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It’s been over 3 years.

The whole thing lasted less than a year, but it was an important and strange time in my life.

He will protest this, but I was good while he was away. I know my truth and that is enough.

The trend for being faithful was started then and there. I decided to do the thing and I did. It was not easy, an angel of the lord came down and flirted with me, stole my heart really, but I stayed stubborn until I wasn’t.

Scratch that, I have always been faithful. I waited 26 years and destroyed every relationship I was ever in for High School Sweetheart even when he had 3 babies by 2 other women and married the second. He got his shit together a couple years after I had given up and I did not bend.
When I am with you, I am with you and when I am done I am done. I will still be kind, that is who I am. All of these things are in my marrow. Time doesn’t matter to my heart. Never has.

Less than a year after I met Final Boss I helped him pack his things and kissed him goodbye in a hotel parking lot as he flew away to go make a better life for himself. He said he’d be back for me and I had all the anecdotal proof in the world that it wasn’t going to happen, and I was already done.

I followed suit that same winter and here I be. Life is better.

A year ago right around now farm hubby and I went out for coffee as I tried to be the sympathetic ex and help him get over the loss of sisterwife. I had my own issues that needed airing out about that whole situation and it should have been cathartic, apologetic and full of forgiveness.

Except he called me the next day with plans for me to move back in, 8 years later. I cannot begin to imagine the mess he has been able to make in the last 8 years and the 7 years of busy work and constant cleaning was more than enough for me. I will take my little attic and my weird little life over that chaos any day. I was pretty insulted that he thought me no better than some girl who would wait on hold for someone else to die and then move back in like nothing happened.

No. Fuck no.

Honestly, I should have known. The others have done the same “wait here while I go try this girl on for size and wifery” and when she doesn’t fit, I get a phone call. It isn’t flattering. Appreciate me in real time or leave and stay gone. 

When Final Boss got on the plane he was (and I believe this) trying to do better, be better. And to tell the god’s honest truth, from the day we met until the day he left, I would have stood by him as he did do that very thing. And I would have been really good at it. I am the girl who carried aspirin in her purse in case he had a heart attack. Did triage in the VIP with his friends while they were bleeding. Picked him up at all hours and made 5am sandwiches.

A few months later he was back in town, back at his old shit and back with his ex. We all know this story. I didn’t like the way my name sounded coming out of his mouth and I told him so. I cried and I was done, like really done.

I both understood what he was doing and didn’t like it. A concept he had a hard time wrapping his head around, ya, I get it and ya, I was still angry. Understanding doesn’t have to denote forgiveness.

I have seen him once since, met his new pupper and he paid me back.
Then I forgave.

We talk on occasion. 5 minutes here or there. I ask if he’s okay, spit a little truth, he tells me to give it up (playfully) and I remind him I have (seriously). He called me at 5am when I was heading to the airport in November, he was also heading to the airport. I was landing at my destination as he was landing at the airport I flew out of. Metaphorical actuality.

The last conversation he was asking for the address of a place he had been to 4 times in the 4 days prior to the call. And I am not the kind of girl to wonder what a dude meant when he said ‘x,y,z’…but ya, it was an excuse to talk to me. Subtle this is not.

Turns out he has been building his empire like he said he would.
And it is going well from all accounts and there is a space for me.

This is a twist. And I am flattered.
Field of Dreams with dogs and drugs instead of corn and baseball.
He built it, but I am not coming.

I understand better than most how awful the universe’s timing seems to be on occasion.

And, full disclosure, as I struggle being the new girl in a new bar, the familiarity and status I achieved out east is so tempting. But I remember the price I paid for it. My sanity and sobriety.
But, being the Queen of Everything in a microcosm is just big fish, small pond. There is no challenge there for me anymore. It has been conquered, dissected and learned from. This latest revelation is just one more jewel in a tawdry crown that was always too small.

There is an old adage which dictates “god will give you everything you ever wanted and then send you a distraction to see what you will do.”

I feel like I could reach back into the archives and find something similar that happened years ago. I mean I did have the trailer, I was ready to go and I panicked and settled for the familiarity of the town I am in now and my stable full of fuck boys. But they are all cuffed now and my girls are gone. 

And I have indisputable proof that I was supposed to be exactly where I was, when I was. Arduous journey? Yep. Worth it? Absolutely.

His job was to keep me there a bit longer, not to bring me back.

I don’t want to go back and redo the things I have already done. 

It is time for something new.

For a minute there, I lost myself ~ Radiohead

We all knew that. I am tired of talking about it and I am sure you are all tired of hearing about it.

But for a minute there I was also a writer with no pen.

The lesser known horseman of my apocalypse, Frustration. He rides a dumpy lame nag of a non descript color and she is very slow and kinda blind.

A song came on my Spotify and I am desperate for better sets to dance to so I was scrambling for pen and paper before the newly formed brain bubble burst and leaked out.

Wednesday night work was not, not great.

I had this renewed sense of hustle and higher purpose, I looked stupid cute. Did lame shows, but kept my balance and rhythm and my legs doth not protest too much during the transitions from kneeling to standing BUT the clientele was 90% coked out townies with no desire to go for dances but they all said I am SOOOOOO PRETTY. I cannot finance my fabulous future with their words, but at least I didn’t feel like a total bag of shit.

I stumbled back upon the realization that sometimes I allow my nightly income to affect how I see myself and when my period is added to the mix the results can be disastrous. But I did not cry. I logically assessed the situation and just said fuck it by the end.

I did end up reminiscing like a motherfucker that night. I had a mini audience at rapt attention.

One of the girls asked me about perdition, and the diet red bull I consumed had me both rotted of gut and loose of tongue. She specifically wanted to know about the process of firing the girls who had flown to that strange little island to work.

It was never easy, except when it was.

I waxed nostalgic about getting a split lip for firing a very aggressive girl who was terrorizing all the other girls while holding a tray. The descent down the stairs with an intact tray full of shots and my other hand cupped under my chin to catch the blood, I really liked the shirt I was wearing.

