No Matter Where You Go, There You Are.

      So I set aside a few days to binge-watch  Grace & Frankie ;

    After weeks of working at a dive bar, six months living in a dinky two-bedroom apartment with a chick who goes by Strawberry but is legally named Amanda, and days of alternating between vegetables and take-out, rum and top-shelf bourbon with my roommate’s blues band and a crappy wannabe-musician who works in insurance, I wake up on a Monday in April, feeling very sick with a line of dried drool winding from my mouth to my jaw.

I want to publish something again. Soon. It should be a short story. I'd love to have it be an action piece with gratuitous violence. How often do I write those? Never.

  -If every/almost ever y time you make a smart decision for yourself, your very insecure boyfriend/girlfriend/just friend is upset, going on and on about you being selfish. Every time. -You find that they’re carefully editing stories they tell about social interactions they’ve had when you weren’t around, playing underdog or hero in each one.

So I looked up my first name in the image s ection of a search engine, thinking  that since, in the past, I found cute-s y graphics reminding me of the laughable fact that my first name is derived from a Gaelic term for "wise one". I was inspired by an older post by  the Bloggess (to which I've left a link below) about her adventures looking up the names "Jenny"  and  her blog name, so I thought  maybe this time I'd get a fun screen grab or two with the name 'Shannon' on it, like a s till of Jason in his hockey mask, weapon read y, sa ying, "Wha tayou mean,  you're ou t of peas?" or something,  but no. No. I got the smiling faces of a bunch of professional-looking pretty strangers,including some insanely ripped, skinny women, one wearing two gold medals, and one of these:   This treasure is from David  Thorne, much to my relief af ter clicking on it and seeing the words " Shannon the Human Snake.   www.27bslash6.com  -  Due ...

          It sucks that with love comes loss, but that's unavoidable, I think. When I ge t emotional about the December 20th passing of one of my loved ones, I repeat to m yself a mantra that I've been very lucky to know him, to be influenced by him. He was   is  was a wonderful person who, along wi th his wife and son, permeated my outlook on family and community and milking the wonderful, simple momen ts out of life. 

Dig this: You have a weird, bad social experience as a child, grow  to understand it, move on, but still occasionally have  the perpetrator pop into your world, and all that comes to mind when  you see them is , 'Go away!  Y ou're no t allowed  to be wi thin two miles of me! Didn'tcha read the con tract ?' And you're not angry or hur t, j ust... you e njoy pretending the bully fell off of our fla t, flat Earth.