This is me at my crying altar back when I was surviving divorce. This could also be me yesterday, when I’m learning to survive 2020.
When my 18-year partnership abruptly ended in late 2015, my life completely fell apart. Everything changed. My home life, my work life, my financial security, my social life, everything. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, couldn’t think, had trouble doing simple shit like walking down the stairs, and threw up randomly.
It was a complete shitshow.
My doctor diagnosed me with something I’d never heard of called “adjustment disorder,” where you’re so shocked by a major life event (divorce, death of a loved one, job loss, natural disaster, etc) that you start having physical symptoms.
I wrote a book about I got to the other side of that shitshow, but then 2020 happened.
2020 is a shitshow on a collective, global scale — pandemic, quarantine, economic collapse, long-over racial justice awakening, unprecedented political and social unrest.
Again, everything changed. My home life, my work life, my financial security, my social life, everything.
…And yet, oddly, while 2020 has been a monumentally challenging year, I’ve been able to eat. I’ve been able to sleep. I not only continued working, but I pivoted and worked even harder.
I did not, in other words, experience adjustment disorder.
Why? Because surviving divorce taught me 9 lessons that are helping me survive 2020.
1. Life blindsides you (and you can be resilient)
Back in 2015, I still had a youthful innocence about life — I felt like if I did things “right,” life would ok. Sure I’d had challenges and frustrations, but I hadn’t ever felt blindsided by life as I knew it suddenly ending.
When my marriage abruptly ended, suddenly I came to understand that life can change in an instant. Doesn’t matter if it’s fair. Doesn’t matter if you did things “right.” Life as you knew it is over.
When your life changes in an instant, it can feel like things will never ever feel ok again. And yet somehow, you adapt and grow and learn you’re more resilient than you ever knew.
It’s a lesson I’m learning again this year.
This is a lesson a lot of us are learning this year.
2. Shitshows come in clusters (it’s never just one thing)
Yes, my divorce was the main ingredient of my shitshow, but there was also a terrifying medical crisis a few months prior (exploding ovary and emergency surgery, HI!), the major milestone birthday, and a remodel that had my family couch surfing for almost six months.
I learned that it’s never just one thing — shitshows come in clusters.
This year, it’s not just a pandemic and a quarantine, it’s ALSO an economic collapse. Oh AND a racial justice uprising. Oh AND murder hornets. Oh AND wildfires. Oh AND an election year. Oh AND… you get the idea.
It’s always a cluster. Always.
3. Prioritize grieving (if not now, then when?)
Surviving my divorce, I learned that I had to consciously make the time in my day to grieve my losses. I learned that unattended grief doesn’t go away — it just bides its time and waits for you. If you ignore it long enough, it will wait for your children.
During my shitshow, I learned that I had to create space every day to just be sad. Sometimes being sad felt like a job. I created special places in my home for grieving, designating a corner of my bedroom to what I called “the crying altar.”
Here in 2020, I’m remembering yet again that you can’t steamroll the loss. You have to just sit and cry sometimes… for all the plans dashed, all the losses piling up, all the new horrors unfolding. You have to make the time to grieve.
If not now, then when?
4. Long-standing issues need attention (and you can do it)
I may have felt blindsided by my marriage ending, but the reality is that everyone who’s been married knows that every relationship has its long-standing issues. There are power dynamics that are out of whack, arguments that keep showing up, old systems that were put in place years ago that no longer make sense.
After my marriage ended, it was excruciating to wake up and realize that some long-standing issues had been broken for a very long time.
Like, decades.
Sort of like how, this summer, it’s been excruciating to wake up and realize that the long-standing issues of system racism have been broken for a very long time.
Like, centuries.
Turns out, healthy relationships and healthy societies both demand constant re-examination so that you can see how long-standing, systemic issues may be rotting things from the inside out.
It’s painful to look at what’s not working, but it’s crucially important. Once you practice doing it for a while, it’s less painful.
5. All your foundations can crumble (and somehow you will adapt)
My divorce felt like it took away everything: my identity as a wife, my identity as a mother (50/50 custody felt brutal), the person who’d been my roommate and best friend, my domestic systems and established divisions of labor, my financial arrangements, my sense of comfort and stability.
It felt like all my foundations had crumbled. ALL OF THEM.
