Category Archives: suicide

Explorers, Convicts, and National Sorry Day

Are you familiar with the Morrissey song, “Throwing My Arms Around Paris?” I hear it in my head sometimes when I am throwing myself out into a city—joyfully embracing as much as humanly possible in however much time I have. The actual song is a downer, obviously—it’s Morrissey after all, the miserablist. But I re-mix it in my head to be uplifting.

—

I visited the RBG every day for three days. There’s that much to see and do, and it’s just a lovely, peaceful oasis in the middle of the big city.

On my first day I caught a walking tour. The morning was fresh from a night rain and the sun had not yet burned the heavy dew off the leaves.

My group included some Canadians, Melbournians, and Germans. The guide was giving her first tour and said she was nervous. She was still getting used to holding laminated photos of flowers and referring to them; they were upside down for her. She was doing her best but kept saying, “I’m not sure about that, I’ll have to check it later.”

She thought this astounding tree was from South Africa.

After 20 minutes I carved off into an inviting-looking dark path through thick trees. Have I mentioned I was enamored with the trees? I emerged to see this banyan with knobs drooping downward; they would become buttresses for the growing tree.

What I hadn’t expected to find in a garden were story lines about three important populations in Australia’s history—explorers, Aboriginals, and convicts.

There was a garden named for Daniel Solander, a Swede who sailed with Captain Cook on The Endeavor around the Pacific and collected 17,000 species of plants, 900 of them from Australia. Most of those were found around Botany Bay, just five miles from where I was standing.

He did this 70 years before Charles Darwin made his famous voyage on The Beagle. Solander didn’t live to read Darwin’s Origin of the Species; he died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage at age 49.

Next I crossed what appeared to be a dinky, unremarkable bridge over a tiny stream. But no! It was built over culvert of “high cultural significance” built by convicts in 1816 so the Governor’s wife could cross the stream in her carriage.

I turned around to find about 15 placards about Aboriginal history. I already knew about the 1967 vote in which white Australians decided to count Aboriginal people in the census for the first time. I guess it took that long for them to decide that Aboriginals were actual humans.

I didn’t know there had been a Freedom Ride in Australia in 1965, similar to the ones in the US about five years earlier.

I was pleased to see that one of the leaders had a Jewish name—Spigelman. When I Googled him I learned he had immigrated to Australia from Poland as a three-year old with his parents, who were Holocaust survivors. His parents are featured in the graphic novel about the Holocaust called Maus, by his American cousin Art Spiegelman.

Spiegelman was born in Sweden after the war. His five-year-old brother had been poisoned by their aunt, who then poisoned herself, in order to save them from being taken by the Nazis. It gets worse, believe it or not.

I have Maus sitting on my bookshelf. If everyone was required to read Maus, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I wonder if we would ever have another war.

Spigelman went on to become an Australian Supreme Court Justice and patron of many humanitarian and arts causes including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

It’s no surprise that Jews are overrepresented in human rights causes. But why should it take something as horrific as surviving a Holocaust to motivate people?

Lastly, I was moved to tears to learn that Australia has a National Sorry Day, which “gives all Australians an opportunity to express their sorrow” about the stolen generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were forcibly removed from their families “for their own good.”

Wow, who expected so much sad stuff in a botanical garden?

I hastened toward a more uplifting exhibit, about carnivorous plants.

A Great Life and a Rainy Ghost

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It was my turn to go into London and spend the day with Heidi. I wanted to visit the Churchill War Rooms, which are an underground complex near Parliament that are operated by the Imperial War Museum. Heidi had already been there, or wasn’t interested, I can’t remember—so we planned to meet at the Houses of Parliament for a tour at 2pm.

I bought tickets online for both places which enabled me to breeze past the block-long line of suckers hoping to get in to the Churchill rooms. There’s a reason they control the number of people who enter. These were the underground bunkers where Churchill and his team lead the war effort, and so they are dark and cramped. I was only inside for a couple hours and I felt claustrophobic. I can’t imagine spending days and nights down there—breathing in thick cigar smoke and hearing bombs falling overhead.

Winston Churchill was complicated. He was born into wealth—at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, where I had enjoyed many long walks on the pleasure grounds. He joined the army, was captured in South Africa during the Second Boer War, and made a movie-script-like escape. He was elected Prime Minister and indisputably led the nation through World War II with world-famous speeches with lines like:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

“… we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.”

