into the wild

I feel bad because two of these riders that I called the Fat Riders earlier are now leaving for Chile and did their last ride and why do you realize too late when people are your best friends. And you totally ripped on them in your earlier blog.

Okay they weren't my best friends, and they weren't fat and I dreaded their lesson every week because I don't usually strap on a muscly dude on top of frail Dewey (frail Dewey weighs probably 1200 pounds so he's fine, just to me he's a princess) and I would have to ride my young horse since they were on my safe horses, and so it was always a working ride, keeping us all safe. Also I always dread things anyway, which is why I try not to schedule anything. And obviously I knew we weren't going to be longtime friends because I KNEW from the outset that they were MOVING to effing CHILE which I found out by looking at a map is like over to New York and then WAY WAY DOWN.

But they were so NIIIICE, guys. Like they met my family on the last day, I called my family out they were making bacon and toasting bagels and they came out and we were all standing out there around the horses on the nice sunny day after the Halloween rain, it was a blue sky Sunday and Nathan had a green mustache from being Shrek the night before and my family got to bond and laugh with these two riders who are 34 and so sweet and about to take four suitcases to Chile and start a life there with four suitcases and a cat, and an inherited farm, in the middle of nowhere. They gave their fridge to their neighbor. They leave in five days.  I'll probably never see them again. Unless I fly 11 hours to a country where I think I would get diarrhea. 

I don't like any last morning, last time for anything. Why should we know things have actual endings? In my mind we were forever, I saw the ending, I was there, I gave them fresh eggs like I always do but how is that it?? I don't believe it. This part of life is confounding. For me, everything is ALL ways, always. Unless you're an alcoholic. Even then I will still call you.

I'm excited for them though. I get to follow on instagram as they build a family and a working farm and see the reality of a girl from Norway who met a guy in Burbank over the internet during Covid and now they're married and moving to Chile together. 

My part in their life? All I did was teach them horse basics. They learned to catch, groom, saddle, bridle, and handle their horses on the trail at the three gaits. Really just the beginning, it's only been a few months of lessons. They'll be great down there, they're going to keep training at a real riding school where they have to wear clingy pants and boots and use english saddles and learn to sit up straight and heels down and correct hands, and all the other things that will make them accomplished riders. I felt good because at my house they learned how to open themselves to a four legged thousand pound partner, and the relationship you can build with that new friend.  

A little bit of me is going with them. They scraped out a tiny bit of my heart even though I try to box everything up and stay in it just for the money. But they told me stories about their families and the escapades of liquidating everything in their apartment, and they saw some hawks, and rinsed off my horses after a sweaty ride, and brought a huge bag of carrots and gave them all out, every time. Plus they were on time, every time. And my favorite part was when the guy rider would always hug Dewey and say I love the way he smells and not even be shy to say it. 

I have to delegate them to people living in my phone now, on the wilds of instagram, their south american life a little rectangle in my hand I get to visit when I'm eating breakfast in the morning. I guess it's as good as real life. I mean, we weren't going to HANG OUT here in the states, I would only ever see them on the back of my horses, and all our conversations shouted to the back of each other's heads as we rode on skinny trails behind each other. This is probably why I like teaching riding, it's SORT of like having friendships, but I never have to look at anyone in the face, and my feet are dangling above swaying grass, which is the best way to wear your feet, and listen to people. 

I love people. In this jigsaw puzzle format. On the trail people forget to be smart as the horse's feet jostle them and they just start talking about all the stuff that's on the top of their heart. It's a good place for a writer to gather feelings. And later stick them somewhere and make them something. Or just feel them. Also good.

Even when they have to leave. And we were just getting started.

Aurora Bore me Alice

So I have an ad up for riders on Marketplace and most people are either 300 pounds or insane but I got this one girl who texted me. She was an actual horseperson from Oregon, missing her horses and living at a naval base down in San Diego. She wanted to come for a longer trail ride and bring her husband. 

I said bro, there have to be horses closer to you. I love horses but even I wouldn't drive 2 hours to ride with me. She said it was okay, they were happy to have an adventure. And they'd pay me for the extra long ride. $300 dollars to ride 2 hours in the creek that I would be doing anyway for zero dollars? And you want to ride my young horse so I can just sit back and watch you suffer while I ride my easy old horse and feel sorry for you? Okay then.

She loves training young horses so as long as she was fine with the occasional retarded zipping into the bushes or stalling out on the trail and deciding not to move (both Meriwether specialties), then I told her she would have a good ride.  

It's blistering hot out and I suggest they get here at 9 to be cooler, and that morning I get up to feed the horses and my mom and myself and I see a message that they're ooops going to get here "kind of early" at 7:59.  It is currently 7:12. Who shows up an HOUR EARLY ON A SATURDAY MORNING. 

I am then zooming mucking the barn feeding saddling the horses so they're ready, cleaning up mom, juicing her, trying to make some fast toast and tea, sunblocking, getting dressed and the kids are all leaving with suitcases to go to New Orleans to the airport it's 7:58 and Nathan is saying mom your riders are here.

So I'm rushing outside with nutella toast in my mouth and I meet these kids, these gentle goons from Oregon, the girl named Aurora who does have a disney princess face and her husband, all 19 years old of him, who is lucky he got married because that face isn't going to launch one ship, let alone a thousand. 

But they are nice kids, they met in middle school and got married at 18 and he's in the military and she's going to boot camp to be a photographer (I don't think I've ever seen photographer boot camp in the brochure) and if they don't get war murdered they're hoping to have a ranch someday where they can shoot deer and elk and bears off their horses (because you never know what's in your meat at the store they say), and they want pigs and chickens and probly to set up a fortress with bunkers and an arsenal. 

