Motherhood means mental freeze.

My site was down for two weeks and it feels silly to make a big deal out of it because it’s not like I’m changing the world over here. The only thing lost was my most recent post and I can’t even remember what we talked about.

I think it went something like this:

I had COVID and it sucked but now I have taxi yellow shoes and they don’t suck. Not even a little, especially when worn with my Kusama socks.

Also, Kaida (whose name means Little Dragon) is a Yoshitomo Nara little angry girl who is now tattooed onto my arm and I love her and she’s kind of like me in that she sees how shitty everything is, yet she still shows up with flowers.

We went to New York and I stood in front of the Strand and I guess maybe yellow shoes are sort of a thing for me these days. (As I’m sitting here on the couch, I’m wondering what the man with the water bottle is doing right now. I spend a lot of time wondering what Michael Stipe is doing right now, and I usually think, “I bet he’s sitting at a table wearing a white linen outfit. Maybe working on a crossword puzzle, and he’s happy enough.”)

Was that everything? Let’s say that was it, and now we’ll move on to 28 years ago when I took a Greyhound bus to Atlanta, Georgia. I was a 24-year-old invincible girl in tight jeans and a tank top (covered with an oversized plaid flannel shirt), and after I stashed my duffel bag under my seat I was armed with only twenty bucks, a pocket full of AA batteries, and a Sony Walkman that held The Breeders’ Last Splash cassette.

Because of a lot of this and thats, the bus ride ended up being 22 hours long, and at one point a guy sat down next to me and told me to let him borrow my Walkman. I figured neither of us were going anywhere, so I handed it over and he moved to the back of the bus and listened to Last Splash. (In case you’re feeling nervous, know that I tracked him down at the next stop and took the Walkman back. He enjoyed the tape.) In the middle of the night we had to stop at a station somewhere and I was feeling sick and a woman came up to me as I ate toast and asked what my story was and I told her that I get really carsick (still do!), so she gave me some pills and told me that they would help and that she was a nurse. I took those pills because she seemed trustworthy enough, and then I slept the rest of the way to Atlanta while Last Splash played nonstop into my head. (In case you’re feeling nervous, know that IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME and also, I was invincible. Remember?) This paragraph is really long, so we can skip the Atlanta details. Just know that there was a cheeseburger, some pasta salad with apples in it, a day trip to Savannah and Tybee Island, and I heard G. Love & Special Sauce for the first time. Egg salad at a bookstore. A party where I told some guy that I was a DJ, and I think it snowed.

Last Splash has been one of my top ten albums (maybe even top five) since it came out. I know everyone has probably lived in Ohio at some point in their life. I lived in Dayton, Ohio for a few months when I was 3, and that’s when Kim and Kelley Deal were living in Dayton when they were 12, and 49 years later (two nights ago) the three of us found ourselves in the same town again. (They were on an outdoor stage in Columbia, Missouri. I was standing on wood chips just a few feet away.)

The show was perfect and they played all of my favorites, but the one that made me close my eyes was Do You Love Me Now? because that song has always been the one.

It was a good thing happening on a good night with mostly good people (and a good sandwich and some good beer).
I bought a shirt.

I hope my site doesn’t go down again. I’ve been knitting frogs and I might start knitting a vest and maybe you want to talk about that.