Sunday Coffee – The Power of Others

Posted on November 13, 2022 by Thistle

I was a mess this week, a big part in tribute to the time change messing with my sleep schedule, and hormone issues on top of that. But it’s not just that. This week really brought home to me just how important it is for me to stop remaining isolated.

Last weekend was a big one. It started on Friday night, with a nerdy board game night at my friend Jennine’s house. Jennine, Kristina, Alia, and I hung out and played Ticket to Ride (my first time playing). I almost didn’t go because it just felt so hard and exhausting, but I knew I’d be happy once I got there. It was frustrating, because I always feel so exhausted by going out, even though I’m an extrovert and actually feel really recharged by being around my friends! Somehow, over all these years, I never made the connection: It’s the actual leaving the house, the getting out, that’s the exhausting part. It’s the beating agoraphobic impulses that wears me out. The friends part? That’s the reward.

The rest of the weekend was great, too. Went out for boozy ice cream on Saturday with Stephanie, then over to Michael’s to pick up some supplies for my next group photoshoot. In the parking lot for the shopping center by Michael’s, there was a pop-up market with a ton of vendors that we wandered through, and made some fun little purchases and personal connections. On Sunday, I had lunch with some cousins that I hadn’t seen in over a year, and then I went to Alia’s house with another friend, Sisa, to have a Love is Blind watch party (which mostly involved chatting with the show running in the background, ha!).

Then Monday came, and I suddenly felt awful, and I ended up a mess for the rest of the week. All the way until Friday evening, when Sisa and Alia – who both had also not been feeling the best – came over to my house for our second Love is Blind watch party. Literally all three of us nearly canceled the watch party for our various emotional/mental health reasons, but we all made it (including me, who had to get off her bum to clean the house, ha!), and all three of us felt enormously better than we’d felt beforehand. Just having people around who you love and who love you, without any pressure or conditions, people you can say to, “Hey, I barely managed to shower today, don’t worry about looking nice for me” without worrying about their response – that’s priceless.

I have been so isolated this year. Ever since Shai and Hulud came into our lives on April 1st, I’ve closed myself off: stopped hiking, stopped going out, stopped everything. Then my kids peeled away to their own new lives this summer, and while I appreciate having my quiet time back, it’s definitely a double-edged sword. There was a time when I had to learn how to use that quiet time productively, and after losing it for 2.5 years to a pandemic, it’s like I’ve forgotten how. I’ve forgotten how to leave the house to go for a walk, or have a coffee with a friend, or spend time at the library. Life has been so isolated, not just since April, but generally since 2020, that I have to relearn how to use my time in a way that’s not just effective or productive, but beneficial to my emotional health. (Rather than actively harmful, which is where I’ve been for the last couple months, sitting around binge-watching TV and shutting off my brain so I don’t have to deal with my emotions.)

Of course, you can’t spend every day or every weekend jam-packed like last weekend. That would also get exhausting. But I’ve also watched how my entire spirit lifts when I take time out to be with others again, and I know it’s important for me to keep doing this. I need to relearn the balance, and it’s definitely time to sort through the coping mechanisms that kept me sane during the pandemic and discard those which are no longer serving me. It’s also time for me to get out into the world again, to experience life outside my home and comfort zone.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Introducing Dexter and Dee Dee!

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Thistle

Considering these two have been in my house for two weeks now, and get turned in for surgery and potential adoption in another two weeks, it’s about time for me to actually introduce them, yeah?

Meet Dexter and Dee Dee! They came home with us the same day we dropped off Austin, Abby, and Rillo. They also had calicivirus, which is why we could bring them home right away. Thankfully, they’d already been on almost a week’s worth of meds at that point, and were actually doing quite well. Perhaps the virus was milder on them, or it was caught early enough. They never stopped eating due to tongue/mouth ulcers, never started dropping weight, never grew really sick or lethargic.

(Dee Dee)

Instead, Dexter and Dee Dee had a few other things going on. First and most important, Dexter’s left eye was severely infected by calici. The virus can cause a lot of secondary infections, and both of his eyes were swollen shut when he arrived at the shelter. By the time he came to us, his right eye was fine and his left eye just needed a few more days of meds for the external infection to clear up. However, rather than looking like an eye, Dexter has a glazed over, solid-colored ulcer covering his left eye, with little vision in it. It doesn’t seem to hurt him or give him any problems, but we’re still treating it with a range of drops (including one made from dog’s blood serum, which is…bizarre?) in the hope of saving it. There’s a possibility he’ll need to get it removed though, making him a little pirate-kitty. Fingers crossed that we can prevent that!