…Sort of like how this year many of us have many foundations crumble: loved ones are socially distanced, kids are home from school, jobs have been lost, travel has been canceled, health protocols have drastically shifted, trust in legal enforcement and our federal and city governments have all been rocked.
And yet somehow, even when all the foundations fall out from under you… you still manage to wake up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other.
Resilience is fucking amazing.
6. When you think you can’t go on, you can
Five years ago, I remember waking up some mornings and just being absolutely sure there was no way I could go on.
There was NO WAY I could function through the heartache. There was NO WAY I could parent alone. There was NO WAY I could handle my home on my own. There was NO WAY I would ever trust anyone ever again, and certainly NO WAY I could ever fall in love ever again.
I felt broken and like I would always be broken.
…And yet somehow, I went on. I survived heartbreak. I parented my kid. managed my home. I relearned to trust. I relearned to love. I learned. I changed. I grew. I healed.
When my son’s school first closed in March (for two weeks, they said!), I had no idea how I would juggle work and childcare for two weeks.
Somehow, five months later, our family has adapted so completely that now my son and I debate whether maybe we should just switch to homeschooling, regardless of whether schools reopen this year (or next year, or ever).
You think you can’t go on, and then somehow… you do. Because adaptation. Because resilience. Because you must.
7. Dancing every day helps (…really!)
This might sound silly, but it’s true. As part of recovering from my divorce, I started dancing at home, every morning. Just for a song or two. Sometimes I was so depressed that “dancing” was just swaying and crying, sometimes I woke up with a flare up of a chronic health condition and “dancing” was laying on the floor stretching my legs.
But I kept moving.
Five years later, it’s not just me who’s figured it out. All of TikTok agrees: dancing at home is fun and feels great.
As quarantine settled in, and my gym closed, and the dance studios shut down, and even neighborhood walks felt fraught with disease and fear… I kept dancing every day, and it kept helping, just like it had when I was surviving my divorce.
8. Everything changes (thank god/fucking tragic)
When I was in the thick of my shitshow, it felt like the heartbreak and grief and depression and overwhelm and trauma would last forever. Truly, I believed I was permanently broken.
But, weirdly, things changed.
Then they changed some more.
Then they changed in a different way.
When I loosened my grasp a bit, I stopped being able to tell when the changes were good or bad… some changes that felt tragic ended delivering overwhelming blessings. Some changes that seemed good ended up being fraught and full of challenge.
It got to the place where I’d just look at every new change and be like, “Huh, everything’s always changing — thank god, but also fucking tragic?”
Here in 2020, I notice things that are awful (quarantine) but also wonderful (time to be quiet and restful). I see things that are fucking tragic (police brutality) that come with odd blessings (a cultural awakening about how many of us have been complicit in systemic racism, and how we all need to make changes).
My divorce tangled things for me — I see grief and love as the same, now. I feel a strange joy even in loss. Happy moments have deep hues of bittersweet awareness… everything’s always changing.
Thank god, fucking tragic.
9. You’re not alone (especially when you’re hurting)
This is the lie that both divorce depression and quarantine isolation whisper in your ears: you’re alone. No one else has it this bad. No one understands. No one is as fucked up as you. No one gets it. Your misery is The Worst Misery Ever.
But the reality is that those dark moments? Those isolated moments, whether they’re the darkest bleakest loneliness in the shadow of divorce, or the interminable tedium of social isolation… THOSE are the moments when we’re the most united.
When the voices in your head scream that you’re alone? That’s when you’re swimming in the soup of shared human experience. We’ve all felt suffering.
When you understand that we’re all in it together, like understand it truly deeply in your bones, it allows you gain compassion for your fellow humans in ways that can help you feel deeply, truly, profoundly connected.
Look, I’m not here to talk about silver linings. There’s no denying that the shitshow of divorce and the shitshow of 2020 are FUCKING AGONIZING.
But part of what I learned by surviving divorce (and what I see us all collectively learning through 2020) is the power of adaptability. The sensations of resilience. The remarkable shared strength that we can all tap into, individually and collectively, to do the hard things that need doing.
We can adapt.
We can be resilient.
We can learn.
We can get through this.