I did have a theory that there was some kind of malevolent spirit that resided in the bar who, in order to be appeased, needed a blood sacrifice on occasion. It was just my turn.

And I realized the only other 3 fights that ever happened inside the bar while I was working happened during my stage shows, except the one where I saw it coming, warned the bouncer and then walked out the door because said bouncer gave me attitude and I figured an “I told you so” would be more fun and satisfying if he got a couple shots to the head. He did. It was.

I am contemplating a Twitch account wherein I can deep dive into my strip club memories and keep them safe while simultaneously broadcasting them. I have really good stories, some you know, some you don’t. I am fairly locked in my room from noon to 4 doing stretches and bed yoga. Why not? 

I am also having a hard time adjusting to the 3 song sets instead of 2 songs so I am going way back in my playbook and digging into the oldies sets. My body remembers them and I flow differently. It works, I am in a retirement town full of farmers. I realized one of the sets I picked was from a time long long ago in a city pretty far away.

I looked out into the audience once upon a time and saw 3 out of 4 men that I had slept with, during the same time period, never all at once.
Faithful readers will recall the Four Horsemen of My Apocalypse.
This second great conjunction happened probably 7 years after the first. They knew OF each other and as I climbed down from stage and got dressed, they all followed me outside for a cigarette and it did not take long for them to figure out the connection. They all teased me gently and I felt very loved, cherished and safe in that moment.

The last song in the set was 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover and we all had a good giggle about that too.

I hadn’t danced to it since then. Until Wednesday night. No such magic happened except that I smiled reminiscing about my 30 something self who was in yet another bad relationship, and for a minute got to remember what it was like to feel loved.

When I look back over my life I see many high places, many chances taken and for the most part, no regrets. Dancing has both been a part of my low self esteem, before I accepted it for what it was and myself for who I am. The highs are bookended with lows of course. Everything is cyclical. And honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My life got better when I started being honest. About who I am, what I love and the things I have done. Shame is a terrible burden to carry, it is heavy and it is really just made up of other people’s opinions of us, and like compliments at a strip club on a Wednesday, they don’t pay the bills so, pretty useless really.. 

I have also decided that things will get better (and are getting better) as I accept where I am and what I am doing instead of living in a future that is unpredictable at best. Yes I am holding the vision, but for a good chunk of time there, I forgot to trust the process. I am sitting in my cute attic now. My room at the girl’s house is clean and smells good at least. I have my screen grab from A Streetcar Named Desire tucked into the side of my mirror and although he was never on his knees, it pleases me. I left my crystals to charge in the window. Found some acceptable incense at the health food store and brought my sheets home to wash, next week is a new week.

This past week at work was the transition from the county’s yellow to green phase. We knew going in work was going to be hard, the clientele would be unpredictable and the extended hours were going to be exhausting. It really really was. 5 shows instead of 2 meant I was on stage doing cardio in stilettos for about an hour a night. 5pm to 2am instead of 11 or 12. The last 2 hours being the busiest of the night. I barely left my room unless it was to prep for work or go downstairs to work. I watched some movies, did bed yoga and started this article last Thursday. I needed to be nice to my body and except for a decent amount of tequila, I was.

I accepted this.

I did a mini spell and would have hit that amount, except a friend from high school showed up and I chose to chill with him and his woman instead of hustling. No regrets.

I also made zero on Wednesday, a little harder to accept, but I came home with the same amount as the week prior, so I am not mad about it. Every dollar brings me closer to my goal. I have almost stopped comparing myself to the other girls. So that is good too. I did my squats and my bed yoga. I corrected my behavior from the week prior and there is still room for improvement, but I am getting better. 

Spring is coming, I can feel it. I am driving myself up this week after my MRI. One step closer to getting this silicone out of my body and time has started to move faster than the molasses of January and February.

This week was a little better than the last and I am excited for the next one and the one after that.

Now I am off to find sexy knee pads and look up this Twitch shit.

The rest of this article is available on Patreon for a $1 subscription per month. Link at the bottom.
Half Wild Thing goes live at midnight tonight, $5 subscription gets you digital access to both books I wrote.

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Good Morning my loves. A warm hello to my new patrons and a huge thank you to the ones who are sticking around while I fumble through this bumpy transition. It’s getting better.

The groundhog days of February wherein time slowed to a standstill and I would shovel 8 inches of snow just to have 8 more fall, seem to have left us.First night in my own bed in a few days. That is a nice feeling. Both being away and back to it.

Walked in the door to no power. S’okay. Didn’t last long and I am ⅓ of the way through American Gods (the book), plus I was so anxious to get home I was the first girl awake in the house and got a nice long and hot shower.

Oh, girls house life. I think I kinda missed it.

Although the first rule of staying in a stripper house is if you decide you have time for a nap and the house has been quiet all day everyone else will wake up and invade the kitchen as soon as your head hits the pillow. I remembered a black out curtain and forgot ear plugs.

Once upon a time my room was this little dormered thing on a cracky street in Newfoundland. On government cheque day we could hear them celebrating through the walls, there were always fights outside at all hours. Inside our house was less chaotic most of the time. I got launched out of bed to stop a few fights and make sure the puking girl hit the toilet. There were enough beds for 15 or 16 girls. I had one of 2 single rooms, a reward for being the keeper of the keys and the taker out of the trash. My room was always too hot or too cold, too bright or too dark. The walls were the color of bandaids and my door was always open. The third floor was like that, unless we were sleeping or jerking off, there were rules.

It got hot up there so we had strategically placed floor fans and a pact to keep our doors open for the cross breeze.

Plus, I gave out the room assignments so I got to be in charge of who my immediate neighbours were…mostly. I rarely locked my door and was never robbed. The doors were so old and had been broken down so many times they barely shut right, I had a butter knife outside my room for the days I forgot my keys, worked just as well.

