2026-01-21
Dental Critiques
I’m getting down to the last few of a once-thick stack of brown coffee filters. There’s now a need to pick up the whole thing and moisten my desiccated January finger to separate off a solo leaflet, like I’m flipping through a dental waiting room magazine about the life of Princess Diana.
When friends aren’t conversationally savvy about the life of Di, I find myself distracted and staring into their stretched mouths as they pronounce long vowels. Certainly anyone without Di knowledge is skipping their six-month dental checkups.
"Yep," I think, "we’ve got a code one along the gum line – nothing a little flossing won’t fix. The bigger concern is some stress signs along the molars in both the upper left and lower left quadrants. Do you grind in your sleep? I can get you set up with a prescription mouthguard, or you can find some less exact kits at Walgreen’s or any neighborhood pharmacy. Personally, I’d splurge with the prescription one, but I’ve seen some success from over-the-counter solutions."
The voice of my friend becomes a squishy and tinny collection of sounds, not unlike the indistinct, mysterious hum of unknown machinery in a church basement. The gears in their temples turn, and I peer into the spit-slick ivory room.
"Do you use an electric toothbrush? You should really get one," I think. "You’ve got deep grooves in your molars. Great for chewing, not so great when it’s time to prevent decay. Those electric toothbrushes – think Sonicare – really help you get all the gunk out."
My friend finishes talking and punctuates the whole affair with a hypothetical period, which we both see in our minds. So I know it’s my turn to talk again. Dang it. I don’t know what they said.
"What did you say?"
"I don’t know much about Princess Diana," they reply. "But have you considered drinking less coffee? Your teeth are turning brown."
2026-01-19
Scattered Matter
Any old smoker can tell you what’ll happen in the end: browned teeth, yellowed ceilings, and sour, sour dogs.
My 14-year-old terrier ended up different than he started. Eyes closed, he was born onto the woven black of a South Dakota trampoline, the final pup in a litter of five. Mom Dog gave life and exhaled and nursed. Dad Dog chased jackrabbits and voles and his own tail, forgetting there was even a Dog to call Mom. My Dog got his balls snipped and ended the whole cycle.
I called him Henry, and he knew those two syllables to mean self, like how “dinner” means brown pellets and lukewarm water. He never saw a trampoline again, and all given time was spent chasing rabbits to the arthritic roots of a big tree out back.
His white and curling fur grew and shed and grew and shed until his coat was coarse and tinged like a matted rug made from a trophy-hunted polar bear. His breath no longer smelled milky like a pup’s – it turned metallic with internal trouble. His playful bites lost their playfulness. He turned sour.
The old smokers told me everything turns brown and yellow, and my tenth grade science teacher chewed Nicorette and told me matter can’t be created or destroyed. I wondered where the white of his coat went, if it wasn’t destroyed, and I wondered if the milkiness and playfulness went to the same place.
I thought about it for a bit. Henry had balls snipped so he’d never become the careless jackrabbit hunter, but I figure his two-syllable self was still passed down.
On the day of the trampoline, someone ate a french silk pie. Processed, digested, and gone, the white of the whipped cream needed somewhere to go. So it went to South Dakota, into a puppy’s fur. Once Henry’s fur yellowed, the white fled to the empty pages of a fresh college-ruled notebook.
The milkiness was originally in an English woman’s lumpy-sugared earl gray. She finished her cup, and the milk was loose and searching, so my dog breathed on it for a while. But one day he exhaled it in a dewy puff, and it left for good to go float in a French cat’s drinking bowl.
Playfulness was in a destroyed Monopoly top hat piece. It wanted to be the nickel strings of an acoustic and used Henry's momentarily playful bites as a cosmic city bus to get there.
My 14-year-old terrier was a brief, dynamic bundle of matter, made up of eaten pies and game pieces. Whatever floating, loose matter existed as Mom Dog pushed on the trampoline. In the same way, the white of the smoker’s teeth goes to fuel the snowfall in Alaska, and the lubricated youth of their voices goes to send kids down waterslides. We’re all just scattered matter, constantly giving and taking and conserving.
2026-01-13
The lotion dilemma
If I go to the store, I can buy hand lotion and foot lotion and face lotion. In fact, I already own hand lotion, foot lotion, and face lotion, and I put each on the foretold appendage.
There’s no such thing as elbow lotion or knee lotion or ear lotion. My mother told me so, just as she told me there’s no such thing as the boogeyman. I just have to settle for some all-purpose nonsense that gets slathered with reckless abandon, a snail trail of coconut oil dragged from protruding ankle to collarbone in sweeping strokes.
I have to wonder if my bicep envies my foot when I twist the blue cap off my foot-specific lotion. Why does that stubby five-pointed earth toucher get its own special container?
"Why must I, the hunky bicep, be lumped in with something so foreign as the calves?"
I wonder if my hand cries out in pain as I dip into the foot lotion; if it screams as I scrape the white cream between my toes. Does my palm lament when I squeeze out a pea-sized dot of face lotion onto its lifeline? Do my fingertips whine when I rub the lotion across my cheeks and that especially dry spot under my mouth?
"Why do I, the hand, have to touch lotions not meant for me? Why does the foot not apply hand lotion to me, as I must apply foot lotion to it?"
I tell the hand and the bicep that we all have different gifts. But in truth, I really don’t know. I guess I just like being moisturized, no matter the cost.
2026-01-11
The Beastie Boys' "Egg Man"
I am a juggernaut creature with cracked eggshell fingertips. I don’t say sorry and I certainly don’t ask please, partially because of my lisp – and mostly because I don’t care for others all that much. I budge to the front and kick up clouds onto the shins behind me. I settle my sticks in the mud and make my blankets wet, and I always overstay my welcome just to leave like the Irish.
I am a juggernaut creature with eggwhite eyelids. Sometimes, when my fingertips get sore, I wish I was slower and gentler and my shell came off in big satisfying strips. But it doesn’t. It comes off in teeny tiny pieces that get stuck in the fleshy boiled whites, that get ground up between your molars and deposited in your gums. The whites and the yolks are swallowed by my sharded shell, and you forget the nutrients but remember the gritty aftertaste.
I am a juggernaut creature with yolk-yellow hair. It doesn’t flow long and it looks like cornsilk suspended underwater. I have cracked eggshell fingertips and big eggwhite eyelids, and I never felt bad for Humpty Dumpty, or any egg dumb enough to sit on a wall for that matter.
2026-01-05
The creation narrative
I stick a cotton plunger in my ear to get all the crud out. Waxy brown exits pretty good, right on the fluffy end of my q-tip, and I inspect before flipping to the clean side and sticking it through the other end of my head, just the same. The act of swabbing my ears is a thankful prayer to God – for he made the two-sided q-tip. Thus, man became a two-eared creature.
I travel down, praising God for the span of the staircase steps. For it is only because of the width of the step that my feet grew this long – not long enough to hang over the edge.
I put on a mitten, whose stubbier second hole made my thumb the opposable thing it is. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Outside I go.
I curse God as I step through the door frame. The wind gusts too fast for my hand to properly flex. My ears are blushed and stinging.
I am perfectly evolved to live up the stairs and down the hall. I am a creature formed from pure dwelling, not dust. Today I will not go out.
2026-01-02
Waiting for flour
I found a stainless steel sugar container from Goodwill about a year and a half ago. It looked like something you’d see in a midcentury house with a red Ford Thunderbird parked out front, and it was definitely owned by a woman who wore modestly hemmed skirts and served her husband meat and potatoes seven days a week while listening to radio dramas.
I, in my Old Navy boys size 16 dungarees, wanted to buy it and rehome it to the land of Japanese-made vehicles, YouTube on laptops, and lentil-based dinners. So far from its origins. I gazed at my reflection in the shiny metal, in that little distorted space underneath where “Sugar” was carved. Hm.
The one problem was, I couldn’t find the other half. The flour container was gone, probably snatched up by someone who had no need for sugar in their life. Or it fell off the back of the pickup on the way to Goodwill. A final oopsie in the hasty process of a post-death estate sale. I looked at the price tag again. Five dollars. I wondered if there’s any value to sugar without its matching flour. I worried its addition into my kitchen would make the whole room feel paradoxically more incomplete.
That metal box went back on the shelf, but it gleamed at me. It showed me my face, distorted in its lightly dented body. It knew my anxieties. And it still flattered, branded me “Sugar,” right across my forehead. Taking it back off the shelf, I sauntered to the register.
Two weeks ago I found a container at the Salvation Army. A flour container. Metal. Etched with the name of its contents. The perfect matching pair for my sugar. I looked at myself in its reflection, and there above my forehead, like a kiss on the temple, it captioned me “Flour.” Somehow even sweeter than the name Sugar.
2026-01-02
Queer flavors
Tomorrow I am going to a brunch at my queer friends' apartment. I am bringing chai pear scones. Never be the person to bring a pedestrian flavor to the gay function.
2026-01-01
Summer is a snowbird
When Winter comes, Summer backs a U-Haul into my driveway, stomps its feet, and takes things in broad, scarce daylight. My neighbors, their herb gardens, their smokey backyards – all of it loaded onto a ratchet-wrapped dolly and dragged up the ramp. Summer then comes into my unlocked home, rolls up area rugs and leaves behind dull, scratched floors. It travels up and down staircases, opens drawers, and peaks behind closet doors. It takes down the thrift store artwork and pharmacy-printed photos. At least Summer leaves the nails behind. It’ll be easier to hang things back up when the time comes.
The day ends and the U-Haul is stacked full and Summer eats a takeout pizza and drinks a Coors Light on my living room floor. Half pepperoni, half sausage, washed down lukewarmly. I ask it where it’s going, where it’s taking things, when it will be back. It doesn’t answer, more concerned with getting the garlic butter package open with its already too-buttery fingers.
Maybe Summer is a snowbird, bound to the same city thta my friend Vivian moved to halfway through fourth grade. I think maybe our loose promises of friendship are a fraying thread of embroidery floss, still holding true for some reason. She’ll take good care of the artwork, the photos, the area rugs, my two can openers, my neighbors, their herb gardens, and their smokey backyards. I think she’ll make special room in her home for these things.
I know Summer won't leave it all at Vivian's forever. It'll load up my things again, and head north when the time is right. I will be glad to see my stuff, made gladder by Vivian's enjoyment.
2025-12-30
Sarah, god of ants
There’s an ant colony in front of my house, and I’m its omniscient ruler. Day and night, I stridulate my soft-skinned body to pronounce the insect syllables, to talk to them in their native tongue.
I can call each one by name. Sometimes I mix up siblings, but what can you do? Even perfect gods make mistakes. All the ants sort of look the same.
Grain by grain, they bring the hill closer to my face. I know they’ll never really reach me. That’s okay. The attempt is flattering.
They build a complex underground city beneath the hill, and it’s where they keep the tabernacle. Why else would they bring offerings of Taki dust and discarded apple stems down there? In return, I protect their promised land against bike tires and slapping flip flops. If Minnesota had ant eaters, I’d fight those off, too.
Their crunchy snowman-shaped bodies aren’t very good at showing physical affection, but I can feel they know me. Some of them even love me. Some of them fear the magnifying glass I hold. I'm not sure how they know what magnifying glasses are, but I guess they are pretty smart. I tell them it's for curiosity's sake. Some don't believe me. I check the forecast. I write the doubters' names on my "to smite" list for Thursday. Mostly sunny!
My neighbors don’t like what I do, namely the stridulation, but they are fools. They’ve got godless ants living in the godless hill in front of their own godless home.
2025-12-29
Sharing oranges
Yesterday I shared an orange. Split the sections with my fingers, digging tips into pulped seams while the Elvis clock in my kitchen gyrated his hips on each second. Separated slices on a plate at the table’s center.
I sometimes wonder what oranges were like five thousand years ago, before we started breeding them to our liking. Or, depending on how you see it, what oranges were like before they catered to our deepest citrus desires to ensure their own survival through the grocery store aisles of posterity. Those crafty, conniving goobers.
I think, beneath their pockmarked skin, oranges were probably one unparted, juicy, spherical slice. Impossible to pull apart without mess. But then some Chinese farmer decided they like sharing it, and maybe that’s the point.
2025-12-22
Gingerbread big leagues
The sugar on the stove clumped, turning a light shade of amber. "It’s starting – get into ready position," I said. Sam stirred to keep it from burning black onto the orange Goodwill pan our roommate bought two rental houses ago. I lovingly call it "the awful pan," and it’s perfectly apt for such a time as this: melting pure, sticky sugar into a molten form.
"I feel like we’re cooking meth," Sam said as the sugar clumps de-clumpify. "I think we could. You just use household ingredients, I’m pretty sure."
The manic words of a woman riding the gingerbread high.
You see, when you tell another person – be it a coworker, friend, or family member – your plans to make a gingerbread house from scratch, there’s a sort of cautionary aura that gets fed back to you. It’s as if you’re telling a trusted elder your plans to move to New York City on a sandwich shop salary.
"I tried that once and it all fell apart." or "Wow, that’s ambitious!" or "So, what’s your plan? Have you thought it through?" or a simple, sometimes disingenuous "Good luck!"
I think the mass skepticism comes from the sheer number of variables in cookie house construction – I can really only compare it to the Apollo 11 lunar launch. Any other analogy falls short unfortunately, though it’s still not a perfect comparison. NASA had an entire room of the greatest rocket scientists, engineers, and technicians making sure things went smoothly for Neil and Buzz. For Sam and Sarah, there were only two solo-flying focused minds, zero ground control.
"Make no mistake, this isn’t some Favorite Day generic target brand gingerbread kit," I said as the stirred sugar neared a deep amber shine. "This is the real deal."
Underneath my bed, I keep a stock of special thick crafting paper. This is the paper I used to create a blueprint of the house, cutting wall, roof, and chimney pieces to size. I rolled out the gingerbread dough to a respectable thickness, then placed the white paper pattern overtop and ran a butter knife around the edges. I felt guided. It was like that pottery scene from Ghost, except instead of Patrick Swayze it was Frank Lloyd Wright, and instead of forming clay I was cutting dough.
Some people like to make a "construction gingerbread" recipe that calls for corn syrup and extra flour to create an unbreakable final cookie. It’s easier to build with, sure, but it has the texture of a hardwood biscotti only Pinocchio or Treebeard could enjoy. Soft and chewy gingerbread is diesel for St. Nick’s mission. If he can’t dip a buoyant, absorbent piece of gingerbread into creamy milk, then what’s the point of all the gift bringing? But soft gingerbread wants to fold in on itself like a gymnast-turned-yoga-instructor. Not ideal for building.
Gingerbread architects and scholars assert that the raising of a gingerbread house is a choice between constructable form and palatable function, in which form must win. I disagree! Let there be no choice! Let us have it all! Let us build sturdy structures with soft materials!
Now the question: how to glue the house together? The royal icing we made for decorating could work, sure, but slippery frosting could slope into crumbling cookies. Sam and I, now an hour and a half deep into the process, hadn’t made any extra pieces. There could be no mistake.
In our doubt, the sturdy Gorilla on the superglue package was a comforting image. His strong arms, holding our house together. Standing on his knuckles and grunting a promise that the roof would stay put. But that would mean compromising the edibility – the sanctity – of the whole project. We couldn’t stomach it, both literally and figuratively, if glue fused the house.
The icing would harden, but it wasn’t sticky enough. And we had some leftover molasses from the dough. It would stick, sure, but it wouldn’t harden. At least not like we needed it to – not like the icing would. We needed some sort of Venn Diagram middleground between the two. A substance that was sticky when wet and hard when dry.
Thus came the Goodwill orange pan and a generous dump of sugar, heated and stirred to bubbling, magmatic substance. The reflective liquid amber held a dualistic power: it could bring us to gingerbread legandom – or it could leave us scalded, blistered, and deformed.
I gingerly dipped the side of a wall into the sugar, then carefully brought another piece to it, creating a 90-degree angle. This would be the front of the house. I then dipped another wall. Then another. Moving slowly. Four walls, hardening to one another. But gaps still existed.
Sam, ever stirring, made a heat-of-the-moment, high risk call. She took the pan off the burner and tipped it, pouring the sugar down the seams of the house like a blacksmith might pour iron into a sword mold. I used a spoon in her trail to clean up dripping trails, my hand dancing dangerously close to the heat.
Our unsafe methods were very successful. We took a brief recess to turn on a speaker and play Van Halen’s "Jump" on full blast.
The four walls were solid, and I picked up the fused structure. The two of us entered a gingerbread flow state, me tilting the airborne house, her dumping sugar directly onto it, me slapping the next piece on.
When you’re riding the gingerbread high, you start to feel like you’re on a Food Network show. You check the time. You communicate orders to each other. You throw dishes into the sink without washing them, because sugar is burning and time is fleeting. There’s also some unpaid Food Network intern who will spend the evening doing the grunt labor of washing up.
Van Halen’s lyrics were harmonized with Sam and I congratulating ourselves and yelling instructions, entirely locked into the moment. "To the left!" and “That roof piece next!” or "hold that, it’s slipping!"
Tipping, pouring, holding. As the final, tiny chimney pieces were fused, a state of clarity and euphoria hit. It’s a feeling that can only come from nailing something so useless, with no real-world application or monetary incentive. We will clock into our same jobs come the work week, and we will make the same wages. But in our hearts, we are experts, champions, architects. We have entered the gingerbread big leagues.
2025-12-20
I'm sick (again)
Woke up this morning with a cold. I could feel a vague sickness brewing yesterday, but I thought an early bedtime with my humidifier on might stave off whatever was coming. Looking back, that was a mistake. I did not remain vigilant. In my deep REM state, I became a docile and stagnant target for infection. Never stop moving!
I spend 40 hours a week surrounded by lice, vomit, and bathroom accidents. I am happy to take on a cold – so long as this virus signals to all the other preying bugs and bacterias “STOP! THIS ONE IS TAKEN!”
I’m 6,575 days lice free (and counting)! I wish they made chips for lice-free benchmarks. Every day without lice is a blessing.
2025-12-17
A pre-solstice curse is lifted
December is approaching its solstice, and it feels like nighttime is bloated and bursting through its britch seams. Night is begging for the gastric relief of more day to ease the burden on its belt.
Under the cloak of 7 p.m. darkness, I met up with a Facebook Marketplace man at a gas station down the street from my house. Our scheduled transaction had the feel of a shadowy, shifty-footed drug deal due to the early sunset. I only have myself to blame – I picked the station with users on ambiguous drugs roaming underneath the fluorescent lights.
These final days before the solstice bring out the moth-like tendencies in us all. Wherever there is bulb or light – let us huddle. I’ll try to remember this feeling next time I get annoyed at the moths swarming my camping lantern in the summer. Empathy.
A middle-aged man who looked just like his Facebook photo climbed out of a red Mini Cooper. I realized he was shorter than me. Threat neutralized. He was also middle-aged, very kind, and named Tim – a demographic I’m sure Mini Cooper excels with.
One by one, I removed items from the camera kit I’d be selling to him – camera body, batteries, lenses, charger, cords. I told him he had my contact information, so if anything is wrong once he starts using the stuff, please reach out. Tim stopped me before I finished the camera bag world tour and responded "It’s okay, I trust you."
A pause.
Trust. I think the final days before the winter solstice bring that out, too. It’s partially the cold – the way we don’t want to linger and hear people out too much. We could just practice blind faith in their intentions, hop back in the Mini Cooper, and turn on the seat warmers. Tim dug his iPhone out of his pocket and opened Venmo. I fed my username to him, letter by letter, just how a mother might feed her child alphabet soup on a sick day.
He hit enter and let the app load. And load. And load. I took out my own phone. We both have Verizon – a carrier that doesn't like supplying the Gates of the Arctic and Amoco gas stations with more than one bar. Tim (bless his heart) tried everything to get his Venmo to load. He stepped to the right a few paces. He held his phone in the air really high, just like in the 90s movies. He powered his phone down and brought it back to life again. He tried Venmo on safari. He tried the Venmo app again. He tried scanning my Venmo QR code. I tried scanning his QR code, then requesting the money. It even got so bad, we tried PayPal – the hieroglyphs of electronic money transfer. No luck. No service. For 15 minutes we stood there, trying fruitlessly.
For every spinning loading screen, Tim and I chatted lightly. Nothing greater than small talk – what do you do for work? What are your holiday plans? What did you study in school? When we hit the second attempt at Venmo, I felt pre-solstice trust surge in me.
"This may be foolish, but I trust you. I trust that if I give you this camera, you’ll send the payment as soon as you have a connection."
A pause. Tim was more than a truster though. He is a man of grit, resolve, and perseverance.
"Thank you, I really appreciate that,” he said. “But I want to try Venmo again."
What happened next, I really can’t explain. As soon as we had both declared our mutual trust – him in the tour of the camera bag, and me in the process of payment – some curse had been loosed. The best theory I have going at the moment is that Tim and I both, at some point in our lives, committed an act of great selfishness. Perhaps I refused to carry a Romani woman up a mountain, even though I promised her in the village I would do so. Perhaps, as a boy, Tim plundered his mother’s entire supply of rhubarb and daisies to buy himself a pair of fine leather shoes. We both had been living cursed lives ever since. But now, in this moment, the planetary orbit aligned just right, the proper constellations were shining behind the light-polluted Twin Cities shroud, and the curse was lifted.
Venmo loaded, and I went home. I don’t expect to ever see Tim again, but I’m happy to know we both live free.
2025-12-15
Imagination
You’d be amazed at just how heavy I can make a 15 pound dumbbell look. I’m tight–lipped and red-faced, curling the weight of a chihuahua to failure, yet I experience no humility in the midst of gallon-water-bottle-wielding gym bros. This is not a humiliation ritual for me. Far from it.
Mentally, I am a mime on the cigarette-stained streets of Paris wearing a striped long sleeve and a red ascot around my neck. I’m about to win a Prestigious Mime Lifetime Achievement Award. None of my mime-ery forefathers have so perfectly nailed pretending a light weight is really, really heavy. I’m a genius. The gym is my canvas, the dumbbell is my brush. Or, to put it in authentic mime’s terms, the gym is my imaginary canvas, the dumbbell is my imaginary brush.
Our brains don't have a slippery mucus membrane to protect it from the world, unlike the esophagus. I like to imagine Imagination itself stepping up to take on this role, becoming a sort of slippery guardian against prickly things.
2025-12-14
The stupid desire to constantly change
There’s a great challenge in the rote mechanics of knitting wool socks.
Knit stitch, purl stitch, knit, purl to make the cuff.
My dad’ll like the gray-colored skein I picked for the project. It’s just the sort of sensible shade he can stomach tucking into even sensible-er lace-up winter boots. As my fingers stretch yarn over the right needle, I picture him headed north to Lake of the Woods in a few short weeks, where a propane-heated shack will wait for him on the thickest ice in years. He’ll catch walleye and eelpout for ten days straight. I imagine he can make it through half of Bob Dylan’s discography over the course of the trip and endlessly toggle between the two stages of Dylan fandom.
He’s great, he sucks, he’s great, he sucks.
When the cuff is finished, I move on to the leg of the sock, not even bothering to count the rounds. I’ll keep knitting three, purling one until I reach nine inches in length. My thoughts can spin and follow their own Great Dane tail before nestling into the kennel of the stitch pattern – knit three, purl one.
I think about that skate park along the river I would pass on my summertime long run route. It’s abandoned now, totally buried in a foot of snow. If I bike there when the world thaws and sprouts again, maybe I’ll bring my camera and get some skate photos. I wonder what those skaters do in the wintertime. If they just hibernate like bears – no point in being awake in a world without skate parks. Maybe they abandon wheels and take up the worthy blade of ice skating. Or they sit inside knitting wool socks for their dads. Don’t forget the purl stitch.
I think about the time my dad asked Father David if there will be ice fishing in heaven. The priest said he wasn’t sure, but whatever heaven is, we won’t be disappointed. He then said we’ll be so full of God’s love that all we’ll be able to do is talk about Him all the time for the rest of eternity. I was immediately disappointed. Knit, knit, knit, purl.
It’s just that, I really like watching old Michael Jackson clips with my roommate, and it doesn’t sound like that will be on any eternal itinerary, no matter what heaven package you receive. Encountering Love face to face is definitely better than MJ. But I’ve never seen God face to face. And I’ve seen my fair share of Dangerous World Tour concert entrance clips. It’s easier to say I like green than it is to digest an incomprehensible color.
I use my fingers as a rough ruler, just like my first grade teacher Ms. House taught me. Only two inches of sock done.
I think about my breathing and how it’s coming from my sternum instead of my belly. I should fix that. Breathing is the root of all zen probably. I worry about money for a bit. Not having enough of it. Not using it well. I worry that I worry about it too much.
I think there’s probably something better for me to be doing than knitting these socks. All this roteness and repetition to produce a drab gray tube of wool. The visual of the flaccid, short creation is a brutal affirmation.
I haven’t escaped this notion of "better" for my entire life. I sat down to knit in the first place because I felt there was something “better” to do with my Sunday than reading my Wendell book. And before that, I thought reading Wendell was “better” than writing fruitless freelance pitches to local publications. And before that, for 22 years, I’ve made a whole fishing-vessel-grade chain of life choices that negated any level of current happiness in the search for an ambiguous, undefinable “better.”
I don’t put the needles down. Knit, knit, knit, purl, and sit in the mechanical motion for a little longer. I'm happy to sit and think about anything, something, or nothing, all while the needles click.
When this sock is completed and stuffed between my dad’s foot and his worn boot, it won’t exist as a final product spawned from optimization, betterment, and constant change. It will be a wearable process, made from steadiness, bound by a knot on either end.
2025-12-11
HELP! (Not in any way affiliated with Apple Records)
I keep accidentally calling it the SuperTime HalfBowl Show in conversation. Not sure how to fix that. It has a much better mouth feel than the real name.
P.S. No updates for a while, sorry! I want to get more structured with the act of writing daily. But I also want to play guitar and run and then knit and then get frustrated when I lose count of stitches because I start mentally singing the parody of "We Didn't Start the Fire" I wrote for 7th-grade history class and then watercolor and doodle in the margins of my gridded to-do notebook (with suspiciously huge margins) and figure out investing and read towards my Goodreads goal and listen to albums start to finish and keep up with my texts and make handmade Christmas presents for everyone and watch standup clips and work on my knife technique (in a non-scary, cooking-related way) and draw up fake companion-plant-filled garden plans I don't yet have the yard for and develop unwritten recipes to store in my muscle memory and then sit around and do nothing with my best friends and then tidy my room and say my bedtime prayers. And I want to fall down new rabbitholes while still making sure the old ones don't close up or weed over and I want to have lots of structure with a supersized side of spontaneity but not too much spontaneity or I'll get heartburn.
I don't know how the Pope, the Pope's Popemobile driver, and I all share the same 24 hours – they probably have even less time to nail sketching the particular curve of a horse's neck than I do. But the Pope is great at being the Pope, and the Popemobile's driver is great at driving the Popemobile. Because they've dedicated their life to one thing. And part of me thinks I'll never nail the neck of a horse because I'm singing that Billy Joel parody while I do it.
2025-11-29
Like a Phoenix from the ashes
Had an allergic reaction and injected my epi-pen as I laid on my cold bathroom floor, cheek against tile (recently mopped, not that it really matters in life-or-death situations). Whenever I enter anaphylaxis, my body becomes like a Minecraft furnace with added coal. I feel a kinship with my house's radiators. Heat seeps from every airway and canal of my body. The wheezing is less of an indicator of severity than my need to strip layers of clothing off and place as much as my surface area against a cold floor as is humanly possible (sans flaying).
I think all that body heat is necessary, much like a Phoenix requires its own flames to rise from its ashes. As the mythical Arabian bird itself springs forth from its demise, I rose from the bathroom floor, picked up my Life is Good sleep shirt, and headed for the couch with a bloodstream full of epinephrine.
2025-11-26
Rishikesh sister program
Had such a zen day. They should start sending Rishikeshian people over to my house for two-week holistic detoxification and enlightenment retreats. The same way we ship the finest of the white population, like The Beatles and mother SCOBY wielders over to their way.
Here is the itinerary for my wellness retreat, loosely based on today:
Wake up, stretch for five minutes, drink a black coffee while reading and listening to John Denver’s collab with the Muppets, go for a walk in the fresh, mentholy winter air, return, shovel and salt the sidewalk and car pad, scrape off car and my roommate’s car, paint and glue together a homemade Christmas garland representing the Star of Jerusalem while chatting with roommate, eat an entire three serving can of chicken with bare hands in an effort to clear out the pantry before going home for Thanksgiving, create a Christmas gift for mom (which I can’t disclose here, she has this website), listen to the entirety of Simon & Garfunkel’s discography on vinyl, think about practicing guitar, don't practice guitar, another walk after sunset in the early evening air, made even more menthol-y by the darkness, hang out with roommates and discuss Marian apparitions and Eucharistic miracles for the rest of the evening.
Send the Rishikeshians my way!
2025-11-25
High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl...
Big lessons learned today. Did some laundry like the rejected Fourth Stooge, and it marked the fourth time in this calendar year that I’ve destroyed white items by washing them with red items. A core pillar of my early adult pride has been never separating my whites and colors.
I tried four different methods to strip the red from my now-ruined whites. Oxiclean, baking soda, vinegar, and bleach were all rendered useless. Reflecting on this fourth disaster, I’ve learned my lesson for real this time. Thank you Pete Townsend – We won’t get fooled again. From this day forward, I will seperate my clothing into categories so complex, it will require me to pull up a Excel spreadsheet every time I do laundry.
I’ll tell you what really matters though. When I went to open the washer lid… I knew something was wrong. It felt like being pulled out of a deep, sound slumber by my phone ringing in the middle of the night – something life changing is about to take place. With my hands on the lid, I braced myself. An ominous, unforgiving energy was radiating off that shameful machine, tucked away in the corner of my damp, unfinished basement. I opened it. I saw pink, everywhere, so much pink.
My favorite white Geese shirt was in this load. I felt my face empty and arachnoid crawl radiate down my spinal cord. I dug through, as if digging through the post-tornado rubble of my home, searching for my puppy or my husband or spoon collection. The shirt wasn’t there.
I looked in my dirty laundry bin, where the clothing that couldn’t quite fit into this first load waited for its turn in the machine. There, at the top, sat my Geese shirt. Oh joy!!
Sometimes disaster reveals the hidden euphoria that is the status quo. When else do we celebrate a white t-shirt being white? I hope to wear my blue jeans and praise them for blueness, and I want to smile upon my the brownishness of my brown shoes.
2025-11-23
The Mental Taffy Puller
There was a time when one of life’s greatest pleasures was huddling outside of a candy store owned by a kindly plump old man to watch the near-magic taffy pulling machine through a shop window. Then you’d go in, a little bell would ring as the door swung open, and you’d spend a nickel on some candy sticks, peanut brittle, and caramels, and it would probably be so goshdarn delightful you’d remember it even through your decrepit and senile days.
Our world is entering a taffy pulling crisis, a delight depression: a period characterized by a downturn in not only delightful things, but delighted responses to things. By this point, we’ve all heard of the cheap dopamine and how our phones and screens and consumerist habits are causing brain termites to eat through everything good and stable about our brain chemistry. While these ideas are certainly related, I think the taffy pulling crisis hits at something a little deeper than cheap dopamine.
A lot of things bring me quick hits of happiness, like retiring yet another Instagram Reel to the Media Hall of Fame or listening to “The Girl is Mine” about 15 times in a day. Ideally, half of these listens are through my noise cancelling, huge ass headphones while I’m on a run, and the other half are on YouTube. Throw in a sunset over a parking lot while I blast my car heaters. Quick happiness is out there.
But none of these things are true DELIGHT! How can I be delighted more? How can I be more delighted?
I’ve created the vaguely early 20th century mental candy store scene – with the crucial jolly plump store owner, the taffy pulling machine, and the bell above the door – to challenge myself in new ways. I don’t want to just feel dopamine, I want to be steeped in delight. I want to feel a mix of wonder, refreshment, and joy all wrapped into one technicolor package – like how I imagine every American household felt as the Wizard of Oz came into color before their eyes.
No longer will I go to my happy place. I will shut my eyes tight and enter my delight place: peer through the shop window at the near-magic taffy machine, open the door, hear the bell ding, and enter the mental candy shop. I will take a deep breath, open my eyes again, and seek delightfulness in the Old World Way. Eat a gingersnap and feels the spice linger in the back of my mouth, smell a candle and marvel at the way they can pack the smell of an apple into wax, and be spellbound by light switches.
2025-11-22
Bushwick Cafe Independent Production
Went to a neighborhood cafe down the street from my place, sat at the counter, and ordered a steaming coffee. Felt like some real down-on-his-luck, recently divorced trucker behavior. I even put my elbows on the counter and hunched a bit to get into character. I peered into the kitchen through the passthrough to see pancake flippers and gravy dousers, and I observed all the servers whizzing out waffle stacks and bacon platters.
I started pretending I was in Bushwick at some pretentious independent theater production put on by one of my art friends, and that none of these people were actually diner employees. They were all actors doing a one-night-only stage play of the American working class, a commentary on the death of the American Dream, and what it means to “make it” in today’s world. I, the viewer, was meant to observe these actors performing their real, honest, gritty, slice-of-life roles, with coworker chat written to sound natural. One of them talked about Thanksgiving plans and the other talked about what work she had done on her car, but none of it was real, and all of it was crafted by some wizardly scriptwriter capturing the essence of the everyman.
2025-11-21
Great day for social credit
Made a joke to the cashier that landed really well. He was a man in his mid-50s, so it was a true comedic Hail Mary. You never know with those guys. We riffed for the entirety of the transaction. Two people having a pleasant time; he with his Coors Light hat, I with my sopping wet hair. One thing about me: I have no aversion to showing up to public venues right after showering. I’m at peak freshness, and I’m so clean I outta be holding a rubber ducky! Let me share it with the world!
Honorable mention: chatted with a waitress about the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Told her the first graders at school wrote thankfulness lists that stuck with me. They wrote things like "my scar," "the color blue," "lunch," "Sonic," "Halloween candy," and "earth." I was reminded that thankfulness isn't complicated. At the end of the day, I'm really grateful for the color green and stovetop popcorn and how books start to smell as they age – and that's nothing but simpleness. She told me her dog is getting surgery this week and her family won't have the capacity to do a bunch of cooking, so they're just ordering pizza. We agreed it'll be a Thanksgiving to remember. The year we had pizza for dinner and talked about the simple, one-dimensional things that bring nothing but joy.
2025-11-12
Growing, Aging, Dying
After working my day at the elementary school, I joined in celebrating my friend Andrew's 23rd birthday at a brewery. We are all aware that breweries are unsettling millenial frontiers, but where else can you find such flexible seating on a Wednesday evening? I ordered an Irish Stout that I didn't end up finishing. My grandma died yesterday and I've been missing her big time. Big time. But between the school kids, the birthday crowd, and the grief, I got to hold every phase of living close in the span of one day. I saw its constant, concurrent, confusing beauty. Growing, aging, dying.
2025-11-10
Token Fourth Pair of Jeans
Wore a pair of jeans that isn't in my main three-pair rotation today. It needs to happen occasionally to assuage guilt and bad karma for keeping them in my drawer. But all day I couldn’t help but wish I was in one of my three sensory dream jeans. Sometimes I wish I could wear the same thing every day, like Mr. Krabs or Steve Jobs.
2025-10-27
Fear no cliche
At some point in his life, Plato wrote down a philosophical line so potent it became the apex of all his collected papyrus scrolls. We’re talking years and years of pondering and abstracting, all leading to a thought entirely off the beaten neuropathway, entirely foreign to us common mouthbreathers. I don’t know what this powerful Platonian thought was, but I know it’s out there.
I’m here to slightly diminish such great thinking as that. A simpler, more utilitarian intellectual resource is there for us – cliches. Let me illustrate. We all love our modern, comfortable air fryers, but I think we’d all admit a basic fire is far more useful. In the same vein, philosophic mantras are great, but in the trying times I’d rather be left with a pocketful of cliches.
There’s nothing like the laughter of a child. The grass is always greener on the other side. Money can’t buy happiness. Better safe than sorry.
We carry innate truths with us. Let's not shy away, I guess.
2025-09-30
Make it a great day
As I scanned the shelves of the Salvation Army Thrift Store for sneakers to replace my currently unraveling Reeboks, I realized fate is in my hands! Entirely in my hands! Mine!
The financial state of the country is a bit of a bummer, especially for us young adults. Either your slice of the job market pie is oversaturated with other LinkedIn #OpenToWork people, or it’s just been totally leveled by an Iowa AI data center pumping out soulless gobblygook at record rates. Huge, sterile halls of computers are fueled by a combination of scarce natural resources and fleeting hope. You could say humans are fueled by the same, but I like to think we generally use stuff more poetically.
