Many didn’t think it would happen. Hell, I didn’t think it would happen. I had accepted the real possibility that I would live out my life single, unmarried, with no Soul Mate until my last breath. Alone. Then the Universe decided to throw me a lit stick of dynamite last summer and fall and I could not put the fuse out!
Sandy’s genealogy and heritage is Irish (Lyle) and Scottish (Stewarts). I like Celtic and Gaelic culture even though I am definitely Franco-German (Bonet/Bonnet on maternal side, Konzack-Miller on paternal side). We both love silver, not gold. Perfecto!
🧨BOOM! As Sandy and I reconnected more and more every third day, then every other day, then every single day/night multiple times, laughing with each other non-stop that my face-cheeks would begin hurting and my ribs sore, we began to talk on deeper levels. It had always been super easy to communicate together. We have known each other as the best of friends (only) for just over 45-years!
Sandy was my very first therapist after my father’s suicide in July 1990. Sandy was married to her first husband then, of 12-years. I was too busy being a hot metrosexual man, 😈😉semi-pro footballer, while working toward my master’s degree in counseling and therapy, exactly what Sandy finished doing in early 1990. However, Dad’s suicide change everything. My whole world was upside down for the next three or four years. I moved back to Dallas, Texas. Sandy moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and we lived our separate lives, but always staying in touch; and yes, always laughing together.
By late November 2024 everything was falling perfectly into place for us. We discussed many times how convenient it would be to get married and both of us not be alone, dying single. She’s 62 (March 29th) and I am 62 (January 4th), three months her senior. She doesn’t like it when I bring that up. 😄 Sandy is quite independent, self-confident always, articulates her thoughts and feelings exceptionally well, and has a fabulous sense of humor and quick wit. My Mom absolutely adores her and Sandy loves Mom since she has lost both her parents. It all just made sense. There was no point in putting it off any longer. Justice of the Peace William “Bill” Ragsdale of Kerr County married us. He made the disastrous mistake of calling Sandy, Sandra, as her legal name and driver’s license read. JoP Ragsdale therefore made a Johnny-on-the-Spot, special adjustment to our marital vows:
We both chuckled every time he said, “Bubba.”
As the legal document indicates, we were husband and wife at 3:23pm CST, August 8, 2025.
Now comes the big, big move for her from Chattanooga, Tennessee, next month and her storage unit filled with all her furniture from her two-story house when she was married—all of it very nice and beautiful furniture and two queen beds, etc. Ugh. 🙄 But honestly, I don’t see any of this being difficult, overly stressful, or untimely. As a matter of fact, in the 45-years we’ve been great friends we have not had one single fight, not even a little spat! This amazes us both, but it is so because we are both excellent, articulate communicators with non-aggressive, pro-positive verbal exchanges without sacrificing brutal honesty. This has always been our best talent/gift together from day one in August 1981. 😍😁
Both of us are excited and looking forward to our lives together full of fun, laughter, and perfect, affectionate communication, the cornerstone of any healthy, long-term relationship and marriage. ❣️💞 😁
Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Learn Always
I want to share some very happy good news for me that was sort of unexpected. Yet, it is worth a blog-post for sure.
I struggled with whether or not to write about it due to my last crushing love-loss with Jodi Kasten. However, at the risk of jinxing these past two weeks, it seems once again that this spectacular, peculiar, sometimes harsh Universe has brought love into my life once again. Sandy is her name. We have been the best of closest friends for over 44-years since our time at university in 1981–1985.
Sandy and I have reconnected recently, last November I think, and it has been like we’ve never lost touch. We just instantly picked-up right where we left off the last time we talked. The most refreshing part of our long, long close friendship was how easily we laugh together! It is often nonstop for hours. While Sandy was here March 22nd thru April 5th, my jaw muscles were literally sore every single day and night because of my incessant smiling and laughing! One night I had to take pain relievers because my cheek and jaw muscles hurt so much. 😄 It was insanely fun!
