THE BOOK 

I was temping in downtown St. Paul around the same time I was dating Jay (see previous post). I remember very little about the job itself--the details of mind-numbing temp gigs tend to blend one into the other over the years--but I do know I was working at The Ramsey County Government Center on Kellogg, next to the Science Museum. I remember having to walk through a metal detector every day, and needing to wear an ID badge to go anywhere in the complex. Our supervisor was a goofy, genial guy who was the spitting image of Dan Fogelberg and frequently quoted old cartoon characters (Mr. Peabody, Underdog, etc).

My old boss, before he got a government job.

I became friendly with another temp, a lady named Reva who was in her mid-40s. Reva was a bookworm like me, and we often traded paperbacks. One day she came in with a novel called Spilling Clarence by Anne Ursu, a book she'd started reading but was "not really feeling it," so I said I'd give it a try. 

Spoiler alert: I never read it. The job assignment ended later that year, I lost touch with Reva (one of the folks lost to the mists of time in the days before social media, back before everyone was trackable) and I never read the damned book.    

Guess what, though? I still have it. 

It's like it was with the mug: I didn't plan to hold onto this book all these years later, I just did. Although, there was some intentionality with this one. See, I have to regularly do sweeps to pare down my collection and get rid of any books I don't plan on reading again, otherwise I wouldn't have room for anything else.* The books I end up keeping are either signed copies, or ones that have sentimental value (if it was a gift from someone dear, I'll usually hold onto it). But all the books in my "slush pile" get dispatched to Half Price Books and various Little Free Libraries around town. 

I've kept Spilling Clarence for over twenty years now. It's been on the chopping block every time I've done a book purge, and every time, it manages to stay. 

Why have I held onto it? The main reason is, well, because I never read it. As a book lover, I cannot---will not---get rid of a book that I haven't read yet. I mean, what if it's amazing? I'll never know if I donate it. 

Also? Spilling Clarence sounds intriguing, if the description on the back cover is anything to go on: 

"What if you could suddenly remember everything that ever happened to you? Would it be a blessing, or a curse? This is the fate of the residents of the town of Clarence, who fall under the spell of a strange and powerful drug that unlocks their memories. The past comes flooding back without the buffer of time, and the townspeople, young and old, find themselves awash in their own reminiscences--of love and death, of war and childhood, of happiness they've experienced and sins they've committed. Beautifully rendered with a light comic touch, Spilling Clarence is a beguiling exploration of our relationship with our histories, the seductive pull of regret, the unreliability of memory, and the bliss of forgetting." 

Hey, look what I found stuck in the pages! 

It's the passport card from my very first passport, which, judging by the date, was issued on July 2, 2006 (ten years before the expiration date listed). Cool!

Without further ado, I am reading it. Yep, today's the day. 

Let's do this, bitches.

* I have to periodically do the same with clothes and shoes, or my closets would overflow. 

THE MUG

There's a scene in the novel Wonder Boys where Grady Tripp, at the end of a chaotic, debauched weekend, looks down at his feet to see that a tuba which showed up early in the story appears to have "followed" him throughout his adventures. 

Does anyone else have something like this? An item that has followed you from place to place over a period of time, even though a.) you never made a conscious decision to keep it, b.) you're somewhat ambivalent about hanging onto it, but c.) still, it's just....there? 

I do.

When I moved to the Twin Cities, I rented a cute little studio apartment in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul. I was living there when I briefly dated a younger guy whom I'll call "Jay." I was 32, he was 23. We used to laugh about the numerological juxtaposition of our ages. 

Going out with a youngster was funny; by our second date Jay was calling me his girlfriend. It wasn't creepy or anything, it seemed kind of natural since we clicked right away and we both dug one another. I didn't mind it. 

Jay had his own apartment in the St. Paul burbs, but--being 23--he was frequently at his mother's house doing laundry and getting free meals. Jay also spent a lot of time at my apartment, and soon he was leaving personal items behind: a hoodie here, a toothbrush there, a towel hanging in my bathroom. Then one day, this mug appeared.  

