There was a period during my youth in which having a midlife crisis seemed like a thing that all the dads were doing. Exact dates may vary, but you could probably chronologically soundtrack the era as starting with Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life and ending with Santana’s Supernatural (or, if you prefer, roughly The Sportswriter to American Beauty) and really hitting its stride around 1989, the year that produced the both the Mazda […]
I don’t post short stories here, but for completely stupid, Celebrity gossip reasons I’ve been thinking a little about love and violence and I was like, “hey, maybe people are tired of reading about the Oscars, and would prefer to read a much less controversial romantic melodrama about toxic masculinity that I wrote back in 2011 and which has nothing to do with the greater public discourse.” Admittedly unlikely as this may be, I put […]
It’s a Tuesday. A beautiful, sunny, slightly pollen-fogged spring morning in the North Carolina piedmont. I am in a Grand Ballroom in a Convention Center with more unmasked people than I have been in a room with since my last pre-plague rock show. There’s a retired college professor on stage giving a mostly bleak economic forecast and a brief lesson about the history of almost wars between Russia and the US since World War II […]
My heart broke about seventeen days ago. It didn’t go the way I thought. There was no swelling of plaintive strings, no tearful goodbye at a foggy morning train station, no devastating letter, no desolating moment of quiet desperation. I simply turned out a light, settled into a pillow, and instead of falling asleep, I worried, and fretted, and somehow conjured out of the darkness an occasional, random absence where once was a heartbeat. I […]
Early in our new dark age, when I still vacillated between making Chaucer Jokes and wondering if we’d have bloody food riots because of pandemic-related shortages at the supermarket, I wrote almost daily about what I was experiencing stuck alone in my house with a fat cat, a Zoom subscription and a couple handles of gin. Then as the seasons changed as did the frequency, what was once a daily mediation on anxiety, morality and […]
Books of 2021 (or 2021)ish Matrix Lauren Groff A historical novel set in the 12th century about Breton lais, sword-fighting nuns, the creation of a feminist utopia and borderline metaphysical lesbian romances that also features Eleanor of Aquitaine as bitch goddess from the ripe imagination of a contemporary American author who has mostly made her name writing about doomed romances in Florida and communes. One of my favorite surprises in just about forever. Alls Well […]
About six days ago, the nighttime temperature dropped, the humidity resolved itself, and the leaves on the maple over my deck trended scarlet. Fall, it would seem, timed its arrival to actually hit on the autumnal equinox—a rare state of affairs here in the North Carolina Piedmont, where it’s not regular sweater weather until sometime after Halloween. People rejoiced. Scarves were unearthed. Jackets unpacked. Some clamored for pumpkin spice. Others made fun of people clamoring […]
My mother calls them chihuahuas. The incidental problems jumping and nipping at your heels. They’re not big enough to take you down, but they can be annoying, and it doesn’t take many to trip you up and force you to fall. She’ll lament—the chihuahuas—at the end of a long day, exhausted. She’ll fix a martini to mute the yapping, and hope maybe, by the next day, they’ll have run after a new target and cleared […]
That was nice, right? In the fifteen weeks since second vaccination, still wearing masks inside, but like, kinda, sorta, almost living my best life, crossing state lines, hugging people, eating out, going to the bar all willy nilly without a care in the world. Well, pretending to not have a care in the world because throughout I was still reading the news as soon as I woke up every morning, and still looking at vaccine […]
Last night, I got distracted reading the news because it was terrible and instead started thinking about that weird period of time in the 90s when it seemed like Aerosmith was the biggest band in the world, but I had never met a single person of any age/musical taste who would have identified Aerosmith as their favorite band or even, like, Top Five favorite band. I’m sure they exist, obviously they exist in great numbers […]
Tiny Commotions 