Suddenly everyone’s the expert on who’s worthy. Did you see any angry retorts a few days ago when three American scientists won the Nobel Prize for Science?

“I can’t believe they won! Dr. Rolf Torgenzeister was robbed!”
“That’s the only study they’ve done! What about Dr. Diddlehopper’s 5 studies?”
“We don’t even know how to use their findings YET! Why are we giving it to them now?”

Nope.

Go ahead and name the last ten winners. I mean…you’re all so invested in who wins, I’m certain you MUST know. Wait…no Googling cheaters. Yes, Nobel uber-fans, I’ll bet you had this announcement date written on your calendars and were awake in the pre-dawn hours so as not to miss it!

The fact is, you know you weren’t, you didn’t even know they were announcing it today and you can’t name the last ten. You probably have never even given the recipient of this award much thought in the past. No, this is just another opportunity for more sour grapes griping. Maybe he’s not your guy or maybe he’s your guy and hasn’t managed to fix your specific issue(s) in the whopping 9 months he’s been in office and so, as if this award has ANY relevance to that, you immediately scrambled up onto your soap boxes, suddenly replete with opinions about the F’NG NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.

How many of you know your presidential history? How many of you that it took Kennedy a full 18 months to turn the economic situation of our country around during his term? How many of you have read about how long it took Reagan to achieve what he did? How many of you read ACTUAL presidential history instead of re-blogging all of this flame-speech stuff without checking the sources and spouting a bunch of negative hate-speech about EVERY F’NG THING that the guys does or in this case….had nothing to do with!!! The guy accepted the prize with humility and vowed to live up to it. What in the HELL would have had him do different? Reject it? Claim it proudly and NOT acknowledge that it seems to be a premature honor? Ridiculous.

There is no way on earth for the guy to win. The constant sour grapes rhetoric coming from a faction of the Right and impatient liberals is an embarrassment to our country. By all means disagree, but good God, disagree respectfully and when, oh I dunno….it’s RELEVANT to your cause?

Listen, I’m completely annoyed with the guy for putting off his meeting with the Dalai Lama, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner, until after his meeting with China and went to the White House website and submitted a letter addressing that fact. So this announcement is completely relevant to my issue with our president and yet my response to hearing that he won today wasn’t:

“What? F him! He canceled his meeting with a Nobel Prize winner! He doesn’t deserve it!”.

No, to the contrary I actually thought:

“Really? Already? Well, good. Hopefully this will give him greater perspective and drive in the area of world peace and perhaps he’ll re-think putting off the Dalai Lama.”

At the end of the day, an American won the Nobel Peace Prize. From the sound of his acceptance, he accepted it humbly and admitted that he feels unworthy and intends to earn the worthiness. Where I come from, this is a positive.

My two cents? Stop mixing politics into EVERYTHING, stop making America look like a nation of douche bags who can’t unite even on something like THIS and have some F’ng pride.

Well, that's one way of tackling the problem...

I spotted this dumpster while on a walk in Hollywood. I had to take a picture of it because it was so wrong and so right all at once…

Captain America Walks To Work

This picture would be so perfect if only you could see clearly the energy drink in his left hand and the cigarette gripped tightly in his right. It’s even rough out there for super heroes folks.

That said, I direct the following to those frightened folks:

I have to believe that you are aware that people marry everyday for money. Individuals cut deals to marry for one or the other’s ability to gain citizenship. Pairs plan hasty nuptials in Vegas chapels and dingy courtrooms because of jealousy, control & unplanned pregnancies. Most of these unions lacking sanctity, devoid of love, absent friendship and devotion…taking place every day, over and over and over. People you don’t know. People you’ll never meet. Crimes against the “sanctity” of marriage taking place on a regular basis. But hallelujah, these crime sprees are being carried out by a man and a woman, so we can all call it good.

So I ask you…did you wake up any less married today because maybe someone a few blocks away married out of necessity? Are the vast numbers of marriages of convenience decreasing the significance of that band of gold on your hand? Do your marital vows now wobble, weakened by the blows the institution of marriage endures every single day at the hands of, GASP, heterosexual couples?

