nakedjen

The Weight of It All

I lived last winter without a furnace.  Without heat. 

I slept with gloves and a fleece hat on, bundled with both dogs on the bed, under I don't even know how many down comforters in an effort not to freeze. 

I love my little house in Salt Lake City, but what I didn't bother to do before actually agreeing to live in it was to determine that it actually had heat.  I know it seems a tad improbable that a house in Salt Lake City, a city where winter hangs on and parties like an 80's glam rocker until well past the spandex and hair spray are out of style, would not actually have proper heating, but my little house did not. 

That is why my cat literally slept on top of the electric radiator I had running 24/7 in one room and why both dogs were curled like a yin yang around the bottom.  We all lived in one room last year curled around one another, our breath sometimes freezing right in front of our faces, and I know it was a sign of my own insanity that I insisted it just was not that bad. 

It was that bad.

Yesterday, I was informed that I was getting a proper furnace for my little house. The location for the furnace would be a closet that had, until this very moment, been used to hide the detritus of a much of my past.  Skeletons of all sorts.  Things better forgotten-- bones and trinkets and smudged half-burned dreams. 

Piles of ticket stubs to Grateful Dead concerts.

A copy of one of my plays. 

Journals and more journals.  Even more, after those.

Photos of me with a bunch a dirty hippies.

More photos and scribbled cards and notes and set lists from a long life on tour.

All the emails from my earliest days with DearSweetDave.

I should have known better.  I really should have.  We know where this is going, don't we?  Yes, of course we do.

I sat down on the floor and I read all those emails.  Every.last.one.

Our hearts made such promises, uttered such incredible vows, spilled such secrets in those first early days of our new love.  Every moment stretched for an eternity and it felt all so brand new, all so very special, so incredibly delicious and ripe with possibility.  I truly believed, in those very early days, everything we said to one another. We really did say all the right things.

We also crashed and burned in a rather spectacular fire.

The love I've found this time can't go hide in a closet because I've got no closets left.

Love is so complex.  It is so very easy to say all the right things.  Words are simple.  They roll off our tongues, right out of our mouths and into the hearts of another without so much as a pause for a yellow light.  It's the showing up, the living of love, the actual wrapping of your own heart tendrils with his without pulling too tightly, without tugging too hard, with a gentle caress that is the most difficult. 

It's that love that I'm showing up for this time around.

The weight of him, all of him, on top of me, inside of me, my heart changing shape simply because of the entangled and messy and beautiful and crazy love that keeps me wide awake with wonder even when I'm fast asleep, that's the love for which I've gone all in.

 

 

 

Jump

I quit my job, a job where I never felt like I really belonged, on the final Friday of July.  I did not give notice, I did not even whisper to anyone that I might not be back the following week, I just walked out and never went back. I had no idea what would be next, of course.  I never actually do have plans for what might be next.  I only knew, absolutely, positively, that I could not do that specific job for another day.  No matter what.

There's always such real possibility in the quitting.  Especially when there's nothing waiting for you on the other side. 

I spent the entire month of August going very deep inside of me.  Detoxing, really.  I think August allowed me the opportunity to finally release the last bits of the detritus of sadness that was still holding tiny shards and fragments of my heart that was keeping me from being completely whole.

I embraced a 100% raw vegan diet and did yoga every single day for the entire month.  I returned to acupuncture treatments.  I just really took good care of me.  Grounded myself.  Found my laugh and my smile, again.  I went quiet and listened to the beats of my own heart and sorted out what it is that I really wanted and, far more importantly, what it was that I really needed.

For the first time in what felt like forever I made myself the priority.  No one else.  Just me.  I really loved me with all the intention and with all the abandon that I have always loved everyone else.

In August, my whole life turned upside down, turned inside out, and then all of me, every square inch, became completely brand new. 

It feels as if so many of us are all spinning on carousels with runaway ponies and that gold ring we're all trying to grab is nothing but fool's gold.  I know, I know it really well, that it is sometimes so much easier to just hang on and to keep spinning around and around than to contemplate steering your own pony off into the waiting abyss.

What I want and need to tell you is that you're far more awesome than you even know.

You have all the gifts and everything you need.  You do. 

Jump.

You are what you love not what loves you.

