It’s going to be all over the place, because there’s a lot to tell over lunch. Yesterday, my sister and I went to Popeye’s and I had chicken and Fanta, the official meal of the Cajun south. It was delicious, and we chatted both seriously and not. So much laughter, and long hugs because it had been a while since we’d had some face-to-face conversation.

One of the things that really flipped my shit was that when Counselor wrote to me and told me not to contact Dana under any circumstances, I told her that I wanted Dana to cut all ties with my family. This was over Christmas, and I really, really meant it.

Lindsay told me that on Feb. 7th, Dana contacted her to ask if she knew any tax accountants, and she was asking for a friend who’d been here less than a year. It hurt so bad I almost cried. Why she thinks that she can have a relationship with my sister after all we’ve been through is unimaginable to me… on the serious. I was glad that I was on my anxiety medication, because when the cortisol and sin started racing through my body, I was able to combat it.

I don’t have a relationship with Counselor… not that I want one. But it would be the same. Dana hurt me so bad that my therapist recommended group therapy for battered women. I am not innocent in that fight, but the last punch undid me. I had a bruise under my eye for a week, and phantom pain for long afterwards. My wife and best friend in the world left a bruise that everyone could see. I couldn’t leave the house. I took sleeping pills all the time to get away from the pain. It was the most horrible feeling in the entire world, and I lashed out at everyone. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t function, and at first, literally.

The problem was that she outweighed me by quite a bit, so when her fist hit my face, at first I thought my eye socket was broken. She arranged a penitential rite with our priest, and she opened the Book of Common Prayer to show it to me. I hyperventilated so hard that she called my parents, and when they showed up, they saw the bruise under my eye, and it was humiliating… Devastating, really. I didn’t want to show ANYONE that bruise, much less my stepmom and dad. I was just undone.

The fight started when she pushed me so hard I went off like a rat dog with a Napoleon complex, but I couldn’t compete. At that point, I was dealing with a lot of shit that had nothing to do with her, but it was making me so anxious that I’d dropped to 117 pounds and my muscle mass was disappearing. Dana was the opposite. She gained weight and was over 200. Again, I couldn’t compete. I was feather-weight at best.

And the bitch of it is I still love her, pray for her, wish that we could have done more to save our marriage than completely destroy it one day at a time. But praying for her gives me peace in the matter, and I won’t stop. It feels like I won’t ever. But I know that eventually I will meet someone else, hopefully long into the future so that I have time to grieve. There are moments when I still can’t function, I am so upset at what happened. We were in trouble, and the fight was just the last thing that happened. I will never forget it, and yet, she’s still the one I’d hoped I’d be chasing around our nursing home.

So, to say that I flipped my shit yesterday is just about the most honest thing I can say. As Bryn would say, “it’s just true.” I had a great time driving my car home, because she is so perfect for me, and then I crumpled in grief and sadness. I went to bed at 7:00 and slept until 8:00 just because I could. I wanted to get away, so I took 2 Atarax and slept without dreaming. I knew it would do that, because if I had been dreaming, I would have ripped Dana a new one, and I didn’t want to have that dream in the slightest.

She can’t have it both ways. She can’t ask for silence and expect to have full contact with my family. They are so over her.

And one day, I will be, too.

Just not yet.

It’s a good day here at “Stories.” I forgot to put on my calendar when my sister had a meeting in Annapolis, so it’s a surprise that she’s coming to pick me up for lunch at 1300. Her car has arrived and is parked in the parking lot, so I asked her if she could show me where the fuse box is. 🙂 There is no one in the world that I love more than Lindsay. She is my favorite person on God’s green earth, and a surprise visit is enough to make me tear up.

Her car is a Yaris 2-door hatchback, and it’s “bigger on the inside,” as anyone who has ever owned a Yaris will tell you. It’s so much fun to drive. So. Much. Fun. She’s my little egg car, and Dana and I have had a long tradition of naming our cars, so I waffle between Eggbert and Egglentine. I also call her Egglebert Humperdinck. She needs some love, and I’m going to give it to her- Volfe taught me how to change out the sparkplugs, and we’ll see what she needs at Jiffy Lube, too. I don’t change my own oil. It’s just too messy and I don’t have my own driveway. She also needs to be scrubbed down with vinyl protectant and I need some sort of Bluetooth device for my phone. Apparently taking apart the dash to add a new head unit is difficult. It’s already got AUX, so that’s what I used this morning for directions and streaming Spotify. Since I’m on a business plan, I share bandwidth with other people, so I’m trying to clear my phone out of everything it needs so I can put local podcasts and music on it not to go over, or limit other people from using bandwith- it’s all about sharing. 😛 Besides, Google Play will let me download albums or stream them, so I don’t have to spend money on Spotify.

I may go to Best Buy and see if they can do the head unit thing, because I found that in my Saturn, being able to have the mic pick up my voice and other people’s voices coming through my speakers so I could actually hear them was amazing. Some of the head units even have iPhone apps so that the head unit can control Pandora, Spotify, etc… and they’re not expensive. The last one I bought was only $125 and free installation. I bought a Bluetooth speaker phone before I bought the head unit the last time around, and found that it didn’t work worth a damn. If you’ve found one you like, please leave it in the comments, because it would be cheaper and easier than replacing the stereo.

This morning on the way to work I listened to the episode of “You Made it Weird” with Ben Folds, because I thought it was the best inaugural thing to christen it given our ties with him.

I drove to work today because yesterday I got caught in the doors of the Metro and I hurt from head to toe.

But that’s another story for another day……

And on that note, my break is up.

By the next work week, I’ll be driving either to work or to the Park & Ride. I can’t decide which is better, because I have come to love my time on the train. It’s basically the only social interaction I get that I truly enjoy. These orange-juice-glass deep relationships are fun, because I get to talk to someone for a few minutes and then switch to the Orange Line and start all over. Driving to Silver Spring station will still give me at least 45 minutes off my commute, because then I won’t have to wait for the bus. I’ll also be able to return to Starbucks easier, because the store is actually connected to one of the Metro entrances. Other days, I know I’ll choose to sleep in and take the freeway. I’m counter-flow traffic, so 20 minutes is not that bad. I can leave my house by 8:30 and still be there in plenty of time. I’m also excited about getting Maryland license plates, because honestly, I think they’re cooler than Virginia. I really want DC, but I don’t live there. The license plates in DC (at least some of them) actually No Taxation Without Representation, the rallying cry for DC… plus, I love the flag.

One of the tattoos I really want is the logo for Sticky Fingers bakery, because instead of bars under the stars, it’s a rolling pin and a spoon. As a former line cook, it speaks to me more than just about any DC symbol I’ve ever seen. But there are more important tattoos I want to get, first. I want a small dragon encircling my dragonfly, with fire singing every part of it until it’s as black as my heart where that tattoo is concerned. In fact, I had a designer draw it up, but I’ve changed my mind as to the look. I want it to be circular, kind of like the Firefox/Thunderbird logo.

I doubt I will actually get it, but I also thought about great tattoos for my ankles. Check it out- one for all four sides- an old school Mac computer, the Windows 3.1 logo, Tux, and the BSD devil. Is that not fantastic? I’d probably do it as a charm bracelet on one ankle if that kind of tattoo wasn’t so terribly cliche. It’s the ankle bracelet and the tramp stamp, the white girl dyad… but especially the Mac tattoo, an ancient SE. That was my computer in late high school/college, because I needed a word processor without ANY way to connect to the Internet. I mean, really. What writer can go five minutes now without checking Facebook… especially now that Chrome has introduced those ridiculous desktop notifications. I’ve blocked them, because they’re just too distracting.

