My wife and I travel endlessly. For work, for home exchanges, for love. We're in the Bay Area, but our careers are online. While we travel, I write.

I write about lady love, about traveling, about home remodels when both women are not handy, about anxiety—oh my god my brain—about trying to navigate the world as a graceful human being, about sobriety. About so much stuff.

travel

Is there a quiz to measure obsessive thinking? I’m walking down the street in downtown Seattle and I just keep thinking, surely I’m crazy.

But we all think that lots of the time.

Right?

It seems like I jumped off a train a few years back and I’m still floundering around in the bay under the tracks. Are you down here, too? Dog paddling like a motherfucker, certain the veil is a little too thin between you and every gosh darn preacher on the corner with an amp and some passion.

How many times will that boy with the flag play that same song?

It’s sunny here in Seattle this week. Like, global warming sunny, and dang if it isn’t beautiful.

I’ve sworn off social media (again) due to intense overwhelm (hey, old friend), so writing on my website that no one reads seems like a solid way to ease this need to SHARE. Just pour it into a public black hole. Who even visits website blogs anymore? There’s not even a video in this thing, for god’s sake.

Which, by the way, is the message the young preacher boy with the red flag, standing on the amp on the corner of Pine & 5th in downtown Seattle, would like EVERYONE TO KNOW. God’s sake is the word.

A lot of people crossing at the corner laugh, bemused by his earnest lip syncing. He looks a bit like he’s floating on a spectacularly small boat, balanced on the top of his amp, hugging a 9-foot bamboo pole—a red flag flying atop—the same song booming on repeat across the pedestrian intersection in front of the Nordstrom Rack.

I’m guessing he’s not in the habit of second guessing himself. His brain probably doesn’t loop, ad infinitum, on the me he thinks he’s supposed to be. In fact, I’d wager, he’s downright certain that his boat ain’t sinking.

Where’s the line between introspection and self-obsession?

Am I crazy? Please send the quiz.

Love, Annie

 

*I tried to find him again after seeing him three days in a row, to take a picture for the very post he inspired, but he’d vanished. Hence my artistic rendering.*

I love Prague. It sings in my bohemian heart. I imagine it's awakened my slavic roots. Or maybe I just love the fact I can navigate the public transport with more ease than San Francisco's MUNI. This city that feels like home. I'm roaming the streets and museums, bundled in winter wear, feeling free. The grey sky

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