Laurel > Recent Status Updates

Did you know women spend about $18k on menstrual products in their lifetimes??

Do you know what drug was starting to show significant promise for women’s pain during menopause, but then the study was ended because it ran out of money? Yep, Viagra.

“The reason I dreamed so big and do big things is because I forget about the constraints of reality for a bit and I go after what I want without considering what might get in the way. Many of us do the same. It’s one of our strengths”

Hacks: write a shitty first draft. Even include silly or extra metaphors or frameworks just to get ideas out (Harry Potter metaphors?!)

“Resparklize”: sometimes need to make old system or task more interesting.

Strike while the iron is hot

Do what you can ahead of time. Wear workout clothes to sleep

Remove obstacles: keep barrier log to figure out where getting stuck

Invest in tools you enjoy using

“I find that if I do something faster than my brain can realize I’m doing it, then it’s like a cartoon. I might be missing motivation slats on my bridge, but I’m just walking on air and not looking down.”

“You can’t fix the world,” she says. “You can’t fix time. People like us, we feel it too much. We want to fix too much. And, sometimes, it just swallows us up.”

And it’ll happen again, to someone else, at another school, during another police stop, at another nightclub. And we’ll all get angry. And we’ll weep. And we’ll scream for change. And we’ll march. And we’ll protest. And we’ll move forward. And then we’ll get tired and take our foot off the gas and slide right back…Over and over again. It’s a type of time travel that all of us are all caught in.

Over a lifetime, if somebody was to pull out the abacus and add up all those little leaky trots, I bet there was miles to go before she slept.

The only weakness that ever gave her grief, over her whole life, was her bladder. As the legend goes when she explains the story, she was born with the smallest bladder in the history of human existence. “A pecan with cracks in it,” is how she described it to him on one of their first dates, back before their daughter ever came into the picture.

I knew a woman who sneezed every time she orgasmed. I’ve shook hands with a Black president and watched Fury Road in the same afternoon. Yeah, kid, I’m someone who’s seen rockets break orbit! When folks come around with that old sales pitch about how things always gotta come up snake eyes in the end, well, I just let it pass me by. Nothing in this life is duty-bound to fall apart. Nothing.

But I’ve seen the back side of hurricanes too. I’ve seen lots of things. I’ve seen birds fight off bears the northern lights dance a jig over the Tuscaloosa. Seen a man get tossed into the air by an eighteen-wheeler and walk off laughing. One time I seen an alpaca riding shotgun in a Toyota Camry in the middle of Atlanta. I’ve seen 40 yr-old bare breasts dangled out of a Burger King drive-thru window…

“I’m tired of standing out. I’m tired of having to be small so that I don’t make waves and I’m tired of having to scream at the top of my lungs just to keep the world from swallowing me up. It shouldn’t be both ways at the same time. It just shouldn’t!”

Fuck Democrats. Fuck Republicans. Fuck conservatives. Fuck liberals. Fuck the Supreme Court. Fuck the red, the white, and the goddamned blue. Fuck it all. I need air. And fuck anybody that wants me to stay in a place that does nothing but suffocate me. I have no home, when you get down to it. No nigga does. And we don’t need one.”

“It’s just quieter,” Not Toni Morrison adds. “I go outside and, hell, when I hear something that sounds like a gunshot I don’t duck under tables. I know it’s just a car backfiring.”

Hell, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet. And a friend is a gift you give yourself.

Maybe The Big Score can help me take out a thirty-year mortgage on this feeling of being able to breathe.

I see Lady Liberty standing tall. I smell the cinnamon of apple pies and hear the sound of home runs cracking the autumn air. I feel the concrete of the Hoover Dam…the gunfire at Sandy Hook Elementary.I see every cop that’s ever pulled me over I fit somebody’s description… Frenchie might have just helped me understand that, hell, for the right price, leaving America just might be the new American Dream.

whatever it is, finally picked itself up off of its eternal couch, brushed off the Cheetos of time immemorial, shambled into the bathroom, looked at itself in the mirror and said, “Today’s the day.”And it said it with a picture of me staring back at it from that bathroom mirror,like whatever it is that I’ve been doing all my life to keep it at bay finally failed, and now, after so long, it’s been let loose.

“Live in Europe as an artist. Away from the guns, the racism, the Christian fundamentalism and Jesus on the Cross Nationalism that you pretend isn’t as big as it is. Live here and tell me about the way it used to be, while you remember. Write books of what was and I will buy them from you, one after another,and you will grow rich and fat with each word.” He laughs. I try to laugh with him,but nothing comes out.

“The way America is now is also the future of America. The way things are is the way things will become, only worse. It is like time travel in the science fiction books, only it’s real! It is alive! Each and every day!”

He shakes his head solemnly. “Five years old, and they are already learning to hide in corners and lock doors. It is terrible. Each generation in this world remembers times that were simpler. Safer. But not anymore for you Americans...” He says it so low it’s almost a whisper. “You are already too late. The good times? They are gone. And they will not return.”

He shakes his head solemnly. “Five years old, and they are already learning to hide in corners and lock doors. It is terrible. Each generation in this world remembers times that were simpler. Safer. But not anymore for you Americans. No. The tree has already fallen, as they say.”

If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that when the real world starts to get too hard for me, there’s nothing wrong with letting it turn into a dream. But this time the dream feels like it doesn’t want to be here.

Back in my day, a phone was nailed to a wall where it belonged. And I always find myself staring off into the sunset, dreaming about the days when I didn’t carry the whole world in my pocket.

A .45-caliber Colt1911.As American as apple pie,student loan debt,truck nuts.Even if you don’t know it by name,you’ve seen it.Bogart carried one in The Maltese Falcon.It’s the gun that came home from the Big War,married Hollywood,has been pumping out kids on celluloid & HD ever since.Chances are you’ve seen this gun more times than you’ve hugged your kids.And holding one in your hands?It’s something else.

Fun fact: in spite of being born a red-blooded American, I’d never owned a gun. Never even held one, when I stop to think about it... It’s hard to believe a story set in America if it don’t have a heater. That’s like writing about preachers and not mentioning getting fleeced. But in spite of what my characters might have done, when it comes to me and the real deal? Unacquainted.

“I’ve heard the legends,” I say. “I just thought it was a story though. Like lottery revenue actually going to support education.”

I am in disbelief. A shock so pure, it is chaste