But back to the whole tattoo thing. I get them because they are the best conversation starters EVAH. Especially with my $1.83 tattoo, people *love* that story and sometimes people tear up when I get to the part about Bill emptying his pockets. I’ve also decided that after my dragon tattoo, I’m probably not going to add anything to my back, because I enjoy looking at them just as much as everyone else. I need to get my quill cleaned up, and maybe I’ll do that first, because it’s the cheapest. I just want some white added to soften it up, and the blood red has faded over time.

I also have a lot of quotes that would be good, but I don’t trust tattoo artists with fonts. I know you can’t imagine why. I would be paranoid the entire time that the kerning wouldn’t be right, the artist would have no idea how much fonts matter, etc. If I *did* get a quote, it would probably be from Doctor Who- “we’re all stories in the end… make it a good one.” I might be paraphrasing, but you get the general idea.

I am actually writing on the train with my Bluetooth keyboard and it feels so good. It’s the first time I’ve ever done it, and I have no idea why I never thought of it before. Mostly because normally the train is so full that I don’t have room to pull it out. However, if I get to the train a little before 8:00, the train is usually not jam-packed the way it is at 8:30…. another reason to only drive to the Park & Ride. Getting my writing time in before work is still important to me, and if I don’t have time to make it to SBUX, this is a great alternative. Plus, my gas will last so much longer. Just not sure how much it would cost to double up on my transporation budget. I need to run the numbers. However, transportation, soda, and sandwiches are really the only thing I ever spend money on, except for the few gifts I’ve bought for friends lately (BRYN, I STILL NEED YOUR ADDRESS!). Amazon is just too easy. I have my Smile account set to donate to Doctors Without Borders, so not only do my friends get presents, so does my favorite non-profit on earth.

You can set your Smile account to several non-profits if Medicin Sans Frontieres (sp?) isn’t your thing, but it’s mine. If I’d become a doctor or a nurse, there’s a large chance I would have just taken off with them. I want adventure in my life, because I feel like now I’m ready to broaden my horizons.

That will happen in March when my friend Scott comes to visit. I am getting SO excited to pick him up at the airport, because I am sure it will be a mixture of going out for socializing and meeting “famous” people…. even if they are Republicans. 😛 Just because I’m a yellow-dog Democrat doesn’t mean I am immune to wanting to meet people that influence politics, whether they’re right or wrong. Because you know what I’ll do. I’ll smile and be charming in front of them, and then come home and tell you every little bit of dirt I remember.

The only time I’ve ever been “caught” writing about politics was on my old blog, Clever Title Goes Here, when I wrote a scathing review of the Democratic Party, including the words “Harry Reid needs to step the fuck up.” I got a comment from the DNCC saying, “we will take your observations under consideration.” I freaked the fuck out, because it was the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It’s always intimidating to run into people you’ve talked smack about on a national level. Maybe that’s why I shy away from politics now. If I write about my friends, I have the chane to make amends or I don’t… they just walk away because they know that if they are a part of my life, they are a part of my writing. It’s just who I am, and I cannot take anything back. I can only try to present them as the three-dimensional characters that they are… the love and the difficulties, real love, painful and true, honest and real.

If I ever picked a fight with someone in politics, intelligence, etc., I might end up on a radar that never ends. I don’t want to end up on some kind of shitty list I can’t get off of because one offense leads to being watched, and I’m not interested. Getting sued is not my bag, baby. I don’t mean any harm. I’m just telling my story and hoping that it resonates with people. I have friends in the hacker community who have gotten on that radar, and their stories are cautionary tales.

And this tale is now finished, because I’m at my stop. 🙂

I didn’t bite the bullet and get a car on my own. I didn’t even think I wanted one until I got a call from my sister, who said that my dad had gotten a new car, so he was letting her take over the payments on his car, and wanted to know if I wanted hers.

Ummm, yes.

Not only is it a manual transmission, a total theft-deterrent device because I’m old and young people don’t DO stick shifts, it’s a hatchback. Literally the car I would have been looking for had I wanted to buy on my own. And, as a total Dr. Who reference, it’s a 2007 Yaris… bigger on the inside. I will become, as my friend John says, a “Yarisian.”

It was enough to make me tear up, because when it arrives, it will still smell like her. It will still smell like home. My dad was so funny, because he called me and asked me what kind of lunch meat I would like in the trunk. If you are not familiar, there’s a thing in our family that I named “Lanagan Lunchmeat Syndrome,” because when I lived in Alexandria, my dad sent me an old Mercedes. I drove it around for six weeks not knowing what the smell was, and I finally took the liner out of the trunk and found a pound of sliced turkey that had probably fallen out of a grocery bag in 1999.

Lindsay came to visit Kathleen and me when my mother’s choir was singing at Carnegie Hall so that we could have a night in DC and then road trip up to NYC the next morning. She was eating a sandwich, and six weeks later, I found half of it under the driver’s seat.

When I moved to Portland, I had a Saturn that was killing me on payments, so I sent the car to my sister, Caitlin. I went eight months without a car, and then my dad sent me his old car, a Ford Focus, complete with a hot dog in the back seat.

Then, when I upgraded to my Jeep, Dana left a Subway sandwich in my center console…. but thank God it was still wrapped. I wasn’t so lucky with Lindsay. 😛

It hearkens back to my early childhood, when my mom, dad, and toddler Lindsay were taking a road trip to visit my grandparents in NE Texas. Lindsay, from the back seat, was feeding my dad Nacho Cheese Doritos. He ate three or four of them and then remembered we hadn’t stopped for snacks or anything, so he said, “Lindsay, where are you getting these Doritos?” “Off the floor,” she replied. My dad said, “LINDSAY!” She said, “Daaaad. It’s ok. I checked ’em on both sides and they’re not dirty.” That’s my Lindsay. She has been a cutup ever since she learned to talk. Hasn’t changed much in that department, and her Kate McKinnon impression is so good it will leave you in stitches. My favorite is when she does Kate playing the mom playing “Grand Theft Auto.” She is literally my favorite person on earth, and we’re going to have lunch the next time she’s here for a conference in Annapolis. That is something for which I am having trouble waiting.

Lindsay had a thing when the driver was ready to load up my car, so Matt (her husband) took care of it. I called him and thanked him for blessing me over and over, and he said, “that’s what family does.” I teared up a little and knew he was right. I can’t wait until I am in the position to return the favor. I have sent very small gifts to my friends for their patience with me as I’ve begun this journey toward wholeness, but I want to do more than that. If I won the lottery, which is impossible because I don’t play, I would buy houses and cars for everyone that has stuck with me over these past few years, because that is what they deserve. I hope the sentiment counts, because I am so grateful… beyond belief, really. I have not been in a space to give back much, because I had (have) so much work to do on myself before my cup was full enough to give to others.

When I was in the thick of my mental illness, I think people thought I was some kind of borderline personality, incapable of seeing anyone but myself. This is the furthest thing from the truth. I care so much it hurts. But when you get down to a place where you can’t even function, it’s hard to care about anything but sleeping to get away from the madness. My life had become so small, so insular, that I realized I was on a path of total destruction, and in Argo and Dana’s case, mutually assured.

