Who Might She Have Been?
I was born in the fall of 1974. My mother was a teenager when she became pregnant with me. Living in a small blue-collar town in Western Pennsylvania, about a year after Roe v Wade had been decided, she found herself with child and without many options. Abortion, while newly legal at the time, was still nothing easy to come by. In 1972 when my mother was still in high school, abortion was still unequivocally against the law in her home state. …
It’s Been A Long Time. I Most Definitely Should Have Left You
I just wrote a book. That’s where I went. That’s why I haven’t posted here. For the length of 100,000 written words — anywhere between 60,000 and 70,000 of which will be published — I dragged myself through a parade of my own memories like a corpse in a white coffin being drawn through the streets in a horse-drawn carriage. I have learned to live in memory, to let the past walk with me in the weary way that ghosts walk alongside those who are touched. There are memories in the silence, memories in the snow, in the cascade of…
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Sometimes it is neither patient, nor kind
My love lives far away so we spend an inordinate amount of time on the phone. Hours. Sometimes entire days working, running errands together. When the silence gets too much we entertain ourselves by posing absurd, impossible questions to one another.
“Okay,” one of us might say, “I’m me, but I’m really into golf. Like my whole identity is based around golf, I have golf friends, and wear golf clothes everywhere, even to formal events. I wore a golf shirt to your dad’s funeral. You didn’t want me to, but I insisted. It’s like how I deal with some childhood…
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On manhood and a single little flower
I recently travelled from New York City where I used to live to California where I currently live. In New York a winter storm had turned the city cold and unforgiving, making each journey outside feel like a chore. Coats, and scarves, masks and boots had to be donned in a lengthy ritual at the doorway. I grew up on the East Coast, a thing I constantly feel the need to remind everyone, and this is how I remember my childhood, or parts of it anyway.
I suppose there is a part of me that feels I am not a…
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I Guess We Can Learn a Lot From Buying An Appliance
My friend’s vacuum doesn’t work so she calls the only local shop that repairs her brand. On the phone the guy tells her that he also repairs laptops and collects antique coins, so if she has any of those she should bring them in. She asks me if I want to come with. I was going to stay home and write but this adventure strikes me as astonishingly more interesting than several hours alone with my thoughts and a blinking cursor. His name, she tells me, is Frank.
Frank’s shop is two doors down from a taxidermist and across the…
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Maybe You Don’t
My body holds traumas that go back further than I can remember and I can’t feel them. To not be able to feel them is, in fact, part of the trauma. See the thing about humans is that we want to live. We want to be alive, and together. We want to be safe and in love. We want to be whole and true. We want to be cared for. We want to laugh, be held close, be warm. We want to be together. These wants, I believe, are fundamental to being a human. …
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What are you working for?
Here in Northern California there have been tremendous windstorms recently, with gusts sometimes getting up to 90 mph. A piece of Highway 1 washed away and fell into the ocean. There has been lightning, an occurrence formerly rare for this part of the country.
A good friend who has moved out of the city and off the grid now rents a tiny cabin in the mountains. I go up there on occasion to write and help with some of the labor that comes with living off the grid and in the woods. Digging ditches to prepare for floods, setting traps…
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I regret to inform you that the politicians are at it again
Once again they’re talking about putting Harriet Tubman on money. What sense does this make? What purpose? Can we not think of a better way to honor someone’s legacy, someone’s work, someone’s life than to place her on money?
How about if we collectively and unceasingly worked toward the liberation of Harriet Tubman’s daughters and sons, her progeny? To do that would mean a dismantling of the systems that bond us to begin with. A dismantling of white supremacy for one — not just a verbal rebuke of it, but a floor-to-ceiling teardown. To do that would mean to dismantle…
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What is the perfect weapon for a break in shared reality?
Once again, I was thinking about buying a gun to cope with the possibility of having to protect my family from the armed white supremacist militias of which my state has plenty. But the morning I was headed to the gun show, it occurred to me that I’m a depressive sort with a fair amount of obsessive thinking and that if I had a gun in my house there’s a possibility I would start to think about blowing my own brains out. Before I even had the gun I found myself thinking obsessively about where the gun would theoretically be…
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The hypocrisy is the point
A favorite pastime of liberal Twitter is to point out hypocrisies and double standards on the right. “You’re mad when Twitter restricts free speech,” someone might tweet to several thousand likes, “but you celebrate when a baker is allowed to deny service to gay couples.” “You claim to hate government handouts, but you began your business with a government loan.” Or my personal favorite, “If those people were Black, police wouldn’t have allowed them to…”
Yeah. No shit.
I’ve engaged in this too. Who doesn’t love being right, calling someone on their bullshit? But the farther along we get on…