If you’re facing down the shitshow of surviving divorce OR surviving 2020, my new book From Shitshow To Afterglow is here for you. Filled with raw, personal stories and practical, research-backed advice, Sh!tshow will help you overcome personal trauma through creative self-development.
Hey guys! It’s me, Ariel — the publisher of Offbeat Home & Life. My new book, From Sh!tshow To Afterglow, publishes on July 21st. It’s about how to rebound after loss, grief, and the other cruel crises life throws your way — it’s sorta the anti-self-help book.
To encourage everyone to get their copies of Sh!tshow ordered now, my publisher is hosting a preorder sweepstakes, and I want one of you to win!
The Sh!tshow Survival Kit
I lovingly assembled this package, and I’m so excited about it. Here’s what’s included in the Sh!tshow Survival Kit:
Luxe gold-embossed Moleskine journal
Great for self-reflection and doing all that brutal ego-dismantlement work!
Hand-stamped raw brass hoop earrings by Seattle jeweler Squirrel vs. Coyote
One earring is stamped with the word SHITSHOW, and the other says AFTERGLOW. You can wear them both or go asymmetrical and rock just the one that shows where you’re at in your process on that particular day!
Handcrafted AFTERGLOW meditation candle by Virginia candlemaker UNLAX
The hand-blended soy candle smells like a custom blend of sandalwood, amber, and nonduality!
3-month membership to The Afterglow
This is my new membership program with exclusive weekly mailers, and massive members-only archive filled with essays, audiobooks, guided meditations, deleted scenes from Sh!tshow, and more.
How to Enter
To be entered into the sweepstakes, fill out the form with your contact info and a preorder receipt number. The sweepstakes ends 7/20/20 at 11:59 pm ET. My publisher is administering the sweepstakes, so if you have any questions about it, email them.
The bed shown here is the Ikea Malm, a non-squeaky fave.
One of Offbeat Home’s most popular posts of all time is this one about bedframes that are quiet during sex:
That’s a great post for folks who are in the market for a new bed frame… but fuck, man: we’re in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. Lots of us can’t afford new bedframes right now. Also, lots of us are stuck at home with our quarantine buddies, which means that our old bedframes might be getting quite a workout.
This means we need some DIY solutions.
Tight screws and squeaky joints
Squeaking and bed noises mostly come from bedframes that have some movement in them, so if your existing bedframe isn’t absolutely tight at every joint, you’ll get a headboard that can hit the wall and squeaks from wood and joiners rubbing.
So first: check how your current bedframe is put together! I guess what I’m saying here is you need to think about tight screws. Very tight screws.
The fewer joints and the tighter the joints the less noise they make for the frame itself. The headboard and footboard need to be attached very tightly and the thicker that joint is the better. My last headboard attached by two screws and it was horribly noisy. Having a headboard that mounts to the wall instead of the frame minimizes the movement being transferred and keeps things quiet too.
Basically, you want solid construction, not frames that have a headboard and foot board and bars between to attach. The more joints there are that can move or loosen, the more noise the bed will make and the looser those joints will get with action. (Floors squeak for similar reasons and you can use talcum powder between the boards to help minimize this, not great for a bed though.)
Please send noods — as in pool noodles.
Buy a pack of foam exercise workout pads (about $20 for 8 squares). I put these under my bed legs and behind the headboard.
If you must get a headboard, mount it on the wall, not the bed. Add some exercise foam padding to the back to prevent any vibration/banging.
A swim noodle or pipe insulator can be cut in half and attached to the back of the headboard to prevent it from hitting the wall
The final result: Absolutely no creaking, no sliding, no banging, no noise … well except the vocal ones…!
We also love this DIY suggestion from a reader:
I built my quiet bed…with landscape bricks/blocks and 2×4’s. It does not move, or make any noise at all! I painted an old door, set it on a few random long pieces of wood so it is up high enough; done. Total it cost me about $40 to make this bed “frame.” The only time it makes noise against the wall is if we are leaning up against the headboard/door while having sex, or it get super vigorous and pillows are slamming against the headboard.
Anyone else have any low-budget DIY bed hacks for quieter sexin’? SHARE IN THE COMMENTS!
I am a working mom. I love my two-year-old daughter more than light, but ever since she was 11 weeks old, my husband and I have had help of one variety or another… that is until COVID-19.