Now that she is back home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, our lives have returned to a boring normal, too quiet around the house, and me and my “one man show” with no help caring for Mom. Sandy was a massive help to me emotionally, mentally, and when possible physically with tasks—I wasn’t alone in the least. It was euphoric if I’m honest. I miss her. I really do miss her now.
We are already planning for her to fly back out here, perhaps May 24th(?) and staying for three or four weeks that go round. Two weeks this last visit went by way too fast for us. Did I say how much I miss her? Sandy was my first therapist-counselor right after my Dad’s suicide and funeral. She helped me through a LOT of crap emotionally and mentally in 1990. She was a superb therapist and deservedly licensed with a Master’s degree in psychotherapy in family counseling. And we had been great platonic friends all through college at Belhaven University, Jackson, Mississippi. We never really lost touch, just got busy with separate lives, family, blah, blah, blah.
But after this last visit here with Mom and I, it was obvious how good, how close, how sound our close friendship has developed all the best qualities for something more significant. It is an easy, natural fit. We are discussing finding our Justice of the Peace her next time out here. I’ll say this with utter confidence… it will be difficult NOT to marry given what has been easily built over 44-years. To me it seems like a no-brainer.
To be continued… 😁😍
Live Well – Love Much – Laugh Often – Learn Always
Feeling nostalgic today. Feeling somewhere else, and not here, wishing for another time, a more euphoric place where I felt… at home—understood in all possible ways by those who had come into my life… and are now gone from my life. So I post this, I play this special song. It was shared with me by two past Soul Mates/Twin Flames.
This song is also on my page The Bohemian, under my About page. I am a kindred spirit of Bohemia, the French tenets of which I descend from my mother’s side are Creativity, Love, Merriment, Experimentation, Art, and the arousal of all the human Senses. My Bohemian side says:
If I had to give a quick summary of myself, it would be “Bohemian Drummer Living and Musing A Different Beat.”
[…]
This belief in integrity and the intense desire for creative freedom often leads to a threadbare existence. Perhaps this material poverty (or ‘simplicity’ as Thoreau would say) leads to the archetypal Bohemian, wild at heart and empty of pocket.
The two Soul Mates/Twin Flames who shared this song with me and meant for me?
There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far Very far Over land and sea
A little shy And sad of eye But very wise was he
And then one day One magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me
The greatest thing You’ll ever learn Is just to love And be loved in return
And then one day One magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things Fools and kings This he said to me
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return
Is it coincidence, random one-in-billion serendipity when we encounter a soul mate/twin flame? Or… is it something more?
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But they never realized just how fragile life is or how very short it can be.
They say “The hottest love has the coldest end.” Now in my opinion and throughout my 6-decades of life that is painfully closer to the truth.
They say “The eyes are the window to the soul.” Yes. This entire week my eyes have been swollen with tears bearing open my ripped and bleeding soul.
It is sometimes said by them “It’s a broken heart when you’ve lost a soul mate,” but that’s only part of it. I hurt in my whole body, to the marrow.
But enough of what they say.
On Thursday, June 29, 2023, my lovely Hat Burglar boxed up and shipped my fourth or fifth package of what she always called “Surprizzles.” If I made a list for you of everything she has shipped to me from Georgia, USA, I’d have a 3- to 4,000 word post. So suffice it to say that she lives and loves to make people’s lives a little easier and a lot happier. And she is the Queen B at it. She is just as gifted in calming you, making you burst out in laughter, while simultaneously sorting out the berserko chicken-pen with chickens running amok with heads lopped off. She rightly earned the title of “Supreme Chaos Manager.” It is sheer black or white magic, a sight to behold actually, to watch what she can make happen; the consummate Doer! And with that my Doer did and with no delay, my box of Surprizzles was on the way …to my door.
But I want to jump back to and ahead in this story.