(Dexter)

Both siblings also have mild cerebellar hypoplasia (CH), also colloquially known as wobbly syndrome. Cats with CH range in symptoms from barely noticeable to so wobbly that they don’t function like cats normally function. However, the condition is a neurological one that they’re born with, and isn’t painful. It’s also not contagious or progressive – it won’t get better, it won’t get worse, and the cats with it have never known anything else, so it doesn’t bother them. In Dexter and Dee Dee’s case, it’s very mild. They have a wider A-like stance and gait, and are slightly clumsier when they’re running around. Sometimes they’ll stretch and their back legs will slide out under them. Sometimes when they’re standing still and look up at you, they’ll have a brief wobble of the head out of nowhere. When they’re stressed or afraid or startled, they have a tendency toward more wobbly movements. But it’s mild enough that the shelter never noticed it when the kittens were in a crate waiting for foster. (We have let them know, because any neuro condition means extra precautions when undergoing anesthesia.)

Lastly, these two siblings are very strongly bonded to each other. TBH, this is the only thing that concerns me about them, because the shelter we foster for doesn’t require bonded pairs to be adopted together. They’re a no-kill non-profit trying to save as many animal lives as possible, so they don’t have the luxury of waiting for an adopter to want two kittens. Dexter and Dee Dee are brown tabbies, the most common kind of kitten around and the ones mostly overlooked unless they have special features that endear them to folks. Having (potentially) one eye and mild wobbly syndrome isn’t exactly something most people will take on, even though the wobbly part is so mild that it doesn’t require any accommodation at all. Taking on two brown tabbies with wobbly syndrome and possibly one with a single eye? It’s unlikely to happen. So these two, who literally won’t use the litter or drink water or eat without each other, are 99% likely to be separated, and that breaks my heart.

But that’s a future problem. For now, Jason and I continue to show these babies all the love and fun and happiness that we can, while also trying to get that eye to heal! These guys are super active and playful, though Dee Dee is definitely the more energetic of the two, while Dexter is the cuddlier. I hope we can get them both all healed up and as cute/sweet as can be so they won’t be completely ignored on the adoption floor for being brown tabbies. If only people knew how sweet and laid back and talkative and loyal brown tabbies are! They have some of the best personalities in the cat world! And just look how cute they are cuddled up with each other!!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – Vote!

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Thistle

Early voting ended in my area this Friday, and official day is on Tuesday. I’ll be honest – I know my vote makes zero difference in this whole thing. People want to think that Texas can progress, but it’s so gerrymandered that our voices will never really be heard, and in the places where they could be, non-white voters are so disenfranchised that it’s difficult to impossible for them to have their say. It’s a mess, and everyone knows it’s a mess, but the people it helps like it that way, so it stays.

Anyway. Enough of the political rant. This post is actually about a funny story from when I went to vote this week.

My closest early voting station is at my local library. Unfortunately, the parking lot is very small, and politicians came up with a very sneaky way of discouraging voters this year. They basically filled the parking lot with folks trying to shill for their campaigns, so that even though there was literally no more than 2-3 people in line, there were no parking spots available to potential voters! (There are some hot races in my local area – we gets upwards of half a dozen fliers daily from a single politician!) So after circling the parking lot a couple times, trying to find someone who happened to be leaving and wondering why it was so full since there was clearly no line, I gave up and parked at a florist shop nearby. On one hand, this meant trying to cross a busy, four-lane road with no pedestrian crossing area. On the other, it meant that I missed 95% of the campaigners, who can’t get within so many feet of the voting area. For extra protection, I brought a library book with me in plain sight so everyone could see I was there for the library, not for voting, and they’d leave me alone. Ha!

Road crossed successfully, library book turned in, campaigners avoided, I got into the voting “line” which literally had one person ahead of me. Took about two minutes til I was sent to get checked in, and this is where things got weird.

The lady checking me in took my license and then verified my address. Before she handed my license back, she looked up at me and said, “How many cats do you have at your house?”

I swear, my brain kicked into overdrive. Was this a security question? Did I put this as a security question the last time I renewed my voter registration? Was this something to do with “preventing voter fraud” as the Right is always claiming about its absurd measures? What number of cats had I had when I sent that answer in, and is it still the same? What if I get it wrong?