Speaking of Dana, I wrote to her and told her it was time to get a divorce. All we need to do is file the paperwork with Multnomah county. She’s going to take care of it and send me a copy. If I don’t contest it, the marriage is dissolved. I hope the state of Vermont is just as easy, because I want to be truly divorced from Kathleen as well. The legal advice I got back in the day was just to let it go… we didn’t live there, so why bother? Because gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, I don’t want to run the risk of wanting to get married again later in life and being stopped because I’m still married to someone else. Honestly, gay marriage being nationally legal is something that never would have occurred to me in this lifetime… especially since when I came out, there were still so many people that thought of it as a disease, or a sin that could be corrected, ignoring the truth of the matter. The truth is that I couldn’t be heterosexual any more than I could suddenly start writing with my left hand the rest of my life.

Could I marry a man? Maybe. But I wouldn’t be completely happy because I wouldn’t be true to myself. I’m just not wired that way… and thanks to the Supreme Court, I don’t have to be.

That being said, I have no room in my life for romance… not yet. I am not healthy enough for anything but beginning good, solid friendships that will sustain me until I am ready.

Because that’s what family does.

I’m listening to the Argo playlist on Spotify, the songs I listened to the most when I realized that I couldn’t be friends with a woman that excited me and be married to someone else at the same time. The fact that Argo has never and will never reciprocate those feelings was irrelevant to me. I didn’t much care what her reaction was, I cared what it was doing to me… and actually, I did care what it was doing to her to be apart from me, because she invested in a friendship and thought I was needlessly throwing it away, tossing it like it was nothing.

She wasn’t physically there to see my reaction to those words, which was basically days and days of feeling like crap and not knowing what to do about it. I was such a sook, and I look back and feel sorry that Dana and Aaron had to deal with my bullshit. I cried like a baby, truly. I needed her friendship. I honestly did. But not in all ways, because when she made me go starry-eyed, it wasn’t mutual, and it wasn’t safe for me keep diving into her, because her words created different reactions in me than mine created in her. The more she opened up to me, the more I wanted to be her person, the one that fixed everything with emotional band-aids and sent her back into her physical world.

But in my physical world, I already had a person, and she had me. I’d made promises, and I meant them. I couldn’t wander too far from my marriage vows, and yet, I did- not physically, but emotionally, because, well, because I wanted to and I was an impulsive jackass at times… and yet, not, because there are emotional layers I am not willing to unpack here. There were reasons I strayed emotionally that I won’t talk about, because to talk about them is to betray someone I love, and whether we are speaking or not, love will never be past tense. But it’s the right kind of love, now. I just had to find it first.

I originally told her about my attraction to her for two reasons. The first is that I thought we’d meet on the ground someday, and I wanted her to be sensitive to it. I’ve said this before, but I didn’t want a situation where she didn’t know she was capable of turning me on and tripping over a land mine. To me, it was fair warning. Full disclosure, no bullshit.

Secondly, I didn’t need her to be attracted to me. I needed compassion… maybe a story about how someone turned her head when it shouldn’t have, etc. A classic “love’s a bitch sometimes” kind of story…. mostly because I wanted her to know that I thought of my feelings for her as inconvenient and, frankly, stupid. But sometimes your heart makes connections without asking your brain first, and your heart betrays you, because you can fight logic all day long. Fighting emotion is useless.

My heart was hurting, because I had to say no to Argo’s friendship in order to say yes to marriage, because when I was “in the cloud,” I was ignoring everything on the ground.

And then I couldn’t make it stick. I missed Argo’s words and reestablished contact before I was truly ready, so there were several more instances of feeling like I was touching a live wire and living to tell about it.

I couldn’t cry in front of Aaron and Dana, so mostly I cried while I was driving myself to and from work. I wasn’t crying because Argo didn’t return my affections. I was the perfect picture of David, the prime minister  in Love Actually who, when he first sees one of his staff, his head tilts and says, “ohhhhh, that’s inconvenient.” I was punishing myself because I knew it was my shit to own and get rid of, and music is how I did it.

It’s a lot of high energy stuff, because I didn’t want to cry anymore. I wanted to take those high-dopamine feelings and use them as an injection of happiness into my day. My heart beat like an 808 drum, and I tried to use that happiness to keep me floating…. and it worked, for a while.

And then my happiness began to fade, because Dana did not see how driven I was to make our relationship right again.

I remember pulling into the parking lot at Alert Logic, Wilson Phillips blasting, losing my shit. Hold on for one more day? Could you shorten it to an hour? Tears rushing down my face in utter helplessness.

This deserves further investigation, but i don’t have time to unpack it all. I’ve got to get back to work. But I will tell you that the song that is playing right now is “DC Sleeps Tonight” by The Postal Service.

It’s a song that expresses something to both Argo and Dana…. I am finally seeing… I was the one worth leaving….

I needed time to get it together. I need time. I will need time.

And now, I have it.

I’m sure we’ll talk more about this later. My mind is buzzing.

Today, the memory that Facebook presented from last year was the first day of my hospitalization, where so many of you poured out your love and support and told me that you were glad I’d gotten the help I needed. I have so many stories from those days, probably enough to write a book, but I’d rather put everything here. There’s something comforting about having my own space and no editors. I’ve made lots of typos, grammatical errors, and run-ons… and still you show up. To me, it’s kind of like making an MTV Unplugged album every day.

I would be remiss not to remember Argo on this day, because it was her words that finally got me off my ass; why do you expect everyone else to fix you? That’s easy, really. I didn’t know I could. I didn’t know how to take power into my own hands, because I’d never done it before. It was the beginning of learning to adult hardcore, because sometimes part of being an adult is realizing that in order to get your shit together, you have to fall apart.

When I first began to see down into the core of my abuse, I was just vomiting emotions everywhere. The Divine Mrs. B and Argo jumped in with their superpowers, because I wasn’t worried for me. I was worried for Dana… that I was too much for her to handle and I needed other people to look after her because I was too wrapped up in my own healing to give anything to anyone else. I felt like I was constantly pouring from an empty cup and I was in no shape to be a wife.I wanted Dana to feel like she had a safe place to fall to talk about me, because I knew she’d need an outlet and might not necessarily ask for one herself.

Because of the way we were raised, our Classic Response™ was to use the buttons on our clothes to hold in our feelings… and then I came along and was all like, “fuck that shit, I am going down and I cannot hide it anymore.” My parents were out of town and dealing with their own enormous amount of shit, which is why I called on my friends instead of them. I am sure they would have wanted to know what was going on, but the stress of adding things onto their plates was heart-wrenching to me, and when I asked my friends to jump in, they fucking did. In a hot second. During that time, Argo and I barely went an hour without checking in, and Mrs. B had the most sound advice I’d ever heard if I could just put it into practice- “just stop caring.” That I was the kind of person who cared way too much and if I could let go of caring for Diane and try to get angry (as I’d needed to do for years) it would help.

In short, it did.

I tapped into my rage, obviously and somewhat viciously. I will never forget the e-mail that I got from Argo after I posted that link: “I heard the sonic boom after your last post.” There is also another piece to the puzzle, and I will not name her because she is a mutual friend, who said that I should get angry, should name, not because I was angry, but because it was the right thing to do.