World War II—and the US making England repay every penny we contributed to support them during the war—and lots of other factors, broke the Empire. The official end wouldn’t be until 1997, when they turned Hong Kong over to China, but many would argue that it really ended with decolonization/independence of India, Malaysia, Singapore, Jamaica, Sudan, Ghana, Kenya, Jordan/Israel/Palestine, and many, many others after the war and into the 60s.

Churchill opposed Indian independence on paternalistic grounds—the Indians needed the British to get them organized. If Ghandi went on another hunger strike, he said, they should let him die. When Churchill was elected PM a second time, he had a front-row seat for the Empire’s dismantling. He lived to be 90 despite being—famously—a chain cigar smoker and heavy drinker.

I feel so inadequate when I write these posts about which hundreds of books have been written and dozens of movies and TV shows made … go see the film that’s just out now, called Churchill. All I can do is repeat my caveat that I am not a history professor, although sadly I think I could play one on TV. I am just a curious person traveling around, learning a bit here and there, and forgetting most of it by dinner time.

—

One thing I can say with certainty: the War Rooms have a really good cafeteria and gift shop. After spending time and money in both I emerged into the rainy street.

I had hours to kill before meeting Heidi. I opened my souvenir Wimbledon umbrella and fought my way through the crowds to the Houses of Parliament bookstore, where I bought more stuff which forced me to carry more bags.

I made my way to Victoria Tower Gardens, a quiet park on the west side of Parliament, and gazed out over the Thames through the rain.

Suddenly I felt something like an electric zing. I have few photos of my father. Being here triggered a memory of a black and white photo of him standing in this exact place with his umbrella open, 50 years ago.

Pigeons

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Sometimes I get a notification from WordPress: “Your stats are booming!” I used to get excited, thinking it must be a publisher in New York reading every post I’d ever written and reaching for the phone to call me with a book deal which would come with a huge advance.

I went to the stats page to investigate and for some reason my last post had attracted the attention of three dozen Canadians. Why? I looked at the tags and categories. Were they drawn by the word “England?” I’ve written loads of posts about England. The only words that were different were “shopping” and “charity shops.” Who knows?

Maybe I have a Canadian stalker. Or three dozen.

Everyone I know is talking about the powerful men in media and politics who are being outed for sexually harassing or assaulting women. All I can say is: it’s about time. And I’m not surprised. It’s happened to me at least a dozen times. No one famous, but plenty of regular men who had some kind of power over me by virtue of age, title, or size. It stopped when I hit my 40s—one advantage of getting older.

I never reported any of the incidents because first, I was very naïve and often unsure what was even happening. Maybe I was misinterpreting things? I mean, the social worker who was helping me get my act together after I spent two months in a psych unit after trying to off myself when I was 16—when he said he’d like to see me in a lace nightie, he was just trying to help me feel like a woman again. That’s what he told me. And that 30-something guy who stopped his car at the bus stop and asked if I wanted to go party—I was 18 and eight months pregnant—he didn’t really want to …? No! That’s gross! I must have misunderstood.

And surely that Greek Orthodox minister hadn’t meant to press his hard-on against my derriere in that crowd of people at the Justice for All rally, right? Wrong. When I turned around in shock, he smiled as if to dare me, “What are you going to do about it?” It must have been my fault. I had thought how handsome he was and maybe he had sensed that and thought I would like what he did.

Surely my boss’s boss had been fiddling with the coins in his pants pockets when he stood next to my desk talking about nothing and staring at my boobs, right? I had just started that job and really needed it. It was 1986 and I had never heard the term “sexual harassment.” It never occurred to me to report him.

A friend described how she tried to get her husband to understand what it’s like.

“Imagine there’s a third kind of human out there. They’re a foot taller than you and 50 pounds heavier. They own everything and run everything. And they want to fuck you in the ass. Every time you go for a job interview, you know they’re imagining you naked. They walk past your cube and look at you sideways, and you know they would like to bend you over, pull down your pants, and fuck you in the ass. They brush up against you and act like it was an accident, but you know they just wanted to cop a feel. If you say anything, you’ll probably be out of a job and nothing will be done anyway because HR works for them.”

—

Back to England, and a more uplifting note. There are things about the UK with which I have a visceral association. One is the little teaspoons. Below are my American teaspoon and a British one, which is larger than many. Every British home has loads of these. Something to do with tea, I think. I bought a couple at the £ Store to remind me of the UK.

Then there are the wood pigeons. When I asked Lynn’s husband, Richard, What’s that bird?” he replied, “What bird?” He didn’t hear them anymore; their call is so ubiquitous.