But they are BESS'S AGE and I think about her up in SB without ever having fired ONE GUN OR BEING MARRIED AT ALL BUT THERE'S STILL TIME and these kids were really sweet actually. Anytime you get on a horse and everyone's having quiet fun and walking through nature in the swirly water and the haunted woods, and when your horse doesn't lie down in the water with you riding her (Jane did lie down again but of course no one was on her, I haven't fixed that training hole yet). The best part was I remembered to drink alot of water so I didn't evaporate and they handed me 300 dollars some of which I gave to Barry for the mortgage, and at the end I was giving them a paper bag full of eggs and wanting them to be my friends and then Aurora got slammed into the fence by mistake by a surprise horse scuffle which was sobering but the husband (who was named Danner that's not a typo) said calmly it's ok she's tough, and I gave her motrin and a bag of ice for her head slam and they headed back to San Clemente where I guess he wears army boots and continues to be tall and skinny, and at night they dream moonily about their land in Idaho where the government don't have a say and their 4 year old kids will be able to shoot you in the pants at 40 yards and they will eat a bunch of doe eyed elk who were just innocently walking their land unarmed and they will say see at least we know what's in our meat, you can taste the sadness

I had another ride the very next day after them with the Norwegians who are moving to Chile and Mauricio said "how old are they?" and I said 19 and he said "Oh they'll be divorced," laughing. 

My friend Linette said this should be a show where I take people on trail rides and all the things I find out about them as the horse's legs rock the secrets right out. It's called 

Happy Trails, she says.

My Bad

So the washing machine that was my parents' old one and at LEAST 40 YEARS OLD working faithfully forEVER broke yesterday. It didn't let me know, there was no struggling, there was no waterlogged white flag waving there was no goodbye letter. I filled it with clothes, I turned it on, it filled up like the directions say it will and was about to start churning and I said oh wait lemme throw this in, and I threw in one more little thing and turned it back on and then nothing.

I pulled the knob and then pushed it back and it hummed but it hummed like ummmmmmmmmm I can't do this no more hun.  

It gave up sadly like a waitress who has had enough of the gropings of her sweaty boss and throws her apron in the soup on the way out. 

The water was still filled up to the top making it the world's heaviest broken thing made by man. Plus there were clothes in there just drowning. 

Of course Nathan has to come home from his new job that night and shop vac the water out with me (we do all broken things together), and even just a tank of shop vac water is heavy as shit so we lug several thousand loads of that water onto the front lawn and finally I'm able to get my soggy friends out of the broken mixing bowl and slap them down into a laundry basket and then heave the laundry basket like a dead body tugged out the door where I step on the clothes to squirt out as much water as I can and then sloppily heft it into my car to take to a laundromat to finish or maybe start the wash.  I grab a tide pod and head to the car and it's already like 8pm.

Did I mention that I have been fighting with my mom's home health all day about SIMPLY having ONE PRESCRIPTION delivered that has been delivered for 6 years now, and for the last week since we switched to this new home health I have been texting them okayyy she's got 3 pills left, I need you to reorder this thyroid med, and also can we get diaper cream and diapers and ensure -- and they text ok sure oh we called it in no problem -

and then nothing and then days go by and then finally I yell at them and say I need this delivered TODAY I'm down to ONE PILL and I call the pharmacy and the pharmacy says oh they never called us and I yell at the home health lady and she says we can call it in to a pharmacy near you and I say ok Vons Tujunga but what's wrong with delivery and they say we don't like that pharmacy anymore they're liars and I say I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL BATTLE WITH ENCINO CARE PHARMACY I JUST WANT THE MED LIKE NORMAL LIKE IT'S BEEN FOR 6 YEARS WITH NO PROBLEM.

So I call Encino Care myself and they say oh sure we'll fill it.

So then I'm driving my soggy clothes to the saddest of all locations, a laundromat on a Tuesday after dark, and then the pharmacy calls and says hey we can't fill it because now Vons has filled it and you better go pick it up it's about to close. I now look in my hand at the tide pod that is melting and making my hand all blue and smell fresh. I grab a napkin to staunch the laundry juice and call the Vons to make sure her prescription is there and are they open while I race there in the dark and they say oh we don't have it. It's at the La Crescenta Vons. WHAT.

It is SOMEWHERE, for sure, filled. So I speed over to that far weird Vons I never go to and get there just in time and somehow I am handed the pills I fought like fucking Marcus Aurelius to get for weeks and everything smells like wet laundry detergent and I TAKE THE PILL BAG and I get back to the laundromat near my house because if you have to go to a laundromat, best to go to one that you went to before during a power outtage not some STRANGE laundromat, and I brought from home 3 dollars worth of quarters cause I thought well that's gotta be enough and then it's SIX DOLLARS AND 50 CENTS for one measly load so I get extra change and put the rememberwhenweusedcoins into the washer.

Then I am just in a laundromat for 31 minutes watching the clothes spin and thinking goddamn it I had no idea how lucky I was to have a fucking washing machine, and I feel humbly like the richest person on earth and I check facebook marketplace for new used washers and no one is writing me back it's like they put their porn ad up of hot looking used washing machines and they aren't going to write you back, ever. 

And then when the laundry beeps I take out the spun out clean clothes and get the fuck out of there because I HAVE A DRYER I'M NOT a COMPLETE HOBO, and I got home to use my perfectly amazingly fine dryer and on the way home the stupid ass home health lady texts casually oh I hope you got her medication and I text back BRO YOU CALLED IT INTO THE WRONG PHARMACY YOU FUCKING COW (ididn'taddthat) and I had to RUN OVER THERE at the last minute and ALL I'm ASKING is can I not BEG FOR SUPPLIES, I am a daughter with sole responsibility for a DYING MOTHER, could you HELP ME. I am barely hanging on could you HELP A DAUGHTER, HELPING A BELOVED MOM. 

and she texts my bad

I called it in to the wrong pharmacy. 

My bad, she says.

The next morning a very nice guy dropped off a washer/dryer for the price of a washer (so if you need a dryer, hmu), and a very nice son came home from work and helped me take out the old sad washer and vacuum up the area and make it all perfect and move in the new little washing soldier, and get him all situated and we did some laundry and everything is palatial in the laundry department. And I didn't have to beg once.

Find the Glitter

I like days where you have no idea what you're going to learn. 

