Category: Uncategorized

Still Here. Barely.

I shaved my head last Monday.

Not for fashion. Not for a dare. Not for reinvention as some shiny little brand strategy.

I did it because my body needed a receipt.
Because my heart kept whispering, we are letting go now, and I needed my scalp to sign the paperwork.

Gizmo died.

Sundance ended. Not just the festival, but the way of it here. The particular Utah snowglobe version where I knew the back hallways, the green rooms, the secret shortcuts, the faces that needed feeding, the ones that needed a tissue, the ones that needed a firm hand on the shoulder and a “drink some water, babe, I’ve got you.” Ten days of taking care of everyone… and then suddenly the lights go out and you’re standing in a quiet room full of empty chairs, holding a lanyard like it’s a relic.

And Burning Man? I closed that chapter too. I am not going back this year. I can feel the hinge click. I can feel the door seal. I can feel the desert wind on the other side and I’m not stepping into it. I’m finished. I’m choosing something new even though I don’t yet know what “new” looks like.

Also, because life has a sense of timing that is either comedic or cruel (or both), my credit card got compromised. So this morning I drove to the bank, bald as bald can be, and I started thinking about what it would be to make a documentary of my life.

Not the highlight reel. Not the montage where the camera pans across costumes and concerts and glamorous chaos.

More like… the witness list.

Because if you really wanted to tell the story of me, you would have to find the people I have helped along the way. The ones who would say: she showed up. She filled the gap. She made it happen. She walked into the mess and started organizing the corners. She brought the water. She brought the snacks. She brought the extra phone charger, the spare hoodie, the peppermint oil, the hand on your back when you were about to fold.

I’m the fill-in-the-blank fairy.

Sundance Fairy.
Fluffer Fairy.
Share Your Sandwiches Fairy.
Missing-person search Fairy.
“Let me just handle it” Fairy.
“Here, eat something” Fairy.
“Breathe with me” Fairy.

And I never, ever, ever accept payment. I have built an entire life on the belief that if I keep giving, the universe will keep providing, and maddeningly… it does. It really does. Doors open. Tables appear. Someone hands me exactly what I need right when my hands are empty.

I’ve trusted that so hard that it became my religion.

Even back on Grateful Dead tour, even in those long-ago days when everything was loud and wild and starry and half-improvised, I was still taking care of people. I made Clyde’s Cookies on tour, vegan, organic chocolate chip cookies, because I needed a way to support myself, yes, but also because it was a survival mechanism. A nervous system strategy. A way to stay steady in the swirl. A way to love people and the planet at the same time. Those cookies ended up in cafés all over Santa Cruz even when the Dead weren’t touring. Little brown-sugar love letters in a world that moves too fast.

I have been in service most of my life. I don’t say that with a halo. I say it with the honesty of someone who knows service can be both medicine and the perfect hiding place.

Because here’s the part I’m trying to tell the truth about:

Right now, I feel broken.

Like… really broken.

Not “I’m having a hard day” broken. Not “I just need a bath and a nap” broken.

More like: I cry over silly things. A song lyric. A dog on a porch. A stranger’s hands. The way light hits a kitchen counter. I cry because my heart is full of endings and my body doesn’t know where to put them. I cry because I can’t fix any of the big things right now, and I am a person who has built a whole identity around fixing. I just can’t seem to find the Nakedjen superglue AND the duct tape.

The world is hurting. It really and truly is. There is a real revolution happening and I am paying attention. I am not looking away. I can feel the instability in the air like static. I can feel the grief in the streets. I can feel the fear. I can feel the fire. Sometimes it feels like the whole planet is holding its breath, waiting to see who will choose cruelty and who will choose care.

I want to be the person who chooses care.

I am still that person.

I’m just… shaky.

I’m alive, but barely. Tender as an overcooked beet. Raw in a way that surprises me. Not numb, not detached, not checked out.

Just open. Too open. All nerve endings.

So this is me, leaving a little note on the community bulletin board of the internet:

Hi. It’s Nakedjen.
My head is bald. My heart is bruised. I’m still here.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I know something is happening in me. Something is changing shape.

If you’re reading this and you’re also crying in grocery store aisles, or feeling oddly fragile in the parking lot, or standing in the doorway of your own endings… come sit by me.

No fixing required.

Just the quiet promise that we are not alone in this, even when we feel like cracked glass.

And if the universe has been kind enough to keep meeting me in the moments when I’m empty, then maybe it will meet me here too.

Maybe it will meet all of us here.