Now we’re all at home, alone together, working, and trying to wade through this mess.
My husband and I are super grateful to have this extra time with our daughter, AND to have the kind of jobs we can do from home, AND to still have paychecks. But let’s be real, our kid is 2, and we can’t exactly leave her to her own devices and focus on our work.
And for me, the guilt is real! The mom guilt that I’m not giving my daughter all she needs/deserves, and the work guilt that my job needs me, and I’m not doing my best…I feel defeated most days.
Between my daughter and my job, I’m fully occupied from 6am until 8pm every weekday, and I’m the kind of person who needs solid sleep to function.
That leaves me about two hours each day to have a glass of wine, spend “time” with my husband, cook, clean, exercise, play with my dogs, and generally unwind enough that I'm able to fall asleep before I have to get up in the morning and start again.
I don't have time or energy for all the beautiful, educational, fun projects that I see other moms doing online… and that’s assuming I could even get the materials! And I certainly haven’t seen a project yet that’s suitable for my 2-year-old to do unsupervised.
Other working parents: How are you managing to work from home with young kids who need constant supervision/entertainment? Is the answer here really just, “Tough shit, life is hard right now. Level Up!”??
I have need of your smarts!! I know I’m not the only one struggling with this problem or this guilt! Can we just share our struggles, and successes, and maybe feel a little less defeated??
Offbeat Home blog posts will be coming less frequently, as I focus my work on my new venture associated with my book coming out in June. Part of that work is The Afterglow, my subscriber-supported weekly mailer with exclusive essays. This is one of them.
CHAPTER 1: Lakeview Cemetery
I don’t know why it took me so long to appreciate Lakeview Cemetery. I’ve lived in my neighborhood off and on since 1997, and sometimes it feels like I know Capitol Hill’s cracks and crevices like the veins on the backs of my own hands.
When my son was a toddler, I’d stand bleary and exhausted as he played at the Volunteer Park playground, sipping my tea and musing on the poetry of the cemetery being right next to the play area. I love that there are only a few feet and a chainlink fence separating the sounds of squealing children from the silence of the gravestones. There’s a great metaphor in there somewhere!
But it wasn’t until these past few years that Lakeview Cemetery has become a friend of mine, one of my favorite neighborhood walks.
It wasn’t until these past few years that I’ve had a quilt hanging in my living room that says WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE. It wasn’t until these past few years that I’ve treated every sad moment as Loss Training. It wasn’t until these past few years that I’ve developed daily memento mori dance practice.
It wasn’t until these past few years that I hit midlife, is what I’m saying.
It took the shitshow of midlife for Lakeview Cemetery to become one of my favorite places.
A couple of times a month now, I walk the three-mile loop north from my house, wind through the cemetery, and then back south.
Sometimes it’s quiet and contemplative, sometimes I bring a loved one and we talk the whole way, sometimes I’ve got loud music on my headphones and I dance with myself in one of Lakeview’s back corners.
Sometimes I bike through the cemetery with my son — although I recently saw a sign that said bikes aren’t allowed, so maybe I won’t do that anymore.
Sometimes, during the summer, I bring a book and a blanket and I stretch out with my dead friends and practice.
Mostly, I go to be awake and alive and aware.
I spend so much time on my phone and in my screens and up in my head, talking to people all over the world and in my imagination and the machinations and plans and strategies and algorithms and it’s incredibly difficult for me just to look around and notice things.
It’s hard to look away from the push notifications and just let the world pull you along.
Sometimes on my walks, I even leave my phone at home.
…I KNOW! Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine my phone in my hand as a strong cocktail — do I really need to take this cocktail on a walk with me? Yikes. Do I really need to have this cocktail in my hand while I’m hugging my son? Eep. Is 7am really a good time for a cocktail? Barf.
So I leave my phone at home, and I leave my house and turn north and walk the treelined streets or dumpster-lined alleys and try to notice things.
I live in this neighborhood, in this present plane of existence.
I can notice it! I can notice the trash stuck in the grass, the stalled out townhome development, the schizophrenic young man rocking on the sidewalk in front of the pot shop. Ah, so.
After the hustle and bustle of my dense urban neighborhood, the cemetery is wonderfully quiet. I mean sure, there’s the small, steady stream of visitors to see the Lee graves, but the rest of Lakeview’s sloping hills and meandering drives are generally empty.
