It is easy to find despair in all things right now. I know this is an exceptional bummer and a helluva way to start a newsletter, especially after writing about Elliott Smith last week which led at least three people to write and say "hey, you okay?" No.
Essays
When did we become so banal and unserious that sadness and the songs that sing it aren’t allowed in polite company anymore?
I'm prefacing all of this by saying I know I'm annoyed, and I'm aware of how often annoyed is the gateway drug to being annoying. Edging on frustration. I haven't had to think about gender for a long time, not in a
Let me tell you that I had big plans this week. BIG plans. A Tuesday newsletter. a Friday newsletter. I was going to write thousands of words, each one of them perfectly placed, no mistakes, no slips of grammar. We all have big plans and intentions, and just like the
I am returned from a journey home, and if you have ever moved away from home and then gone back to visit you know exactly what I’m saying when I tell you my chest is still recovering from the journey. It was a good trip, kind of the perfect
I’ve got a lot of memory loss, which is a funny thing for someone who writes a lot in memoir and self-centred stories to admit. I am my own little unreliable narrator, coaxed on by shards of memory and questions texted to old friends and an older sister.
I foolishly want milestones to mean something, less out of desperation and more from a desire for days and landmarks to mean more than they are capable of. Values I placed on monuments that live only as washed out images in the rearview, all half-remembered and fading out of
I’ve been thinking a lot about dads lately, which I’m sure is a by-product of moving through the rough draft and obsessive meandering of book writing (The Dad Rock That Made me a Woman, available….). Someone was asking me this weekend how I write, how I made
I'm going to admit something to you, a personal failing or at the very least an admission to having arrived late: I'm listening to Wednesday, and I'm doing it for the first time. Rat Saw God, the North Carolina bands fifth record, is last
I need another week before I can write anything here. I tell myself this every morning. Just one more week. Just one more. Very recently, I lived up to the looming threat of my responsibilities and filed the first rough draft of my debut book, The Dad Rock That Made
This is all artifice, it is beautiful for it, and we are lucky to be here together to watch a world of someone else's creation live and fade around us.
*This piece originally ran in Bitch Magazine in 2022. I wrote it firmly believing that a trans woman writing about Jackass wasn't going to set the world on fire, and it didn't, but it was nonetheless surprisingly well-received. I will never forget getting a text
