emmaruth | Reading

I found a bunch of scribbled on pages from a very long summer night in the 90s when handful of folks did acid in my apartment. I spent a chunk of time sequestered away in another room writing my feelings out because I was stuck in my head on the verge of a bad trip. Despite being quite high and my baseline terrible handwriting, they are surprisingly legible. I remember being fixated on writing until someone (who it was I can’t remember) eventually pulled me away from my little self imposed solitude to play wipeout, and that was a stellar idea on their part because I probably would’ve had a progressively harder night if I had been left to my own devices to turn into the steppenwolf/harry haller of central square.

The gist of it was that I didn’t want to be there. I don’t think there was some cool party going on that I had fomo about or anything like that, I just intensely didn’t want to be where I was. I think most “____ got high and did _____” anecdotes are usually stupid, especially when they involve me. This one felt a little more self aware, and I’m impressed I was able to articulate how I felt in that moment, because that sentiment often a constant for me. I rarely liked where I was, I always assumed anywhere else would be better. I don’t know why or what it was, but I just had to drag myself along with this inexplicable yearning that somethingwas eluding me, that I almost had it, but not quite and if I stayed constantly moving, constantly searching, someday I’d find it. It was rare I was able to relax or live in the moment, I mean I hosted parties that I left, either to go to a concert or to go to another party. This was a thing I did more than once! Not a ton but even one time seems kind of weird.

I’m completely in denial about moving to Ireland in less than 9 weeks. The more we’ve sorted and dismantled and gone through stuff, the more I have realized how settled i feel in my home, that this is the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I was a child, and I don’t want to leave, not yet and not under these circumstances. By all rights I could see myself hating this house; my mom died here, Ethan learned his dad died while standing in the kitchen, my sweet little bear died here, we spent months here in lockdown, there were some horrible moments. But there have been lots of really good moments too, being able to swim every day, our gardens (which sucked this year but there were reasons), our cardinals, our hummingbirds, how big we do up Halloween, the little apple orchard we planted, our deer, our neighbors, having a ton of space, having a bathroom bigger than a lot of bedrooms I’ve lived in, Ethan’s music studio, the potential to make this homier and happier, I don’t know that I can love another home like I love this one. When I am here I am not thinking about how to escape and where to escape to.

In Northern Ireland for 11th night this year, there were effigies of immigrants and refugees burned in the bonfires. While those were a bunch of loyalist idiots, anti immigrant sentiment across the country is at a fever pitch with the #irelandisfull movement gaining steam. I don’t feel great about that for a lot of reasons. I’m not gonna wave my passport around and act like I’m Irish because I am not.

It is not great and I feel pretty shell shocked about the whole thing. I do want to move and I do want to move to Ireland eventually, but not at this breakneck pace, not to Dublin. I’m scared about housing, about anti immigrant sentiment, I’m scared about healthcare, it’s all so much and I feel like I’m drowning at times. I know we’ll be able to handle it but we shouldn’t have to. We’re trying to stay but it’s getting further and further out of reach and I don’t think it’s gonna happen and I feel dreadful about it. I don’t want Ethan to just take any job to facilitate staying here, I don’t want him to burn bridges with his current employer because that isn’t a great long term strategy. There’s one company that looks/looked maybe promising but I also don’t see how getting passed over for one position for maybe another is something to be even cautiously optimistic about but I have also proven myself to often be a little raincloud so who knows.

I mean I don’t love America right now either to be clear, it’s also fucking disaster, and who knows maybe in 4 months I’ll be happy to be in a tiny apartment on a dock in Dublin hoping that our tenants don’t burn our house down in our absence. But it kinda feels like a case of the devil you know.

I wanted to end this with how well that night on acid turned out. My roommate and I in specific had a blast together and it was one of those nights that really cemented our already close friendship leaning into chosen sisterhood. I remember hanging out well into the next afternoon dissecting everything and taking a detour to the blessedly air conditioned floral department of star market. But that was one night and I was like, 20. This is a whole ass lifestyle shift that will be years and I’m 47. So ugh?

Also holy fuck I’d punch a puppy for a cigarette and I haven’t felt that way in a long time so I know I’m truly stressed. Puppies will remain untouched though.

hummingbirdmadgirl

at some point I’ll get a computer and these will suck less in terms of formatting, right now I’m using my phone so…also I totally get that these have been super gloomy, all the sorting of stuff has wrecked my house, so at night I have been trying to sit and sort through the thoughts it stirred up. Back when I used lj, I forced myself to write everything out in one go, with these I’ve been following a few trains of thought into the weeds and some have taken days or weeks. This one has taken at least a month now.
———-
There’s this show I love called BoJack Horseman and it’s just one of the most brutal and accurate takes on depression and self destruction I’ve seen, which is impressive since it’s a cartoon. About a horse. In Hollywood.

