Author: Monica Thomas

I was supposed to do a post about crossing the halfway mark in our Kickstarter yesterday, but here comes today and we are less then $1000 away from our goal.

YOU GUYS!!!  

YOU GUYS!!! 

WE ARE 75% THERE! You are so great! This is so great! AAAH! I’m full of all-caps and enthusiastic relief. This thing is happening! AAAAHHHHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHH!!!11!!1!!!!
Okay, taking a deep breath and looking at the very round, very calm mourning dove outside my window. Be the dove, Monica, be the dove:

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Guys!! OMG!! AAAh! Thank you thank you THANK YOU!!!

And to the rest of you: WE STILL WANT TO GIVE YOU PRIZES! So many prizes! So badly! Have a gander!

Some things are hard to grasp. It’s taken me a while to realize this. As a rule, I walk through the world with the belief that whatever it is, I can understand it. I like this arrogance – it is challenging and comforting, and most of the time it is accurate. But despite frequent accuracy, it turns out that arrogance is arrogance, and, as much as it can push capacity, it can also obscure the truth. And the truth is that there are some things that I fail to understand, even as I experience them.

My grandmother died in November, on a Saturday morning. I was on the bus coming in from Boston to say goodbye. My mom and stepfather living five minutes away only just made it to her bedside; she died within 20 minutes of their arrival. Nan was not someone who’d namby-pamby around when there was someplace to be.

I arrived to her home, to her body. She was gone but she was still in bed. Her eyes were closed, skin smoothed of the wrinkles that had resided there for the past 30 years, her features sharper than I’d ever seen. Her hands were folded, beautiful and cold. I held her hand in my hand, in my heart, and in my eyes. It was a different goodbye than I had imagined.

It is different to walk through the world without her. I don’t understand this world yet, and I certainly have not reconciled myself to liking it.

I avoided going to bed the night she died. I didn’t want to wake up in a world she was not in. New Years was hard too. What good is a year she would never be part of? Why would I willingly enter that reality?

About a month after she died, she began appearing in my dreams. I can’t express how good it was to see her.

Another dream, a little later: I was attending a funeral for my grandfather. This was surprising; he has been dead a decade now. His death marked the first time I tried to comprehend the permanency of loss that death entails. But enough. Back in my dream, it was his funeral and all these people I loved were attending. These friends of mine traveled far to be there. We were all outside and they were sitting on a hill and spreading down into a baseball field with no bases. I remember being on the edge of this hill, alone, alternately crying facedown in the grass and waving to these intimate friends. I was far away, inconsolable and loved. I was so grateful for everyone there.

I woke up from this dream thinking I’m gonna have to do this twice more in the near future.

I have two more grandparents in their nineties. Which is lucky as far as these things go.

I stepped in the pothole of extreme ligamental destruction one year and 8 months ago.

I haven’t run, really, for twenty months. I haven’t jumped for twenty months. I haven’t danced fully, I haven’t hiked. I’ve done a lot of physical therapy, some 16 months of it. Nearly two babies worth. And my ankle still isn’t mine again, isn’t whole again and I am so fucking tired. I’m ready to be done with this. I am not interested in healing, I am interested in healed. Fixed. Perfect. Strong.

I am tired and I am jealous. I am jealous of everyone who is moving around like it is no big deal. Like anyone can do it. I am so jealous of the people who have never been hurt, who somehow, magically, don’t get fucking hurt. I am jealous of Theresa who bounces around the kitchen like bouncing is fun! and easy! and full of whee! I wish I had that. I wish there wasn’t this fear, pretty regular and pretty unrelenting, of reinjury. I wish there wasn’t this knot of nausea in my stomach. I wish that this entry didn’t make me want to cry.

What I want to express here is that a bum ankle is not the end of the world, I know this. It is not a tragedy. But it was a big ass, deep pothole, and it swallowed a bit of my soul. It is a slow and uncertain recovery, and the waiting, and the living of a life you do not choose, that doesn’t feel full, is hard and gets harder over time. It wears you down. You get used to it, and by you I mean I, but sometimes then you remember how things were and you are angry. Angry about the present, scared about the future. Pissed that there are so many questions.

The pothole has since been filled so no one else will fall in. I’m glad that happened before the government shuts down. What I lost there is buried under asphalt, a stupid final resting place for a stupid chapter of existence.

Sometimes I love the superficial.  I get off on aesthetics, adore the decorative.  I revel in excess, swim in color and pattern, and go on marathons with texture.  Hours of life spent beyond pleasantly in unnecessary dialogue with form.  There is an intensity and a delight in this for me that is deeply satisfying and somehow meaningful.  Sometimes the superficial seems to carry import.

Other times things happen and the superficial just seems superficial. 

