Category Archives: Experiences

Character, Experiences, Work, Writing

Twenty Thirteen

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So my resolution this year is about writing. It’s about this blog becoming an actual platform for the stories of my experiences that have informed my philosophies on life – personal & political & anything between. As I’ve said many times: the only thing I truly feel like an expert in are my own experiences and my reactions to them. By articulating them here, I may be able to find a way to share what knowledge I’ve unearthed through pursuing love, through enduring pain, through aspiring to be as fearless as possible and my ever-growing need to embrace doubt and truth as recklessly as possible. Maybe these stories will be useful or inspiring, either to others or simply reflecting back at myself.

So I promise 24 stories this year. Two a month. There are days when I feel that I could write entire novels of my life, and other days when the lake of inspiration is dry as a bone, but over this year, I can do 24 pieces of this puzzle which forms my personal picture.

Anais Nin said it best: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” — I’m taking that to heart this year.

So I’ll start with this past year. 2013 was an exciting year of my life. To be honest, pretty much every year since 2007 has been a progressive attempt to top the previous one in terms of challenging myself, embracing new experiences or diving further into what I’m capable of. Continue reading Twenty Thirteen →

Character, Experiences, Humanity, Past

On & Up

We’ve all made mistakes in our past. We’ve dated people we probably shouldn’t have, wasted time and money, hurt people (intentionally or unintentionally) and otherwise made regrettable decisions. Mistakes are lessons if you learn from them, and what matters is that you try not to make them again. If you have crappy patterns, deliberately change them.

If you want a good future, move on from your past. Give others that opportunity as well. Move forward. If others won’t let you, leave them behind. Everybody’s got a journey, and sometimes you get to hold hands along the way, sometimes you have to fight and walk in opposite directions. But never stop moving. Never stop trying. Never stop striving. Never stop doing. Not for anybody else, but for you.

Adventures, Character, Experiences, Modeling, Past, Photography

Baring More with Peter Paradise

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Long before I became the subject of hundreds of photographs by Judd Weiss, I modeled for Peter Paradise of Boston. I posted a few shots of our work together in the past, but as both of our birthdays approach, I wanted to share some of our story, and some of the best work I feel we ever did together.

The next few photographs will include some semi-nudes, so those who would be offended or disinclined to see these (hello, family!) should probably do themselves a favor and not look any further. Spare me the lectures, too. Continue reading Baring More with Peter Paradise →

Character, Experiences, Writing

Forgive Me

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Yom Kippur is a Jewish Holy Day also known as the “Day of Atonement”, which occurs soon after Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). There is a lot of ritual and tradition surrounding the occasion, but my bastardized overview concept is about atonement for one’s sins. I once observed a Jewish friend of mine apologizing to various friends for hurt they had caused, to take responsibility for their actions and to move on from that in the new year. Despite not being a practicing Jew myself, I felt it was a good enough tradition to adopt, and try to recognize it every year with a “moment” of repentance.

I have no deity to confess or repent to, nor any arbitrary moral requirements besides those of basic ethics – to not harm others by my actions.

So this is for you. And my sins are those against others.  Continue reading Forgive Me →

Current Events, Experiences, Politics

A Bad Batch of Prohibition

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Lately I’ve noticed a slew of news stories referring to a “bad batch of Molly” killing young partiers in the mostly north-eastern United States. This is a tragic story. Drug overdose is a tragedy. But the media compounds these tragedies further through their irresponsible misrepresentations of the facts.

Happy Little Pill.

I really wish the news media would stop using variations of the phrase “bad batch of Molly”. The drug they’re referencing is called MDMA, but this is not MDMA. It’s being represented as such, but it’s not. I’m skeptical that there are even traces of MDMA in this shit, but sure, maybe there’s some. We haven’t even gotten the toxicology reports back yet, but that doesn’t stop the news from blaming Molly because the victims allegedly thought they bought Molly and everybody’s got a fetish for speculation over facts. But MDMA is not what’s killing people here.

People are dying from shitty drugs sold by sketchy people because they have no way of knowing what they really are. Because they are illegal. And people are scared to ask for help, or ask the right questions at all, because what they’re doing is illegal.

Stories like this make many people decide to double-down on our wasteful and useless drug war. Hell, as the Obama Administration decides not to pursue intervention in states legalizing cannabis, how else will law enforcement keep their funding up? These terrible stories beg for “something to be done”, and it looks like we’ll see further crackdown on party drugs. But the War on Drugs is wrong on a number of levels – and yes, I absolutely blame the War on Drugs for these deaths.

Dear reactionary news media, go find the real story here – that government prohibition of recreational drugs makes them far more dangerous – and please leave Molly alone.

Adventures, Experiences

The Bear & The Bird

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I’m kinda-sorta-maybe-a-lot-in-love right about now. I would claim I don’t know how I got here, but I do, and this is where I’ll tell you, if you stay to read. This entry was harder to write than most simply because it’s a currently evolving story, not a finished chapter from my past. I hope I do this present experience justice.

It was just another Wednesday in June of 2012 when I spotted a clever post on Facebook credited to an online friend. The original poster was some cocky-looking guy named “Judd Weiss” who’d tagged my acquaintance. After some banter back and forth in the comments I explored Judd’s profile, pictures, and website (Hustlebear.com) and found we had mutual interests and mutual friends, so I sent him a friend request.

