Jordin Silver

(A ‘Memere’ is french-canadian for “Grandmother”. Many Mainers call their Grandmother a ‘Memere’….)

I just remember staring at her crypt, and being unable to stop crying. This beautiful marble top that would house my Memere’s coffin. I just kept reading the couple words over and over again……

“Lorraine P. Toussaint. November 18th 1933 – January 28th 2010″………

I kept reading over and over and over and over…’January 28th 2010…..January 28th 2010′…Hoping that I would wake up from this nightmare, and it would be January 27th, and I could tell my Memere not to go in for the operation that killed her. Wishing I could have known that date ahead of time……January 28th 2010….January 28th 2010…

She was my heart, she was my soul, and I loved her so purely. So purely. When I was younger I used to cry when we would leave her house, just because I loved her so much….When I would come home from Seattle, I would cry the same way, because I would be afraid it was the last time I would see her.

She battled cancer for 15 years, but one simple operation somehow took all the good from my world…..

The week of the 28th I had made myself a bunch of notes and left them around my house….”call memere!! call memere!!”. She was going in for a simple operation, but I always liked to talk to her before, just to let her know that I loved her. Her operation was on Thursday January 28th, and my first attempt at calling her was Tuesday January 26th.

I called, and the phone rang 6 times…I hung up…. It was very odd.. Memere was the kind of person who would pick up the phone before you even finished dialing….So it was odd the phone rang 6 times….. I called my mom and asked, ‘Where is Memere?’ She said, ‘She’s home, It’s weird she didn’t pick up!” I told her I would try her the next day…Wednesday.

All Tuesday night it didn’t sit well with me that she didn’t pick up…….Thought I don’t believe in a higher power, I do believe in fate (somehow)… I would later find out why fate had decided not to connect her and I on Tuesday.

Wednesday I was drunk and heading to band practice. I had a rough day, but wasn’t going to forget to call my Memere. I picked up the phone and dialed her, and she answered within 1 ring:

“Hey Memere, how are you?”
“Oh I am fine!”
“Are you ready for your surgery?”
“Yeah it’s not that big of a deal! I’ll be in the hospital for a few days, so I’ll finally get some rest!”
“Oh really? Well, maybe I can come get a surgery too! I’m starting to get run a little ragged!”
“Hahaha……..Oh, hold on a second”
“Okay”
“That is your Aunt Linda…Your Uncle Dave was in the hospital today, I need to make sure he is okay”
“Oh, NO problem Memere, I just wanted to wish you luck, and tell you that I love you. I will get your hospital number from my mom tomorrow, and bug you when you’re awake, okay?”
“Okay, I love you hun”
“Goodbye Memere”.

That conversation lasted one minute.. I can’t stop looking at the duration of the call on my phone….

I met up with my band, and we started bringing Marian’s drums up the elevator to practice. When I got to the right floor, my phone was buzzing in my pocket…..I looked at it, and it said it was “Memere”…

Now, my Memere never called me, really. Let alone called me back. I was always very good at calling her about once a week just to chat……So I found it very odd that my phone was ringing her number…Cos she would have had to have found my phone number AND figured out a way to dial out……

So I picked it up.

“Hi Memere, what is going on?”
“We got off the phone so fast, I didn’t want you to think I didn’t want to talk to you, and I didn’t get the chance to tell you Goodbye’..

Those were her last words to me…..’Goodbye’…..

HAUNTING…..

My family is big. Her and my ‘Pepere’ had 5 kids, each with spouses, and 5 grandkids. And I was the last one to talk to her……And her last words to me were ‘Goodbye’….She called me back, she found my number AND a way to dial out, just so she could tell me ‘Goodbye’…..

It was a simple surgery….This wasn’t supposed to happen…She was the healthiest 76 year old woman ever. She fought cancer for 15 years, and now she is gone…

I loved her… I loved her so purely. It feels like all the good in the world is gone, and it will never return. This is my first real close death, and first ‘wake’…

At the wake I just stared at her body, thinking, ‘ I loved her for everything that you can’t see. What she liked for music, her big heart, her thoughtfulness, what she went through in life, how she could laugh at everything, she made everything funny…”

I wish I could say, ‘She is in Heaven now” and take solace in that, and move on. Just knowing that she is in a spiritual place, that she earned by being so good on earth…..But I don’t believe in Heaven, so all I have is a giant open wound and confusion.

Where do you go when you die??

Isn’t it amazing? That thing that makes you who you are? That energy, that power that can not be found when you cut into a body….WHERE IS THAT? And where does it go, when you die?? It’s scientifically proven you lose 21 grams when you die……What is that 21 grams? And where does it go?

I find myself deathly afraid of the dark…. deathly afraid of the dark…..And all I want is a sign, but I am so deathly afraid of the dark….Every time I hit ‘Shuffle’ on my iPod, (which is filled with a lot of music she taught me about) I wait for a sign….. Did that song come on because she is with me??? Can she see me?? Will I look out the window and watch her walk through the moon lit Maine snow, and look up at me and tell me that everything is okay? Will she come out of my closet one day and just tell me things are fine?? That she is in a better place, and I will be with her one day….

