Rasmenian Detritus

No More Comforting Lies

February 2, 2026 by RasmeniaNo Comments

Two decades. That’s what I celebrated on New Year’s Day. Twenty years since I boarded a plane in Denver to start a new life in Paris. So many things have come and gone during that time. Lessons. Loss. Lifetimes.A few days after toasting that anniversary, I buttoned up my black suit over my very fancy Joe Strummer t-shirt and threw on my very classy black Converse All Stars. Then my husband and I attended a ceremony at the town hall here in Brighton where we became British citizens.Not where I envisaged things going when I moved to France in 2006, but many things that are part of daily life were unimaginable twenty years ago. I’ve been visiting that point in time a lot recently. Temporal landmarks provoke reflection. A brief regression to who and where we were. It’s not nostalgia, exactly. Just a side effect of crossing a milestone.I’ll be honest. I experienced severe growing pains during the first few...

Another Invisible Ghetto

October 28, 2025 by RasmeniaNo Comments

Hey, y’all... I wrote another book.It’s a novel. It’s also short stories. It’s illustrated. It’s years of my life distilled into around 300 pages.And it’s currently available for pre-order.However... if you are interested in obtaining a paperback copy before the December 2nd release date, you can get one. If you click this link here and order from my online store starting today, I’ll send you a signed copy that will come with some fun extra freebies that you can only get by ordering from me.Here’s a little more about it:The gloomy building behind the dying businesses downtown is a place mainstream society finds easy to ignore. When the young man in the third-floor apartment is crushed beneath the weight of profound hopelessness, a chain of events is set in motion revealing the quiet desperation of the building’s residents as they navigate their own struggles with love, loss, and the search for meaning in a world that seems to have forgotten...

The Road to Nowhere

September 23, 2025 by RasmeniaNo Comments

I hated Ozzy. It wasn’t his fault. The blame belongs to the man who tried to kill me. Like all mistakes, my entanglement with that man had a before and after. Before him, I was a fan of Ozzy. Ozzy rocked. He was danger and rebellion. For a kid growing up in the 80s, that was more than enough.1989 was a tough year. I played “You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll” from Diary of a Madman repeatedly. I mostly listened to cassettes back then, so every time the song reached the end, I had to rewind and find the right spot in the tape at the beginning of the track. After a while, your fingers learn exactly when to push rewind and play. Do that enough and the tape gets warped enough so that Ozzy sounds like he’s warbling from the bottom of a lake. I had a serious problem with authority figures and that song became another anthem in...

There Was a Girl

June 13, 2025June 13, 2025 by RasmeniaNo Comments

There was a girl with strawberry blond hair woven into a braid that hung down the length of her back. Her blue eyes reflected the sky and absorbed everything beneath it as she sat next to the window in the school bus talking about Supergirl and Wonder Woman. About Spiderwoman and Batgirl and how Huntress had the best superhero costume because she wore a purple suit with a super cool mask.She kept her hands tucked under the school bag on her lap. Kids are less likely to make fun of what they can’t see and this girl knew all about that, so her hands stayed hidden. If they had eight fingers and two thumbs like everyone else's, it’d be different. She couldn’t conceal them all the time, but learning how to avoid drawing attention to them became second nature. A word like "syndactyly" was too strange and confusing for the first grade.Every day, we hopped off the bus at the...

Art Awards, Americanism, and Arnold

February 3, 2025 by RasmeniaNo Comments

The art award was a big deal. The level of fanfare was off the charts. If you were one of the lucky winners, you’d have some fantastic swag to prove your artistic bona fides, including a Certificate of Recognition, a placement ribbon, and an American flag pin. Yeah, just like the one politicians tack on to their lapels to prove how patriotic they are.Most importantly, it meant getting your picture in the local newspaper.My family did the usual thing. They snapped Polaroids of me proudly displaying my masterpiece. My image was stuck on the fridge, mailed off to relatives, and forever immortalized on a plastic photo mug that sits on a shelf next to my desk as I write this.The theme that year in the Americanism Fine Arts Contest sponsored by the PTA in Mill Village, Pennsylvania was, “Look Out Your Window…”.When I looked out my window, I apparently saw my dog, a spider, and a barn. Or maybe the...

The Year I Forgot How to Live but Didn’t Die

October 28, 2024October 28, 2024 by Rasmenia2 Comments

No matter how things go wrong, it’s always a blindside. Life goes tits up on a fucking dime. There’s no warning. No easing into the skid. One day, it’s all systems nominal. The next you’re crashing down to Earth, staggering through the wreckage, reaching out for something solid to steady yourself for one goddamn second to get your bearings and reorient yourself. A daily routine is boring, but when it’s gone, you want it back as much as you’ve ever wanted anything in your life. We take quotidian predictability for granted.The upheaval starts because one day, something happens. Maybe Earth shaking and cataclysmic. But probably not. Most times, it’s a small thing. A sudden pain. A discomfort that won’t go away. Maybe something you knew was inevitable. The problem with inevitability, we always think it’s further away than it is. That we have more time. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear because the call is coming from inside...