Like my shrink fired me (okay she changed to another company but wasn't I worth staying for, I'm a million times better than Kaiser). But we signed each other's yearbooks and RIP I'll never see her again but she set me up with another shrink, a fat jolly Jasmine in Orange County who probably used to work at Disneyland and now she's going to aside from wrestle into her large sports bra every morning she's going to help me find the glitter in my otherwise solid pretty successful life.

Yes she told me we could find the glitter. 

I KNOW they have actual glitter and that Carrie Fisher used to carry glitter in her purse to fling whenever there needed some cheering up (note to self: glitter up). But the shrink was right, even though I'm pretty sure she was giving me a zoom meeting in the room off her mom's kitchen.

I think I MADE all these life choices. I did for SURE decide to have kids I just didn't realize I'd be seriously doing the job for 26 years. The longest job I had ever had before kids was 9 months. And that felt like an ETERNITY and also I was fired from that job for writing about the office staff. The job only had another week to go but I have to say, the writing was really accurate and funny. The truth sets you free, plus you have to clean out your desk and miss a last paycheck. But I was also pregnant with Nathan, so really my segue into my next job was already in process.

It's hard to think back to shit that is already done that you spent a whole long time curating, and then when you see your kids big and making pretty good choices and doing pretty well, the mom in us sits back on her haunches and in my case, wonders how many saddles she can buy now. Like how many ways can I ride AWAY and in how many different saddles.  

I don't want to get away, I want to fill up that reservoir the way it was all capped up to the top before. Now it's all wildly out of whack. All my yardsticks for measuring if I'm happy or not are all thrown out of the pool, all my routines and trips to the fair and excessive worrying, it's all just gushing into my shoes. No wonder I'm bewildered.

The jolly shrink was saying you don't have to do anything about the person you were. You merely step a little to the side out of that puddle and you are on fresh ground. You can still reach out to hold hands with that person who made you who you are, she's right there still drowning. You just have to start over again, right over here. 

As Carrie Fisher says, nothing's ever over. It's just over there. 

I have one foot in the puddle and one foot over here. After a year of Bess the caboose on the loose, I still can't believe I even get the chance to Do something else. I am so tired! Taking on my mom was also a job I willingly took and that my older brother willingly encouraged when we were in desperation 6 1/2 years ago. Nobody in their right mind takes on dementia of a beloved mom single handedly for 6 1/2 years. But at Uncle Wayne's house that day in June, 2020, next to the wide water, I did what was in front of me, and that was my mom dancing around in the grass. If only she'd kept that Santa Monica house and rented it, we could have hired a full time nurse and I could still have been a great daughter, bringing her home here to live with us. Being with her but not under her.  This 6 year job, for that growth of sheer guts, I happily accept my Oscar. Facing the grief every day, that and skin breakdowns that are hard to heal, are my least favorite. The least easy.

So from this other perspective there is so much I can explore. I don't have to go back to being the happy whore I was in my 20s, that's the only other version of myself I had honed. It makes sense that you think hey let's look that girl back up, we know her at least. I definitely know how to do all of that, if that is what I need to do. I can keep teaching people to ride, that's a job that I can't believe people hand me money to do. It's actually ridiculous the amount of money to get on a horse. Anyone can do it. But apparently nobody is, because people are paying me way more than I can believe. 

And there's all this writing. All these characters born and wrestled and telling me jokes that I write down and then squish into a form. I love them all. I should really take the time to get a Masters in Creative Writing so I can keep working on the thing I can do and find people to help me get it out into the world. But as my friend Chris says, with 2 masters degrees, Fuck Writing. 

I told the kids what if I need to do stuff for myself now. After you're a mom you don't really care that much about what you think but you care about what your kids think about you. I don't want them to think that there's anything more important than all the things I did to be with them and be their mother. I am Wendy in Peter Pan. I mothered all of them and myself and an island of mermaids and lost boys. But now my mom bag is empty except for just being there for grown kids in this new way, and now I keep looking in the bag for where I left myself. And I pull out peter pan's shadow. I better stitch it on and find some glitter and learn to fly. 

In my dream I am living in big green fields in the country in New Hampshire if it wasn't freezing and teaching little kids to ride in a riding school and out on trails. I have great teens helping me. At night I write in my barn attic loft and sometimes I go off on shoots when I sell something that can be financed, produced, shot, edited and sold. Is it that hard?  

In reality I live an hour from the beach near a pool surrounded by trees with dogs by my side and kids in and out, and wandering chickens laying fresh eggs in the barn. At night I watch old Moonlighting episodes to remember what good writing sounds like and I go to bed wondering if I'm going to get my chance to tell my stories and to be myself even more. 

I'm so lucky to have even this moment. 

But you know what helped the most? Just going in and lying on Emma's bed, and Nathan eating some lunch at her desk and just talking about it with them. Talking about what if I need something. Would you guys mind if I figured out who I am now.

Training Day (or Once More Into the Drink)

I've been teaching so many riding lessons I got a bit confident and started riding out my 5 year old only a year under saddle Meriwether WHILE ponying 3 year old only 3 months under saddle Janey Pickle. This way all the horses get out because my paying riders ride the older, mature boring ones that I dream about while I'm on the stupid learning youngsters.

I took out my favorite riders today, the tatted up lesbians as we call them. They teeter on the edge of not being students anymore and in the dangerous area of let's try THIS out and see how we do level of riding. They're 25, so they have no sense of the gravity of how important your bones and body parts are, they just see the fun. I'm there carrying all the danger that's why I have to have so many saddlebags.

We have been riding together awhile so we have a creek trail loop we've been doing and today I said ok let's go this different way, you can canter in this one area, you can get on Meriwether and practice his third ever canter on the trail (crushed it, perfectly). In fact Meri was no trouble at all on the trail today, today was JANE'S day.