We were having coffee one morning, and I told Jay how much I loved this literary-themed mug he'd brought over, pointing out Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Nabokov, and some other famous authors I recognized. Jay was like, "Yeah, it belongs to my mom. She works at Barnes and Noble." I told him it didn't seem kosher to swipe his mom's mug and leave it at my place, but he waved away my concerns. "Ah no, it's fine. Believe me, she has a collection of these." 

A few days later, we were drinking wine and laughing at my cats Shelby and Riley. They were crouched on the windowsill, chattering at the squirrels outside. "You know," said Jay, "my mom has this thing for her cat. It's like this carpeted ledge that fits onto the windowsill, so the cat has room to stretch out. I'll bring it over." 

I was like, "Dude, seriously? You can't do that." If Jay nicked the cat's ledge, I would not only be stealing from Jay's mom, I'd also be stealing from Jay's mom's cat. Nope, no way. I couldn't have it on my conscience. 

Jay kept trying to convince me it would be fine, and that his mom could just buy a new window ledge for her cat. I put my foot down. "Fuck no, I'd be pissed as hell if someone did that to me." After going back and forth for a bit, Jay finally relented and agreed that he wouldn't bring the thing over to my apartment.  

We dated for about six weeks. It was hardly an epic romance for the ages, but we had a good time. Jay was funny and quirky, a computer animator who played the theremin and was obsessed with pirates. We went to a lot of movies together; March of the Penguins and Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers are two that I remember, just to place things in a historical context. 

One thing that bugged me? Apart from going to the movies, a lot of our dates consisted of me, Jay, and like thirteen of his buddies hanging out at various hipster bars around St. Paul. While I liked his friends--they were a fun, creative, diverse group of people--I began to balk at the frequency of these types of outings. Jay didn't see why I'd have any issues, since I liked everyone, and they liked me. 

It was becoming an annoyance, though.

The last thing I recall happening in our short-lived relationship was Jay coming over with his DVD player (I didn't have a DVD player; I barely had a working TV at the time) so we could watch Kill Bill, a film he was adamant that I see. I fell dead asleep about 20 minutes in, and Jay was miffed. I often fell asleep when we watched movies at home; I was also temping full-time in downtown St. Paul during the day and posing for drawing classes a few nights a week at the College of Visual Arts. I was exhausted much of the time.    

Still, for him, it was an annoyance.

Not long after, Jay and I made a mutual decision to call it a day, and we parted amicably. He remembered to take the DVD player, the hoodie, and the towel. I tossed out his toothbrush. 

We both moved on. 

A few weeks after Jay and I split, I noticed that I still had his mom's Barnes and Noble mug. By that time, I felt awkward about contacting him to see if he'd pick it up, so I didn't.

More than 20 years later, that mug has traversed the country with John and me, living in the kitchen cupboards of six (Seven? Eight? A dozen ? I've lost count.) different residences. I've kept it all this time, for reasons I don't understand. 

Well, one reason. I mean, it's a cool mug, you know? I still use it when my favorite mug is in the dishwasher. 

Wanna see my favorite mug? Sure ya do!

My stepdaughter and her kids sent me this during the lockdown. 

Of course it's my fave! 

Thanks, That Was....Fun?

I've been thinking a lot about writing, and why I haven't done much of it over the past few years. Part of it is time and the lack of it (we moved back to the Indianapolis area in early 2024 so I could help take care of my Mom, who has Alzheimer's). Another reason is that I've been channeling the creative energy I used to put into writing into making art, mainly painting and mixed media collage. You know what I love about art? It's fun and therapeutic in the way that writing used to be for me, but--unlike with writing--it's something you can show people and they can say things like, "Oh, cool!" Or, "Hmm, interesting." Or, "I don't get it, but okay." 

