Tag: family

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I was so excited for my holiday plans. We were going to do a long drive, bring mashed potatoes and cookies, catch up with people I don’t see often, play some tabletop, and snuggle my partner post feast-and-DnD. Mindful of the fact that we’re in flu season and still in a pandemic and I’m trying to travel responsibly and health concerns of other family members, I asked about their COVID precautions.

And let’s just say, they fell short.

There is still enough in me to be extremely disappointed. Because I thought they’d be better, for their ailing parents. For their children. For their loved ones. For complete strangers who can’t protect themselves as well, for health or other reasons– but as we’ve seen that part is just too hard for most people.

For the fact that COVID is still around, still serious, and still something to consider.

So today, I don’t know what we’ll be doing instead. I’ll just grab stuff to cook and wine to drink while I cook and just wing it with my own loved ones. The ones that still give a shit about this whole pandemic thing, anyway. And I’m going to go ahead and assume Christmas will be the same way.

So, uh, Happy Thanksgiving. Or as I like to call it, Happy “Surround Yourself with Loved Ones and Celebrate Another Year Surviving This Colonialist Hell” Day. Stay safe. Mask often. Get your boosters. Test a lot. Still take COVID seriously.

https://www.okdoomer.io/everything-that-friend-wants-you-to-know-about-covid/

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On a drive home from work I call mom, because my car can do that now and I need something to do on my 45 minute commute. We were discussing hobbies and things and I kept putting myself down: “My nesting partners are so creative with building things with their hands! All I do is stream video games and write for my blog.”


She goes, “What sort of things do you write?”


I reply, “Oh, anything that comes to mind.” And, I added with only a little hesitation: “I’ll send you a link.” To my credit, I actually did in a rather tight amount of time. And I did not forget, either.


In retrospect, I was only a little apprehensive. When I Officially Came Out on Facebook last year, there was only a little bit of apprehension then, too. I’m about to be 40 in a few years. It’s time I stopped pussyfooting to others about my truth. I’m also a firm believer in Show, Don’t Tell, so while I could’ve summed up my blog with “Introspection, Observations, and Rants” I really thought it better to just show it to her.


Besides, she knows what sorta weirdo I am already.


A blog is very reminiscent of how I handled my composition notebooks when Harriet the Spy was popular in the 90s. As the opposite of Harriet M. Welsh I did let anyone read my journal (and, thanks to the hard lesson she learned, I also learned to keep the really mean juicy bits in my head)! It was full of observations, quotes, song lyrics, boring day stuff, and doodles. In high school, a classmate was so enamored over the phrase “Satan’s Day” I penned that morning that he read the passage to the entire class! While it lacked malicious intent, said passage was still raw in my mind during that time, and I just felt mortified.


So, maybe I’m just predisposed to writing publicly about things. Just, you know, No Adults Allowed until I became one. And, perhaps, not so fiercely private– mom can attest to this; I was always as such from when I was a child. It was so I wouldn’t even tell her the nightmares I had so she could comfort me, and I refused to practice the recorder instrument in the house. I opted to make weak flute noises in the car, with all the windows rolled up.


Well, there’s still no nightmares here, and you won’t be getting context for Satan’s Day. Just things I’d like to share. If you’ve read my disclaimer you know the drill.


As for my mom’s response: she cried. But not in that “jfc you still think Garfield is funny” disappointed crying, the “you are so much like your dad, with your way with words and creativity” crying. Because he also wrote poetry and was a pretty damn good drawer to boot. I like to think I got my flair for storytelling from him, too… and my tendency to troll people. You know, annoy them a little. Like not telling people what the fuck Satan’s Day alluded to.


I’m proud of what I write, except maybe that one post on Halloween a few years back or so. So this was also like “ma lookit me” as I run up to her and show her my crayon drawing of flowers and rabbits.

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My grandmother was dying when I penned this post.

There is a lot of what my mother bitterly calls it, drama, concerning the surrounding circumstances. But most of it is not important; what matters at this moment is how she does not want any of this drama when the time comes for her to require elderly care, and when she passes away.

