I slept a lot yesterday. Delicious unconscious delirium and getting rest helped bring acceptance in having put down my best friend, the legend, Easy Mac: Queen in the North.
With a clearer head, I can recalibrate to an emotional state of gratitude for every person who commented, texted, visited, sent gifts and flowers, and cried on the phone with me or in person. Saying “thank you” really falls short in response to the abundance of care; every gesture helped and made me feel loved. And that people loved Easy, too.
It feels a bit dorky to so loudly and publicly grieve for a very senior cat as I write this long ass sermon. There was a Guardian article about how on average sphynxes live for 6.8 years. Easy Mac not only surpassed the expectancy by doubling it, she also tacked on three more years. Her passing was not unexpected, it was just a day I dreaded. I hold on too hard in moments when I should accept the flow of nature; I doubt I will learn this lesson though it’s been taught many times. And while I am very supportive of others in all moments of grief, I tend not to extend the same compassion for myself leaving me embarrassed that I am taking up a shitload of space with a sorrow that is disproportionate in comparison to real and significant tragedies. There is pain but there is also perspective.
Every animal I’ve loved, I have had to witness their passing and am reminded that the last gift we can give is that of a dignified release. While the loss in the great mystery of the cosmos is very little, my emotions are very large.
During our time together, I experienced loss and difficulties, as have we all. And it was Easy who I would turn to for comfort, to establish a routine of care where I could love her and feel that love in return, and that ease made facing challenges, both personally and professionally in some hard jobs, feel achievable and like I could provide meaning to others because I was given meaning in daily gestures. So where do I turn for comfort now that she’s gone? How do I drown out the silence in an apartment booming with her absence? When I wake up, how do I prepare for the day without her?
When in pain, I assign meaning to coincidences or everyday normal occurrences, like a lot of people do when trying to make sense of their hurts. After Easy was admitted to the ER, the vet called and asked me to return for an in-person update. When I arrived, not only was the overseeing vet there, he was joined by the senior vet on call. The senior veterinarian was the same vet who put Liono down so many years ago in the very same place. And while she explained Easy’s deteriorating condition and our options, it was surreal to again see this kind woman who released Liono from his pain almost a decade ago.
They allowed me in the ER to visit my sweet girl, bundled in blankets, and even though her eyes couldn’t focus she meowed and lifted her head when she heard my voice. And in that moment, I thought, “there is a chance here. If I pet her and she purrs, we can continue treatment to right this ship…even though they maxed out her blood pressure medication, even though they told me she’d need a blood transfusion.” But while I bargained, her overseeing vet approached me red-eyed from crying while watching us together. And that’s when I made the decision.
After in the exam room, holding her head like I’ve done a million times, as the light left her body, her overseeing vet again became emotional and apologized for doing so in front of us. Which, tbh, I had never experience before in putting down other pets, but it helped validate the pain. He said, “I know how special she was.” In the lobby, the senior vet was there and said, “thank you for providing her that kindness.” Yesterday, my local vet called to walk me through what happened and confirmed it was the right decision.
Grief is for the living. And now that she is gone, I’m left looking back on our memories and a life shared for many many years. There must be a thousand photos taken of Easy Mac, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the photos were even higher in number. In scrolling through the photos on my phone and social media, I moved through years filled with graduations, weddings, anniversaries, birthday parties, babies’ first photos, new homes, and just sweet boring everyday life. There are photos of Easy Mac with my lifelong friends and then moving into the future photos of Easy Mac with those friends’ children. What an unbelievable privilege and a gift to have shared that love with her and by extension others.
As Easy Mac got older, one year, when she was fourteen, she got this rare parasite and she started to wither rapidly. The vets were mystified how an indoor cat got a parasite usually only found in cattle. After her diagnosis while waiting on a compound medication to pass the parasite, I spent almost a month in bed with her giving her subcutaneous fluid injections and hand feeding her. I promised that if she wanted to fight, I’d fight with her. And that when she was better, we would throw her a massive fifteenth birthday party.
Not only did we celebrate her fifteenth birthday, we celebrated her sixteenth, and then her seventeenth. My dedication to her meant that any gifted moment following her resilience would be met with gratitude and celebration.
