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
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there is some power to be found in loudly and emphatically giving a shit where people can bear witness to it.
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There should be a German word for having never wanted something, but needing it to feel good all the same.
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
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I’m home, and I did not plan to be here
Writing through all the thoughts that haunt a life
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
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.