In the United States we have a non-existent FTC that is supposed to protect individual American consumers and phone users from insane amounts of telemarketing sales calls, AI spam callers, and other invasive businesses blowing up your phone’s call-log and voicemail capacity. A few wireless carriers offer a very basic spam-protection feature and/or app, but they too are near useless. I hate this infuriating marketing with an intense bitterness and our nation’s defunct economic model these wireless phone-cancers feed off and breed from: Free-enterprise or Hyper-capitalism. My fury is boiling just below atomic eruption when one listen’s to my cell phone voicemail greeting aimed at all telemarketers and AI spam-dialers.
Growling, my attempts to waste as much of their time as they would mine with my 2-3 minute greeting-of-torture, are not as effective as I had hoped for several reasons. One thing that is recognizable in my tone and attitude to this American AI plague is my enormous growing aversion and maddening for all-things-technology and their blatant abuse by sales and marketing departments upon my precious time. I mean, I’m ready to push the red-button labelled “Never Push This Button.”
Unknown to me, my lovely Hat Burglar often called my cell just to listen to my polite rage, or in her message to poke me with the proverbial stick inciting her grumpy grandpa (me) and make me either more grumpy or tolerably grumpy, just for her own amusement and entertainment-fix. Here are a few of her voicemails I will treasure for the rest of my life:
April 8th, 2023:
May 16th, 2023:
May 23rd, 2023 with her son Jay calling me:
June 29th, 2023 – her latest, and last VM to me:
Greatest worst best friend EVER! 😍
∼ ∼ ∼ § ∼ ∼ ∼
In the late morning of July 2nd, 2023, between 10:31am CDT, my time, and 1:40pm my time, my Soul Mate and Twin Flame, my Hat Burglar, who I’ve written about so affectionately since May 11th and she wrote about me/us June 6th, died suddenly of a severe heart-attack. Her husband tried to revive her several times with CPR, but the attack/seizure was simply too harsh and too swift. She was 47-years young. I don’t want to let her go…
my all-time favorite pic of my Hat Burglar, aka Jodi
Her box of Surprizzles arrived, wanted and unwanted, three days later on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023. It had her typical flashy, Gothic, dark stickers smacked everywhere on the box. One sticker was the Jolly-Roger skull and crossed bones. It said on it in large pirate-script: Poison! I knew inside there were specially baked chocolate-chunk cookies (lots of them!) along with my various surprise items of shock-n-awe and/or uncontrollable laughter. In this reaction Jodi never failed; she was undefeated against me at 8 — 0. But her box sat there in a living room chair all morning, all afternoon, and into the evening. I could not muster the courage to open what should’ve been a sensational Cloud-9, Made-my-day moment… that instead would make all the life-long memories very different than intended.
Around six or seven PM, I don’t remember exactly, with Mom nearby I opened the box. There were eight to ten containers of big cookies, a book she knewI would love reading (she was spot-on, 10x better than Robin Hood’s second arrow through his first arrow), and then the real kicker; another envelope with her handwriting.
Out of all the surprizzles she included in this, her last shipment to me, this one in particular item/envelope evoked the most intense mixed emotions I have experienced in my life to-date. Forgive me, but to fully understand its profound euphoric and devastating impact on me, it requires some past context.
One afternoon in June when I was out running errands she called my cell. I always have the car stereo semi-blasting (not), playing my many favorite songs from several genres. This one time she called me while driving—then I pulled over of course for public safety reasons—and after 3-4 rings and her call almost ready to go to my voicemail greeting, I caught her just in time! However, I had not had a chance to mute/turn-off my loud music. Hence, she immediately heard this song (we both love) blaring on my stereo CD’s. Try to listen to its entirety and lyrics:
My Hat Burglar has or had an exquisite talent for imagining, creating, and manifesting serendipitous, life-long moments and memories for everyone around her, especially those she adored and loved most. For example, my heart-wrenching, gut-punch special envelope with cinematic directorship of exactly how we would part after finally meeting in person after a long, trouble-making, breathtaking weekend with sore face-cheeks from too much smiling, on top of sore ribs from laughing non-stop, she included this:
Ouch… just ouch. Eery. Are you fucking kidding me!
