Stationary Unicycle

I began having suicidal thoughts as a child. The thoughts grew large or diminished, but desiring to not be a living person was always there at the back of my brain, as a big presence or a wisp of an idea, in some form, always. When I was a little kid, I shut down. I was blank. Despite everyone's best efforts to knock the “weird” out of me, I managed to hide a kernel of my self hoping that some day I would find it and tend it. That was brave and hopeful of me. To my family I was simple, dumb, blank, hapless, a loser. The real me was internal and far away for safe keeping. Middle school was a nightmare. I managed to endure and didn't die. High school was a horror story. I wanted to die, but I didn't. College was fraught with crisis and fear, and though I never got a degree, neither did I walk in front of any of the tractor trailer trucks that sped past me on my walks to campus, nor did I throw myself over the bridge railing into the Stillwater River. At one

The obnoxious Salon headline read: "Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis?" Fuck you, Salon . Just fuck you. First: I am not getting REALLY OLD, thanks very much. And heads up, youngster, the next 20 years are going to fucking fly by. You're going to be 40-something and be as shocked as I am now every time you see your 40-something year old face in the mirror, because on the inside, you still feel like the funky little hipster you used to be. My kids are going to be the hip happening cool youthful adults when you're middle-aged. They will mock you for being getting REALLY OLD. When this happens, I will get all Schadenfreude on your middle-aged midlife-crisising ass, and I will laugh and laugh, if I'm not already dead and sleeping the dirt nap of the ancients. Second: You wanna know how a slacker has a midlife crisis you smug little millennial?  Come over here while I lace up the Grunge era combat boots of my youth, and I will m

Maine winters linger. It's just what they do. But this year it's different. Winter isn't lingering so much as it's stalled in the middle of the road. We'll be looking winter in it's ugly road-dirty grill until we can call a goddamned tow or push it out of the way, muscles straining. I believe that people encase their past traumas in amber. We are living beings and the hard remnants of the past are hurtful to us. We store them and we try to forget about them but they make us ill because we are living beings and we are meant to fill ourselves with the present which is alive, and the future, which is full of potential. The  dead relics poison our blood. We forget we carry them. It's one thing to carry the certainty of death in oneself. It's another to carry death itself. There are crows in the yard. Flapping black wings, One crow drives his head into the soft snow, he shakes his head, flaps his wings, hops forward, does it again. I thought per

I'm awake. Mostly. It's Monday/Tuesday. It's Tuesday on the calendar, but content is all about Monday. Say all the words. Even if they are ugly words. Even if they are hurtful words. Even if they are very strange and weird words. Even if your father tells you your words do not make you pretty. Especially then.