Anyway, I love these shoes:

Holy whoa amazing, no?  Death, glamour, violence, unicorns. A golden pistol and pearls.  A piece of devilry.  Shall I taxidermy it for you?

They are called “Gun Hoofs” and by Iris Schieferstein whose work is creepy and provocative and sometimes very beautiful.

Guys, I am size 7.5. Pretty please.

Um… I haven’t written in a while. I blame Israel and the fact that I was there for three weeks. Now I am back and I’ve been home nearly two weeks so I really don’t have an excuse anymore.

So let’s grab the bull by the horns.

I think it is awesome for Mad King Thomas to be blogging; I am not sure about doing it myself.

I have really mixed feelings about writing and putting it out for anyone to read. It is an uncomfortable thing. Exposing. There is already so much of me that is available for public consumption, both because of this here digital era and because I decided to be a performer, and more specifically one who makes those performances and makes them about the things she is thinking about in her once-upon-a-time personal life.

I tried to be a grown-up for a while, keep things to myself, answer my own questions, make decisions alone. I stopped liking all my friends, so I stopped. In performance too, it seems a rare occasion where holding things close is an effective technique. In performance, it seems the more of myself I can give the better it is.

I used read blogs because they give me fodder to like the author less, which was awesome when I already disliked the author. And now I am authoring a blog to give you (some vague you, which is perhaps someone but perhaps not) fodder, I guess.

I have a desire to control how much of me is given but I am not sure that is going to work in my life, on this blog, on stage. And it seems that a fully embraced life creates the opportunity for a lot of exposure and takes a great deal of vulnerability. And I do want to embrace life fully, right?

So, here we are. Reservations have to be put out for the wolves. They are hungry. It was a cold winter.

Sometimes I think the world is too much. Too wrong, too broken, too full of things I can’t fix but can’t forget.

This January has been rough for people. It is cold and it is dark. My friends, a lot of them, are sad. My brother is sad. My step-father is sad. If I spend too much time thinking I get sad too.

I read something and I carry it with me for days and often weeks. So sometimes I won’t read the news. I won’t check my messages. I won’t call my family. I won’t call my friends. I won’t return e-mails. I’ll show up for work and I’ll go to rehearsal, but mostly I’ll spend a lot of time in bed – a trick for surviving I learned once upon a time.

Things are just slightly too much so I’ve spent a lot of time napping and I’m behind: on e-mails, phone calls, travel plans, taxes, friends, sleep. I feel a little more alone than I’d like and I feel a lot more alone than I am.

Life is easier when it is warmer, when the weather isn’t trying to kill you. When your toes don’t feel like marbles rolling around in your boots and you are not worried about how you have totally lost them forever. Life is kinder when Mother Nature herself is not reminding you how powerful she is, and how you are just the jam on that toddler’s hands and not only can be easily wiped away but probably should, else the kid will get a rash, or maybe get some on that nice white couch.

Yesterday, the Moscow airport was bombed. 34 people were killed and 168 were wounded. Doku Umarov, a rebel leader, claimed responsibility. He said, “the war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.”

This summer Russia was on fire. The forest was on fire and the peat bogs were on fire. And they had record heatwaves and people were dying from the heat, and from drowning.

I went to Russia in August, but it was not bad where I was.

I performed. I stuck my tongue out and licked and licked and licked, and people pulled out their cameras and took my picture.

In Russia I danced amidst metal. I performed with a caiman. If that creature is not some sort of prehistoric god, I don’t know what is. I smiled too much, talked too loud, dressed too American, and looked too Jewish to blend in.

The caiman’s owner was a friendly, smiling man my age. His surname meant sunshine. He told me his father spent his life bringing light and happiness into people’s lives. He was determined to do the same. He brought me a clementine on a cloudy day, “a slice of sunshine,” he said.

He owned the saddest monkey I have ever seen. Tiny and depressed, dressed in a frock, she sat on a small table in the middle of a room, leashed to one of the legs. She looked miserable and resentful. She shared the table with a rabbit. The rabbit did not need a leash; it had no interest in jumping off. He gave me and the rabbit and the monkey cucumbers to eat. He would cut cucumbers for her so she could eat the seeds, her favorite part. She looked interested and anxious and excited when she was eating cucumbers. She made a mess of them. She got hostile when he took the cucumber remnants away from her but not violent. He wiped her down and dressed her up and she glared. When he finished she grabbed the rabbit to her, and held and held and held him. Comfort, I guess.

Theresa and Tara have spent the last two weeks splashing around this blog like fish in water, and I’ve been standing around mumbling things about how I just ate, and cramps, and also I don’t think I believe in water.

Turns out water exists guys.

Water: actually real. This water lives in Oregon.