In the early days of The Shitstorm, because I so often purged the insanity of it all into collections of words on social media, I’ve now ended up with a weird journal of “on this day” memories to track the trajectory of our haphazard lives. Some days, looking back is too much, the shrapnel wounds […]
[From November 7, 2021: One of the through-lines of our lives, certainly these last few years, has been the overwhelming amount of grief we’ve been faced with, each new loss compounding the ones that came before. A little over a year ago, weeks after returning from a restorative trip to the ocean, Chelli would lose […]
[From September 1, 2020: Yes, everyone was fine and yes, cars can be fixed. But this dance between safety and independence, especially with a raging pandemic all around us, has nearly been the death of me more than a few times. This is one of those times.] One of the great difficulties of navigating these […]
[From December 5, 2018: This was written the last time we were in Tulsa, four years and a day ago, before such travel decisions would become all the more complicated by the pandemic. Chelli hadn’t been traveling in a couple years at that point, but her mother’s swift decline into dementia had become severe enough […]
[From November 14, 2018: As I look back through everything I’ve written over this 7+ year period and try to figure out which entries represent each time or season, I see the way I was often looking for examples — something akin to an unspoken mentorship, I guess — of how to do this hard […]
[From May 8, 2018: Psychological stress fractures plagued us for months, in ways great and small, but always unexpected.] I had fallen asleep on the couch around midnight, following a quiet evening of “self-care” at the house, just Chelli and Stella and me, trying to catch our breath after an emotionally grueling day. Our Friday […]
[From April 16, 2018: Lessons from one of the humans I have loved most in this world.] During the last years of my paternal grandmother’s life, her mind ravaged by the cruel joke of Alzheimer’s, my grandfather served as her primary caregiver. He would have it no other way, he always made clear, because he’d […]
[From March 12, 2018: The fallout, both physical and psychological, from the “jail weekend,” as it would become known, unfolded slowly at first, then at breakneck speed.] I spend a lot of time relishing my introverted nature, occasionally to the point of unapologetic misanthropy. Ironically, I’m also terrified at the thought of growing old alone, […]
[From February 28, 2018: There’s no way to honestly convey the depths of all we’ve experienced without including the events of a particular weekend in February 2018. Even a number of years later, though, I’m hesitant to pick at its scab, knowing full well that we’ve yet to fully recover from it. As I sit […]
[From January 17, 2018: As I’ve been going back through the various entries I either wrote in my journals and/or posted on social media, I’ve been looking for a handful of representative pieces from each season of our experience. There are some things that now, with the benefit of a little hindsight, I know ended […]
Sometimes I ramble. 