Today marks the 2 year anvil of my mother's passing... and surprisingly so far, has been a pleasant day for me mentally. I started to feel shame that I was laughing with bud-rista at the dispensary, yelling at shitty full moon drivers to "FUCKING GOOO!!!!!" and then laughing at my own outrage, re-organzing my clos et while belting out the lyrics to "It's Raining Men", rough-housing with the cats, and getting excited for Jon and Jack to come home tonight. I have been beating myself up about getting something together for her memorial. I had collected so so many drawings, comics, photos, stories (omg the stories...) and ideas along the way to make her memorial service the best fucking experience anyone had ever seen because she truly deserved it and touched SO many characters along the long and winding road of her life.

A survivor of every type of abuse, picking herself and her dogs up boldly and marching on, with a SMILE even! She had a stint where she lived in a hotel with her 2 dogs Puddles and Kramer, and I remember spending a weekend with her. To be honest, in theory it was super depressing (and kind of embarrassing to me at the time) but the fun we had was unmatched. Laughing at the shit life chucked our way always. I would not have survived half of the shit she did, she was resilient af.

I had such big plans for this mom-orial that I didn't even realize how big of an undertaking it was until I started "comping the experience up" in Photoshop lol. The last 5 years I had been working for an ad agency and that was literally my job – to help curate live experiences for big brands, most of which ended up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and teams upon teams of people.

Even with the help of a wonderful community (Olivia, for the floral arrangements and Kevin for the willingness to help construct this whole thing, Jon to reserve the space at Kildare etc), I realized just HOW MASSIVE even the planning phase of this would be... so I decided to ditch the idea. But not completely...

See, I have been working on various pieces of art, scanning/color correcting photos from her past, listening to tons of audio recordings (that I took of her during phone conversations towards the end of her life), not to mention the part after a loved one dies where you have to clean out their entire house, list it, sell it, close all financials, etc. I did all of this mostly on my own as an only child with a single mother. Of course I had some help along the way but man, this wasn't easy. At the time, I myself became resilient and handled it all very well. Even though I wanted to fist fight and verbally demean the director of nursing at Elevate Care (the facility I thought was guilty of her rapid decline).

After her death, I got engaged to the love of my life in New Orleans, where (naturally) when wasted at some point during our post-engagement celebrations along Bourbon Street I LOST the little blue velvet baggie that contained a few fistfuls of her ashes. I wanted to spread them in New Orleans somewhere special because she never got to go to NOLA and I just KNOW it would have been her favorite fucking city ever. But alas, she died thinking it was VENICE, California. (She fucking loved Venice Beach, more on that later).

The next morning I shot out of bed covered in dread and paranoia (like Catherine O'hara on the airplane in Home Alone the moment she realizes lil Kevin is missing.) and BAM!! No blue velvet bag in my purse!!!!! (also no cigs, no lighter, no souvenirs, all lost in the night). NO MOM.

The shame was instantly dissipated by laughter from beyond the grave. Jon and I burst out laughing. We were like –Omg, someone definitely picked up that baggie, looked inside, and thought they scored the night of their life. Her ashes don't look terribly different than some certain "street drug" (dealers choice here, in case a potential employer reads this ::rolling laugh tear-eyed emoji::) Anytime I meet anyone from NOLA, I tell this story.

...And that's what memorializing my mother is really about. Honoring her effortless talent of magically transforming tragedy into comedy, time and time again. But she was also very classy and old-fashioned in many ways too. Oddly enough, she almost never swore or used foul language. And for a woman who smoked hella Newport Lights and drank hella Robert Mondavi Chardonnay (the BIG bottle... she would literally say this when asking anyone to pick up wine for her, "AND GET THE BIIIGGGGG BOTTLE!! and she'd laugh hysterically, but she wasn't kidding, she wanted the big bottle.

You see how I can go on and on and on about her? So, that was wherein lied my problem. I would need the rest of my OWN life to document HER life, and I just don't know if I have it in me, because how much time is left for me? One never knows.

So naturally, an avalanche of these grandiose art projects flood my mind... but the moment I put pen to paper, or pixel to page, or shard of a ceramic decorative plate (part of a family heirloom I smashed) and lock it into place on a plastic birdbath. You, see I was dabbling with mosaics at the time ::: rolling laughy emoji x three::: I begin to realize that THIS is what life is, the act of doing something artistic in the first place. Not always for show, sometimes never finished, and mostly half-started, but necessary.

So anyways, I have sworn myself to start a website ( a blog of sorts) with ALL of the art I have made in the past, present and future dedicated to my mom (Tbh, it's just a SquareSpace). See, here I am writing this and crying because I miss her so much but then laughing because of the "it's a SquareSpace" thought, brings you back to reality ya know? Anyways, comedy is king.

So, I bought the domain and have started it already. But I am such a nut bar when it comes to design and stuff that I just KNOW I will never launch it if I can't get it looking the way I want. And that means editing video, sound, designing fonts, etc, and I have to stop finessing everything because there's just no time man. So I'm launching it NOW. It's messy, it's not done, but it exists... for now.