One breath at a time.

February 9, 2026
Badump. Badump.

Tomorrow is my birthday.

I’ll be 62.

And yes, it is also my father’s birthday.

Ironically.
Not ironically.
Kismet.
Habit.

A cosmic joke we’ve both been in on since the first day I opened my lungs and learned the sound of his name.

It is all I’ve ever known, sharing a birthday with a man like him.
And this year, as we all know, the birthday came with teeth.This year was very difficult for both of us.
Me and my father.
Two birthdays. One weather system. Climate change is absolutely real.

He almost died while I was sitting in Bali, on the other side of the world. I was waking up to roosters and temple smoke and offerings arranged like tiny prayers in palm-leaf trays. He was intubated in a hospital outside Baltimore, tethered to machines, his breath being borrowed. I was on the phone with my sisters doing the sacred arithmetic of panic: the shoulds and coulds and woulds.

Then I made a decision that still feels like the only one I could make.

I decided to live my life way out loud.

I decided to wake each morning and bow and pray to the Bali gods and goddesses in the best way I have been taught. I decided to place my hands on my own chest and hold my father’s heart in mine like it was an instrument I could keep tuned through devotion.

Because his heart is my own.
Let’s be honest.

I am not being poetic. I am being literal in the only language my body trusts.
Isn’t that what we do, ultimately?

We keep each other’s hearts beating. No matter where we are.
Isn’t that what love is?
One beat here. One beat there.
One beat in this chest answering a beat in that chest.
Call and response.
A long-distance holy communion. Take this beat. I’ll give you mine.

I can feel it even now.

His heart has a way of announcing itself.
Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night like a knock at the door. Sometimes I stop short in the middle of a busy intersection and forget the world has cars. Sometimes I stop dancing and just stare off into space because the beating gets so loud I have to listen.
Sometimes I have to just stop.
Because the beat is bigger than the moment I’m in.

Badump. Badump. Badump. Wait for it….Badump.
One beat here.
One beat there.
Way over there.
Wherever he is.

It isn’t easy sharing a birthday with a man who lives his life so loudly, so gregariously, so unapologetically. A man who has always taken up space as if space was created specifically to be taken up. A man who can turn a room into a story just by walking into it with that half-cocked grin.

The encyclopedia could probably use his photograph, worn and tattered and sepia toned, under the definition of: life lived beyond the edges. Full of hell. Full of laughter. Full of trouble. Full of impossible charm.

This little nut did not fall far from that tree.

This is the part where I refuse to make myself small.
Because tomorrow is not just my father’s birthday.
It is mine, too.

I made it to 62.

I made it here with my own two feet and my off-key singing and my insistence on showing up again and again and again. I made it here with love in my fists. I made it here with my heart out where people can see it, which is a dangerous way to live, but it is the only way I know. I walk into the fire, never away from it.

I have marched.
I have fussed.
I have fought for what’s right.
I have loved people so hard it felt like my ribs were going to crack open and let the light out.
I am still here.

So, Albert. Happy birthday to you, you CRAZY (all caps) beautiful human.
I mean it with all the love. With all the heartbeats. Every single one. Mine, too. Badump!

Here we are again, for another spin around the sun.

I can’t even believe it.
I really am so grateful.

Two birthdays.
One world.
Two wild hearts.
One echo.

Tomorrow, if you’re reading this, pause for a second.
Put your hand on your chest.
Feel your own drum.
Notice the beat that has carried you through every single thing you thought might take you out.

Then go live your life out loud.
Keep someone’s heart beating, if you can.
Let them keep yours.
One beat here. One beat there.
Badump.

xo
Nakedjen

P.S. Why today? Because Sundance. It’s basically my birthday party, my church, and my annual emotional car wash. I’m volunteering (!!!) and will be in Park City for the duration starting today, so I’m kicking the celebration off early and holding the bittersweet right alongside the glitter.

January 20, 2026
Pockefuls of Dr. King

Every MLK Day, these buttons come out like a small, shining ritual.

Like: keys, chapstick, dog treats, and then… pocketfuls of Dr. King.
I hand them out while I’m out doing service, because sometimes the only thing I can offer is a reminder you can pin to your chest. A little metallic permission slip to be brave in public.

These were inspired by my sweet friend Dave Winer (thank you, Dave, for the nudge and the spark). And now I’ve got so many of them. I keep them like talismans. I keep them like seeds.

The quote on the buttons says:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Whew. Right?

