Hi there. I'm watching the Madonna album trailer on repeat. I've got green lasers shooting out my ass. I'm dancing with the gays in the bathroom. I'm loving watching Julia and Benedict and Debi and I feel like I'm a teenager again, catching MTV in laundromats all up and down the eastern seaboard, trying to mimic Madonna's moves, feeling like a sham in the shadow of a showwoman and channelling her indomitable courage as a solo artist on my way across the tightrope every night on a show that had my name on it, even though my age was a lie.
She was there alongside me the whole time. Her ballads would break my heart. Her artistry would blow me away with every new reinvention of herself and I quickly learned that I could do that too. I could cut my hair and put on red lipstick and then I could grow it all out again and put on fake diamonds and I could wake up and be whoever I felt like being and I had this icon to teach me fashion through music videos and by the mid nineties jeans and a bustier and a pack of cigarettes was a uniform. Kitten heels and bobby pins. I made Lochlan stop and check the lipstick hue.
Is it blue red? It has to be blue-red.
He would just lean forward in the truck and turn up the Eagles. Or Wings. Or whoever. It didn't really make a difference. I couldn't get style cues from Paul McCartney or Glenn Frey now could I?
This album is going to be amazing.
It was a bright spot in a terrible weekend. It's Pride Month. Fifa is on. It's supposed to be exciting and fun and summery and amazing. But it was thirty degrees and we kept blowing fuses and then Lochlan and PJ decided to dismantle and upgrade our entire internet network with new and better peripherals and easier to configure interfaces and cut the devil off at his knees when he tries to restrict my access, and it begat and nine hour odyssey of fetching phones and checking cameras and resetting every smart device in three houses and dropping coverage and realizing half the UPS backups aren't working.
A trip to the computer store. Again.
More running around. Me rerecording all of my voice recognition as my pronunciation gets a little worse every ten years or so in the most noticeable and disheartening way. My hearing hasn't gotten that much worse but it's enough to catch the difference so they make sure I enjoy whatever music I want to listen to, whenever I want to hear it
We're not actually going to any of the soccer games, not for a lack of invites. It's boring really. Very very boring. And we're not going to venture downtown for any pride things either, sadly. The flags are up and the neighbors are pissed but we also wave as we fail to apologize and continue to live a colourful and storied existence. You only get one trip around this ride and I want it to be one to remember.
We also have a bear in the garden who's practically a resident at this point. It's an old one with beautiful sad eyes, a stubborn streak and and a nose for fresh berries so wish me luck being allowed out after dark. Especially with my headphones on.