I also had another friend that carried me through that time in my life, but we aren’t friends anymore, and don’t think I don’t care about it. She was my “little buddha,” injecting calm into the storm, but I fucked that relationship all to hell and I miss her a little each day, wishing I could reach out and knowing I shouldn’t, because it wouldn’t bring her any peace. She told me she was pulling chalks (or something like that… I have no idea what it meant, but one of my strong points is context clues…. I knew what she meant, anyway.).

It was, as Argo said, “realizing the common denominator was me,” and trying to get all the help I needed to be able to survive this massive amount of trauma I’d been dealt and just kept sweeping under the rug, because I was gaslit so successfully that I thought Diane was right. I was just crazy. Nothing happened that was untoward or inappropriate, I just couldn’t get over her.

Getting over her was relative. I stopped having romantic feelings for her in the late ’90s, but I wanted the family she said we were, while at the same time trying to push me away as quickly as she possibly could. It was a paradox I could not handle. For instance, when I was 18, Diane wanted me to come and live with her so that I could get out of the Bible Belt and go to school at Portland State. When I talked to her partner, Susan, she said that Diane had told her that she thought “when I was 18, I’d just go away.” It was interesting, because Susan has a son, and when I met him, I instantly thought of him as a brother, because I thought I was part of Diane’s package as well.

But I wasn’t. I just thought I was. We took a road trip together, getting to know each other in a family sort of way, and yet, after that, it never gelled in the way I thought it was going to go. Too much sludge in my soul to come clean, too meek not to just go with the flow.

The title comes from a Facebook post, where I told Dana I loved her “100 and crazy percent.” It’s the way I felt one year ago today about myself.

And on that note, it’s time to get to work.

Much love and hopes for a great day for you all.

 

 

I bought some Marie Callender frozen meals to take to work. I know it’s processed food, but I figured it was better than going through a drive-thru. Today it was turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and carrots. Then, I had two donuts for dessert in addition to the one I ate when I got here. I’m planning on taking a long walk later. I needed food, especially sugar, because I am absolutely dragging ass. This morning I woke up at 0430, raring to go, but then I decided to sleep another hour and a half, and then I couldn’t move. Seriously, getting up was equal to the task of nailing Jell-O to a wall. I don’t know where my 0430 energy went, but it left and was replaced by a hungover malaise from my sleeping pills. I finally got out of bed at 8:15, ordered an Uber, and threw on my clothes. I put all my pills in my backpack and took them in the car. I got here just fine, but I wish I had taken all my 0430 energy and run with it. I could have made it to Starbucks by 0600 and settled into a semblance of routine.

I do not know why when I was unemployed, I was so anal-retentive about my schedule and now I’m not. Perhaps it’s that I spend so much time at the office that I feel I need every ounce of the time I’m not there. However, it would have been nice to have a shower this morning. I got a new Axe fragrance (body wash, not cologne) that smells like rosemary. It’s called Deep Space, and I’m pretty sure they don’t make it anymore, but it’s still in a few stores. I like Axe body wash because it smells so good and the fragrance lasts all day, so there’s no need for cologne/perfume/etc. I am also a huge fan of Dark Temptations, which has notes of chocolate and vanilla and whatever the hell it is they put in Obsession. Yes, I said it. Obsession.

That just took me to a very dark place. Diane wore (and probably still does) Obsession for every moment we were in the same room, and over time, it became the scent of home. When she walked into a room, the scent took me back to the bell tables at St. Mark’s, where we would share secrets and long, comforting hugs.

I choose to remember those moments as “home,” because when I don’t, I want to break stuff (it’s all about the she said she said bullshit).

I like having a note of Obsession in my cologne because it reminds me of that time in my life, and feels like home to me now. It’s like an homage, similar to Basie quoting Ellington or similar.

Recovering from all of this still leaves me in a weird “I’m sort of ok about it but I still want to kick her ass into next week” sort of place. But my goal is to take away rage, not add to it. I’d only be going back on my word that I want peace, and anger would only set me back even further in my recovery.

I really miss Sarah, and I need to find a therapist that can meet after work. I’ve got so much to do in terms of working on myself that I don’t want to abandon it. PTSD is real, and it wires my reactions in ways that I never would have even thought. For a lot of people, it is the key that unlocks their personality, and I am no exception. Until you understand where I’ve walked, you cannot understand me.

And if you cannot understand where I’ve walked, just the want to is enough.

Amen.

There really are a lot of perks where I work. For instance, there was pizza delivered for lunch. Afterward, I wanted something sweet and realized I didn’t have any chocolate, so I decided a Coke would have to do. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a real Coke, loaded with ice like every Texan ever…. except in Texas, the type of Coke would be a Dr Pepper… we just don’t have any. Such a pity. Samantha thinks that it’s probably my blood type…. and she might be right.

Although since I’ve moved here, I’ve started buying the generic sodas at Giant, because I like the fruit ones without caffeine. They’re killing me, though, because the last two times I’ve been there, the diet grape has been out. Right now I have diet cola with lime (which turned out to be really good and doesn’t taste like Pledge™), diet root beer, and diet orange.

The diet orange tastes like diabetes.

I also bought a mixed case of Zevia when it was on sale at Whole Foods, because I had never seen it so cheap and probably wouldn’t again.Dr Zevia is quite tasty, and I’m glad that I don’t have any in my fridge because I am sure that the amount I drink of it is unhealthy entirely.

I also found Diet Gosling’s at Wegman’s, and oh my fuck. It is everything I have ever wanted in a soda. I’m getting a jones right now. I wonder if I could con someone into driving me.

I talk about diet soda a lot because it’s my only true vice. I only drink alcohol occasionally, because I’ve had my fill. When I was at Biddy’s, we used to get one shift drink every night, and I used it to try everything in the bar. I never ordered the same thing twice.The other fun night was when we found a cheat sheet of cocktail recipes behind the cash register and started trying those. The best one I found was called a “Pineapple Bomb.” 1 oz Southern Comfort, 1 oz Amaretto, 5 oz pineapple juice.

Treat yo’self.

For the record, I hate Southern Comfort, but it’s good in this.

The surprise in the bar was that my favorite turned out to be currant vodka and 7-up, or Tullamore Dew and soda with a bit of cherry juice to bring out the undertones of the whiskey.

I am a great mixologist, and I like to play around. But if I had to choose what Katt Williams calls “a drank, and a backup drank,” it would be Old Overholt and Jack Daniels. It’s best for your backup drink to be something everyone carries.

I drink both with a tablespoon of water to let it bloom.

And for those of you in Houston who like this sort of thing, Spec’s has a house brand of coconut rum that I used to drink straight out of the freezer, because it makes a coconut slushie. Tread carefully. Your ex doesn’t care about you, and no, you cannot do a handstand.

Going straight edge with the occasional drink has been the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. I used to have a drink every night after work, which invariably turned into two or three over the course of the evening, just laughing and talking with friends. It wasn’t enough to make me drunk over that period of time, but it affected the way my medication worked and I wasn’t sensitive to it when I clearly should have been.

Now, I feel better. Just don’t take away my diet soda. I will cut a bitch.

Our divorce announcement was the first thing I saw when I logged into Facebook this morning, and because I’d written about it yesterday, it did not make me as angry and sad as I thought it would. It’s like the post yesterday helped let out some of the air in my tires. But I still need some tea for this one. Irish Breakfast. I’m not fucking around here.

Hold please.