In her last years, I would wake up in the mornings and feed her water from a mug and oversee her care. Further in the future and her final year, I found an unused journal with little prompts on the side of the road in West Philly. In 2025, I would start every morning brewing coffee with cinnamon in the grounds, proceed with giving Mac her medication, clean up after her, and giving her water from a mug and wet food. During this morning ritual, I would write or draw in the journal and show it to her. I called it “Breakfasts with Easy Mac.” I filled up the whole journal. And then started a new one. Every word, every moment, a small blessing.
The last bit of writing for her I titled, I’ll sing to you when I get home, and it goes like this:
Crowded conference room, filled with tired social workers taking a self-defense class. The tanned instructor, arms smooth and lumped with baseball muscles, tried to motivate us. “Remember your reason for surviving,” he said. “Say it out loud. Who needs you? Say their name. Then say, ‘I’m coming home for you.’”
A tired existence with an overburdened bank account, a life purposeless because of struggle. Who was I to demand a safe return? And to what? The solitude of a one-bedroom walk-up, pilled carpet and water-stained walls?
Except, of course, for Easy Mac. My cat.
The warmth of our connection, and breakfasts before work, each sipping from mugs. The green flash at twilight, her steady purrs unconcerned with anything beyond the edges of our gurgle in existence. Her ease transferable; contented sleep bundled under comforters with our snores synching. In those moments, the world softened.
Like scooping the spoonfuls of food to her mouth, neck stiff with age, her body humming with gratitude. In the ways she’s nurtured me with affection, I learned to nurture in return.
When the instructor asked us to shout our purpose, I said, “Easy Mac, I’m coming home to you.”
Fin.
Thank you for giving me purpose and the drive to create meaning, Easy Mac. For showing that I have great capacity to love and that love, even in its most humble forms, is transformative.
Every day we spent together was the best day of my life, and what an honor for so many years to finish a hard day by saying:
Every January 1st, I start off the New Year along with FUN-A-DAY. What’s fun-a-day? Glad you asked. In their own words:
The idea is simple: pick an art project, do it every day in January, and show your work in a group art show in February! Fun-A-Day is always FREE, NON-COMMERCIAL, NON-JURIED, and ALL-AGES. Everyone is invited to participate, the only requirement is to HAVE FUN 😉
I like having fun, so I start off the New Year with a plan to participate. However, most of those plans are overly ambitious and I get about seven days in before realizing that creating a fully designed postcard with poetry and images of Philadelphia cats is a much more labor intensive pursuit that is allotted for in a month (but I’m still plugging away at that project, which will eventually be realized and dope as fuck).
In the interest of actually trying to complete some goals for this year, including updating this website I keep paying for, I committed to finishing fun-a-day and wanted to do with the least amount of effort possible.
So, for 2025, my fun-a-day project was Mug-A-Day, wherein I use a different one of the many MANY mugs I’ve accumulated throughout my adult years (and some from childhood) and take a photo of it with some mostly corresponding accompaniment.
To my surprise, though not my overburdened cabinet’s, I had kind of a lot of mugs. More than 31, as it turned out. And it was a satisfying goal to mark off to start the year. A little trot down different times in my life, mugs as gifts, and memories from those mugs along with some new memories by documenting them
It also provided a lot of personal insight about the coziness of my small life. Even though I work a lot and can feel like a grouch a lot of the week, every sip and communion in being present with these mugs presented an irrefutable reality: there is a lot of love, ease, and joy every single day.
Also that I will wait until nail polishes chips off instead of removing it.
Not necessarily a proud moment, but I stole that mug on the far left from an incredibly low paying job from the communal cabinet. I used it to heat up Spaghettios only to find out while eating in the office breakroom that the underwear portion disappears when heated. I quit that job via email a week later.
Foodie
To learn more about doing your own fun-a-day, check out their page brought to you by Art Clash. Document all of your mugs.
image of the Long Island Sound; Hunt, Samuel Valentine (1803-1893), Engraver; NY Public Library; 1865
It was the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend, and I was on a train to Manhattan and couldn’t stop sneezing. There was an elderly man next to me reading, he was there when I got on the train. As is so often the case with Amtrak, it was a sold-out train, and it took me wandering to the second-to-last car to find an unoccupied seat.
He was very elegant with white hair and khakis, reading an Eric Ambler novel.
