Day 13: If we were sharing a post-election bottle of bourbon ....

I know. I know. I missed a day. I was spending time with a friend who was visiting from out of town, and we stayed up too late, and I missed. I will make it up though. By the end of the month, I will have posted 30 times. I can imagine how disappointed you must have been to get up this morning, immediately check for a new post here, only to find ..... nothing. I am so sorry. Then again, I've published 623 624 posts here on this old blog. Have you read all of them? Really? Because I'm pretty sure even I haven't read all of them.

For tonight's post, imagine we're sitting on my couch (too cold for the porch), cuddled up under my fuzziest blanket (which leaves something that looks like cat hair all over your clothes), drinking good bourbon (Old Scout for me), eating buttered popcorn, complaining about the dog's farts, and talking about some shit. Or rather, since you're not really here, I'm talking about some shit.

Like the election. Ain't that some shit? I decided to stop saying "I'm good. You?" when someone asks me how I am. I say, "I've been better." Or, "I'm angry/scared/ sad." People are kind of taken aback. I don't care. You shouldn't ask that question if you don't want the answer. But I get that they don't know how to respond. They do their best.

But when they hug me and say, "It's going to be OK. We'll be OK," I say, "No, it's not and we're not. But thanks for trying to make me feel better." Or, "You're right. We probably won't even know the nukes hit." (I lie. I would never say that.)

People mean well, but I simply can't fake it right now. I don't want to. I'm tired of acting like things are OK when we really just stepped in a big, steaming pile of national dog shit.

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I've decided I need to take better care of myself, no matter how raw I feel. After a really shitty Thursday, I went to ecstatic dance Friday night. Coraline's step-aunt asked if she could spend the night, so I had a few unexpected adult hours to enjoy.

As always, it felt good to move my body and use muscles I forget to use unless I'm dancing and trancing. And as always TOM (That One Man) was there. That one man who comes to get attention from women whether we want to give it to him or not. Last time he behaved very strangely after my group shut him out and even stopped dancing for a while because he wouldn't leave us alone. He circled the room and made random bird noises for probably half an hour, even during the last meditative songs when everybody else was sitting quietly. We're supposed to bow with prayer hands and say "Namaste" if we don't want someone to dance with us, but he didn't give me a chance Friday night. He'd just brush by and then away with his back turned. So instead of staying in my own safe bubble, I had to stay constantly alert for him .... Yeah, TOM shows up at a lot of events and meetings. I'm going to talk more about him in future posts. I'm still glad I went, but this week more than any other in my life, I needed for all the men in the room to back the fuck off. (Some women who were new there actually liked what he was doing, so ....whatever. Perspective. If I showed you a video, you'd see what I mean.)

Not to put such a negative spin on it, I'm so grateful this is something I share with my daughter-in-law Montana. At the end of the session, I was sitting on the floor with my legs straight out just soaking up the sounds, and she came over and sat across from me with the bottoms of her feet against the bottoms of my feet. It was just right. And all the other people who go are just right too. It's always just TOM.

Afterwards some of us went to a local bar to listen to some blues. And, yes, there was a TOM I used to date and had to block from texting me there, but he didn't bother me, so it was OK. Besides, I suspect my son would have had something to say if he had, and I didn't want to deal. Women aren't the only ones who are fed the fuck up with the way a lot of men act.

Saturday Coraline and I went to the farmer's market where I work and commiserated with our friends there about the election. Then my friend Colorado came to visit, and Coraline went off to celebrate her dad's birthday and spend the night with her other grandparents. Two free nights in a row are rare for me. I had to take advantage.

Colorado and I went out for dinner and ate forbidden foods -- BLT's with avocado and goat cheese (even the fucking bread), and the best sweet potato fries in town. Then we went with my son Drake and Montana to a new blues club, which is in an old bank built in 1928, and is actually blue inside, to hear some friends play. We drank some lovely designer cocktails, listened to some sultry blues, and then came home and stayed up until 4:00 face-chatting with Colorado's sister and drinking more bourbon. I paid for that when the alarm went off for church, but fuck it. The world could actually end this time.

This afternoon I went to a writing workshop for the next All the Sex Monologues, which will happen in fall 2017. We'll be raising money for Planned Parenthood, so it felt good to get to work on something positive and exciting that will counter some of the negativity from the bullies on the Right. I felt like I had found a bit of ground where I could dig in and make a difference. Of course, there was TOW there, but I don't want to write about her. I'll just say I'm grateful for my kids and my friends and the opportunities I had to find peace for just a while this weekend.

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So the weekend was a start on taking better care of myself. I know I need to do better in my daily life though. I've had some health issues that I'll write about in another post. I need to lose weight. Coraline and I both eat too much sugar. I need to go to the gym and get stronger. Take the dog on more walks. Write more, Facebook a lot less. Get my house in order for winter. Nothing new there.

But I also want to cut my hair off even if, as a friend reminded me, everybody will think I'm a lesbian, like happened last time I did that. I'm not only tired of hair maintenance though, I'm tired of following gender-biased rules for how I should look. Eventually I might even shave it off like one of the cool kids. I am one angry feminist right now, and I'd like to show that in some physical way. Getting a tattoo that says "Fuck the patriarchy" isn't really my style.

Finally, I'm going to make a real effort to go to the Million Women March on DC in January. I've never done anything like that, and I always resented that I missed being old enough in the 60's to join the protests. And if anybody has anything to say about whether women should be protesting the unpopular election of a rapey old orange hairball for POTUS, you can fuck right off. Comparing Donald Trump with President Obama is insulting and ridiculous. Nobody was ever coming after your fucking guns, but they are coming after my vagina. So I'm going to be there.

Anybody else going?

I guess it's obvious from this post our conversation would probably be pretty grim at times if we were really sharing a bottle of bourbon. Anger. Tears. Searching for connection and hope. Trying to find a laugh or a dance or a song where there is one. It's going to take more than that, of course, but we honor the grief first. And then we start kicking some ass so we don't lose all of our rights and the planet too. Women's work is never fucking done.