Over the next year I’ve certainly gotten to know him (I’d dare say more than most) – I met him in person a few weeks later at Freedom Fest in July. I brought a couple of people up to a little get-together in his hotel room, and next thing I knew I had seven people following me to a great little restaurant in Las Vegas. He sat beside me, and somehow as I drank glass after glass of Sangria, I missed the fact that I was sitting next to the next great love of my life. Continue reading The Bear & The Bird →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Writing

The Move That Made Me

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I sat at a computer all night trying to find the emotional zone that makes me tell a story. I got distracted by the typical aspects of the internet, and suddenly dawn arrived and I had no words yet, despite having spent three days telling myself it was time to write it. Finally, I grabbed a pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter and headed to my porch to watch the sun rise. I don’t even smoke, I just love the smell of burning clove, the way the tendrils of smoke rise off the ash at the end of the cigarette. I listened to birds sing and the neighborhood wake up. I started talking to someone who wasn’t there, I started telling them the story I was trying to tell in written word, and suddenly it poured out. I do this a lot. I tell it like I’m a character in a movie, like every dramatic scene that’s quiet in which a character tells another the truth. Dramatic pauses, a drag from a cigarette and thoughtful sighs. It makes it so much more artful, and suddenly those spoken words travel down to my fingers and allow me to walk back inside and type them out. It’s always this damn cigarette that brings it out.

Three years ago, on Memorial Day weekend of 2010, I left New England for my new life in Los Angeles. I was twenty-two and ready for an adventure. Many friends confessed confusion as to why I would leave, and why I’d choose Los Angeles, a city I only knew three people in, a city so much different than where I was from. Once I moved, and still to this day, I get asked by people in LA why I chose to move there.

I often laugh and say, “it all started with a boy”. Continue reading The Move That Made Me →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Travel, Writing

Love (Found & Lost) Along the Road

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So, the context provided in the entry before this one should explain that I’d followed love to a strange set of life-decisions. After having planned for over a year to move from Boston to Los Angeles, I finally did, and a year later I left to drive haphazardly across the country. Because of a Boy. Seriously, read that damn entry first.

So I left Los Angeles on June 3rd. It was very hard to do. My stuff was in storage, my birds were in their travel cage, there was less money in my bank account than I’d hoped, and I was very, very, nervous. I had just moved to LA a year before. I’d been so excited to start my life there. I kept looking at my favorite restaurants, favorite haunts, thinking to myself that I’d be back in two months, that I’d just settle right back in, hopefully bringing the Boy back with me.

The only way I was able to leave was by reminding myself I’d be back soon. Reminding myself that I had an adventure to go on, and that I’d be home again before I knew it. That the time would fly by.

So I drove to Las Vegas. I checked into my hotel room at The Artisan, a hotel I’d stayed at many times before and have stayed at many times since. I spent the next two weeks working – booking tables, selling bottles, hosting parties, Go-Go dancing, bar-tending private parties, gambling even, all cash and quick. The plan was to make as much money as I could fast, and to head East.

A few days before my expected leaving date, I met Ghost. Ghost has a real name, but I don’t feel like using it, as few people know it and by keeping it close I feel it makes him still belong to me in some way, even though I’m giving away this story.  Continue reading Love (Found & Lost) Along the Road →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Travel

The Context (Leading up to the Summer of 2011)

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Two years ago, I was in a very different space. So different, in fact, that I can barely recall it, so I flip through journals and pictures and try to reassemble the jumble of memories. I loved a Boy who lived 2,000 miles away from me, and I struggle to remember why. I try to remember kisses and adventures on chemicals in a forest land in upstate New York where we found one another among the clutter of New Age festival wildness.

Two years ago, I packed my life up and drove across the country for three months. That’s the story I’ve been wanting to tell, but before I do, I have to explain why I did, which is a story in and of itself. So there are few entries to read, and they’re autobiographical nonsense of a girl in her early 20s who seems to make a lot of life-altering decisions for boys. But these experiences, for all that they twist me around and make me run off on crazy paths in alternate directions, they’ve really shaped who I happen to be.

So, I guess we’ll back up to July of 2010, when I flew from my home in Los Angeles to New York for an annual hippie festival I’d been attending for years. It was already set to be a wild adventure – I flew out with clothing, a sleeping bag and a pillow, but no tent. I had no room for one in my baggage and decided I knew so many people at the festival that I would find someone to let me share their tent. It was a crazy idea, I’ll admit, but I love those kinds of situations. I have always made the best of not knowing what comes next, and Brushwood is a real home for me, filled with friends of my parents, friends of mine, former lovers, and lovers yet to be discovered. Continue reading The Context (Leading up to the Summer of 2011) →

Experiences, Past

My Socrates

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On March 23rd, 2009, a great man passed away. I meant to post this on the anniversary of his death, but I’m off by a few days. I have recently been talking more about him, as he inspired one of my tattoos (that story is for another entry someday).

This is what I wrote, the day of his funeral.

…

I was a student at Manchester Community College from June 2002 until May 2005. One of my very first classes was Critical Thinking with Eugene Rice, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 9:30-11am. I was 14, he was 72. Our connection was dynamic – we were both full of questions and answers. I developed my questions through rebellion and discovered my answers through speculation, and presented both arrogantly. He achieved both through experience and trial and error, and presented both in various fashions, from elegance to antagonism.

What we had in common was a desire for thorough knowledge, and an antagonistic spirit to achieve said knowledge.

He hated the word “teacher” he told us, one class, due to his belief that it implies indoctrination, preferring to refer to himself as a “mid-wife”. Knowledge was already inside us, you see, and he was simply there to assist with the birth of it.  Continue reading My Socrates →