***
I used to spend a lot of time in a suburb named Ambler. And when I snuck peeks at the man and the novel, it reminded me of the amazing Mexican restaurant there. I would go with my friend, Shawn. Shawn was so beloved by the staff that one time we went there on the later side, and I apologized to the staff for ordering so close to quitting time. The man behind the counter said “for him? We’ll stay open.” We sat at one of the glossy tables and I had the best carne asada burrito. It tasted like San Diego. It tasted like home, and being a teenager, and eating at Santana’s with my best friends. For that moment in the darkening restaurant under the pink sky of a suburb outside of Philadelphia, space and time closed in on itself. I was both an unburdened teenager in San Diego and an adrift 29-year-old adult who just lost her apartment after another lay off. But I was eating a carne asada burrito with a best friend. Shawn and I ordered tres leches cake to share and while we ate, the guy from behind the counter dropped the television remote off at the table just in case Shawn wanted to change the channel.
It’s a good memory.
a photo of the folks I’d grab burritos with, and the burrito that made me
***
I’ve never read Eric Ambler, who writes spy novels, but I have always wanted to be a spy.
I will never be a spy. As much as I strive to be unassuming, I am constantly conspicuous. It is not that I walk into a room with the grace of a cool breeze and command attention, nor am I a bright swallow charming in my bounciness creating a draw. It’s that I’m clumsy. If there is a table, it will not be saved from my knees. No sidewalk un-tripped. No train seat was avoided by the crash of my silly body. No surface not stumbled upon.
And I have allergies.
A sniffle for all seasons. Pollen. Heavy rain giving way to humid days. Dander. Plants. Sun. Stars. And the moon at night. All of it makes me sneeze. I have oak rings under my eyes, which I found out is likely attributed to allergies. My nose is always running. My eyes are the coat of a fox, ringed and bleeding into the whites with the constant rubbing. Two fists in a circle distressing the eyelids in the motion of a fussy baby.
***
This train trip was no different. I had a sneezing fit within the first fifteen minutes of the ride. The man turned his green and white-check shirted back to me. Who could blame him? He was a well-composed and iron-pressed person traveling. He was seated next to a woman with messy hair in a pilgrim-like dress, except cut way too short, and ADIDAS flip flops. And she won’t stop sneezing.
During the second round of sneezing, I got more embarrassed. When I became too self-conscious of the rapidity and achoo sound, I tried to swallow the sneezes. That weird, muffled body quake of holding in a sneeze. Just so I didn’t make myself too loud. Too seen. That never works, right? By the time we passed Trenton with the shouts of late passengers rushing up to catch the train before it left, I decided not to hold in the sneezes anymore as it was prolonging the whole fit.
So, I sat with my running nose and thought too much about the history of embarrassment.
***
I don’t know if the man was judging the sneezes and sniffles. I was projecting my own insecurities onto him, which is, of course, unfair and self-obsessed. The truth is, most people aren’t thinking of us as much as we believe they are. It is the painful pull between not wanting to make a show of oneself, opening yourself to judgment or humiliation, and the reality that you are likely not on anyone’s mind but your own.
***
I wasn’t always embarrassed about my allergies. I accepted them as a part of myself, like my freckles and hazel eyes. A body’s spontaneous response to protect itself from assumed threats. I have allergies, just like I have reddish-brown hair. Just like I have a scar where a cancerous mole used to be. It’s a part of my makeup.
***
I learned to be embarrassed about sneezing during one of the happier summers of my childhood. I was a preteen on Long Island, the summer before my family moved to California. The sweltering steam of a summer that lasted forever, feet forever bare and burned by the asphalt in the community pool parking lot. The taste of plums swimming in melted ice from white and red coolers on the beach. Getting sand stuck in your teeth that had clung to white bread sandwiches. The sound of the Yankees game on transistor radios. The way the seat of the swings at Hemlock Park got too hot and burned the back of your thighs. The summers you daydream of as an adult sitting in the grey bubble of an office building, everything fabric, even the cubicle walls.
***
My jaw ached with the ever-present motion of chewing entire packs of Bubble Yum Cotton Candy bubble gum. I had strong opinions about what bubble gum brand was the superior: Bubblicious vs Bubble Yum, and while I preferred the former’s name, I loved the latter’s mohawk-haired duck mascot, with his spiked collar and piercing. My hair was streaked from the sun, and freckles stood out like constellations; even now, the smell of pink zinc is so strong in my memory, I can feel the coating on my nose to keep it from peeling. I read Sweet Valley High and Fear Street books by the dozen. WWF and Marvel comics ruled my whole life. And while I know that there were difficulties during the humid days of that summer, I can only remember the ease. The memories are a protective shield my brain has developed to create a space in which to escape during hard times. The pruned fingers from swimming for too long. Dialing 800-numbers with friends at the payphones to laugh at messages, or, more frequently to call collect to the house with the rushed message following, “say your name,” of, “hi, it’s Janie, please pick me up at the library. Bye!”
