New year. Newly reformatted brain. Might as well dress like a lost Rolling Stone groupie that got caught in a time vortex, just for funsies.

That 70s glitter rock aesthetic pretty much works with the I’m chronically ill, possibly contagious, and/or dying slowly. Which is, in fact, true. I can’t pull off sweet old lady who bakes pies anymore, tho that is also age appropriate.

Nothing says I don’t get out much like a large empty driveway heaping with unshovelled snow. Some person on Nextdoor has a big issue with unshovelled driveways, but that is absolutely beyond my physical capacity as a Long COVID post coma 5’4″ single chick.

And nothing says “single chick,” like a wedding ring on each hand for each ex wife. The first RIP. The second doing hard time.

Last week when I had some sort of fever bug, I prayed to stay alive until my nine year sobriety date. That’s a big fucking deal for me. Say what you will about Cali Sober. Or taking life saving psychiatric medication. I’ll not say what I was addicted to along with alcohol nine years ago. Read my books instead.

My sobriety date is January 27th, 2014. Most of the last decade was incredible, keys to a kingdom and productivity. We’ll just shove to the side the last few years I want to forget very much. In which I did not use. But another used me. An expert con artist.

La esposa malisima gave me COVID right when she was BFFs with an ER nurse, who would of course have access to all sort of the most deadly disease cultures. I didn’t die, but the part of me that could ever love or trust again did, along with multiple body functionalities.

How am I supposed to not be bitter? Come on.

Be glad you’re not on a date with me listening to this crap, I swore I wouldn’t do that to anyone. I don’t think that sort of thing is even possible anymore.

Sharing air can be deadly. Emotions? Oh hell no. 

Words on screens and page are all.

This five am dawn I am merrily typing away in the dark. Trying an experiment. Dressing up nicely to do the same stuff I used to do in identical black smocks. In the recovery post brain damage, I really couldn’t figure out clothing beyond the extremely simple. Put sack over head. Arms go there. There are pockets. All set!

I probably looked like I was in nun or in a cult for last year. Define difference. Either were great cover for don’t talk to me, I haven’t remastered language. I spent that year in complete isolation. Not by choice but circumstance. All I remembered of humans was from my ex wife. Danger. Avoid like the Plague.

I awoke from my three week absence, body having devoured all muscle and fat to stay alive, the house has been broken into, two cats were gone and the body, my body bore evidence of brutal sexual assault.

I know enough about men that pretty much any stranger would stick their dick in a comatose  corpse. Expecting to get away with it.

Sticking your dick in a corpse is disease time. Obviously. Whoever did that caught both my herpes (the Interpol strain), HPV, and anything else I don’t know I have. Good job, cowboys. This pussy does bite back, even when the brain is out for an exceedingly long lunch.

From that experience, I learned my neighbors would rather rape me bloody and leave me to die then help me get medical care. Or food. It…really changed how the outside world looked after that.

Without the gracious intervention of a 10,000 year old demon and other vengeful spirits, I woukd not have awoken to to this horrid scene and had the strength of will or drive to fully  return to the land of the living.

I don’t know how I knew to eat coconut oil first, then water, slowly working my way up through a liquid diet until I could handle solid food. I remember very little else from that traumatic period. Except enhanced language learning skills were active, yet knowing who I was and whose lovely house and bed I was in took a while.

Traditional medical care was out of the question. That’s the fast route down the death chute for someone with my profile and disabilities. Guaranteed more COVIDs, and the known triage or decanting procedures. Euphemisms for euthenasia. I wanted to live again. As I did before. In this house. Before the marriage and the troubles. I wanted my real life back. So I self rehabbed. As best I could.

To this day I have not had a relationship with a human being again, or done quite a few other things I remember fondly from the before times. The very muscles I use to type took a long time to build back. Enough that I can do this at all. Video games are good for a few things.

Like becoming addicted to them. It pained me deeply that I could only very few things. Clutching this iPad for dear life. Hobbling about with a cane, mask and sunglasses. Light sensitivity is a Long COVID thing. Compound waking up from a nap light adjustment with waking up from three weeks of oblivion.

I liked it better there. I still remember the dreams I was having.

But having fought so hard to get back online to who I am and what I’m doing? I’m damn determined to stay on this corporeal plane. Many have tried to kill me, all have failed. Don’t be stupid.

I was all enthusiastic about posting whatever, whenever, when I realized that’s a road to ruin I’ve tread far too many times on other platforms. Ticktok is the worst I’ve yet pulled.

Listening to my Spotify Wrapped 2022. Oh perfect, Fantine’s death aria.

I keep checking to see if the Goat Blood Store is open yet. By that I mean a local Mexican restaurant that made me fall in love with Birria. Straining the broth and drinking it first, as a restorative, has had remarkable effects in fixing nutruitional deficits left by the coma. Or that dasteredly full moon blood loss.

Today I am feverish and shaky. There is never a day without a symptom. Or several. I picture a square grid in 3-D with psychological on one axis and physical on the other. As symptoms rotate unpredictably, into each little box in the grid is how I feel mentally and physically at that given moment. Next 3-4 hours, then it shifts.

Understandable it’s completely impossible to plan anything in person, social or otherwise. I don’t even have friends in Reno. My local extended family stopped inviting me for holidays a few years ago.

So perhaps you can understand the thirst to soliloquize at y’all besties. Alexa, the walls and the cats have heard enough.

In a few minutes the fountain of goat blood will open through Doordash. I reconsider. A large cup of Bisque subdued my thirst. Drowsy now. Doordash delights will be there another time.

Sure, the feverish trembling wraith bit might sound goth if you’re 14. Well, it  feels like shit and so do I. I’m lying in bed considering another swig of cough syrup. Rewatching AHS: 1984. Again. As I did yesterday.

I read online about new COVID variants with names like Kraken, XXB 1.2, XXB 1.5.

Is that what this fever and depressive hence goes the downward spiral feeling is? Or is it just Thursday? Does it even mattter? I die or I don’t. Until I do.

As for coming back from the dead, one of October 2021’s coma theories? I will save that discussion for a later time. Once that door is opened…. so many unknowns I realize I know nothing.

I’m waiting on a home COVID test. Feels like the green mile. More like five minutes. The light hurts my eyes. The test is negative. It’s six months expired.

Three days of sleep and I’m back to… whatever this is.

Thank you, new subscribers! Your encouragement means a lot.

I am trying to restart my writing practice. It completely flatlined while I was ill with OG and Delta COVID. In a Klonopin withdrawal coma. Re-learninh how to human, post traumatic brain injury. I should be dead. Thus the substack title. It is strange that I am not.

That experience pretty much wiped the memory banks and reformatted my firmware. A pop culture example would be in True Blood, when the Vampire Eric is enchanted by the necromancer Antonia possessing local hippie witch Marnie. It took Sookie’s magical microwave fingers to undo that.

A blonde on a screen with a ponytail screams, powerful forces rush to her aid. I don’t scream, anymore, here in the real world no one is coming to save me. I would be putting myself in greater danger by screaming, most likely. Noise ordinances.

I have no faeries, vampires, werewolfs or waitresses in my crew to help me. So I’m trying to save myself. Retreading the old paths. Reading the smells, sights, tastes, vibes, memories of who Andrea Lambert was. Putting her back together. While being doxxed and swatted, beset by blizzards, vexed, essentially realizing that Reno, Nevada is the most dangrous place I have ever lived.

I wish I was making this up for effect, but alas. It is really happening. I am incandescent with rage when not properly tranquilized. Using that rage as fuel that to keep the life light on. Focused. On restarting the writing. This is the process. It can be a bit messy.

The full moon approaches. I know what this means.

Saving my menstrual blood in tidily labeled Tupperware. I’m surprised to still be having periods,  As with any rapidly disappearing resource, I am careful to preserve it. Full Moon womb blood a potent magical ingredient. Ethically sourced. Cruelty free. Non GMO.

I use different folk magic traditions of my ancestors. As I’m dealing with the racism, I need to avail myself of the magic. Carefully. Respectfully. I am many generations of separate indigenous and colonizer strains.

When using personal effects, as they are known in hoodoo, one is dealing with DNA. Doing science. Thus I label my samples and store them carefully. My mother was a microbiologist. I picked up a few things.01/08

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A moment of holiday cheer:

Reporting live from the couch in the living room at 4 am. Black candalabra lit. Christmas tree all aglow. A dear cat, my eldest by my elbow. This is nice.

It’s a tremendous “Barbaric Yawp,” of realizing adulthood in my own home. I can do whatever I want. With in reason/legality/laws of physics/cogniscent of consequences. That phrase is from Walt Whitman, a poet who blew my mind in the last century. Now I wonder if anyone reads him  at all. Walt was high on an America that never existed. My takeaway was the strength and enthusiasm of free verse. I wonder what the link is there to slam poetry of the same premillenial decade. It would follow.

