me, is the incredible ranch and equestrian facility that was created upon a patch of ground that had once before been the home of "the largest llama herd in the U.S." The place of which I speak is none other than 11330 Mount Vernon Road, in Auburn, CA.  It had several other addresses associated with the property since it had been multiple parcels and over 50 acres at the time of the llama ranch. It had been the family property of my then fiancé, Craig.  His father was a fanatical animal collector, and his animal of choice was llamas.  In high school, Craig had been an intern and worked for our neighbors, Carole and Greg, who owned an adjacent ranch and quietly had been managing a performing and retirement ranch for chimpanzees.   Craig's brother, Hayden, became interested in training and performing with large animals, and later was able to break into that business, starting his ow

  I am swimming across a vast, threatening channel.   The water is cold and dark.   The current moves me more than I manage to move across it.   I see lights at the far shore, appearing just when I need to see them the most.   I swim, and swim, and swim, until I just need to rest.   I just need to close my eyes against the tide, and the force that pulls at me.   And then I wake and I fight to keep swimming,  because that is all that I can do to stay afloat.   I cannot go under.   I allow myself to dream of the shore and that safety.   I was there, once.   I left the shore, and the warmth of safety on my own accord.   And, now, having become immersed in the dark channel between that time  —the shore; warmth; life; people— and another life, I know that to keep swimming is the only way.   The closer I feel I may be getting to the safety of the shore,  the more deeply I feel the deep  reaching to pull me under  and to rally it’s monsters to converge at my back  and devour me wholly.   I am

My recent visit to see Alice, my lifelong childhood friend, afforded us a number of opportunities to reminisce. Predictably, the conversation eventually meandered to our memories of the summer day a few years back, when the El Dorado County sheriff raided my property in full riot gear, with dogs and assault weapons at the ready. Alice, her husband William, and Jeff and I were all in shorts and even possibly underwear (having never gotten dressed on a hot September weekday when I was working in my home office and they were newly arrived guests who’d just driven ‘round the US on a late summer vacation to get here). I was in my separate office, a building I’d crafted with love as my sole and separate space where I could work undisturbed. My wonderful, barn-like office building was flooded with filtered light and views of my beach and the American River beyond. I detected movement on the hillside looking away from the beach, and the motion was moving in the direction of the vacant second h

Sometimes, just these recent years, I feel as though I’m hiding in plain sight.  My world is compartments.  I have the real estate compartment.  The dog-mom compartment.  The “I do CrossFit” compartment.  The “good friend to my girlies” compartment.... And, there’re the little spaces I really don’t want to admit.  I don’t want them to be seen.  They are the compartments filled with my short-comings; my failures; my weaknesses.  In there lie monsters. I’m writing this because I can’t keep it to myself anymore, yet I am fearful of sharing with friends.  I’ve tried to explain this to my loved ones; my mom; my sister; friends.  I’ve been disbelieved, shamed, abandoned, even lied about, but rarely have I been supported or believed.  So I lay my truths here in this tomb of digitalization, knowing I’ve finally spoken it somewhere, even if only to electrons and silent technology. I think that my community doesn’t believe me because, all my life, I’ve been a warrior.  I’ve been fierce,

My path in life has never been typical.  Being, among many other things, an engineer, I view my life's trajectory in a flow chart manner; I look back and see that everything was a series of either/or junctures.  In this way, I can see, (I fantasize), how my life would have looked if those roads less taken had been the road taken, instead. And, sometimes, I have to admit, that some roads were not taken just because I came face to face with a decision I had been working up to, and then it just seemed too..... scary.  I hate that there are certain things I’ve gotten close to doing or goals I’ve gotten close to realizing, I have veered always from at the last minute because the pressure of getting that close was so intimidating. I know that I can’t list a LOT of “near misses” in my lifetime.  Perhaps I can choose to view that as its own sort of success.  I mean, veering is human, right?  I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on things I wish I’d done.  That might be because th

I’ve been gone.  I went dark on my blog.  Truth is, I didn’t want to keep writing about my wounds and keep dragging whomever is reading my blog entries through my muck and mire. So much has happened since I shared an entry.  My last one was a bit of commentary on living in the dark during the power-downs last fall.  Not for the first time, I reflect on the irony of those couple of months—we felt has though that  was isolation!  Another responsive reflection though is that it gave my little town of Auburn a chance to practice coming together as a community to make sure everybody had what they needed. So, when March 13th rolled around, and sheltering in place and social distancing and self-isolating became a real thing, I think we were better prepared for having been through the power shut downs.  Yay us! In between all of that, life was really feeling as though I’d found an equilibrium I’ve sought and not had for some time.  My health and strength and vitality — the things that

We’re in the beginning stages of round two of the PG&E power outages for the Northern California area. While I fully and whole-heartedly believe the planned outages are a bullying move by a conglomerate grown too large and bloated, I also believe that I live in a community that can take the strong-arming and come out the victors, because we band together. I’m lying here in our bedroom, on the second “first night” of outages...meaning the second round and the first night of the second round.  I think that PG&E wants to see us on our knees; they want to see us begging not to make this our “business as usual.”  If this were our usual, I’d be ok.  We would be ok.  But the fact that it comes from a big fat conglomerate that wants to shove it down our throats makes it FAR LESS PALATABLE, I want to say FUCK YOU, PG&E!  I mean, I can’t.  This is what we are all coping with together.  And, THAT is what PG&E didn’t get.  A community suffering.  We will pull together,  We wi

We're in a funny place in this world these days where people (including myself, sometimes) share very personal feelings and experiences on social media.  My point of view about this is that different people have different reasons for sharing, but for many, the social sphere feels a lot like a personal support system. For me--in writing this blog--it's a personal challenge to be authentic, but also more raw and real and vulnerable than I feel should be on, say, Facebook.  Even more, its always been intended to be a challenge to write more than I otherwise would, and to risk my allowing public access to my writing. Not that a whole ton of people read my stuff, but it's authentically there, regardless. All of that aside, a friend did just this morning tell me she reads some of these posts.  And, in the course of telling me that she reads my blog, she claimed I had made public a personal email from a third person.  In fact, I referenced a comment from that third party e