These Frameworks Labeled Home

The Weakerthans second album, Left and Leaving, turned 25, and I am late celebrating it. I started writing this on the day of its anniversary with the best of clear-eyes intentions. I started and stopped sentences, cleaned out spelling mistakes, went back and recompiled half-considered paragraphs. I thought about the

The Tale of Billy Pumpkins

The uber driver on our way to the Harvard bookstore didn’t know what a memoir was, and I’m still at a loss as to the chain of events that leads to someone being legally permitted to own and drive a car, but live entirely unaware of a dominant

Say you care less how I feel

Every interview I’ve done lately has been connected by a single, unexpected thread. A red string tacked to disparate faces weaving an unexpected story from happenstance and stray thoughts. This isn’t true of every conversation I’ve had, but enough of them have created a trend. I was

Lessons on the posture of giving a shit

there is some power to be found in loudly and emphatically giving a shit where people can bear witness to it.

Tramps Like Us

There should be a German word for having never wanted something, but needing it to feel good all the same.

Fix The Tracking

We can never ask AI to generate the past we want to hold onto, or the perfect world we believe was promised to us and I guess for some it is easier to hope that someday a computer will make this world perfect for you than to accept that real perfect will always be broken

The road from home

I’m home, and I did not plan to be here

To recreate us

I love a song about the earnest failings of youth, because these are the years it is safest to fail.

Reachering a Mystery

I have spent the last week searching for something I know is always going to be lost. Not a physical object, but a memory. An idea of a face, warped and faded in time. The smell of an old living room, the one across the street from my childhood, where

Laundry tumbling in the drum

It’s frustrating to look for the news within the story, as if the facts are immaterial to the clicks and the rage of it all. Today, of all days, there is news of a record from the Arcade Fire, but the facts are buried below the promise of a

Light bulbs for the wicker man

I abided by my promise. Six years ago I drank my very last drink, woke up suicidal and tired. Swore off all my bad habits. Then I walked down to a tattoo shop, listening to Dwight Yoakam in the shitty headphones paired to my phone. Drank a perfect latte and smoked three (four) cigarettes on the way.

No blood in any of this

I remember green feeling different. Green that was more than just a shade reserved for grass slowly emerging through the melting snow in the not-winter seasons of my youth. Green that hummed on a monitor, green with sharp corners and dull edges. Pixelated and cold, but teeming with life and