"Please, put me in a home." I know. Unlike her sister, I will do the responsible thing and recognize that I can be no caregiver. "And I do not want a viewing." Give me flowers while I am living. We agree on that. She does not want the "song and dance" of the whole funeral thing and knowing her family, "song and dance" would be the understatement of the decade. She doesn’t even want a gravestone. "Cremate me. Or donate my body to science. I’m already an organ donor." She even suggests, if she ever succumbed to dementia like her mother, to pump her full of LSD and, hm, let her go. "If I’m going out, I want to have a good time."

Jokes aside, no one likes to think about their mother dying.

So the topic turned to other things– in hindsight– a segue. Mom had recently visited the attic to retrieve the vinyl collection. As an avid user of Spotify and iTunes, she no longer felt the need to keep them around and was going to donate them. And the packrat that I am (my VHS collection can attest to this), I snatched them up.

We went through the entire stack. Some I’ve never seen before (growing up, I was more interested in the growing technology that was the Compact Disc; the vinyls were safe from my pillaging), but some I recognized as the art the covered the living room wall. From Talking Heads to Prince, Michael Jackson and ZZ Top and AC/DC and… albums about… drag racing? That one took me by surprise.

Some are certainly damaged. Others scratched. Others still, missing covers in the dusty stack. Covers missing records.

While I did joke about selling The Beatles’ White Album, I knew they weren’t going anywhere. Especially with mom’s words in my ears, about leaving nostalgic tokens of love behind.

There was a story for most of them: going to the record store after watching The Wall, her singing a few bars of Lovin’ You, some albums she had while growing up, and some I remember fondly as cool stuff on the walls.

These stacks of albums tell a story of what my parents experienced and loved. It is another thing I can hold, memories of weight I can feel and thumb through.

When the time comes I will let her go, but I’ll hang onto Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk album for a while longer.

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“Whoa,” I said, sitting up a little as the credits rolled. “I haven’t heard that in forever.”


“What song is it?” he asked, shifting under my head. We had been binging Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for two hours and Netflix’s “Are you still there?” prompt caught us lounging on the couch, my head on his lap.


“…I don’t know. It’s been so long since I’ve heard it.”


And as he did a quick Google search, I was too busy remembering.



As everyone should know by now– by pop culture osmosis or actually reading and/or watching the series– JJBA references rock artists and songs.


And my dad loved classic rock (rock, generally). Music, generally, but classic rock was his favorite genre. When I first heard Roundabout, I wasn’t familiar with it. But I knew the style, and it was confirmed by my mom that it was one of the many songs he liked.


I may not remember much, like the title or who performed it, but I knew that tune from my childhood:


There are spoilers here, btw. Check out Spotify instead if you need to.


Growing up for me consisted of a lot of waiting– my school district was in another county, so we had to wait an hour for the bus. When I was older, we waited for daycare to open. During the periods where we had only one vehicle, we waited for mom to get out of work. We waited for the bus again in my high school years and when I graduated, we waited in a McDonald’s parking lot on top of a surprisingly scenic hill.


A lot of that waiting was done in the car, with the radio on. And all of the time, it was me and my dad. And finally, my dad would scope out pretty chill places to, well, wait. These would usually be bodies of water or an interesting bit of forest. When he was in the mood, he’d talk (OK, a lot of the time it was more like lecturing), but we mostly just listened to the music.


And hearing the first bars of that song… it jogged a memory of when I was much younger: There was a lake, and it was afternoon, probably early spring. We may have been killing time before we picked up mom. I don’t remember what I was doing or even which car it was at the time. Hell, human memory is pretty faulty in general and I could be misremembering all of this.


But I remember when my dad was still alive.


Grief is something else. It never goes away, it just crops up when you’re watching an animated series that’s supposed to be (for the most part) fun. But considering my reaction to Dan of Steel (Gaucho was another defining background album from my childhood), I kinda saw this coming.


So this “just” (air quotes) made me miss him.


I listened to this song on Spotify and finally cried again.