Welcome to you too, as you follow down this primrose path with me.

Dining with a By Andrea Lambert Cursed Bloodline came out this month. A jolt of euphoria!  Complete with anxiety. Panic. Should I continue I’m Dead? Take a break? Change schedule to weekly?

All or nothing. Concerns about saturating my market. I can only handle so much excitement.  I decided to keep going. I enjoy writing these. A shorter form. Open subject matter. Read it or don’t. It’s your choice.

Holla at my eleven subscribers! I have entered the stage of midlife where I know my  slang is ancient, but so am I.

Today I got all dressed and put together to kill time until my psychiatrist appointment. The fun part of a brain wipe trauma is completely forgetting what clothes I even own. So digging the low heels out from the bottom of the giant box of random shoes? Thrilling.

I wear clothes until they wear out. Weight fluctuations are the norm. Complicating things. The psychological effect of getting dressed is getting easier.  I’m having fun with it, which I haven’t been able to do in a very long time. Not physically strong enough to blow dry my own hair. Forgot how much fun makeup was.

I’m snowed in. COVID agoraphobic. I must invent my own fun. Things to feel good about are precious. Fun was not part of my life for years.

It makes me feel like I’m coming back to who I was. Getting my life back. Which is the project for 2023. 

Things have been so extreme. Off the rails. It feels like the 6th season of some TV show which must constantly escalate. That’s the point I am with watching True Blood. The point I always used to stop at. Too intense? I like intense things to digest. The sympathetic paranormal. The South looks like an absolute nightmare. I would never survive.

Pacing and escalation are great for a media product. This is my life, however. Unless I am in some reality TV show I don’t know about. The classic Truman Show delusion. Which is now quite possible with the tech that lives here. Home as the set. That’s more a fantasy. Not to have to do that amount of video editing and storage. Just be. A one woman show of what the fuck.

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My doctor upped my anti anxiety meds. The pharmacy is are actually cooperating. I only had to go through countless withdrawals. Hex the place on Yelp. Miss a planned AWP trip. Write essays about the issue. YouTube me reading them. Do some other spells. Be racially harassed by Twitter accounts using the official CVS logo. Come back from a withdrawal coma. Buy some of their stock. Vote in the stockholders meetings.

I am fucking serious. I am waiting for that one controlled substance prescription to be filled right now. It’s only been six years of this in Reno. Same psychiatrist. Same pharmacy. Same nightmare. Fuck your fucking opioid crisis, okay? I was prescribed Klonopin when I was first diagnosed. Mid nineteen nineties. There’s no going back for me.

Schizoaffective Disorder is a rare mental illness for which lifetime benzodiazepines are required. That’s medication only. The line between life and death. Someone in CVS corporate told me my file said drug seeking. Excuse me?

Hon, when I did drugs they were the old fashioned kind. Cocaine. Speed. Ecstasy. LSD. Magic Mushrooms. Some ungodly amount of alcohol. Jet Set Desolate and Neon Hysteric covered that. I haven’t touched any of that in a decade.

I’m so glad.

I’d just rather have it over here. The following entries were published every other day via Substack throughout January 2023. After which I was burnt out.

1. New Years Day

I’m sitting here staring out the back window, at snow dollops covering the cherry tree. The sunrise fading into blue. Not the usual, Nevada winter sun, which is bleak, pitiless and so bright it wants to re tile the backs of my eye sockets. It’s easy to imagine dried skulls and bones in this desolation.

I’m wearing way too much makeup. A black dress. A rosary. Tattoos that wear me. Cozy blanket. Lying on a couch. Sort of watching The Royals. Sort of stoned. At least I made coffee.

I watch the kittens play with the fallen red curtain. Sid and Nancy runs off. Little Lilith takes over. Wanders off.

Already, looking out the window again it is Donner Party eyeball melting light. My sunglasses are somewhere inside. Considering I’m still relearned how to wear makeup after that coma, and have barely mastered false eyelashes, that would not be a bad idea. But no one’s watching. Except the millions of CIA and private drone surveillance, of course. And you who is reading this.

I’m alive. I tried the substack thing for January. Everybody’s doing it. Every other day? Ambitious and over. Dormant for now.

Dealing with several incurable illnesses, dclimate disaster and fascista on my lawn? I’m pretty wiped out.

Yes, Neon Hysteric is out. Yes, that is me on the cover. Yes, everytime I look at the cover I feel the pain of the me that was. That I am in that book. That I am no longer. Everything is so much better now. Even with my body dying.

