This Maggie business is starting to feel like a project, rather than a life sentence of crazy-mean adjacency. I live a triggering life. Would that topic–the Triggered Life: What I learned by living next door to a full-time trigger”–be of interest? Would it make a good Ted Talk? Does anyone care about Ted Talks anymore? Do you know how many jokes I made about Ted Talks that bombed when I was serious into improv and trying to play at the top of my… what was it? My intelligence! How could I have forgotten that? Answer: three. I realized then it wasn’t funny, and yet I am still dying to make a Ted Talk joke.

But I think I have the basic Maggie narrative down. I get it. There’s not too many more zigs and zags of this stupid story yet to come. It follows a pattern and let’s all hope it doesn’t get too dark.

I have been worried about trying to write it while being inside it, because I think memoir should be pretty baked in. You should not live and write it at the same time unless it’s reported, which this is (reluctantly) is.

Here it is from my perspective. Woman (me) putters along, floofing through life kind of painfully, enjoying things through gritted teeth. Then pandemic (my fault, by the way. I predicted this in 2009 when I went briefly mad and stockpiled food. I gave a nurse my last dusty masks in week 2 of the pandemic, purchased in 2009. They smelled like mold but she was really nice about them. Wasn’t it such a scary time?), then Maggie (definitely my fault), and then the realization that none of this crap is personal and we should all get along and have a good time, as well as we can!

That’s my story and I’d like to tell it.

It just hit me that I should interview people, like her family, about Maggie. I can’t even write that sentence clearly. Oh got it’s so upsetting to me. I’m not a fucking podcaster. My life is not a true-crime life.

Do you think Maggie will find out?

Only if it sells, dingus! But seriously, I do suspect she suspects me of wanting to write about her and is gaslighting me. Often Maggie notes in social media that people want her to write a book and she can’t but she knows sick sick things about Barbara Walters. She also loves to call me a failed comedy writer, which I kind of am. She so has my number.

My therapist has shingles and I am deeply worried and concerned. First of all because I think she is elderly and the severity tends to go up with age. And secondly because I had a mild case and it was very distressing. When it was really going strong, I had tingles running up and down one side of my body, like electricity. And I thought I had herpes and that Calvin had cheated on me.

Also Dianne Feinstein. She didn’t do well. I am totally fine with Feinstein resigning from the Senate but I am not okay with my therapist retiring.

Really disturbing Maggie FB post today

I’m not screenshooting this one because it’s not about me, but basically it sounded like she had a guy come into her house to do some chore and then he sort of sexually aggressed her. I don’t know if they had sex. She’s written about sex with another person once before and it was so upsetting. She was kind of witty about it but it made me nervous

Our lawyer is being a schmuck. We are looking for a new one. I will, I promise, post a still of her mooning our security camera last week.

Oh, the mooning! She performed it really well. She’s been posting a lot about me telling her that she was a bad dancer a few years ago, when I was hoping she would be arrested so taunting her. And I believed it at the time. She’s still so mad about it, because, I bet, she’s actually a good dancer. When she’s launching her moon stance, she gets up gracefully despite all her ailments. She sort of rolls into the moon stance. I cannot deny that physically she has gifts.

But at the time of this opinion, I hadn’t spent enough time with Maggie to really evaluate her dancing ability. My opinion was unformed and hasty! I admit it. I wish I had the wisdom then to say: You, Maggie, technically are a very good dancer. But as a performer or really, just a person on stage, you cause me to look away. I don’t like looking at you. I’d rather someone else was dancing, not you.

But still, a talented dancer.