Where are your sanctimonious marches against the heterosexual people of the world who treat the act of marriage like a means to an end? Why aren’t your picketed masses huddled in the parking lots of Sin City’s drive through chapels or at the studios where shows like “Hitched or Ditched” and “Who Wants To Marry My Dad” are taped?

I’ll tell you why. You all say that you are interested in “protecting marriage” but you’re not. You’re only interested in keeping it away from gay people while the heteros of the world, who commit felonious acts against the institution everyday, go unchallenged by the hypocritical throngs of your religious “in” crowd. You’re divisive about homosexuals because they aren’t like you and because for whatever reason you’ve decided that it’s okay to give more weight to whatever part of the bible you interpret as saying that homosexuality is wrong and less weight to the do untos and the judge nots. The hypocrisy is astounding.

But thank Heavens (pun intended) there is an answer!

Marriage is a religious rite. That said, the religious groups of the world should be allowed to lay exclusive claim to it and to define its limitations and boundaries. But get it OUT of government and give it back to the churches. The framers of our great nation were quite emphatic about a clear and defined separation of church and state. With this issue upon us it is now easy to see that in retrospect, it was a terrific mistake to integrate marriage into the civic fray and to attach to it tax breaks and insurance coverage laws and the like.

So out it should come. Get your religious rite out of my government! Marriage should be returned as a religious rite to the religions and churches of the world and a marriage ceremony should serve only to sanctify a union in the eyes of their God and their church and not to legalize it. If anyone and I do mean ANYONE wants to legally bind themselves to one another, it’s civil unions for all, gay or straight, period. This would allow certain religions who are more open minded and open-hearted to sanctify gay unions if they choose and then those that do not choose to do so would not have their tax-exempt status threatened.

It’s a win/win. Free lawn signs for all.

It was dawn, before the vet’s office was open and I awoke to discover him in the startling throes of the dying process. Sides heaving, eyes pleading with me to help him as he stumbled toward me drooling and delirious. People are uncomfortable with death, with my telling of the details but I don’t care. I lived it. The reader can look away, the listener can tune it out…but not me. I was locked into that traumatic experience by the depth of my love for that cat. Sobbing the instant I saw him, following him every step of the way as he dragged himself from place to place in a desperate attempt to get more air into his fluid-filled lungs. Telling him that he could go. Begging God or the Universe or Whoeverisinchargehere to take him and free us both from this dreadful reality. I witnessed the panic and the pain of that wonderful creature’s last hour in this life with me and I held him in the cool grass of our front yard as his last breath failed him. As a writer I am compelled to retell it. As one who loved him and whom he loved back so much better than I ever could, I am driven to honor the gift our relationship was in my life.

For some of us, pets bring to our lives an added dimension of richness born of love, personality and loyalty. Truly these relationships never falter. Not on the pet’s side anyway. Pets don’t ever dabble in the moody or the fickle. They adore us unconditionally no matter our faults. We might be unemployed, unpopular, even un-bathed and still they delight in our company. Other than food, water and the occasional diversion the only thing they truly want is to accompany us through life. Prior to losing Flanagan, I always felt like two cats and a dog were too many pets for one single girl and yet strangely since he’s been gone there is a deep sense of lack. The loss, albeit a bit paler in comparison to that of our most beloved human relationships, is still profound and it bounces against the empty spot he once took at my fence when I’d come back home and against the quiet of the morning when he’d typically plaintively meow to be let out and it echoes back into my heart. The pain repeating and repeating and repeating. The intricate threads of a pet’s personality weave their way into our daily lives and for a time after they die those broken threads bleed an achy, melancholy sense of vacancy into our lives. Now I’m left wondering just how long it will until the bleeding stops completely.

Finn mourned his brother by remaining at his grave for days.