My room was the meeting place, the venting place, the chilling place and the safe space.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-cathouse-48179794

Okay, something weird happened when I went to post this article.
I was looking for a quote, I had the Chuck Palahniuk stuck in my head “all god does is watch us and kill us when we get boring, we must never, ever be boring.” But that wasn’t it.

I have been boring lately, I admit it. I said ‘I lost my voice’ and someone took it literally. No, I just lost a huge part of myself. I can’t think of anything to say, mostly because I not doing anything.

Anyways, after 19 days of solitude and staying home I went out and did stuff, but we will get to that in a minute.

I was looking for a quote, had the wrong one stuck in my head and decided to google “god and plans” because my theory is that the gods think its funny that when we do make plans, it’s just an open invitation for them to fuck with us. That’s been my experience anyways. (gestures broadly at my life)

So, wow I am rambling…I google the thing and God’s Plan by Drake comes on, which happened to be crazy popular my first few months in Newfoundland and Stompy Magoo, the stripper that made my life miserable used to sing it at the top of her off key lungs at really inopportune times.
In the way that a lot of things become funny years later, I giggled. It is funny. That someone so inconsequential had so much sway on my life for a bit.
She had all the strippers convinced I was an evil witch. Witch yes, evil no.
It got better when I leaned into it. All the girls who were making fun of me started asking me for wishes and spells.

So I watched the video. The beginning is a black screen with the words “The budget for this video was $999 000 and we gave it all away.” I almost cried a couple times, it was really sweet. Also, a million bucks for a music video is insane by the way, but what he did made me feel good.

I am currently in a rocky relationship with money and hope it turns around soon. I wish I had money to throw around like that. I could help so many people.

So anyway, Back to the post I meant to write.

I adulted yesterday and got my taxes done.

I owe money. I don’t recall if that has ever happened before to be honest.

Lil mad, no gonna lie. But I am not surprised.

This year, so far, has been a bit of a financial drain. The first leg of my last trip was budgeted beautifully. But everything since the beginning of January has been one bit of fuckery after another. Broken snow shovel, grocery delivery, crazy phone bill, car fixing, customs on a suitcase of dirty clothes.

No, wait it all started with paying $275 USD for the extra bag on the plane. December 9th, things started getting stoopid.

I was supposed to leave January 9th and stretched it out another 26 days.

That’s on me.

Add the zero income and ya. I need to get my ass to work. I am guessing it will take me this 2 weeks of schedule to get me back to zero, then all gravy moving forward. I am officially breaking this cycle. Money comes easy and frequently.

The last day of my first stretch is a full moon, go big or go home I guess.

The way my current work works is we get booked for one or 2 blocks at a time. A block is 4 days on 3 days off. We stay on premises with the option to leave on our 3 days off. Once the weather gets better I can see myself sticking around. It is a 3 hour drive and it is truly beautiful up there. My lake is there. And the summer shifts are 5 on 2 off. Seems silly to drive home for one Monday just to turn around and go back again.

I am actually really looking forward to this summer now that I think about it.

I left my home town  in the 90’s and didn’t go back for 20 years. I do miss it.
Thinking about it prompted a memory which turned into a montage of memories of me leaving places to start over other places. I do this a lot.

I have been sitting here making imaginary budgets in my head. Imaginary because the particular county where I am currently employed is in yellow and could easily slip back to red, I have no idea when surgery is and there are 1000 other reasons why I can’t really plan anything.

I know what not to do which is get involved with a mediocre dude and go live somewhere expensive. I have done that way too many times now.

My grandmother passed away the year before my friend Greg died and she left me a bit of money. $7000 to a minimum wage 19 year old kid seemed like a million dollars, and I used that money to leave my home town and move up north.
I felt that Greg’s death and the events that surrounded it coupled with the sudden boon was a sign to leave, and mayhap it was.
A year later I was pregnant on a greyhound bus moving to Toronto and I love my kid more than anything, so sure, let’s call it fate.

I enjoyed living in Toronto too. It was mostly a fun decade. Especially after 24. I wouldn’t go back now, but it served me well. I left to move to the farm 14 years ago?
Moving to the farm put me in debt and trapped me there after I had been doing quite nicely on my own for a while. I miss the apartment (and job) I left at the behest of ex hubby. It was a beautiful spot. Well, I made it beautiful and I think he was shocked I paid for it just fine on my own after he left. Lord save me from men who need to be needed. 

And my last pilgrimage east, well, let’s just say the money I made on a two week stint as a new girl in the fall was about as much as I made in 2 months in the dead of perpetual spring. I was reliant on a piggy bank stuffed with $2 coins and $5 bills. Just getting there was expensive. The moving, the storage etc. I did not plan that so great but it all worked out eventually. Somewhere around the end of March Tina 2 Chainz and I landed a whale in the VIP and suddenly all my bills were paid and there was food in the fridge again. I had a lot of $1000 nights after that first one.

Something in me decided that if I ever do another leap of faith, I want to have x amount of dollars and this and that and the other fucking thing.

I realized this morning, that isn’t a leap of faith, it is a life maneuver of preparedness.
Who am I?

When I did my budget in December to move where I wanted, I had 6 or 12 months rent put away and/or paid before I left my current house, in my head. The plan now is different, but I am chuckling at myself for being so pre-prepared. 

I know from 30 years of anecdotal experience you can think you have all your bases covered and think you know what’s coming and the hand of god will come down and flick you into a different direction entirely.

I used to pay big city rent, feed myself and my son on minimum wage. $229 a week. I used to feed 4 people at the farm for that same amount every couple of weeks. Like I do know how to do this. My second grocery order of $90 was a stupid splurge, add the indian food take out and that could have been my food budget for the month. I have become spoiled somehow.

Most of my exes sponged off me, so the last 7 years of being single I have had more money than I am used to. I am no longer looking after adult children that I didn’t give birth to. This is a good thing. I have traveled, had adventures, bought (and left behind) some beautiful furniture, lived in lovely places and never gone hungry or without anything really.

