love

February 24, 2026

Crazy Chronicles – Episode 2

The actions that I took yesterday gave me a sense of pride. I knew what I had to do, which was to reach out to my therapist, and instead of my usual, “I know, I should,” I did. Evidently how I worded my email to him concerned him in such a way that within five minutes he called me.

“What’s going on, Josh?” He asked.

I began to explain the entire weekend and how I had felt. For someone who I feel, at times, just keeps me as a patient because I’m relatively low maintenance he was on-it when it came to my crisis. We talked on the phone for about five minutes. He listened to me and then responded by reminding me of all that I have gone through in the past few years. As a result, I am still in the process of grieving my husbands death. He explained that grief can manifest as anxiety or panic attacks because it’s our bodies response to the lack of the person’s presence.

“This person should be here.”

“It’s like they were completely erased from your life.”

The reminder really struck a chord in me and once I understood, and accepted this answer, it all made sense. I look back on the past few times I’ve had these episodes and each one was either directly or in a roundabout way, connected to his memory.

The first time was when we were driving to visit our Papa Bill in Palm Springs and I lamented, to myself, on the drive that I really missed Charlie. He was the chatty Cathy who could strike up and maintain a conversation about headlamps. He could make it so engaging that it would spark another topic and then another, like a firecracker. Without him there that day, the car ride was near silent. We had music playing but there was no discourse. To add to the vacuum of sound, it was also the first road trip with the three of us where charlie wasn’t included. The weight of his absence so very, very obvious. It made my heart hurt.

In that event I think the grief was too much for me to comprehend and it manifested as a “heart attack,” because a large part of my heart was no longer there.

The last two were not so much his absence but the meaning in it. He wouldn’t have approved of my BFs and my trip to SLO (it was a “sexy” trip) and then this past weekend the three of us were hanging out in the living room, without him, talking about how the brother-husband had a date with a new man.

Conceptually I understand that life goes on but… The heart doesn’t know or even really care. It wants what it wants. Mine wants my Charlie back. I am utterly lost without him. He successfully held this crazy together and now I am left to do it by myself.

To top everything else off, the past couple months I have been plotting and planning my proposal to the BF.

Charlie always joked, before he was ever diagnosed with ALS by the way, that when he died I would: 1) bring my boyfriend to his funeral, which I did do, but he brought his; and 2) that I would be remarried soon after he was gone.

I hated those jests. It felt like he was discounting my feelings for him or not believing that I absolutely I loved him. “Accusing me” of “moving on” felt like I was trying to erase him or, at the very worst, that I never cared for him. If there ever was a doubt in my heart that I “didn’t really love him,” caring for as he lost the ability to do literally anything and my subsequent immense longing has wiped awat any doubt. That man was my everything. Some may scoff, “how can that be, you had an open relationship? You had a boyfriend!”

To that I say, love is not precise. There is no single picture of what it should, could or does look. I believe that two heterosexual men can love another more than a spouse and not have it sexual in any sense of the word. Sex does not equal love, and vice versa. Combining them as one thing is minimizing the immense potential of the two. If they both work out, then you’ve got lightning in a bottle. Cherish it. However sometimes our hearts and minds are compatible, like the person was made specifically for you, but in the bedroom you both want entirely different things. Trying to meet in the middle is one way to build a strong bond, but sometimes there are things that are just impossible to bridge because of expectations. There are moments where even when your partner tries, there is a mental block reminding you “they’re not into this” and that kills potential in the attempt. I have found from my own experience at least, and even with my husband.

We want our partners to be happy and if that’s not doing that well… what do you do? In my opinion, suffering in silence is not an option. It’s what led me to cheating over and over again.

Instead of us breaking up, because at the core of our relationship was love and trust (I don’t know how it survived with my infidelity), we decided to open our marriage. After which, I believe, with every fiber of my being, it brought us closer together. It was all based on honesty and communication. We had a set of rules that guided our relationship and dictated what was and wasn’t okay. It wasn’t some lawless wild west where we could just do whatever the fuck we wanted.

I could wax poetic about non-monogamy for hours, but that isn’t the point of this post.

Today I am doing so much better. I reached out to a professional and I listened to his expert advice. My word choice is deliberate. Most people hear what they’re told, but do they listen? Do they comprehend how it applies to them, in that moment? I got lucky because I am someone who spends hours ruminating in my mind. The bitch WILL NOT shut up.

Even with all of that progress, however, I still think I’m dying, but aren’t we all?