Not going to lie: we are in troubled times in this country.
Troubled like the air before a storm. Troubled like the kind of quiet that isn’t peace, it’s paralysis.

And I can only imagine what Dr. King would have to say if he could scroll our feeds and watch our headlines and listen to the ways we talk ourselves out of action because we’re tired or scared or numb or “it won’t matter anyway.”

But one thing I’m certain of: he would still be asking us the same question.

What are you doing for others?
How are you showing up?

It’s the question I ask myself every single day. Not as a performance. Not for gold stars. Not for the internet.
Just as a compass. A way to keep my heart from going silent.

So if you see me out there, doing my small bit of service with Clyde energy in my step (or without him, if it’s one of those days), and I offer you a button… take one. Pin it on. Carry it forward. Hand it to someone else when the moment asks for it.

Because we are all having one experience here.
And I don’t want to sleepwalk through mine.

xo
Nakedjen

January 19, 2026
Her Name Was Renee Nicole Good

This Did Not Have to Happen

(and this is where I am placing my attention today)

Her name was Renee Nicole Good.

She was a prize-winning poet.
A legal observer.
A woman who spent her life taking care of other people.

Yesterday, she was killed while doing exactly that.

She was not armed.
She was not threatening anyone.
She was not looking for a fight.

She was there to witness. To observe. To make sure that what was happening was seen and recorded and not erased. She was doing the quiet work that keeps the rest of us honest. The kind of work that rarely gets thanked and too often gets punished.

This did not have to happen.

I can’t stop thinking about how familiar she feels to me. A good life, but a hard one. A person who stayed tender in a world that rewards armor. Someone who showed up, again and again, even when it cost her something. Especially when it cost her something.

We are living in a time when violence feels ambient. Like weather. Like background noise. It seeps into places that are supposed to be safe. Churches. Schools. Sidewalks. Courtrooms. Places of worship. Places of care.

And our nervous systems are wrecked by it.

If you feel jumpy, exhausted, angry, numb, or scared, you are not broken. You are responding appropriately to a world that keeps asking us to metabolize the unbearable and then move on as if nothing happened.

What makes this loss so heavy is not just that Renee is gone. It’s that we’ve been taught to accept this as normal. To respond with sorrow but not with change. To call it a tragedy instead of naming it for what it is: the foreseeable result of choices we keep making.

This is not about politics.
It’s about how we value human life.

It’s about whether we are willing to protect the people who show up with notebooks instead of weapons. Whether we believe that witnessing, caregiving, and accountability deserve safety. Whether we are brave enough to say, out loud, that this way of living is not okay.

Renee was not reckless.
She was not naïve.
She was not trying to be a symbol.

She was doing her job.
She was doing her calling.
And she should be alive today.

So here is my very human, very non-partisan ask:

Slow down.
Pay attention.
Refuse to normalize what is breaking us.

Talk to your people.
Check on your neighbors.
Support the caregivers, the observers, the poets, the ones who show up with open hands instead of clenched fists. Choose de-escalation when you can. Choose care when it’s available. Choose to notice.

This is where my Love Is Still Beating practice comes in.

Every day, I’m committing to naming ten real, verifiable good things that happened in the last 24 hours. Not to deny the grief. Not to look away from the fire. But to remember that love is still moving through us, even now. Especially now.

Today, one of those ten is this:
People like Renee exist.
And they matter.

Say her name.
Honor her life by refusing to accept her death as inevitable.
Let your heart stay open, even when it hurts.

This did not have to happen.
And we are allowed to demand a world where it doesn’t keep happening.

**********

Here’s what you can do, today:

Pause before you scroll.
Check on someone you love.
Offer steadiness instead of outrage.
Support people who choose care over force.
Pay attention to what keeps your heart open.

This is how we push back against a culture of violence.
One regulated nervous system at a time.

January 8, 2026
Afterwords

I’m not here to write about how August was found.
That story is already orbiting the globe, carried by hearts far larger than mine.
What I need to write — what I must write — is how these last 24 days rearranged me from the inside out.

Because something in me changed.
Shifted.
Cracked open like a geode that didn’t know it was full of light.

For 24 days, this city — this state — this strange and stubborn place we call home — showed up with a force I was not prepared for. I’ve lived here long enough to be grumpy about it. Long enough to feel like Utah and I have an ongoing feud. But let me tell you something with my whole chest:

Don’t tell me this city ain’t got no heart.
I heard it beating. Loud. Unified. Unstoppable.