I like to read the headstones and imagine everyone’s stories. Sometimes I sit and cry with particularly sad stories (the parents who lost six children, the WWII Japanese American soldiers, the unmarked graves).
Sometimes I lay down on the grass and imagine that, if time is an illusion, in this moment, all the folks who are buried in the cemetery are all laughing together and then coming simultaneously.
Midlife: when your thoughts turn to giggling cemetery orgies!
Midlife: when crying at the grave of someone you didn’t know, feels entirely appropriate!
Midlife: when rainbow-wearing old ravers go goth.
Midlife: when my Enneagram3w4 starts to lean real hard into that beautifully tragic four-wing!
I have a few favorite dead friends I like to visit, especially Grandma Dora here, who I’m convinced had a raunchy sense of humor because LOOK AT HER TREE’S BUTTHOLE!
CHAPTER 2: The first exhumation
On one of my walks through the cemetery last summer, I turned off the road that winds through Lakeview and ventured into the gravestones in the far northwestern corner.
Wandering down the sloping hill toward the quietest corner of the cemetery, I wove between the gravestones like a garden. I admired them as I walked by, reading names like I was sniffing flowers. So many stories to smell!
Glancing up from my grave garden revery, I noticed that the chainlink fence at the bottom of the sloping corner of the cemetery was peeled back a bit, creating a space just big enough for a person to step through.
When I wandered further down the hill to investigate, I found a small trail leading from the opened chainlink. The light path led south, tracing along the outside western edge of the cemetery.
Huh. On all my walks, I’d never noticed that before.
I decided to slip through the fence and follow the trail. It was late summer, late afternoon and I’d left my phone at home. My son was with his father for the weekend, and I was gently stoned, and I had nowhere to be. No plans and no people were waiting for me. This kind of day used to fill me with panicked existential agoraphobia, but now it’s my favorite.
The trail traced along a steep, eroding slope above a brick retaining wall, which leaned maybe 10 feet above the sidewalk of a Capitol Hill back-street. The area between the cemetery fence and the retaining wall was lined with mature deciduous trees, their roots doing their best to hold the hill from pushing the strained brick wall from toppling onto the sidewalk below.
If you looked at the scene in geological time, you could see that this muddy, wet, grave-filled hillside was slowly sluicing its way downhill, gravity pulling the whole massive pile of soil ever onward, down the western slope of Capitol Hill toward the sunset.
I picked my way along the slope between the fence and the retaining wall, watching my footing closely to avoid tripping over the tree roots. I stepped over bits of trash stuck in the leaves, noticing shards of broken glass and candy wrappers and an old bottle and some more glass and…
…That’s weird. Why was there so much broken glass back here?
A few steps later, another glint caught my eye, this time peeking out under a tree root. I squatted down to investigate.
It was a mason jar, sticking out of the soil between the roots. Curious and stoned, I started digging around the jar, first with the toes of my Adidas, and then with my fingers.
I was delicate at first, but got more aggressive once I surrendered to the reality that my hands were going to get dirty.
A Ball jar emerged from the dirt. Whole, and unbroken, cradled in the roots of the tree.
Fucking cool!!
I looked up from my prize, glancing back at the path where I’d been walking, looking back at all that trash I’d stepped over.
Suddenly, I could see that the soil was brimming with glass and ceramics. Sure there was legit trash like cans and wrappers, but there were also the lips of bottles, the edges of jars, old flower pots, bits of broken vases.
Immediately, I understood what this was. These were decades of grave flower containers.
The containers that held flowers left on graves had been rolling down this hill for a hundred years. Lazy groundskeepers had probably tossed trash over the fence many times. Jars, bottles, vases, and flower pots had all rolled down the slope, and settled here, cradled in the arms of the roots.
I tried looking at the hill with different eyes, eyes with a time signature measured in centuries instead of seasons. I could see — no, I could feel how the slope was a slow, controlled mudslide, working its way down the western side of Capitol Hill.
It might take hundreds of years to get there, but entropy says all hills are heading toward all valleys, and so here we go! I could feel myself in the consciousness of the hill and feel its truth: I’ve got places to be, dammit!
