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 […]
I don’t remember how old I was when someone first told me I had a weird mouth. Maybe three or four. My dentist, at the time had habit of filling the awkward, sometimes painful silences with aggressive UNC sports boosterism. I was neither Tarheel born, nor particularly Tarheel bred, and when I died I hoped I would be less Tarheel dead and more “suite at Cannes, at twilight, surrounded by doting admirers.” So the dentist […]
It is a known fact that I am not very good at ending things. I stay at jobs for way too long and habits for longer. My tendency is to forgive, but hounded by memory, I rarely forget. I can get sentimentally attached to almost any object if I think about it for a moment or two. And on the narrative front, I have written many stories, plays and otherwise; every single one of them […]
In the beginning, I was not Generation X. I thought perhaps I wanted to be, because they all seemed to have seen The Replacements play live, but my birthdate but me outside the range agreed upon by the authorities on the topic—journalists, Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland, advertising executives, Billy Idol. Time Magazine and Coupland put the Gen X cut-off birthdate at around 1972. Of the two, I suspected Coupland was more credible, even if his […]
Twenty-five years ago this month my roommate and I received word from the Academic Advising office at our non-flagship state university that we’d both been placed on Academic Probation. They cited our poor showings over the last two semesters and poor showings they were indeed. Having enrolled full-time, we’d each managed to complete exactly two classes (both ones we shared—an art history survey on Renaissance and Baroque painting and a symposium on Oscar Wilde and […]
Tiny Commotions 