One.  I'm sorting through a box of very important papers.  I only know the contents are very important because the words Very Important Papers was hastily scribbled on the outside of this recycled box before it was shoved under the eaves of the house, who knows when, however long ago.  There are names scratched in his tell-tale left-handed sideways scrawl on torn bits and there are random lists with some of the items scratched through and others left still hoping to someday, one day, any day be completed. 

They will never be completed.

There are bills and more bills, most of them unopened.  Were they ever paid?  Torn pages from magazines that contain both pictures and stories of dreams that were shoved in this particular box deemed very important, but then long forgotten. 

There's a toy that once belonged to Clyde. An empty coffee mug with the detritus of the last drops of coffee now a permanent solid goo along the side and the bottom.  An SCO mouse pad. A badge identifying me as a consultant for Sun Micro Systems.  Pennies and nickles and dimes and quarters.  A candle once used for wishing heart-felt wishes on the new moon.  Did they come true?

It was called Furkefying. The tossing of everything on the desk tops into a box and labeling it Very Important Papers and then shoving it away and rarely ever unearthing it again.  Something his family had done.  Something we did when the clutter became too much. 

I'm not quite sure how this furkified box came with me and is still here or why I found the need to carefully excavate all the contents before dumping it all in the proper recycling containers?

There is no new news, no grateful unearthed bits, just a lot of shredded dreams.

 

Two.  It is no secret that I have very special place in my heart for farmers.  Organic farmers, especially.  That I hug them whenever I get the chance and that my secret boyfriend desire these days is the organic farmer who also owns his own pot of glitter and is comfortable wearing a tutu and maybe writes his own books.  I know, I know.  Tall order.  A beet fairy girl can have her fantasies!

I must be far more chatty about this than I even realize because just yesterday as I was waiting for my daily espresso at my beloved Coffee Garden, the barista pulled my four shots and then as he handed me my beautiful drink said, "Nakedjen, I have a present for you."  I couldn't even begin to imagine what on earth the barista would have for me?  I've been going there, as we know, every day since I arrived in this Salty City and this was the first time anyone made mention of an actual present.  There's been LOTS of free espresso for which I am ALWAYS truly grateful, but a present? 

Then Ben, the barista, pulled a sack from under the counter filled with organic heirloom tomatoes.  That he had grown.  In his own garden.  And he said he brought them just for me because he knows I love farmers.  Especially the organic ones. 

I am not going to lie to you.  I absolutely SQUEALED.  So much so that everyone who was just rubbing the sleepy sand from their own eyes and was still waiting for that caffeine jolt to bring them to life got a shocking wake up call.  And, yes, of course I hugged him.  Passionately! 

I'm still rather amazed, honestly.  I adore all my farmers at the market, as we all very well know.  But this was incredibly kind and special.  I had some of them for dinner last night and I know it's just me, but people, I could absolutely taste the love. 

Who have you shared your garden bounty with this week?  I'm pretty certain there's a beet fairy girl who would just love to squeal at the gift of a tomato.  Go and share!

 

Three.  I have nearly a terabyte (who would have believed we'd have terabytes of anything??! And doesn't it almost feel like that specific drive should be snarling with dinosaur teeth and stomping around on huge feet ready to take over Japan? Or China, even? I am TERABYTE, FEAR ME!) of music.  All kinds.  Because while you may think the only possible music I can ever listen to is by that band that held my ankle tightly by a string and carried me floating along on their adventures for so many years, it is actually quite the opposite.  Of course, yes, I have nearly all their live shows, every single one, included on that TERABYTE, but I think you might be shocked at what else you'd find there.  Or maybe you would not be shocked at all.  Because, maybe you're like me and you just know that music is the beautiful language of our souls that we all innately speak.  From birth. That there really isn't any bad music, just music that suits what we need at this particular moment in our journey as we spin together around the sun.

There's lots and lots and lots of music on that drive.  Which, especially on Sunday afternoons, I enjoy allowing to shuffle through and surprise even me because I forget what gems it actually contains.

On Sunday last I had hit shuffle and the music was gently wafting through our entire house.  The dogs and I were having a lazy day with the New York Times.  Except suddenly it was not lazy at all.  Suddenly there was this HUGE racket and I couldn't quite figure out why both dogs were barking like the house had just been invaded!

