August 23 is WWdN’s official birthday. It was 24 years ago last week that I finished building a website from scratch (in notepad, using raw html), after about 6 weeks of intensive study, and many late nights of trial and several errors, and turned the lights on here, for the first time. Sadly, the earliest capture I can find at the Internet Archive is from 2002, but this is pretty much what it looked like for most of its first decade:

You’ve come a long way, baby.

I wanted to write something last week to mark this moment, but just couldn’t find the words, so I celebrated the moment quietly, which is how I’ve been doing basically everything for the last couple of years, while I am intensely focused on my own recovery. I don’t think I even mentioned to Anne that the date had passed.

That’s kind of where I’ve been, creatively and energetically, for this entire year. I mentioned in an Instagram reel that I haven’t had access to my creative self all year, I think largely because of the shock and trauma of America’s dumbfucks voting to put a fascist tyrant and his administration of incompetent criminals back into power, after we all saw how incompetent, evil, cruel, destructive, and violent they are.

Really great work, everyone. Especially everyone who was really worried about the cost of living, you know, the milk and eggs crowd? How’s that working out for you? And all the Walk Away people must be sleeping so well these days. Just fantastic fucking work all over the place, you fucking chuds. They are planning to ban the Covid vaccine, so those of us who want to protect ourselves from all the stupid conspiracy theorist dipshits who think bullshit and science are just “opinions” are just fucked, now. You’ve doomed us all to the world you alone deserve. I, for one, will never forget what you did to us, and I will never forgive you. I hope you spend the rest of your miserable lives ostracized, alone, and afraid. May you never know a moment of peace. May you wear your support for this petty little tyrant like a scarlet letter, so everyone knows who you are and what you did.

Anyway, as you can see, I’ve been distracted and preoccupied with all of this endless horror. I’m just exhausted by ten in the morning every day, and try as I might to find other things for my attention and time, I keep getting drawn back to the news, hoping I’ll see The Headline, or some indication that the entire Republican party, its punditry, and its media echo chamber have finally stopped being singularly focused on protecting and covering up for a pedophile rapist and his child sex trafficking pals. And I haven’t even touched on the endless attacks on innocent people who have been declared Enemies of the State because of who they love or the color of their skin. It’s fucking disgusting, deplorable, infuriating, and has ripped the mask off of much of America. It’s been really hard for a lot of us who grew up reciting and believing “liberty and justice for all”.

That’s my head, every day. I’m worried for the people I love, I’m sick to my stomach as I watch six unelected, transparently corrupt, Christian Nationalists issue unsigned decrees that overturn the will of the voters as they hand more and more unchecked power to a criminal and his criminal organization.

It is so hard to tell stories, to find the joy and release in creative writing, when I feel like the world outside my window is on fire. Sure, my privilege currently protects me, but Timothy Snyder pointed out that if we have to remind ourselves of all the ways we are currently safe from political lawlessness, we are already living in an autocracy. That’s scary as fuck to me.

For a lot of us who are survivors of abuse, every day with this motherfucker making everything about him and his fragile little ego is jabbing a finger into a deep bruise that can’t ever fully heal. For a lot of us who have worked so hard to leave and overcome our abusers, to live our lives as fully as possible in spite of our experiences, it is an endless struggle of flashbacks and nervous system dysregulation, while we remind our bodies that we aren’t trapped with our abuser anymore. Thank god for EMDR. Thank god I can afford regular mental health care. Thank god he’s going to die and hopefully soon.

I haven’t wanted to write anything in my blog because what I just wrote is all I have been able to write. When I want to tell a fun story about playing Mysterium with my family, taking my son axe throwing for his birthday, celebrating my son earning his Master’s Degree and starting his PhD, or any of the things I couldn’t wait to write Before All This, I stare at an empty document while I write and erase ten words over and over again, hoping these will be the ones that grant me access to my Creative Self. And the harder I try to find them, the more effectively they hide from me.

I have also felt like I shouldn’t write in my blog, while I have been struggling to write and turn in two pieces that I agreed to write last year. One is an introduction to a book, and the other is a short piece of fiction. Last week, I finally broke through on the introduction. After almost a full year of struggling and failing, I found it. It was so much fun to work on, so deeply satisfying to finish, and such a relief to turn in. I have never been this late on anything. I hope I’ll never be this late on anything again. I hope nobody notices that I’m writing in my blog when I haven’t finished the other thing, which I have started and abandoned too many times to count. I have probably written ten thousand words or so, trying to find the approximately 700 or so I committed to assembling into a story. I’ve tried to come at it so many different ways, from big ideas to small ideas, from limited points of view to omniscient points of view, and nothing is sticking. It just feels like I’m writing with someone else’s hands that don’t fit quite right. Maybe writing here today will help me find my own fingers again.

Maybe I needed time away, and that’s why I didn’t write anything in my blog for over a month, not even on the day that was a cause for celebration, the anniversary of the moment I took my first big step into the world that had always been hidden from me, or made inaccessible, by my dysfunctional family and abusive parents.

And I know that it is weird to hear a 53 year-old man talk about his parents and his childhood so much. I see pretty cruel commentary about that online, and while I don’t take it personally, I do compassionately hope that the kids who are saying it only do so because they haven’t experienced what I have, so they can’t understand. I get it; in a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve only been living my own life since I quit drinking in 2016 (hell of a year to start rawdogging reality, wil), and I’ve only been doing the work to recover from and manage CPTSD for a couple of years.

