Author: Nikki Nelson-Hicks

A friendly wolf among sheep.

Are you still in the same place?

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

This morning an alarm went off on my phone.

I was surprised since it’s a Sunday and I had specifically cleared this day to spend with my family since it’s Father’s Day.

I checked my phone and on my calendar it read:

I ain’t lying.

That took me a second to digest and then I remembered why I left that memo to myself.

Six months ago, my horoscope said that this year would be full of changes and that I should check back in on this date and ask myself, “Are you still in the same place?”

January Nik was feeling a bit down in the dumps and decided to put the Astrological Guides to the test and marked it down on her calendar to ask herself that very question.

“Are you still in the same place?”

Whoa, doggie. Let me count the ways.

Since January, we have skirted WWIII, a global pandemic has shut down most everything, Australia caught on fire, Trump is still Trump, protests and riots over systemic racism and brutality inherent in the system, and we’re still waiting for the Murder Hornets to invade.

But, let’s focus on me.

Let’s check in physically. I am currently 10 lbs lighter and an inch or so tighter thanks to Pilates. The blood work from my last physical was the best it’s been in years. My IBS has been pretty stable since working AWS (more on that later). Menopause is still doing its thing but that’s inevitable. I’ve been trying new recipes and eating healthier so that is also a big bonus plus.

Psychologically. Ugh. Well, that’s a bit of a roller coaster. Some days I am feeling pretty good, full of hope for the future because I am basically a romantic optimist. And then other days I go online, check the news and social media, and wish the Four Horsemen would just ride through and finish this farce once and for all.

Seriously. This is me

On the Creative Front, I go from a manic burst of writing and dreaming up New Exciting Projects!!! to a sluggish, what is the point?, editing and reformatting old projects. But I don’t stop because….Reasons.

OH! and I’ve also been accepted into a Bachelor’s degree program at University of Virginia. (First I have to do this stupid Bio101 online course because my math classes didn’t transfer but that’s a cinch.) I’m excited! I’m having my first advisor meeting on Zoom this Monday. I’m aiming for a Bachelor’s degree with a focus on Writing and Psychology. What I’d like to do is be able to take this training and use the power of Story to help people with mental illness or social problems. It’s a lofty, romantic and probably impossible goal but, what the fuck, I’m just killing time otherwise.

Regarding the Day Job, oh hell! I could never have imagined in a million years I would be where I am right now. It is SO SWEET. I wake up, roll out of bed, slap on some day old jeans and a t shirt, grab a cup of coffee, go downstairs to my home office, log onto my work PC and COMMUTE IS DONE! And, best of all , I have found that I am a viable and needed part of the office team. I never felt that back in the Before Covid Times. I used to worry that everything at work would go to AWS (alternate work space) and I’d be booted because, I felt, that I couldn’t do my job online. My days consisted of processing paper contracts and going upstairs 2-3x a day to “check the box” and see if there anything there for my department.

It was like a tragic Russian farce. My job was to ‘check the box. It is always empty but still, it is my duty to….check the box.’

And the Covid 19 Pandemic hit and we were forced to change with the times. Departments scanned and emailed their contracts to me and I would route them to the appropriate signers. Weirdly, this caused my department to become more communicative with each other. Before this, my bosses really didn’t know what I did because, if I were doing my job correctly, they never saw the problems because I checked and fixed them before it ever landed on their desks.

So, this is a Freaking A Plus for me.

And I love staying home. I can do my day job, keep my housework under control AND even work in my stories. AND NEVER WEAR A BRA!!

And the wildflower garden we planted is blooming!

On the family front, we’re doing fine. Frankly, the quarantine hasn’t really affected us socially. It’s one of the upsides of being hermits. We’ve got our online worlds, books, movies and Netflix. Fuck, this is paradise!

So, I’m feeling pretty good.

And then I remember what is happening outside my gilded, secured walls.

And I feel a mixture of fear, anxiety and, quite frankly, embarrassment that I’m in a better place now than 6 months ago.