Please don’t mistake me. I’m not dysfunctional with grief. There are no contemplative glances at the razor or Google searches on noose weaving. I still laugh and tell bad jokes. My Twitters aren’t tamer, my Facebooking hasn’t faded. No, I’m still breathing and bathing and imbibing in all that I was before he left. I’m just telling the story of my loss as plainly as I know how. As plainly as I must to to honor that big, fat, sweet cat of mine and the tiny yet unbreakable threads that wove him into my heart.

I didn’t find him. He found me. I was at my landlord’s house which is on the opposite side of the block and as I headed to my car I heard a loud meow. I turned to find an orange and white tom cat. Scruffy, dusty and unkempt but teeming with amiability and warmth, he came right to me and I bent to pet him. “Well aren’t you sweet,” I told him “but can you please tell your brother to come back because we miss him?”. Three months previous another orange stray had come my way, so charming and comical, but with a penchant for wanderlust. I had considered making him my own and had named him Finnegan, but hadn’t seen him in almost ten weeks. I was sure he’d been taken in by someone else or worse, had suffered a more tragic fate. I gave this friendly new stray a few more scratches, climbed into my car and drove off. Hours later, when I returned to my house what I saw on my porch stopped me. There on the top step was the friendly stray I’d met at my landlords house and with him…Finnegan! His first act in my life was give me what I’d asked him for. This would set the tone for the kind of animal he was through and through.

Once, when he was still merely a friendly stray in my life, he arrived in my door completely wallpapered in deep, bleeding scratches from what was clearly a vicious fight. Without a second thought I ran a warm, shallow bath and placed him in it. He didn’t fuss a bit. While it was clearly a foreign experience, he trusted me implicitly and quietly complied. I bathed his cuts, toweled him dry and followed this up by putting first hydrogen-peroxide and then Neosporin all over his back and loosely mummy-wrapping him in an Ace bandage. He never once fought me. Never complained. Instead, he purred from start to finish. When my doctoring was complete he made for the couch and napped for the next five hours straight.

While Finnegan would leave loyalty offerings of dead mice and bird’s heads on my doorstep; Flanagan, a pacifist, would instead leave crumpled bits of paper trash that he’d fished from the neighbor’s trash. Daily I would open my door to a discarded paper towel or an empty candy wrapper, perfectly centered on my porch’s top step.

I called him the Ambassador. In spite of his large stature, tall from paw to shoulder and weighing in at nearly 18 pounds, he had no interest in fighting. I would sometimes catch sight of him sitting in our backyard passively observing all of the strays and scalawags. He was the first to attempt to socialize with them and the first to retreat if they balked. I only saw him fight when cornered or to finish one of the many fights that Finnegan had started but could not carry on his own. He was protective.

My neighbor’s yard could double as a wrecking yard. A jumble of non-working cars, industrial parts and decrepit homemade shacks, I tried to encourage my boys to stay out of there. One day I heard him meowing from that direction and so I went to the window to call him home. Instead I witnessed my cat’s altruism in all of it’s glory. He was standing in the middle of their concrete yard and meowing toward a junked BMW. Out from beneath the car emerged a small black kitten. After licking and nuzzling the kitten he meowed at it, turned on his heel and led it out, down the front of our property line and straight into our yard. Once inside the safety of our gate, he lay down and the kitten joined him. The two napped in the sun for hours, the kitten spooned up against Flan’s side. I loved my cat for the heart he had. That immense and giving heart.

Never was the size and depth of his heart more obvious than on the Tuesday after my father had passed away. I had been cemented to my parent’s house by the arrival of family and by emotional obligation and this was my first chance to steal away to my home and be alone with my grief. At this point in time, Flanagan had not yet officially crossed the line of “Stray Cat I Find Lovable” to “My Cat I Could Never Part With”. When I walked up my steps, he was there on the porch waiting for me. I let him in and then sat on my couch to just sit still in the silence. After a moment or so I bent down into my own lap and began to sob. Right away I felt Flanagan carefully get up onto the couch behind me and climb his two front paws slowly up my back. He then lay his upper body and head down on me and purred so, so loudly. He stayed there without moving while I cried and when I stopped, he climbed down and lay beside me. It was such an obvious act of comfort. I decided in that moment that he was mine. He never again repeated that act, but throughout the years when I would cry openly, he would come from where ever he was in the house to lie beside me while I wept. In the deepest part of me I have always felt that that cat was a gift that the Universe sent my way to comfort and love me in the same calm, steady way my father once had. My Dad passed on April 16, making that Tuesday’s date April the 20th. I lost Flanagan on April 20th exactly five years later.