February 23, 2026

Crazy Chronicles – Episode 1

I want to document all of this weird psychosis I’m going through because 1) if I turn out to be correct it’ll be a crazy story and 2) because I feel like not enough people talk about what mental health is like as you’re experiencing it.

To put it plainly, I do not feel well. Mentally. Even physically. Two of the weekends in February I have had events where I feel like I am having a heart attack. That is normal when you eat like garbage and don’t exercise. Plus I just hit 40 and my family doesn’t really have a great track record when it comes to hearts. I believe my grandfather had his first one in his 30’s but I might be wrong and it was in his 40’s. Regardless it was the second one that took him.

What makes this feeling exceptionally worse is that I feel like I have had “premonitions” of my death. I am lying in my own bed, the ambulance crew comes in and starts working on me, but I end up passing away before they even get me onto the gurney. My boyfriend is telling the EMTs about our prior experience of having called for an emergency crew and how I am “fine.” Then there is darkness and all I hear is my BF’s voice calling my name and saying “Stop faking. Josh, wake up.”

This last detail, the haunting words, is an echo of when I went to the emergency room a couple weekends ago thinking the same exact thing. The only issue was, I wasn’t having a heart attack. My heart rate was off the charts but I am mostly certain that was caused by my paranoia and panic of my own demise. The demise I “foresaw” when we were driving down to Palm Springs a month ago.

It should be noted that with each of the above events I was thoroughly, utterly, off my tits stoned. I had had far too many edibles. And in this stupor I believe I “had flashes of the future.” Ones which I started to feel again in these noted moments above. Aka De ja vu. It’s been happening quite frequently lately. This is where I started to feel insane, because it is like the de ja vu becomes more frequent as I get closer to the moment it actually happens.

For instance I feel like I have done this before. I am having de ja vu even now, as I write this.

Maybe it is this weekend when I have my real heart attack and die.

It’s thoughts like that that have kept me on edge since Friday and I cannot shake it. I keep feeling as if I am marching toward my inevitable demise. It is stressing me out and making all of this way worse.

So, to be proactive I have reached out to my therapist to get a sooner appointment than March 9th. I need some advice because this overwhelming, all consuming, feeling/thought that I am about to die is really, really not fun.

I also made an appointment with my primary to get my heart checked out. The last few days my blood pressure has been elevated. So I am documenting it, while also trying to think soothing/calming thoughts.

The one thing about all of this that upsets me more than my own death, is how I am stressing my boyfriend out. I’m getting flashbacks from when I was 4 and my dad was having his mental breakdown. I vividly remember him standing in the living room, my mom sitting next to me on the couch, trying to talk him in to going to a hospital. He had just spent the last few hours swinging a broom around in the backyard killing “demons.” At one point, he had to put on yellow kitchen gloves because he was getting blisters.

I love my father, with all of his flaws, but I refuse to let this be a memory, of me, for the ones I love.

As I was writing this, my therapist called and we had a quick chat before rescheduling. He told me that people don’t have mental breakdowns now like they did in the 80’s. That was because people were over-stimulated and didn’t know that was the issue so they would check themselves into a hospital to find respite. Fun little fact. He also said that sometimes grief will manifest as panic/anxiety attacks. That one really hit home. A lot of the time when these events occur is in moments where my husband either should be there or he would be upset if he knew what was happening. My therapist explained that it is the lack of this person that makes you start to panic or feel anxious because they’ve always been there.

February 10, 2026

Does This Clown Taste a Little Funny To You?

Last night was a weird one for me. I spent most of my evening laying in bed “doom scrolling” details in the Epstein files. It got to a point that I started to physically feel fearful and repulsed, as if I had just watched some grotesque gore flick with a terrifying villain. Did that discourage me from continuing further? Oh no. I am a glutton for punishment and chaos.

At some point in my information consumption I had my interest piqued enough on the topic of Kuru that I started researching it.

Kuru is a disease that is caused by damaged proteins that have accumulated in the brain. It causes neurological issues such as: tremors, speech issues, dementia, muscle loss, and balance issues. All of these things I have witnessed in my mother, father, and husband until their untimely demise. Could this be the answer to why in the last 5 years I lost them all with very similar issues?

My mind spiraled out of control. In the abstract I can understand that this is just my brain trying to rationalize the abrupt disrupt and loss of my family. I get that. But… what if it’s my answer?