"Welcome To Whoever You Are"
analog collage 
2025

"Follow the Gleam"
analog collage
2025

"Cosmic Jam" 
analog collage
2025

The feedback is more immediate; it's something folks can look at, touch, and have an honest opinion about pretty quickly. Whereas when you write novels, everyone gets really enthusiastic and says things like, "Wow, you're an author? I can't wait to read your book when it's published!" And then sometimes they buy your work (but maybe don't read it, or at least they never mention it again) or they don't buy it, but still say things like, "You're really talented, keep it up," even though you suspect that they've never actually read anything you've written.   

I'm not complaining, and I don't take it personally, because of course it takes more energy and commitment to sit down and read a book than to, say, look a painting. And seriously? What I've learned about any sort of creative endeavor--writing, painting, et cetera--is that the work is its own reward, and if you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. As cliched as that sentiment may sound, it's also true.

The one novel I've published (I have five other novels that are mostly written, just unfinished) does okay in terms of sales, especially considering that I'm an indie author. Even though Thanks, That Was Fun has been out in the world since 2011, I still get purchase notifications fairly regularly, and they still make me happy. There is something undeniably thrilling when strangers discover and buy your work, and I can't see myself ever getting blase about that.

Overall, I'm satisfied with Thanks. There are a few parts that make me cringe, and certain portions that I obsess over when I go back and read them, thinking, shit--if only I could revise that now! But for the most part, I'm proud of the novel. 

Lately, for the first time in several years (since the pandemic, anyway), I've started writing again--just here and there, enough to get the old juices flowing. There are two of my WIPs (Works-In-Progress, i.e. the unfinished novels mentioned above) that I have decided to go back to, complete, and probably publish independently. The other ones? We'll see. 

****************************************************************************

Recently I've been going through some of my old journals. Ever do that? WOW. Some of the more entertaining bits--to me, anyway--are the entries I wrote when I was chemically altered. Here is the part where I make the obligatory, "Kids? Don't do drugs," statement, or more accurately: "Do as I say, not as I did." These are a few scribblings from 2008, when I popped an Ambien late one night and thought it would be fun to make myself stay awake and write. (It probably was fun, but of course I don't remember it. I do remember gorging myself on carrots dipped in peanut butter, because Ambien makes you do shit like that, and also having a conversation with an imaginary person sitting next to me on the couch.) Anyway....

A hot mess obviously, but I'll translate my fucked up handwriting......

Better to live in a drunken state than a noodle variation of the oman is rate you know it's all the best when you go to the miller

Yeah, my little experiment with Ambien-induced writing didn't exactly produce anything earth-shattering (and this was by far the most coherent passage of the bunch). But I bet if Taylor Swift dropped one of her surprise albums featuring a track with the same lyrics, the media would eat that shit up with a spoon. I can see the reviews now:

Jezebel.com - "Taylor Swift seems to be channeling Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, and we are here for it!"

AV Club - "Taylor Swift's dark new release leans into the esoteric."

I could go on, but you get the idea.

An aside: it's funny how dated Ambien references are now. Like, it was such a mid-2000s drug to do, only seeming to exist in a very specific post-MySpace era, when Britney Spears was flashing her minge at the paparazzi, and we all thought Dubya would go down as the worst president in history. 

 Art - 2023

Here are a few of my paintings from this year. It's only a fraction of the work I did, but perhaps by this time next year I'll want to share more.

"Incoming"

acrylic on canvas 

2023

"Spirit/Fractal"

acrylic on canvas

2023

"Year of the Rabbit" 

acrylic on canvas 

Jan. 2023

"The Candyman" 

acrylic on canvas 

2023

This? This goofy pink bastard gave me fits. First of all, that nose was a real bitch. How do you paint a nose that resembles a buttplug that's supposed to look like a nose? 

My inspiration was the packaging for Cosmic Candy, a discontinued Pop Rocks-type confection from my childhood. To my delight, around the time I was working on this painting, I discovered that there's a trippy foreign film of the same name that centers around a benzo popping neurotic with an obsession for the titular candy. 