When he’d get sick or injured and a substantial vet bill had to be paid, people would comment on how lucky he was as a stray to have found me. But I know that’s not true. What I know now for sure, here in the wake of his hasty and heartbreaking exit, is that it was me who was lucky to have had the chance to share the space in my life and in my heart with that incredibly unique and endlessly loving feline.

Years ago my friends used to call me “Picture Girl” because everywhere we went I always had a camera with me and incessantly documented our times together on film. I had a particular proclivity for candid shots, especially those depicting laughter. For me, every photograph containing a moment of genuine mirth immediately communicates to me in a way that other photos do not.

My friend Courtney is a fantastic photographer. Though an amateur beginner, she is already absolutely adept at capturing the magic of everyday moments and objects. Every time I see one of her newest pictures on Facebook, I immediately know something about her day in a way that requires no accompanying language. This made me realize that my blog in its current state, absent of photographs, is lacking a deep and vibrant aspect of communication.

So from now on by God my blogs are going to contain photos! One, maybe two shots that hopefully bring a kind of immediacy that my prose alone cannot.

Until then – I’ll heist one of Courtney’s to enliven my page:

Jack Henry's High Chair

Parents part ways. Friends fight. Lovers leave.

Each of our lives, start to finish, replete with exits.

Here and there it’s a happy thing, but more often than not we’re sorry to see it. Sorry to have caused it. Sorry to be powerless against it. So sorry, most of all, to feel it.

It’s that feeling that puzzles and intrigues me. The woesome longing for something lost to us. A something that often we were living quite contentedly without, before having known it.

What mysterious bit of interpersonal magic unfolds to make another person so fundamental to our day-to-day sense of happiness? Why, in the wake of loss, are we pained by the strains of a song, the subtle waft of a signature scent, a stray pair of socks discovered in the laundry? Debilitating artifacts of what once was, waiting to be unearthed by the mere act of living.

Where does the missing come from? Is it born of our penchant for familiarity? Of a sense of ownership? Are we simply so averse to change or do we actually feel deeply entitled to everything that has belonged to us, even the intangible? The heart marching forward in spite of the brain’s retreat; stubbornly refusing to let loose the intertwining. Leaving us, for a time at least, conflicted and stunted. Spurring us to take emotionally clumsy steps backward and sideways. Thwarting our forward momentum until, once enough time passes, the memories haze and the details blur.

It is there amidst this fog that our brain is finally able to mount a successful intellectual coup against the heart’s rule of sentimentality and habit. Bit by bit we begin to move forward into our lives with fluidity, as we did before the loss.

The heart’s landscape blissfully free of holes once again.

I often wonder what all of the ramifications of that fact will be. How will that personal truth play out in my life? Will my heart be less complete if I’m never given the chance to experience the kind of love a person feels when they have children? Will my life be lonely because as my parents age and my friends and siblings build their own families, I will always ultimately exist unto myself? Will holidays as the perpetually single relative wear on me? Will vacations as the girl flying solo grow tiresome? Will I be able to weather forever being “Aunt Melanee” and never “Mom” without feeling that my life is lacking? Is there an emptiness that will come with having never been the main focus of one small human being’s love, having never felt what it’s like to be the ultimate source of security to a child from their very first day here on Earth?

It would be a lie to say that I don’t feel slighted by fate. In truth it feels something more akin to banishment. When I hear that a friend is pregnant, when I see them wipe a teary face or hold a sleeping, red-cheeked toddler a part of me feels like I’m on the outside looking in at the Parent Party. No invite ever having arrived, my biological clock edging toward midnight, my one, solitary ovary poised to become the proverbial pumpkin.