But maybe even all of that chaos and change is for the best.

Birth is a messy thing, painful and not very polite.

I hope we can say that, in six months, we are in a better place.

Until the Murder Hornets get here…

I Did A Thing

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

I called my sister, Melinda. “Hey, I need to warn you. I did a thing.”

“AWGAWD,” she cried out. “What the hell did you do.”

First, a little backstory.

Aw, hush. You ain’t going nowhere in the quarantine so, just settle down.



Many years ago, after putting it off, I enrolled in a college. It was a community college, Saddleback, I think it was called. It didn’t really matter because shortly after my registration went through, my mother died and that keboshed that.

A few years went by and I tried again. Enrolled, was accepted, registered.

And then I got pregnant.

Enrolled again. My father died.

Enrolled again. Another pregnancy.

So, in case you’re not keeping up, if I try to go back to college, a price has to be paid. Either a birth or a death.


However, after years of depression and just tired of waiting, in 2000, I put my foot down and announced to the Heavens and to the Hells, I was going to college and getting a degree and NOTHING was going to stop me. I registered and waited for the inevitable.

It never came.

3 years later I got my Associates.


So….crashing back to NOW.

I did a thing.

I’ve enrolled in a Fall program to get a Bachelor’s. It’s all online at University of Virginia. It’s a degree in Writing, so, yes, a useless degree BUT it won’t really matter.

I’m not doing it to be useful.

I’m doing it for me.

It’s going to be expensive, time consuming and who knows if I’ll even finish it but, fuck, I’m going to try.

And, now we wait to see if the Powers that Be demand that price to be paid.

To whoever dies or pops out a womb gnome……Mea Culpa.

Ugh. I get a little backstory heavy but flow with it.

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

I’m having an antsy day. Nothing really amuses me or keeps my attention for long. I was perusing through Youtube and found a parody video of the Phantom of the Opera tune, Music of the Night, but done with a Quarantine twist.

It was amusing enough but what caught my eye was a video listed below it. Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman doing their version of Music of the Night, O.G. Phantom of the Opera circa 1988.

A little backstory:

Just hold on a minute….jeeez…\

Back in 1990, I was 25, living in California, no kids, husband was off in Desert Storm, and I had a shitload of time on my hands. A friend wanted to go see Phantom of the Opera in Los Angeles. I was like, “Whatever.” I really didn’t care about it one way or another.

And then, I saw it.

Pretty much accurate

I’m a fairly obsessive sort of person. I measure points of my life by what thing I was obsessed with at what time. 11 years old, I was mostly in cryptozoology majoring in Bigfoot. Around 13, I was big into Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars. Rounding into my teenage years, I was into Dracula. WAY TOO into Dracula. At one time, I could actually write out his family tree. Yeah.

And there were my Jesus Freak years….

We don’t talk about that. I was a huge twat. Even Jesus would’ve told me to calm my tits.

There were a handful of other obsessions that came and went but, at the time, I was Obsession Free and feeling pretty good about myself.

Until Phantom of the Opera.

Gurrrrl, I went down a huge rabbit hole. I spiraled deep. And this was before the Internet so luckily I only had the local library and my the swamp of my own head canon to drown in. I played my CD* constantly, staring off into the dark as I created my own fantasy world, writing what would now be called Fanfic of the Phantom’s adventures Post Christine.

That bitch.

In these fantasies I replaced her (the bitch) as his love interest but it was never requited because….wow. Damn. What the hell Past Nik? Can’t even score in your own head canon?

It’s embarrassing but, fuck it. I own it. That is who I was. A lonely, 25 year old, fantasy driven kid dreaming of some ill fated love affair with a disfigured, definitely homicidal, possibly rapist, tragic Anti-Hero.

Hey, who hasn’t done that?

Crash back into Present Day Nik as I watched the MTVesque video of Crawford /Brightman performing Music of the Night.

A song, I also want to emphasize, that would grab Past Nik by her panties, twist them around my middle parts and pull me into ecstasy.

