Should you have a care to, click image to listen to Last Chance Texaco by Rickie Lee Jones. I highly recommend listening to it as you read. I think music helps convey a feeling, tell a story. Maybe it makes your heart ache a little. If you are wired in a bittersweet way, you might understand. I feel like this all sounds less than professional, and so what? It isn’t the point. We can’t connect with each other through shiny veneers. I like it. I hope you do, too.

LAST CHANCE TEXICO

I’m a work in progress, and so is this website. My dreams outpace my body sometimes. Please know that I will be working to share more about my story and what has helped me along the way in hopes that it helps others.

For now, know that the shiny pictures on my home page only say so much. What you can’t see is the heartache and healing and half finished projects and money that should have gone elsewhere. I needed an old pretty light to fill a hole in me more than I needed to pay down student loan debt. Yes, I said need. You can’t see the extra work I created for myself and my husband when he already works his fingers to the bone. You can’t see my piles of notes and notebooks, empty coffee cups, and sometimes incoherent scribblings that come out of my ADD brain. You can’t see how I favor a creative outpouring over dishes that pile up endlessly and laundry that is ever-growing…along with my guilt of not being able to do more. You can’t see how I struggle with organization or how I thought those pretty pictures would add up to what I thought was my Hail Mary, part two of my life that would be written by me instead of the old messages I had accumulated. Yes, I thought they were my Last Chance Texaco as Rickie Lee Jones sings in her bluesy way.  I sit here listening to it, crying to it , writing to it, in my own bluesy way.

Some images are raw and tell a story words never can. They can speak a kind of guttural truth. Other images can trick you, lie to you, and tell you that someone really has it all together. I think about people who do.  People whose car is neat and tidy, whose life fits into neat compartments, whose manicured nails match their perfect “I got my shit together” selves. That’s not me. Surviving wouldn’t allow for that kind of put-togetherness. Slow blooming during motherhood wouldn’t either, at least not for me. But now, it is a mostly more happy, purposeful chaos. It used to just be one filled with despair. The photo of the woman tangled up in old film…I resonated with that old image and made it mine.  That's me, just trying to figure it all out. You know, I think I’m closer than I have ever been, but if you have it all figured out, please tell me. For now, I’m going to lean into this, because I see beauty in these messy bits, too now.

My eyes need beauty the way my lungs need air. My disorganization doesn’t help with this need, and you can understand why I might often feel I’m choking in a city with cheap money that builds without care and where green is in scarce supply. Creating in my home through my surroundings became my outlet when I had so many mornings saying, “I just have to make it to the end.” So many days crying when no one was looking. I’d slap a functionally depressed smile on my face and wonder why I always felt I was on the outside looking in.  

Would you believe my world has been so small that barely any eyes see what I create? That’s why I know it was just my need…some insatiable need that even I couldn’t quite understand. I learned to smooth drywall mud on walls to get rid of too new, too uniform texture that assaulted my senses. I learned to wire lights that seemed from another era. Details are my poetry. I wanted my new home to look old. Before finishing one project, I was curbed by fatigue or too much to do or an image in my head of the next space that I had to get out of my head and into reality. Sounds a little manic, I know. All that up and down has lived inside of me like a storm. I’ve always been trying to understand myself…to understand what broke and if I can glue the pieces back together.

I understood a little more when I read the book, Sacred Spaces, by Carly Summers. The stories in her book were about people who healed through their spaces, too. This is my refuge, my little island of healing that also seems to torture me, because I’m limited by time and money and to-do’s. It’s an unfinished puzzle, a book I’ll never finish, perhaps. Loose ends never feel good. But a little cat whispered in my ear a story about love, and so I took a detour. But it’s been a lovely one, full of lovely people I didn’t know were out there before, and some too, who hurt my fragile heart. 

Along the way I remembered the little girl inside me, and together, we’ve been healing and remembering who we were supposed to be. BoBo, forget the shiny, pretty pictures that aren’t real anyway.  Will you be my Last Chance Texaco? I love you so. Thank you for helping me remember.  Our world is on fire, but we are refined by fire, aren’t we? Tell me what will remain is something more beautiful, because this is ugly.   I’m engaging in my magical thinking...  maybe our little book about love can put out a few of the flames, or at least let people know there is good in the world, too.  

