1. The first movie I obsessed over, in the kind of way that can only be felt by the young, was Pump Up the Volume. It was the summer after my freshman year at Miami University. I was sober for the first time. I was home in my parents condominium, a place they bought not […]
1. The average lifespan of a white American male is 78 years old. I am 37 right now, which means I’m screaming towards middle-age. The halfway point. You know, if I’m lucky. It’s been a rocky road, though, so I don’t expect that I’ll get to live out that average. Not because I’m a fatalist. […]
General Butler State Park. This is my writing refuge. The place I go where there is no other place for me to go. The chaotic swirls of my life don’t find their way here. I am not sure why. I do not question these places. And yet I don’t always trust the quiet solitude. I […]
The night sometimes wraps itself around me. There’s an oddness to it that I can’t quite explain. Emptiness and hollow, a long, dark hallway. I think it’s way I don’t slow down. Or rarely slow down. Like a child who sprints up the stairs after flipping the light switch, desperately trying to beat the blackness. […]
There’s been only a very short period in my life when I’ve enjoyed flying. And enjoyed was probably not what it was. Probably fatigue, a soured relationship that exists near the back edge between the first months’ bliss and the final months’ disgusted disinterest. The area of empty casualness. My life in Berkeley involved flying. […]
Hello Students: You have all heard me discuss David Foster Wallace numerous times throughout the semester (including the class-opening essay, which I still encourage you to read). This will likely not stop during the last 8 weeks. I’d apologize, but since I’m not going to stop, it seems disingenuous to do so. However, of all […]
Jim Carroll died today. This is weird for me. But not in the same way that it was weird for me when David Foster Wallace died. Or Hunter S. Thompson died. Those two days were low points in a life that was already spiraling out of control. Dark, evil days. Those two writers were the […]
prologue. "It" is happening again. The "it" that is happens not as much as "it" used to. Which strangely isn’t comforting. The "it" is a creeper, lying dormant for long stretches of time. Hiding. Always watching. Waiting. Which is what "it" does. I know this about "it", which makes "it" not so terrifying anymore because […]
Nathaniel Hawthorne. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hunter S. Thompson. David Foster Wallace. These are my mentors, the writers in my life who have shaped my thinking, my narratives, my words. They are the familiar community of comfort, the places I visit when I’m lost. That they tell, in some manner, stories about the American Dream — […]
Today was a good day. That’s happening more and more. I suspect those good days were always happening around me. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to it. Focused my energies in the wrong place. I still do that from time to time. Failure is part of being human so there’s no pretense that I’m […]