I’m not even joking.

During the high point (or low point depending on your POV) of my Phantom crush, there was concert in Irvine featuring the best of Andrew Lloyd Webber featuring, MY MAN, Michael Crawford. I scrabbled up my meager pennies and got a seat that was SO FAR AWAY from the stage, he appeared like a Pink Singing Blob on the stage. It didn’t matter. When I heard his voice, I felt myself become transcended. Listening to him sing Music of the Night, I felt like I was being pulled off my seat.

Yeah, kind of like that.

Yeah, it’s humiliating but I promise you there is a point I am slowly working my way towards.

SO, crash back (AGAIN) to Present Day Nik, watching the video, blah, blah.

And I felt nothing.

No. That’s not true.

I did feel something.

*DEEP BREATH*

I feel annoyed.

Like, seriously….what the hell am I watching? He’s a manipulative maniac pretending to be an angel sent by her dead father. She’s a naive, social climbing, theatre kid wannabe.

The candles, the gothic atmosphere, the cape, the boat, the flowing gown.

Was this my ideal of Romantic Love? Who was that person? Why did my 25 year old dumbass self find THAT attractive?

Kidnap me from my bedroom, gaslight me, murder coworkers, attempt to crush me with a chandelier, terrorize my friends, garrote my boyfriend, stalk, kidnap me (AGAIN) and sabotage my career?

Get the fuck away from me.

I’m too far away from 25 year old Nik. I’m so far removed from her that I can’t even begin to understand what the ever loving fuck she found romantic in such a character.

Present day me, 54 year old menopausal me, she doesn’t have the time, patience or the fucking energy to put up with that kind of shit.

I don’t want Romance.

I don’t need hormonal gas lighting.

What 54 year old Nik wants is someone who has her back, can loan her $20 when she’s short on cash, will rub my gnarly, dry, scaly old lady feet, watch Rick and Morty and keep my goddamn glass of wine full.

You can take your gondoliers and sewers underneath the opera house & shove it.

*CDs for the Younglings out there are round, silver discs we used to listen to music. Now, they are used mainly to hang on sticks and scare away crows.

Don’t want to crack the egg and spoil the fetus…

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

BUT

I am working on this new podcast project idea. I’ve gotten two scripts done and I’m carving out a 5 episode story arc for what I hope will be a serial drama full of high strangeness and wonder.

I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing but, hell, that’s never stopped me before.

A weird time for magical thinking

Nikki Nelson-Hicks

I have a horoscope app on my phone.

I use to consult it every morning after catching the bus to work to get an idea of what sort of day was ahead for me so I could get ready for it. It was a strange way of arming myself to do battle with the day.

I haven’t looked at it since the Covid 19 lockdown.

In February, before all the shit went down, I was feeling very low and I started consulting my tarot cards. Again, it’s a harmless psychological crutch. I don’t think my cards have any sort of magical divining powers; I use my cards in a purely Jungian vein. Taps into subconscious archetypes, helps me to see outside of my head. And, back then, I was in a whirlwind of despair, lost and lonely.

I haven’t even thought about flipping a card in months.

Isn’t that weird?

You would think that now, of all times, NOW is when I’d be consulting oracles and looking for some sort of supernatural signs.

But, I don’t feel any compulsion to do look for comfort in any kind of magical thinking tricks.

Where I do find comfort is turning off the TV, logging off from internet and going outside for a walk. The sky is blue, the trees are blooming, grass is thick and green. Birds are singing and squirrels are effortlessly leaping from tree to tree like trapeze artists. The air smells like honeysuckle. There is a cool edge to the wind to remind me that winter is not exactly done and to enjoy the warmth, sweetie and remember: weather can change on a dime in April.

When I stop doom scrolling and look outside, I am reminded that Life is all around us.

And, as long as there is Life there is Hope.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel the need to throw the bones to scry what might be happening down the road.

Now, I feel still. I listen to the wind. And I am content to wait.