And I keep saying it, because I cannot afford to forget it, 9 years ago I could have started building my tiny empire but instead I moved back to Toronto because my crappy boyfriend at the time wanted it and then we struggled for a year and a half. But at least he got to get beer and wings at the pub 5 times a week.

Not repeating that cycle, I refuse. No man is cute or sexy enough for that shit. Yes, my vagina is yodeling her song of starvation and loneliness, but this too shall pass. 

And in the immortal words of Aerosmith “can’t say baby where I’ll be in a year.”

I can’t, I do not have the slightest clue. 

But right now I am warm and safe and tomorrow I go to work and I think it is going to be good for me on 57 levels.

I need out of my house and out of my head. I need some structure and discipline. And the money will be nice too. 

I have a leg up as far as survival goes.
And this is all coming too late to help anyone now, but serves as a good list going forward, plus a reminder for me.

My mother and father raised me in a converted Mennonite farmhouse, with no indoor plumbing until I was about 22 months old. The story goes, she told my father she wasn’t going to potty train me with an outhouse and the bathroom got built. 

We moved from the country to a subdivision when I was 7, but I remember remnants of the time before running water and electricity on the farm. The well outside with the hand pump provided fresh clean potable water. The bureau in the kitchen held several well maintained kerosene lamps. We had one of those ancient wood fired oven + stovetop, and that is how our food was cooked, bread baked and house heated when I was little. 

I heard stories of the renovations that I couldn’t possibly remember wherein there was no insulation against the cold of Canadian winter, save some newspapers from the late 1800’s.

And that is another thing. I am Canadian.

We understand cold, our houses are built to withstand it. That being said, I have had a burst pipe (once, my bad) and many a flooded basement in my day.

I grew up in that farmhouse and the power went out a lot. But we didn’t need it. My mother had the radio on from the minute she woke up to get my father off to work, until we went to bed. If there was weather coming, she knew it. The bathtub was filled with washing/flushing water, the lamp wicks trimmed, the kerosene filled. And the garage always had enough wood to get us through for months lining the walls from floor to rafters. We had a root cellar and a deep freezer lined with ice, just in case. My mother had an impressive one acre garden and canned or froze everything she grew, all lined up in organized rows in the pantry. Of course we went to town for coffee, sugar, flour etc. but in the dead of winter where the roads were impassable, we never once went without.

I wonder what it was like for them to adjust. Both of them from Michigan, both from sizable towns. My mother and her best friend had been heads of the house at a commune for years and my father’s stoicism and capabilities to fix everything are the things of myths. But they weren’t raised on farms, they chose that lifestyle in their 20’s, before I came along.

I made a similar choice and was pretty dumbfounded about the lack of preparedness when I went to live with my husband on his farm. The garden was in ruins, the soil tainted by a leaking rototiller. A barn full of his hoarded mechanical crap instead of providing shelter for the sad looking chickens. If the power went out it was dark and miserable. And I had to give my horses lake water to drink every summer because our well would inevitably go dry, 2 trips a day, 13 buckets in the back of my jeep. I bathed in various lakes 3 months of the year too. But I made it work.

In retrospect I think it might have been easier for me to flip a Mennonite farmhouse into a productive homestead than it was to deal with his patched together hoarders paradise. Start fresh instead of constantly fixing what hadn’t been done right in the first place.

But I kept the animals alive, got the garden going for a couple of years. Fed us 100s of meals sourced within a 30 km radius by cultivating the land, raising meat birds and goats and forging good relationships with the neighbors, and when the power went out, we were fine.

I also remember the big eastern seaboard blackout of 2003, we weren’t so lucky. It was summer and my ex wouldn’t stop opening the fridge. Lost a lot of groceries and I actually had to walk home 2 miles uphill because transit stopped working when my boss finally let us close the restaurant.

We were in a grid of mostly industrial businesses, actually, our building was not zoned for residence so we were one of the last neighborhoods to have power restored. But at night we had light, because I had my mother’s kerosene lamps, wicks trimmed and ready. And I traded food with the upstairs neighbor for the use of his barbeque. I do remember how amazing it was to sit up on the roof and actually see the stars.

10 years later the ice storm of 2013 had us powerless for 8 days.

But, I was living in the snowbelt far out of town and everything I learned as a kid growing up in the nether reaches of nowhere had already been put into place.
Lamps, candles, batteries, non perishable food that didn’t need cooking, a freezer lined with ice, plentiful jugs of potable water.

Mostly prepared I should say, my piece of shit (now) ex boyfriend didn’t bother to fill the tubs and sink up so we scrambled for washing and flushing water. I was 2 hours away at work battling an ice storm to get home. But it did force me to completely drain the pipes so none of them froze. 

I had a big beautiful fireplace, we stashed the contents of the fridge on the back porch and lived quite happily until the power came back on. Even had wood fired pizzas from scratch and I made a mean batch of fajitas. We lost some produce sure, all got a bit ripe a few days in, which could have been avoided had my pos ex filled the ample tubs we had with water like I asked him to. But we made it by melting snow.

It pointed out to me that there is a huge juxtaposition between city preparedness and country living. But with the weather getting weirder by the year, everyone should have 

1. Enough potable water on hand for 3-5 days of power outages.
   1 gallon per person per day. More if you are me.
   That means one of those 5 gallon jugs each, stashed away somewhere in the house. And a hand pump for the tops.
2. Sterno pods and/or a camping stove and fuel (alternatives listed below)
3. Canned goods and a non electric can opener, other non perishables 
4. A battery powered or crank radio, also batteries.
5. A cold temperature sleeping bag for each person in the house
6. Candles, candles, candles. You can heat a room with a few tealights and a terracotta pot. Ikea sells 100 pack tealights, get 3 packs
   (I’ll post a link to a “how to” below)
7. a) leave your taps to run a bit on cold nights or
   b) know where your main shut off is for your house and empty the pipes completely.
   Fill your bathtub(s) prior to a power outage so you can wash dishes and flush toilets. (Good way to drain the pipes too in case of freezing)
   Potable water treatment tablets work too, if you can’t boil water.

