Let's All Meet Up in the Year 2000

I need my golden crown of sorrow my bloody sword to swing
I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology


This is gonna be a long and winding stretch like you’d think I started taking yoga.


When you get diagnosed with a bullshit disease like mastocytosis you end up hearing all sorts of horror stories about how the disease itself may not kill you but you will probably die from some stupid avoidable complication most likely a reaction to medication. You learn Christopher Reeve had it and how it seriously diminished his treatment options leading to paralysis. When you get diagnosed with a stupid bullshit disease 20 years ago and most of the information on it is still written by fellow patients you end up with bonkers pamphlets like, ”what you don’t know about anesthesia will kill you” since we’re almost all allergic to opiates, and you live in terror that everyone is undereducated about this dumb disease.

A couple years after moving to Los Angeles, we returned to Boston in the fall for a wedding. It was a lovely event full of tons of friends, and multiple times I got big hugs from enthusiastic people who then said they’d just gotten over being sick. I was so happy to see people I didn’t care much but my the third or fourth time I kind of got a pit in my stomach. Upon arriving back in Los Angeles after our weekend in Boston, I realized I’d picked something up from someone and was ready to lean hard into self care. Then my dad had another heart attack or something I can’t remember, but it was enough to get my parents who never told me about his health debacles to call me to tell me I might want to get home so I immediately did. Flying back and forth takes it out of you under the best circumstances, but when you’ve got a sinus infection brewing and then go on multiple cross country flights in rapid succession, the pressure changes wreak absolute havoc in your sinuses. Especially when the inflammation from the disease coupled with the inflammation mastocytosis causes end up creating an imperfect storm where the infection is trapped. Which is what happened to me. This went on for months of testing different antibiotics, steroids, and antifungals in an attempt to get that thing out of me before resorting to surgery. During this we had to abruptly move out of our townhouse in Venice due to some severe plumbing issues that were a major healthcode violation. While that place had kinda sucked, the location was great and we didn’t want to move, we had to.

So my world in LA was getting smaller, we had moved to DTLA where walking around wasn’t remotely the easy option it had been on the West Side, my cat Luna had been diagnosed with cancer and was winding down her time here, my new but ever present headaches were a delight, my balance being off from my sinuses made firespinning a no-go, seeing all my Boston friends so briefly made LA feel lonely, it was all just exhausting. I’d gone hard with watching tv as an escape, never a good sign, and been watching this surprisingly good sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother”. It was super gimmicky but had some really poignant moments (and Alyson Hannigan) especially with music. One episode ended with “Shake it Off” by Florence and the Machine and I was immediately smitten. It was a song that turned from sad into anthematic, throwing off the shackles off the past, recognizing it for the burden it can often be, it just found me where I lived, it felt redemptive and hopeful which was what I needed at that point in life.

On the drive from DTLA to UCLA for the first of the many many many many surgeries it would take to remove that infection, (the final being in 2021 which is insane how entrenched that fucker was in my skull) the first major surgery after my masto diagnosis, I sat curled up in fear in the passenger seat listening to that song on repeat in the pre dawn hours, her voice surrounding me like a warm blanket. It made me feel safe when basically nothing else could.
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Tonight, pretty close to exactly 14 years later, I ended up absolutely bawling, straight up ugly crying in Belfast while Florence Welch stood about 30 unexpected feet away from me singing that song and it was shocking the intense wave of emotion that rolled over me as it was the first time I’d ever seen her live. I don’t even know how many concerts I’ve been to, it’s gotta be in the hundreds, and I’m pretty sure I can count the amount of times I’ve cried on one hand. Maybe two but I kind of doubt it. But I did this evening and it felt only like joy.

When we found out we were moving to Ireland we had a LOT of mixed emotions. At basically the same time Florence + the Machine announced a new album and UK tour dates including one in Belfast so we went for it. If another job somehow materialized we could sell the tickets or maybe make a vacation out of it OR if we end up having to move at least we’ll have something to look forward to was how we justified it.

We basically drove up here, threw stuff in our hotel and ran over to the arena because I wanted to see the opener, Paris Paloma, who is also a really powerful musician singing against the patriarchy while allowing herself to be feminine, something her or Florence’s NLOG predecessors rarely let themselves be. I have to listen to more of Paris but so far I love what I have heard. Her song Labour has become a tiktok feminist anthem especially after Trump got reelected and MAN does that song hit different in a country where women aren’t losing our rights and don’t have open sex abusers in office. Labour is a really powerful anthematic song and it makes me really grateful that it doesn’t really apply much to my lived experience as most of the men I was involved with were fairly solid dudes who didn’t demand the traditional gender scheme level from their partners (or at least not me).

Florence was just transcendent. 9 songs were off the new album which I’m admittedly not as familiar as I’d like to be yet, since it’s new and I’ve been busy, but even without knowing every single song it was beyond powerful. She’s hypnotizing to watch as she runs barefoot around the stage, seemingly feral but really it seems tightly coordinated with other dancers, taking on a real theatrical feel. There was only one song I’d really wanted to hear that I didn’t (Third Eye) but the 2 hour set more than made up for that.