The roots of the trees along the retaining wall were a part of the story, holding the jars and bottles and other containers safe in their hard fingers, through years of rain and sun and numerous human neighbors walking on them. As the slope’s slow journey down the hill continued, however, the jars were emerging — blossoming like little glinting petals from the soil behind my gravestone garden.
I was enthralled, and spent half an hour digging up first the Ball jar, and then what appeared to be a small but sturdy juice glass.
The path only goes for a half block, and then I scrabbled down an ivy-covered embankment to the corner of 11th & East Blain to head home.
I felt self-conscious, walking down the sidewalk in front of million-dollar homes, clutching two filthy old jars I’d just dug out of their graves. But I smiled at my neighbors as they passed, and radiated a vibe of “there is nothing at all odd about a middle-aged woman walking down the street double-fisting dirt-crusted glassware — these are not the droids you’re looking for.”
My walk home took me through Volunteer Park, where I randomly stumbled across a chamber music performance at the amphitheater! I’m not really into chamber music, but I had nowhere to be, so I sat down and enjoyed it.
My body felt, patient. The sensation was of being in precisely the right place at the right time.
There was nowhere else to be.
CHAPTER 3: Drinking death
I got home that evening and got to work washing out my ground-score glasses in the kitchen.
As I stood at the sink, the water running muddy over my hands, I considered for a moment what I was doing. I’d just exhumed glass from behind a graveyard. The situation was macabre and kind of dark. I should be intentional about what I’m doing here, before I go thoughtlessly playing around with this energy I’d brought into my home.
I mean, was I going to drink out of this glass?
I lifted the glass up in my hands, letting the light from the window shine through it. It had cleaned up nicely, all the dirt washing off with relative ease. The glass was in excellent condition and didn’t feel that old, maybe the same age as me? It felt like it had served orange juice in the 1970s, in a mustard-colored breakfast nook in a split-level Brady Bunch kind of house.
The glass was physically clean (and honestly, I’m not worried about soil in my water — better dirt than plastic, know’msayin’?), but what story would I be telling when I drank from this glass?
What vibe was I was bringing into my scene, man!?
This was a container used for flowers on a gravestone. Was I drinking death? Was I filling my body with decay and rot, inviting in the agony of unresolved ghosts? Was this a grief chalice?
…Cool story bro, but that’s not my story. I don’t write dystopia — that’s my boyfriend’s jam. It’s just not my genre, you know? No, my mind didn’t go dark. My mind went where it usually goes, which is interpersonal relationship and conversations and social dynamics.
Someone had filled this glass with water and flowers, and then they’d taken the time to bring it to Lakeview and place it on a grave.
Someone alive filled this glass with love and life, and then they’d taken the time to bring it to Lakeview… to have a conversation with someone dead.
The conversation might have been, “I love you, and I miss you.” The conversation might be, “I’m so grateful for all you did for me.“ The conversation might have one been of admiration, or obligation, or even anger or animosity (You always hated peonies, you asshole! Not much you can do about it now, huh?!).
It wasn’t my place to know the content of the conversation.
But regardless of content, all conversation is a form of attention. And all attention is a form of love. What you pay attention to, grows. Positive or negative, attention doesn’t care. As I’ve said for years, attention is currency. Attention is love. (The opposite of love isn’t hate — it’s disinterest.)
The way I saw it, this glass was a conversation.
The way I saw it, this glass was a love story.
I had exhumed a love story, and now I was going to drink from it. I rolled the story around in my mind like a smooth white marble.
…I’M IN!! I like that story.
My intention set; the situation felt all good. I told this glass what I saw in it and what I wanted from it. The glass shone its consent, and it was so. Hey, Love Story Glass! Welcome to my home! I love you! Wanna makeout? Here, I’ll put my mouth all over you so you can enjoy the attention, and we’ll make our own love story together!
I put the glass into the cabinet with all the other beloved glasses and mugs, and turned my attention to the Ball jar.
The jar was a worn pale blue, and felt old. Some quick googling informed me that it was from somewhere between 1910 and 1923. Cool! I’m not big on antiques, but I’m into a good century-old love story unearthed from the roots of trees.
This was a talisman I wanted in my home.
I filled the jar with water, popped some greens in it, and set it on a table.
Mission accomplished.