Every item mentioned above can be stored in one rubbermaid (per person) at the back of a closet, labeled with the name of each member of the family. Make it fun if you have little ones, stash colouring books and crayons or non electronic games and treats in their bins.
Just make sure to rotate the canned goods and pick nonperishables that you actually want to eat.
Do a deep freezer clean out and layer bags of ice underneath everything, you lose a little space but it is better than losing all of your food and you know you aren’t going to eat those freezer burnt tater tots anyways.

I lived a long weekend of -20 degrees Celsius in a house where our oil heater went empty on the Friday by barricading myself in the living room and nailing blankets over the windows and doorways, I had one tiny space heater, candles aplenty, snow pants and 2 dogs. We made it until Tuesday morning.
A tent in an insulated room in your house also conserves heat when sleeping.

I am writing this, not to gloat or brag, but as a warning of sorts.

I grew up knowing how to do these things and I have realized how many people don’t know what to do and the weather just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Rotate your food goods in conjunction with time change, just like the batteries in your smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors.
Also, any combustible source of heat can lead to carbon monoxide poisoning, so be careful.
Stash an extra cord of wood in the garage if you are lucky enough to have a fireplace and a garage.

I plan on living in a tiny house living starting next year and have had to mentally reconfigure my space allotment in my head so I have all of these things on hand. Down south trailer living sounds great until the snow falls where it isn’t supposed to. I am currently looking up the pros/cons and specs for installing a tiny pot belly woodstove in a trailer.

We live in a technologically great age, but we have gotten away from being able to make it for a few days without power and running water, and it scares me. A quick trip to the camping supply section of the department store and basically the same amount of money you would spend on a couple dinners out, plus a little forethought and knowledge about how your house works is enough to save your ass when the weather gets weird and the government does nothing.

***Please note anything that produces a flame also sucks the oxygen out of the space you are in and can cause carbon monoxide poisoning, and in the last video with the pop can/alcohol stove 91% alcohol or higher and 1983 penny or older to be safe.

Sometimes, often, when things go wrong I get an urge to light everything on fire.

Wait, that is not entirely true. 

I’ve stayed and fought to preserve things that were not worth preserving. (gestures broadly at 7 years of farm life)

Let’s talk about that for a minute shall we.

Examine my stubbornness and folly.

He used to call me his sexy chocolate alarm clock.

At the beginning of our relationship, I would drop my son off at school and had 2 hours between then and when I had to be at work. So I would stop at the Starbucks on the corner, grab us coffees (he liked mochaccinos) and jump on the streetcar in the opposite direction I needed to go, back to his house and wake him up with a coffee and a blow job. It was a $15 venture 3 or 4 times a week now that I think about it with the coffee and the extra trips. 

This is who I am as a girlfriend. I figure out nice things to do for my partner and I do them.

If I am awake before you, you are getting coffee and a blowjob.

So, a month or two in, I went into his room, he was sleeping, I did my thing and started to gag, not in a funny sexy way, he wasn’t very big at all. No no dear reader, I pulled a long auburn hair out of my mouth. My hair was black. It had been wrapped around his cock and ended up in my mouth. So gross.

Took me about 30 seconds to realize what was happening and I started crying and left.

He was obviously cheating. I obviously didn’t want that. So I left the key on the coffee table and bailed while he was still naked in bed, half asleep trying to figure out what happened.

That could have been the end of that story if the streetcar had come to take me away.

But it didn’t.

He caught up with me at the corner and gave me this bullshit story about how his brother’s girlfriend put her laundry in with his and it must be her hair and I was being silly and stop crying and did I want a ride to work.

I am not a stupid girl, but I wanted to believe him, even though logic and physics dictate a hair cannot get coiled around the head of a dick under the foreskin from laundry transference. Its scientifically impossible. But I was cold and tired and sad and the streetcar wasn’t coming and that moment changed my life for a long time to come.

He got a way with it once and kept pushing the envelope.

Had I known then even an inkling of what was to come, and maybe I did, my gut was doing somersaults and not from my chai latte, I would have said no and save myself the $60 bucks a week and 7 years of cheating, fighting, financial abuse and bullshit.

He is the one who extolled the wisdom upon me that ‘we train people how to treat us in the first 3 months of a relationship’ anything we start or let slide, becomes habit. The ex before him never grocery shopped, cooked, cleaned or did laundry, that was all on me for 5 years. Because I did those things for the first while we were together without question or hesitation. Again, I figure out nice things to do for my partner and I do them. Sometimes to my detremement.

I would love to tell you that I have found some balance, but if you ask any of my recent exes, they would all tell you I was generous and kind and nice. Final Boss got me out of bed repeatedly to go get him wherever he was after multi day benders and back out of bed making 5am sandwiches when his hangover would kick in.

I am too nice, and part of me is still holding out for the person that will appreciate me as is. I don’t want to become cold, I have had so many opportunities.

But what does that have to do with anything?

After I left him finally, I lit a match and set that whole part of my life on fire. Purged everything, including friends. It has been 9 years and 5 days since the Valentine’s Day hotel incident that was my last straw of a million that broke my back. I have maybe one thing left that I owned when I lived at the farm. So much of my shit is in storage that I can’t even be sure about that one thing anymore. I tossed all of it 3 moves ago. And I had some cool shit. I just don’t want to remember.

Wolf pointed out that I was having an abusive relationship with social media. He isn’t wrong wrong, but I did that thing wherein I complained about it more than I explained why I liked it.

I also left the blog as is for its entire existence and never allowed it to evolve or grow. I would write a post, post it to Facebook, people would read it and I would do it again on Thursday.