During the summer I turned twelve, I had a crush on a boy with green-brown eyes and hair the same brownish-red as mine. Nose full of freckles. He was funny, sarcastic, rebellious, and original. He was always at the principal’s office. Those who agitated against strict Catholic school education were always the people I liked the best. His brother was my best friend’s boyfriend, so we were always in proximity. I scribbled his name in my lock-and-key diary with loopy hearts all around it. I had no chill.
***
Even now, I am not used to attracting the attention of the people I like. Awkward and fumbling, I vibrate anxious energy. And as a deeply self-conscious preteen, the fretfulness was magnified by a thousand. Everything I liked was dorky but my grades were terrible so I couldn’t even be part of the overachieving academic nerds. I longed to be like my hero, Jessica Wakefield from Sweet Valley High. But I wasn’t even her drippy twin, Elizabeth. I was Elizabeth’s loser best friend…Enid.
God. She was the WORST
My crush was both popular and cool, and even at a young age was remarkably self-assured. So, when he told a friend, who told a different friend, who then told ME, while she and I were burning to the color of cherries in the grassy knoll section of the public pool, that he like-liked me, I couldn’t be sure if maybe it wasn’t a joke at my expense. I was the butt of a lot of jokes. But I was also an optimistic little kid, and believed in the impossible: that my crush might actually like me back. I buckled up purple rollerblades (it was the 90s and these were considered cool) and zoomed back home to write in the lock-and-key diary every excited emotion that a preteen could have.
***
During the 90s, comic books had subscription order forms within the crumbly pulpy paper of the comic. I always wanted to clip along the dotted line and place an order. Even though I made frequent trips to the comic book store, as well bike trips to the Hallmark store several blocks next to the pizza place where I would buy rainbow Italian ices, the thought of comics showing up at my doorstep and getting actual mail was thrilling. We are far removed from those days, and with the ever-shrinking world allowing us to get all worldly goods delivered to our stoop within a day, the excitement of a package showing up is somewhat diminished. But I cannot emphasize enough how thrilling the idea of a pack of comics arriving was. My parents never entertained my wish and annoying begging. Until that summer. We snipped the order form, I put down my preferences, and we sent that sucker into the world.
Just took this photo. It’s from Gambit and the X-Ternals, Vol 1. Age of Apocalypse, babyyyyyy
The day the mail-away comics arrived was the same day that my crush called the house and asked me to watch the fireworks at the waterfront with him, his brother, and my best friend. The comic haul was unbelievable. I got an entire stack of Cable and X-Force comics (I was obsessed with Domino) and each one was a banger. While stretched out across the bed lost in the world of Marvel’s marvels, the humidity turned my hair into a cloud with only the slow loping circle of the fan to provide any relief, my dad shouted up the stairs that there was a call for me. Thinking it was one of my friends calling to meet up at the park, I said hey but the voice on the other line was my crush; my stomach dropped. The spiral motion of anxiety buzzing through every part, tingling in my fingertips, I almost dropped the phone. I listened to his raspy voice give the details for pick up, my brain embedded in a puff of cotton candy. Replacing the phone in its cradle, I jittered with nerves and excitement, paced around my room, and then returned to the comics to pass the time.
***
By twelve, a lot of my peers had started to explore personal expression through whatever the cool clothes of the moment were. The baffling preppiness of every popular kid at my school was stuffy and beige, Abercrombie everything. My parents, again, were not in the habit of indulging my khaki desires to fit in among the sea of neutral palettes. Individuality was not a concern of mine, nor most preteens, and I ached to be seen as normal and stylish. But my lack of interest in spending babysitting money on anything other than candy and comics resulted in an unremarkable wardrobe. When I was taken clothes shopping, I never knew what to get to help fit in. I would often default to favorite hand-me-downs or babyish clothes from years earlier whenever I went to hang out. And while I enjoyed reading the new issues of YM at the library, I had no interest in investing the energy of “getting ready.”
***
When my crush’s parents came to pick me up, my hair was a frizzy triangle, and I wore old black jean shorts with penny loafers. I felt nervous, and uncomfortable, and had a hard time processing the difference between excitement and dread. During the car ride, I twisted in the mini van’s seat to speak directly to my best friend, a pretty girl with big blue eyes and stick straight black hair. I spoke too loudly and tried too hard to be funny. This must be a universal memory among socially anxious and awkward people, the moment in preteen/teen-dom trying to both be visible and invisible; the overly loud delivery of jokes that won’t land to impress the person you are pretending to ignore.
This day from twenty-six years ago, has mostly been lost to time. The location was a waterfront with slicked-down, cool, grass patches before a rocky beachfront, but it was not the ocean. Where we went was likely somewhere near the Long Island Sound or a Bay. His parents left us to our own devices, and we wandered around a fair with food vendors and the racing bodies of kids and adults flying kites. The four of us ambled about before we climbed on top of picnic tables and acted like we were much older and cooler than we were.
By the time it got dark, our group split into two. My best friend with her boyfriend, and my crush and me. The darkness swallowed us up as we sat on a curb that separated the grass section from the parking section. Both of us looked out to where the ink of the tides lapped against the shore, the upstairs and downstairs of the atmosphere was one void. In a brilliant burst, the red flower of the first of the fireworks appeared. It illuminated the dark water below and shimmered vermillion in the gentle waves. And it was in that shining moment when my crush turned and kissed me on the cheek. He like-liked me. I like-liked him. And maybe being a preteen wasn’t so hard. And I shouldn’t be so nervous. And it was not unthinkable that people would like me despite my weirdness.
And right after his lips left my cheek, leaving a slightly damp imprint in its wake, was when I sneezed super loudly.
***
Up until that moment, my list of things I was insecure about was the unfurling-of-a-Roman-scroll-to-the-floor levels of long. But it had never included my allergies. Sneezing was beyond any control and not anything I could keep from happening. It is what it is. Nor was sneezing really that gross since it came with a built-in sanitization method of covering one’s mouth.
***
But there we sat in silence as the boom of fireworks blossomed overhead, both of us not knowing how to broach the continued quietness. He was embarrassed because I said nothing in response to the kiss. I was embarrassed because a sneeze was the answer to the kiss’s gesture. Not the eight million things I had imagined and rehearsed, not a Jessica Wakefield toss of my hair before kissing him on his cheek in return.
The world was bright with the extending and disappearing shapes above, the distorted glass water below. I was mortified but happy, a repeated complicated feeling felt all throughout my teen years.
***
The silence between us persisted but I slipped my sweaty little hand into his; we watched the dancing fire unfold.
***
It was the summer again, and the train was almost to Manhattan. I took two Benadryl, which made me dreamy. When I got to the city, I transferred to the Long Island Railroad, and a second leg of the trip took me through the echoed halls of childhood. The bassinet motion of the double-decker rocked like gentle waves past places that shaped me. And after grousing at the lack of sidewalks, I arrived at my parents’ house, a short walk from the train station. They had returned to Long Island years ago.
When I greeted my parents, they gave me lots of hugs, and after we went to eat linguine with clam sauce at a restaurant with red-checked tablecloths.
The Island was a home that was also not quite a home. After eating, I asked my dad to drive us past Bayville, where there are arcades, ice cream shops, and firework displays during the Fourth of July weekend.
We drove through the village with the Long Island Sound making its music in the background. Fireworks lit up the skies above us, and I remembered with humor and forgiveness the summers of my childhood.
And with the memories like whispers from ghosts in my ears, I was embarrassed but happy.
You [sic] Life is Not So Great came from the chaos of the internet twelve years ago. The way back of our online lives during that time was populated by blogs documenting the very best of beautiful existence. Curated clothes, crafts, families. It was the initial glossy cultivation of gorgeous realities. This would eventually give way to influencers, and algorithms, and curation of takes in pithy characters.
Those blogs, and what they evolved into, were and always have been fine. And aspirational.
I did not lead an aspirational life, but I had a desire to carve out a place on the web for my sad, fucked-up existence. The terrible jobs, the horrendous apartments, the pitiful meals, and the laissez-faire attitude toward my health, safety, and reputation. I have always had a deep and somewhat pitiful need to be witnessed and seen for who I am in whatever moment throughout the years. A brash and unruly (and obnoxious) teenager on Livejournal. A chaotic and depreciating young woman in my twenties on MySpace and Facebook. And, eventually, a threadbare blanket unraveling on a blog that was meant to be the antithesis of the ones popular over a decade ago.
