It’s been years since they have touched my hands, but still I remember how it felt to hold them. The sensation, of dirt sliding along the palm as metal bars are moved and shifted in space, is pleasant in its own gritty kind of way. How the metal always
Essays
This is the nature of a tool, which is only ever just a thing and nothing more. An item that exists in the world, that you might hold in your hand and learn to master, with tricks and secrets to its nature.
Blog Posts
If you have ever felt self-destructive, and if your brain has ever spoken to you in words of flames, then you might hear memories of yourself in Cornell.
There’s a special kind of soap for hands that perform the kind of labour where dirt and grime and things soak into the skin. Fast Orange, as it's called, comes in an orange bottle, and smells accordingly of sweet and bitter citrus. And you would be right
Blog Posts
I learned that men don’t like how I write about music, or how I write at all. One wrote me to say that I don’t write about the chords when I write about music, it’s always just about feelings.
Blog Posts
I want each of these memories to be the first time I heard the Beastie Boys because I want their history to live on the delicate lines of a thousand possible futures.
When I was a kid, my sister and I raided the remains of my parent's once lavish record collection. My dad’s records had his name written on them, although sometimes they were crossed off and rewritten by his brother in a bout of playful sibling thievery. His
Writing through all the thoughts that haunt a life
There is no written word without a weary hand wielding the pen.
The veneer of visibility as a performance is nice, and it is also nothing.
My first coffee was poured from the spout of a steel urn into a styrofoam cup, the kind that squeaks and crunches in your hand when you touch it that I’m certain was a little toxic.
I can tell you that McPizza was salty and sweet, with perfectly melted cheese that tasted a little like an old ninja turtle fresh from 2 minutes in the microwave, all melted plastic and nostalgia.
I don’t really have any hobbies, having fallen into the class trap of the working creative that is essentially a pile of bills and immediate needs placed gently over a hastily piled patch of grass. Most things I do, I do because I need to eat and other annoying
I worry that we have let Sad Song mean too many things, that it’s too easy a phrase to describe such a deep well, and it’s time to find new words for the walls we hit on the way down.
There are new things standing and waiting out there, each of them a mark on the days ahead, as if they are lighthouses steering me and my most tired bones away from the rocks that might shatter us once and for all.
An act of clearing by just putting all the extra snow in scores of uneven piles that are half on the sidewalk and half on the street, ensuring that at least this way no one will ever run the risk of being terribly happy
I have to trim down my coffee intake, and it is highlighting the grip of addiction in my brain. I currently drink an amount that is shocking to anyone not similarly afflicted with the same predisposition towards self-destruction as me, but normal for those who would see themselves in
I am perfectly on time with this, which is to say I am late.
“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
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.