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.
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
Essays
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
Halloween is the worst holiday for DJs. Outside the very narrow margins around the Monster Mash there are very few good danceable Halloween songs. Maybe Halloween just isn't the season for dancing, despite what all the skeletons who play their own bones as instruments will have you believe.
I can’t say this for certain, but I believe part of preparing to release a book is psyching yourself up for people you’ve never met to hate you for the rest of your life. This is where I’m at in the process, or at the very least
I didn’t get Oasis tickets. I couldn’t really afford Oasis tickets, but I wanted to believe I could afford them, and what is being alive if not believing you can afford all the things that might ruin you? I got my little special presale code in my inbox
Lysh and I went to see PJ Harvey here in Toronto. On the east end of town, which if you live in Toronto and you live in the west end you’ll know can feel like driving to the moon. It has to be worth it, even though it’s not really that far, but far is relative, and distance means nothing.
I watched Will & Harper, the documentary road trip movie starring trans comedy writer Harper Steele and her long standing comedic partner Will Ferrell, almost by accident.
Legally, I’m already behind on my responsibility to write about the new MJ Lenderman record, Manning Fireworks. I write about music, I’m a culture critic to some, a journalist when it matters, a writer who often writes about music when I tell people what my job is. Music
I have told you this story before, and for reasons that will be made clear it’s important that I tell it again. It opens years ago, in St Johns, Newfoundland on a Sunday morning with a half-blue sky, crisp and just cold enough to feel barely warm enough for
“I’m a random bitch, and you’re a random bitch, just think about that for a second”. I’ve been thinking about this line a lot this week, delivered by Chappel Roan into the front-facing camera sitting comfortably in front of an off-white wall. It’s the tail end
Essays
The true promise of transition and sobriety and all big changes is asking to remember all the things I have worked to forget and carelessly put away.
When I was a kid, I had a wallpaper trim creating a border in the centre of the otherwise blue walls of my bedroom. I’m sure there’s a proper term for this kind of wallpaper division, and if there is please tell me as I’m clearly just