Today an old high-school friend added me on Facebook. After looking at my pictures she told me that she could see from my pictures that I’d had “a really fun life” and I could tell that she meant it. This simple statement hit me profoundly and launched me into reflection. My life thus far really has been amazing. Working in the entertainment industry straight out of college meant my life was filled with so many exciting experiences. I’ve shared a table at a sidewalk deli with Vince Vaughn, I’ve been to a Saturday Night Live after party, I’ve attended the Grammys in L.A. and New York, I’ve walked the red carpet at the Emmys, I’ve seen Tony Shalhoub streak the “Wings” set, I’ve chased girls around the pool at the Mtv Beach House while dressed as Butthead, I’ve handed Brad Pitt a Coke on the set of Fight Club and watched early cuts in the David Fincher’s trailer, I’ve been kissed by David Letterman on National Television and chatted up by Oprah during a commercial break, I’ve had my ass pinched by McGyver and have given golf cart rides to Damon Wayans and Paul Reiser, both joking all the way. I’ve been in a restaurant called the Buffalo Club while Sydney Poitier, Sean Penn, Harvey Keitel, Jon Bon Jovi and Dan Akroyd ate at nearby tables while I tried not to ogle them, I’ve done my tongue tricks for all of the Kids in the Hall, I’ve taken a workshop with Donald Faison and done stand up comedy and listened in on conference calls with Gene Simmons. Yes…it’s been quite a ride.

So I went to my online photo albums and tried to look at them with fresh eyes. As if I were someone who hadn’t seen me in years and were trying to get some sense of what Melanee Dark’s life had been like since we’d tossed our caps together so long ago. I looked and there it was. The fun popping and exploding off of each picture. Each shot exuding simplee, silly happiness. My life has truly been blessed with more fun in thirty-eight years than most people get a chance to have in an entire life.

And what of self examination? Living a life largely single has afforded me the to opportunity to truly gain a deeply solid sense of self. I can say without pause that I absolutely know who I am and who I am not. I have always been someone who longed to understand myself, to be able to shine a light on my issues and learn how to get out of my own way. To attempt to get to the end of my life as a better version of myself than I was at the beginning. But would I feel so self-aware if I were married or had children? Would the selflessness of parenthood have stolen the spotlight from my inner self? Would the expansion of my identity as spouse and parent have given me too much personal geography to map as clearly?

I couldn’t help but wonder if this is the trade-off. Could it be that the balance in my life might be found in a life filled with pinnacles? Or in the comfort I feel in my own skin? When I wake up on my last day, will I feel as much comfort in my memories as I would have felt in the final loving good-byes of the children that never were?

It’s impossible to know until that day I suppose. Until then I’ll get back on the roller-coaster and cross my fingers that the answer is a loud and fun-filled yes.

Prior to this mass electronic exit, I fancied myself a spiritually centered and stable girl. Seemingly solid in self-awareness and keenly comfortable in my own skin; if asked to assigned descriptive adjectives to myself I would have tossed forth words like purposeful, contented, relaxed, introspective.

Then the silence arrived. Only…it was not alone. With it came a surprising discomfort.

Amidst the blackout I realized that under normal circumstances I ALWAYS have the television on. Once under the false opinion that I needed alone time, I could now see that I had peopled my solitude with local newscasters, favorite fictional detectives, silly self-narrating doctors in scrubs and of course my constant companions; Oprah, Charles Osgood & Jeff Lewis. I wasn’t craving alone time, I was craving the kind of interaction that didn’t require any actual work on my part.

A fervent insomniac, I sleep with the television on. This affords me the opportunity to focus on the 2am re-run of Conan O’ Brien’s show instead of letting my mind focus on my life and its issues. With only Conan’s musings and antics funneling in, I can drift back to sleep free of angst and contemplation. Now my nights are interrupted by self-awareness. My days punctuated with yawns.

