Dear Darling Ones,

Here is the hazard of essentially spending a year alone + having a 20-year-old blog + being a forty-eight-year-old perimenopausal woman: your memory is not as reliable as it used to be.

Every day when I get ready to write I have to think really hard about whether or not this is something I just wrote about. It seems everything I think seems vaguely redundant to me as though I recently had a conversation with someone about it. Most days I spend a good chunk of time searching I Will Dare dot com for words I plan on using to see if I have, indeed, written about it.

For the record, I could not find the word bergamot anywhere on this site, nor bergamont as I like to misspell it. Weird, really, considering I had a huge crush on this lavender & bergamot hand soap from Target for a long time, and because of the song “Find the River*” by R.E.M., which is why we’re here today.

This afternoon two of my twitter pals were having a conversation about songs they’ve probably listened to more than all the other songs. One of them mentioned “Find the River” by R.E.M. and I got the wavy vision with the far, off dreamy stares.

A long, long time ago I can still remember how the TTHM would sing that song all the time. In my memory he sang it to me, though as I have demonstrated above I’m not exactly sure if that is true. What I do know for sure is that he sang it all the time and it made me super melty inside. The TTHM had a really good voice, the way really tall men frequently do and if I close my eyes i can hear him sing Me, my thoughts are flower strewn, ocean storm, bayberry moon. I have got to leave to find my way. Ugh, I get goosebumps remembering it.

“Find the River” is one of those R.E.M. songs that is super underrated in my life. I forget about it all the time. It gets overshadowed by all-consuming love for “Nightswimming.” It also gets forgotten because it sometimes lands in the “ceases to exist” file I keep a lot of things related to Exs.

Today, however, it was a small, lovely thing to recall the song and how I felt when a tall, tall, handsome man sang it to me.

And if I told you all this before, humor me. I’m a boring spinster who never leaves the house. I have to repeat myself.

All of this is coming your way,
Jodi

P.S. The shitty picture at the top is the actual, factual Minnesota River. I took it a bunch of years ago when I spent summers Tibblesitting. I had to crop Nolie out of the picture because my heart. My heart couldn’t take it.

•If I could smell like a song I would choose this one. Bergamot? Vetiver? Ginger? Lemon? Yes to all of this.

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Scene 1: 1996

A bright, sunny day in August, most of my family is huddled under the trees in a small, family cemetery on McColl Road in Savage. They’ve close the road because there are so many mourners. We are burying my 19-year-old cousin Alan who died in a freak road construction accident in Duluth. He fell from a cherry picker while working road construction during the summer break from college.

For reasons I will never understand, after everyone has said what they need to say, and all that can be heard is sniffling and sobbing, someone presses play on a boombox. Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” floats through the air. IT’s been 21 years, and I still can’t listen to the whole song without my eyes filling.

Scene 2: 2008

A cold, snowy February in 2008 at the Town Hall Brewery, Superbowl Sunday to be exact. I’m sitting at the bar with a Tall, Tall Handsome Man a decade and a half my senior, a man I had been romantically interested in years before. When that went belly up we stayed friends. He would read me Flannery O’Connor stories over the phone before bed before we drifted apart. But that year, in 2008, we decided to meet at the Town Hall to watch the Superbowl. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers play the half time show. I shake my shoulders & sing along with “American Girls.” The TTHM remarks about how attractive that habit is. I smile.

Scene 3: 2013-2016

I write and revise and rewrite and revise a book about Rock & Roll, I call it The Beast (FYI: The Beast is still seeking representation if any of y’all are literary agents looking for a client. In a pivotal sequence, our heroine Cora gets her first taste of fame and immediately records a duet with Eddie Vedder, it’s a cover of “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” which serves two purposes: she gets to meet a musical idol and she gets to exact a sort of revenge on the dudebro who recently broke her heart. It is the perfect song for this moment in the book. I listen to it about a hundred times. I listen to Stevie Nicks’ That Made Me Stronger a thousand times.

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I spent my Valentine’s Day on the couch with some Potato Oles, a bottle of Bulleit, and my Fabulous Friend Jodie (FFJ). We laughed and drank until about 3 a.m. and then crawled up the stairs and passed out. My dreams were plagued with images of driving on snowy, slippery roads, and being at some odd party where a handsome Australian man kept playing with my butt.

The morning came ridiculously early when Paco, my asshole cat, decided that eight was the time to get up because goddamnit he was hungry. I put him off for about an hour but then when he got super persistent with the meowing and climbing all over me, I hauled my weary bones from the bed, but mostly because the coffee maker turns off at 9:30 and I needed some of that shit.

I was surprised as I settled back onto the couch with the coffee and a packet of Pop Tarts that I wasn’t actually dying for a hang over. Sure, my sinuses felt like they were trying to escape my face, but that was hardly the fault of all that whiskey, right?