I don’t know how to do any of this, but I’m trying to figure it out. I know that writers get stuck and find their way out of it, and I’ve been doing my best to give myself patience and grace and space to figure it all out … I’m just growing impatient, is the thing.

I have a great story just sitting here, inches away from my fingertips, and I can’t figure out how to grasp it.

So I guess I’ll remind myself that I’ve been putting words together in public for about 8500 days, I’ve written a bunch of books — including a New York Times bestseller! — and that whatever it takes to do it is in me. It’s just doing a very good job of Not Being Seen.

But this feels like something of a start, anyway. I forget that it’s okay to make short, silly, 50 word posts here. I forget that I don’t have to follow up every long absence with something profound and carefully edited.

I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and I still forget. But today, I remembered.

Thanks for listening to me.

I had such a good time with my garden last season. It was the first time I had ever capital-t Tended a garden in my life, and it was a deeply meaningful experience for me. I learned a lot about myself in the process, because I kept allowing my garden to be a metaphor. Also, I had more tomatoes than I could give away, the biggest pumpkin I have ever seen, peppers forever, and sunflowers that went up to here.

I have been intensely focused on CPTSD recovery from child abuse for a couple of years. I work on it in therapy every week, and I work on it in between sessions, when I’m able. Walking my garden twice a day gave me lots of opportunities to reflect on The Work that I was doing, and I’m pretty sure it gave me an extra d4+1 on all my saves.

I live in zone 10B, and we can grow just about anything here, all year long, if we’re willing to do some extra work during the frigid 40 degree nights we endure for up to a whole week every January. I’ve never done that before, because I’ve never felt connected enough to my garden to get the winter survival gear out of the trunk.

But this past winter, I thought I’d give it a go. I looked into it, and saw that most of the winter stuff available to me didn’t interest me enough to plant and Tend it. But I read about planting a cover crop, and that sounded pretty cool. I liked the idea of putting a ton of seeds down and staying out of their way while they did their thing for a couple of months.

I ended up choosing a mixture of oats, peas, and radishes. I cut everything down to a nub, to let the roots die off and nourish the soil, and tossed the seeds all over the place.

Over the winter, they sprouted and grew into one hell of a cover crop. The peas produced beautiful, delicate, purple and white flowers. The oats got so tall, and surprisingly smelled kind of sweet, too. Marlowe loved eating big blades of grass every day. I noticed that they sort of whistled or hummed softly when the breeze was just right. Depending on the sunlight, they looked green or blue.

About a month ago, they started to dry up. Marlowe lost interest in the grass, which I presume wasn’t as sweet as it was when it was still cold at night. Anne and I planned this season’s garden, with fewer tomatoes, and I began to prepare the planting beds.

I started clearing the cover crop out, one section at a time. The peas were all dead and crumbled in my hands. I turned them into the soil. There was one radish, a big daikon-looking thing that filled the air with a spicy blast when I yanked it up. Then there were the oats, three and four feet tall, growing in thick clumps that formed a tiny forest for ants. I pulled them out, one at a time, shaking all the soil off the roots. Dust clung to my hands and forearms.

I started on one side, and worked my way down and around, one clump at a time. The soil came up and fell off the roots easily. It fell back into fluffy mounds that I swept into the holes left behind. I wiped the sweat off my brow with the back of my right hand, then wiped the mud I’d left behind with my left hand. I tried both forearms before I started laughing and accepted my muddy forehead.

I kept working, silently thanking the oats for doing exactly what they were asked to do as I cleared one and then the next and the next.

I blinked sweat out of my eyes, shook some mud off my head, and looked at the newly-cleared garden. The soil was fluffy and rich. Loamy, I think they call it. It was ready for the growing season, and I was ready to plant it.

But first, in the final corner, there were a couple clumps of very tall, very thick, oats to pull out. I considered leaving them, so Marlowe could continue to have her grass snacks, but she hasn’t been that interested for about two weeks, at least.

“You have done all that was asked of you,” I said, “you can rest, now.” I wrapped my hand about the base of the clump nearest to me and gently pulled it up. I shook the soil out of its roots, put it to the side, and moved on to the next one. I stopped suddenly and stared through the little forest.

There was a deep green … something … against the wooden edge of the planter. Some kind of hornworm, maybe? A beetle I’ve never seen before? What the hell is that?

I parted the stalks and saw a single jalapeño hanging from the top of a single stalk. The nub I cut back at the end of last year, safely hidden by the cover crop, grew back at some point, flowered, and produced a single, perfect, beautiful fruit while nobody was looking, or expecting anything from it. I looked closer and two additional flowers revealed themselves.

I cleared the remaining oats, careful to not disturb my unexpected jalapeño. It’s obviously thriving, but the flowers are so delicate before they begin to bear fruit; they must be treated with care, even if that just means being careful around them. It’s good to do that, from time to time, I think: remember to take care. We can easily damage something we aren’t even thinking about, when we are careless.

I didn’t expect anything from the cover crop. I just put it down and hoped the seeds would grow. I didn’t expect anything from this jalapeño. In fact, Mr. Bond, I expected it to die.

It’s amazing what happens when we plant seeds, and tend to our gardens, without any expectations, isn’t it?