All that took place in about two seconds, and then I just said, “Seven.” The lady laughed, handed me back my license (Did I pass the test?) and started chatting with me about cats while she got my ballot ready and printed out. Only when she handed me the ballot and I caught sight of my shirt did I clock what had just happened.

Dear Manda,

You have multiple shirts related to cats. You also probably have cat hair everywhere on your clothes, even if you try to keep them clean. There is really no reason to ever be surprised when a stranger asks you about cats. It’s kinda your whole personality at this point. Get used to it.

Love, me.

At least I still avoided any campaign folks on my way back out of the library. And I got my useless vote in, civic duty done. I guess it was all worth the funny story!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Favorite Photos of October 2022

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Thistle

I didn’t include my favorite photos in my monthly wrap up this time because frankly, there were just too many favorites!! I don’t know why some months I can barely choose four or five, and some months I wish I could throw three dozen into the mix! (Well, no, I know why. Sometimes I take 50 photos in a month, and some months – like October – I take hundreds.) In any case, here are October’s favorites, which I managed to whittle down to 18.

Clockwise from top left: monarch butterfly in my garden; Gremlin looking like he wants everyone to get off his damn lawn; coffee with Rillo; queen butterfly in my garden (my fave butterfly!); red admiral butterfly in my garden; a cozy coffee shop. Can you tell it was butterfly season in my garden? I had to leave out multiple other shots that I loved!

Clockwise from top left: “red dance” (practice with motion); gorgeous portrait of Kristina; Alia the goddess of feather and fire; queens of autumn; “in the woods” (creative portraiture with candles); Alia the flame goddess. (All of these, and all of the next batch, are from the Ghourlies photoshoot I did last weekend. The “red dance” photo was a practice/vibe/brainstorm photo for this particular shoot.

Clockwise from top left: Kristina the flower goddess; Alia in grass; Kristina the flame goddess; the Narnia wall; as autumn fades; moon goddesses emerge (a portrait that proves even blurry outtake photos can be turned into something gorgeous!)

Now, were 11 of the 18 favorites of the month taken in a single night? Why yes, yes they were. Are they the best photos ever? Of course not. I’m still a baby photographer, and my skills with camera and editing software are rudimentary. On the other hand, I have the loveliest friends who are helping me to practice and grow into this dream. I smile every time I see the photos, remembering both the joy of that night, and knowing that even if I’m not the best photographer, I improved each and every one of these photos, and both Alia and Kristina love them. Can’t wait to do this again!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | Leave a comment

October 2022 in Review

Posted on November 2, 2022 by Thistle

October turned out to be a pretty incredible month. Started on Day 1 with a Muslim Culture Festival in Austin with friends – my first proper ladies’ day out in ages – and ended with an amazing Halloween night where we had the exact perfect amount of candy and also got to feed a community cat. Because even the cats in the neighborhood know that we’re the cat house, ha! In between, I brought kittens back from the brink of death, went on a yarn crawl with a friend, semi-rescued a neighborhood cat, dove into a bujo project to consolidate the 13 notebooks taking up space on my shelf, and had my first real group photoshoot. Part of the busyness and insanity was in compensation for the very real dissonant feelings I have about becoming an empty nester, and part was just October, which tends to be fairly high-energy for me. So there were down moments, but overall, such a lovely month.

Reading and Watching
I didn’t read nearly as much as I wanted this month, just the four books (or four and one novella). My brain was preoccupied with other things, and frankly, I spent WAY too much time watching TV this month. Great British Baking Show (and omg the “Mexican” week was soooooooooo bad), Unsolved Mysteries, Love is Blind (with friends), NCIS, La Brea, The Real Love Boat (oh god it’s awful!), SVU. I remember the days when I literally watched only a single show or two! I really need to pare these down, especially some of the really horrible ones that I don’t even really like, haha! However, I did get to see Hocus Pocus 2 with my friends, and that was awesome!

Goals
We finally got all of our cats’ microchips updated with current addresses, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages!

House
Jason has been working on getting our porch/deck finished as a deck, since we probably won’t be enclosing it in the future now. We also fixed some of the holes/tears in the wall and re-textured. I’m at a place where the repairs aren’t ones I can help with, so I’m just trying to take care of other things so there’s less on J’s plate.

The Ferals
So many cats this month. We had Sunday, the not-actually-a-stray-cat who got stuck in our tree. We had the A-Team foster kittens, who survived calici and are now up for adoption. (Well, Gremlin was adopted within an hour of going onto the floor, and Abby was adopted over the weekend. Rillo still needs a home, though!) Our new fosters are Dexter and Dee Dee (see pic below), also recovering from calici, and probably have mild CH too. Then on Halloween, a big orange community cat decided to plonk himself next to us as we gave out candy (pic at right). We gave him some fish to eat, and scanned him for a microchip (nope). He was pretty friendly, and eventually, he brought a friend over to our yard (who was too skittish to get close to, but Jason thinks it might have been King – Shai & Hulud’s dad). The orange boy was so friendly that he kept trying to get us to let him inside the house. Not today, buddy! Ha!

Health/Fitness
Literally the only exercise I did all month was the hike up to the top of the park for my group photoshoot. Mourjaro was kicking my ass this month – or more accurately, my stomach. I’ve been at the lowest therapeutic dose for five weeks now, and the nausea was intense for the first three of those weeks, especially weeks two and three. Sometimes it would last for nearly an entire week. Nausea if I ate too much, nausea if I ate too little, and the beginnings of food aversions to anything with fiber, fat, or protein (leaving me pretty much with simple carbs!). Thankfully, the fourth week only had one day of nausea, and this week was maybe half a day, so I’m feeling much better. On the negative side, it means that a lot of the month, I was living on bread, crackers, and chips, plus yogurt for breakfast (the only time I could eat real food!). I was trying desperately to get in nutrition with pureed veggie soups, but the whole month was a struggle. You can see why exercise on top of that would have been bad! So I listened to my body, I did what I could to mitigate the nausea and food aversions, and I’ve made it to the other side now. Even without exercise and all the junky food, I lost 2.5 lbs in October, and as of today, a total of 11.5 lbs since I began this new med. Hopefully in November, I can add back in some yoga and walking to my routine!

Highlights of October
A great month with a LOT of highlights:

  • Muslim Culture Fest in Austin, ladies’ day out, including henna and art and food and dance and so much fun
  • Hocus Pocus 2 movie party
  • my new perfume that I love so much every day
  • the collective uprise against Paul Hollywood for his absolutely, certifiably wrong “expertise” in Mexican food; and then later for his “s’mores”
  • yarn crawl and discovering new coffee spots with a friend –>
  • having the resources, network, and support to rescue cats as needed when they show up on our doorstep
  • queen butterflies and giant swallowtails and monarchs coming to our mistflowers! Plus, new critters, like the andremona moth, to photograph and identify!
  • playing with creative editing for artistic portraiture
  • the lady at the animal shelter told me that she honestly didn’t expect all three of our calicivirus kittens to make it, and said we did a really good job bringing them back to health
  • the day Stephanie and I showed up wearing the exact same shirt by accident, ha!
  • writing to a GBBO contestant via Insta, not expecting them to even read my message much less reply, but they replied !!!
  • “YOU CANNOT HAVE MY PLANS!” (iykyk)
  • Gremlin getting adopted within an hour of being put on the adoption floor! Abby adopted by the end of that weekend. Now if only we can get Rillo adopted!! He’s the sweetest and goofiest. ETA: He was adopted on Nov 1! Hurrah!
  • the fake B$ (Brandon Sanderson) Spirit Halloween costume –>
  • “Ghourlies” photoshoot, then dinner out with friends
  • giving out full size candy bars for Halloween, and making a teen’s night when we let him have two caramel Ding Dongs, which he said was his favorite, and then some kid (maybe 10 yrs old) put his candy back when he realized the box of sardines on the tray was available, ha! We let him take a candy too.

Coming up in November
This is the time of year when I tend to quiet down. It used to be because I was hard at work for NaNoWriMo, now it’s just a comedown from October’s madness. There’ll be Thanksgiving, of course, but other than that, I have just about nothing planned.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Happy Halloween!

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Thistle

However you celebrate, or don’t celebrate, I hope today is a good one for you. Sending all the love and pumpkins and brilliantly cool, crisp weather!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – End of another RIP season

Posted on October 30, 2022 by Thistle

Technically, there’s today and another day left to finish up RIP, but it’s unlikely I’ll finish another book by then, so I’m going to wrap this up now. As has become my norm these last few years, I had good plans and then just stopped reading regularly come mid-September. I’ve said in other posts – other things have just been occupying my brain lately. In any case, I read seven books for RIP this year, if you count my two pre-September reads:

  • The Clackity
  • The House Across the Lake
  • Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
  • The Ink Black Heart
  • The Change
  • The Kiss Curse
  • Ghost 19

Several others from my original list of options turned out not to be RIP-ish even though I did read them for RIP. Several still haven’t gotten to me from the library – very long hold lines! And quite a few were culled once I tried them and decided they weren’t for me. Honestly, I wish I’d been able to get to those few library books, plus two more from Book of the Month that I simply haven’t gotten around to. Then again, I kinda read RIP-ish books year-round, don’t I? So I’m not going to save them until next season!