Calamity Jane Austen Reaves has only been ridden since June when she turned 3. She is very good about everything, nothing bothers her, she just plods along. She ADORES eating along the trail, she will even eat food out of Meriwether's mouth. They are best buddies, they sleep next to each other, they stand together for all important events like feeding and getting their feet trimmed. So it's no wonder that I decided okay I'll bring Jane along on the trail when I take out the tatted up girls, she never does anything. Then I started riding her half the time because riding Meriwether the whole time is like riding a firecracker that's constantly looking around for bombs. He's steadfast, he's just small like a sleep dart, and ridiculous, like a 4th grader who raises his hand to go to the bathroom during a test he didn't study for, and then stuffs up all the toilets. Because that's results you can see right away.

I do admire Meriwether though. Once he's had another year under his, well I guess saddle, he's going to be the mayor of munchkintown. 

So we went into the trail the back way and I even got off to walk Jane through the rocks and into the first water because she is a little picky about stepping into water at first unless there is a tray of snack bushes right nearby. I got on, and lead the trail through the woods, ponying Meriwether behind me and the girls behind them. I got off AGAIN to go down into the deeper creek water and Jane was fine, and then I got back on trying to get all my ropes straight and started walking in the creek. Normally Meri and Jane are hyper focused on WHAT PLANT IS THAT      CAN I GET MY FACE OVER TO THAT  so I wasn't noticing or even expecting that suddenly Jane would decide hey I'm hot hold my bag I'm gonna take a little dip real quick and while I'm on her back, she just decides to LIE DOWN IN THE CREEK. 

I have only been on a lying down horse once, years ago, when Mags decided to take a little lie down in deep water and she stood right back up. This time I didn't know what was happening at all, just suddenly she's at the depth of floor, and I'm sitting there thinking is she going to get up like Mags or is she going to roll on my leg. I didn't wait to find out, my next thought was kick your fucking feet out and get the hell off this horseraft quick. So I instantly as a 60 year old hag can do this, I got my feet free and leapt over to the left (the opposite of where her legs were, thinking that is 4 thrashing feet not in my face and Jane just dipped to the left to wet down her side and then got up like ALL DONE. 

It is not a good feeling to have your horse who should be standing be quitting on you under there. It is really the only thing you can't control. I guess bucking is also a thing I cannot do very well, because lying down in the creek and bucking are both things luckily my horses never do so I don't get experienced at handling it. So here is a new skill served up in an anxiety tray given fresh to me. In the beautiful creek, my favorite place outside of Vancouver's Stanley Park Island.

I think what goes through your head is all the things that COULD have happened, courtesy of a brain that seems to love playing worst case scenarios theater and I just sort of rearranged my floating shoes back onto my feet as my body shakily recovered from the why did you do that you don't know the creek rules and the horse rules which are never lie down bro never

Jane was just eating plants and totally unconcerned because she felt a lot cooler now and one of my girls said here I'm gonna ride Jane now and she gave me Dewey and after switching stirrups so our legs would fit on our new rides, she got up on Jane and I led the way out of there on Dewey and I was in front when we went through some other deep water and apparently Jane then decided to LIE DOWN AGAIN and the girl jumped off but then I put Jane on the rope and everyone was okay and there was no more waterpark action, Jane is only 3. Jane was showing us that she is only 3. When a horse acts so mature you have to remember that some days they are going to show you that they are truly only 3 years old. With 3 months under saddle.

We walked home with no more tricks. The girls and I realized that I have to step back a step in this training stage and in water just do one young horse at a time, to make it so I can focus fully on the training and not skip any steps. Horses need all the tiny steps to build a solid riding partner. Jane has to go back a step and remember to not roll in the creek. This requires a whip, a rider paying attention with only one horse, moving swiftly through water and not stopping, until she is solidly understanding the rules. 

You do think maybe you should quit. But then wait, you're just learning something. It would be so much better if there were never any new things to learn. Do we think Jane wants to keep us safe? Yes, for sure. If she knew it was wrong, would she be sorry? For sure. She is a horse that adores us all, everyone she meets she greets with gentle eyes and soft muzzle. She would give you her wallet, and her couch. Will we be ultra safe in the water now? Yes. We will lead her to solidly knowing the rules. So this can just wash downstream.

no little hurricane

I just don't recommend kids. I mean DEFINITELY if you're on the fence you HAVE to have kids, there's no way NOT to have kids don't even consider it.

I'm just saying if you're cast as the mom then bro, hang on to your tits because you are going to feel like that midget in Poltergeist when the souls moved through her in a WHOOSH and she got kind of out of focus and her hair messed up. 

You can't get out of the way because you LOVE THEM so much. 

Alls I know is (yes I said alls) Nattan and I dropped Bess off for her second year at SB and I wasn't sad, I know how to do this now, you take all the stuff from the garage, you stuff it in your van, Nattan checks the van fluids to make sure we don't die on the way there, we unload the stuff at the school, we cram it all into the room, we stand around with other parents in the living room area looking at each other like why is there so much room in here oh I know why, it's because that's where the loss is residing. The loss is what the parents get to keep, it is in the dorm room in the emptied out containers that you have to roll back to the lobby, that's what you get to keep you give it all, you set it up nice, you put a comforter on it, and in the lobby, if you're lucky, they give you a blue rubber wristband for free, that says UCSB We Gaucho Back.

I felt good leaving her there because at least now her room was clean, all summer her room looked like the back area at Shoe Warehouse after Christmas, just alot of piles of boxes and random paper and discarded clothing. But when I got home I felt the sadness wall hit because now her room is clean man and I'd much rather have Bess in her island of mess than clean room and no little hurricane.

Have a little baby. End up 19 years later with a blue wristband. It feels fair.

It was chaos getting her there because she doesn't like to pack, but when she does pack it takes her a really long time. Then we had to pick up a bike on the way. Then there was traffic. But the windows had so much green outside them and I never get to go anywhere, I'm strictly one on one with dementia currently, and I'm pretty good at laser focus on intimate surroundings, but it is sure nice to look outside and see things passing by and the wide ocean smiling it's blue ridiculous unanswerable question at me, and the shape of the hills and the slidy-ness of the slopes of green ending in freeway and then ocean. 

