Not an anniversary goes by that I don’t think about the crazy kids in this picture. This was before cell phones & cell phone cameras, of course, which means we took the picture — a selfie before selfies were a thing — with an actual camera, no doubt some sort of 35mm point-and-shoot, then had […]
We’ve always had a complicated relationship with Thanksgiving. For the first decade of our marriage, we spent each holiday traveling to out-of-state family gatherings, with all that entails. For the next thirteen years, we skipped out on the traditional trappings in order to spend time in the Sonoran desert, just the two of us, walking […]
Years ago, long before I knew there was a term for it — I thought it was a weird byproduct of my lifelong struggle with insomnia, with a sprinkle of mental illness — I started having intense lucid dreams. It wasn’t until I was telling a dear friend about my “weird dream thing” a year […]
I used to know someone who would talk a lot about “thin spaces,” physical locations where the separation between the physical and spiritual worlds seems slight. More often than not, I’d give her pronouncements a bit of side-eye, in no small part because she seemed to fancy herself a walking, talking “thin space,” a self-proclaimed […]
Looking back at old posts from along the way of Chelli’s illness produces such a mixed bag of emotion. Almost always, it starts with a simple and unavoidable acknowledgment that, my god, we’ve been at this for a long time. Sometimes, there are little details I’ve forgotten, moments that seemed cataclysmic at the time, now […]
In the early days of The Shitstorm, because I so often purged the insanity of it all into collections of words on social media, I’ve now ended up with a weird journal of “on this day” memories to track the trajectory of our haphazard lives. Some days, looking back is too much, the shrapnel wounds […]
[From November 7, 2021: One of the through-lines of our lives, certainly these last few years, has been the overwhelming amount of grief we’ve been faced with, each new loss compounding the ones that came before. A little over a year ago, weeks after returning from a restorative trip to the ocean, Chelli would lose […]
“Among women who don’t get pregnant, the abortion rate is zero.” I saw that quote in the middle of a Bulwark article about today’s March For Life and it got me thinking. For those “pro-life” marchers, if they really want a world with no abortion — as they claim — it would only make sense […]
[From December 17, 2017: I know I’m skipping around a bit, chronologically, but this popped up today in Facebook’s “on this day” memories and I thought it was worth repeating. I also thought, holy shit, we’ve been doing this a long time. Then there’s the fact that the pandemic (and, for us, a string of […]
[From July 12, 2021: So much of my writing in the months after losing my grandfather was centered on trying to process that grief. It was complicated, of course, by the isolation and general grief of the pandemic that was ravaging our country, but even though I spent quite a lot of time both thinking […]
Sometimes I ramble. 