People I had never met became my family.
People who shouldn’t have had time made time.
People who were exhausted kept going.
People who had nothing still gave everything.
People who live outdoors — who navigate survival every damn day — carried the torch with a clarity and grace that humbled me to my knees.

Yesterday, on a hunch that didn’t make sense on paper but burned in my gut, I drove to Redwood Road. I walked into the pockets of humanity we call “the unhoused community,” gently, respectfully, palms open.

I didn’t demand.
I didn’t accuse.
I didn’t interrogate.

I said, softly, “I know the code. If you’re helping him, you have your reasons. He’s an adult. You don’t owe me anything. But his mother is on day 24 of her own hell, and she just needs to know her son is alive. Please. Let him know she loves him. Let him know it’s okay to check in. That’s all I’m asking.”

And something changed in the man standing in front of me — not his posture, but his energy.
It was like watching a lantern ignite behind his ribs.

He looked at me steady and said,
“I’ll make sure your message gets where it needs to go.”

I clasped my hands.
I bowed my head.
I whispered, “Thank you.”
And I walked away.

Hours later, August was found.
Not because of me —
because collective care is a force of nature.

Because Salt Lake City —
in all its contradictions, its rough edges, its quiet resilience —
showed the hell up.

Because people who live outside, who are dismissed and overlooked and judged daily, were the ones who held the line with the most dignity and strength. They are the heroes of this story.
Say it out loud.

And let me tell you what all of this did to me:

I have been the Chief Love Beet my whole life.
I show up.
I take care of people.
I fix the things I can.
I hold the ones I love.
I drag my glittery boots into the dark and try to make it lighter.

But this?
This was different.

This time, I wasn’t the one holding the container — the container held me.

Salt Lake City held me.
The volunteers held me.
The mothers held me.
The grievers held me.
The searchers held me.
The unhoused community held me with a kind of honor I will never forget.

We cracked our hearts together like a chorus of fault lines.
We refused to give up.
We refused to look away.
We refused to let “impossible” have the last word.

I am changed.
I can feel it.
A new chamber in my heart, carved by 24 days of strangers-turned-family, by the hum of hope vibrating through every street, by the relentless love of a mother who would not stop.

August is alive.
And so, somehow, am I —
in a way I wasn’t before.

Thank you, Salt Lake City.
Thank you to every single person who loved outside their bodies.
Thank you to those who showed up even when it felt impossible.
Thank you to our unhoused brothers and sisters who carried this story with honor.
Thank you to the fierce, unshakeable ache that binds us as humans.

This wasn’t a search.
This was a remembering.

We belong to each other.
Still.
Always.
Especially when the world forgets.

December 11, 2025
💜 Purple Alert: Why I Still Search for August

People keep asking me why I’m still searching for August.

Here’s the truest answer I have:
Because I can. And because I hope you would, too.

Because if your heart beat just a little louder —
if you heard a tremor in the universe,
a missing pulse,
a soft human who hasn’t come home —
I like to believe you’d go looking.

Even if you didn’t know him.
Even if he was 29, grown, and complicated.
Even if the world insists adulthood equals safety.
(Trust me, it doesn’t.)

Sometimes a brain goes haywire.
Sometimes it lights itself on fire.
Sometimes a person walks away naked into the snow
and doesn’t even know they’re gone.

I know this because once — I was the one who wandered.

New Year’s Eve, 2008

(which was technically still 2007 because time is a suggestion)

I had just moved to Salt Lake City.
A blizzard.
No friends yet.
Just two black labradors — Buddha and Stella —
who carried my heart on eight paws like it was their holy job.

I don’t remember the seizures.
I only remember becoming conscious in the snow.
Naked. Disoriented. Freezing. Alone.

Not metaphorically.
Actually and literally wandering the city,
no memory of how I got there,
no idea where “home” even was.

I saw the glow of a Smith’s supermarket.
Closed. Empty.
But a payphone in the vestibule leaked just enough light
to feel like a lifeline.

I remembered one number.
Collect.
My mother.

“Mom… I’m naked and cold and I don’t know where I am.”
“Jennifer, you’re in Utah.”
“Why would I do THAT?”

She called emergency services from Maryland.
She told them where to find her daughter
wandering state-newborn and soaked in snow.
They found me.
They wrapped me in blankets.
They got me home.

And when we arrived?
Every single light in my house was on.
Front door wide open.
Two dogs sitting guard — waiting.
Holding vigil over whatever was left of me.

If I hadn’t found that payphone,
if I hadn’t seen those lights,
if Buddha and Stella hadn’t anchored me to this world,
if — if — if —

I could have disappeared.
Forever.
Just like that.