Where do we go when we die?

Will I dream of her? Please, please just let me dream of her one more time, so she can be in the same place as me and I can admit to her why I was tired the last night I hung out with her….(I told her it was from drinking, but really I spent 4 hours lying in my bed crying about what life would be like without her…..) I never told her the truth.. I told her I loved her, but I never really told her how much I loved her…. How purely…….How real my love was for her… How life will never feel the same again, and it almost feels pointless now..

I’ll miss her shuffle…and the way that I could call her any time and talk about anything….I would go to garage sales and buy old 45’s that looked good, and I would tell her what I got, and she KNEW…SHE KNEW all about the music….. My band is based around listening to records in her basement with her, learning HER kind of music……. My whole band is based around that…making her proud…and she never got to hear us..

I’m devastated…Im distraught. I feel like a shell of a person. If I am smiling, it is fake, if I am laughing, it is fake, because it hurts so badly….I loved her so purely..

I got to write her eulogy…..After a 6 hours writing session with my aunts and cousins, we only had one paragraph left..The last one. I laid in bed, drunk and full of sleeping pills, just staring blindly at the computer screen…my fingers in position….and I talked to her….

“Memere, you were so beautiful. You deserve a Eulogy that the whole world will remember…You deserve one beautiful line as beautiful as you were…. I need to do you justice….” ….and I just cried, and cried…thinking of my loss, and wishing I could talk to her one last time and tell her how I felt……..I cried and cried, and then I noticed my fingers were typing…….When I wiped away the tears in my eyes enough to see what came out, I had written:

“The most beautiful words, strung in perfect order, could never describe how amazing you were”…

I know..she was old…she was going to die soon, but why…..why…..why? January 28th 2010…

THESE GOD DAMN CATS!!!

My girlfriend and I tried another brand of cat food on our cats… NO GO!! They only like the EXPENSIVE STUFF….. They’ve been starving themselves for two days in protest!!

I couldn’t take it anymore so I went to Safeway at 11pm to get them their expensive-ass cat food.. (Snobs!)

Go to Safeway, get the food, check out…….and my DEBIT CARD IS DECLINED….

Now I just checked my bank account. I am no where NEAR $0……so what the hell is going on?
Try it again, and it says, ‘can not complete transaction!’

I think all the regular Safeway employees were slaughtered earlier today and the streetwalkers took over the store…Cos the guy ‘checking’ me out looked like he slept behind the store when his shift was over. He had the ‘homeless man hat’ dirt all over his clothes and face..and that big ‘homeless man jacket’……He wasn’t even wearing a Safeway apron…..or a name tag!!

So I have a homeless guy ‘checking’ my groceries, the dude in front of me used an EBT card and the woman behind me was making CAT NOISES at my cat food….I should be the least embarrassed out of this entire group, right? Well I was mortified…….. My card just got ‘declined’ in front of a LOT of people….Weird people….but a LOT of them!

….but then I remembered getting THIS letter from Bank Of America:

(Basically it says they f’d up in some way and my debit card number MAY have been slipped…..)

So I tell him to ’suspend’ the transaction, get in my car and drive 2 miles to a Bank Of America ATM… Activate the new card, and grab cash out, then head back to Safeway. (Lets not even talk about how I chased some guy all the way into The Madison Pub because he left his debit card in the ATM right next to me!)

When I get back to Safeway, I felt like I had to explain my situation to this guy…Like he was judging me or something..(realistically I wouldn’t be surprised if he was walking around with a dump in his pants…he looked THAT homeless).

Not only did I say: ‘oh, Bank Of America sent me a new Debit Card, I had to get it’….. I also used my new debit card for the purchase DESPITE the fact that I took $40 out of the ATM when I activated my card!!!!

I felt like I had to prove to this homeless looking checker that I DO have MONEY…..and I didn’t just run to my friends house and beg them at 11:00pm for $20 so I could buy cat food..

FML?? YES…FML!

*As I am writing this, ‘Toopie’ is eating for the first time in two days…snobby bitch!*

I am a huge Beatles fan. I learned how to play guitar by a book called, “The Beatles: Complete Scores”. (Anyone who’s seen this book always points out that I wrote “The Bible” on the cover!)

In 7th grade I wrote a paper on how you could change the date John Lennon was killed, into my date of birth just by moving a few numbers….Creepy, right? (That bitch teacher gave me a D…. Apparently I was supposed to write the paper on Madagascar, but that was boring!)

Anyways. I’ve heard every single Beatles song ever recorded on their albums…..Every song EXCEPT one……”Eleanor Rigby”.

You can decide if the idea is romantic or cheesy…But I wanted there to be one Beatles Song that I have never heard…A classic….That one day, I could finally enjoy at a really important point in my life. As some kind of ‘reward’…

All my BAD friends that I shouldn’t hang out with try to trick me by playing it..I always run out of the room!

