Essays
A brief history of darts in the body
I started smoking, and I don’t remember the first one at all, but that is often the way of firsts.
Essays
Cheap McNuggets at the gates of Heaven
Tasting heaven only cost $.49, and each bite brought me closer to God.
Essays
Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away
Do you ever think about how the emotional core of “Such Great Heights” will never feel the same due to an alarming lack of answering machines? I mean, yes, sure, even without the machine it is still an emotionally resonant song about long-distance yearning, but that distance feels cheated now.
These Frameworks Labeled Home
The Weakerthans second album, Left and Leaving, turned 25, and I am late celebrating it. I started writing this on the day of its anniversary with the best of clear-eyes intentions. I started and stopped sentences, cleaned out spelling mistakes, went back and recompiled half-considered paragraphs. I thought about the
The Tale of Billy Pumpkins
The uber driver on our way to the Harvard bookstore didn’t know what a memoir was, and I’m still at a loss as to the chain of events that leads to someone being legally permitted to own and drive a car, but live entirely unaware of a dominant
Say you care less how I feel
Every interview I’ve done lately has been connected by a single, unexpected thread. A red string tacked to disparate faces weaving an unexpected story from happenstance and stray thoughts. This isn’t true of every conversation I’ve had, but enough of them have created a trend. I was
Blog Posts
Lessons on the posture of giving a shit
there is some power to be found in loudly and emphatically giving a shit where people can bear witness to it.
Blog Posts
Tramps Like Us
There should be a German word for having never wanted something, but needing it to feel good all the same.
Essays
Fix The Tracking
We can never ask AI to generate the past we want to hold onto, or the perfect world we believe was promised to us and I guess for some it is easier to hope that someday a computer will make this world perfect for you than to accept that real perfect will always be broken
Blog Posts
The road from home
I’m home, and I did not plan to be here
Essays
To recreate us
I love a song about the earnest failings of youth, because these are the years it is safest to fail.
Reachering a Mystery
I have spent the last week searching for something I know is always going to be lost. Not a physical object, but a memory. An idea of a face, warped and faded in time. The smell of an old living room, the one across the street from my childhood, where