---

The tea that I made is very, very strong… and that’s the way I like it. Steeped for a very long time with lots of Splenda and CoffeeMate. It’s what’s called a “Builder’s Brew,” which is basically “it’ll put hair on your chest,” in the words of my friend Dianne Maurice. I’ve already had plenty of caffeine, but I don’t write well without a cup of tea beside me, and this entry requires writing well… or at least, to the best of my ability… which is slowly coming along. I think.

---

Dana usually called me “her beloved,” which I believe she picked up from my grandfather, who has called my grandmother that for years and years. They’ve never met, which is such a pity because it would explain a lot. 😛 My grandfather and I share a lot of the same characteristics, like a walk passed down from him to my father to me. Sam says that I “walk heavy,” and she can always tell when I’m in the house. It’s true.

It is also true that Dana looks like my grandmother in certain pictures, especially when “Nanny” was young- something I noticed long after we met and comforting when I figured it out. Over time, Dana became a Lanagan through and through, even picking up our special language, McLanamese. It’s a combination of all our last names- McCain, McMenemy, and Lanagan. There are certain phrases we’ve used over and over, since I was a teen, really… because if something is funny once, it’s funny a thousand times. Dana would slay me every time she used a “Lanaganism,” because it just proved to me that she wasn’t just my wife. She was a daughter-in-law, a sister-in-law, and an aunt to the cutest child on the planet.

However, in my family, we do not use qualifiers like “step” and “in-law.” For instance, Lindsay’s husband is not my brother-in-law, but my brother. I use them here to explain the legal family relationship, but she was a daughter, a sister, just like me. In some ways, and I’m not sure that this is a joke, my family liked her better than me… or at least, it seemed that way to me, and it made me happy. It just showed me that she was “one of us.” In that way, it is the biggest loss I’ve ever faced. Grief flows from me like a running river, because I didn’t just lose a partner. I lost a member of my family.

As an aside, the phrase “legal family relationship” reminds me of Counselor. She used to give lectures on how to get temporary restraining orders to battered women, and one of the funniest things about it was that she had to explain that you could put “husband” or “boyfriend,” but BABY DADDY IS NOT A LEGAL RELATIONSHIP. It put Dana and I into fits, and it was one of those phrases that just came up over and over… you know, because if it’s funny once, it’s funny a THOUSAND times.

I am writing all of this down to show that to me, Dana is not a person. She’s an event. My dad said that about Diane to me when I was a kid, and I instantly knew what he meant… that when I looked at Diane, I saw her in her current iteration, and every iteration that came before it.

When I met Dana, I thought she was the most obnoxious person I’d ever met in my life, and as I have said before, I looked at Diane and said, “Who. Is. That. Woman. That. Accents. Every. Word!” It wasn’t until Dana invited me into her silence that I began to love her for all she is worth, which is a whole hell of a lot. She was my world, in the very best sense of the word. In a way, we were perfect for each other, because we both had these faces that we presented to the rest of the world, and the people we were one-on-one. I learned that Dana was very different- quieter, smaller, still. And by smaller, I mean guided by the smallest part of her spirit she could find, rather than being the biggest personality in the room. I began to wish that more people could see the Dana I saw, and we had a code for it. When she was overacting like Shatner, I could lean forward and whisper, “dial it back, Dana.”

Alternatively, she could do the same for me in different ways. I am quiet and solitary to a fault as I grow older, and there is only so much togetherness I can take. Dana could tell with one look when I was done, and would start saying her goodbyes. It was marvelous having someone not afraid to run interference.

So when I think of Dana, I can see galaxies. I see her for who she is, and who she was, and I cry my eyes out thinking about the fact that I will not see her as she will be, which I have always thought was an amazing person, full in herself. Because of the way we both behaved, I don’t believe either one of us has the right to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation, not because I have the potential to act the same as I am, but because we might lapse back into old patterns and the progress we’ve made might get lost in the shuffle.

We might make good buddies, but we can’t. We just can’t. I cannot bear the thought of watching her love someone else in front of me, and I cannot speak to her future, but I can speak to the past, that when I’ve had girlfriends and Dana has filled the best friend role, she was jealous to a fault… and huge turf wars ensued. I can say for myself that the same thing would happen with me. We have so many old inside jokes that it would destroy me not to have her by my side.

It’s something that I should have known when I told her about my feelings for Argo. Period. The turf war began in her own mind, because Argo was never in the game. As I have said before, the main idea in crushing out on Argo was because it couldn’t go anywhere, and I felt safe in the knowing of it. I’d never kept anything a secret from Dana, and I didn’t think this one was one I should hold, either, because talking about it helped it to go away… until Dana became convinced that Argo was a threat because of all the truth we’d shared with each other… that Argo would fall in love with me regardless of orientation and gender. It was never true, not ever, but it seemed true to her and that was what mattered. I think I have said this before, that I shared that information with Argo, saying, “how I have that much power, I do not know.” It is true that I told Argo to relax, that I just wanted to flirt with her in a non-threatening way, and I opened the door to something I never should’ve in a million years… maybe two million… because Argo’s wordplay is sharper than mine, and without knowing it, she stepped over my comfort zone and I thought about those flirts for years… to the point where after I broke up with Dana, I had to know the truth, because Dana’s words had gotten under my skin. I took my shot with her, and I lost… but that didn’t mean I loved her any less. It wouldn’t have been fair not to love her for exactly who she is, and not some cocked up story.

My line was always that I wanted Dana to be my “I want to scratch my nails down your back” girlfriend and Argo to be my “wine and yoga pants” girlfriend- and never the twain shall meet… and I lost both of those chances when I lashed out at both of them, unreasonably so, because I did not have the tools to deal with what I was feeling. I had all the emotional tools to deal with other people’s problems when they put them in front of me, but I could not turn around and use that toolbox on myself. It is my life’s work to figure out how.

The dream of this church, St. James and All Sinners, is real… but I need to figure out my own mental shit before I can take on the responsibility of caring for others all the time. As I wrote to Susan, “I need to work on myself because pastors sometimes show up at the worst times in people’s lives. I want to feel everything, and have enough clinical separation that I am not carrying other people’s problems when I get home.” St. James is just another reason I miss Dana desperately, because she was willing to go the extra mile and become the partner I needed in ministry. Her ability to listen without trying to fix anything became a lifeline.

I met another woman at a Meetup that scared me to the point that I never called her back when she reached out to me the next morning… I just ghosted because in my mind, she was perfect for me. She’d been a church secretary for almost 25 years, and knew how to build a church from the ground up. I was still licking my wounds with Dana and Argo, and it was the last thing I needed, to feel the dopamine rush of “new relationship.” I took her goodnight kiss with me, and it fed my ego mightily, because I knew that I was attractive to someone else. But I couldn’t in good conscience drag someone else into the morass I was facing. Dana was still everything to me, and going into a new relationship would have taken away my focus on erasing that fact.

And Argo would never tell you this herself, but she is gorgeous. Just the type of goddess where if she asked you to jump naked and backwards off a diving board singing the “Star Spangled Banner” you’d do it or die trying. The dopamine rush of “new relationship” with her, no matter what it was, also had me dying inside for a while, because I’d pushed her away in the most ugly way possible. So out of character for me that I cannot help but cringe when I think of it. She thought I was angry that “I didn’t get my way,” but I never thought of it like that. I thought that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I never took my shot, and that even if I lost, it would have been heartbreaking not to ever have been brave enough to ask. Dana’s words resonated in me, hardcore, and I had to know for sure if Dana was right or wrong.

