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.

Night.

Samhain approaches.

Full blue moon.

I lie prone stoned.

Play Marianne Faithfull’s

“20th Century Blues — A Night in the Weimar Republic.”

The grey cat yowls.

I flip the porch light on.

Go outside.

In black with Bind Trump sigil.

Mask of cherubic Satans.

There are two gallons of coconut oil

In the box outside.

Apocalypse prep.

The House of the Rising Sun closed down.

In cube centimeter node.

For an indefinite future.

My consciousness

And corporeal form inside.

“Alexa, how long until the election?” I say.

“There are seven days until Election Day.”

Then the unknown.

“Rapellendum mallum quod minatur mihi,” I say.

Cast a warding cube in rombus.

As above,

So below.

Two pyramids.

Faceted stone.

An single eye surveils.

As I am surveilled.

“Giving good as you get,”

From a song long ago.

The screens I watch,

watch me, I know.

“His house is in the village though.

He will not see me stopping here.

To watch these woods fill up with snow.” — Robert Frost

Any day now it will snow.

Any day now my period will come.

No men since Obama.

Yet

I do not feel

In my body

The tumescence

Of womb blood.

Glutted bloat.

No.

There is nothing inside me,

But a lean wash of coffee.

Cold.

Black.

September 30, 9:05 pm:

In three hours is my forty fourth Birthday. I google myself. Discover the birthday surprise of top billing.

“You arrived when you were meant to arrive” a mutual says on Twitter. Finally, I am the most famous Andrea Lambert. At least at this moment. After decades of dedication. It thrills me beyond belief. I don’t even know what to say. Don’t say anything.

I curl up in a sheet on the bed. Watch “The Royals.” Drink cold black coffee. From a disability supply cup. Eat blackberries. A few days after the last day. Folklore says one is not supposed to eat blackberries on this day. The Devil kisses blackberries after the autumnal equinox. Ave Satanas! The berries are ripe and juicy. It is a full moon. I will silently howl into the void. Howl at the moon. On this page.

9:18 pm

“It’s my time,” I declare to great aunt Theda’s hardwood floors and the cats. The blue moon above. Throw away the blackberry carton. Consider the project. To write through counting down until my birthday. For this blog entry.

My Entropy column, “Dining with a Cursed Bloodline,” is on hiatus until 2021. Given how much is in flux with the election. How dangerous it is to be listed as a journalist these days. How much of a soul sucking disaster 2020 is so far.

So much will change in the next quarter. I won’t know what’s going on politically, personally or literarily until 2021. I do not anticipate a smooth transition of power. Given the circumstances. Prepare for a coup. Or infrastructure collapse. Or the apocalypse. Spend my birthday money on a an apocalypse prep sized tub of brown rice. A water pump purifier. To use in the stream out back. Stream water looks and tastes wonderful. Is lovely to swim in. But drinking unfiltered fresh water will give you giardiasis.

“Be prepared,” is the Girl Scout motto.

9:35 pm

I have an optimistic cottage core agrarian survivalist plan to living off the land. This family land I live on. This land was Mexico long ago. Belonged to the indigenous Washoe.

Laura Ingalls Wilder books gave me a lot of ideas. I wish I realized as a child what a horrible settler racist Wilder was. I didn’t understand race. A child raised to think I was white in Southernmost California.

I am a person of ambiguous mixed race: Spanish, Mexican Indigenous, Italian, Swedish, English, Slave owning white. My closest living white relative has a nose job. There’s a lot going on. I don’t know what to call it, Other people decide that. Based on who and where they are. Men said I looked, “exotic.” I think know what that is code for. What I think about that doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough information. Without a genetic test.

My DNA is likely already on file somewhere. I do not doubt the efficiency of the Federal government. If they wanted me dead, I would be. I don’t plan on giving them any reason to make it so.

What race I am doesn’t matter to me. I’ve always been this person. Lived in this body. With skin this color. Hybrid vigor. Or white adjacent. That matters more to other people. The current president. Second civil war on simmer on the national stove.

I am not trying to do anything other then what I am doing. Of have done in the 6.66 years since I have been sober. From my substances of abuse. Cannabis is excellent harm reduction for alcohol and harder stuff.

Some of the harder mistakes that makes my first novel Jet Set Desolate, so controversial. I am not embarrassed of my past. It just is.

10:15 pm

I hunger. Microwave frozen chicken strips that my ex wife left. Her frozen food contributions were a dubious divorce settlement. When the apocalypse comes, that ham would be good barter fodder.

I take the hot breading nuggets out of the microwave. Try to eat. Am not even sure if there is chicken within. They’ve been in the freezer for a long time.

That divorce feels like a lifetime ago. Feels farther away then the pain of my domestic partner’s suicide. My life has settled back to pre-legal wife rhythms and calm. I realize I can’t be a wife to anyone. Of any gender. Or none.