I'll write more about that in the near future. Trust me, it's a whole thing.

Hallo, I'm Andie Nash! You may know me from the 20/20 "Bad Romance" story, but did you know I'm also an author? Well, now you do. My novel is called Thanks, That Was Fun and it is chock full of bad romance. There is also a lot of sex--good sex, bad sex, and no sex--something most single women (and men) can relate to, no?

Just so I'm not blowing my own trumpet (um, no pun intended) here's a description from my esteemed publisher:  "(Thanks, That Was Fun is) a humorous look at modern love and the lengths some people go to in order to get and keep it. The witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters and unconventional ending make it a satisfying read for anyone who is single, heartbroken, in love, or in between."


My novel has also been described as "the perfect summer read," (--E. Gedan), "Compelling, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud funny," (--Sharyn Parker Ross, author of City Zen) and Angela Weldon says it's "like gossiping with your closest girlfriends over a bottomless glass of wine." 


Thanks, That Was Fun is available for $1.99 on Kindle and not-Kindle.


What are you waiting for? Go read it now! Don't worry, my blog will still be here when you come back.


I promise.

Buffy, "aspirin," Mr. Yuk, and Just Say No

Buffy, the little sister on Family Affair, was the first person I'd ever heard of who took drugs and died. I was about four or five and I was fond of watching reruns of Family Affair and The Brady Bunch in the afternoons with my sister when she came home from school. I remember my mother telling me--quite matter-of-factly--that Buffy was actually a teenager and that she had recently died from "taking drugs." This blew my mind because I couldn't quite wrap my head around the notion that a). the pig-tailed little girl on TV who talked to her doll wasn't really a little girl anymore (the concept of "reruns" was a bit advanced for me); b.) that she had taken something called "drugs" (or "pills" I think my mom had said--which in my head translated to "aspirin,"--the only pills I knew of); and c.) she was dead. That last realization was particularly weird: the idea that someone could be alive on TV and dead in real life was freaky! I was confused but morbidly intrigued by the whole thing and enthusiastically repeated this information to my little neighborhood friends, all of whom were familiar with Buffy and Family Affair. They seemed equally fascinated and perplexed by the whole thing as I was.

When I was in first grade, a policeman came to talk to my class about all the dangerous things in our homes; like the bleach under the kitchen sink and the paint thinner in the garage and the polish our mothers used to make the living room furniture shiny. We were sent home with a whole shitload of Mr. Yuk stickers to plaster on anything that could be ingested by ignorant little kids (or curious older ones), like the Windex in the bathroom that resembled blue Kool-Aid.

I never got that far with the Mr. Yuk stickers; my mom neatly affixed one Mr. Yuk sticker to the kitchen phone--it had the number of the national Poison Control Center on it--but confiscated the rest of them after I thought it would be funny to stick Mr. Yuk faces on every toilet in the house. (My mother, who had to scrub off the stickers with lighter fluid, was not amused. I'm sure I got grounded for that one.)

I also remember an anti-drug talk of sorts by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, following some ancient filmstrip about safety in the household. She told us that, although our parents might have bottles of aspirin and other pills around the house that looked like candy, we were never ever ever EVER to eat them, no matter how tasty they appeared. I was like, DUH, everyone knows you'll die if you take medicine when you're not really sick. That's how my parents explained it to me anyway, and it just seemed like common sense. And I was already well aware that aspirin most definitely did NOT taste like candy, because I had to take chewable children's aspirin whenever I got sick, and they tasted like the inside of a dog's butt (or how I imagined one would taste, anyway).

Those ain't Mentos, kids.

