In a four-month period between October 2022 and February 2023, I lost my oldest cousin, my grad-school roommate, my dog, whom I loved more than anything on the planet, and my house, to a catastrophic flood. I guess I didn’t lose the house. Not permanently. But it had to be largely rebuilt, and I was
I have had the same anxiety dream for, probably, thirty-five years. Since soon after I graduated from undergrad, I don’t think that It’s a particularly original dream. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have had some variant of it. I’m in college. It’s the end of a semester, and I realized that I
Back in 2003, when I was working for the duck, I collected a ton of business cards. Wait. What? You didn’t know that I worked for a duck? WHICH duck? Well, that would be this mothereffer right here: See, after the tech bust, I was one of a gazillion people laid off from their extremely
I wrote this originally as an exercise a while back, but I thought that it was worth including here because it’s still true, every day. I’m still a weird Scrodinger’s experiment of fine and yet not fine, all the time. I saw this piece of poetry recently, and I felt, well…seen. I have built my
I spend a bunch of time reading what people a whole bunch smarter than I am (at least in the ways of politics) think about the current state of things in Washington. My preferred drug of choice is Substack, where all the smartest of the smart congregate. I happened upon a wonderful piece by Malcolm
One thing you should probably know about me is that I used to watch soap operas. A lot. I watched routinely 3 hours a day during the summers growing up, and from 1982 on (the year we got our first VCR), I sometimes watched more than that, continuing probably till I was in my mid
Home is an interesting idea. I have lived here in Washington DC for 33 of the last 36 years. Before that, I lived in rural PA for 19 years, and in WV for two years. In the middle of my tenure here, I lived in Pittsburgh for three years, to attend grad school at Pitt.
I wish I’d kept track of how many journals I’ve tried to keep over the years, starting with that little white one in 1976 that I wrote in for about a week. Even then, I was paralyzed by what to write. Plus the lines were too small for my way-too-large letters. There have likely been
Author’s Note:Everything from this post through to July 2021 was originally written for a book reviewing project that I did for my previous blog, fiftytwo.blog. I wrote one book review per week for fifty weeks back in 2022. I’m moving those reviews here, unabridged and unedited, just so they…still exist. Somewhere. But, I am not
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