I walked into the living room to sort out the ruckus to find Stella circling the entire room like she's on a search and rescue mission and Buddha standing on the couch looking completely and utterly perplexed!  They were looking for Dave Winer.  They both know him and adore him.  And his voice, at that very moment, was coming from all the speakers in our house. 

I had one of his podcasts on the drive.  It had shuffled on and he was speaking about something to do with the River of News and the dogs, well, were certain that he MUST BE IN OUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW! 

Stella, being the smarter of the two, finally went over to one of the speakers and decided that he must be inside.  So she stood there and does what any labrador does when she's absolutely positively certain of something.  She tried to eat it.  This unprecedented activity caused Buddha to LEAP from the couch like he was playing the role of Spiderman in his primary school production, land right on top of Stella and then I had a ring side seat to a barking snarling WWF match of doom.  In the living room.  Because Dave Winer was stuck inside the speaker.

I turned off the podcast.  His voice stopped.  Magically, so did the match of doom.  Except Stella wasn't quite convinced that all was completely well.  He was in there at one point, he had not come out, so he must STILL be in there.  Treats were a mere miniscule distraction for a short while and I changed the to playlist to Coltrane so we could return to our lazy Sunday afternoon.

She hasn't forgotten though.  She keeps checking.  She just better not try to really rescue him. 

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Something I ate is something I should not have eaten.  I know this because I’m having trouble discerning which direction I should be facing the toilet.  I am not very pretty at the moment.  Things are more complicated because I’m at my sister’s house, not at my house.  The dogs are with me and I contemplate just crashing on the cold tile floor in the guest bathroom, but the heavens have literally split open and there’s thunder and lightening crashing across the skies, rain is coming down sideways in fierce buckets and my dogs are terrified that we are all going to die.

NeverNakedBeth is not very sympathetic.  She tells me to just get over myself, suck it up, and take my dogs home.  Where I belong.  I tell her she’s the world’s worst mother.  That wasn’t a very kind thing to say, I know.  Not nice at all, really.  I actually know that she’s a terrific mother.  I just can’t believe she’s watching me wretch into a toilet, knows the weather conditions outside and is kicking me to the curb.

I’m so out of it, truthfully, that I’m not even quite certain of the chain of events but the next thing I know I’m being told to get in my car and that NeverNakedBeth is driving me and the dogs home.  Her husband will follow and bring her back.  All of it feels crazy, but my own body is being so uncooperative that I can’t really muster the energy to try to sort out a better option and I know that there’s no way I can drive even though it is only 20 miles from her house to mine.

“You know,” I tell her, “The last time this happened I was in Sweden.  I was absolutely positive that I was going to die.  So I called Dave in Santa Cruz and made him stay on the phone with me for 12 hours, so he could call the front desk at the hotel if I suddenly expired!” 

“Jennifer, no one does that!”

“It seemed like the only thing TO DO at the time.  I really thought I was going to die!”

“But, seriously, who does that? Who keeps someone on the phone for 12 hours just because they don’t feel well and think they might die?”

“Dave did it for me.  I suppose that’s a reason we’re not married anymore…”

“You think?!?  You’re just difficult, Jennifer.  We love you, but you just make us really tired!”

She continued driving.  Really slowly.  Through the buckets of sideways rain and navigating the accidents that were littering the highway on either side.  It seemed to take forever to get from her house to mine and we rode in silence while I tried my best not to vomit in her lap.

I know I make my family really tired.  I know I am challenging and difficult and exhausting and, oh their favorite word, special.  I do know that it is really not easy to be my sister, or to have me as your daughter, that life with me as part of your family has more than a dash of the unexpected and not always in a delightful way.

I often say that we choose our friends and they often become our family.  For years I was really quite good at cherry picking a smattering of soul friends who made a great naked family and that worked very well for me.  They’re still my family and they all know where they live in my heart.

Since I’ve moved to Utah, my family, that I didn’t choose, has really and truly become not just my family, once again, but also my friends.  I adore them, truly, madly, deeply.  Which is not something I might have said at any point before this and I feel really blessed to be able to share my crazy mixed-up life with them.  They gave me a soft landing when I was shattered and needed a place to go.  Family can be good like that.  Mine was especially good at keeping their door and their hearts wide open.