It is so nice to have calm Nathan with us, he drives the car like the professional chauffer he was for 15 minutes this summer at John Legend's father in law's funeral. Nothing bothers Nathan except for gas prices and know it alls, he pretty much likes everyone and everything. He's always saying aw mom, everyone deserves a second chance.

I was sad when I got home because the whole summer went by and I barely got to be the mom I used to be, only 2 beach trips, Bess working all hours and then hanging out in Culver City with the girlfriend we're not sure we all like yet, and when she was home just sleeping and on her phone. I guess I just miss the affectionate baby I had, and I miss being somehow useful to her. I don't only want to be useful to pack the college stuff into the car. And I only did that because time was running out, she never asked for any help. And it was Thursday and we had to leave the next morning. So I don't like that we didn't work together in a Brady Bunch way where there was more laughing. I was worried we have left her alone too much this summer. Maybe she needs more help and guidance. She doesn't ever ask for much and maybe those are the people you need to be there for the most.

Nathan built a tv for her in the her dorm living room and we met a nice suitemate. The two girls in the room next door to Bess looked like they had definitely called the suicide hotline at some point. It seemed very serious in there. Bess's roommate had everything pink and seemed not funny at all so I'm interested to see how that works out. She can get along with anyone. 

My life stretched out warped like giant silly putty in the sun and then we drove home and it shrunk back just the dogs and the regulars and one less baby and I got in the pool and thought well

at least I have this wristband

I love wound care

Pardon my departure from this blog, my mom was trying to die from pneumonia for a week and now she's been home a week flooding my back house with diarrhea and I have felt very out of body, mostly just into her body and keeping her body going and knowing that it is not forever, now. I am finally getting the picture that I am not fixing this dementia and going to get my mom back with a big ribbon on her under my christmas tree. I get my mom for right now, breathing much better, snug in her bed that I made for her, under the dangling christmas lights, next to the garage full of stuff from 26 years of kids, barely sorted through, but I have my mom. Little vulnerable thing, she has no one. She has me. I just see all those years where she ran the ship and made weird things important, like dancing, and making creamed chipped beef, and psychics who worked in the laundry at her work, and her jolly face, always her face, she was always there. Maybe she was a little obsessed with herself but who isn't obsessed with themselves. She was always there, the face I looked for to feel comfort. I still need her. But I understand now. I cain't always fight the pneumonia. Sometime she will need to slide out and go live with gramma, she will be so happy to be back at the Haley family reunion, in the sky, with the runny potato salad and most of the relatives that you don't like. But gramma was so good. Squatty, and sensible, and living near water always. I always wished I'd had the 15 siblings she'd had. What a crowded, rambunctious house that musta been, in Easton, Maryland. It's a tiny brick house, just up from the marina. We saw it. Anyway. Because of gramma marrying boring and mean Grandpa Hollaway, and having my bonny faced mom, I am.

I'm just glad for the comfort of her face. Safe at home. We've had such a long life together. I'm so lucky to have her still here, to feel with my nose. Moms and grammas and daughters are somethin.

The best thing about the hospital was the soup. And the guy named Logan who took us in the ambulance. ER is way better on tv than in person, make a note. 

While in the hospital, my mom aced her swallow test, she isn't aspirating. I told them she isn't aspirating. She just needed an antibiotic. The home health totally fucked me up by not giving me an antibiotic on Friday night. By Sunday night she had pneumonia and thus the very first mother daughter Logan ambulance ride. Logan was skinny jeans thin. A fireman. He would burn instantly, like flash paper, he'd be disintegrated in a cough, by fire. He couldn't have weighed more than a pocket protector. I'm so grateful there are crowds of people working at hospitals and in ambulances that are there for you when your mom can't breathe. I'm also really glad I'm not one of those people. 

I'm a teach people to ride person. Which is what I was going to blog about. My day today.

I don't actually like to do this teaching that much, but always I need the hay money and I'm kind of curious and at the same time terrified at meeting new people. I stress out so much when new people are coming to learn to ride. Then I do the lesson, 150% as I always do everything (except cooking) and then it takes me all day to readjust. People in my face take it all out of me, like my energy whirls right out of me and they take it away in carry out containers. I have no idea how not to do this. I just flow right out and puddle everywhere.

So today this girl named Kjersti and husband named Mauricio came to learn to ride. Kjersti was from Norway and from the size of her pants she had not been skimping on the chocolate up there. She met Mauricio on Tinder during the pandemic and they talked on the phone for two years before finally meeting. He's an electrician.  When they were texted me to come for the lesson, she said they wanted to learn horses because they were about to move to Chile and wanted to get their own horses so they wanted to know how to do it. I figured they were retirees, like in their 60s, so when they showed up Mauricio looks like he just finished high school and he married his Norwegian nanny, Fat Sal. Big boned really. She looks like she drained an entire dairy farm before emigrating. Milk fed. Those kids they have are going to be latin dancing snow globes. 

So aside from being surprised by their youth and the size of her, which I was instantly feeling sorry for old Dewey, who has arthritis and took one look at her like oh hell no but he gave me the side eye and lowered his head because okkkkkay I like to eat hay, I'll hellllp with the hay bill, he says. 

Apparently Mauricio is retiring at the age of preschool, he inherited a 30 acre farm in Chile from his grandfather, it has a house on it with electricity and a well, it's 30 minutes from the beach and ten minutes from a river and the town. I was already packing my bags and asking him how many shorts I should bring, they leave November 7th. 

I gave them the basics of riding, how to catch your horse, I put a brush in Kjersti's hand and she sort of held it limply but eventually did the job, Mauricio was more hardy, picking out Maggie's feet, learning how to saddle up. They live nearby in Burbank. She used to be a nurse but she said you know, after 9 years I needed a change. So she came here and is a dog walker. Then one of her dog walker owners is 80 and fell down and so now she's been patching her up as her nurse. I love wound care she said, a phrase that I'm pretty sure she used on Tinder. 