The Catfish Poet proposed years ago that I get rid of everything, and then backpedaled when he saw the numbers and potential and wanted to use me and my platforms to sell his shit. I have almost walked away 3 times now.

There is a post in there somewhere called “Before I Go”. 

I left it up for continuity even though it was folly and turned out not to be true. Same with the couple of posts about the fake soldier, the year of Lumberjack wherein he had a secret girlfriend the whole time. I think she had his babies, good for them.

So, I finally got out of my abusive relationship with Facebook and I thought a full purge was the only way to go. Fuck the blog, fuck everything really. I was torn between filling a shopping cart with my belongings and going to live in a tent city and getting a mediocre job and a mediocre husband. Barring those things, just going back east and doing a do over. Reno another room in Brian’s house and wait to be rescued, but accept that I wouldn’t be.
I am not exaggerating for dramatic effect, those were my 3 choices for the better part of a month. 

Except, I still want all the things I wanted 7 years ago. Little trailer down south, revenue streams from writing so I wasn’t tied to rent in one place or one job.

I have proven that I can write a novella from idea to published in 60 days if properly motivated. 

Selling them/myself is the challenge now. But it always has been. I just keep being good and hoping someone notices.

It doesn’t matter that I am a really good writer, the market is saturated.

I have a month of bed rest post surgery looming. Instead of migrating the blog to Patreon, maybe keep both instead of setting my life on fire. 

I don’t know what I am doing to be honest.

I had a very long talk with a very old friend last night and he kinda kicked my ass a bit and offered suggestions. Mind you he is ‘mister technical web guy’ and I am a luddite. But 7 years ago I didn’t know how to navigate wordpress either so there is that then. I still don’t use it to its full potential but the groundwork is there, so much groundwork. And he pointed out that women writers have to work 10 times harder than our male counterparts, he is not wrong.

The things I learned and the skills I honed over the 7 years of living at the farm have made me what I am today. Self sufficient, good in a crisis, I can fix a car, unflood a basement, live without power and even my polyamory is a direct result of what I lived through there. I also know I never want to have another farm in Ontario or Canada really, ever. Nor live through another winter here.

I must have learned something good from the blog over 7 years. I just have to figure out what.

“Its only after we have lost everything that we are free to do anything” Fight Club

There are parts of me that are fighting to remain. Including this blog.

Extras still available here

https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch

It is the lunar new year. Smack dab in the middle of a very intense retrograde. Well, not the middle, 8 days left. Fuck the first 8 were rough, the 3 in the middle sucked so bad.

I followed the rules, or so I thought. There are always rules.

I watched a YouTube video of a woman telling us 18 things not to do on the lunar new year and I was like “shit shit shit I did ALL the things”. But in a weird stroke of good luck. I did them right before they would have been bad luck. The washing of the hair, the dumping of water outside, the sweeping all done in the time called before.

Phew.

Moving on.

The Facebook download of the last 12 years of my life is complete and now sits in 2 bizarre files on my laptop. Everything is there whether I want it to be or not.

I think I am going to do what I wanted to do before, get a new laptop and start fresh. AFTER retrograde. No buying electronics or large purchases while papa is dancing backwards.

My whole life, social media, storage both physical and digital is full of so many old pieces of me, there was no room for the new.

Same with this blog. I am embarrassed of some of the stuff on here, but I left it because it felt ‘complete’. The life of an archivist.

Giant organizes his music like I organized my life and I always found it weird.
Alphabetized complete collections organized in albums.
But what is the fun in that?
Where are the infinite playlists of awesome, wherein I can listen and remember driving to the quarry?
Driving to Ohio, driving to Newfoundland.
I did a lot of driving.

I pick and choose what songs I like. I loved U2 until Rattle and Hum, I loved Tori Amos but she got weird too. People grow and change, artists do things that don’t jive with what we loved about them. And then Miley Cyrus does a bunch of covers in her backyard and I have to admit, I love her voice.

The only constant is change.

No matter what I do or what I keep, doesn’t change the fact that all of that is water under bridges I probably already burned, or wouldn’t cross again if the were still standing.

I don’t need to keep everything. Just the good stuff, and maybe in 12 years the good stuff will look like the mess of old farm photos on my laptop that I was so scared of losing once, or the Facebook I was scared of losing, or the men or the friends.

History dictates no matter how hard we try to hold onto the past, it’s gone.

I did that with someone in my life too. I wanted things the way they were. I was taking his pontifications and predictions as gospel. They ain’t.

We don’t know how we will react until we are reacting.

People, places and things I thought I couldn’t live without are gone. And here I be.

Well, not here…

This blog is undergoing a slow migration to Patreon.

The new content is there, some of it is free.

I can’t count views like I used to, but there is money there for me and that is what is necessary, not some arbitrary number counting my imaginary popularity and giving it false value.

Still same old me. Well, not same same, I am evolving. We all are.

Different website

https://www.patreon.com/posts/no-secrets-in-of-47412802

Anyone else remember Tobias Funke’s audition for the fire sale in Arrested Development?

I am having a fire sale of sorts and his over the top performance is perfect for the commercial.

I am honor bound by my patron planet not to do or say anything new, plan anything or exist really. Just staying in my loop and in my lane.

Since Papa Mercury is doing his first backwards dance across the sky and I will be in strict quarantine for the duration I just wanted to let everyone know what is happening here.

I am going to go back through the 700+ articles I have written here. Mild edits, some full deletions and every single one will stop halfway through and be linked to the patreon account to finish reading.

Now, it is not a pay-per-view situation.

Not exactly. You CAN pick and choose if you wish.

If you want a pdf copy of any article, comment below the article and I will find it along with your email.
$1 per post, bulk discounts available.

Otherwise…

SOME CONTENT WILL REMAIN FREE, THINK BLOG AND FACEBOOK PAGE PLUS A DIARY.

Or…

$1 per month gets you uninterrupted access to the archives and all posts moving forward.

$2 per month gets you access to ‘patreon only’ posts plus all archives, and new articles.