I am lucky that I am loved so fiercely by all of them in spite of me.  I just need them to know that I love them just as fiercely and with every single fiber of my heart.

Audit Me This

I know that he knows that the one thing in the entire world that upsets me more than anything else, truly, is the IRS.  Well, I suppose animal cruelty and sex crimes perhaps are even more upsetting to me, but truthfully, as silly as it sounds, anything involving me with the IRS causes palpitations and anxiety and my typical ostrich response of burying my head deep under the covers and hoping it will all just magically go away.

When it comes to the IRS, it never ever ever magically goes away. 

When I met him, thirteen years ago, I had just, literally JUST, extracted myself from a long and complicated affair with the IRS that had stretched back to the early days of the late 1980's and a missed opportunity to file a proper 1040  for paltry earnings earned at a variety of part-time jobs while touring with the Grateful Dead and living on random floors in flats in San Francisco.  My bohemian life of never having one address for longer than a month or two, no permanence, and no real bank account resulted in my wages being reported to all the right government authorities but the associated W2's and 1099's never actually getting to me. 

Yes. Right. I do know it is my responsibility to obtain those documents and submit them properly.  I especially know that now.  In 1988 I was hugging trees so fiercely and following in the footsteps of my liberated brothers (and smoking what they were smoking) that I truly believed I was not "required" to pay taxes because they were voluntary.  I wasn't putting zip codes on my enevelopes so I didn't have to pay the government anything.  

I really am that stupid.  I admit it.

My non-compliance with one of the basic tenets of being a truly contributing working member of the United States of America resulted in fines and fees and more fines and more fees and penalties and then compounded interest and oh god by the time the bill finally reached me at my more than one month permanent address nearly seven (yes seven!) years later it seemed astronomical by my poor hippie girl standards who had just finally landed in one place only because Jerry had died and it was time to stand still and grow up.

Grow up and pay the man.  All my dollars.

I did. I paid the IRS absolutely every last dollar that was owed.  Including all penalties and all interest.

My complicit and savings draining affair with the IRS ended in 1998. 

Since June, I've been getting bills addressed to me that do not belong to me from the IRS. 

For taxes owed for 2008 by a certain former husband.

Dollars that need to be paid.  Lots of dollars.

Finding that envelope in my mailbox every month fills me with anxiety and dread, quickly followed by sadness.

The IRS insists I need to be informed.  I insist that this is an invasion of privacy, both mine and his.

There's this broken part of my heart that just wishes I could call him and ask him to please fix it.

I can not. He will not.  

It's until death do us part.

 

 

It's Not About The Letting Go

December 5 Prompt

Author: Alice Bradley
Let's Panic About Babies
@finslippy

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

I feel like there’s so very much in my life that I should have released this year, that I had internal dialogues over and over and over again until I was even sick of myself talking about it to just let it go but there was all kinds of strange anxiety and fear wrapped up in the release and I kept grabbing and grasping and finding reasons to just hold on tight as if I ever even really had the things in the first place.

That’s the lesson here, I believe. For me, at least.

It’s not about the letting go. Or the release, even. It is about the waking up, the opening your heart, the realizing that none of us, truly, owns or holds anything other than the space to allow people or events or, yes, even things in to it.

The space I held, so dearly, in my heart for the man I was once married to has changed shape and form. I was told this would happen, but I never even chose to believe it and for a while I stuffed it full of lots of hurt and anger and even blame of both myself and him to hold the shape and keep everything just so and my heart beating along and me moving through my days, not so much alone in this world, as a wounded soul who couldn’t be bothered with others because, oh dear, oh my, oh fuck it to hell, I’m still broken.

Only not. 

The shape of my heart, the space that help my marriage, the sweet and tender love of him, isn’t stuffed with hurt, but instead is filled with forgiveness and, yes, a new kind of love.  Love that came with awakening and understanding. Love that is quite different. Love that includes him.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes, it takes waking up, it takes finding your own part in all the parts that made up the whole story, it takes claiming and owning your rightful space in your very own life to release your grip and to soar.

 

The Cheese Stands Alone

Before.

