The Wake Of A Battleship

She was an incredibly frustrating woman. I know, that is exactly not what we’re supposed to say, and not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s the first thing that comes into my head when I think about Barbara. An incredibly frustrating woman. She’d do these things that would drive you crazy. She wanted things her way, and if she didn’t get things her way she– well, honestly, we don’t...

I’m sick of being sensitive

Goddamn I am sick of food sensitivities. I’m honestly starting to wonder how people do it. How I’m going to do it. Today, I’m in Rochester visiting my sister and we took a family trip to lay to rest the ashes of my mother. Maybe it’s just the wash of emotions contained in such and act, but the frustration of eating today made me want to scream. After The Deed, we stopped for lunch at a...

I’m so sick of hearing about your damn no-gluten diet

Generally, I’m a really easy going guy, with an amazing patience for cultural, spiritual, and personal relativity. I grew up in a multicultural family and internalized the belief that different peoples, and even different people in the same family, can live happily with different beliefs. Despite this, I’m just about fucking fed up with this whole “gluten-free” bullshit. I mean, don’t...

No Health Insurance For Me, Thanks Oregon

Being self-employed sucks sometimes. I’ve been covered under my wife’s health insurance just fine, but recently, we started wondering “what if my wife wanted to do something that didn’t offer insurance.” There’s always a bit of guilt being self-employed, because I realize that part of the reason it works is because she has benefits through here job. This means, however, that if...

I’m the guy your mother warned you about

So I’m walking down the street last night. It’s dark, and I’m walking fast because I’m meeting my fair Jessica at a restaurant and want to be there before her, because I don’t mind waiting for her, but I know she doesn’t like waiting for me. So, I’m walking faster than usual. It was a beautiful night, actually. Pretty warm. I had my favorite brown leather “not used for...

Take a Number… Wait, nevermind, you are a number

I’ve never really had a problem with waiting. I know that many people hate to wait for things– appointments, people, Christmas, whatever. That’s the reason that, as much as I can, I try to be early when I meet with people. I’m afraid that people don’t want to wait for me. At the same time, I sometimes wish people would show up late for meetings with me– even an hour late,...

Background Noise

When I was 25, it was a very good year. There were, beautiful girls wearing… nurses uniforms and… telling me to wake up… “Wake up. Wake up, John.” Groggy, I opened my eyes to a white and pink room that smelled of a combination of death and the avoidance of death. A few days later, I left the hospital to 30 days convalescence leave and barely another year as a member of the “US Military”...

Barrett’s Esophagus

… check. Throttle ignition lock? Check. And we’re descending into Despair in 4… 3… 2… This is one of those things that sucks to write about, not because it’s hard to write but because the very act of writing it– while it helps me to formulate my thoughts and feelings– proves that it’s true. And I really really wish that none of this was true. There’s an onion that...

A Picture Of My Mother’s Death, In Words

Long-time readers will know that I’m a fan of Wordle, the web site that let’s you make word clouds of strings of text. I have a lot of them1 because they present words outside the context of narrative, which is both disjointed and jarring, while at the same time being fascinating and beautiful. I decided to make a couple based on the writings I did during my Grief series to see how they would...

Sunday

Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind. The lost need nothing. They are ashes and dust, pictures and memories. They are mistakes and regrets. Grief is not for the lost, but for the left behind. Grief is a space in our living. It is a vessel. It is a room, empty of all else. It is a space in the soul, a space we need to breathe. Grief is not for the lost, it is a space for the left behind. Grief is a...

Funeral

Saturday. What is Saturday? Saturday is a placeholder. Saturday is a schedule. Saturday is an opening in a schedule. Saturday is a funeral. You wake up in a room full of people telling you how sorry they are. You don’t know how you got here, nor do you know when you got here. Thirty seconds ago it was Monday and you were answering your office phone. Now, you are speaking to a person you haven’t seen...

Friday

You step off the plane into a winter of anger and regret. It’s cold in the town of your youth. Much colder than you remember. It’s more grey than you remember. In fact, there’s very little that’s the same as you remember. The town of your youth is exactly the same. Your cousin picks you up at the airport and you decide that the innocuous questions that she asks you are just that. You decide...

Thursday

You take the day off on Thursday. You tell yourself that it’s because you have to prepare yourself for 7 hours in the middle seat of a plane. You tell yourself this, but mostly it’s just because you’re suffocating and need some space to breath. You feel like you’ve been at full throttle for weeks, though it’s only been a few days, and your eyes burn as if you’ve been awake for the...

Wednesday

You are starting to understand why people need time off to grieve, because the exhaustion you feel this morning is more than you could have imagined. It’s a dark heaviness that pulls you down to a space just a bit beneath the floor. A dark place where bones lay. Another morning of images. The gray sky, eggs on toast, coffee, a blue robe. Snatches of moments driven by a quiet lover as she tends to everything....

Tuesday

You sleep like shit. This is more due to the bottle of cheap wine and resultant headache than to any thoughts or dreams you may or may not have had during the night. When the alarm goes off you feel like you want to cry, then you remember that you have much darker things to cry about than a hangover, so you hit the alarm and crawl out of bed. Awakened and like a zombie you go though the routines of a normal morning....

Monday

At 8:30 am you get the call at your office. Knowing that it’s your sister, you’re not sure how worried you should be. The last time she called you here, it was to tell you that your brother died. She doesn’t call you at work just to chat. She tells you, but it won’t sink in. It has for her, she’s had more time. She’s crying, and you try to comfort her, not knowing what to say, or...

All Hallow’s Birthday

Today is my mother’s birthday. I won’t bother calling her. In fact, I’m never going to call her again. Instead, I’m introducing a series of posts lasting one week beginning tomorrow. None of it was written for her. It was all written for myself. Happy birthday, mom.

As Darkness Descends

Recently, I discovered that despair has no color. Despair needs no color. It works its dark magic using only black and white. Like the white square of a newspaper column. And the black words printed there. Words that would lie so innocently by themselves, yet were strung together in such a way that they announce the death of a soul. I’m in no way a dark person. I tried to be years ago, and wrote all kinds of...