$5 gets you digital copies of both books plus the stuff above.

There are other more expensive tiers and ‘offerings’ in trade, instead of subscriptions are also an option.

Once I hit 100 subscribers, I will post teaser chapters of the 3 books I am working on and I will be adding a patreon only snapchat account once I get back to my space and equipment and find my fucking center.

I am trying to figure out how to do yearly discounted subscriptions to patreon to make it easier for everyone, including me, but you all know I am a techno peasant at best and I am at the whim of both retrograde and friends helping me out.

This wordpress platform is crumbling, I never used it to it’s full potential, nor maintained it properly and it is entirely possible that I will not renew my godaddy web ownership et al.
But I think that is August, so a long way off.

You have time.

I wanted to thank my dedicated readers, say hello to the new ones and express my gratitude to you all for getting me this far.

Yes, I am having a massive existential crisis.

Maybe it will pass, maybe it won’t.

But you can be damned sure I will write about all of it, just not here.

With love, light, lust and very little grace, warmest regards and best wishes

Sarah

I had to decide to stay or go. I walked into my room and opened the window and Ted was dead. I closed the window too hard to fast the night before and smushed him. I killed Ted.

Ted was the wild golden gecko who hung out on my ceiling and ate the mosquitos. Did this cute lil butt wiggle when I would talk to him.

Ted is dead and I am going home.

I used to believe in signs, omens. But this is just practicality. If I wait it’s a $2000 expense, and that is my bills for a while. Can’t waste it on a whim or a want. I used to do that, I am not that girl anymore. I am not anything anymore.

It is so weird to have a crisis of faith as a … whatever the fuck I am/was.

My religion or neurosis whichever you want to call it was never overly defined. It had no edges. No set rules.

I am honestly thinking I am mentally ill, and I fooled all y’all into thinking there was something more and I am so sorry.

This is what is.

I am too old for this shit. Too old to be believing in fairytales by about 40 years or so.

15 years past when I ought to have been getting married and paying into a mortgage.

46 is really old to just start adulting.

I used to think I had a purpose in life. What the fuck was wrong with me. Decades of delusions and here I am with nothing.

I used to think that if “I believe it I will see it”.

But the bizarre filing cabinet in my brain was making connections that were never there, seeing roses where there were only thorns and making unicorns out of dirty white horses.

I remember being broke as a joke my first month or two alone in Milton, still cleaning up the financial mess left by my ex while stripping in Ontario winter. Going to work in February at a strip club is a fool’s errand, every dancer knows this.

I had rescue dogs and I was out of dog food.

It was cold and I was running out of firewood.

Two things happened, a buddy of mine sent me $200 bucks out of the blue. We had coordinated a dog rescue together and I helped him out before, he repaid the karma. I got dog food. Then a customer of mine who knew I had 3 fireplaces to keep going offered to start bringing me broken down hardwood pallets to throw on the fire. Every Tuesday and Thursday he loaded up my trunk with banana boxes full of wood chunks. Those pieces burned better, longer and hotter than the 6 cords of wood I had bought from my neighbor and got me through till March.

I kept a couple unique looking pieces as decoration. Still have one of them.

There is good in the world. I will never deny that. but I saw those things as divine intervention. Saw chance meetings as fate. It’s just life.

The schadenfreude of the Redditors vs Wall Street and the #noflylist feels like the scales of social justice finally tipping in the favor of the common folk and it pleases me. I might even buy a little stock just for kicks.

My dog lives with her auntie Mikah now and I have enough food to exist and roof for now. I am lucky in this. I know that.

I did do DMT and I tried to talk to god and there was nothing.

Maybe this is a side effect of that.

Maybe I knew there was no magic in the world all along and I just needed something to keep me going.

It is really hard to keep going.

I have loved people who technically do love me back, but inactively.

I don’t get a happily ever after.

I get to wave my pom poms from the sidelines as they find “suitable” partners and make lives of their own, far away from me. I am left over in my corner trying to forget how excited they were about me once. My arms are tired and my heart hurts.

…..

(to continue reading please click the link in the paragraph below)

……

I am sure no one is horribly interested in reading another 1000 words of me whining about my existential crisis, but if you do…the rest of this article (and many more) are available over on my patreon.
I made a new tier so it is $1 per month to keep reading. Works out to less than 7 cents per article, even less in USD.

https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch

I got acrylic nails done for the first time probably 23 years ago.

And, with the exception of farm life and a handful of straight jobs that didn’t pay enough, nor warrant getting them done, at least once a month since.

I can’t grow my own nails, I bite them.

For some reason, I don’t touch the fake ones until they have grown out for x amount of time and then I pick at my fingers until they bleed.

As I type this, my fingers hurt.

This happened twice during the two previous lockdowns as well. Fresh set of lovely fingernails that cannot be filled or maintained, and I file them down so I can write, but eventually they chip, split, peel and I rip them off violently and it hurts.

I have always bitten my nails. My Nana hated it, she even went so far as to take me to her nail salon and bribe me with polish. It didn’t work. Maybe 6 times in 46 years I have grown my own nails out nicely.

Never when I am stressed.

I remember my very first reconstructive surgery. I had come down with a slight cold and they delayed my surgery by a day. I wasn’t sure if they were even going to operate. My fingers were chewed to shreds by the time they put me on the gurney and rolled me to the ER. I remember the throbbing and the shame of it.

I remember getting thrown in a holding cell, 52 Division I think, during the really bad snowstorm of 1999. I had a fresh set of acrylics on when they locked me in the room and they were in a pile on the table when I left, in pieces and shards. I can still remember how bad my hands hurt.

