Author: admin

“I’m not telling you again to get out from under the vacuum.  You’ll make me trip and break my neck, then where will we be?” My mother.  Realizing she had a problem child.  One who loved white noise of any kind.  I’d lie on the floor while she and the big Electrolux did their thing. …

Y’all know how much we’ve needed rain here. We’ve been living in a dust bowl for years now. And I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, because we’re not, but still – couldn’t the biggest on again/off again rainstorm in eons have planned itself around the holidays? Oh well, we may be bitching, but we’re still…

To my horror, what seemed to be a tiny patch of hives peeked out at me from between two toes as I kicked off my slippers and got into bed.  I’ve never had hives before in my life.  “Good grief, how stressed could I be?” I wondered as I scratched the tiny itch.  Not any…

I used to fantasize about settling down with someone and decorating for Christmas alongside them. Now it’s just an excuse for me to drink cabernet and do nothing while The Partner does it all. Of course the whole thing opens up a scenario where he can yell out things like, “Fix me a drink,” or…

9/11 was already tough for me.  My mother had only several weeks to go on this earth and we were all holding on by a thread.  I walked into the living room to find my father watching the unfolding madness on the TV across the room.  As the cancer had eventually gone to her brain,…

On the day Nanci Griffith died I received calls and texts from friends far and near like a loved one had passed. It truly was extraordinary. “Thank you for turning me on to her all those years ago…” “What??” I thought, thinking this person only listened to grunge. Another one: “I’m remembering the night you…

“Let’s do a chest x-ray, just to make sure.” The doc knows I’m climbing the walls because I’ve had a tiny cough all summer.  During my annual physical in May, he had initially told me to ignore it, but the damned thing never went away, so here I am again in the panic-inducing office.  …

“There’s something going on right now – in your line of work – in your life – it’s in the process of popping.  Coming to fruition.  What would that be?” Sarah the Ojai astrologer leans in, waiting for the answer.  One of the few people who recognize me from my work in tinseltown, she’d seen…

I wasn’t going to write anything about this Christmas.  I didn’t have the energy.  It wasn’t anything like, “If I can’t rip off my mask and French 50 other folks over fondue then I’m not doing it.”  It was simply the fact that this year has gone by so incredibly fast it didn’t seem like…

When I was a kid, my next-door-neighbor Stephanie Carter’s mom loved horror movies, the gorier the better.  When she heard a man’s legs were hacked off in the middle of the night in some British schlockfest none of us had heard of, we were piled into the car and driven to the Eagle Drive-In tout…