There’s a character who frequently lets people know she’s above all of it, unlike them she has -real- depth. She’s not part of the celebrity scene, she has a dysfunctional origin story, but like all the characters how reliable of a narrator she is is up for debate. She has taken on ghostwriting for celebrities to pay the bills (which she sneers at), she plans to write a memoir that’s going to be cathartic and brilliant and life changing for her and the readers. But when she gets the opportunity to write, she can’t. At all. That story isn’t in her. Her *wanting* to be that person superseded actually *working* toward it.

She struggles with this because *of course* she has felt real pain, she’s been accompanied by that pain for most her of her life, pushed around by something dark and laborious that she could not control. But trying to articulate it, it comes out as nothing special, the ghosts haunting her are generic; high school bullies, a father who didn’t understand her, older brothers who were jerks, Judy Blume stuff. She thinks that maybe she’s too happy to properly express herself, after all, can a synthetically happy person not wallowing in the depth of despair possibly be capable of plumbing the depths of her youth? She goes off antidepressants, convinced that it will fix her writer’s block. It doesn’t. Instead her executive function tanks, so she’s not writing *and* her apartment is trashed. You see her personal fable shattering throughout the course of a single episode, and it’s gutting but so relatable.

So much suffering isn’t really unique (also I wanna be clear here i am talking more about depression type stuff not situational) it’s universal, we just can’t see that when we’re in it because it’s really nefarious and isolates us by making us believe it’s exceptional, and then we start to believe maybe we are, by extension for surviving it. You claw your way through something that feels unspeakable only to recognize it for garden-variety inconvenience it was. Then we question everything; Why go through all that pain for what feels like nothing? How do we make that pain good pain? Where’s the growth? What’s the lesson? Why make it to the other side of that divide with nothing to show for it? There has to be a reason, right? How insulting is it to consider that all of that was for “nothing” because we can’t find the words to make it more than a handful of horrible or regrettable memories?

We didn’t survive our own mind just to have life increasingly raise the volume by getting some incurable bone marrow disease or by following that devastation up by getting sexually assaulted by a friend a couple years later, just so we can at best maybe make a really impulsive move to California in an effort to get away from that, to then come back and watch our family die around us in the midst of a pandemic, did we? If we can’t turn horror show experiences like that into *something* what was the point of any of it, why did it have to happen? Why can’t it be inspiration for something profound instead of just damage?

I guess because so much art romanticizes suffering and we admire people who molded their own into greatness, there’s this hope that maybe somewhere in us we might have the capacity to create something monumental as a testament to our surviving right? Not the wrecked shrine to our suffering that we’d previously warped part of our lives around, but something better, productive, maybe hopeful to have made all that violation and trauma somewhat worth it. We conflate suffering with creativity, the archetype of the tortured genius is so drilled into us, that suddenly surviving isn’t enough, and if that’s the best we can do it’s some sort of failure, which is insane when you’re dealing with a brain that wants to sabotage you.

We look at authors like Plath or Woolf and we define them in part by their skill, but to their discredit we also define by their mental illness. Yes these women created amazing works, and yes they suffered from crippling mental illness that ended them, but we assume their creativity spawned from the same well as their grief, not about how much more they may have done if they had gotten help. Woolf aggressively bemoaned her struggle in her suicide note that illustrated the lack of adequate intervention in her day. She hated the disease for what it robbed from her. Hell even if look at Elizabeth Wurtzel who unapologetically made her suffering her brand, she didn’t get into Harvard just for “big beautiful eyes & also being really profoundly sad”.

———
I have been going through a deep dive into the past and some of it has been joyful, some zsurprising, and some of it has been surprisingly painful. Over the decades I’ve lived in MA I have lost a lot of things. Tons of photos and letters when my apartment building got set on fire, as we didn’t get much out before mold bloomed on and it got saturated with the stink of smoke because of course a water logged building left locked up in the heat for a weekend will do that. Later the basements of two other apartments flooded taking out a lot of what had survived the fire. Somewhere in between that my first laptop full of 6 years of emails, classwork, and photos got wiped due to someone-who-was-not-me’s incompetence (I am very prickly about that). Then finally the server my main email address lived on for years died and I hadn’t downloaded those emails (that one is totally on me). We opted not to back up snotgoth which is for the best but that was some history (although it admittedly made us look feral) But seriously it feels like life conspired in such that I’ve lost swaths of records from my past. A big digital pit ranging from 1994-2004 ish is just something I’ve gotten used to. It sucks but it is what it is. I still have livejournal I guess but that was always performative.

