"Why does this never get any easier?" I groaned to my trainer last week in the middle of deadlifting. He looked confused. "Well, because we keep adding weight to the bar. You could only lift half this much a year ago." I had to concede his logic, even if it didn't really answer my question.…
Day 1,651: Start Stopping
It's New Years Eve afternoon. I'm at a coffee shop working on a commissioned essay about small matters like marriage and sex and desire and monogamy and how I'm a natural at three out of four. The writing is going...not great, okay? Plus I just ate a pretty disappointing croissant and the little boy behind…
Day 1,605: Book Cover Reveal!
Psst...wanna see what my book looks like? It looks like this: I used to work in publishing, so I can tell you that landing the right cover can be tough and involve lots of revisions and arguments. (You'd be surprised how many writers aren't crazy about the final cover they end up with, simply because the cover…
Day 1,586: Tara Still Burned
We interred my father-in-law's ashes last week. He died eight years ago, but my mother-in-law never got around to scattering the ashes and in the meantime, the Catholic Church made some kind of rule change about who gets into heaven based on how their ashes are handled. I wanted to say, "Oh, come on. If heaven exists,…
Day 1,495: Stonewall
Someone was rude to me in a work meeting last week and I called him on it. It wasn't a big drama. He cast a condescending aspersion, I calmly corrected it and requested he not do that again, he muttered an apology, and the meeting moved on. Except the me part of the meeting. As…
Day 1,466: Sympathy for the Devil
Saturday was my fourth soberversary. I went into the archives looking for my third anniversary post, thinking I'd write something about what's changed since then. Turns out I didn't write an anniversary post last year. But I did write one starting like this about a month before my third: "My heart: I’ve been working hard…
Day 1,439: Desire Isn’t Lack
Have you seen the streaming series I Love Dick? It's a dark comedy (based on a 1997 cult novel) about husband-and-wife artists at a residency in Marfa, Texas. The wife, Chris, falls fast and hard for Dick, the macho artist who runs the institute. Dick is totally uninterested in Chris, which doesn't stop her from writing him scores of increasingly unhinged…
Day 1,276: Dissident
Am I a dissident now? I thought yesterday, reflecting on national events that have not exactly worked out to my liking. It's not an everyday word, dissident--it makes me think of tanks and gulags, Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. Not me, walking around on a dignified low boil, making practical contingency plans I hope I won't need.…
Day 1,262, Part 2: Thank you.
I wrote today's first post before going back and reading the many, many blog comments I received in the wake of "Enjoli." I hadn't looked at them before because for some of the reasons I talked about in my last couple of posts, I just needed to be in a quiet space for a bit.…
Day 1,262: Here, there, and everywhere
You know how when you procrastinate about doing something it can start to make you feel guilty, and then you procrastinate even more, and then you feel even guiltier, and so on into a vortex of black nothingness? Yeah. But I'm back! Guiltily. As you'll see, things have been kinda busy, not that that is any excuse. …
