Rainy Days
Driving in power storms isn't much fun. I know what hydroplaning feels like, so I never drive fast in the rain. I never really drive fast at all, but other people fray both ends of the driving speed spectrum in a rainstorm. Petey drives his F-100 at 70 in the left lane because he can. Betty pulls over under an overpass in a three-drop drizzle fest. Everyone has their own shit going on.
Writing In Oblivion
My old journals were for me. Writing is for me. I lost my way so many times because of the rigors of the Internet and the FOMO one gets from being micro-successful in a niche product that exists to resell you your own stuff. Building this site and pouring my letters into it is the antidote. I still harbor odd wishes that someone from The Paris Review or The New Yorker will happen upon this asteroid of a site and fall in love. Here, I wait.
Solitary Confinement
I used to cry when my kids went to their mom’s for their half-week after we got divorced. After I dried my tears, I went to Taco Bell, ate some in the car, and brought the rest home to eat in my underwear on my couch in front of the TV. It was hard to sleep without them at home. For all the years I found so much pleasure in solitary confinement, I never realized how lost I would feel in it as a parent.
Best Laid Plans
Some mornings you wake up expecting to absolutely crush the day. Then your kid is sick, your dog barfs on your shoe, your cat gets out, and your boss reminds you that you said you would be in early today, and early is in forty minutes, so you throw an Eggo into the toaster, and it shorts out. But your partner comes in, handles all the home psychosis, and lets you rush out the door so you don’t get fired. You get to the corner and realize you forgot your wallet, so you try a risky U-turn to hurry up. You hit the curb, pop your tire, and have to call a tow truck. Also, your phone didn’t charge and is now out of battery.
Things I Happened Upon
We used to hide our money in our dressers, behind our clothes, at camp. We did this because our counselor, the greatest man to ever live, told us that the Lewis Savings Bank was a scam. It was a fake bank at the camp where they kept your money. It was totally legit and safe. Our money would disappear because, as Burke told us, bandits found it from time to time. Some nights, in the middle of the night, he would bring us home fribbles from Friendly’s and introduce us to a random girl. None of us will ever face the truth, and we don’t care because the guy was a legend.
Autumnal Renaissance
I can feel it coming today, but the trees show no signs of the impending color changes. They are yet to paint themselves into portraits for the ages, with yellow and orange hues covering the background like a tapestry of acceptance. Everything looks better in autumn; even me. I open my bedroom window a crack to get a microgust of the future.
When Summer Was All There Was
I can’t say I’m proud of what we did, but I am also not not proud of what we did. Kids don’t have fun today like we had fun. In some ways, that is very good, and in some ways, very sad. I don’t want someone else to wake up to their stepbrother at 4:18 AM telling them he “parked” his car somewhere in the woods and you need to drive him back to find it. When I asked him how he got home, he said he ran five miles barefoot in loafers. I drove him back in my underwear and found his car so far back in the forest that it was impossible that it was there. But it was. And we lived another day to tell the story.
Locational Significance
I’ve wandered a lot in my life. My parents got divorced when I was two. I got divorced when my kids were four and two. There have been a lot of houses. There has always been one home. Or, in the case of divorced people, two homes. I don’t know that I agree that home is where the heart is because our hearts are constantly ripped and sewn back together, and the location faintly matters when the heart wants what it shouldn’t. So, I’ve moved around. Yet, here I am.
A Barometer of Hope
I look at the old versions of myself, as if they were hung in a California Closet and sorted by color. Some days, I mistakenly take out an oldie and wear it with whatever the smirk version of a frown is. A light frown because part of me still likes that guy. But when I put him away at the end of the day and become my current self again, I realize how far I’ve come.
Throwing a Football To Myself
I used to wonder if I was just making excuses for being lonely. Then I went to a mall again. Nothing I had ever said in my life had been an excuse. The tightrope walk of being human, for me, made other people en masse seem like an impish kid banging a gong while wearing headphones and also kicking at his parents as they tried to grab his seventh Go-GURT out of his slippery hands.
Sample Sizes
I know they have free trial periods for a lot of things, but those are usually a farce. If it’s impossible to return, no one’s going to do it, and that’s the game. You can return your sample if you play hopscotch in the rain, on a Wednesday in October, while wearing a down vest and holding an old TV antenna in a lightning storm. They know what they are doing.
Grandmas Walking With Weighted Vests
Weighted vests are like podcasts. Everyone has one. Your brother’s antisocial high school friend, Aaron, is now crushing it with an anthropological podcast about how humans evolved from chimpanzees. He has two vests in his hall closet. One is a blue finance bro vest; the other is weighted and black.
Hoodie Season
My memories of growing up in Brooklyn Heights usually look like Fall in my head. Brown, yellow, and orange hues, before the yellow moved to the snow on the sidewalks, thanks to all of our dogs, for the entire winter. The apartment buildings were the backdrop to nature’s attempt to integrate with the city.
Underwater Basket Weaving
I once took a full-semester class in college called Women and Crack Cocaine. There was a book by the same name that we read. It was incredible because it was so nuanced. The semester before I took a class called Deviance. I loved my second college and my advisor, Al, who taught both of these classes. I went from failing business college to straight A grades because of the freedom of choice. You’d be surprised what students can accomplish when you open up the bandwidth on their educational opportunities.
Everything Holds a Place
I have a small action figure in my office that I played with every day as a kid. I think it was from an emergency show, but if so, I don’t know why he looks like a redheaded lumberjack. Either way, he carries my childhood inside of him like a guy the size of Paul Bunyan who goes home to take care of a baby rabbit with a tiny milk bottle, and covers it in a fleece he cut to cuddle it.
Balancing On An Exercise Ball
When I was in my first semester as a freshman in college, my mom was dying of cancer, and I had mono. I slept seventeen hours a day and could barely wake myself up to watch Stealing Home and eat before falling back asleep. I started college by almost failing all of my classes and sitting on the baseline of the basketball court so that the other guys on the team thought I was some sort of team assistant. In my first healthy practice, I drained seven threes in a row in the first five minutes. Then I kept flunking most of my classes and floundered through two depressing years. No one even knew she was sick.
What the Signs Are Telling You
My grandmother has to use a magnifying glass to see things as she got older. For some reason, I didn’t put that together with her ability to drive a car and see well while doing it. She ended up getting into a car accident that she never really recovered from. I’m sure the lung cancer didn’t help. I crashed my car the night before I left for her funeral. I wasn’t sick, and I could see fine.
Fighting With Mittens
In elementary school, we used to have to walk from school to Cadman Plaza Park to have gym outside. Sometimes, we had lunch or recess out there. There were always two hot dog vendors with their carts. They were in direct competition for all business, but especially for our tweenage duckets we had tucked into our corduroys. One day, they got in a fight. An actual fist fight. One was a man and the other a lady. The man stabbed the lady with his hot dog tongs. We were all shook. We left hungry.
The Things That I See
We once had 34 empty plastic cups, formerly full of Tom Collinses, on our table at the East End Comedy Club in East Hampton while we were in the front row to see Andrew “Dice” Clay. I was woefully underage, with a fake Swedish bus pass for ID, and hoping that, whatever form of God there was, he would not go on a rant about my pimples. Bada-bing!
Warm Blanket
My daughter used to sleep in the pillow of my Vizsla’s stomach and suck her thumb and twirl her hair. Parenting is incredible. You walk around lonely until you create someone who is part of you. You will never feel lonely in the same way again. Then you get a divorce, and you only get half the days, and your old loneliness now seems like a distant star in a universe of despair.