Today is day one of Essay Camp. A few months ago I began following a writer on Twitter. I don’t know much about her other than she seemed cute and was living in Paris and was writing. She has something like 10,000 followers or more. On her substack, of which I’m a free (unpaid) subscriber,…
Category: Dear Diary
Daily Fifty-Two: Mar. 20, 2023
The black pickup truck with the rattling muffler rumbles into a parking spot in front of the dollar store. The decal on the back window reads, “this is what white privilege got me.” Trash bags and empty water jugs fill the pickup bed. The driver’s backwards cap boasts the stars and bars.
Goats on Van Ness
On the drive home from work today I passed a hillside where a few goats were grazing. Sometimes, the goats are out, and sometimes they’re not. I like seeing the goats. When I see them, I say (in my head) hello goats. Today, shortly after I passed, I tried to imagine the goats in the…
Hefty Cropping
The other day, an old friend texted a picture of the two of us and wrote, “you used to be hefty.” I sent back a photo of Wilford Brimley and said now I’m old and hefty. Fun fact: though he looked much older, Brimley was not quite 51 years old when Cocoon was released (I’m…
The Dog, Again
Yesterday, I wrote about the dog and the walks we have. Given that we live together, it’s a topic from time to time. We take two walks a day – every day. Quite often, they’re short walks because it’s cold and windy here for five or six months of the year. Because the roads were…
The Come Down
This is the come down. The moment of crashing back to reality where Saturday night entails listening to some music and Sunday will be spent doing chores and prepping for the week ahead. After a week of urban exploring, meeting new people, eating and drinking, and sitting outside at cafés in the sun, I am…
Be Here, Now.
I’m still caught off guard by how quickly negative emotions or something approaching nervous dread can creep in, pour themselves a drink, and settle in on the couch with feet up as though they own the place. Minor setbacks in the face of major change, or small realizations that none of this is going to…
Lovely, but Fleeting
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…
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…