Surprisingly in going through all these old hard drives I’ve actually *found* some stuff, errant emails or AIM chats circa 1999- early 2001 that I genuinely have no clue how they’ve landed in my possession in 2025 since they should’ve been off the hosed laptop. I was so initially excited to see these, but oh man, they are honestly *INCREDIBLY* stupid, embarrassingly so. As someone who has battled depression and anxiety forever, it’s really been over the last few years where I feel like I’ve pretty sustainably and consistently come out ahead (which is wild considering the last few years). But sometimes I catch myself wondering if I’ve lost something, whether it’s age, or if the ketamine treatments left me a little dimmer, maybe I lost my voice when I stopping my obsessive journaling, maybe my somewhat self imposed lack of a “post” pandemic social life has lessened me, maybe it was the choice to live as part of a we vs a me (which is in fact possibly one of the braver things bonkers me went for), maybe it was my gradual slip into living a totally sober life, but regardless the reason, there are times where I feel like I’m not who I used to be and rarely I’d wonder if it’s a good thing.

Those have been the moments where I’ve romanticized younger me. When left to thrive in the lenses of rose colored classes I see her as vivid, chaotic, driven by something wild and passionate, constantly searching for something, driven and bold. But these fragments — these messages and chats — showed me someone else entirely. Someone lost. Someone extremely detached. Desperate to find meaning but unwilling to ask for help or really able to give anything. Dispassionate. There’s no depth to any of it. Just someone flailing through a quiet numbness tamping down their feelings because actually feeling, processing it, or doing anything substantive with it — that was too much. So these conversations are so vapid and I’m so checked out it’s sad. I thought I was fearless but truthfully I was clearly governed by fear. Sure I was “fearless” in terms of taking stupid risks at times, but in terms of really being fearless, willing to be vulnerable? Fucking terrified.

Just so many instances where I was so cagey and not invested, and was *at best* fishing for things from nearly dried lakebeds that I knew could not sustain me, but I’d go through the motions anyway hoping for anything, even things I didn’t really want, like some sort of barely living hungry ghost. I was looking for any form of validation from anyone hoping any affection might in some way make up for how hollow and alone I always felt. One example was a conversation this dude is just basically talking at me and really I could’ve be anyone.i didn’t see me or my voice there at all.

I am almost a little surprised at how many people with supposedly great big feelings were around while I was massively self destructing. I worry that me being a mess was probably just what people expected, which is sad but also fair. I used to believe I must’ve been really good at hiding it, but don’t think that’s the case reading these things, it’s clear I was not doing great (also, idk, maybe the excessive drinking and clubbing and drugs and dropping out of college were possibly also indicative there may have been some underlying issues with me). I know one of the first things they tell you when you’re learning to lifeguard is how an actually drowning person doesn’t look or act like how you’d expect, but I don’t know if that works as a metaphor. It’s important to stress that I do not feel like anyone else could have or more importantly should have shouldered any of that responsibility other than me, but I guess i am surprised at how successful I was at keeping people at arms length (I also assume I’m forgetting things). Just looking back, I’m glad I survived me.

Total side note but it warrants mention is that in all honesty one of the reasons I will always be so besotted with Ethan is because fairly early in our relationship I got completely freaked out because I saw that this had potential to be really serious and I was scared. I was also overwhelmed because I was trying to get back into Emerson (I succeeded, hooray!), I’d gone on hormonal birth control (terrible idea, boo!), my new living situation wasn’t awesome (it eventually got mildly better, hooray!), and my new job was stupid (it eventually got a lot better, hooray) so I did the very on brand for me move of trying to end the relationship. In my mind it was better to end it prematurely because it was inevitably going to go to hell because I had a lot going on and anyway I was a nightmare, it had been fun, etc etc etc. Previously I’d told him about my not great patterns and my long term struggle with my brain and how I’d been in and out of therapy for over a decade already, and he knew I’d been unwillingly out of it for a couple months because I’d lost my previous job and thus my insurance, but also the therapist I liked a lot and had seen for a good chunk of time had been diagnosed with cancer in spring of ‘02 and stepped away from her practice, so I was using that and the excuse I was still feeling out the new and different insurance for my aforementioned new job to drag my feet because starting over again with a new therapist always sucks. And also it was fall and colder weather traditionally messes me up. ANYWAY, basically he told me that he did not agree with me I had not presented it as a debate but OK) and that regardless of the future status of our relationship, it seemed like I maybe needed to stop dicking around about finding a new therapist because he was worried I was starting to backslide into not doing so hot. Which was a massive splash of cold water, just because he saw me slipping into bad habits before I was aware, and he called me on my shit in a really compassionate way. He also was not overly hand holding about it, he was very “you know what to do, you’ve done this before, you know how to get help, you know sometimes you need help, you need to take care of yourself, but if you want me I will be here for you” I don’t know, something about how it all played out, I felt fully seen and not judged for who I was, for all of who I was including the dysfunctional stuff, for the first time in a long long long time maybe ever, and it was really empowering. And yeah when I got out of that moment of panic I in fact did not want to break up. Yay sorry that’s a tangent.