Dana was disastrously wrong, but I do not fault her for it. I take responsibility both for taking my shot (after Dana and I broke up), and the way I pushed Argo away with such vitriol. I knew that my attraction to her would not go away until she was out of my life completely (at least for a while), and I took the biggest and best shortcut to trying to push her away that my heart breaks at my own hand… just about every day, in fact.

The thing is that Argo would have ghosted had I just asked. I didn’t need to rage at her and try to make her feel like shit. It backfired in a major way, and that is all that needs to be said about that. It was a time in which I both needed her desperately as a sounding board and needed time to get my shit together before I could take down my protective walls with her. I was so utterly conflicted, confused, and angry.

I didn’t realize how much I needed medication to deal with anxiety, along with the protocol I was already taking. The medication does not deal with my mood and behavior- that is up to me and my therapist- but it does take away the impulsive fight-or-flight response to everything. It takes away the shortness of breath and the, as Nadia Bolz-Weber calls, “cortisol and sin” racing through my body when I feel anger.

I wish that Dana and Argo could both see me with different eyes, because when it was good, it was so, so good… and when it got bad, it was wicked.

If there is any hope at all in this garbage dump of a situation, it’s that this is not the end of our movie.

But it is for now.

Fin.

:::::::::PARTY ALERT:::::::::::::

Dana and I are getting married soon (obviously, QUITE soon), but we’re not going to do everything all at once. We’re going to go to the court house and get our legal benefits squared away immediately, then planning a wedding at Epiphany later. I cannot even. Oy the decisions. I am guessing that we will end up at a coffee shop/bar/restaurant/our backyard with food and drinks afterward. Let Dana and me know if you want to be on the txt distribution list for that and we’ll text you when we’re leaving for the courthouse. That way, you have enough time to get to our house/the meeting place by the time we’re done and can relax with “all y’all.”

Sometimes Facebook has a way of kicking me in the gut every morning. It will pass, but right now body memory is taking over and I remember exactly how I felt throughout this whole process. Soon, the memory will be our separation announcement, and even though it is here in the pensieve, it will still wake me up with sadness and rage when I see it pass by in the “memories” section that Facebook thinks is so cute.

What is so amazing is being able to go back to that memory on Facebook, and all the love that poured out for us as we began our new lives. At least 60 people expressed their sadness and their hope, and it meant the world to me. I didn’t think of it so much as an ending, but two new beginnings, and we both jumped at them. Dana found what she needed in Texas, because she didn’t have any memories attached to it save the ones we had together. I was haunted by a number of ghosts, most notably Diane’s, because learning who I was as an emotionally abused child made Houston the last place on earth I wanted to be every day. Houston had me emotionally regressing into the child I was, rather than the adult I wanted to be… which is why I think my moves to both DC and Portland fixed a lot of problems, because I was free to explore myself in a way that I couldn’t when I was so emotionally laden… until I realized that my relationship with Diane was never going to change, and in fact, our relationship had damaged me to a level even I couldn’t recognize, so I swept it under the rug for years and years until I came unglued. More than one of my friends, as I explained my teenage years, said, “are you kidding me? This IS sociopathic behavior.” At first, I couldn’t get angry with her. I recognized that if she indeed was sociopathic, that the break happened when she was a child, too. I blamed her abuser, instead of realizing that Diane needed to take responsibility for her own behavior…. which she has done with one e-mail and never face-to-face… and even the e-mail didn’t cover the extent of what I went through. It was basically, “I can see how some of those conversations might be confusing and upsetting to you.” Confusing and upsetting didn’t even begin to cover it. I was gaslit for years, with both Diane and her partner convincing me that I was just this kid with a crush who couldn’t age up. I was mentally unstable, and they were blameless.

I was mentally unstable, but they took no responsibility as to why.

Shame nearly killed me, because it was “all my fault.”

I wanted to marry Dana more than anything in the world, because I’d done it once already in the state of Oregon. I said the words I needed to say to ensure we’d be together forever, because I honestly and truly believed that we would. But as I began to see down to the core of my abused nature and just how much work I needed to do on myself, I realized that I’d jumped the gun in announcing that we were getting married, because Dana didn’t sign up to marry this version of me….. and that version is gone.

I am stronger and weaker than I’ve ever been. Some days, I am six feet tall and bulletproof. On others, I just need to hide under the covers. I am lonely, not for someone, but for her, and there is a huge difference. Someone to cuddle me and dry my tears would be a nice thing, but no one is her. In some ways, I will never get over it. In others, I am so glad she’s gone that tears of relief flow. I will never forget the moment my glasses smashed into my face and I crumpled on the floor with agony and broke up with her on the spot. I’d had about as much Dana as I could take, and I cannot speak for Dana, but I’m pretty sure she’d had all the Leslie she could take as well.

Neither of us had the emotional tools to deal with each other as we waged our own battles in our own minds. My head was in the clouds, because I wanted to be with Argo as much as I could to escape what was going on at home, and I don’t even mean that in a romantic way. We had our own language, our own emotional shorthand, and it was right and good. The idiocy of thinking that translated into romantic love is a mark left on me from childhood, and I had to learn to deal with it before I could move on.

We fought needlessly, all three of us, because I wanted to own my shit and get it right. I wanted to be married to Dana with romance and candles and “married” to Argo in loyalty and support, like all long-term close friends do. I once asked Argo what our relationship would look like in 20 years, and she told me that it was impossible to say, but hopefully strong and comfortable. I carried those words like a mantra, and destroyed them in one or two epic fights, going out of my mind with rage. But perhaps it was a gift from both of them to go it alone, and to figure out what I was going to do with me. I didn’t like me very much, and I took it out on both of them.

The reality of the situation was that I just wanted Dana and Argo to make room for each other so that I didn’t feel this constant tug-of-war between my love for both of them, outpouring in different ways. Dana told me that Argo would never see me as anything but a mental patient, and I hope that she was projecting things onto Argo that might be there and might not. What I do know is that Dana herself will always see me that way, because she has yet to own her part in all of this. The good news is that she doesn’t have to. I am far enough away from the situation to see that Dana doesn’t process the way I do, and she may never have words for me again.

One of the best examples of this is that I asked her if she could forgive me, and she said something very profound. She said, “I don’t even know myself well enough to know what you did and to figure out what I did, so forgiving you is impossible to say.” It was one of the best memories of our breakup, because those words really struck a chord with me, and I began to see her in a different light- that she was every bit as introspective as me, just not willing to let those feelings see air…. because perhaps to say it out loud makes it real, a mantra that Diane and I have had since I was little, and it is so true it hurts.

I hope that she is on her own journey now, and that the journey she’s taking brings her as much peace as the one I’ve taken alone. But it doesn’t erase my wish that there were do-overs and begin-agains. I have so many regrets, so much to work through, so much to let go before I can be the person God clearly wants me to be…. because what I have noticed is that God always calls the broken, and perhaps that is the point.

As I break open to let light in, all I want is peace. Ruminating over the end of my relationship with Dana brings me nothing but sadness, and I believe that I need to feel it. Really feel it. Get lost in it so that it doesn’t keep coming back to haunt me as I stuff it down and it comes up over and over later in life. I don’t want to seek someone else like her.

But I cannot say how utterly embarrassing it was for me to make this huge announcement on Facebook and then have to retract it. I felt like a huge failure, because I was the one that wrote an article on marriage that got shared all over the world and had I taken my own advice, I might not have felt so stupid now.

