Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the day Mom and Dad took their first steps on the journeys that removed them from my life. Tim and I didn’t commemorate it in any special way. We commemorate our parents daily, talking about what they did and why. The one favor our parents did us by dying…
Fake versus real
January 4, 2014
I’ve done some very stupid things in my life. One night in Norway I got drunk, climbed up a tower crane, and walked all the way out to the end of the boom. No idea how many hundred feet off the ground I was. When I got to the end of the boom, the wind kicked…
The matryoshka card
January 3, 2014
As some of you may know, the US Postal Service has me on a list. A large percentage of the valuable postcards I buy go missing, even when they’re registered. The Snowden revelations have convinced me that it would be the easiest thing in the world for my name and the names of my German…
I liked the first day of 2014
January 1, 2014
Today our friend Sandra came over to Tim’s house and cooked us a turkey. Sandra is a remarkable person. She took care of my Great-Aunt Marian for nine years, a job for which she could not have possibly been paid enough. Marian was…difficult in her prime. As an angry, elderly widow who’d suffered a debilitating…
I AM sorry but go away
December 28, 2013
August 20, 2012, was not a good day. I learned that someone was not at all who I thought. It was genuinely horrifying because I discovered that I’d been dealing with an insane person. She’d hid her insanity relatively well, but as always, I denied the little signs that things were awry. In August of…
Broken arms and exploding piglets
December 28, 2013
I broke my right arm in 1971. Mom and my siblings were watching an oil well being drilled at night in the vacant lot two houses down in Campo Verde, Tia Juana, Venezuela. The Club is in the foreground; right above the words “photo courtesy,” you can see the giant swimming pool where a nineteen-year-old…
The first Christmas without Mom and Dad
December 24, 2013
This is the first Christmas without Mom and Dad. What I feel mostly is strangeness. When you get to be old yourself—I’m fifty-one—it’s incredibly bizarre to no longer have access to people who were there your whole life. Dad’s dying process was so sudden, unnecessary, and ghastly that when he finally passed away, it was…
The perfect end to 2013
December 9, 2013
Most people would tell me to not link to this, but Tila Tequila has come out as a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of Hitler. It’s the perfect end to 2013. What a ridiculous, awful, exhausting, painful, depressing circus of failure, lying, and dashed hopes this year was. So 2013 deserves as its denouement Tila Tequila…