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So poetry month is once again upon us. Last year, I posted a new poem every day in the month of April. This year, I’m aiming for a little less work and self indulgence, so while some of the poems will still be mine, a lot of work will
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A picnic of nightlife Imagine yourself having a child. The experience is so avant-garde. Everything bores you. You wear sunglasses all the time. You scrub your hands with lemon soap so the whole house smells like lemons. You ignore the coffee, which upsets your stomach, and the cats that follow
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Past seasons The pokeweed out back snapped off at the stalk in a storm I slept through. And this morning the shower is empty, dripping stupid. I sit on the front porch with coffee, a broom, and a grain scoop to scrape and twang and keep the alley clear. It&
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Civic Life Joe planned to build his own here soon, on the land he was talking about earlier. Which waited, like all land waits. The house gentle in his mind, flanked by inviting maple trees, ivy coating a field-stone wall. Cups of coffee for brothers and sisters, friendly with steam.
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I realized today that I went through the entire month of November without updating this blog, which is an irresponsible and reprehensible oversight, but I promise, I do have a reason: I’ve been working on a couple of things. First, the bad but entirely expected news: My initial round
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There’s a great essay by David Foster Wallace about the 1998 Illinois State Fair. It’s one of his more accessible pieces, not so much because the subject is relatively simple to grasp, or because it’s like a straightforward, observational American Travelogue (he addresses his perspective as an
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Note: This is an essay I wrote originally for a newsletter at work. In 2013, researchers at MIT successfully implanted false memories in the brains of mice through a process they called optogenetics. Using lasers, the researchers targeted specific neurons in the mice’s brains, activating engrams, which are cells
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Hello again. Happy Labor Day. I took August off from blogging, without announcement, but I’m back for September. I’m also struggling through a really frustrating bout of chronic running fatigue, which has me a bit stir crazy. I have some ideas for blogs this month about the US
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To say that the Fenway Frank was the iconic food of my childhood would not be accurate; that accolade belongs to the Friendly’s Cone Head Sundae. However with summer—and at long last proper summer, when anxious hygienic precaution is gleefully disregarded at barbecues across this great nation—officially
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Early voting has begun in the NYC Mayoral Primaries, and I want to say first that if you’re a registered democrat in New York and you have any questions about ranked choice voting, I strongly recommend that you just wing it on election day. The election cycle has been,
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One of the most important things you can learn as a person is to never assume something is natural or inherent. The list of things once taken for granted that I’ve since learned resulted from campaigns or a sequence of particular choices grows longer every day. Hegemony is a
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Lawn Sonnet