Essays
“Wonderful Christmastime” is not a perfect song. It might not work on your holiday playlist, or stand proud on a list of beloved classics, but it might be that it’s not a song to be played at home with intention
Blog Posts
The lesson learned in all of this is that I need to work harder on allowing myself to celebrate the victories and the little things, that I'm allowed to be here living this life.
Essays
This is the beauty of the song, the heart of it in those who lost their lives in service of building a world many believed they never belonged to, as if they are men out of time.
Maron is vulnerable, but he is also allowed to be in a way that many simply are not.
I have long described myself as Taylor Swift agnostic, which is not really true because I do believe she exists, and the truth is that I always misuse agnostic when I really mean atheistic.
When I lived here, I was always chasing something, the perfect idea of a life in the wild and untamed north. Partied and thought about parties and how each one would be the answer to the questions that kept me awake and pacing in my living room, like a raven seeking food half-buried in the snow.
Essays
The second time I ever came out as trans, it was in an Arby’s drive-through in Alberta on a flip-phone in the height of the oil boom. A decision made with impassioned haste that left lingering memories of trying, failing, and the desire to try again regardless of how
Writing through all the thoughts that haunt a life
I started smoking, and I don’t remember the first one at all, but that is often the way of firsts.
Tasting heaven only cost $.49, and each bite brought me closer to God.
Do you ever think about how the emotional core of “Such Great Heights” will never feel the same due to an alarming lack of answering machines? I mean, yes, sure, even without the machine it is still an emotionally resonant song about long-distance yearning, but that distance feels cheated now.
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 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
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
there is some power to be found in loudly and emphatically giving a shit where people can bear witness to it.
There should be a German word for having never wanted something, but needing it to feel good all the same.
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
I’m home, and I did not plan to be here
I love a song about the earnest failings of youth, because these are the years it is safest to fail.
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