Essays
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
Blog Posts
I’m home, and I did not plan to be here
Essays
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
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
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.
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
Writing through all the thoughts that haunt a life
Last night I had a dream that I was at a friend’s funeral, and this morning I had to wake up and check the obituaries to make sure it wasn’t real.
I’m thinking about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” this morning. Partially because I always am, and partially because of three seconds in the opening minutes of the latest episode of Severance.
For months I thought there was an owl outside.
The Grammy’s were last night, which feels like a very funny break to have in the midst of an eternal barrage of doomer news, but maybe it's just the kind of aside people need. Let us post about something else for a while. Give the Grammy for
If you've been waiting to read a portion from my upcoming book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, today is your lucky day! Big thanks to Luke O'Neil and his incredible newsletter Welcome To Hell World for featuring an excerpt, an essay featuring one
I can hear the theme music in stale and still air. Even with my eyelids closed and sleep on the horizon, it’s there. Hunting without terror, a lingering spirit calling me closer to the edge. Obsession in synthwave, dancing in 7/8 time, taunting, teasing. Enticing. I read a
I am nothing if not open to being called to action in order to write a meandering blog post on something I actually have a lot of thoughts about but wanted to spare you a diatribe.
Note: this is a piece I wrote to read on stage for The Basement Revue, a yearly music/literary variety show here in Toronto. I thought it would be nice to include it here in the newsletter at the end of the year as well. If you'd like
Spotify is a garbage ball rolling around the idea of a life and gathering all things onto itself, like a kind of Wario Katamari Damacy.
I wrote a book. It wasn’t always going to be this way. One day I just decided to run. I packed two bags of my belongings, left the Yukon, landed in Toronto. Stayed in the spare room in a loft next to a pretty good coffee shop in the
There’s a lot to be said about saying fuck it and grasping for all your desires when everything feels like it’s falling apart at a rapid clip.
It was a stupid fucking costume. A last minute costume for a last minute party that I didn’t really want to go to at all. It was a party that I had wanted, that we had all wanted and asked for. Begged for, almost. When you have a friend