Brief backstory that has nothing to do with anything…I was stripping at Zanzibar on Yonge Street in Toronto, I lived maybe 5-6 big city blocks away. The city had been hit with a bad storm and was pretty paralyzed. State of Emergency, the whole of Canada made fun of the mayor for calling in the Army. My girlfriend left work from day shift and I finally caught a cab. The traffic and snow was so bad the meter hit 20 bucks before we hit 3 blocks. We wanted out of the cab, driver was being awful and abusive. My girlfriend handed him a 20, demanded change, and when she reached for it, he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her halfway into the front seat. We had been sitting at a red light, she had opened the door to get out, we proceeded to roll across the intersection with her legs sticking out the door and me screaming at him to let her go and trying to pry his hands off her. The clincher was… my friend was a scrappy fucker. When she finally got some leverage, she hit him 3 times, hard in the temple and knocked him out cold…hence the rolling through the intersection. Her purse had fallen out the door, someone stole her money. We both just wanted to get home. So we gathered our shit and walked down the road towards our houses.

We got picked up by the cops 10 minutes later and thrown in holding. They couldn’t ‘tell us apart’ so we both got charged with assault.

It was a very expensive clusterfuck.

I have had a lot of those in my day. Barreling towards another one right now. All because I decided to share a cab with someone, or move to Newfoundland or move away from Newfoundland, living on the farm was expensive as fuck, leaving it too. The trailer 6 years ago that chewed my jeep’s transmission. The car wrecks.

Everything listed in the last paragraph was a separate $5000 mistake, and there are so many more.

The above isn’t what I meant to write. I was tapping away on the keyboard and my fingers hurt from being chewed and I thought about my first surgery and my impending surgery and the massive lack of direction that is happening in my life right now. All the things I have lost or am losing.

This is the last thing I am going to write for free, and I will tell you why.

When I was 16 years old my mother burned everything I had ever written since kindergarten.

I have eluded to this before but never explained it so here goes.

I had the same dresser from 2 years old til I was 38.

One big drawer across the top. 2 smaller deeper drawers in the middle and 2 cupboards on either side.

The bottom drawer contained layers and layers of papers.

Every note I had ever been passed in class. Every creative writing project I had done for school or fun. Birthday cards, poems, drawings, lists. Basically me in words and pictures.

My mother thought I was doing drugs; because I was. My behavior was angry and erratic, I was disruptive at home and school.

She went into my room to find something that would give her a clue as to what to do with me.

I wasn’t terribly organized, so everything in the drawer was just thrown in there, loosely chronological.

I had been getting high on acid and writing angry, sexual, crappy, angsty teenage poetry. Still hadn’t had sex yet. But I digress.

She read the stuff on top, found it to be pornographic and burned everything.

I am allowed to be upset about this. And I was.

I ran away from home.

I kept writing for a little while until my only writing partner and friend died in my lap and I gave up.

I lost everything.

My job, my apartment, my family and bestie at the time.

And it was all a series of unfortunate events that eventually led to me living in Northern Ontario and getting knocked up.

Not the first time I have lost everything, and I am sure it won’t be the last.

You know most of the rest.

There have been a lot of bad decisions and hard roads and fuck ups and times of great bliss in my life.

I was getting better at walking away instead of having everything ripped away.

Then the Facebook thing and I am standing in my childhood bedroom looking at the empty drawer listening to my mother say, “it’s gone, I burned it”. Not realizing the enormity of what she had done, what was at the bottom of that drawer, or the middle. It was me, it was everything I was.

I died that day metaphorically. Defeated.

After Greg died in real life, I didn’t write another thing until I hit my 30’s.

12 years of my life disappeared from that drawer, 12 more years the day before yesterday when the powers that be on Facebook decided I was too much trouble to bother with and they set my life on fire.

I know I am being melodramatic, but I am really trying to figure out what I am supposed to learn from all this.

What happened to me at 16 put me on the life path I am still walking.

I could have stayed living at home, been a lawyer or a writer, gone to university. But instead I worked in restaurants and had a baby at 20. Started stripping at 24 and here I is.

(Gestures broadly at the nothing I have to show for anything.)

Everything I have tried for the last 3 or 4 years has failed. Actually, if you think about it, it is all a failure. Except my amazing kid who literally lives his life the opposite of mine on purpose; and he is doing pretty well for himself.

I am a glaring and constant reminder of what not to do.

And I try new things and the universe just yanks them away, with a no and a slap on the hand until I reach for the next thing and that is a no too.

Am I an idiot?

Did I believe in a magic that doesn’t exist?

Ya, I totally did. I might actually be kinda insane.

I can’t believe I believe in anything. Seems so stupid.

I have completely lost my faith. What did you think was gonna happen?

I am not a witch, I am just some dummy with massive delusions, a bunch of rocks and mild pyromania. True passionate twin flame love is fucking horseshit.

Everything I believed is a lie.

I think I brainwashed myself into thinking there was more than 9-5 day to day blah blah blah.

There is only blah.

The angel of the lord is hitting me with my own hands. But he doesn’t exist either.

I remember thinking my life felt magical, like I was manifesting good things and I was happy. I remember being happy. I remember believing in fate and good juju and lessons.

But there is nothing remarkable about me except my willingness to fail out loud.

And I am so tired.

Sofa king tied.

Do I just get a straight job and a little humdrum apartment?
Try to work my way up to middle management.
Drink wine with my friends who also have average lives so I can sleep at night and try to forget everything.
Maybe learn how to knit so I stop biting my nails?
Get a mediocre boyfriend, sex on Thursdays and all-inclusive vacations once a year. Book club, spin class. Just exist like everyone else.

This has never sounded so appealing.

After today I am moving this blog over to the Patreon.

Mercury is spilling Gatorade all over everything and not in a ‘we just won the championship’ kinda way. What else do I have to do besides tie up old loose ends. So many loose ends. My life is a bunch of unfinished macramé projects shoved in a garbage bag.

Half a million times someone has read what I have written and I have nothing to show for it.

I am going to edit my past and see what is worth saving out of this drawer of papers before the universe decides to light that on fire too.

So long

Farewell

Auf Wiedersehen and thanks for the fish.

https://www.patreon.com/sarahthegoodwitch