ETcetera...THE OTHERWORLDLY REPORT

One of my readers wrote to me the other day and told me to stick to my dating stories and not rant about NASA. But every once in a while, I think something is more important than dating when someone decides to bomb the moon or someone dies and I have to attend the funeral. And although losing a dear family friend is tragic and heartbreaking, it forces me to take a break from the adventure and insanity of coupulation (my word.) So I was off to Arizona for the funeral that turned out to be more of a celebration and drunkfest which my friend Carl would have wanted. I could hear the words Carl would be saying in his southern drawl that I always loved hearing. “I’m gonna go run interference for ya’ll.” While I was in Arizona, I decided to take a short, but overdue vacation to Sedona, a New Age mecca for seekers and girls who have dated too much. I have always been a spiritual person, albeit a bit sacrilegious. I was raised Catholic and was taken to church in my mother’s arms. She coul...

I once attended a writer’s conference in Maui. There had to be over a thousand people there, half of them men. And I was attracted to one of them. Just one: the most dysfunctional, admittedly maladjusted, bipolar one of them. I could feel it when he walked into the room. He wasn’t overwhelmingly attractive, but he was wildly intelligent and a great writer. He didn’t use his real name when he wrote which made him all the more mysterious and deadly. There was just something about him. I had found the needle in the haystack and got stuck with it. I had found something that hurt without even trying. Call it crazy. I tended to call it chemistry (and fireworks that burned.) So I am determined to figure this out. Is chemistry a physical attraction or is it more? It obviously doesn’t always work to our benefit. In fact, sometimes it hurts (a lot.) Is it real or is it imagined? Does he (or she) remind us of Daddy (or Mommy?) Are we finishing (or unfinishing) some business in our past? If I coul...