It’s this call and these spoons that made me smile every morning.

Elder, Kickin’ It

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This is a series of posts about Belize that starts here.

—

In the real world, there is more bad news in addition to all the shenanigans in Washington. Every day there are reports about all the people overdosing on Carfentanil, a synthetic opioid 10,000 times more potent than morphine. The anniversary of Prince’s death just passed; he overdosed on a similar drug, Fentanyl. Carfentanil was developed as a large animal anesthetic. Really? Who takes drugs like that?

Sadly, my dad did. It was his birthday recently; he would have been 81 if he hadn’t overdosed in a Wisconsin motel room nearly 50 years ago, aged 32. He died of a lethal combination of alcohol and Paraldehyde, which used to be prescribed to treat alcoholism. Paraldehyde is classified as a “hypnotic” and has mostly been replaced by safer drugs. Was it an accident or intentional? I’ll never know. What I do notice is how little emotion I feel about it anymore. That’s taken a long time and a lot of work. He loved to travel, so I like to think he would be happy about my adventures.

—

After our snorkeling day, we were herded onto the van by Mark to attend a Garifuna drumming performance at the Hopkins Cultural Center. It took an hour for us to drive the mile distance as the crow flies. It was a very dark night. Thank goodness there were potholes the size of bathtubs full of water, which reflected the light from the three streetlights in town.

Eventually we were ushered into a large thatched-roof hut where we waited for our supper. A woman about my age was the cook, and she was obviously working her ass off. She had been summoned on five minutes notice to produce food for 20 people, and after an hour her young adult children served up bowls of hudutu and fry bread. Again, it was full of bones, but we were so hungry we had no complaints.

A 30-something man in a dashiki jumped up on the stage and started shouting into the mic. “Let’s give a hand to Elder Elspeth for the wonderful meal!”

Elder? If she was an elder, that made me one too.

The guy, whose name was Myron, launched into a long, disconnected rant about Garifuna culture. I had read about it in the guide books, and he seemed to be making stuff up. Garifuna is a language and a culture brought by mixed-race slaves from the Caribbean to Honduras, Nicaragua, and British Honduras—as Belize was then called—in the early 19^th Century. I asked a question; I don’t recall what it was because he angrily yelled, “No!” at me and resumed his animated monologue. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. He was very muscular—maybe he had ‘roid rage.

Myron went on for half an hour, then two other men joined him and they began drumming and singing manically in the Garifuna language. It reminded me of a pow wow, where the first song is really cool, the second one is good, and then they all sound alike.

Despite it being ear-splittingly loud, I was trying hard not to nod off, as were the other snorkelers. Mercifully the trio only played five songs. Then they jumped off the stage and started selling CDs and passing a hat for tips. It was clear they couldn’t wait for us to get out of there.

—

Midnight. One hundred Fahrenheit with 99% humidity. I lay in my bed in the middle of the room, between Trudy and Emily. Our table and chairs had disappeared while we were gone but we were beyond curious about why things came and went.

My Restless Legs Syndrome is always worse when it’s humid. It sounds like a silly condition, but it’s ruined more nights of sleep than any worry or noise or excess of caffeine or alcohol. Just as I’m falling asleep, I get a creeping feeling around my knees and have an overpowering urge to Move My Legs.

Then music started up in the distance, a low throbbing beat. This would last for hours, I thought, as I kick, kick, kicked to the beat.

Long Ago in a Land of Spandex

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Greetings from St. Louis. One more day of the road trip, and one more guest post from Vince.

Long Ago, In a Land of Spandex

It’s Friday again, my favorite day of the week. I like my job, but I like weekends more, and at this very moment it’s the longest possible time before more work. This will be the seventh post now on the topic of my career. Or careers. Or lack thereof, uh, yeah. I have no career; I have held many jobs over the years.

At this moment, I’m taking a break from packing my few belongings for the big move. I finally threw away all of my stuff from prison and boot camp. I was never going to use any of it, so I’m happy to toss it out. Alright then, on with it.

After leaving Rochester and finding temporary shelter with a friend of a friend in Fountain, Minnesota, I was given a job as a line cook at Pedal Pusher’s Café in nearby Lanesboro. The owners were a couple with three kids and they all lived upstairs of the restaurant. Looking back, it really sucks to see how things went down. They were kind, generous people who went out of their way to help me when I was down. They even let me sleep in their camper for a while after things went sour in Fountain, and while I waited to find an apartment of my own which they also loaned me the money for.

