Category Archives: General

I warned you.

No one wanted to believe.

Now it’s too late.

{Shout-out to Carl for the heads-up on this one.}

This dumb-ass meme has been making the rounds for the last fucking week. Second perhaps only to the ‘May the Fourth be with you’ bullshit thatâ’s right around the fucking corner as far as annoyance and ubiquity goes, it stands as testament to ‘NSync and a young Justin Timberlake before he grew into naked hunkdom. I’m just over the whole meme thing, but any reason to post a link to a nude Justin Timberlake can’t be all bad.

These glorious magnolia blooms come from a species I’ve long admired. The neighbors down the street had an immense magnolia tree in their shaded backyard. If you followed the woods behind our house far enough, you would come to a bank which led up to the back of their yard. In the spring, through curtains of chartreuse foliage on yews and similar landscaping shrubs, one could spy the glorious, if brief, flowering of the magnolia. It took center stage for just a few days. The warmer it was, the sooner the show would be over. Some years I missed it completely.

Their sweet scent carried on the wind, though I cannot say that is what drew me to the yard. Mostly I happened there by chance, and out of the corner of my eye I caught their show. Keeping careful watch on the windows of the house, I’d steal across the year, quickly pick up one or two fallen blooms, and scoot away holding the delicious blossom up to my nose while inhaling the delicate perfume.

Their one major drawback is their messiness ~ the blooms drop and quickly decay, leaving a mushy mess that must be dealt with, usually right after the initial clean-up of a yard takes place. Their thick leaves are also the kind that don’t degrade with any efficiency. Better to admire these from a distance, and I do.

There are varieties that bloom in shades of yellow during the summer ~ the tulip magnolia is one I believe~ and I’ve thought of finding a place for one of these. They seem more exotic, the blooms coming so far after the initial flush of blossoms. One of these grows in Boston, and I seek out its flowers in the high heat of summer, pretending I’m a Southern lady gasping for a mint julep or a charged adult glass of sweet tea.

We’ve been back from Savannah for a few weeks now, but the recollections of that fabulous trip were just posted, so this post rides on those Southern coattails until some of that sun works its way back north. On with the recap…

It began with politics. My apologies. 

Boston bloomed, and will again. 

Approaching April showers.

Our Easter family dinner. 

Our Savannah chronicles in one recap. 

These Tiny Threads…

The shirtless men in black & white.

Hunks of the Day included Janjep Carlos, Anthony Joshua, Pete Buttigieg, Nick Viall, Tommy Hatto, 

This says it all. 

[Find my incendiary political side on Twitter.]

#Resist 

The high Catholic holidays are now behind us, which can only mean the happy transition from spring to summer is well in progress. The temps have finally agreed to go along with our mind-set, and yesterday Andy and I put away the pool cover for the summer season. A happy moment indeed. On with the recap for the past week – photos from our family Easter Sunday gathering coming in a few days, along with a Savannah recap, so come on back soon…

For once, let’s begin with the Hunks of the Day, which included Zachary Levi, Dan Carter, Maluma, Matthew Noszka, Lil Dicky, and Francisco Alvarado.

Let’s follow that line-up with the #TinyThreads feature.

Madame X will see you now.

A gin fit for the summer season.

The new Madonna song (and surprise, I love it). 

The boy I never wanted to be.

Might Louis Vuitton be the scent of the summer?

Don’t joke about Good Friday, they said.

Or Holy Saturday.

Or Easter Fucking Sunday.

Easter libations to carry you through the whole of spring. 

I will never understand the unabashed joy that comes from seeing my unabashed terror in this childhood Easter Bunny photo, but it runs deep and wide, and this is a perennial favorite at Easter time.

As young as I was, I distinctly remember waiting in line at Mohawk Mall to see this horrifying creature. I remember being scared out of my mind. Hopefully I had a diaper on too. For many years thereafter, I steered clear from the bunnies that began appearing in malls every spring. I’ve conquered that fear, but such residual terror always runs the risk of being resurrected when one least expects it. I found myself coming down the escalator at Crossgates Mall a couple of weeks ago, deposited right in the sightline of a friendly rabbit. I dodged and swerved and kept a wide berth. No sense in tempting fate to repeat such terror. Even if this one had a friendly face and was totally lacking in a tulle tutu around his neck.