This is not stuff that haunts me, it was just surprising to see how wrong I was about myself. I get that these are just snapshots and maybe not the whole picture but still. Same with old paper journals, all that great big pain just revolved around feeling alone while not really letting anyone get truly close, which is probably the most mundane self fulfilling prophecy ever. That for so much of my teens and twenties I was constantly fighting myself to keep my head above water when a lot of that pain was an illusion created by my not properly functioning brain. I had no idea what I was actually going to face later, and when I faced *real* shit, I mostly did ok and didn’t crumble. I was stronger than I thought when I wasn’t being my own worst enemy.

I guess I was just excited at the prospect of getting some insight into past me, and the insight I did get was just of a person I kind of simultaneously feel pity for but also dislike, for a lot of reasons. Which is unfair to a degree because that person was a traumatized kid, it just feels sad to think about how much of that trauma was self inflicted and meaningless.

denise posting in

dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

hummingbirdmadgirl

I found some more old letters and it is wild that we lived in a time where we ever traded handwritten letters, now we can barely be bothered with emails. We have multiple social media platforms dedicated to making communication as concise and brief as possible. We used to care, I would hope high schoolers were keeping the tradition alive but they have cell phones too. I’m at the point where I’m lamenting antiquated forms of communication, next I’ll write 5 paragraphs on how awesome call waiting was.

One letter struck me because the author stated in a kind manner that I was one of the more mature people they knew, and considering at that point I was one of the younger people in our social circle coupled with my commitments to very much not getting the point, drinking too much, doing too much ecstasy, doing too much dropping out of college, and just in general being an exceptionally depressed and self destructive mess I feel like I was not the intended recipient for this.

Letter writing makes me sad because I have some sort of coordination issue or neurological thing going on that was never fully explored. My handwriting is *beyond terrible* and writing actually fucking hurts and I have to tap out quickly. I am right handed but I hold my pen hooked like a left handed person, which is not ideal and I have struggled with this and practiced against it for decades but it’s a code I cannot crack. I found out this was deeper seeded than “boy my handwriting sucks” because aside from letters, cds, and photos, I have unearthed a treasure trove of medical records including some really intensive iq testing I went through throughout grammar school.

Long story short, because my handwriting was so bad and because I was so tuned during school, my first grade teacher felt I might need an IEP. Instead that testing resulted in a an iq score that qualified as “extremely high”, with the caveat that my score would have been higher but my handwriting issues hampered my test taking abilities since parts of the tests I’d taken were timed. Again I feel that perhaps I was not the intended recipient for this.

I have had this theory since high school that only children have an unfair advantage when it comes standardized testing like this because we tend to socialize with adults more than peers, many of the skills formed through socialization with are formed with adults. So we maybe have earlier and stronger grasps on reading/writing/verbal skills/reasoning etc, because I am fairly certain I have not met an only child who didn’t qualify for some gifted & talented program or another. I mean we’re often socially crippled and kind of insane and often don’t seem to understand how interdependence works, prone to crashing out young, but fuck yeah we can nail standardized testing. (Also I finally googled “my” theory and it checks out) So yay for tanking all that potential. Maybe there’s still time.

I think I’m mostly out of the really emotional past relics (I still have a *boatload* of tapes and cds to go through but I can do that anywhere and it doesn’t feel as raw as photos - oh I did find a tape from a partner from high school that included two songs they’d written and recorded, talk about setting the bar unfairly high!) and now I’m going through my own current stuff and it’s shameful really. I *hate* getting rid of stuff, which I assume is because I’ve had a bunch of instances of losing stuff suddenly- the fire, two apartments had basements that flooded while stuff was stored there, stuff getting stolen from a friend’s basement that included clothing my mom made (that *really* broke my heart), an old laptop that some idiot promised me he backed up and wiped before I could check the backups, so I feel like after having lost so much stuff I became a little overly sentimental, which is dumb and I need to get over it. It’s still hard when it includes stuff like my mom’s clothing or my dad’s books but give me time.

Most the time this isn’t a big deal because I’m not super materialistic, but tonight I was trying to go through my perfume collection and OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?!? I mean mostly it’s that I’ve been collecting this stuff for over 20 years and the bulk of it (bpal mainly) is relatively inexpensive and the bottles are small but then suddenly I have way too much to ever justify getting another bottle of anything ever again. BUT I don’t drink or smoke or have a lot of freedom at posh restaurants, I don’t want designer basically anything, and I am so sucked into the absolutely delightful sensory experience of perfume. I absolutely love it but I am also ashamed to have a lot of it. I have a budget, I always come in under it and when it comes to things for me, perfume, clothing, jewelry, stuff that is unilaterally mine, I only spend my own money, but it still feels obscene. It’s not like I want to live some ascetic life, but I also don’t need to be a maximalist.