Lanesboro is a bustling little city full of B&B’s, bike trails, trout fishing, tourists, and spandex, It has a few restaurants too, and they were very busy in the summer. I hadn’t been on a line in some years when I started there, but I picked things back up pretty quickly. Time flew by, I worked hard, and started drinking hard. I also met a new friend that would play a major role in my life for many years to come: gambling.

In the form of pull tabs, I whittled away my pay checks one dollar at a time for months. Eventually, I started taking advances on my pay checks, and very shortly after I started doing that, I started taking advances without their knowledge. This may come as a shock to some people with whom I have not been entirely honest over the years, but I’m letting it all out now. I felt like a lowlife piece of shit, but unfortunately, I just did not care. It didn’t take them long to catch on to me and I was eventually fired for stealing.

Unable to get unemployment benefits, I became withdrawn and moved in with an unenthusiastic friend and his soon to be wife. I sat in that room for a month, maybe two. I wore the same clothes, I ate ramen out of the package, and I cried every day. I was too proud to ask for help. I couldn’t take care of myself, I couldn’t find a job (because I absolutely was not looking), and I was about as close to having a suicidal urge as I’ve ever come. Auspiciously, a very good friend of mine got me out of that trance and back into Fountain where I held a few more jobs.

About two weeks ago, I sent a letter to the owners of Pedal Pusher’s. I told them a lot of what has been going on with me, but more importantly, what was going on with me back then. I asked them to give me a chance to repair the damage I have created, and I included a small token of my sincerity in the form of money. I haven’t heard back from them and I don’t know that I ever will. But I have done my part. At the very least, I have tried to open an avenue of communication with them so that I may fix what has been broken for so long. It was the first of many letters to many people, and with each one, I hope to feel a little more human again.

In Pig’s Eye

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I’ve been writing about a road trip to South Dakota that I took for work last week. I can’t say a lot more about it. There were some eyebrow-raising moments which have to remain confidential.

But one of my intentions in blogging is to demonstrate how you can experience adventure close to home—and even in your head. You don’t have to spend thousands on a trip abroad. Your own neighborhood can hold surprises.

I’ve lived in St. Paul almost all my life. It’s not that big of a city—about 300,000 people. I went for a long walk on a Sunday afternoon and found the following things that were new to me.

I crossed the Smith Avenue Bridge, which everyone calls the High Bridge, because it’s, well, high. The High Bridge was new to me. What a view. I know, my photos are not the best, but they’ll give you the general idea.

Sadly, because it’s high, the High Bridge is one of the preferred bridges in the Twin Cities for people to jump from. There was this tender note from a stranger to a stranger.

There was this makeshift shrine to someone named Teagan. I don’t know if she was the same person to whom the note in the previous photo was written, or a second jumper.

Someone has been thinking about how to prevent suicides from the High Bridge. I don’t know. Would you have the presence of mind to call the number, or would you even see it if you were intent on jumping off a bridge?

Ah, the sun came out, very welcome after being reminded of suicide at every footstep. This is a view from the Wabasha Bridge toward the train bridge. I don’t know the name of the train bridge; everyone just calls it The Train Bridge.

Now I was in Kellogg Mall, a long strip of greenery between downtown and the river. I don’t normally read plaques. Because I travel so much, if I read every plaque (and spent time on every portrait of the Madonna and Child, for that matter), I would never do anything else. But this one said something about Fr. Lucian Galtier, who gave St. Paul its name.

At the base of the rock there was a bag containing a hat, scarf, and mittens with a note that said, “I’m not lost! Please use to keep warm!” Presumably this is for some homeless person who has a preference for pink.

If it hadn’t been for Fr. Galtier, St. Paul might still be called Pig’s Eye. Pig’s Eye Parrant was a blind-in-one-eye French Canadian fur trader who squatted outside Fort Snelling, near present-day St. Paul. He made hootch and sold it to the soldiers, then eventually built a shack on the river landing below what would become St. Paul, becoming our first civilian resident. The details are sketchy, but it makes a good myth and we have a pretty good beer named Pig’s Eye as a result.

So go for a walk! Think how you would tell the story of what you see to a good friend, or to a stranger. Get out of your rut. Take a different route than the one you’re used to. Take a left turn instead of a right. Follow that path into the woods you’ve always wondered about. Notice things. Snap some pics, or not. Adventure is all around you if you hold the right attitude of inquisitiveness.