“It’s the first take on the female stag thing,” Dante Zuniga-West, author of Rumble, Young Man, Rumble, said of Jet Set Desolate. At CalArts. In 2006.

10:32 pm

I put the hot empty plate in the dishwasher. Of the House of the Rising Sun.

“It’s not for me to say,” as goes the Johnny Mathis song, whether or not Jet Set Desolate was ahead of it’s time. No one at CalArts in the late 2000 was okay with a queer cis femme conducting herself as I did.

Jet Set Desolate is available internationally, through Amazon and IPR License. In my website stats I note new countries, lately. Am thrilled.

“Wilkomen, bienvenue, Welcome,” as begins Cabaret. In Weimar Berlin. In Weimar America, to other parts of the world, my writing could represent Xennial American decadence. I don’t know. Mais bienvenue, restez un peu dans mes mots, si vous voulez. Il y a si plus de choisir de. Amusez-vous bien.

11:00 pm

In one hour I will be forty four. In this year of our Horned God and Three Faced Lunar Goddess, 2020.

In the bathroom I consider what witchcraft to involve in the transition, if any. I had planned on doing a hoodoo spell to break the psychic tie to my ex legal wife. I might be hallucinating that These periodic psychic flashes of where she is and what she is doing.

To break ties with an ex lover, hoodoo suggests burning my public hair, Angelica root, rosemary and onion skin. I’ve been gathering the materials since this phenomena first occurred.

In tonight’s episode of, “Psychic or Psycho,” I shave my pubic hair. Grown out it for the first time in twenty years. Wash it down the drain. I’m not doing that hoodoo this full moon. In times this dire, all intel is… something. Dubious entertainment.

I mentally sign another vow of celibacy. This one for however long I solely shall live. My first first vow of celibacy began when I began growing my grey hair out. Documented in my Entropy essay “Dinner Whore Celibate.” I decided when the grey touched my shoulders I would take a lover. Kept that vow. Married her. It didn’t go so well. This time the question is whether my hair or my body flatlines first. I’d like it to be the hair.

11:43 pm

My first Facebook, “Happy Birthday,” comes in. From a CalArts mentor in the United Kingdom. Par la magique des fuseaux horaires, it’s October 1. Already, in European time.

Imaginary fireworks go off in my head. Nine minutes until October 1, 2020 in Pacific Time. I cut a slice of Raley’s Tiramisu. Pack a bowl.

11:55 pm

I impulsively take a creamy bite of birthday cake a few minutes before midnight. Tee hee. Delicious.

11:59 pm

I put on red lipstick. Grey eyeliner. The rest of my face. A long gown with stars on it. A gold doubloon necklace from my Latin grandmother.

12:00 am

It’s my birthday! So it begins.

I lift my head from the black sheeted bed before midnight. Tears in my eyes. I remember the dead. Or those dead to me. Those I loved. Who either perished. Or I lost touch with. Through the viscitudes of time and distance.

“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on…” Les Misérables plays. I feel close to the grave. This time of year. Autumn. Fall.

The anniversary of my domestic partner’s suicide. A gouge cutting through my heart and soul. To pour forth tears of blood. Again. And again. I am like this every year. It’s almost eight years since she passed.

I remember many a dear friend. Who I no longer know is still alive. The morbid ritual of checking the Social Security Death Index. I’ve done it for years. Checking to see if old friends were still alive. Somewhere out there. Looking for what I fear.

By 2020, the Social Security Death Index is no longer free online. It feels like an act of grace. More losses I cannot bear tonight. I weep nevertheless. Into the black sheets. Remembering the woman who once stood beside me. Held me in brief yet perfect love.

When I remarried. Seven years later. I could not sleep in the same bed as my new wife. I was too scarred. Too afraid. To wake up to another corpse. Another vale of tears.

I saw a rift coming. Pushed that wife away. Aware my own intimacy issues prevent me. From in person human relationships. We divorced. I must be alone.

I have lost no one to COVID. Yet. That I know of. Those last two sentences strike like deep bells gong.

“For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” My own death I am less worried about. I am one door in the grave already. It is those few people left in my life that I love. My parents. Sister. We are all getting older in the times of pandemic apocalypse. 200,000 dead does not go unnoticed.

As relieved as I am, that divorcing my wife. removed my only disease vector. My grief creeps close tonight. The veil is thin.

It is the week of the waxing moon between the witches sabbath Mabon and my birthday. A full moon on my birthday? Perhaps will rouse me.

The plunge from yesterday’s mania, to today’s grieving, is like falling off Niagara Falls. A plunge so far. So deep. That I am always shocked. When a few days or hours later. I rouse again. In mirth. Anxiety. Psychosis. Or consumption.

I cannot get off the Schizoaffective go round, it is a carousel ending only in that final transition. To final rest. I am not ready yet. It is a strict rule I have. I will not be the active agent of my own death. It will surprise me. As natural.

Yet the pain goes on and on.