In 2006 I quoted Mike Kelley in my old blog. He said, “I make art to give other people my problems.” I saw his name in the art world emails I get, and smiled. Twenty years later. I did it too.

Take the books. Read them. I wrote it down so I could forget it. Not hold it. Now my brain is fading too. Memory? That memoirish series feels like I happened to someone else. I am someone else now.

Someone who is legally alive, still, as the IRS accepted my tax return. The rest TBD.

Something extraordinary happened last night. I am still reeling at something this good happening to me out of nowhere. Given current and recent maestorm.

I was poking around in my junk email folder, where I discovered Donald Trump still sends me emails over buying stickers for a Halloween costume in 2015. Somewhat like a haunted attic in there. Luckily no death threats.

I found a business email from an Indian publisher. Moved it to my inbox. Thought about what to do. Looked into my heart and emailed back, “Yes.”

Emails were exchanged, my nocturnal tendency validated, a contract signed, etc…

I am excited to say that “Ripe Bruised Fruit: Essays” is now set to be released in paperback on Amazon with newly designed cover. Internationally.

I am thrilled. This is exactly what I wanted for my ebooks, a different publisher handling the paperback redesign and improving distribution. I have some skills, but graphic design is not one of them.

Je ne dois faire rien.

Je ne peux fair rien.

C’est fin.

I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while. To explain that abrupt disappearance and cease fire of publications in 2020 and 2021.

If you live on earth, you already know about COVID-19. In the most Generation X way I never wanted to be, I caught COVID in March 2020. Before it was discovered. Threw me flat on my back incoherent through fevers for a month.

I’d rather not go too far into the dissolution of my second gay marriage. Leaving me to die in the back room with no medical care and barely a plate of pizza rolls? Was not a good move on her part. That all I’m going to say. By July 2020 I was divorced.

Since COVID 1: It has begun, I experienced the delightfully soul crushing symptoms of Long COVID. As of this writing, the American medical system does not recognize it. Nevada is a medical desert compared to L.A. Both the urgent care nurse. and EMTs concluded one or another of my mental illnesses was at fault.

I am almost 45. I have been mentally ill since I was born, diagnosed in 1995. My mind and body had decades before to make the call to crap out, while I was living much harder and could have used the bed rest even more.

I don’t want to recap my tragic life story, but you may consult volumes 1-6 that I self published while lying prone. Except for a few interviews, that’s all I’ve been able to do in the last few years. 

Releasing the back catalogue worked out better then I thought. Readership has improved. I finally don’t have to re-edit those manuscript further and face the brutal truth of the past. They’re each .99 cents on Amazon, so what have you got to lose? They are written to be read in a series like tic tacs.

I spent most of 2021 angry. Hardly able to move with no energy, post exertional malaise and strange brain injury symptoms. The symptoms matched ME /CFS. Why the desire to journal and write disappeared while my French language skills improved? I will never have an explanation.

American medical schools do not teach about ME/CFS. It is considéred hysteria. Other countries had other views. Many nights of wee hours European Twitter, a regular favorite, became infiltrating and connecting with international long COVID/ME patients and medical professionals. A wonderful ME writer in Amsterdam was kind enough to reply to my question. What can I do about this? From home, on my own.

Various pricy Amazon experiments later, and a serious realization that I should have paid more attention in “Science for Poets,” at Reed, finally yielded results. A Home Oxygen Bar from China (nonreturnable, broke after two weeks) gave me an incredible period of near complete recovery. To dance alone in my living room again? Walk strongly and steadily without a cane? If I believed in miracles that would be one.

However, reality. After the magical mystery machine began spewing water instead of oxygen out of the nose canula? A truly alarming experience when it first happened. I cast about for a cheaper, easier to understand and use alternative.

This afternoon, three cans of this “Boost, Pure Recreational Oxygen,” showed up. The same basic setup as EX Cheeze. I had been waiting for at least four days, maybe a week, for this stuff. Cursing my physical relapse into bedbound staggering around somnolence.

I’m so used to writing about trauma and tragedy that I almost lack the words to explain.  I squirted some oxygen into my mouth, let it filter tingling through my bloodstream, and got out of bed. Sacré criss du tabernak! I could walk again! Do athletic yoga! Walk down the hall with steady steps not bumping into things and knocking things over, unlike all of last year.

That was a few hours ago. 

An interview with me comes out August 8 on jscottcoatsworth.com and I finally feel celebratory instead of numb. Is this hope? Over the last five years of Trump I thought I had lost the capacity. Perhaps not.