Happy New Life, Again

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Happy New Year! I am re-posting this from January 1 of last year. I hesitated to share such a personal story then, but it has been the most-read post of the 232 Vince and I have written. Maybe it’s the story, or the encouraging advice. Or maybe it’s the guns.

If you received this twice, that’s because I accidentally posted it for January 1, 2015. Off to a good start, I say!

—

Three years ago, I hit bottom. I had lived with depression for as long as I could remember, but then…. I had to have a tooth pulled—boy, will that make you feel old! Then during a Christmas Day blizzard my car was towed and I spent four hours waiting in line outside at the impound lot to pay $300 to get it back. I then drove to Fountain to visit Vince. The trailer he shared with Seth was full of guns, beer cans, and smoke. I figured what the heck, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so after he assured me that none of the guns was loaded, we posed for photos that became my holiday cards to my friends in the UK, where they had a good laugh over us gun-crazy Americans.

Due to the blizzard I spent the night in Seth’s 5-year-old daughter’s bedroom; she was at her mom’s. Here’s a tip for parents who smoke: Keeping your kid’s door closed doesn’t keep smoke out. I couldn’t open the window and after tossing and turning until 5am I slipped out and drove home. On the way I started itching. Great—now I had bedbugs!

—

I contemplated suicide. I leaned my forehead against the screen of my 20th floor window. I had turned 50 the year before. Thinking about being depressed every day for another 30-40 years wasn’t real appealing.

—

Here are the things I had tried to manage depression and anxiety:

Meditation

Medication

Prayer (including begging, pleading, and bargaining)

Acting normal

Abstaining from drinking

Cutting down on coffee

Self-help books

Alanon

Exercise

Getting outside every day

Appreciating beauty, be it fine art, nature, music, babies, or kittens

Gratitude lists

Avoiding negative people / avoiding unnaturally happy people

Running away to other countries

Denial

Journaling

Telling myself, “At least I’m not a refugee / amputee / blind / fill-in-the-blank.”

Psychotherapy

Retail therapy

Sleeping, drinking, and movie binges

Reaching out to friends, even when that was the last thing I wanted to do

—

I thought that jumping out of my window would be exhilarating, until I hit the ground. I had some leftover pain killers from the dentist, and my prescription for Restless Legs. I googled an overdose of the two and learned that they wouldn’t kill me, but that I would likely need a liver transplant. I decided to keep living.

—

That spring, I visited Vince again and this time, made a reservation at a B&B. On the free-book-shelf there, I picked up a tattered copy of, “Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy”, by David Burns, MD. I read it and did what it told me to do, and I stopped being depressed. For good.

The book was about Cognitive Therapy. I had been instructed to use it at least twice in the past, but I’d been too stressed out to do it. Basically, you write down your negative thoughts and then argue with them rationally until you’ve de-fanged them. Writing it down is important; if you try to do it in your head you’ll end up down a rabbit hole.

So was a lifetime of depression cured overnight by one book? No. I think it was all the other things I had tried over the years—the good things, anyway—and then I added this on top of them and together they all added up to a breakthrough.

I still feel sad sometimes–there’s plenty to feel sad about–but I’m not depressed and I’m committed to living.

Sorry for the long post but, if you’re struggling, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind, keep plugging away, and keep trying new things.

PS: I didn’t have bedbugs after all. I think I was just itchy from the smoke and dry air. Living with addiction can turn you into a drama addict.

Free But Not Free

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After avoiding each other for a couple days—not easy to do in an 800-square-foot space—I offered to make dinner so Vince and I could talk and clear the air. “Unless u want me to write a letter to u instead,” I texted. No, he texted back, we can talk.

We started with a hug and “I love you.” It reminded me of our moments on the hug rug in prison.

He wolfed down his stir fry while I talked, then talked while I ate. We went through our lists of grievances. To my surprise I didn’t get defensive and he didn’t roll his eyes and walk out of the room.

The one thing I was nervous about was saying, “It is my house.” That’s a fact, right? But saying it would feel like I was lecturing a teenager. This was about my request that Vince ask me—or at least give me a heads up—when he was inviting people over—even family members. He responded that I had brought my friend Sarah home a few nights earlier without warning him.

“I didn’t even know who she was,” he said.

“Sarah? You don’t remember Sarah?” I asked. “We came down to visit you and we spent the day together picking agates. We had dinner at that nice restaurant where you ended up working….” Had he been high on something, all day and evening, and I hadn’t been able to tell? It didn’t matter now.

