I hate going through stuff and cleaning out. There are people who get joy from this practice. I’m not one of them. And yet, I find myself in the unenviable position of doing this personally and professionally. Personally, I’ll need to purge for a move. Professionally, I’m getting ready to hand the reins over to…
Category: Life
Saturday Night Phone Dump
It’s a long road winding under the stars type of a Saturday night. I have a glass of Malbec and am listening to slow, wistful, and seductive tunes on the stereo. The playlist is called Stay All Night after a Junior Kimbrough song. When it gets a darker, I’ll turn the lights down and hit…
Tripping Over My Multitudes
All morning… or at least for the first twenty to thirty minutes of it, I’ve had the Ben Folds song, “You Don’t Know Me,” stuck in my head. Self-knowledge and this ridiculous attempt we make to know others is something I frequently explore yet seldom have anything new to contribute. Meh – “the clueless chump…
A Type of Writer’s Block
We humans are, or can be, a miserable lot. The last few abandoned blog posts have all started with complaints about the weather. We had a string of 8 or 9 days where it rained every day – and for a few of those days the temperatures were in the 30s. By contrast, the last…
Driving Towards Dystopia
I try not to spend too much time worrying about the dystopian hell I fear is approaching: recession, mass unemployment, full-on economic collapse. I gave notice at my job just before Thanksgiving. About a week later Open AI released ChatGPT. In the few months since then, AI technology and the “intelligence” part of AI has…
Limbo Doesn’t Last Forever
Yesterday, I wrote a long and whiny piece about having too many of the “wrong” options for how I spend my time. I was feeling bored and cooped up and I didn’t want to be productive. The cold, gray day didn’t help. Underpinning not wanting to be productive was this emotional shrug that asks, “what’s…
Toxic Friends and Virtuous Victims
One day, whether you are 14, 28, or 65, you will stumble upon someone who will start a fire in you that cannot die. However, the saddest, most awful truth you will ever come to find – is they are not always with whom we spend our lives. -Hunting Season by Beau Taplin How should…
Reflections on April 11
The dog was already in my room when the alarm went off at 4:45. I lazed around for a few minutes before getting up and making breakfast. He spent the next hour and a half next to me pouting. It’s difficult to concentrate when he’s needy like this. Today is an anniversary of sorts. I…
Attachment and Erasure
This morning I cleaned out some emails from my gmail account. I didn’t get rid of many, at least not compared to how many are sitting in my inbox. My goal was to get to under 100 unread emails. Most of the unread ones are poems that are delivered daily. I succeeded in getting it…
April Comes Like an Idiot…
“April is the cruelest month…” So begins T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There has been nothing particularly cruel about April so far, but it’s early in the month and there’s plenty of time for the sledgehammer of life to take out a few load-bearing walls. Despite a few cold mornings, it’s beginning to feel a…
Bolognese and Sacred Spaces
The best Bolognese I’ve had was at an Italian restaurant facing River Road near Trenton, NJ. I think it’s still there but maybe under new management. It’s a stand-alone building next to an auto repair shop. It is dark inside the way Italian restaurants can be dark inside. The bar is black and shiny, the…
Power Outage
Strong winds passed through and the power was out for hours. Today I have food to throw out. There’s a type of anxiety that happens when storms hit. Once the power was out, I became aware of all the things I wanted to do that required power. Sure, it’s been days/weeks since I’ve submitted poems…