I’ve heard the beginning, I know how the song goes, but I have never heard the Beatles Version all the way through from beginning to end……

Oh no! What if I get a job at a station that plays “Eleanor Rigby?”……hmmm…..It’d be a funny vlog..

JUST HAD THE MOST ANNOYING CONVERSATION WITH MY DAD!

Apparently my grandmother asked him what being ‘gay’ means. And his response was, ’she’s just good friends with this girl!’. Which is annoying because I’m sure my grandmother knows what GAY means! She’s old, not stupid!

Then he told me ‘i’m starting to understand it more, but i would appreciate if you just didn’t tell her what it was when you call her!’…

I’ve NEVER told THAT grandmother that I was gay OR that I had a girlfriend (I just avoided it…But if it came up, YES I would tell her!)

So then (because my father is religious) I threw back, ‘I’m 27 and I am not going to hide who I am at this point. If that ruins my relationship with her, it’s her loss not mine! I’m too strong to let people manipulate me and make me feel bad about the way that I am! If you tell me to lie to her that makes me a liar, and liars go to hell dad!’ then he hung up….

(gay people go to ‘hell’ too, but if ‘god’ is gonna be such a dick about who I love (cos ‘apparently’ ‘he’ created me AND made me this way)……. If ‘he’ looks down on the way ‘he’ made me, than he can go fuck himself.

(Watch the video with HEADPHONES and the volume all the way up…It doesn’t sound as bad as it is if you just play it on your speakers (unless you got bangin’ speakers!)

Apparently our upstairs neighbor is allergic to carpet?!?! What the hell???

Long story short: We pay nearly $1,550/month for a glorified studio apartment. Brand new, Hardwood floor, stainless steal appliances, frosted glass doors to the ‘bedroom’. We love it, except our loud neighbors.

Ever since they so courteously moved in at 9:30pm we’ve had problems. Twice I had to go up and tell them to turn the bass on their subwoofers down cos it was shaking our apartment. By the third time I had to write management. A few days after that they were working out HARDCORE in their apartment and it was making it unbearable to live in ours.

Now they walk like assholes and shake our apartment ALL DAY EVERY DAY when they’re home. We’ve videotaped them as proof.

So they called a meeting with the Building Manager for us to talk this out. The building manager agrees with us. She was horrified when she saw the video and heard all the noise……..

The meeting was 27 minutes of the ‘guy’ talked circles and saying we just have to deal with it…… Here are some audio clips from the meeting:

People in this clip: Ishmel, his subservient gf ‘Hannah’, my girlfriend, myself, and the building manager. You can figure out who is who by what each person is saying.

The full 27 minutes of the meeting is horrible. The dude talks himself into circles, and says things like, ‘we want to be respectful, but we wont walk lighter’.

Don’t really know what is going to happen. The building manager was getting quite upset…And Leighan wouldn’t let me put Ishmel in his fucking place like I wanted to… (I was about to, as you can hear in the last clip!)

UPDATE: The building manager called me and pretty much reiterated our same issues with the meeting. That he was being a jerk, talking circles, AND that it was funny he said he was allergic to carpet but has never lived in a hardwood floor apartment!

Ishmeel had to cancel the meeting yesterday because he had to work late, so we’re having another meeting monday at 6:30p. The Building Manager said that they will be served a ‘10-Day Comply or Vacate’ warning, to be quieter… So she doesn’t expect the meeting to go well.

My goal is to get a picture of Ishmel and to record him getting upset!!! Lets see if I can do it!

This ‘78 came out in 1952. The Ames Brothers – I Wanna Love You on Coral Records. I picked it up at the Antique Stores next to Seattle’s Underground Tour..

I had this fragile record in my posession for 10 minutes….Yes, TEN MINUTES, and I broke it….It has lasted MANY things, since it was made…Wars, Presidents, Scandals, Someone ELSE’S record collection.. It probably has quite the story of where it’s been since it was made…..AND IT TOOK ME TEN MINUTES OF OWNING IT TO BREAK IT!

This piece of plastic is the same age as my FATHER!

I must have been HITLER in my past life or something, to have such bad luck!!!  (PS-this record was made 7 years after Hitler killed himself!)

This is my new favorite thing in the ENTIRE world. It’s called USTREAM.

Basically it’s an iPhone APP, that uses your iPhone videocamera to broadcast LIVE to USTREAM.COM (so it’s like a real-time vlog)  I’m gonna start using it all the time (when appropriate)….it sends out a tweet and facebook update when I’m live.

(I’ll delete the tweet+post when I am not live anymore! So if you see a post, I’m using it and being a fool!!) (ps-my girlfriend HATES this!)

Stream videos at Ustream

(if only I had Heidi Klum’s face!! I would be the total package!)

FAMILY BONUS:

I was asked to fill in for harms last night. I miss being on air… Here are some highlights: