After my friends left and my pizza arrived, I had a heated discussion over economics with the couple sitting next to me. I’ve talked to this couple before (once) and I’ve seen them often. Like me, they’re Friday night regulars at the bar. The conversation began innocently enough – they wanted to know what I…
Category: Life
To One Day Have a Shared Language
I subscribe to a daily poem email list. I don’t read them every day. Instead, every week or two, I’ll read a bunch of them in one sitting. I did that this morning. In the bio for one of the poets, he wrote about how he loves when he gets lost in his writing. He’ll…
Stubborn Love
She’ll lie and steal and cheat
And beg you from her knees
Make you think she means it this time
She’ll tear a hole in you, the one you can’t repair
But I still love her, I don’t really care.
The Open Door of a New Year
If there’s a theme I’m seeing and feeling this New Year’s it’s to walk into whatever comes next with confidence and wonder. From a poem I saw published today, “isn’t this lilting world shaped as an open door?” and from a poem by Lucille Clifton: “i am running into a new year / and the…
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…
Speculation and Dithering: An Addendum
As soon as I hit publish on my recent post about dithering, I second-guessed how such a post would be interpreted and/or received. This happens a lot when I have concerns about who might read it or what they might think. It happens when I talk about any subject over which I hold multiple and…
Speculative Questions and Dithering Answers
The other day I wrote a long and rambling mess of a post about indifference as a form of accepting uncertainty (Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference). Or at least that’s what I was trying to write about. I was also trying to touch on what it’s like to try to live without expectations and how…
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…
Adjusting the Throttle of Indifference
Indifference…. we sometimes deploy it as a defense mechanism. We sometimes use it as a cudgel. Because it can be used in these ways, it seems important to be able to distinguish between real indifference and manufactured indifference. As a defense mechanism, feigned indifference – saying one doesn’t care – means they can’t be disappointed,…
Another Piece in the Puzzle of Becoming
A journal I’ve heard of through Twitter opened their submissions for a 48-hour window. I had until 11:59 pm on Monday to get something in. This seems to be a thing some journals do – open for brief windows. I don’t know much about the journal other than some writers I’ve followed seem to mention…
With More Enthusiasm than Skill
Twice I sat down to write about free speech, Twitter, hypocrisy, and whether or not a business should be forced to serve people when doing so would violate their religious or ethical beliefs (current supreme court case). I didn’t get very far in either attempt – a few paragraphs here and there about the state…
Learning to Tie My Shoes
I have days, today being one of them, when I feel like my life’s failures and frustrations are mostly the result of poor organizational skills and a piss-poor memory. There are times when I feel like I might have missed some class that everyone took – maybe in the fourth grade or freshman year of…