“They say crying makes the heart lighter.”
If that is true, then my heart is weightless; it is gone missing… with her. The rest of this earth-shattering, upside down, euphorically crushing, unfair life, for me, will NEVER be the same until my last breath. This painful emptiness, why? How?
— Photos below of Jodi, my Hat Burglar, added July 12, 2023 —
Jodi and Pudge, her youngest son.
Dante, the little Schnauzer, grabs & tries to eat Jodi’s hair!
One of the most difficult parts of being a woman is perception. (Really any human, but I can’t speak to the male experience…) Depending on the viewer, I am a wife, sister, mother, lover, administrator, artist, writer, musician, Appalachian kitchen witch, agnostic, Methodist, businesswoman, benefactor, singer, failure, genius, angel, heretic and… and… and… (yeah, I know.)
Yup. I’m all of that. The best people in our lives see the whole person. They love us for everything we have been and will be. Rarely – all too rarely – we meet someone who intrinsically knows the depths and the heights of ourselves almost immediately, recognizes their kindred soul and latches on like a barnacle to the hull of an ancient wooden ship.
The Professor is one of only two men I have ever met who would cackle wildly to Meredith Brooks’ song and immediately look across the room at me and laugh even louder when I’d scream, “SHUT UP!” Somehow, through abuse, trauma, anxiety, depression, loss, love, pain, triumph and even a little surrender, I’m still me. I genuinely LIKE me. I’m never bored and few around me are either.
However, as I say so often in real life, “We’ve all got our shit.” GenX (and those so adjacent they scraped their nose missing the boat) is in an ice skating death spiral with our parents who won’t die and our children who can’t leave. We caretake, we earn, we work, we give, we worry, we shepherd, we beg, we plan… it’s fucking EXHAUSTING. The reward in the end is maybe getting by… but definitely losing our loved ones to death or adulthood.
When we find each other – those who genuinely vibrate on the same frequency as we do – we have a debt to pay to each other. We’ve been holding this shit in check since our mothers were ordering speed out of the back of Cosmo. We were supposed to be “slackers” and instead ended up with the world on our fucking shoulders.
The positive part is that we gave ourselves permission to love without apology. Bands, fandoms, books, D&D, cars… whatever it is, we’ve found ways to connect with our own kind. It’s said all the time online, “Never apologize for your passion.”
You can’t keep rowing if you don’t have a paddle. For some of us, those rowing the heaviest payload, we need more than one paddle.
I have a husband who is absolute perfection. He is smart, kind, a loving and engaged father, a generous lover and he has unending patience. I also have… a Professor. To me, he is the pressure valve on my life. He’s endlessly fascinated with my weirdness and never gets tired of my nonsense. He adores me as his twin flame and – here’s the shocker! – he loves my husband too, because my husband makes me happy. He balances me in a way I’ve never experienced.
So, I have two paddles and I thank the glorious Universe every day for that. I couldn’t figure out for so long why I was going around in circles. Now I know – I needed both. I won’t apologize for it and I won’t tell you that you need to be what I am either. I’m just telling you… if you need two paddles, there’s no medal for going down with your ship. When the waves take you, there will be no one there to tell you that your morals were stellar.
We don’t know what comes next after we go. This could be all there is, but I can tell you with certainty that I know My People. These two men are My People. These two men would bail me out of jail, kiss me when I’m sad, take care of me when I’m old and hold my hair while I throw up. I’m not dyin’ for anyone, but if I had to go, I’d have two hands to hold onto. That’s the definition of a blessing and they’ll pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.
'Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it' - Terry Pratchett
The Professor's Convatorium 