Rear View Mirror – My Week In Review

Tomorrow will be the one year anniversary of a very good friend’s death. He died six months after my father and coincidentally of the same thing. That is a lot of loss and regret. In both cases, I wish there would have been more contact with them at the end. I know I can’t make someone communicate, but I could have tried harder. At least made sure that they knew they were loved and valued, that they mattered and they were important.

I can’t change anything once it has happened and I probably cannot change the amount of sadness I carry with me, that is just my reality. Life really is a lot about losing and doing it gracefully and enjoying everything in between. And knowing that you have to keep breathing and experiencing and creating energy and living for those that no longer have that luxury.

When I think about the people that have come before me and died, not just direct relatives and friends, but even the people who had entire lives in the house I live in, I am so weighted with survivor’s guilt. It’s not healthy or rational, I know, but it is overwhelming to think of the numbers of people that were and now aren’t. This should come as no surprise to even the occasional reader of Waldina, most everyone chronicled here is dead.

That summer I spent out at the lake house 20+ years ago, trying to dig myself out of all of the fucking garbage that happened to me and was told to me that I let become who I was, I would lie on the dock at night staring at the stars. I would close my eyes and try to remember what they looked like, burning their memory, their placement into my brain. I would think about how tiny I was, a spec compared to them, and how I could overcome and control anything that came my way.

Adam knew that story about me, the dock and the stars and on the day before my 30th birthday, he arranged for us to get matching star tattoos. The next day, he gave me a copy of The Little Prince with a line from the book inscribed inside.

This week on Waldina, I celebrated the birthdays of Vermeer, Helmut Newton, Ezra Pound, Bob Ross, Edith Head, Elsa Lanchester, Roy Lichtenstein, Sylvia Plath, Hillary Clinton, and Pablo Picaso.

The Stats:

Visits This Week: 2,355
Total Visits: 418,085
Total Subscribers: 788
Total Posts: 2,276
Most Popular Post Last Week: HAPPY 62ND BIRTHDAY CINDY SHERMAN

This week on TheRealSPA over on Tumblr, I obsessed over my style icon, my life icon, my expressionless spirit guide: Buster Keaton.

The Stats:

Posts This Week: 62
Total Posts: 21,772
Total Subscribers: 738

This week on @TheRealSPA Instagram, I posted photographs of some of the people I celebrate on Waldina and I posted a photo of me after a haircut. I used all the filters.

The Stats:

Total Posts: 795
Total Followers: 437
Total Following: 615

For extra credit, I have been listening to this song on repeat on my walk to/from work.