It’s been lovely, even if my list was very short and actually didn’t include either of the books that I’m most likely to reread during this season (Gentlemen & Players, and The Night Circus). I enjoyed most of what I read, and that’s what counts!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Goodbyes: The A Team

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Thistle

Wednesday morning, it was time to finally say goodbye to Austin (Gremlin), Abilene (Abby), and Amarillo (Rillo/Willow). This batch of fosters had been with us for about 5.5 weeks, and we’d nursed two of them from the brink of death due to calicivirus. All three had grown happy and healthy and friendly and sweet. Abby loved to sit in your lap, while the other two scrambled up to your neck and shoulders so they could be right up as close as possible. (In this pic to the left, you can see the two boys simultaneously fighting for my cuddles and cuddling with each other – this was a daily thing!) All three were very attached to each other, and would tangle about in piles when they slept. They were also extremely attached to Jason. Whenever he got home or would walk into their foster room, all three would go from dead asleep to excited in an instant, running off me with their tails up high so they could go to the door to greet him.

(Anyone who says cats aren’t affectionate has never really known a cat!)

As you might be able to tell from the photos I’ve put up of these babies in the past, our foster room isn’t the brightest room in the house. There is a lot of detail missing in the photos as you zoom in, and I could rarely get photos that showed true color. I really wanted to capture some good photos of these darlings, so on Wednesday morning, I brought my camera into the room instead of just my phone. The good news: My camera has a range of adjustments that can help it to work in lower lights. The bad news: Those adjustments give me a very shallow focal area and only barely long enough a shutter speed to get non-blurry photos. More bad news: The two boys decided that Wednesday morning was Zoomie time!

(Pure personality: Gremlin looks like you need to get off his damn lawn. Rillo can’t be still for a quarter-second. Abby says she’s through with their nonsense and she’ll watch them from a comfy chair.)

In other words, 75% of my photos came out blurry and useless. Rillo, the most chaotic of the three, was definitely the worst at this, and I got zero solo photos of him without some blur to his face. Halfway through our impromptu photo shoot, I brought in a handheld light cube, which helped to bring in more light, but also meant that I was shooting one-handed, which sometimes caused the shots to shake even when I managed to keep the kittens still for a split second. Argh! In the end, though, I managed to get some good photos (or in Rillo’s case, at least one decent photo).

Miss Abby, queen of sleep, will snuggle but only if you let her put herself in your lap herself, is especially in love with Jason and will groom him if he lets her, loves strings and zippers on Jason’s shorts, demands beef baby food at least once a day. Slightly stingy with purrs, but once you’ve got them, she chirps as she purrs to show she’s blissfully happy.

Rillo, the boy who exudes every characteristic you’d expect in an orange kitten with a shared brain cell (iykyk), who has run headfirst into poles and walls because he was too focused on something else to notice them, who has to be picked up when you enter the room and cuddled on his back for belly rubs, and will lick your ears if you don’t stop him. Constant, nonstop, loud, instantaneous purrs.

Gremlin, the tiniest boy, looks like Gizmo and earned his nickname, eyes that slant in a way that makes him look like an angry, cranky old man even as he’s purring and licking your fingers, who must perch up high and so he’s an instant shoulder-kitten, has a silent meow (ulcer damage or just the way it is? we don’t know), the most laid back and tolerant boy you’ll ever meet despite his grouchy face. It was particularly hard to say goodbye to this little guy as he stole my heart from Day One. There were tears, and I am not normally a crier.

But not to worry. What better way to drown your tears than introduce new love into your heart? The shelter had several other calicivirus kittens that desperately needed foster homes, so we took home a duo. Dexter and DeeDee are about 4-5 weeks old, but I’ll leave their introduction for another post. Here’s a teaser photo, though.

