I got sober. Life got big.
A friend of 20+ years called last night. You could say it's been a complicated relationship, the same way you could say Mt. Rainier is a pretty big hill. We've hurt each other at times like only two people who know each other very well can do. We'll talk every day for a year and…
Continue reading ➞ Day 1,826: In This World, There is a Kind of Painful Progress
I have no particular wisdom to offer you nice people today. Life has been throwing some extra weirdness at me lately, and Seattle is having a heat wave (a Pacific NW "heat wave"=over eighty degrees) that I cannot really cope with. And I got sucked back into the fruitless search for a nude lipstick that…
For several years I've been in this life phase called "friends keep adding me to secret menopause Facebook groups where women gather to share information, vent, and validate the living shit out of each other." I hate it. Sure, at first I was game. I'd jump in and introduce myself and start reading posts and then…
"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.…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Off-Dry 