Happy Easter y’all.

The purgatorial period between Good Friday and Easter was always one of suspense and tension in my childhood home. The kids among us were usually just thrilled to be on Easter recess, but in the oppressively-Catholic atmosphere of our house, the apparent death of Jesus and the impending resurrection left us in a state of limbo. Even when our favorite Uncle would visit, there was a halting aspect to our celebration, the way death hangs over everything when it touches us.

The weather being so volatile and variable at this time of the year, and the date of Easter always switching from early to late to everything in-between, also wreaked havoc with one set of scenes or circumstances. We’d vacillate between days outside in mud and rain, to days inside with snow and sleet, to days outside in sun and splendor, to days inside in peaceful slumber. Sometimes there would be violets already in bloom, other times there would be snow on the ravaged tips of barely-rising daffodils. Everything seemed to be in a suspended state of indecision.

So it is on this Saturday, as we wait in joyful hope of His coming, an eternal reminder and symbol of returning hope, the way spring always comes back, the way summer follows suit. Amen and Halleluh!

Come on. 

It’s funny.

Happy Nailing!

Happy Good Friday!!!

“He wanted, as did I, to become something he’d neither yet seen nor dreamed of, something he’d recognize the moment he saw it: himself. Yet he was constantly confounded, for no matter how much he adorned himself with scarves and jewelry, he could not understand that this was himself, as was also and at the same time the boy in overalls and Keds. He was split in two pieces – as who was not? – the blond wave cresting rigidly about his close cropped- hair.” – Richard McCann, ‘Mother of Sorrows’

Engaging with a recent bout of nostalgia, and embracing all that we were, I find myself taking a brief sojourn back in time to when we were young. Writers such as Richard McCann, who wrote the featured quote above, are much more adept at evoking such memories. I can only approximate what it was like, what I was feeling, and mostly it only resonates with me. Still, most of our memories convey similar wistfulness and longing, and perhaps you can relate to reaching an age where you have just as much to look back on as you do to look forward to. I hate ending a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. Like looking back. Now I’ve gone and muddled the day before it’s even begun. That’s what revisiting the past can do.

Parting the palms: it’s the day after Palm Sunday and high Holy Week is upon us. May this one be higher than the Empire State. It’s also a rainy Monday, which makes moving into this week extra fun. On with the recap…

Cody Christian went shirtless.

The thread of threads continued.

Tom Ford to the extreme.

The staggering beauty of Diana Vreeland.

Mad Men Zen.

From a writer who knows Dick.

Our Broadway Weekend with Mother has been finalized. 

Recalling the vintage (and my old goatee).

Returning to the scene of my crime. 

Shirtless miscellany.

Hunks of the Day included Garðar Thór Cortes, Toby Levins, and Gideon Glick.

“Hi!” he said, joining the Customer Service line behind me at Wal-Mart (the same store I had robbed a while back). It was my first time in a return line in well over a decade. I just don’t return things, even if I should. Even if they don’t fit or work. But this time, when a pair of pruning shears shit the bed after three cuts of a hydrangea, I decided to exchange the thing.

“Hi,” I said in my most-unamused tone when I finally realized he was talking to me.

“Been waiting here long?”

I had been. “Yeah, I’ve been here half an hour. Well, maybe 15 minutes, so good luck. I’ve been giving that manager dirty looks hoping she would do something,” I said nodding at the sheepish woman with a barbed-wire wrist tattoo who had been over to help for all of 30 seconds before hiding behind other cashiers and pretending to give important orders in any other part of the store.

“Whoa, that long? Hey, when is a good time to plant a garden?” he asked.

Puzzled, as I didn’t even think he saw the pruning shears in my bag, I asked him what he meant before truly ferreting out his kookiness and realizing I shouldn’t have engaged.

“Like can I start a garden now?”