“It’s my house,” I said, and the world didn’t end. We agreed to have dinner together a couple times a week so we can talk things over on a regular basis instead of saving them up.

—

A few days later I texted Vince to ask if he’d like to eat lasagna with me that evening, and he replied that he just wanted to go home and go to be after work.

This is it. This is what they were talking about the day Vince was released, when they said that adjustment to life on the outside would be harder than anything they experienced in prison.

And now the weather has turned, to the cold, dark days of Minnesota winter. It’s hard for anyone to get up and leave the house when it’s dark as night and freezing drizzle, but Vince has to walk six blocks, take a bus and a train, then walk six more blocks to his job in the laminating factory. He still can’t cash his own paycheck because Wells Fargo requires two forms of ID, even for checks drawn on its own accounts.

—

There was an editorial and an article in the St. Paul paper about criminal justice system reform. At the end of a local forum, two mothers got up and spoke about the effects of incarceration on the family.

“There’s no help,” said one mother whose son had committed suicide at age 28 because he just couldn’t make it on the outside.

“There really isn’t,” said the second mother. One of her sons is schizophrenic, and thanks to her persistence he’s in a state hospital, not a prison. She faces eviction because her landlord won’t let her other son, newly-released on 10 years of probation, live with her. He was convicted of criminal possession of a firearm. If I was renting in her building and found out he had moved in, I’m sure I’d be unhappy.

These forums and op-eds are good news—there are reform efforts like this going on at the national, state, and local level, and that they have bipartisan support. But the words of these mothers weighs on me. Vince actually said the other day something like, “It would almost be easier to go back to prison that to be trapped on house arrest like this.” Ugh.

MUST be positive! Must make gratitude lists! Must not indulge in self pity! This too shall pass!

Only eight more months to go.

A Cell is a Cell is a Cell

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ANNE

Is there such a thing as prison-phobia? If so I’ve got it. After nearly two years of thinking, reading, talking, and writing about prison, I have an irrational fear of ending up in inside myself.

Just for the record, I have not broken any state, federal, or international laws.

However, just last night I was reading the novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. In it, a character is minding his own business when a two robbers being chased by the police come running along and stand next to him, catching their breath. He is arrested with them and beaten mercilessly in an attempt to get him to confess, which he doesn’t. He is eventually released, but he slits his wrists the next day because he is so traumatized by the experience.

Did I mention he is black and the cops are white? Does this sound familiar? The book was published in 1953. Sadly, some things don’t change.

So that scenario is not likely to happen to me, but phobias are irrational, not rational.

I was also freaked out by the third season of Orange is the New Black. I won’t give away what the last scene of the last episode sets up for the inmates, but it had something to do with crowding/lack of privacy and it really hit a nerve.

—

My cousin, Molly, and I have talked over the years about buying a piece of land overlooking the St. Croix River and building a retirement community of tiny houses. You know, these are the 250- to 400-square-foot houses (75-122 square meters) made of beautiful woods and lots of clever features to store stuff and make the most use of the space. The idea is, you can have a paid-off house, live in the country, and feel good about yourself because you aren’t destroying the planet by consuming as much as the average new home built in America, which as of 2013 was nearly 2,500 square feet (762 square meters)!

Then Molly sent me this article, “Dear People Who Live in Fancy Tiny Houses” and it killed my dream:

What if you’re having a shitty day and you just want to be alone? You can’t be alone, right? Because your partner or children are sitting two to ten feet away from you at all times. Don’t you feel like a rat trapped in a cage? Don’t you ever want to turn toward your lover or spawn and shout, “Get out! Get out of my tiny house!”

The condo Vince and I are sharing is 800 some square feet. So it’s not the tiniest, but there are privacy issues. When the other Molly—Vince’s girlfriend—is over, I’m sure he wishes I would disappear. I wish I could kick back on a Friday night and watch my geek-ola shows like the PBS News Hour and Washington Week in Review with a couple glasses of wine, but I can’t.

On the whole, things are going well with us, at least from my perspective. But I have mostly lived alone since Vince left home 20 years ago, so it’s an adjustment.

A Break from Breaking Free

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ANNE

Vince says he’s hit a wall with the blogging, and I need more than 10 minutes notice to come up with new material. After over a year of blogging and nearly 200 posts, I’d say we’ve earned a break.

We’ll be back. If you haven’t yet binge read the thing from the beginning, start here and click on the right-pointing arrow at the bottom of each post to proceed. Feel free to share with others, and thanks for reading.