During the pandemic, it kind of felt like the world was ending. And then most of us came out fine: some with new careers and hobbies and businesses, some having lost, but most just fine. I can't help but think that despite the normalcy of the lives we have returned to, maybe the world as we knew it did end because the way I've been feeling since hasn't felt the same.

A while ago I was reading about the decline of the western as a film genre: “In recent years, the cowboy has been replaced by the superhero as the most common expression of American values in blockbuster filmmaking.”

I have been told all my life that I could be and make anything, and that it's up to me to make my own meaning in the world.

It was the Grammys last night, a time for Flowers, women, and poetry.

6 foot tall fashion models walk down the runway all somber in sculpted gowns with the tonally contrasting yet familiar sound of something blaring in the background.

"Not all wounds bleed, 
I gander there’s an itty bitty one in me,
pretty coagulated into shame and prisms."

Since the time I've had my very first website decades ago, so much has changed about the internet and how we show up online. Shiny object syndrome and a forever identity crisis means I’ve tried it all, various platforms and bio variations and labels to try to perfectly encapsulate what it is I do.

I’m going a bit behind the scenes to share some of what’s been going on internally over the past few months. And maybe this doesn’t fit into any plan, but you know what, sometimes I really hate strategy.

One of the nights that I spent climbing out of a half-dream I was there at the Eiffel Tower looked at it for all of three seconds and it—the surround sound, the smell of stale Pulp, a thousand deadly sins—it was like I was in a casket with stars for a ceiling, laying still though legs moving seeing midnight blue for the first time and not just black masquerading as blue; the colour of romance is always the colour you haven’t seen before.

"this is what it’s about:
the loneliness of being female and surrounded
by a world that knows how to use you but
not how to value and understand you."

Of the many killer lines Miranda Priestly artfully delivers in the film version of The Devil Wears Prada—putting cerulean and the economics of materiality onto the map for the rest of us—one of my favorites comes near the end.

I’ve been selling things for a long time. I was the one rounding up my family’s junk to become another’s treasure in our first and last yard sale, the one begging mom at age twelve for $100 to buy the beeswax I needed to make and peddle lip balms, the one who, as soon as I was old enough for a credit card, signed up to sell jewelry at an online craft marketplace, the first of its a kind and a revolution at the time. I wasn’t particularly crafty; I just really liked making and selling things.

I have officially been a writer for a couple of years now but not necessarily a poet, even though technically I have this past week just launched my first collection of poems and I have made at least one sale, which, I guess, means I’m technically a poet. Hurray?

What’s your sign?

Life, the ratrace. We think it’s a race to the cheese but it’s really a race to the death; and along the way, there are a few things that matter in how we in the 21st century define a life well lived (the only time in history where so many of us can measure life by the subjective concept of fulfillment rather than a very cut-and-dry you’re dead-or-alive survival): how much you make, your relationship status, how big your house is, where you’ve travelled, and don’t forget this last part because if you do, the rest doesn’t count; how much of this is documented on Instagram for all to see.