But then Mrs. Baker told us something odd: she said that if any "older kids" ever told us that sniffing glue would make us "feel good" to never do it because--you guessed it--it would also make us get sick and die. This was new information to me. I knew what glue smelled like, we had the real stuff at home--Elmer's Glue--not that weak paste they made you use at school that wouldn't even stick to itself. I was surprised that I'd managed to inadvertently inhale glue dozens of times at home while doing construction paper crafts, and I had yet to get sick and die. I realize now Mrs. Baker was talking about the heavier industrial model airplane type of glue, stuff that I wouldn't have had at home anyway. But--as insane as it sounds--the exaggerated danger of what I assumed was Elmer's Glue may have sown the first seeds of doubt that drugs and other chemicals wouldn't really make me get sick and die. That it was just something people said to scare you.

Not that I had any interest in experimenting at the time. When I was around eight years old, I remember watching a TV documentary about the 1960's with my mom while she braided my hair. They were showing clips of some hippie woman singing in a rough, raspy voice, all bluesy and intense and shaking. "That's Janis Joplin," my mom told me. "She was a famous singer when I was younger." I frowned at the bell-bottomed figure on the screen who was flailing around and contorting her face like she was having some sort of embarrassing fit. "What's wrong with her?" I asked. "Oh, she got into drugs," my mom replied. I tsked, shaking my head. "She looks dumb enough to do them." I'm pretty sure at this time that I still thought "drugs" = "pills", and although I had figured out by then that there were stronger pills around than just aspirin, I still thought you had to be an absolute moron to take them. How could taking "pills" do anything more than make you well when you were sick? And what was so great about them that people--not just kids, I mean, some actual grown-ups--would take them? Seriously, how could you NOT know you weren't supposed to do that, dummies?

Ahh, childhood. When everything is either smart or dumb, good or bad, black or white. If only life really were that simple.

Rainbows, unicorns, butterflies, and sunshine.

Then suddenly it was 1983, and Nancy Reagan did a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes to speak to the youth of America about the dangers of drugs and to tell us all to "Just Say No!" Yep, that really happened, and I saw it when it aired. And yeah, it was as lame as it sounds now.

The most fucked up thing about this picture?

The old people are still alive, the young ones are dead.

So in fourth grade a group of high school kids visited my class to perform some anti-drug skits and hand out green "Just Say NO!" stickers for us to put on our book bags and Trapper Keepers. The high school kids--some of whom had actually (holy shit) tried drugs, back when they didn't know any better, of course---told us about marijuana joints, which were like cigarettes only much worse because you'd get addicted to them and die. We learned about a white powder called cocaine that people laid out in lines and snorted up their noses (why would anyone do that? Snorting stuff up your nose hurts! My mom had to pretty much tie me down to get nose drops in me whenever I had a cold). And we learned about this stuff called heroin, which made me almost puke because you did it by tying a belt around your arm to make your veins bulge out (EWWWW!!!) then sticking a needle into your arm and injecting it into your bloodstream. I was appalled. What kind of sick shit was that? You REALLY had to be stupid to want to give yourself shots, as far as I was concerned. But, the high school kids assured us, one day some of us--maybe even someone right there in that classroom--might be tempted through peer pressure into smoking, snorting, or shooting one of the very drugs they talked about that day and we needed to be prepared. That was A-okay: you didn't need to tell me twice not to stick myself with needles. I got it. Just Say NO!

Oh Nancy. You would have been

so proud of the fourth grade Me.

Of course, now it seems ironic. If my childhood self knew what sort of trouble I'd be getting into in my adult years, she'd be appalled. I can imagine her lecturing me:

Smoking? Ewww, cigarettes are nasty! Everyone knows those things kill you.

Drinking? That's icky. Beer tastes gross and wine smells like farts.

And pills? Really? That's the first thing you learn NOT to do. Don't you remember what happened to Buffy?

For those of you who don't know, I've been in recovery for several months. I've given up my two favorite things: pills and booze. I no longer abuse prescription drugs (Xanax and Percocet were my favorites, with an occasional Ambien thrown in for good measure) and I've quit drinking. It's taken me a few tries to get it right, but I can truthfully say now that I am sober for the first time in a long, long time.

I just hope I've made the old me proud. She's a bit naive, but her heart's in the right place.