I got them all mounted up, Dewey almost broke in half when she hefted up there, and again, she's not fat, she's just her bones must be solid metal pipes in there. I guess the winters are pretty rugged in Norway, they gotta have like twice the bone density.

She asked where the best place to canter was, and I was like not here with me, that's for sure. You are just riding for the first time since you were a kid. That's like asking where you sign up for the Indy 500 while you're learning driver's ed. 

Also it was about a billion degrees, did I mention, the amount of water draining down my face was refreshing if it hadn't been hot soup temperature. I tried to look normal as I walked the dogs alongside them up the path, noting that my water bottle was almost at the end of the water and I also don't like walking that's why I have horses. 

I got them up to the flat straight part where there is actually a space to canter and the horses are used to cantering there so I said ok actually you can canter here, and there they went. Together, like carousel horses, my sweet buddies took good care of them and cantered easily up the little dirt trail sections between driveways that gives them enough space for a good feel of cantering without it being so long that the horses would go crazy taking off or anything. 

The hardest part of teaching the lesson and waiting for the money at the end is all the pretending to be interested in everything. I genuinely AM interested in people but when people are paying you for a service you have to do the service, act like you're not doing it for the money, and then write all about them later in your blog. 

They had such a good time they said, because they learned so much, and they said oh we are coming back and I was like please just go to chile and send me your instagram so I can watch this unfold. If they were a bit smaller of a people, it would actually be great but I am a little sorry for my horses. 

I can't imagine being 32 or 28 and retiring to a place where I knew no one and raising my kids in a country where I knew no one and there was no road that lead to Ventura Beach. I guess you find your new beach. I guess if you're from Norway you're just so glad to be anywhere else, and without a parka.

After I closed the gate on those immense people and came back in to feed my mom and see Bess for five minutes before she sweatily loaded people onto buses at the hollywood bowl and in a week we will be loading her back to UCSB, and then my mom is sleeping more and not eating that much and I hope she's okay, and I mucked the barn and put mom to bed and sat in the pool while the dogs hung out camped out right next to me saying

it's okay man. We're here.

The Pen

I was on a ride to the creek with these tatted up lesbians that come to ride every week, these girls are the funniest creatures to grace the backs of my horses. 

And now this ride was the first time I put them on different horses, I put the smaller, more skilled one on young Meriwether, the amount of riders he has had on him are ONE, that would be me. So I was a little worried but I got to ride old Dewey, the anchor of the ship. I figured if I'm on the masthead, I can sort of control how safe our ride is when I'm riding a gentleman, so off we went on a new adventure. 

The thing I wanted to try was once we got through the tunnel, maybe we could canter up the big hill that gets you to the top of the wilderness. Meriwether has not really cantered with a rider (that would be me) on him, I've only done a few seconds because he is the size of a matchstick and I am the size of a volcano. It is a little hard to balance on a tiny horse and I want to do right by him, and have success so he will canter easily for his whole life. We are setting up his habits for the future. 

I guess I did the same things with my kids. Little bits of things at a time until they were all growed, and doing well and hopefully sailing along happily with a full heart. 

Anyway, I had put the other rider on Mags, who is the queen and is pretty sure everyone wants to dethrone her, so she's always looking for someone to behead. But this girl really took Mags firmly in hand, which she needs to function at her best, and I was proud of the girl because this is only her second ever horse she has been on in her life. She has only ever ridden Dewey. For the last 7 months. Both girls started as total beginners.

These girls have come a long way, in little bits, and more and more I am seeing them become the teachers, and me the student. Like this ride.

We come through the tunnel and I get my camera out to video them in case we get his historic first long canter with a rider. I'm in front, because I can set the pace and keep the shenanigans at a zero, which is the only number for shenanigans on horses.

Dewey does a perfect easy canter, Mags is following him gently, I'm trying to video and I can't really see Meriwether but HE IS DOING IT! He does a nice slow canter, just keeping up with the big horses, the girl on him is having the time of her life (she loves speed, we are opposites) and we get to the top of the hill with everyone on board, Meriwether with a brand new skill, a new faster gear and new rider, and this is one of the biggest hurdles ever.

The rest of the ride is pretty nice, just a regular walk through the woods and creek, then back into the haunted woods on a newer trail then back up through the hill to head home. Meriwether did perfectly, was his normal balky self at times (he likes to stop and pretend he can't remember how to go, hoping you get off and he can eat grass), but we all got back busting with success.

I had to hurry our ride because my mom's yearly social worker had just pulled up and I had to leave the girls to rinse the horses and feed the chickens and put the saddles away. This social worker lady is important, she works for IHSS which is the government agency that pays me to care for mom. This was the yearly evaluation to make sure she qualifies and get her all set for next year. I came in all sweaty literally gross like a melting salt popsicle with dripping hair, but she couldn't tell how soaked I was cause she was up to her balls in paperwork and she asked questions and looked at mom and organized her stack of stapled official papers and wrote down all the things I answered. Everything went smoothly. Then she said ok, that's good, here you can sign these do you have a pen

I looked at her because she was HOLDING A PEN right there. I was like um 

yeah okay

So I went to the kitchen to get a pen, thinking wow she must really not like sharing her pen it must be a really great pen or maybe she's afraid of pen disease or do I look like I would not be able to cleanly handle her pen she did not look at all horrified by my sweaty horse situation during the whole interview, I don't know why she couldn't me HAND ME HER FUCKING PEN

Anyway I got MY OWN PEN it's a SHITTY PEN cause I couldn't find the good one and I signed about 300 places so my mom could get money and continue to sit in this chair for another year while I feed her burritos and ice cream. The lady left and I ran back out to help the girls finish putting the horses away and tidying up the barn and dismissing them for this Tuesday with some snacks and juice like it's preschool but they were so happy and they handed me my lesson money which I just stow for hay money later and I run back in to make sure mom has had some water and a bite of food and then I

LEAP into the pool to cool off, start my 100 laps to maintain my chiseled figure and as the water gives way forgivingly to my regular backstroke, I look at the sky and the trees and I contemplate 

the pen

Just have fun, he says

I had this great meeting with this guy I met when I was 20. I'm not sure if I even just dreamed that first meeting back then but if I did I convinced him and now here we are.

