We’ve always had a complicated relationship with Thanksgiving. For the first decade of our marriage, we spent each holiday traveling to out-of-state family gatherings, with all that entails. For the next thirteen years, we skipped out on the traditional trappings in order to spend time in the Sonoran desert, just the two of us, walking […]
[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 July 12, 2021: So much of my writing in the months after losing my grandfather was centered on trying to process that grief. It was complicated, of course, by the isolation and general grief of the pandemic that was ravaging our country, but even though I spent quite a lot of time both thinking […]
[From November 1, 2020: Hero-sized hole.] When I was a kid — maybe 6 or 7, although the exact age escapes me — I was on a fishing trip with my grandfather and uncle on Lake Erie. It was a typical part of my childhood summers, spending time on the lake on various trips to […]
[From October 27-28, 2020: The bulk of 2020 was incredibly difficult for the entire world, as we all found ourselves dealing with a once-in-a-century virus. The pandemic undoubtedly caused a lot of extra stress for Chelli and me, as we tried to fashion an existence that would ultimately protect her from a virus that a […]
[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 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 February 7, 2016: Because sometimes the little things… aren’t.] I know it wasn’t really about toothpaste. Standing there in the middle of Target late on a Sunday evening a couple weeks ago, though, it felt like a personal assault, like the final insult in a string of ridiculous injustices being thrust upon us. And […]
[From January 19, 2016: Here’s another from some of the earliest days of The Shitshow, when every day felt like a new indignity, a new diagnosis, and a new reality.] When a tornado rips through a small town in the Midwest, leveling a trailer park or maybe an elementary school, invariably there will be someone […]
[From February 20, 2016: This entry was written on a quick 36-hour “mental health getaway” to Los Angeles, something I used to do a lot in the days before the shit storm. It’s weird to think that I haven’t been back to LA since.] Sometimes I worry that I’ve given you the wrong impression. I […]
Sometimes I ramble. 