This morning I woke up feeling weathered and old. I didn’t even look in the mirror, but I had this vision of myself with a sagging face and storm cloud skin. I felt washed up and hunched over. I felt like someone prematurely aged by booze and cigarettes and a graying heart. I don’t smoke…
Category: Dear Diary
Poetry and Alchemy
Yesterday I received a rejection email from a journal where I had submitted some poems. Last week, I got a rejection email from a different journal. I had forgotten about the one from a week ago – by which I mean to say I hadn’t even logged the submission on my spreadsheet. I didn’t remember…
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave My Job
11/17/22 Yesterday, I did a thing. Without knowing my next move, I gave notice to the executive team of my board of directors. It was a soft notice, not a hard two weeks. I said I’d be leaving, and I’d like to do so early next year (two or three months from now). I said…
Revisions and Deletions
This week’s “My Back Pages” list has been full of old posts from three years ago – apparently I was writing a lot then. Most of those posts are raw attempts at getting to the heart of the cognitive dissonance I felt when my engagement fell apart. They are/were my desperate attempts to understand, move…
A Spider in the Kitchen
When I was young, I once got in trouble and had to stand in the corner. Ok, probably more than once. But on one occasion, there was a spider in the corner and I begged to be allowed to leave. I’m pretty sure I cried too. Instead of reducing my sentence or granting me clemency,…
Sometimes on My Mind but in Different Ways
Last week I started texting with a woman from California. We talked late one night and I found myself frequently referring to my recent past as “a few years ago.” It seems everything in my life happened a few years ago – all of my dating history falls into this category, my recent jobs, my…
Galleon
An observation… I went on to a website (syllable count dot com) because I wanted to verify that galleon was three syllables (in my head, my bastard tongue and speech can quicken and make the word sound like two: gal yun). Most of the ads on the site were for a website called money metals…
Attention and Avoidance
The other day I went to the pet store. I needed to get treats and poop bags. In one end and out the other. 120 poop bags – that’s almost two months’ worth of shit that I’ve committed to picking up. The cashier was new and wasn’t sure how to exit the current register screen…
On the Quiet Shores of Melancholy
This morning I woke up from a dream feeling sad. A lot of the details escape me (duh, it was a dream), but the feeling lingered and left me a little slow and dazed. In the dream, I was friends with, and maybe dating, a very pretty and elegant woman (who might have looked like…
Thoughts, Coincidence, and My Brain
The rain started just after the dog and I finished our walk (fortuitous – this usually plays out the other way around). I’ve never been one to believe in fate or divine timing – I suppose I’ve always just thought of coincidence as coincidence. Though like most people, I find many instances to pause and…
Drivel
So concludes another week. Fall is here in its various manifestations – weather, twinge of melancholy, and officially in a calendar sense. It’s 44 degrees this morning – I’m not ready for the colder, darker days ahead. I’m not sure I have much to say here in this space today – though I seldom do…
New Year, New Look
A reasonable question might be how does one celebrate a TurtleSloth birthday? And reasonable follow-up questions might be, is it the turtle’s birthday, the sloth’s birthday, or both? The answer to the first question is, with great irreverence, of course. As for which came first the turtle or the sloth… does it really matter so…