HYPNOSIS CLOUD

I always feel my words need music, like I need to live and write and feel through all of the senses. Maybe these words need this song: Truth and Bone, Heather Nova.

I’m having a good cry full of a grief for living in a time I wasn’t built for, can’t acclimate to.  I cry for my slow blooming, time marching on, the time I have left, and for a body that might not ever keep up with my dreams …and these dreams will ache like unfinished puzzles in the story of my life.   It seems there is nothing I can do fast, partly because my body won’t let me, but also because everything I make, create, find the bravery to share… takes time that this world doesn’t have for me.  Tasting a dream at 50 has its hurts.  I got my head in the stars and my hands in the same damn dishes that grow out of nowhere.  They always slam me down to Earth.  I hate them. I hate my hamster wheel.

And social media.  I hate that, too.  I think about how it’s so hard for me to adapt.  I think about how we could use it in order to break it, if enough of us were awake.  But then I tell myself there are good things, too. I tell myself that it’s me who is broken …that my nervous system is frayed, and I’m just walking through this world without skin. I can’t look at animals suffering and without homes.  I can’t look at how we give women messages that it’s okay to age even as I fight the countdown on my own life with a multitude of lessons from the wise on how to age backwards. But you know I must, because I got a taste of a dream at 50 and kids who need me in a world that feels upside down, and because societal and generational pressures got to me, too.  I can’t think how to make myself relevant and in most ways could give a shit less if I am. That’s not true. It just sounded a little rebellious. I made myself invisible for so long, and maybe I just don’t want to end that way.

I did Quantum Healing Hypnosis once… because that’s me, always seeking healing, understanding.  I was put on a cloud, floating, floating, drifting, floating.  I like clouds. The point was to come down off my cloud, to stop where I felt called in order to explore past lives that might offer glimpses into the patterns I carry into this life…you know, for healing.  You can look in some mighty strange places when there are no easy answers.  Not so strange to me, though. I’m not sure I’ve ever been at home in this body, especially without skin.

So atop my cloud, I stopped over what felt like the French Alps …a quaint little village in another time, except it was empty, seemingly recently abandoned.  No people.  And oh yes, I did look.  It seemed made for gnomes.  I went inside one of the houses.  No one.  Only loneliness, which has forever been my companion, because I don’t know where or how I fit, even when surrounded by others.

My only instinct was to get back up on my cloud and stay there for all of eternity.  Look at the suffering from there. That might be easier. But then I had the urge to float up.  Up. Up.  Into the black, but it didn’t feel dark.  It felt like holding.  Resting.  Because I’m not sure I’ve ever really been held. Here on my cloud in the black, I talked about my children as mirrors, so similar in our makeup, in our sensitivity.  I understood I could give them what I needed but never had, and perhaps in so doing, give it to myself.  That feels like healing. Right?  Well, it was.  It was the beginning.

I also talked about bringing old things back.  Good things take time.  I think it’s okay to love things when they are sculpted out of our souls and sorrows.  I hate it when people say things don’t matter.  In my dad’s house that used to look like music sounds, guitars once hung on the walls.  Now guns do.  I guess you can imagine he isn’t there anymore. The few times I stayed with my dad, music used to float into my morning dreams. It could have been Tango in the Night or Voices Carry or the strum of his guitar. Things matter.

So here I sit, wiring old lights, listening to old songs, finding old frames that look like the passage of time, loving my old things.  I think about how we cheapen words like authenticity and trauma and everything else you might find in a big box store, “art” included.  So fucking unromantic to live in a time that holds no love for slowness.  You know, it isn’t time that flies.  It’s us.  And our children can’t anchor to the chaos.  No wonder they all have anxiety.

Could we all just stop and look at each other and say, “Tell me how you really feel.”  Everything is a marketing ploy now.. even being real, and how real is that?  Authenticity is now a branding strategy, and it makes me feel sick. Makes me want to check out, but I suppose we are all slaves to the system.  Even me. 

If this is a midlife crisis where I get to say whatever I want, sign me the fuck up. I might make a .99 cent store of musings on Substack, because nothing is .99 cents anymore, but everything is cheap.  Anyone interested?  I thinned the veil with a glass of wine to access these thoughts, …so I’m not always sure I can get to them. But I’ll give it a try, and I’ll be really authentic while doing it. Here I am.  I’m here. Trying to do the opposite of keeping myself small.  Taking up space and trying not to say sorry for it.