Well, the only problem with them having kuru is that it requires the consumption of human flesh, primarily the brain, that is tainted with… kuru. According to one of my MANY google searches, the last reported case was in 2004. This is a very rare and uncommon disease. In the history of the illness, it was primarily witnessed in a tribe that had a ritual of consuming their dead family members after their passing.

To my knowledge… My parents and husband were not cannibals. However, people do have their secrets. I didn’t know my husband was cheating on me, as I was actively cheating on him, until I caught him.

What this thought does do is lend credence to this fear that I have had over these last 5 years: that somehow/someway we were exposed to something that caused all of this.

When I would voice this to my husband, before he passed, he would immediately fire back, “Then why aren’t you showing signs?”

This is where I confess to the world that I am a chicken nugget and french fries man. I am the pickiest eater and won’t really venture out of my culinary comfort zone unless I am peer pressured into doing so. (Side note: I had a friend who had a serious peanut allergy tell me to try stuff at a buffet with a remark “it’s not going to kill you.” Shortly afterward we had to rush to the store to get Benadryl because the bitch didn’t bring her eppy pen.)

What if my family was given, without their knowledge or consent, human flesh to eat?

I have this really random memory of our trip to Lake Tahoe, where the wait staff watched us eat our meal, in an entirely empty restaurant. The reason it stuck out in my memory is because of how bizarre it was that they watched us… and how we were the only ones in the restaurant at dinner time.

All of these fears and assumptions are made worse by the very fact that we have only received half of the millions of files the DOJ possesses. And these are the files they were willing to submit. What’s in the other fucking half?

Now, do I really think that is the answer? No.

Is it just me trying to find meaning in their sudden deaths? Yes.

However… We cannot rule out this as a cause.

The only real certifiable answer I do have, that this is not the case, is that when my husband and I went to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion to his ALS diagnosis, they tested him for everything while we were there. I imagine… that might have also included tests that would reveal signs of kuru. Like I said, it’s caused by deformed proteins. It’s not bacterial or viral.

(As I am writing this, I just had a random memory of a doctor asking him if he ate human flesh at one of his appointments where we all just laughed it off.)

In the big scheme of things, why does this even matter? They’ve already been taken from me. There is nothing that can be changed and having an “answer” does nothing but further fuel my confusion. Where would this have happened?! Why?

I need to just accept that life sometimes shops at Costco and we were just working through our bulk box of death.

December 23, 2025

Christmas “cheer”

Christmas is just a day away and I have less than zero spirit in me. I couldn’t even be bothered to decorate. I did do some but it all looks like shit, when you really examine the placement or motif. In the end it was Tony who did most, if not all, of the work. He was pulling double duty trying to bring “wonder for the season” while we both have none.

The more distance I leave between the death of my husband and the present, the more my heart aches for him and the life we once had. Every day I grow increasingly sad by his absence. I never realized how much of him was me. Or how our life together wasn’t perfect but it was ours. Now I just feel like a foreigner in a strange land.

Navigating all of the Christmas events without him or the new ones with a slight twist, just make my heart ache more than the moment before.

The other day I went to the boyfriends company holiday party and during it they played a song that once I left to drive home, I downloaded and had it on repeat the whole way. Every mile driven was soaked in tears. I could not stop myself from crying. It was ugly and visceral. The kind that if I were to ever see someone doing in real life or film I would immediately think they were faking it. It was that dramatic.

As the embarrassment of my actions shrouded over me, I looked around the car and asked myself “if you’re faking, who is this for?” No one was watching. No one even knew I was crying. It was just me. Well, me and the mental manifestation I have of my husband sitting in the passenger seat.

I would look insane if someone were to look at me through car windows. I turn and speak to him as if he’s there. Sometimes I hear a response in my head and other times I can see him making a face at me. All of it not real. In my head.

Grief is wild.

So much of my life exists only in my head. I sit and ponder everything, backward and forward in time. Then I hit the junctions where my thoughts skew into random topics of which I will dedicate entirely too much time ruminating. It’s a habit that has become too prevalent, that hours will pass by and I will find myself back in my family room as if no time has passed. It’s the nearest experience I will ever get to going to Narnia.

These mental adventures are, if not more, perilous than the imagined ones. Some times I wonder if this is how people go “insane.” They start traveling the narrow passages of their thoughts and wind up trapped in their own head.

Anyway… Merry Christmas. It is a trite sentiment but it never feels more tangible than when you’ve lost the ones you love: treasure the moments you have with them. They will one day be gone.