Believe me, I can solve all your problems in a hot minute. It’s solving my own that’s taking time.

Amen.

 

 

Dear Susan,

It’s funny how meeting someone on a train can change your whole outlook on life. There was a time when I didn’t know you, and then there was a time I did. It happened that fast. I feel the same way about the other friends I’ve made here. I’ve had some that have been with me since the last time around, Alexandria from 2001-2002, but not so many I don’t have room for more. I’ve met homeless people, people who work with homeless people, and heads of national organizations. My life experiences have run the gamut, and perhaps it is what I needed to open my mind to what the universe has in store for me… whatever that might be. Right now, I know that I need to focus on myself, because I cannot pour from an empty cup. After that, who knows? I just want to make sure that I have something to offer instead of giving away everything I have and feeling that there’s nothing left for me.

I am so guilty of that in the past. I would give away everything emotionally that I had inside, and then use fight-or-flight to try and get some of it back… mostly flight. I’m generally a lovah not a fightah, but I wouldn’t have said that about myself last year. I fought needlessly as I went out of my right mind and didn’t know how to handle it, and now I am picking up the pieces. There are people I desperately miss that I know will never speak to me again… I don’t even have to ask. But it doesn’t stop the hurt, mostly because it came at my own hand and not someone else’s. But, as an old soldier once told me, I can only tell you that, from my own journey, self awareness is extremely costly – and it is worth every bit of effort and expense you can pour in to it. So I’m taking her at her word.

Self-reliance is a gift, hard, hard won…. and even then, it’s not like I have some sort of special life-hacking ability. I stumble. I forget to take care of things that I should and over-worry about others. But the main thing is that I keep trying to get it right. I keep trying to prove myself to myself, when in the past, I had to prove myself to everyone else.

The best part is that I have a written record of how far I’ve come, and how far there is still to go. I was just going to write to you, and then I realized that this letter was bigger than just the two of us.

Love,

Leslie

I slept so hard that when the alarm went off, I thought, “fuck it. I’ll Uber.” I went back to sleep for another hour, because the sleeping medication I take works really, REALLY well. I also didn’t want to walk to the bus stop in the snow, or wait for the bus while the wind whipped across the back of my neck. I don’t Uber very often, because it’s $25/ride from Silver Spring to Landover, but I make enough money that I can treat myself once in a while.

It comes time to get ready for work, and I am checking my e-mail frantically, hoping there’s a message that we can all work from home because then I won’t have to go through the hassle of putting on pants. There’s no e-mail, so I go ahead and get ready, putting on nearly every warm thing I own, because not only is it cold outside, it’s cold in our building. For instance, I generally wear skiing silks under my trousers and I am comfortable all day. I am lacing up my snow boots when I hear, “ding!” I know instantly what it is.

Yup. We’re all working from home today. It was a good thing I decided to sleep in, because if I hadn’t, I would have gotten the notification as I was on the train to Landover, and then I would have been late to work in my own home. Beat that with a stick.

It’s still 20 minutes before I need to log in, so I’m blogging and drinking the soda I mentioned in the title. It tastes a bit like a fizzy Jolly Rancher, and it’s delicious. However, now that I’m going to be home today, I am a little irritated I have drunk so much caffeine that now I can’t make myself a pot of tea without having a heart attack (I don’t have decaf).

I don’t have much to report since Sunday. I’ve slept and read a lot, plus watched Mercy Street and Downton Abbey, but other than that, nothing has really been going on. There’s a quiet to the snow. The object of the game is just to stay warm, which takes energy in and of itself… or at least, it does for me. I tend to shiver violently when I’m cold.

I’m looking forward to the sun coming out. I enjoy the snow when the sun is shining and the world is bright and cold. Right now, it’s a bit dreary, but that will change. It doesn’t stay dreary around here for long. Maryland, like Texas, has the kind of weather that reminds one of the movie “Sybil.”

And on that note, it’s time to get to work.

One of the best preachers I’ve ever heard in my life is the Rev. Dr. William Lupfer. We met under very unusual circumstances, and I can honestly say that I have never been the same since. He made me laugh, he made me cry, and he gave me sentences that I will use in my sermons from here to eternity… credited, of course. But first, the story of how we met.

Dana and I had gone out with a group of friends to, I think, Ringler’s Annex in Portland, Oregon… the name of the bar is not important, but Dana was sitting next to me, and that is. Her uncle is an Episcopal priest in Sierra Madre, California, and at this table full of friends, she mentioned that fact.

The most handsome priest I’d ever seen came to our table and said, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I heard the words ‘Episcopal priest’ and I had to come over.” He was having a beer with a friend and just decided to come and introduce himself. I was glad that he did, because he was funny, polite, and memorable.

So memorable, in fact, that when I decided Bridgeport UCC and I had had enough of each other, I remembered Bill and decided that I wanted to go to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Dana, having been an Episcopalian since birth, jumped at the chance to come with me.

A few weeks later, I auditioned for Dr. John Strege, and joined one of those choirs with blow your hair back repertory, and it was one of the best singing experiences of my life (singing Bach’s “Kick My Mass in H mol” conducted by early music expert Eric Milnes was a huge highlight).

This doesn’t really have much to do with what I learned from Bill, just to say that because of the choir, I got to hear him preach A LOT. He said two things that have stuck with me, one that pertains to today, and one that just made me laugh.

The first is, “when you have a theological problem, the first thing you should do is go and drink a beer with a Lutheran.” The crowd howled, because everyone knew he was referring to the late, great Marcus Borg.

The second is, “you’ll notice that in the Bible, Lent is referred to as 40 days and 40 nights… yet, on the calendar, it is 46. That is because you do not count the Sundays. Those Sundays are islands of mercy in the darkness.”

“Islands of mercy.”

That means that in the middle of the darkness, you can celebrate all the things you have given up to remind you of this penitential season.

What did you give up this year?

I decided to give up all my old stories to make room for new ones, and today, I just can’t. It’s Valentine’s Day, and I am very newly divorced, even though it’s been almost a year… or perhaps it’s that today, it feels new all over again. Last year was heart-rending in its sincerity, because Dana and I did not do anything special, but gave each other our undying love through words.

Because I gave up my old stories, these “islands of mercy” feel even more penitential. I am sorry for “all the things I have done, and all the things I have left undone…” Perhaps the things I have left undone even more so, because I could not enforce an emotional boundary with Dana, so I moved away from her to create one that is entirely physical. I cut off any chance of redemption, any chance of grace, any chance to let the Holy Spirit move in both of our hearts. However, I have come to know deep within that it was the right move, even though I am hurting. Perhaps my Holy Spirit moment was the knowledge that love, while almost everything, isn’t. My objective is to carry her in my heart, and go out with joy.

Holding on to the temptation to work on our relationship isn’t a temptation that I needed, or perhaps it was… because I needed to feel it in order to be able to turn away… which brings me directly to the Gospel reading for today.

After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”

Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.'”

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'”

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

I have said that Jesus needed to be tempered in his faith, because he needed to rise up from being a regular Joe to the preacher that moved thousands, which, in that time, was a spectacular Nielsen rating, to put it in modern terms. Nowhere in the Gospel is Jesus’ refining fire more clear.