Before we were, well, you were, well, yes, even I was, much younger. Everyone referred to us by both of our names swirled across their tongues into one. I was never just Jen in all of those years. Ever.  I wasn't really Nakedjen, either.  I was, of course naked, sometimes always, but not Nakedjen when I was with him, which before, in those days, was nearly every single minute of all of the long days stretched before us like a time which might just last forever.

I thought we would last forever.

We finished one another's sentences easily, shared that crazy mind meld that two people often have when they just know, with a scary certainty, what the other one thinks without even having to ask, and because we knew each other far too well, we fought in rages that were legendary over the most insipid and stupidest and childish things. 

We were dreamers of dreams and magicians pulling rabbits from hats wearing tattered capes singed from standing just a bit too close to our own bonfires.  The love ran out and we found ourselves on empty.

Before.

Then. 

Then I found him. He spent a longer time looking and he found me. We found each other. Hearts exploded. Love was declared. Over and over and over. Again.

It was heady, it was fast, it was furious. But it wasn't, well, ever really exactly right.  We had all the pieces of a puzzle, every single one cut precisely, but I had my pieces, and he had his pieces and some how they just did not fit. One with each other. Together.

In the beginning, then, we used a superglue of love to hold us together.  Bonds strong that made the edges of puzzle pieces that really did not mesh not rub quite so harshly so we could just gaze at the pretty picture and ignore the bumps, the gaps, those spots where there were not even pieces at all.

Cracks appeared that love couldn't fill.  The picture was no longer one of forever.

I had a faded and worn photograph of two happy people, he's hugging her knees. 

He had a document of dissolution that he begged me to sign.

Freedom from forever.

Then.

Now.

The cheese stands alone.

With two dogs. A cat. A rescued beta fish from an experiment in a lab gone all wrong.

Better. Now.

Happy. Now.

Loving and loved. Now.

Naked. Now.

Now.

Kaboom!

I dreamed last night that I was sorting out plane tickets using every available frequent flier mile available to me on all available airlines, switching them from this airline to that airline, cashing in that gift and this, to gather and compile enough miles to put all the men who have abandoned me on the very same plane.

A plane that I knew, with absolute uncertain certainty, was going to be blown to smithereens in the sky by a carefully planted IRA bomb.

It was all so carefully calculated. Gathering all of them in one place, cajoling them, getting them each to agree to take the flight.

I even, in this particular dream, welcomed each of those men on to the plane, buckled them into their seats with a kiss and a smile, and then leaned down and whispered gently in their ears, "I love you. Always."

It's October.

The month of my own personal kaboom and I'm as fragile as a leaf turned a firey golden red and touched at the edge with a silvery frost.  Ready to go crunch with the slightest touch of your foot.  

While many are donning demonic masks and asking for treats, my face is already a mask trying to hide my own internal pain that I'm truly afraid will crack into thousands of pieces if I allow my truths to surface.

So instead, I try to sleep and I have nightmares. Of planes going kaboom in the sky.  Except that I really do know that a plane going kaboom, the imaginary visceration of those men who abandoned my heart, is just that: imaginary. My own way crazy mind's path towards helping to put my heart back together again.

Kaboom.

There's Healing in the Leaving

You have to ring a bell to gain entrance into the squat brick building that is like all the other buildings that surround it in an industrial strip of warehouses that seem to hug the mountains near the west valley of the Salt Lake. 

The only thing that alerts you that this building might be just a bit different from the others in this industrial complex are the bars on all the windows. It is hard to tell, at first, if that is to keep everyone inside or to keep those of us outside out. 

There are handwritten signs asking parents to keep their kids from playing with the candy machine, various plastic chairs, a television tuned to The People's Court and four windows that feel rather like bank teller windows. The candy machine, I notice, is for a long ago charity and has cobwebs where the candy should have been.

Long ago, promises were made. By me. To him.

Long ago, promises were made. By him. To me.

Even before that day when we gathered together under those redwoods with all those who were closest to our hearts and made those declarations and promises and vows filled with love and forever and infinity, there was one ring.

Give by him. To me. Platinum. With diamonds scattered across the band like falling stars. 

Then on our wedding day two more bands. One for each side.

With more scattered diamonds, more falling stars. A constellation that was constructed solely for me of eternal love from him.