Over the dusty, hissing Salvation Army speakers, a rotating announcement track always plays between worship songs. It’s a man’s voice, and he tells you all about the upcoming sales and discounts. The track ends with the phrase “have yourselves a great day.” Or, I should say, it USED to end with the phrase, “have yourselves a great day.” Now it ends with the phrase “make it a great day.” This script change happened sometime in the past month.
Just as Curt Claudio heard John Lennon speak to him in the Abbey Road Medley, I felt the man from Salvation Army corporate summon me in that announcement. A great day is no longer something to have and keep – it is something to be willed. Something to make.
I bent the sole of a maroon Puma sneaker to reveal a terminal case of dry rot. They were my size, I loved the style and color, but the degradation was irreversible and unfixable. This would not be the pair.
2025-09-14
Candles in the end times
Zombie-related media doesn’t have nearly enough scented candles. If the grid went down we would depend on the 2016 Peach Bellini Bath & Bodyworks limited edition three-wick candle to bring us light.
2025-09-04
Bikes: The windsong of American lies
There’s a seat nestled semi-comfortably on the seam of my buttcheeks as wind rolls off my gelled eyebrows like water off a seal’s back. My pedals command the front and back wheels to motion, not unlike Planet Earth commanding the sun and moon to spin her days into nights. My legs pump towards terminal velocity, but I don’t register on any speedometer. I’m still. Perfectly still.
Instead, the entire world – its sly cats, dumb civilians, and wise old oaks – is moving at my command. It all speeds toward my face and past my seam at whatever rate my legs push those pedals. And with a squeeze of my fingertips, I return the entire Earth – its wise cats, sly civilians, and dumb old oaks – to a proper speed and order.
I am on a bikeback. I harness creation. I am wearing a women’s size small helmet.
So, yes, the rumors are true: I’ve been riding my trusty bike around town. It’s a heavy steel contraption I’ve owned since I outgrew my Disney Princess bike, and the real cyclists in this city might describe it as a “beater.” I take no offense – it just means bandits and hooligans (the kind who wear striped t-shirts and black eye masks) don’t care when I park it in the alley.
My beater bike has outlived three school laptops, two iPhones, and my college car. It was around for the cremation of two childhood pets and two grandparents. They were dust, and to dust they returned. The bike was never dust, I guess. I think the thing will even be around for when I hit the age where birds and butterscotch candies suddenly become really important to my identity. I’ll have to let my attorney know about the bike when I plan my estate.
The staying power of my aquamarine Walmart bike is not an anomaly – it represents the norm. I’ll walk you through the history of transportation to show you what I mean:
In a time before alarm clocks, the rooster was the best man had. But sometimes the rooster got up late, so man would awake to a grim sundial. He was late for cave! Walking was really slow. Thus, man invented running. But then man said “this is a lot of work – I wish I could have a lower class creature do this for me.” So man created the horse and buggy. Which was all well and good until man realized this lower class creature had no fingers, only hooves. In his effort to have dominion over the beast, he became subservient in the act of picking up its poop. Then came the coal-powered train. And man had the desire to offroad it. So then he created the car. Then he created America and made the infrastructure entirely dependent on a big complicated Ford machine.
To hell with that flighty rooster – as modes of transport came and went, the bike persisted. It’s just two wheels and some chain: a simple, honest creature with its inner-working delicately displayed for all. Cars are complex, hooded beasts that can’t afford such transparency with owners.
How did America, the country of total freedom and hyperindependence, get hooked on the car? A machine crying out for weekly gas station trips, regular mechanic visits, foreign parts, and perfectly smoothed roads.
American, Yankee-Doodle-type freedom is a bike. It’s filling your tires with air whenever you remember you should. It’s cutting through woods because you know a shortcut. It’s hearing the water rush as you squeeze the brakes and halt at the shore of the Mississippi. It’s embodying efficiency in a way assembly lines and motors can only mock.
As the wind sings in my ears, I hear every American lie of expansion, growth, and profit whispered in its song. Bombing a hill at top speeds? That’s freedom. That’s independence. That’s the stuck-his-feather-in-his-cap-and-called-it-macaroni dream.
2025-08-26
At the foot of the Ecuadorian band
I was at the Minnesota State Fair by myself today, listening to an Ecuadorian band play Andean music at the DNR building. The stage is behind the fish pond where Morgan Wallen fans and socialist homesteaders watch the catfish swim side by side.
Panpipe and charango notes floated over a dusty concrete patch for a lone dancer: a little girl in chocolate-fingerprint-stained white polo. She flung her limbs to a rhythm – not necessarily the one being played. Maybe one I couldn’t even hear.
It wasn’t long until she pulled her littler sister out to join her, this one in a striped shirt that hid chocolate a bit better. Their mom watched and smiled with the pride of parenthood. I looked on with the smile of a little sister – something I’ll always be no matter how old I get.
Then the two were joined by a sun-damaged old guy in a Navy hat and his pale wife, hobbling to the downstrum of the guitar. Whatever routine they danced was learned in a class decades ago, not the right style for the music. He was old enough to forget where he put his keys and she probably forgets to grab the mail and they both forget to throw the ketchup out, even though it’s been expired since 2005. And so their garbage bin overflows and their orange juice is separated and chunky, but the dance is safe. They each demanded that impractical routine to a special, secret place in their memory – a place even old age can’t find – and that's why they're here.
Another stout elderly man with a phone attached to his belt came out. His two granddaughters joined. Then a couple. Two more couples. A pair of middle aged women who danced like Def Leppard was playing over Touch Tunes at a Pine City bar. The song wasn’t over and dust passed between the dancing feet.
The guitarist said something into the microphone, and I caught a few words from my high school Spanish vocab sheet. He started with "Who here is from…?" and received cheers from a group of four standing off to the side. There was some back and forth. The four joined the dance floor.
A drunk woman in a "Defend Our Troops" hat (I’m not making this up) leaned over to the couple next to me. “He should really speak English,” she said. No one answered, because why would they? The music sounded good. Many measures passed. She added a comma and a second clause to her thought, “Though I guess he doesn’t have to.” In the warmth of a Eureka moment and a steady buzz, she joined the others.
"What is left is what is." Wendell Berry wrote that phrase in his poem "The Broken Ground." I read it just two days earlier.