Here’s to the next month of meds, socializing, nursing, cuddling, feeding, playing, cleaning, and bringing new babies into our hearts!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Ghost 19, by Simone St. James (audio)

Posted on October 25, 2022 by Thistle

It’s 1959, and Ginette has been sent to upstate NY by her doctors “for her mental health,” where she becomes trapped in a house haunted by its past.

This is another story that leans heavily on the trope of watching the neighbors and a stylized version of agoraphobia, not to mention the whole “crazy woman put out of sight to avoid publicity” thing. However, St. James takes this from what’s normally thriller territory into ghosts, hauntings, and paranoia, until it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Both Ginette and the reader will eventually start to blur on what constitutes reality. In that way, this story came to remind me of The Yellow Wallpaper – not to say that they’re similar, but they have the same kind of trapped-room undercurrent and “women’s hysteria” gaslighting. Because this takes place fully in the past, it’s unlike other books I’ve read by St. James, but I still rather enjoyed it.

I’m not sure if Ghost 19 counts as a short story or novella, but the audiobook (read by Brittany Pressley) was just shy of three hours. Since that’s actually not my shortest audio in 2022, I decided to count it as one of my reads. (I don’t normally count individual short stories.) It was quick, well-read, well-paced, and captivating. Great for Halloween time!

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – An Unacceptable Book

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Thistle

One of the books that I planned to read for RIP this year was a short nonfiction book called Haunted History of Old San Antonio. It was written by a married couple who run ghost tours in town, and it included both places I know well (like Comanche Lookout Hill) and places I didn’t know at all. Given that I love all things spooky and supernatural, I thought this would be a good fit.

Let this be a lesson to my future self: Do not buy books sitting on grocery store checkout shelves. This book wasn’t just bad, it was horrendous. As in, so disgustingly offensive that 1) I had to check the copyright date (2011) and 2) I threw it in the trash rather than putting it in the donate pile after I abandoned it 40 pages in. No one needs to read this kind of whitewashed, racist, white-glorified garbage. To be honest, some of the phrasing and “history” in here is so offensive, I refuse to even include quotes here, because I’m just that horrified with the way this was written.

And beyond the racism and whitewashing, half of what I did read was completely made up and inaccurate! For writers who claim to be interested in the history of San Antonio, the authors don’t seem terribly concerned with accuracy or facts. There’s one line in the section about Comanche Lookout Hill that says, “From Loop 1604 today, when the wind blows right, the tower can be seen where it still stands.” First, the wind would have absolutely nothing to do with the visibility of a four-story medieval-style tower in ruins. Second, while 1604 is close by, the tower is not visible anywhere from the highway. Nor is the highway visible from any of the lookouts near the tower. That is pure fancy, and yes, was pure fancy when this was published, too. Then there was this little tidbit:

Unfortunately, this tower has been broken into and vandalized many times by juveniles throwing large parties and holding seances. Some of these vandals have even practiced witchcraft near [the] tower, trying to call back the dead on spooky Halloween nights.

That quote makes me want to die from secondhand embarrassment. Has the tower been vandalized? Yup, though not just teens are the culprits. No one is holding seances. I mean, come on. Most of what happens in the park is stuff you’d find in any area of dense woods – people doing drugs, having sex, drinking – silly, stupid, and/or reckless stuff. The book claims that people who walk around the park feel like they’re being watched or followed, and that’s again a load of bunk. That park has hundreds of folks that hang out there, people of all ages: families and school trips and seniors groups and Pokemon Go players and dog-walkers. Many of them come several times a week. I promise they’re not feeling all spooked out all the time. I’ve personally walked, hiked, and run around that park thousands of times over the last 16 years, and have only felt creeped out twice. Once was when I was off-path and came across a cache of pills and syringes – not spooky, just a big fat nope I’m outta here. The second was while listening to a ghost podcast as I jogged through a tunnel of trees that consequently felt spooky for the first time ever.

Even the history of the park is glossed over and glamorized in this book. The scant factual details are easily found in a quick google search. As someone who has hosted many hikes in the park, both regular and haunted, I know the history well, because someone always asks about the tower, or the name of the hill, or some other detail. And if I can get more info from a google search than an entire chapter, albeit short, of this book, not to mention more reliable info, how can I then trust the veracity of any other chapter?

I’ll admit, it was disappointing. I would have kept reading if it had just been a sensationalized account of the spooky bits. Honestly, that’s what I expected. But once you start adding in the parts that are too offensive to even quote? I can’t. I just can’t. Into the garbage it goes.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | 1 Comment