When I was not focused on Kat Von D’s newest tattoo or Ken Seely’s current Intervention I was writing blogs, Googling anything and everything that interested me, keeping current with all of my friends via Facebook updates and video blogging ad nauseum.

Surrounded by this newly din-less atmosphere, personal reflection has entered the fray. Am I really all that comfortable in my own skin? What personal truths must I be dodging so fiercely that until this circumstantial return to the prairie days, I have literally filled each waking and non-waking moment with noise? Akin to a child who is afraid of the dark, what self-discovery do I fear is hiding in my mind’s closet, waiting to pounce?

It begs the question; how much true alone time do any of us really have anymore? In this day of DVRs and iPods and cell phones and internet access in our coffee shops, burger joints and libraries…do we ever take the time to make ourselves available only to our own minds and spirits?

I miss television. I miss the seemingly endless expanse of the internet and the way it affords me immediate access to my friends and their lives and the world as a whole. But how do we strike a balance between our connection to the outside world through technology and our connection to ourselves?

Perhaps I’ll voluntarily remain in this electronic exile a while longer and see if the answer is hiding in the closet.

Those things stated; I hardly think the Dalai Lama could compete with my the state of contemplation I find myself in.

I find myself wondering for the first time what my purpose is. What direction am I meant to face? What goals am I meant to set for myself? Even in the most trying of times I have always felt the presence of design. But not now.

The predominance of my friends are or have been married. Most or many have children. Yet I have never been asked and am fast approaching the point of no return as far as kids are concerned. What can the purpose be in this? I long to have a revelatory understanding of the intricacies of myself that have consistently delivered me out of relationships. My career trajectory is stalled. Try as I might, the engine won’t turn over and I wonder if it’s because I’m pointed in the wrong direction, away from what I’m meant to be doing? Which leads me back to my original quandary? What am I meant to be doing? I can’t help but wonder if there are other women who feel like me. Is there some silent sorority of women who feel worthy of a life fuller than the one they find themselves in? Are there graduates? More importantly, will they sell me their term papers so that I can turn the tassel on my cap as well?

I think about so many things; about going back to school to get my degree. About starting over as a writer’s assistant and working my way up. About moving. About changing. About growing.

I wish Google had a life map application. A dynamic form where you could enter into it the things in life and in people that move you deeply and bring you happiness and a handy list of instructions to direct you to your new life would appear.

I think I’d even like that app if it didn’t work. At least it would assuage the boredom.

No one loves heartbreak. None of us holds affection for the smudgy blacks and grays that spill into our empty moments or for the painstaking process of establishing a new normal sans the one we loved. We feel more like a lonely stranger in the little places that we once frequented as part of a couple. Sitting alone at a favorite coffee shop or strolling alone down a street that we used to walk hand in hand down; these acts seem to intensify our awareness that the relationship has ended. In the earliest days and weeks of a break up memories of sweet moments pounce into the fray of our thoughts like emotional hobgoblins hellbent upon reminding us of the vacancy and its hollow, looming ache.

Gradually we grow adept at edging out those fairy tales. We banish the what ifs and the maybe somedays and we square ourselves with the reality that it’s over and that life goes on. We walk down those streets and revisit those little places and reclaim them; beating back the pain and building new history with every passing day. As the weeks and months unfold, we migrate back into the emotional Switzerland from whence we came and we fall back into the space between.

This space is a blissful place to linger. It’s that time in our lives when we’re no longer hurting over the last person and not at all interested in another. Free of pining for we you lost and of yearning for who we want, we are able to focus wholly and completely on ourselves. Distractions in this space are fewer and less loaded with personal quicksand. The roads here are less replete with psychological potholes and emotional detours. When we find ourselves here we should breathe and stay awhile. But a warning;  loneliness knows the location of this space and can slip in unannounced. Sometimes it wears the mask of the person we lost, other times it’s disguised as the promise of someone new.

My advice? Be still. Perhaps it will pass without noticing us and we will live to enjoy another day in between…for now.