CHAPTER 4: The old hobos
I’ve gone back to the retaining wall several times, but last month I went back with Ellen, a bff/ex-gf of mine. Ellen’s lived on Capitol Hill since the mid-’90s like me, and we like to go on spontaneous neighborhood walks, winding through the hidden alleys as we dissect our lives and creative work and career challenges and self-inflicted interpersonal dramas.
I’d told Ellen about my summer ground-scores, and she’d mentioned noticing a sign on the north side of the cemetery — the retaining was being replaced, and a bunch of the old trees were getting taken out.
“It sounds like they tried everything they could to save the trees,” she said. “But there’s just not much to be done.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “Those trees are precarious, and the houses across the street are expensive. The wall looks like it’s at a weird angle.”
“The sign said that construction would be starting summer of 2019,” Ellen said, smirking because things were clearly running behind.
“The clock is ticking!” I shouted. “We should bring trowels!”
But then we went to brunch instead, trowels forgotten.
It was a cold Saturday, and although it wasn’t currently raining, a heavy rainstorm had just passed through Seattle. After brunch, we decided to go for a long walk to check out the wall.
I mean, how long is the wall even going to be there? You can bet that no-one’s going to be doing 20th-century archeological digs when they take out those trees! Might as well go exhume some love stories while we can, right?
We approached the wall from the street, clambering up the ivy slope toward the cemetery. The groundskeepers had recently tended the retaining wall area, and the soil was raked free of leaves.
The earth was extra exposed.
Again, the tree roots spread out their wares, like nature’s chthonic marketplace.
Ellen dug at a shard with a stick, while I poked around in the roots with my fingers. The earth was wet and cold, but not frozen.
This time, I dug up a bottle, its lid rusted tight to the neck.
Ellen and I assessed the bottle.
“Look at the cool grape decorations!” I said, turning the jar on its head and rubbing my fingers across the mud. “The bottom says Washington Wine Counsel — so I guess this is a wine bottle?”
“…shaped like a hip flask?!” Ellen laughed. “You can bet that was some shitty wine!”
“Totally,” I said, imagining an old wino slipping a bottle of sweet fortified wine into his trouser pocket, and heading to the cemetery to go get blotto in peace.
Ellen and I slipped through the fence into Lakeview, and I tucked the bottle under my arm, smearing my coat with mud. We washed our hands in rainwater collected mausoleum plaques.
My nails were crusted black with soil, but I did the best I could to rinse them, sliding my wet fingers back in my warm coat pockets for the walk home.
I rinsed the bottle off in my kitchen sink, welcoming it to my home, and then set it on my table.
I waited for the bottle to tell me what it wanted to do.
A couple of days later, the bottle announced its plan: this old hobo of a bottle wanted me to bring it home for Christmas, and introduce it to my father.
An old dirty bottle with a lid still rusted to its neck might sound like an odd gift, but if you know my dad, you know it’s perfect.
My father’s a former professor turned city bureaucrat, a longtime Buddhist who retired a decade ago to focus on his poetry. Dad’s a boomer iconoclast who loved James Brown in the 50s, watched Jim Morrison almost burn down a music festival stage in the ‘60s. Dad spent the ‘70s getting his Ph.D. and becoming a “back to the land” hippy, complete with hand-building a log cabin after reading a couple of manuals about the subject. I’m pretty sure he’s a 5w4, and he writes poems about Zen and his prostate.
Also, my family is known for unusual gifts. There are family legends about my mother giving everyone “rocks and sticks” for Christmas one year. She’d made sand candles at the beach, decorated with all sorts of found organic materials, but really, they sorta did look like rocks and sticks — there just happened to be a wick in there, too. (Trivia: these kinds of things sell for $35 on Etsy now. Mom was 40 years ahead of her time!)
“It’s not rocks and sticks,” I said on Christmas day, as my father unwrapped the dirty bottle and looked at me, a little baffled.
Then I told him the story, about the summer walk and my discovery, and Ellen’s and my recent visit to the doomed trees and retaining wall.
My dad likes a good story, so he was super into it.
He’s also a curious nerd like me, so after he took the bottle home, he washed it and researched it. The Washington Wine Council was founded in 1938, but became the Washington Wine and Grape Growers sometime in the ‘50s, so the bottle probably originated sometime in the 1940s — just like my dad! Similar bottles are listed for $100 on eBay.