Those blogs were informative, well-meaning, and money-generating. You Life was (and is) low-budget and sarcastic. Something about the ruthlessness of exhibition, and the humor in poor choices and unfortunate circumstances fed me and this blog for longer than even the original stream of blogs existed.
I pay for the url yearly even though I basically stopped writing in here ages ago. So, what am I doing keeping this?
Even during the absolute shittiest moments, You Life was a joyful outlet. After the MFA, the publications, and a handful of small press collections, the place that still brought me the most happiness in my writing life was right here. Even if I was documenting how I used my refrigerator for a garbage (for almost two years…eek, what a monument to mental illness), the writing nourished me. So, You Life remained.
But, like, not everything has changed and not by that much
With that longing in mind, I think I am going to start writing in this bizarre relic of the World Wide Web that I continue to pay for, year after year. I don’t know what I’ll write about, or how often, but the desire to reconnect to the enthusiasm that came with updating is stronger than the feelings of silliness about the vanity of self-exposure. It’s not even really like people read blogs that much anymore, which makes me feel safe about the cringey credo I’m penning right now. I still have a lot of VERY strong feelings about ravioli, and cooking, and cats, and essays to write about candy corn and the confusion that comes with watching only reality television for a month without stopping.
I’m going to take a nap while watching Fraiser. And then make a calendar of what to post. And I *might* even stick to that resolve and the timeline. And if it makes anyone feel better, I still have the leftovers of a lasagna I made from the Super Bowl (the one that takes place in February) rotting in the back of my fridge as I type this.
I have been staring at this open window to write something for almost twenty minutes, which is not exactly reflective of my lack of busy schedule but more emblematic of my lack of stuff to write about here.
But, I really want to.
A depiction of me tending to my busy schedule and also my cat Easy Mac.
I was just talking to two of my friends about wanting to re-explore this space that I’ve owned for something like ten years, and that feels like a pretty intense length of time to have a blog. You Life has been around through the advent, rise, and fall of personal blogs and instead of pulling the plug I continue to pay for this domain year after year. I rarely update this but I always remember really enjoying doing so when I was younger; You Life always gave me the chance to create spontaneously and embrace chaos joyously.
Ostensibly, I’m a writer (or so I’ve been called), and I’ve been extremely lucky to have a number of publications and several of my books published. But, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that some of the greatest enjoyment I’ve had as a writer was before any of those publications while I was writing about how I used my fridge as a trash can for two years on this blog. And I was actually incredibly inspired by my publisher’s personal blog. I watched Josh engage with writing and the world in a unique and unencumbered way that continues to impress me so much, he writes meaningful and wonderful observations. I highly encourage anyone reading this to give his blog a check. It’s excellent and thoughtful and consciously curated with care (meaning it’s emphatically not like You Life).
It’s freeing to have a space for writing that involves being a trash pest, a mess, a benevolent cat benefactor, and a helpful possum person. The world is exhausted with itself, and I recognize that there is important work to be done both utilizing social media and writing as well as on the ground work, and I’ll continue to do so. I can also see within myself that I’m struggling to find the humor in things.
I can never escape me and my trash
But, tbh, I need something to do for enjoyment other than scrolling through the Bravo Real Housewives Reddit.
However, I still don’t entirely know how to functionally use You Life (i.e. writing site, hookup site, self-call out burn book). But while I figure that out here is what I’ve been up to recently during year seven of COVID-19. It’s mostly just wrestling-related stuff.
The Road Warriors: Legion of Doom is my second favorite tag team after the Hart Foundation. I love a blend of 1970s punk rock and the aesthetics of the Mad Max movie franchise. While never a fan of motorcycles or an impending apocalypse, I do love spikes and nods to bondage. Plus, I loved their catchphrase, “what a rush.” What is the rush? What does that mean? Wrestling? Doom? Drugs? the drumming of Neil Ellwood Peart?
Here are some impressive facts about Hawk and Animal (Michael Hegstrand) and Joseph Laurinaitis) that I never knew. While the gimmick was obviously lifted from Mad Max, did you know that they were the first in professional wrestling to successfully bring a theme from a movie and incorporate it into wrestling?
Please also enjoy this gem that I lazily read on Wikipedia:
Under either name, their gimmick was the same – two imposing wrestlers in face paint.
There is beautiful poetry in the simplicity of that statement. Two imposing wrestlers wearing facepaint is how I want to come back to earth.