Some of this is definitely compounded by the pandemic because I still got things, especially at the beginning, with the expectation this was not going to last forever. That was a bad guess, and I have this gorgeous untouched makeup or not used as frequently as it should be perfume, and my consuming of things kind of had to slow down to keep pace with the radically shifted way I interact with the world. I wear a mask so I don’t need makeup, I am way less social so I really really don’t need makeup, but I have stuff my mom got me for Christmas of 2019 and I can’t let it go yet. But it’s old and I’m sure expired even if unopened.

Perfume seems like it will be a hard habit to break. I love how many nice brands basically have stories to tell before even touching on the manipulative nature of fragrance and how it interacts with our brains. But mainly I love getting to choose if smell like a piece of marzipan (I often do!) or a church on fire (I also often do!) I don’t know, I need to rationalize “ want to have stuff” with “I feel really guilty having stuff” and I need to get those two beliefs to make peace so I can just smell like a piece of cake in a church on fire in peace.

hummingbirdmadgirl

I started this the day after we lost Bones. It’s clearly been some time now.
——
Over the last few weeks it was clear Bones was winding down. Being 13 is remarkable for any frenchie, living almost 2 years past a brain cancer diagnosis even moreso, so none of this was surprising but it was shitty. He’d started eating less so we were kind of preparing ourselves.

Last night he was absolutely ravenous, to a worrying extent as he also seemed agitated. I had gone downstairs to get a glass of water around 3am and he was still awake and pacing. About an hour later he had a seizure, a bad one, so we gave him his rescue meds. Those drugs are usually very sedating but this time they did basically nothing. I almost believed he knew death was breathing down his neck and he wanted to be as alive for as long as possible before it was over, but really it was the tumor wreaking havoc in his brain that the drugs could no longer put a dent in and not some Herculean feat to savor every second, he clearly wasn’t finding joy in the minor chaos he was wielding. Magical thinking for the loss.

Around 5 or 6 he had another seizure, we gave him more meds, and again they didn’t accomplish much in terms of calming him. I had forgotten how bad his seizures could be because it had been so long since he’d had one. At this point just having had two seizures so close together (which had not happened since the day he got his brain tumor diagnosis) coupled with the anxiety, we knew it was the end.

We were trying to figure out if we could have someone out to the house or if we’d need to take him to an emergency vet. Getting him *to* the emergency vet was a concern since he just wanted to move and his carrier couldn’t accommodate that, and since he was a panicked perpetual motion device he’d cause chaos in a waiting room. Having a vet do a house call was preferable but frustrating just because the first appointment was later in the day that we’d hoped. But he’d be home at least and not in a carrier or a car trip to a strange place. He’d be with me and Ethan and the ladies.

We had some meds left over from when my mom was on hospice and there was a pretty significant crossover with meds dogs take to calm down so we used those. He’d finally settled down around 9am, he was occasionally making noises kind of like a tiny mewl or howl (he rarely vocalized so that was surprising) but he seemed comfortable and no longer anxious. At this point I’d been awake for 24 hours so I took a power nap. Because I needed to otherwise I was gonna collapse at the worst possible time. Ethan had slept for a good chunk of the night so he was doing significantly better than I was for the moment.

I got up and hour before the vet was set to arrive and we all hung out in the foyer. I took the ladies out and there was a bunny in the driveway in what felt like early morning sun to my sleep deprived brain.

The vet came and she was very nice, she took paw prints while he was alive and nose prints after he was gone. I have to find them, I forget where they are. She confirmed that this was all symptom of of the brain tumor and there was really no way to pull him back from that precipice another time. She felt that if we didn’t intervene he would pass soon, possibly that day, and I do believe her because I think he was gone before she was done injecting him with that fucking pink stuff. Of course before that she said he seemed tense and again I wanted to anthropomorphize that to mean he still wanted to hold onto the ground and remain alive and here with us, but really his brain was beyond thought and that tension wasn’t resistance to leaving, it was probably pain.

And then he was dead.

I think because there have been so many close calls where we thought he was a goner and he wasn’t, I half expected that yesterday too, not so much magical thinking, but I guess playing out a script my brain has become accustomed to. But no, that little body, that little chest that I’d watched raise and fall for 13 years was still. It felt offensive somehow. I was so accustomed to just watching him breathe that watching him *not* breathe was upsetting in a way I can’t articulate. I have been with people and pets when they’ve passed or sometimes right after they’ve passed and I’ve felt immense grief but this just kind of poked at some feral part of my lizard brain that just did not want to see that, and just momentarily refused to accept it as if it was an affront or unnatural. Then we showed the ladies (who were more interested in the fun new person) so they would know where their friend went. Later on Myrtle was devastated, Tulip was Tulip.

