Today is the calendar reminder of how my mom died on this day three years ago. I also realized I hadn’t made a blog post for three days soooooooooo… I am also realizing that I’m not especially communicative or creative when focusing on staying cheery and achieving the regular goals during weeks I feel are […]
Tag: dark humor
Anniversaries and Holidays Which Evoke All Emotions
When you experience loss, you suddenly have new days to dread. Or celebrate. It depends on how you’re coping with your loss. I honestly don’t know anyone who genuinely looks forward to a death anniversary like “OH WOW IT’S ALMOST THE DAY MOM DIED. I CAN’T WAIT TO CELEBRATE HER!!!” but I’m sure you’re out […]
GOOD MORNING 🛎
Where am I? Are the police busting down our door? And then… what day is it? If the police are busting down our door, I want to know what day it is. That was the cognitive scene today at exactly six in the morning. It was a bit surreal as a loud bang woke my […]
Rats
Shit happens. When your shorts fall down, pull them up, be grateful to have pants and get on to cleaning up the trash and contemplating what the hell you’re doing with your life.
Coping: a Frustrating Revolutionary Reality
Yesterday, my husband David received a NEGATIVE! result for the free coronavirus test we took last Friday. So that’s great. However, since we took our tests at the same time at the same place… it felt weird I did not receive my test result when he did. First my sense of humor and #1 coping […]
“Want a beer?” and Other Life-Saving Techniques
“Want a beer?” is what I’d hear if I walked into a Wisconsin friend’s house because it’s what is first said when terrible (and good) things are actively happening. I’m so demoralized and not surprised by all the news reports about American violence of late I’m going to talk about drinking alcohol. However, I’m not […]
The Edinburgh Fringe, Tourists, Darkness and My Disdain
I grew up in a somewhat tourist-y area. Baraboo, Wisconsin is naturally gorgeous and features a lake which was formed by glaciers. It’s named “Devil’s Lake” and thus throughout the surrounding area many of the roads and activities are titled “Devil’s This” and “Devil’s That” and, as a kid, I just thought it was all […]
Remembering Nice Interactions in Scottish Society After Poor Interactions in Wisconsin Society
Usually, if I’m feeling bright and cheery, I try to gather it all up to summon the nerve and will to go out and talk to people. I’m remembering this because I had some pretty upsetting interactions with humans recently as, due to a family emergency, I found myself in a small town in Wisconsin […]
Same Rant, Now With Castle View
Rough day yesterday. 911. Emergency room. Parking lots. In any case, a reminder to not allow meaningless, small stuff to dominate time because our time is short. And this reminds me of feeling the same way in Scotland: tired. One day, while living in Edinburgh and feeling overwhelmed by deadlines and recent deaths and academia, […]
Thinking About Other Things Like the Scottish Ferris Wheel From Hell
We lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for three years as I was awarded three years of research funding by the University of Edinburgh. La-dee-dah, I hear you. For the record, Edinburgh is the most visually stunning city I’ve ever seen. When we first got off the double decker bus on South Bridge and looked around it […]
Back in Milwaukee, Paranormal Activity Outpaced by Criminal Activity
After a year in Pittsburgh, we moved back to Milwaukee and rented a pest/rodent-infested apartment in a kind-of-bad neighborhood which always has car alarms going off and which also comes with the creepiest daily interruption: The ice cream cart was novel when we first moved in and then it lost its charm. There is a […]
Moving Out and We Took the Haunted Mirror With Us (To Goodwill)
Right. So, we started to pack up to ship out. The haunted house had won. Well, it wasn’t as much the weird happenings as much as the whole thing about my mom living her last days and dying in our house. The latter factor was a big one as we didn’t want to continue to […]
The Outsiders
Our house activity climaxed with my beloved mom’s fight to defy death in her final months battling frontotemporal degeneration (FTD). New things started to happen which didn’t seem particularly paranormal as they involved tangible, organic creatures who were simply behaving oddly. Specifically, the animals started to mobilize. By this point, we had lived in our […]
Someone Never Stopped Coming Home
While it was still just David, Hemi Monster and I, our house, the first and only house for which we made mortgage payments, still felt busy. Even when any of us were by ourselves, we were never truly alone. That can be comforting and it can also be terrifying. On one afternoon, it was more […]
Our First House Came With a Haunted Mirror We Didn’t Want
In late September 2014, David and I bought our first house. Since we had very little money and were also looking for “character,” we had been house-hunting for quite awhile. Yet, we had an amazing realtor who specialized in “hard cases” and she got us in to view a lovely old house on the very […]
Ouija Boards Pieces, Music Boxes and Other Shit That Shouldn’t Move On Its Own But Does Anyways
So I owned a Ouija board as a kid. My grade school friends and I would play it during sleepovers. We named it Reinhold because that’s what it said its name was. That was likely the most significant thing that happened with that board as I don’t think my friend and I were too familiar […]
Don’t Move Into a Haunted House
I’ve been told that epileptics are prone to paranormal activity but I’d say most people are fair game if you move into a place with black handprints up and down the basement wall a la Blair Witch. My husband, our mastiff rescue Hemingway and I moved to Pittsburgh last year to fail at starting a […]
“Well, I’ll Just Stop Eating Then…”
Super share. I can’t speak for anyone else but myself… but since my teenage anorexia was an indirect product of my teenage epilepsy, I’m going to super share. 😐 Eating disorders are largely a manifestation of feeling the fuck out of control. “My life is spiraling out of control and I’m also 16 so… yes, […]
Maybe Zoo Animals Don’t Want Stay At Home Order To Ever End
Watching the news right now is terrifying. And it’s been terrifying for… years. But it’s especially terrifying right now. And they say we are all in this together but… no matter how many “feel good” stories the local news plays, it’s really difficult to feel good about humankind when watching the news. Yeah, I watched […]
The Moths Are Mobilizing
In addition to the armed people who are trying to intimidate? state governments into opening everything by gathering in protest crowds near state capitols… because… they don’t “believe in” the coronavirus, science, hard data, global news reporting, or how New York City officials are digging mass graves… the tenuous relationship between this apartment’s moths and […]
Brain Wars!!! 