Dec 27, 2022Single Entry from the Abridged Index of My Mistakes: July 2022 (Nostalgia)May the bulldozers come for the home where I first crawled and stepped, young and teetering into the world (unbalanced), and where I pushed teeth from my jaw with a small tongue and tasted copper in the blood, and where the black dirt that fed the marigolds and azaleas was…1 min read1 min read
Dec 22, 2022Single Entry from the Abridged Index of My Mistakes: May 2021 (The Planetarium)My 2001 Subaru struggles to keep up with traffic, so we kickoff another round of “my car.” There’s an old convertible with white walls ahead. “My car that blue Mustang!” I shout. My five-year-old son in the back repeats after me. There were rules to this game at one point…4 min read4 min read
Dec 22, 2022Single Entry from the Abridged Index of My Mistakes: October 2022 (Brushing Teeth)I’m just trying to brush his teeth, but I can’t. He dances a rebellion on the small stage of a stool instead. At five, my youngest is the melody of a song too big to be contained. He turns away from me and jumps just high enough to catch a…6 min read6 min read
Jul 16, 2022A Rational Complexity of Organs and ElementsThe answer to “How fast can it go?” is “How fast do you want to go on 10 inch tires?” Let me begin by saying that this does not end well. The 1965 Vespa SS180’s speedometer did not work, but then again, they never do. Even if it did, 60…Nonfiction15 min readNonfiction15 min read
Mar 9, 2022The Comfort of ObscurityThere is a cumulonimbus thundercloud that forms above the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia around 2PM almost every afternoon between September to March (taking a short break in January). This particular cloud is formed by the unique shape and placement of a pair of islands as well…11 min read11 min read
Dec 16, 2021Take ShelterFinding the beginning of the end of the world — I preferred to remove the desk chair and then squeeze my body into the small cavity underneath my father’s old writing desk. At 9 years old, I was small enough that I could pull my knees up to my chest and still have enough room to place a pillow behind…16 min read16 min read
Oct 22, 2021What I Said(On why I don’t write about the 6 years I spent working with adults with developmental delays) — “I’m dying,” I said, or more accurately, “I’m dying to”, which was different. This particular dying was a way of wanting. “I want to,” I could have said, but it was more than that, so “I’m dying to” was what I said. …3 min read3 min read
Oct 19, 2021Watching To My Heart’s ContemptMy earliest and most enduring strategy for riding out the pandemic was marathoning procedural crime shows. …Crime Shows15 min readCrime Shows15 min read
Dec 18, 2020The End of ForgivenessWhen I was 16 years old, I participated in a medical study on a trace element in the blood called selenium. They told a group of us gathered in the Budapest hospital’s wide conference room that we had iron (vas) in our blood as well as zinc (cink), copper (réz)…9 min read9 min read
Jul 22, 2020PerpendicularThe Architecture of America and Surviving the Second Wave — Sound engineers are leery of rectangular rooms with hard surfaces. A piano generates the same music no matter where it is played, but from there the sound strikes against either the carpet or the hardwood, a perpendicular wall or an angled one, and the windows or the furniture and so…Walt Whitman16 min readWalt Whitman16 min read
