After a full day of travel (3+ hours in the car and close to 7 hours on a plane), I arrived in San Francisco Saturday night. I had just enough time to check in to my hotel and Uber my way over to Oakland for a dinner date. We hit it off well, and had…
Category: Dear Diary
Unqualified
Sometimes I think I’m not really qualified for this job,the job of my life, I mean. “Homework” by Tony Hoagland Today, I felt wholly unqualified for life. I bounced between trying to write poetry, trying to write a post about trauma, processing the potential challenges of moving (tied to the post about trauma), reading poetry,…
Sometimes Expecting the Worst
Oof. On Twitter, I saw a poet say she had time to provide feedback on a few poems (for a fee). She was being recommended by someone else who said that after incorporating the feedback, all of the poems were accepted for publication at various literary journals. Despite being turned off by the prospect of…
The Day after Valentine’s Day (2023)
Yesterday, I thought about writing a Valentine’s Day post, or an anti-Valentine’s Day post. I also thought about doing a phone dump of screenshots of love poems (which quite often aren’t “love” poems). Apparently, the former poet laureate, Billy Collins, has been doing a video blog or podcast or something like that in which he…
Maps and Memories
I feel like I could have or should have been able to predict my afternoon slide into a slump. A slump that has, somewhat intentionally, stretched into an evening slump with a glass of wine. I wish I could describe the feeling better. It’s a bit of a hollow feeling and at times a desire…
A Good Week
It’s been a good week. Though it’s only part-way over and there’s still plenty of time for Chekhov’s hammer to wreak havoc: Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will…
Happy Sunday Y’all
You might as well turn back now. This is one of those list/update posts. As in I’m not sure I have anything to say, but having spent a day in solitude with good music and good books, I feel compelled to say something. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of songs from the band…
Against Routine
I have routines – lots of them. I say that I keep them or use them as a way to free up mental space for other things. Given my mental output, I’m not sure it’s working. I eat the same thing for breakfast almost every day: two waffles and two cups of coffee. On the…
Grouchin’ and Grinchin’
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…
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…