Jesus was strong in his faith, and did not succumb to the fame and fortune the Devil had to offer. He resisted the temptation to be known as one of my preacher pals calls “Jumping Jesus, the Bouncing Savior.” I think this is partially due to Jesus’ own mettle, and, venturing into fiction, wondering if the angels would have actually caught him had he abused his God-given power. In order to become the person God wanted him to be, Jesus knew that did not include taking power for himself, because he did not want power over. Jesus wanted power with… and perhaps that is what those forty days and forty nights were about in the first place… solidifying what kind of person he was going to be… what kind of preacher… what kind of message he was going to give to people who were just as broken as we are today.

Remember that at Christmas, the angels did not announce to the Sanhedrin that the Messiah had been born. The angels announced it to the poorest people they could find… people desperately needing the hope and grace the Christ offers as mediator and advocate.

However, no one has ever said that grace was easy. This Lent, I am literally crawling toward Easter. My temptation is to sit in my grief, ruminating over and over about everything I have done wrong, all the flaws in my character, all the ways in which I created Good Friday for myself. I was tempted by all the wrong things, and, unlike Jesus, I succumbed to them. Cortisol and sin raced through my body when I got angry in a table-flipping way. Love flowed through me for someone who was not part of my covenant with both Dana and God. I stumbled over and over into a darkness I thought would never end. I very nearly committed the mortal sin of suicide, because I did not think that I was creating a permanent solution to a temporary problem. At the time, I thought I was creating a permanent solution to a permanent problem.

I do not think that suicide is a sin for other people, because everyone has their own reasons for it and I am not the one who gets to say whether it is right or wrong for them. I believe it is a sin in my own code of ethics, because when I get into my small, still place, I realize that I would be, in effect, killing the Easter that might occur if I just wait.

In this first Sunday of Lent, I realize that creating that code of ethics is why we need it. Lent’s penitential potential is to create our own saving grace, to await the resurrection that invariably happens in the middle of the mess, to quote the Rev. Dr. Susan Leo.

During Lent, we are supposed to focus on the messes we’ve made, so that when Easter finally comes, we are able to resurrect ourselves.

Some Lents are always going to be harder than others. There is no way for me to know what kind of messes you’ve created, but I know we’ve all made them. We’ve all failed to resist temptation from the devils in our own minds. We’ve all metaphysically tried to make bread out of stones in order to lift ourselves up, only to find that the loaves we thought we were getting were only stones after all.

And as we reflect on the rocks, we remember that it is not long until we are renewed once again.

Just wait.

Amen.

I am going to stay home and write about the Scriptures today instead of going to church, because I just cannot bring myself to leave the house right now. I am ruminating in my own thoughts and I just want to be left that way. Facebook presented me with all my memories from this day, and I am overwhelmed. I need this time of rest and reflection in order to function in the world tomorrow. I don’t want to hide out, but I desperately need my space.

2015

To my Valentine, Dana, my “Palentine”, Aaron, and my “Galentine,” Argo… You are the faces I look to when I need love. You are the faces I look to when I give love. I cannot imagine life without any one of you, and hopefully we’ll all be old and gray on a beach somewhere flipping each other shit until the Jack runs out and Aaron has to drive us home. Sometimes, the only thing you want from the people you love is a night by the campfire, lying on blankets and looking up at the stars.

2014

The great thing about Valentine’s Day is that it recognizes all kinds of love. This year, not only is Dana my biggest and best Valentine, but so are all of you, the people that read me every day and follow my successes and failures- offering lots of humor and love to help me get through what Mary Oliver calls “this one wild and precious life.”

2013

Dana Bamberger Lanagan, I have loved you since the third or fourth time I met you. 😛 There is no one that I would rather share my heart (and sometimes, my brain). You are the Valentine everyone wishes they’d gotten- big and glittery with extra lollipops taped on the back. The kind you keep forever. I love you, darling. You are the best thing about waking up every morning, but of course, today is the kind of day to say those things out loud.

2012

Happy Valentine’s Day to the great love of my life, Dana Bamberger Lanagan. The reason she’s the great love of my life? She’s got too much information for us to ever break up. I love you, sweetheart!

2011

I am not a big fan of Valentine’s Day, even though I am half of a couple. It’s not the sentiments I hate, it’s the stores that look like red threw up everywhere. Again, though, I love the sentiment. Dana Bamberger is the absolute love of my life, and I wouldn’t be the woman that I am today had I not met her. She’s opened my eyes to so many things- I’m kinder, more patient, and better at darts.

I took Uber from work to the church so that I could get to the Ash Wednesday service, only to find out it was already over. It had started at 5:30. However, I did get there in time to clean up. At CCC, we have a professional kitchen, and I’ve been dying to get my hands on it. So what did I do when I walked in? I ate a metric fuck tonne of pancakes. But after that? John knows what I did. So do Drue, Knives, Dana, Shaun, Ian, et al. I made that grill my bitch. I used to be quite known for it, and by that I mean anal retentive. And by that I mean that if I was in the bar and it was someone else’s shift, I’d go back there and make sure it was up to code. My code.

We didn’t have any vinegar, so I used club soda and ice instead. We didn’t have a brick, so I used towels and a green scrub thingme. In fact, there’s an entire list of things that our kitchen needs and I will get them, because a day care meets in our church and I wasn’t going to let the youth group get yelled at. So I did the job with the tools I had, but next time, I’m coming prepared. I told the kids that we had to play “the health inspector is coming tomorrow.” I don’t know who it was, but there was a 17-year-old white boy I swore was an Ecuadoran dishwasher, he was so efficient. I couldn’t tell him that, only chuckle to myself, but he deserved tips. JMSK, he could have given Jimmy a run for his money, especially since we had a dishwasher half the size of one in a restaurant… but at least it was professional grade… enough to the point that I burned the ever-living shit out of my hands and I hadn’t felt more alive in months. I started giving orders, and one of the volunteers said they thought there was a janitor… I said, “not before preschool starts tomorrow.” I wasn’t dictatorial about it, just firm, because clearly someone needed to be in charge and no one had ever worked in a professional kitchen before. I knew this because no one knew that the appliances had to be wiped down, the floor had to be mopped, etc. I basically took them step-by-step through closing down Biddy’s, and it worked.

I mean, they were making *pancakes.* I assure you that no one in that kitchen knew more than me about cleaning up after brunch food. I missed Dana so much that I almost cried, because I thought to myself that if there was anything I’d forgotten, she would have remembered it. It’s scary when you realize that this IS your circus and these ARE your monkeys, but I did the best I could without her. I just made sure to go through her checklist as I was cleaning up…. and if there’s anything I *did* forget, it wasn’t anything major. Apparently, the youth group got ripped a new one last year, not by the pastor, but by the people at the day care center for the way they left the kitchen. I was not going to let that happen again. The only thing that really confused me is that there were no instructions on the dishwasher, and I couldn’t get the damn thing to drain. I pushed Off, like, ten times and then finally just closed the door. It drained and I said, “SMILINMIGHTYJESUS!” which is Christian for anything I would have said at Biddy’s.

My aim was to leave the kitchen better than I found it, and that wasn’t too hard considering they’d just stopped cooking the moment I walked in. I filled one of the sinks with soap and water and just started scrubbing everything down. The floor was the hardest, because the pancake batter was dried and stuck on like concrete. I spent quite a bit of time digging it out of the grout on the floor. I also emptied the grease traps and did all the things I knew to do that maybe the kitchen staff hadn’t done in a while.

And after all that, I did not get ashes, nor did I have alcohol.

But it was still a great holiday.