Lockdown had me in a bit of a drinking tailspin, which has resulted in a number of fascinating purchases.
The first of these purchases was the WWE channel. I’ve been a huge HUGE fan of professional wrestling since my childhood. The WWE channel provided me the opportunity to travel through time and back to the happiest aspects of being a little kid and revisit matches I used to love and wrestlers who I’ve always admired.
One of these events is Survivor Series 1991. Matches that made me lose my shit upon rewatch. I was like a bottle or two of wine deep at the time, but listen this was the Survivor Series where the Undertaker beat Hulk Hogan for the championship and the aftermath of this Survivor Series led to the iconic moment when Shawn Michaels kicked Marty Jannety through a window during Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake’s “Barber Shop.”
Also, the Road Warriors were headliners and I was VERY enamored with them under the glossy gaze of my red wine eyes.
Inspired by this, I made an alarming purchase, as I discovered the next morning.
I have a relatively healthy collection of WWF Hasboro figures from the 90s. It will never set the world of collectors on fire, but they are treasured remnants from my childhood. I never sought to collect them all, I just got the wrestlers I really liked.
However, I never had LoD.
As it turns out, I decided to rectify that absence with a 2 AM EBay purchase. The cost was slightly jarring for toys. But I was doubly alarmed with the cost of these mint though not-in-package figures as a total. And that was because of the cost of shipping.
Because the LoD were coming to me straight from Barcelona. They were international Road Warriors traveling to the banks of Philadelphia.
But, I am so grateful for their place in my home and among the thrones of the other tag teams I have.
LoD reigning above the other tag teams
This happened months before the passing of Road Warrior Animal. I hope LoD is partying in the great beyond; and on land in Pennsylvania, I had the two of them destroy the entirety of the collection of Cannarella tag team action figures.
If you’ve made it this far, please give me recommendations for other matches to watch that you particularly enjoyed. WWF or WCW, no matter.
And settle a debate. Candy Corn (my favorite candy):
That’s it for now until I figure out what I’m doing with this space. My candy corn and I will see ourselves out until next time.
I keep forgetting that I pay for this site and update it about once a year. Anyway, it’s the apocalypse and the world is absolute shit. As we all continue to descend into the toilet bowl of personal misery, sometimes genius can strike.
And with that in consideration, I’d like to have everyone honor and acknowledge me as one of the most premiere intellects of our time. Because why haven’t we been doing this since the invention of pizza:
Yes, I had it with coffee because this was my breakfast.
Why haven’t we been dipping our pizza into tomato soup always? I get that people will dip crusts in marinara sauce but that feels limiting and embarrassing when getting into the tomato soup game. Besides, I hate a chunk of tomato.
So, it’s the days of shelter, and time and meals are meaningless so likely I’m putting a lot of stock in this creation but I have nothing else going on except rewatching The Hills obsessively. Does anyone want to talk about this show now that I’ve started watching it decades after it’s first episode? Like…maybe if Lauren keeps losing all her friends, the problem might be LC? Someone discuss this with me.
“I want to forgive you and I want to forget you“
So, long story short. Dipping your pizza into tomato soup is awesome and I would really like to talk to someone, anyone, about The Hills.
I applied for a job, by the request of a person that works at the office, about five months ago. I got a call back and did one of those annoyingly long phone interviews – the ones where you have to hide in the corners of your actual job and whisper talk during a lunch break that goes for over an hour.
And I didn’t get it (I know. I’m shocked, too). They sent me a quick email letting me know. Such is life, such is war.
After suffering the rejection, I went about my life as normal and didn’t dwell on this humiliating defeat at all.
And I got a new job.
And life proceeded as normal.
And then I got ANOTHER email letting me know I didn’t get the job. As though, a month later, they felt the need to remind me just in case I didn’t get the message the first time.
That’s a nice feeling.
Two months pass.
AND I GET A THIRD FUCKING EMAIL LETTING ME KNOW I DIDN’T GET THE FUCKING JOB.
So, I decided to let them know that as much as I appreciate them incessantly informing me that they didn’t think I was the right candidate maybe they could stop sending me rejection emails.
Is it how to walk home casually – and not wheezing – with not one but two of those massive jugs of cat litter and not feel like dying because you keep putting off quitting smoking? If not it’s probably nothing.
Unless it’s this guy….then it’s a whole different story
You life is not so great 