In college I had written a Moonlighting script because the writing and the love affair on that show was an all consuming creation. Plus the dialogue just ripped a river through me. I get all churned up when there's funny dialogue delivered by a rogue and it ends up in kissing. I loved disaster in unrequited love.

This exec guy was working with my dad and he read my script and liked it and we met on the balcony of some person's house in 1986 and we weren't even sitting down we were just standing by a rail and he said I'm gonna give your script to Glenn Caron and that was the creator of Moonlighting, the writer whose words changed the rhythm of my own. 

So now it's 40 yes 4 zero years later and I've run out of things to write about it (check backwards in this blog if you don't believe me) and my kids left for colleges and lives and I'm just training horses religiously and caring for my mostly blank mom, in other words THERE WAS SPACE here for a minute if I ignored all the cleaning and so I started writing to weird people I don't really know like Big Executives I met when I was 20 to see if anyone would take a look at my little Lewis and Clark show. 

I was ready (again) (I have done this before) to try and put my writing out there in the world. 

So first I wrote a letter to Batman. I was at his wedding when I was 15. It was one of the greatest memories of my life, sitting in a old barn in New Hampshire, in the rain, in the middle of a muddy field, watching this later to be superhero marry this lady my dad went to college with. Then I wrote to the exec guy from the balcony, Jordan. I wrote to my old best friend Howard from NYU who now runs the Discovery Channel. I wrote to David Witz who brought me in to interview for a job on Critters and inadvertently started my whole motherhood career. (He really owes me.) David went on from Critters to do other big movies, just like Leo DiCaprio and Angela Bassett (both from Critters). Let's not forget that big things start with low budget warehouses full of surfers and sets made out of old egg crates. That's the reality of the formation of my base. It's a solid place! If you can watch the art department build a spaceship out of things you find in a dumpster, you can do anything.

I wrote this Jordan email because he was a nice guy, and I was hoping a nice guy who liked my writing would still be a nice guy. And that he would be really into gaying up history. My email was true, funny, friendly, nostalgic, Glenn Caron-worshipping, and              he wrote me back!

He said great to hear from you! Let my head of development set up a zoom call. Talk to you soon.

This was on like a regular Wednesday in late July. I went automatically out to muck the barn and I cried and I talked to the rake as I always do as I'm picking up piles of crap and horses are milling around ignoring me and I cried because I can't do any of this. I'm not a networker. I can't do a zoom call. I can barely do the microwave. I'm already holding everything together I have nothing left this is such a bad idea. 

By the time I was done mucking I realized that the people in me that like to throw mud on passing cars in a thunderstorm were just flinging mud so I would think I was incapable of doing a hard thing. Just because most of the people I have talked to in the last 40 years were growing up people, and dementia patients, and four legged thousand pound animals, this doesn't mean that I CAN'T DO WHAT I'M NOT USED TO DOING. I just have to get used to it. 

Calm down. One thing at a time.

I asked my friend Chris who does zooms every day to do a fake zoom with me so I could get used to it again. (I did teach zoom kindergarten during Covid. It's just been awhile since I taught math to 5 year olds without wearing pants.) I had all my notes for what I wanted to say. 

I was so serious planning my fake meeting and then seeing Chris on the zoom in  a white room doing what she does every day made me feel suddenly shrunken, like a drunk dwarf juggling chainsaws and feathers. She made me see that a) he doesn't care what you've been doing for 40 years, he wants to help you now. Throw out all that and 2) he wants to help you. And he did Fried Green Tomatoes. There's some gay in him.

By the time it came time for the real meeting, I had my notes down to four lines. I had no idea how to weave them into a meeting. The night before I told B I had all this I wanted to say, here's my list, but what if I couldn't say it all. He said, as he always does, very relaxed, you can't direct the meeting. You have your notes. But just have fun.

It was just like when we had just had Nathan at the hospital in Florida, and teeny Nathan was in that little clear crate beside the bed and for a second I thought oh no what if I can't do this. And he said you just have a new friend, that's all.

This is why we so rely on the baffling planet Barry. He sees no problem in the big mysteries and fears, but yet he cannot put a dish from the sink into the dishwasher or wipe a counter. That's all me, baby.

I was terrified up until the moment of the zoom and for several minutes into the call, and then --

--I had the greatest meeting of my writerly life. All heart, some nature of the industry talk by him to share his perspective as a decades long executive with how the studio system is functioning at the moment (this is where I breathed, and reassembled myself in karate gear to take on this meeting as a solid sparring partner), then lots of talk about writing, and good writing, and EB White (since he did Charlotte's Web, the movie), and we talked about how comedy is really all that matters, after family.  He's gonna read my script, it will take 6 weeks (it's really long) (it's 25 pages) no they're backlogged, but he's going to read it and I made a contact a person who if he can't help me will help guide me to a few other people, and that was the first push of my little Lewis and Clark pebble. My very first. 

It's not that I need to be the guy to gay up history. It's just that it won that Austin Best Comedy Pilot festival, and so even though I have other scripts and other projects I thought, let's go with this momentum. There was just that very popular gay hockey show. This has gay AND horses in it. And comedy and heartbreak and love.

When I mucked the barn next I just was busting at the guts happy. It is so fun to watch something you squeezed out of yourself from two guys talking in your head, shape it into a scene, shape it into a longer story, love your characters enough you want them to live, and then box them up and send them out into other people's eyes, hoping that someone else will get on the boat with you. It's like when they would send orphans into the old west with their names pinned onto their clothes, so they could go work on farms. You don't know where they're going, but you dressed them up as nice as you could and they have solid strong feet and we're hoping for the best. 

I'm in the ring. 

Silence is Golden

I love the levels of my life.