“Sure.”

“But will the plants survive?”

“You can prepare the bed now and plant later.”

“I guess we can grow pot now too! It’s legal right?”

Now it was starting to make some sense. “Well, I don’t think it’s quite legal yet,” I said warily.

“But they won’t charge you, right?”

“I think if you sell it they will charge you, but if you get caught smoking it they supposedly aren’t doing much,” I said, trying to figure out how to end this inane conversation. He went on about the pot and the garden, and how he had been to Denver where it’s legal and he had a Gummy bear with pot in it only it was 100 milligrams instead of 10 milligrams and he ate the whole thing and ruined his entire vacation because he was lying in bed thinking he was dead.

“That must have been scary,” I said in as dry and dead-pan a manner as I could muster.

“Hey, I got this keyboard here for $53 and then I found it on Amazon for less,” he said, showing me a keyboard in a box.

By the grace of God, it was finally my turn at the customer service counter. I won’t be going back.

Every once in a great while, I’ll dust off a few old photo albums – the actual, physical kind that we once used – and indulge in a brief bout of nostalgic mental meandering, retreading old haunts and revisiting former moments of a glory we never quite realized at the time. The photographs here are from the 1990’s so you’ll have to forgive my goatee – I knew not what I was doing. More moving to me are the expressions of genuine happiness and hope on the faces of people who remain vitally important in my life. We were on the verge of stepping properly into our adult lives. Maybe we thought we knew more than we did; for my part, I always felt like I knew just a little less than these brilliant people I was lucky enough to count as friends. They made me better. They made me strive to be a good person. They still do that.

Back then, the world felt like perpetual summer. It laid before us with verdant avenues and beautifully winding roads, where each path held its pretty mysteries, beckoning us to try this or attempt that. I gingerly stepped with slight trepidation, wading slowly into the pool that so many of my friends were already splashing in, diving deep beneath its sparkling surface and coming up with breathless tales of accomplishment and honor.

Why did life seem so simpler and happier when looking back on then? It certainly didn’t always feel that way at the time, but our smiles and our joyful carefree countenances indicate something else. We were happy then. Life hadn’t rocked us too much, not when you look back at all that was to come afterward. Definitely not when you look at where we are now. Yet we didn’t realize it, at least, I don’t think we did. Not in a deep way. I do remember brief moments when I would stop, literally, in the middle of a Boston sidewalk, when spring was in bloom, and the air was filled with the perfume of flowering fruit trees, and think, ‘This. All of this. Take in all of this – the beauty, the air, the night, and the morning.’ Even though I would invariably return to melancholy and doubt, those moments would harden into a necklace made of memory gemstones, each carved into an exquisitely-multi-faceted jewel that would be lit from within on those dark days to come. Our home is happily littered with such jewelry. It’s not something that can ever be stolen or taken – not by anything other than forgetfulness and time, but all things are obliterated in such fashion eventually.

Looking at these pictures is like rediscovering a treasure trove of those gems – invaluable, immeasurable, inestimable in riches – adorned in beauty, bathed in light, and bound by unbreakable wisps of happiness.

“The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up – flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jeweled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, ‘twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.” – Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’

Spring invariably ushers in a new season of social events and get-togethers, and as the weather makes for enjoyable outside gatherings (assuming it eventually will…) I find myself in the act of preparation and planning. My favorite place to be.

The gardens are behind, but nature has a way of catching up. Unfortunately, working humans don’t have such a luxury, so if we don’t get some nice days the yard may not be cleaned up by the time it’s ready to sleep again. Again, it will all get done or it won’t, and some years are just about surviving and maintaining.

My fickle side has me undecided about how to navigate this blog for the summer. I’ve enjoyed taking most of it off for the past two years, but I’ve also hankered for an outlet when the days are rainy or the weekend is worth writing about. Toying with a lighter schedule that doesn’t see me completely offline from June to September may be the way to go. Two posts a day, no matinees? That sounds like a plan, with the caveat that it’s all subject to change by wish or whim. That’s what summer should be. First, though, let’s have a proper spring.