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I don’t know what it was about Bones but I was *so* fascinated with him from the minute I first saw him. When I had gone to see his litter I was interested in his brother who was mostly black, but the Bones just came waddling over and he was just nothing like what I’d planned or wanted but absolutely perfect. His smell, the way his fur felt, the ever changing striped brindled pattern of his fur. He was just remarkable. He was also clever and curious as he climbed all over the couch and fell on me and Ethan repeatedly. We found his breeder in Newport Beach. They had beautiful Arabian horses and French Bulldog puppies everywhere and the name of the breeding program was “mon petite chou” which I love since the literal translation is “my little cabbage” although he was more a little potato, but either way a little darling.

Bones came into our lives at a pivotal juncture. Prior to him, things were rough, we were hurting financially, Ethan’s job didn’t look like it was a good long term plan as the company was starting to struggle due to being targeted by larger companies that wanted to take over their share of the prosumer music space, I’d only just gotten over a sinus infection that had lasted for months and required multiple operations to remove and also holy cow was healthcare a privilege in California which added to the struggling part, I was navigating masto and what it was doing to my body, we were in DTLA adjacent to skid row and with my not knowing how to drive and Ethan working long hours in the valley, it was isolating. I’d left some truly horrible shit behind in coming to California and as much as you can escape your surroundings you can’t escape your brain and it’s extra hard to escape your brain when you’re stuck in your apartment in a not walkable area. It wasn’t all bad obviously, but it was the first time things felt really overwhelming in a “how do we get out of this/can we get out of this” way other than when I’d gotten sick.

We had gone to Seattle together for a job interview for E, and in the airport I saw a frenchie and played with it for a while as we waited for our luggage and just loved it. We discussed how maybe if he got the job we could get a dog to celebrate since we needed a win. I had always been a dog person and had been thrilled when a previous roommate had a dog I got to help take care of.

I planned to name our hypothetical dog Spike because there’s a really weird Tom Petty song that I love called that, Luna had also been named after a Tom Petty song, and secondarily because I’d been on another Buffy kick. But when I met this particular puppy and learned his placeholder name was Bones I was sold on that because it was so ridiculous and I have always loved skeletons because they are friendly since they are always smiling.

We spent a bunch of time and money puppy proofing the apartment as bulldogs are known to be destructive, but he didn’t disturb anything, it was like he knew and accepted which stuff was ours and which was his and that was it. He also just wasn’t destructive in general, I still have his first toys. his good nature was the same with house training, same with the cats, this dog was just absurdly good with integrating into our lives like it was his job. I was almost glad he was not the best to walk (he pretty much demanded to lead) because then he’d be *too* good and possibly a robot or an alien. While we never nailed spectacular leash behavior, I did teach him to fist bump me with his head.

I started walking him around the neighborhood alone and making friends with neighbors in our building and the ones adjacent. This was stuff I hadn’t really done since my diagnosis since my health was unstable and frightening. Being out without Ethan was still scary at that point. He knew cpr, he knew the meds to give me if I passed out, he knew where my list of meds and doctors contact was in my purse. Finding your bearing after spending over a year getting tested for so many scary things each having so many equally frightening differentials, finally to get diagnosed with some rare chronic cancer was very traumatizing and I was dragging my feet ondeep dive dealing with all the repercussions. But now this little dude depended on me to be brave so he could be comfortable, so our walks got longer and more varied. I have a picture of him as a puppy next to some street art that said “Life” and I felt like he’d helped me take the steps to get some of mine back from myself. I’d been holding myself hostage without realizing it.

We had to fly to Seattle a few times and brought Bones with because Seattle is amazing and I don’t know why we didn’t move there. The first flight something had happened with seating and I had to hold him on my lap during the flight, and it was the first flight since like, 1997 that I wasn’t a teary or drugged up mess throughout. I was just staring in his little black kinda almond eyes trying to entertain him and make sure he wasn’t scared and suddenly we were in Seattle. I told my therapist about it afterwards, just kind of awed that my dog was so good at distracting me due to my trying to distract him, and he told me he was going to register him as an ESA, something I’d never heard of until then, something so very Los Angeles.

We moved to Venice and we’d walk around the canals near our apartment at night after dinner because it was quiet and beautiful. Sometimes you’d hear someone’s stereo or television echoing across the water in the cool night and it was perfect. You’d hear the water, maybe a family of ducks, and it would just be the little bear just leading me and Ethan around taking it all in. We talked a lot on this walks and it was always so calm and so secluded feeling and I loved it, I think some of my best memories of LA are those walks.