This is what is left. This mish mash of people on a dusty DNR dancefloor at a bumfuck state fair is the result of everything. Literally everything. Everything as far back as a feudal serf sneezing in his empty barley field or a t-rex going for an afternoon swim, and then even farther back from that.
Those sisters take from their mother in the same way the Navy man took from his own mother back before the sun had ever touched his weathered skin. Body yielding body. Time yielding time. We’re all taken from the apples that fed us... and the soil that fed the apples... and the husks and the decay and the rot that fed the soil. That pileup of dark broken oldness will give and give and one day we’ll return the favor. We are creation born from creation born from creation.
But we’re also the last unstricken name on a cosmically scaled, red-markered process of elimination. We’re a result of the apple we ate as much as we’re the result of the apple seed that never germinated in compacted topsoil, or the too-ugly honeycrisp tossed from the Walmart value pack. Infinitely unlikely, creation born from elimination. We are what is; we are what is left.
I watched the girl with the white-stained shirt come off the dance floor out of breath. She spoke to her mother, the one who yielded her, just as much as she spoke to the void of all her mothers who would never be.
"I think I need a dance break."
And so I got teary-eyed, there of all places. The air carried the tinge of vegetable oil, cheese curd breath, and showhorse poop. Bodies were clothed with kitschy and culturally relevant graphic tees, certainly on their brief stay in a middle-class laundry cycle before eternal damnation to a landfill in Chile. I don’t even want to bother dissecting the mess of the political views represented by those dancing.
It wasn’t a classically beautiful sight, but it was an inherently miraculous one. Each one of these people, equally unlikely, coming here to meet at the foot of the Ecuadorian band.
2025-08-11
Carstickerlessness
A common bit of American fortune cookie wisdom: those who want to run for President are not those who should.
Basically, you have to knock a few screws loose before you:
- Desire that much power
- Have the capital available to grasp for it
In a similar fashion, those who want bumper stickers are not the ones who should have them. Most of the time, when I see a politically charged decoration on a car, my response is, “Yeah, brother, I figured.”
The Etsy stickers on the back of a lime green Kia Soul have never shocked me, just as the Amazon stickers on the back of a lifted Ram 3500 have never made me look twice. It’s a totally redundant gesture. If anything, I want to know if this is a chicken-or-the-egg-type dilemma. Which came first, the political leaning or the car?
I think, as a nation, it’s time we turn to the stickerless for guidance. I want to hear from the people driving ambiguous car makes and models. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Mazda SUV with a strongly worded decal. Or a Hyundai telling me how to interpret today’s headlines. It’s about time we get these drivers in town hall meetings or Instagram Reels comment sections. Let them speak to my parents and cousins at Thanksgiving.
It’s no longer a question of partisans reaching across the aisle – the gap is too far for the human wingspan. Now it’s a job for the bumperstickerless. They must pull up to the curb, quickly demand “get in, there’s no time for questions,” then jettison off to the other side of the aisle. These nonpartisan Ubers are our only hope.
2025-08-03
Cryptid?
I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree this morning. I didn't know that could happen. It was so quick... so sudden. I don't think I was meant to see it.
2025-07-31
A Co-nun-drum
This past weekend, I met a nun who played basketball for Harvard. Yes – this was before she committed her life to the religious service.
I don’t know if the Pope is allowing 6’1” forwards wearing habits to juke people yet. I’d imagine he’s still getting settled into his new cubicle and getting to know his coworkers, who are inevitably saying things like, “You never worked with Francis, did you? Yeah, things were totally different back then. Management was way chiller before he left.” Coworker stuff. Vaping in the bathroom on company time. You know the drill.
So, yeah, it’ll probably take a second to get the Papal Documents about nun forwards. Regardless, I couldn’t get the image of a sister in Lebrons 20s out of my head.
I started wondering. What would happen if an NBA All-Star Team played a pickup game against a quintet of nuns? What is the right, just, and biblical way for a wall of 6’7” men to act in that situation? Should they decimate them? Let them pass for easy layups? Either option is equally pathetic.
I’ve pondered that dilemma for 0.2 seconds, and the answer is now obvious. Everyone knows the Space Jam Michael Jordan Superstar Team could absolutely level some Carmelites, no problem. We don’t need a commentated four-period massacre to figure that out. Simply put, NBA-ers have nothing to prove.
Instead of making martyrs of these pious women, the All-Stars could play a fun-loving match against the nuns where no one gets hurt -- similar to how a parent might not go full force on their child during a game of Monopoly. It's more fun for everyone if the adult who's well acquainted with the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism has mercy on the child who yet to understand a piggy bank. The NBA players could allow themselves a few cheeky three-pointers and screens on offense and let past few layups and rebounds on defense. There'd be a good-spirited handshake after the final buzzer to cap off the evening. The players go home happy and are sound asleep by 9PM.
Conundrum addressed. But that dilemma was too easy.
What’s really sinister to consider is what a group of 30-something, rec league men would do when faced with the same question: How do you play a pickup game against nuns?
These are not men with life-size cutouts in department stores displaying their wingspan and hand size, nor are they men with white-lined lips featured on the cafeteria Got Milk? poster. They are not the NBA's finest.
Rather, these are men who are starting to question the feasible lifespan of their marriages. Men who are still grappling with the knee injury that left them benched their junior year of high school. Men who are coming to terms with inheriting their father’s hairline, with no ticket to Turkey in sight.
In essence, these are men who have everything to prove. Ponder with me. How would they play against these nuns?
July 23, 2025
The Hellman’s Mayonnaise Retrospective
Redacted because it's stupid.
2025-07-22
Redacted
July 21, 2025
Hello world. I've been thinking about the subtle, understated beauty of a La Croix can today. If you've never looked at a La Croix can and thought, "huh, there's something there" .... Maybe you need to get closer to life's hint-of-lime scented breath.
I think it's the way the design elements aren't quite centered, and the font isn't quite papyrus. The streaking colors aren't quite representational of any one thing. It forces the viewer to source meaning from their own personal memory bank and play with the focus of their eyeballs, much like a Monet painting might do.
La Croixs are all the same flavor. The various-colored packaging would have you think differently, but it's a lie. Just like how every color of Fruit Loop tastes the same.
The La Croix package is not asking you to crave anything, like a McRib box reading "Tangy Temptation" in corporate patented font might. The La Croix package is asking you to sit, be still, lament. And, if you’re ready. Take a sip.