My dad replaced the lid and filled the bottle with brandy.
I’m pretty sure the 70-something hobo bottle is deeply contented in its new home, happily shacked up with its 70-something poet friend. I imagine them sharing nips of brandy, laughing over old stories.
CHAPTER 5: The moral of the story
I know how this goes… Some of you just read this and thought to yourselves, “How come I never find cool things by a cemetery?! Interesting shit like this never happens to me!”
This is the same little voice that whispers at some of you, “I can’t start a daily movement practice because I don’t have the right headphones.”
That little voice is a liar! It’s a loving little liar trying to keep you safe (aww, thanks, little voice!), but it’s a liar.
This is a story about wandering through a neighborhood and noticing things. Noticing is free!
This is a story about gaining comfort with loneliness and liminality and not knowing where you’re going. This is a story about heading out any way to wonder at the wander — even if you’re a person who likes a map and a plan.
This is about just allowing things to unfold.
This is a story about staying present with where you are emotionally (even when it’s uncomfortable, awkward, maudlin midlife ennui) and feeling it all the way knowing it will change. It’s about maybe recognizing some unexpected joys in the discomforts.
This is a story about stepping away from the screens, going out into your most immediate, very close little world, and taking the time to focus your attention on the small things you usually walk by and step over.
It’s just a story about seeing familiar places differently.
It’s just a story about noticing.
It’s a story about love.
All of these stories are completely accessible to you — today!
So many of us spend so much time ignoring our physical worlds, stuck in our screens, our minds off in digital lands far and wide. Our bodies just sit there ignored, sitting in our ignored neighborhoods.
If this story inspires you, I invite you to put down the device you’re staring at right now, put on your shoes, grab your keys, step outside, and gonotice where you are.
Peek into the back alleys and spend some time with the ants in a crack by a dumpster. Go investigate the grass in an empty lot. Be safe, but go find a hidden corner behind a strip mall and see what’s oozing out of the asphalt.
The only task is just noticing, and then observing the stories that come up — judgment? admonishment? where is that hill going? where are you going? Try to observe the subtle sensations in your body — ew, that loogie on the sidewalk turned my stomach, but that dead leaf has a remarkable symmetry to it. Can you love it?
The experience of exhuming love stories in your neighborhood is deeply, profoundly accessible to you.
Go see what you can dig up this weekend.
…And then tell me what you find!
If you’re into this kind of thing and want to read more, I hope you’ll join me over at The Afterglow
Like most of us, I do a lot of my shopping online, which means a lot of stuff showing up at my house overpackaged in big old boxes that sometimes hold smaller boxes with then another box inside.
My concerns about over-packaging aside, the reality remains: I have a lot of boxes in my house.
For the new year, I’m trying this new idea:
Any packaging that enters my home must now be filled up with old stuff, and given away.
This is just a version of “one in, one out” … but on a very tangible, practical level.
What am I going to do with this box that my new teapot came in?
I am going to fill it with clothes I haven’t worn in years, and send it right back out the door to be donated!
My house is small, so this is part of keeping it from getting cluttered… a box with something new comes in, the box is filled with old stuff, and sent back out into the world to find a new home.
But I’m also taking care of my recycling… just on a very large scale.
Oh, it’s about that season again — the time of year when we all awkwardly gather around with groups of people we may or may not know at all (randos at the office! second cousins and their new girlfriends at family gatherings! neighbors who just moved to the hood!) and give each other weird (but not so weird that they’re offensive) gifts as part of a white elephant gift exchange.
Today, I'mma wrangle up a brand new list full of brand new weird stuff you could bring to any white elephant gift exchange — so safe, that they’d even be safe for an office party.
None of these are over $40, and most of them are in the $20 range… they’re all a little WTF, but clean and office appropriate.
Monster pasta strainer just wants to drain your pasta and very gently weird you out. $18 from Amazon
It’s a pen holder, but it looks like it’s been stabbed. $12 from Amazon
Aww, life would SUCC so much without this lil succulent planter. $12 on Amazon
But wait, what I really want to know is what’s the best white elephant gift exchange item you’ve ever gotten? That you like LEGITIMATELY love — not just funny, but actually useful or cool?