Rarely we’d take him on the boardwalk and strangers would ask to take his picture. I was less keen on that because he wasn’t neutered yet (he was very small so we were waiting) but as frenchies were getting more popular they were also getting stolen more. Because he was tiny I’d tell people he was a mutt and that seemed to work. It was great, on one walk we’d see these gang guys (real gang guys not “I’m white and everyone who isn’t must be in a gang”) and they tell us he was a little matón, then 2 minutes later we’d see some sorority girls who would squeal at what cute little baby he was, then we’d see some crusty old surfers and they’d say he was punk as fuck; he was something to everyone and he devoured the attention.

Throughout all this Ethan kept getting headhunted by Beats by Dre and finally decided to interview to just keep those muscles working, he wasn’t taking it particularly seriously. They asked him to make a presentation about himself since company culture was a priority, I believe his predominantly featured pictures of him with the dog. (Also him firespinning - not with the dog) He immediately got the job.

Google moved into Venice and we moved to Hollywood because rent skyrocketed. I had wrenched my foot falling down on the side of a volcano in Hawaii, as you do, and ended up with a nasty ganglion cyst in my foot for my trouble. So I was kind of hobbled in a post surgery moon boot but Bones tolerated my slower pace of walking. What he did not tolerate was, that unlike Abbot Kinney or the canals, when people were looking down at the ground, they were no longer looking down to see him, they were looking down to see the stars on the blvd. His indignation was evident. He eventually learned to coexist with the stars because something more exciting was happening. He was meeting all the unhoused people who lined the streets on Hollywood and Sunset.

The wealth disparity in LA is obscene, Hollywood Blvd is full of people struggling to get by right in front of the strip mall the Oscars are held. Some people just straight up ask for spare change, some dress up as off brand celebrities and charge for photos, throw in a ton of predatory Scientologists and it’s a whole vibrant scene that once your repeated presence shows you’re not a tourist, becomes super fascinating and oddly fun. So I’d go on big walks with Bones during the day and he’d soak up the attention of all the people hanging out who wanted to play with a puppy and maybe bum a cigarette and talk and be seen. These folks were just as much my neighbors as the woman who lived upstairs who was an agent for a few actors from Shondaland, and it made sense to get to know everyone. Plus getting to play with a dog is rarely a bad thing. During this era Bones also got interviewed by The Jimmy Kimmel Show and a coked out Andy Dick tried to steal him. So many tourists took photos of him, I kinda didn’t get why (I mean I did since he was special, but it was still odd because I am biased) but I wish I could see those photos now. We also learned he hated skateboards and would get upset if one of us (usually me) hid behind a parked car, refusing to go anywhere until the three of us were reunited.

Then my dad got sick. We hurried to New York, Bones met my mom and he adored her from the get go. One night, before my dad had come home from hospital, she was sitting on the stairs by the kitchen as we were both kind of drowning in the enormity of the road ahead of us. She was petting Bones and noted his ears were very soft. I had replied that yeah even though he was short haired he was surprisingly soft, and she reiterated, “no but his ears are like velvet” and she was right and I don’t think I had ever noticed it before.

My mom never once complained that I didn’t change my name when I got married, she never once asked if we were having kids as she believed all the iterations of me from childhood to early adulthood who expressed no interest in that, but she leaned *hard* into having a grandpuppy and spoiling the hell out of him. It was precious, I think just by existing, even at times on the other side of the country, he gave her purpose outside of her immediate grief, just to spoil him and love him. I still have a voicemail from her where she was so excited about buying him a flannel bed so he’d be warm when I returned with him to New York to huddle in the winter months following my dad’s death, since Bones had never experienced an east coast winter.

Ethan moved from Hollywood to West Hollywood while I stayed in New York for those months. When I got back to our tiny but amazingly situated apartment, I definitely fell into some grieving self isolating patterns that weren’t the best. But walking Bones through WeHo was always a trip, especially after a show got out at the troubadour, the whiskey, or viper room and he’d just soak up the attention of the crowds gathering on the street. At some point him and Ethan got photographed and invited to some reality tv star restaurant opening or something, I am fuzzy on the details there.

We eventually moved back east and Bones had a new city to conquer which was easy living on Newbury Street. Our first week back he got us invited to a fancy birthday party for Catie, one of the dogs at the Copley Fairmont who had a children’s book written about her. We’d assumed since it was a dog’s birthday party it would be casual but we were very wrong. We were very much there only because Bones couldn’t go on his own. It was fantastic and surreal.

