On the ride back from Milwaukee, I noticed the low headstones in one of the cemeteries, and I got a sense, from the arrangement of the headstones, as if it were some kind of message, that one stone couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be any higher than any other. All of the headstones were low to the [...]
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I rake to enliven my lawn. I have a sense that raking helps the growth of the grass, that I’m opening things up for the surviving blades– providing space to breathe and flourish. It’s logical and might be factual, but I got the idea from my friend Brian when he and I were eighteen. He [...]
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I know I’m playing on someone else’s field, by someone else’s rules. I expect it to be difficult to excel, and I expect to struggle, but given a chance, I can win in foreign territory because I am better, more skilled, than the ones who made the rules. It approaches insurmountable, though, when the people [...]
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I feel calm and happy today, and for me to feel this way, on a day Chicago is soaked and draped in gloom, must mean my grandmother has her arms around me.
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
I’ve been getting some dislike mail about the grammatical structure of my posts, or that I’m sounding less coherent, and while I never found the need to defend my extemporaneous writings before, I probably should say that my entries are unpolished intentionally. I’m in the throes of a ten-step recovery program for writers who haven’t [...]
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My blog gets approximately fifty hits a day, which qualifies it as a personal journal, for the most part. The people who read it are people who care about me, people who dislike me and want to see if I talk about them (You (plural) know who you are.), and those who are interested in [...]
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Saturday, January 30, 2010
I was just browsing in my local Borders, but only because it was there. Borders is by far the most inferior of the book chains on and off the web. There’s no stock, their prices are too high for an alleged big book chain, and they brew terrible coffee. In my browsings, I came across [...]
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
When people like J.D. Salinger die, we’re not necessarily distraught over the loss as if it were a person particularly close to us. I think our sometimes inexplicable grief is a reaction to the thought that another piece has broken off the foundation of our frame of reference. Even in his isolation, a refusal to [...]
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The truth is that I always thought it would be cool to be a brooding, isolated person who was misunderstood by everyone. There may have been times in my teens and early twenties when I actually practiced this artifice on people with the convenience of being able to revert to my happiness. I had a [...]
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
It’s difficult for me to admit I’m getting older, or to accept it with any kind of grace. I have always been like this, though, especially with respect to my writing. The easiest way not to get anything done as a writer is to pick your favorite writer, figure out how old he was when [...]
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