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Raged Harder

Posted on 1 min read

I’m in my hometown again to visit my grandmother. She continues to have slipped further away every time that I return. Her pride has remained though; she fought and raged against this world harder than anyone I have ever met, and that continues even now. I admire, empathize, and am repelled by the way she approached this life. Ninety-six years, however you get there, is an accomplishment. Most of this last year with her has been in the rest home. Even here her pride refuses to let her eat with the other residents, and yet she remains cheerful and funny with the nurses. She swings wildly between an uncompromised attitude …

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ROA

Posted on 2 min read

When I was 15 I saw the movie The Rules of Attraction. Incomplete and meandering, it’s an easy movie to hate. And yet it held me like no other movie before. It was for me, the most revolutionary thing I had ever seen, and so in that sense it accomplished everything that it set out to do. Where other movies were escapism from reality, this was a promise of a future to come. I still vividly remember the basement I sat in when I watched the movie, and the looks of revolt on my friends’ faces at the debasing crisscrossing storylines. I once heard the director say it ‘was a …

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The Blue Line

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As I’m watching the de-icing of jets on the Frankfurt airport tarmac, wrapped in a music playlist I put together a lifetime ago in Madrid, a strange realization comes over me: I don’t have a desire to live in Chicago again. I love that city so much. But in this moment, my time there feels complete. The soft spot will remain, but I’ve carried around the regret of not choosing to move back there when returning to the US for years, possibly for as long as I’ve lived in Colorado. The beauty and grime that mix in the most uncontrived way possible has always captivated me. The other great American …

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Technology is not Culture

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Nothing but puke and rainbows

In the airline seat I grow restless. I watch as the teenager next to me purchases wifi to rip through Instagram, and then Snapchat. He moves faster than I could ever consume the information. When I was younger, and people would talk about their disgust for technology, it always revolved around the speed of things: shortening attention spans, more information, less human interaction. That’s how the fear of technology was explained to me. I always thought I would be fine, that the fear wouldn’t find me, because even if I couldn’t keep up to date, I believed that I could empathize with the desire to move faster. But as I …

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Closing Doors

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It’s raining, but pulsating with light, when I wake up. I walk towards the glow of the window, and look out across the patio, and into a courtyard that seems slapdash and tight. The buildings surrounding me are all about the same height, and all I can see rising above the skyline are the cranes of new construction. As I wake, I realize I’ve never seen San Francisco in the daytime. I’m embarrassed of the fact, given the industry I’m in, and my love of film noir. I need to find a map to get my bearings, as the hills and the flat height of the construction, make it impossible …

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In This Moment, I Know

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My daughter is sick. We go to the zoo but she refuses to walk, and so I carry her on my shoulders. She won’t speak, but only points at things she wants. Eventually she points to a bench, and we sit down. She sits a few feet way from me, but as she get more and more tired, she slowly closes the distance between us. Finally, she rests against my shoulder, and closes her eyes. I pick her up, and hold her in my arms. Instinctively her hands burrow into my coat, and she falls asleep almost instantaneously. As she breathes, I rest my cheek against hers, and I realize …

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A Defense Mechanism

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My thoughts return to a repeated question: are we born to be happy, or is it a learned behavior? I don’t want to know from some study of lab rats, or by analyzing people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. I simply want to know anecdotally, in my own life. I remember being happy, and I remember being sad, but then when I dive into the memories, I can barely recall either. There is a prevailing sense of anxiety slipping through everything, as if I were throwing a caffeine pill into each memory, simply to watch the shearing effect it would have. But feeling happy, and feeling sad, are so …

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Balance It Out

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I feel like a man possessed. I find myself drifting back down 17th St. in Denver. A place I lived only briefly, but where I felt a rare connection in a city that has the depth of an also-ran Dubai. I write for hours in cafes and bars, and look back on what I’ve written with surprise and déjà vu. The writing is strange to me, but vaguely familiar. I must look borderline insane, my head resting on the back of my hand, inches from the paper. I drink coffee until I can feel my heartbeat in my eyeballs. And then I switch to beer to try and balance it …

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Feel Better

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I forgot for a long time why I ever started writing in the first place. It wasn’t to keep the memories for longer than they would float in my head, and it wasn’t to share the writing with others. It was simple; it made me feel better. It kept me from circling the drain: it was therapist, Xanax, and best friend, all insulating me from the grating quiet of everyday life. Somewhere it moved away from that. It became another part of my life where I needed to allocate time, another pull on the thin thread keeping things together. And then, when I’d forgotten how it feels to write frantically …

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Drunken Rat

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A while ago, for a number of situational reasons, I decided that I had had enough of living in the least communicative life I had ever occupied. It consisted mostly of me running around like a drunken rat during work hours, and letting unspoken things dominate my personal life. I became a high-functioning nervous wreck, and so the concept of vulnerability was appealing to me: put it out there, and let it go. Regardless of the outcome, at least you put it out there. What an appealing concept after years of insomnia and motor skill deterioration. Like a drug addict that’s found religion, I’ve taken it too far. I hate …

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