Six years ago, I was having a cocktail with a friend. She’d recently crossed the threshold into Later 40s and was grumbling about the myriad issues that accompanied what she called “the slow train to crone town.” I nodded along, giving the occasional sympathetic smile or the expected “oh, yeah, totally, right,” but I was only half-invested. I was not quite forty at the time, and though I was the kind of youngish person who […]
I have a terrible resume. It lists exactly three jobs, one of which I’ve had (in some for or fashion) for over twenty years, some meaningless corporate jargon, an award I won in college, and as little as possible about my unimpressive college career at a couple of unimpressive state universities. I tried to add some flair once by with a section where I said Iiked rhinestones, unintentionally homoerotic religious art, urban decay, socialism, pirates, […]
Edwin Booth, actor, famed tragedian, theater manager, and Union supporter was in Boston when he heard the news from Washington. He’d living been in Dorchester with his daughter after the recent death of his wife, setting up for a show at the Boston Theatre in between performances in New York. People in Boston liked Edwin—he was talented, a rising star. I haven’t read the right biographies to tell you that much about his personality, but […]
So how’s everybody doing? I’m a bit rattled. I’ve been doing a lot of things that I shouldn’t—stress eating, stress drinking, stress shopping. I probably won’t surprise you to know that I’ve been handling our historic crisis (pandemic + election that may very well plunge my world into a level of sustained chaos that ranges from –depending on who you ask–a few burned out cars to, like, sustained battles in the streets) via over-consumption (although […]
My first election was November 1980. Carter/Reagan. My understanding, from a historical standpoint, was that it was an election in which a surprising lot of Baby Boomers, who all reputedly had grown their hair out just in time for 1968 and then spent most of the intervening twelve years experimenting with drugs, communes, cults, macramé, multi-level marketing and revolutionary violence (not necessarily in that order), suddenly discovered polo shirts and jumped ship because, I dunno, […]
They say, at about 6am this morning, Gloria Maxine Mitchell Altizer Moran passed away peacefully in her sleep. Gloria Maxine Mitchell Altizer Moran. That’s twelve syllables, at least three lives and five epic novels (maybe six, “Maxine” alone is worthy of a twofer). I always thought I’d name my daughter Gloria after if I’d ever gotten around to having a daughter. But I never called her Gloria, not to her face anyway. I always, only […]
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up at 3 at 4. Sometimes unprovoked, sometimes when the neighbors across the street turn on their floodlight and my bedroom windows glow silver behind the curtains, crosshatched with the veiny limbs of the tree in the front yard. I rarely try to will myself back to sleep. Instead, I rise and read or write until I drift off again. I pet Walter, who snores or purrs […]
My social media is a blur of memes and reading lists, of heartfelt pleas to listen, to amplify, to defund, to abolish. I watch friends get in fights with their relatives, their neighbors, a friend of a friend in a comment section on Instagram. Most of the time those relatives don’t say the really awful, overt stuff—though the Nazis and the Confederate Flag wavers and whatever unctuous post-post-modern fusion of has been enjoying a bit […]
I had a hard time getting up this morning. I read the news in bed, so I could have the option of turning over and crying into my pillow, should the mood take me. I didn’t. Maybe I’m cried out, dried out, not so much toughened up as turned brittle by Events. Maybe I’m too far up on the knife age between fury and despair to wring out any weeping. My life is okay, but […]
Over the last few days, one county, thirty-five miles and about 180 degrees removed, politically, from the overeducated, progressive oasis where I make my home, about 4000 mostly-unmasked white people descended upon a local track to socialize, crowd into the stands, and watch car races on a national holiday to commemorate war dead, hours before COVID-19 neared its 100,000th (reported) American life since, roughly, March. The smiling race fans, many of whom in a high […]