We started going back to LA almost immediately and frequently since Ethan’s job ended up still being there. We’d usually stay at the Hollywood Roosevelt which was exciting since we weren’t paying for it and while it wasn’t the Château Marmont, it was still old Hollywood glamor and it was also two blocks from our old Hollywood place so it was very walkable and familiar. Bones quickly made hundreds of new friends, got to walk all over Hollywood and Sunset again, got to be in even more tourist photos, accidentally licked the bodypaint costume off a woman going to a Maxim sponsored party at the hotel (she didn’t care, I felt scandalized), got used in an advertising campaign by the hotel, met so many celebrities and loved and was loved by so many strangers.

Back in Boston and Cambridge, when Ethan wasn’t around he was my little guard dog and would stay glued to my side. It also seemed like he could count days and without fail every Friday night before Ethan came home he’d get more jazzed and have trouble sleeping. I tried really hard to not act differently to see if he was maybe picking up on my cues, and I’ll never know, but so many Friday nights he’d sleep facing the front door as opposed to behind my knees (I am a committed side sleeper)

Our first winter on Newbury Street, when it seriously snowed, I remember taking him out and watching his little brain basically short circuit as he watched stuff fall from the sky and *stay on the ground* and then he’d look at it and then look up at me and Ethan as if we’d had something to do with it. Most of our time with him in LA had been a drought so he hadn’t seen much rain let alone snow. He was enamored. He loved running in the snow and was extra excited when we moved to Kendall and had a tiny yard because he could tear things up in the snow off leash which was the dream.

He’d started showing signs of food allergies kind of out of nowhere when we lived in Kendall. One day I noticed he had a bump under his skin and I was immediately convinced it was a mast cell tumor. The reason my mind went to that was not blatant narcissism, it was because at that point most of the chemo used to treat mastocytosis originally was formulated for dogs because mast cell tumors are super common in dogs. (I have a dog disease, I was raised by wolves, it tracks) His vet wasn’t as convinced and thought it was just a fatty lipoma so I took him to a different vet to have it excised and it was in fact a mast cell tumor. That was absolutely terrifying, but he had a bunch of scans done and that was the only tumor and they’d gotten all of it. (Also yay pet insurance)

When the pandemic hit, our neighborhood, and our yard, were overrun with rats since we were next to some restaurants and Harvard housing all of which shut down. It was pretty awful and we had to walk him down the middle of the street because after we saw a rat kill either another rat or a pigeon, we didn’t want to chance it on the sidewalks with the trash cans. Since there was very little traffic that was easy. Ugh that was so bad. Other than the day that Ethan’s dad got diagnosed with Covid, those walks were the fucking worst parts of the early pandemic experience.

Then we moved to the burbs and my mom moved in with us and stole my dog. I wasn’t annoyed because she seemed a little off and I couldn’t put my finger on it but he brought her comfort and the world was ending so what of it. Then she fell down the stairs and then came home with Covid and got Ethan sick. She ended up in the hospital, Ethan took over the first floor since it had a bed and a kitchen and bathroom and Bones refused to leave his side. This kind of sucked for Ethan because it was early 2021 and no one really knew if pets could transmit Covid or if the virus could live on their fur and be transported around, and Bones was basically attached to him, so while he was dying of Covid in the coldest January I can remember, he’d also have to take the dog out. I still feel terrible about this but I hadn’t gotten Covid (I was testing as often as I could since my doctors wanted me to go straight to the hospital if I was positive because they were worried it would be fatal for masto patients since we are prone to cytokine storms) So I was stuck on the second floor and they were downstairs watching lord of the rings and alien (and the whole raging sickness thing)

After their almost 3 week Covid quarantine Bones kind of became Ethan’s dog. I feel like we kind of had three eras with Bones. The first one he was our dog when we all lived in LA, the middle he was my dog between NY and the Boston/LA split, the last he was Ethan’s. Interspersed in there were his brief but intense infatuations with my mom.

When my mom was dying he stayed glued to her side up until 2 minutes before the end when he decided he needed to be far away. After she died and he had a seizure two days later I wasn’t even surprised. The timing felt like he’d held it together for her or for us and his little body and heart and mind were exhausted in her absence. He was diagnosed with cancer quickly and we decided that losing him and my mom in a couple weeks was too much and we’d try stereotactic radiotherapy, it was only a few sessions and if it worked it would be obvious fast and if it didn’t work, that would be obvious too. He handled it like a champ.

We took him to Philly and to NY multiple times. I would’ve loved to have taken him back to LA but I was worried with his brain tumor it may be painful to fly and he would be too stoic to let us know. Kind of like many of us are destined to do, he faded over the last two years but he was always surrounded by love.

I could write so much more about him; him and the cats, him and wingnut, him and the ladies, him and his obsession with Sephora, him going to Disney, his love of skyr and popcorn, his little tantrums, his one eyed pirate phase, he was just an amazing dog and I hate that he is not here now but I am so incredibly grateful for the time I got to spend with him. He was the best bear ever.