We joked that there were three rings on my finger because he wanted to be certain I really knew that I was truly married.

Then today. Today. I'm standing there at a counter behind barred windows accessed only by the ring of a bell. My fingers completely bare. A very young Mormon boy who asks me so innocently for the story about those three rings.

I tell him that he left, that my husband left, that I no longer need those rings, that while I knew that I was really married, that I tried to be the best I could at marriage, to win all the marriage awards, some marriages just end. They just do. And the constellation fades. The stars fall completely. They no longer shine.

That boy, that young Mormon boy, asked me so gently if I was going to be okay and explained, there in that strange building behind the barred windows, looking across at me with love and innocence, that this was certainly a story he had no experience with himself but he believed that a man who left a woman like me couldn't have been much of a man at all.

How easy it is for those who have not lived our very own story to create an ending that cushions their own gentle hearts.

Had I read the Book of Mormon, he asked?

Oh yes, I replied. Of course.

Then you know. He was wrong.

But I also know, oh of course I truly know, that he was right.

I left the rings, my three marriage rings, my constellation of falling stars, with the Mormon boy today.

There's healing in the leaving and love to be found. Especially in discarded wedding rings.

Forever ended. Infinity goes on.

They say, whomever they happen to be (I often contemplate who they are and I suppose they are always changing depending upon the certain subject so just tying it all up with they, calling these experts they, instead of truly searching out their names is easier, I suppose, but we've all gotten rather lazy, I think and they, those who have actually done the hard work to assess the damages at hand, really should be getting more credit...still I'm going to abuse the privilege right now and just continue the tradition) that music has been known to trigger suppressed memories, bringing them forth, extracting them from a cellular level where we had no idea we'd even stuffed them.

This wasn't quite like that, of course.

Some quick and superfluous background. I got married. You know that part. To David. You also know that part. I'm really choosy about music. That part, oh that part you all definitely know. The part you may not know, even if you've been reading very carefully, is that we were sung down the aisle by a live band.  It was that choosy about music bit.  The band, one of my very favorites (it was both the very choosy and perhaps a bit of the very spoiled in this case) played Van Morrison's Into the Mystic as David and Clyde and I walked down an aisle filled with smiles and tears and bubbles and hearts floating on magical love dreams. Yes, I know. Fairies were in the glen and unicorns were even grazing in the grass.  It was that ridiculous.

I then, as we all know, had a marriage.  You also know that part. That particular song was kind of, well, integral to the marriage. Played a key role along the way. Again, I'm not certain you'd know that unless you happened to be living with us. Which most of you were not.

I spent Sunday evening being entertained by The Swell Season.  My appreciation for their music runs pretty deep and I kind of have a little bit of a girl crush on Glen Hansard.  He's my Irish boyfriend.  It's a gift to live in Salt Lake, actually, because they happen to play here a lot. On Sunday evening, the concert was outdoors, under the vast Utah sky and I was right in front of the stage, my heart swelling with each and every note.

Then it happened. They played, Into the Mystic.

So, here I am (or there I was), standing on a hillside, red eyes fighting back the memories that want to spill in wet tears down my cheeks and I do what is probably not the smartest thing a person in my situation should do.  Then, again, I am not known for being intelligent, especially when it comes to matters of the heart.  I tend to go all in, full force, without even pausing for a breath, without a notion of thought, just grabbing the moment presented beating fast in front of me and, well, somehow love just has to win in the end, right?  Doesn't love always win?

I sent David a smidgen of video. 

Of those two fabulous people singing that Van Morrison song that had sung the very two of us down the aisle on our wedding day.  I just did it.  Wrote: I can't hear this song without thinking of you. I don't think I'll ever be able to do so.  I hope you're happy and well.  Love and more. Jen

I pushed send. Went back to fighting my own tears. Because, well, it was THAT song.  That song that on that day so many, many years ago held such promises for both of us of forever times infinity.  Forever ended. Infinity goes on.

I did not expect David to reply and even had a twinge of anxiety about opening that door. I haven't spoken to him in ages and a day.  We have other lives now. Lives that are not about rocking gypsy souls.  Lives no longer lived in days of old.

He did, though. With gratitude and love back.

Love does win. In the end. Forever might end, but loves does win.