I know I say live music is like church to me but this show really felt like a spiritual experience basically from every possible angle, the exchange of energy between the performer and the audience carried a real weight to it that felt like more than what I usually experience at shows. I turned to Ethan at some point, my face all streaky with tears, and asked if he thought we joined a cult. I kinda think we did but I also think I am ok with it. Honestly I just don’t have words other than that it was amazing and I want to go back and experience it again and I hope they end up playing Dublin.

I also think I am maybe getting too old for general admission shows. I have lesions in my spine and hip and standing basically in place for 4-5 hours is getting to be a little much. It was fully worth it this evening but I know I’m gonna pay for it tomorrow while we’re tromping around all the sights we want to see. We’re going on a private tour with a man named Flip who was an extra on Game of Thrones. We were supposed to do it last year on our “everyone gets the flu” trip, so this is something I’ve been hyped about for a while.I’d very much like to get some sleep however there is a bar in our hotel and it’s a Friday night so even though the bar is closed all the patrons have now spilled onto the street and are singing. I am definitely too old for that 😬

I started writing this back in the summer when we were briefly trying to pump the breaks on the move.


Growing up my dad had a rifle and a shotgun that hung on the wall of his study, and while they were not loaded and were disabled, my parents put the absolute fear of god into me when it came to guns. Which isn’t a bad thing, but I am absolutely terrified of them to a crippling degree regardless of who has them. I remember in a post 9/11 Manhattan getting off the subway after one stop and walking the rest of the way to my destination because the subway car was full of national guard carrying long rifles and I didn’t like that at all. Or when Ethan and I went to Paris in 2004 and seeing all the cops around the Eiffel Tower with long guns and again being physically uncomfortable about it.

I feel like this is maybe maladaptive, not that I want to be armed to the teeth, or at all, but I can’t have this crippling aversion to guns either. So we’d planned to go shooting with a friend this weekend. Ethan got his LTC a while ago, he signed up for it after the inauguration that’s a whole other thing, part of me does feel like exposure therapy could probably be beneficial… when I had to fly all the time I was able to handle it. Also side note, Ethan looks like an absolute brute in his drivers license photo. He’s got sharp features and dark blue eyes which can be pretty striking and when you combine that with his neutral expression which is very cranky looking, he looks like someone you would not want to mess with. For his LTC card he looks like the most jovial person ever, what the hell man.

So we were gonna go shooting and then I woke up still feeling awful, which I think is gonna be my daily routine until I get my kidney cleared out. I was an anxious about going and at my absolute best I am completely unnerved and jittery about guns and I am not at all at my best right now. I worried I’d get spooked by a gun and end up throwing it which would be a seriously terrible idea, but also like something I’d do, so then I went back to bed to be antisocial and crampy while Ethan went out to have fun(?) although I feel like everyone involved also takes this stuff pretty seriously, as you should, so maybe it was not fun, but productive.

So yeah.

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After the inauguration we privately and intensely discussed gun ownership. Neither of us were psyched about it but it felt inevitable. The seeds kind of got planted when a man tried to break into the house in 2023 and it took the cops what seemed like ages to show up while Ethan and I crouched on the stairs with our dogs freaking out while some tweaker was attacking the front door littering our porch with broken glass. After that we got pepper spray and aluminium baseball bats, which were a salve when dealing with fear over arbitrary tweakers. Fear of the government was a totally different story and we did feel like it was our responsibility to protect ourselves if necessary if the worst case scenario happened and while I can be fatalistic it seemed like a possibility.

As someone who had dealt with depression their whole life, this was a risky proposition but the prospect of civil war or the government collapsing or the need for genuine high risk disobedience seemed like a real and riskier thing. We’d talked it over and decided only Ethan would get a license and I’d try to get comfortable around guns and go to pink pistols meetings and whatnot, but whatever we owned we’d keep in a biometric safe that I would not have access to. Which to be clear, it’s not like I was simultaneously contemplating opting out while looking at guns, i hadn’t had that level of depression in probably just under two decades, but i have fought that level of my illness before and while that’s totally embarrassing it’s the sort of thing you need to be realistic about. Between my skittish form of anxiety and history of depression, I might not be a safe gun owner and it was worth addressing. Even writing this all out now it seems unhinged that we were trying to contemplate how to make this work, and I can see how when I was writing the earlier part out I was kind of trying to be ok with something I had serious cognitive dissonance about. But I do feel that the left needs to seriously look at how the leadership just isn’t there and that there’s a frighteningly growing prospect that people may need to arm themselves to protect themselves and their communities because pacifism may just be naïveté. AND AGAIN THIS IS INSANE I FEEL THIS WAY. I DON’T LIKE THIS.

We were gonna go to London this weekend and punted it for reasons so I decided to go to a hiking store and look at some gear. I ended up getting into a long conversation with the manager about what a malignant waste trump was and how fucked this entire situation seems, and at the end of this conversation which was strangers just venting their spleens, he said, ”Im glad you’re here and I hope you stay, I hope you don’t go back” and on the surface it felt so kind, like “you belong here, you’re finally home” but it’s not like we’d made plans to go hang out or hike together, so I don’t know how much of the sentiment was that vs “your country of origin isn’t safe anymore”. We’d had a lovely chat though and I was happy with my birthday purchases and the experiences they will afford me, and then in the car park I got a notification that a man had been executed by ICE.


I can’t with this shit and I’m not even in it.