I love the caring for my mom. Knowing that she knows someone cares about her. Someone kisses her goodnight each night. Someone touches her cheek and puts a face down to find her hidden dementia eyes and moves away the dementia til I can see her and she smiles. The things that aren't easiest to find are the things worth looking for.

I like so much the riding into the creek and the worry of training a new horse. I like that it is also levels. You expose them to so much and then comes the time to get onboard the beast and then you start just in your backyard and today I rode the youngest horse, my last little one, into the creek, in the water, and she was just fine. Because we took a bunch of time and exposure there, so she didn't care at all to be walking in water carrying a me, she trusted me. It helps that she's curious, and willing. I feel safe because I set it up to be safe. I have the old mare along with us. I only rode for a fraction of a second, just to set myself up for the next time. Just to get the feet wet and feel success. Next time we'll do a little bit more. Next year I'll be riding her in the creek all the time and barely remembering that we never used to do that. That is was at one time the scariest thing of all because of the sinky sand and the youthful horse, because it was new and who knew how it would go.

This year has been stung in the face by bees, heart attack b, evie searching for love and striking out always, nattan trying out chauffering, bess home from college but in groups of loud girls, no beach really, no trip to the fair, things changing.

But always caring for things, mom, the kids, the horses, my body, the new weirdness of reaching out to random people to try and make my Lewis and Clark show happen, realizing I am on THEIR trip, just like they were, I have to ask a bunch of people to help me so I can make it come true just like they did, and they certainly didn't know what they were doing. They were doing everything with a paper map drawn only by hearsay.

I like that none of us actually know what's going on. We sort of know. We THINK we know. We're going forward based on something we did yesterday, fragments of a plan we had when we were kids shaped into whatever ran us over as we were on our way. Lumping that in. Lumping in every disaster with every success, and maybe they're all the same thing for real. It got us here.

I feel scared that we are so fragile, little living beings on a rolling planet. I can feel the world moving and it is so hectic.

Today in the creek after the ride on young Jane, I got back on the old mare Mags and rode thru deep water and then up into the sandy woods and it was so silent in there it was like being inside Notre Dame. It was like being in Athena's Temple. It was silent like the pope's robes hanging in the closet. 

We snaked through, on bare horse feet, taking nothing, but listening listening filling our hearts up with silence the most filling sound of all. You can hear everything in it.

Water and silence and horses and trying to do one hard thing every day. Many hard things. It chips away at you but eventually you become that greek statue with no arms but a perfectly tilted neck, humbled by the artist's chisel at your perfection. 

They're making you just right.

 

Well, ain't it somethin

Did you ever wake up in the middle of your life and you're like hot damn this is my life?? How did I ever get this lucky?

Maybe it's because I'm reading Henry Miller in the pool and he's wandering around Greece telling too much about nothing but every now and then he stabs you with a shard of how beautiful the world is the ordinary world, people exploring dirt patches of land that make them happy, the way a stranger can remind you of something you forgot to notice, the luck of being able to sit in your kitchen and drink tea and listen to quiet which is the sound of things unfolding easily.

I decided on my 60th I would finish this script called Subculture which has all the remnants of things I hadn't put into a story, things I held onto because I didn't want to look at them, so I shoved them all into this script about being a sub, being a temporary human, and if that means we are failures at long term or if that means we are just killer at the immediate. Part of the story is having a trenchcoat full of rocks and unloading those rocks into the sea. Evie said maybe you never get rid of your rocks even if you empty your pockets. 

But that shit works, bro. I have emptied my pockets. Really my brain would say, I have shifted my focus by an increment, but there are many other paths when you decide to not be burdened by what only you decided to hold onto. It has nothing to do with any other person. It's just the relationship to yourself, and freeing yourself. In the script she is trying to Free Lance, and there is a surfy Lance character, who lives in the tunnels under Subway, and there are old boyfriends that lure her with the past, and there are dead husbands. 

A true Shakespeare play of ghosts, folly, comedy, tragedy, the deaths of mothering and daughtering, love and temporary employment. Oh it is a terrible piece of work. But drafts are always easier to fix up later, it's the birthing of them that's hard. But lately I have been thinking as I roll my mom around in her husk, with her still beautiful to me shape and sound and familiar curving skin, I'll take it ALL. I'll take it all AGAIN. Every bit of my explosive tenure on earth, beloved spacehome circling the emptiness, circling itself, circling the yellow star. I'll take all the limping dogs, and the coffehouse theaters and bare feet and ducking under jungle branches in the creek, the shape of horses, the confoundment of love, playing cards, kids wearing tiny elastic pants, the journey

this one immense temporary ride

I vacuum up every crumb and stuff my pockets. Somebody thought to make pockets. There is so much I am seeing and that I need to still see. 

So calm down, Jules. I say. Since I emptied the rocks, and I ran out of things to write about because I wasn't mad or sad anymore, I decided hey time to sell my writing again.

I might never get anywhere or maybe I'll already there, but every day now I've been reaching out to some person new or some person who helped me in the past, or some far flung executive who's probably dead, but I'm reaching out to say hey. My stuff is good. Shove aside some other people's stuff for a minute and cram mine in there. There's beloved life in it. 

I'm speaking up for my work. The time I usually spent chasing people or love, let's try this, instead. It's addictive, like diving into cliff water far below, you gasp a chest full of water, scramble back up to leap again. 

When I get overwhelmed and drowning, I switch back to the other jobs like feeding my mom. Swimming. Taking the horses out. Getting on the new young horse Janey Pickle. Seeing how easy it is to just get on and try it for a few minutes, building a relationship. If I do it gently, I can build a relationship where she will literally carry me, happily, anywhere we want to go. I show her my heart, and if she decides, she matches it with hers. Horses always say yes. If you give them yourself.

Everywhere in life, you are doing the same thing. It looks like different tasks, using different clothes, different email addresses, different foods but it's all the same rope down into your well. You're nurturing your life, you're growing your soul. Nothing is wasted. Nobody's in trouble. 

It's good to let go of the rocks. You float up.