No alert. No network.
No hey Utah, one of us is missing — go look.

That is my WHY.

That is why I search for August.
Because someone should.
Because his mother deserves not to wonder.
Because he deserves to be alive and found if he wants to be.

Because there is a world where that night was me
and nobody knew to sound an alarm.

Utah doesn’t have a PURPLE ALERT.

But it should.
Every state should.
A Purple Alert for adults who wander,
who are neurodivergent or vulnerable or lost in the fog of a burning brain.
Not a punishment.
Not a trap.
Not a “gotcha.”

Just a net.
A community rally.
A lifeline in the snow.

It is not a miracle.
But it could save one life.
And that is enough.

I have systems now.
Layers.
If I go missing again — alarms will go off.
Texts will fly.
People will look.

Not everyone has that.

August doesn’t have that.

He is missing.
Still.
And I’m not ready to stop searching.

If you’re reading this, you don’t have to know August to care.
You just have to remember something simple:

There was a night I could have been the one you were searching for.

And every mother deserves to sleep knowing
that if her child wanders naked into the snow —
a city will rise like hands to catch them.

💜 Utah deserves a PURPLE ALERT.
💜 August deserves to be found.
💜 And any one of us could be next.

If this moved you — share it.
Talk about Purple Alerts.
Help me make noise.

We’re still looking for August.
Let’s not stop.

December 4, 2025
This is not the end of the story…

Today I hiked in the sunshine with Clyde.

It was a Tuesday — just a regular Tuesday — and we walked into the foothills the way we always do. Clyde investigated every sagebrush like he was conducting a scholarly examination of the state of the world. I let the sun warm my face and tried to remember that my body is real, and here, and mine. Two feet on the ground,

While we were climbing, my phone pinged — an email from NBC telling me all about Bravocon in Las Vegas. All the Bravolebrities. The VIP lounges. The velvet ropes. The Important Lanyards. The whole spectacle.

And I laughed.
Because there was a time (blogger years are geological time) when I went to events just like that — shipped home boxes of absurd SWAG because it was too much to carry — and once rode an escalator completely naked:

Down.
Walked around.
Back up.

A perfect loop.
A Tuesday.

I texted my friend Lydia — who works for NBC — and asked her why we were not attending Bravocon, because obviously we would be trouble with a capital T and a glitter cannon.

She laughed.
She agreed.
And I also reminded her — gently — that what I truly want is to be Snoop Dogg’s sidekick for the WINTER OLYMPICS in Italy in 2026.

And the best part?

Lydia could actually make that happen. Ratings Bonanza! xo

This is what I mean when I say: life is bizarre and beautiful when you don’t pretend to be smaller than you are.

After the hike, Clyde and I ran into Joesephine (hello, Love Beets) and through the ancient art of neighborhood witchcraft, we managed to skip the entire line at Coffee Garden and both got our coffees exactly the way we like them. No fuss. No apology. Just a little everyday magic.

Joesephine looked at me — the real kind of looking — and said:

“If you’re applying for jobs, only apply for dream jobs. Don’t shrink. Don’t back up. Don’t forget who you are.”

And here is the part I have been circling around:

I’m no longer at SLC Qi.
The ending was sudden.
I didn’t get to say goodbye.

There’s sadness there.
I spent years welcoming people, holding them, tending a community like a flame cupped in two hands.
To leave without closure feels like walking out of a story mid-sentence.

But this is not a story about loss.

This is a story about return.
To myself.
To spaciousness.
To possibility.
To mischief.
To joy.
To Tuesdays that begin in the mountains and end with delicious espresso magic and olympic-level daydreams.

This is the part where I remember:

I have a lot to offer the world.
And I am now available.

So if you’re looking for:

A storyteller.
A community builder.
A joy conspirator.
A dog-led pilgrim.
A woman who knows how to hold grief and glitter in the same hand—

I’m here.

Not under a bridge.
Not disappearing.
Not diminished.

Just in the doorway, barefoot, grinning, hair a little wild, absolutely ready.

The world cracked open a little this week.
I felt the draft.
I stepped toward it.

So stay with me.

We’re packing snacks.
I’m even making sandwiches.
Clyde is doing important sniff-based reconnaissance.
The universe is already rearranging furniture.

Italy just might be calling.
Snoop Dogg is warming up.
The glitter is unbottled.
The mischief is humming.

Let’s fucking go.

November 11, 2025