As FFJ continued sleeping upstairs in the guest room I decided to do some follow-up investigation on some of our conversations, specifically the “Whatever happened to. . . ” portion of the night.

Because it was Valentine’s Day we spent a lot of time talking about men and sex. My couch would not have passed the Bechdel test last night.

“Whatever happened to Darling Jason?” she asked.
“Dunno. Disappeared.”
“Whatever happened to the secret boyfriend you never blogged about?”
“Broke up with him on Valentine’s Day and now he’s married.”
“Whatever happened to the TTHM?”
“Ummmmm. . . .”

And I had no answer, which made me kind of sad. Like how do people just drift out of your life. I couldn’t remember why or how it happened or even if it was me who drifted from him. Of course as soon as the topic came up I set my fingers to Googling. I found him. On Twitter. But FFJ made me promise not to do anything until the morning because how sad would I look if I was following him on Twitter at 2 a.m. on Valentine’s Day?

So while the first swallows of coffee were seeping into my brain I found him again. And he is happily married and that made me happy for him. And then I followed him on Twitter, because of course I did.

FFJ finally roused from slumber around 11 a.m. and we debriefed on the night until she had to go gather her children and attend a family brunch.

At about this time I set about making Family Dinner, which I hosted. In a brilliant stroke of prescience, I had decided on Thursday to make chili and also serve hot dogs, because chili cheese dogs are just about my favorite of all junk foods. And if you are making the chili yourself by chopping a ton of vegetables and all that, it virtually takes all the guilt out of chili cheese dogs.

Once the chili was crocking and I gobbled down a plate full of scrambled eggs the only sensible thing to do was take a bed nap. Bed naps are my favorite all naps.

I don’t often bed nap because that means you’re really going under and not just laying on the couch in hanging out in that precarious place between sleep and awake.

Sister #2 texted me awake around 3:30 asking why she needed to bring hot dogs buns to dinner if we were having chili.
“I thought we could have chili cheese dogs,” I texted back.
“That sounds really effing good,” she said. “I’m a bit hungover.”

So Family Dinner was really effing good. For unknown reasons my family was surprised by how good my chili was, even though I’m well-known as an award-winning chili maker. I keep the trophy on the top of my cupboards.

Now I am sitting in front of the rather boring SNL 40th Anniversary show and typing about napping and chili.

I am the most exiting person who ever lived.

The “It’s (Insert Day of Week) and I’m Boring” is a series that Christa and I do to pay homage to the beauty of old-school blogging. (I totally copied this nice explanation from Christa).

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I’ve been slowly picking through Watchmen since about September. I’d get so far in the book and then come to the poorly written autobiography stuff and stop. I’d pick it up a few weeks later and have to start all over from the beginning because I had no idea what was going on.

During the Superbowl, the TTHM said that reading all the crap between the comic book parts wasn’t necessary. Wolfdogg had told me the same thing before, but having that idea reinforced was comforting. Thus, reinvigorated I decided to give Watchmen another go. I am nothing, if not resiliant.

My desire to read the book was mostly borne out of the high esteem it is given in the graphic novel canon. People (men mostly) talk about it in reverent tones with dreamstars in their eyes. It’s like one of the high holies alongside Maus (which I haven’t read) and Jimmy Corrigan (which I also haven’t read, but own and will read sometime this year in the name RP2009).

But, well, I’ve decided to give up on Watchmen. Here’s why: it’s really fucking boring. I’m in the middle of chapter seven (of twelve) and I really don’t care what happens. I don’t care about any of the characters, I don’t care about the story, and I don’t care who is killing the masked vigilantes. That fact that anyone ever cared stuns me.

The characters have no depth, no life, they are flat and dull. I have no idea (aside from maybe Rorschach who is the only interesting one in the lot) what motivates them, what they want, or why they exist. The story is confusing. There are stories within stories within still other stories. And since I don’t find any of the characters interesting, I don’t care enough to figure out what exactly is going on, thus the book is a big zzzzzzzzero.

I blame the fanboys for my apathy. It is their reverence, their grand pedestal upon which they have placed this book that has ruined it. There is no way the book can possibly bear up under the weight of such adoration. I’m not sure what Watchmen would have had to do to meet my expectations, but whatever it’s doing it’s not working for me. This is the very same reason that I will never see Star Wars. It cannot live up to 30 years of hype.

So, I’m calling it quits. Watchmen can suck it. I’m going to go spend my time reading something that makes me at least care about what the hell’s going on.

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There are a lot of books and generally when people come over for the first time the conversation usually starts with books in some way.

This was no different with the TTHM who visited the HQ for the first time last night. Before he even had his coat off he was mumbling something about The Gargoyle and how he was waiting for his library to get it.

“Oh,” I said. “I loved it which means you’ll probably hate it.”
“But Christa liked it,” he said. “I love everything Christa reads.”

Then I punched him in the stomach. I don’t care if he is an old man, you don’t do that to me in my own home.

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