Stationary Unicycle

We adopted our elderly Maltese the day before Thanksgiving 2017. Summer looked like a well coiffed old lady, sparse closely shorn white hair with a slight wave, her pink skin showing through. She wore a little red sweater. If she had been a human she would have smelled like tea rose dusting powder and kept a tissue up her sleeve. I'd never had a dog of a specific breed before. I was taken with her sad story, her owner had passed away, those who had been tasked with caring for her neglected and abandoned her. Her 17 year old companion, Max, also a Maltese, had been so ill he needed to be put down. I needed to take care of this tiny old lady and so I adopted her on the spot without doing much thinking about what taking care of an aging Maltese would entail. Grooming a Maltese is part of responsible ownership, not just for aesthetic reasons, but for their overall comfort and health. Had I done my homework I would have know that Maltese fur grows pretty fucking fast and is hard to ...

I am unbearably sad right now. My country is a disaster, those who are leading us are leading us straight to hell, and it feels like there is nothing I can do. I know "they" want us to feel powerless. If we're weary we give up. It's hard to think of anything else but the terrible news every moment of every day. I think that's part of what is eroding my will, the constant bad news, the daily tragedies. It's exhausting. I will endeavor to find something to lighten the mood in an effort to ease the heavy burden of our shared reality. It may take a while to come up with something though. I may take several whiles. There's the story of how my son and I shaved the dog. That's pretty funny. Yup. It is. The punch line is, the dog looks like Olivia Newton John circa 1980, you know, skinny with giant leg warmers. Shaving the dog's legs was tricky, Summer the Amazing Elderly Maltese was over it by the time we got to her limbs, and frankly,...

I bought my 15 year old son his first pair of cleats today. He's joining the football team this year despite growing up in a family devoid of interest in sports, despite never having played football before, and despite my past stance on tackle football in middle school. I refused to let him play, he seemed so young. It felt like too much of a risk. Am I worried about injuries now? So much yes. So so much. I know that head injuries, neck injuries, broken teeth, broken bones, did I mention head and neck injuries, are a real concern. And I am concerned. I'm already worried and the season doesn't start for a few months yet. But I'm letting him join anyway. Because he wants to. Because he said he'd do it even if I said no. Because I want to support him in his effort to become stronger, I want to support his need for being a member of a team. Because he's been searching for his place for so long and he feels he may have finally found it. I remind myself t...

I am going to just blather on about stupid shit. My heart hurts from all the terrible news, my head hurts from all the stupidity. I can't believe my country, the people of my country, our "leadership", I just can't . I find myself just wanting to go to bed and never get up again. I try to stay on top of the news even though it makes me ill. There are times though, when I need to hide. I know it's my privilege that allows me to bury my head when I become overwhelmed. I can't help but feel ashamed and weak for checking out of reality long enough to binge watch Queer Eye. I also know if I don't do something silly or enjoyable, I will become totally burned out and even more useless than I feel right now. I am sure there are others who feel the same. But every time I sit down to write something frivolous and funny, nothing comes to mind. It's as though there will never be anything good again. We've turned a corner and we've gotten...

"And Jesus wept." I am not a religious person, but these words moved me.  My county's leaders are corrupt and immoral. Some of them are truly evil.  Nothing else seems to matter right now. Children being torn from their parents and kept in abandoned buildings behind chain link fencing like animals is almost more than my brain can comprehend and my heart breaks.  I will put my body on the line, I will raise my voice, I won't quietly sit in the background. This is the time when our moral fiber is tested and we must all be strong, stand up, speak out or forever be on the wrong side of history. To stand back is shameful. If you don't do something, be ashamed.   Silence is complicity. 

I am writing in public. When writing in public, I use the smallest font I can. I hate the idea of someone reading over my shoulder. Not that they would, why would they? But what if they did? Horrors.  Inevitably they would catch a glimpse when I've spelled something wrong, like GLIMPSE, which I just a moment ago spelled GLIMPS but then I caught the error and fixed it, but what if someone saw that before I noticed the mistake? Would they think I think there is a singular GLIMP? God forbid.  Out of context, anything can be embarrassing or damning. Also, fruit salad should be cut into smaller bits because eating it in public alone is sort of gross. Do you take the bigger chunks in smaller bites? If you stuff the whole thing in there, you can't chew it and sometimes it gets wedged on the roof of your mouth and the only way to save the day is to pry the food out with your your finger. So then, smaller bites it must be, but what if you're afraid you'll bit...

Writing a poem can take me years.  The first draft usually comes to me quickly and it's heady stuff, exhilarating. After that, editing the thing, that is where the real work lies, and that can take years.  At some point I need to let it go.  Lately I haven't had a glimmer of a poem, except for that haiku like thing I shard here on the blog, or was it the other blog? Anyway, even though it was only three lines, that was stewing for a couple of years.  I didn't change it much from the original, but it did take a long time for me to recognize it's poem-ness,  I carry a notebook with me most of the time. I was flipping through an old one, from 2013, and I came across only one line in the entire book that really stood out.                                                                ...

If you are considering suicide or feel hopeless and helpless, please call the Suicide Prevention Life Line.  Call 1-800-273-8255 Available 24 hours everyday https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ please don't kill yourself. I spent the winter and spring seriously contemplating suicide. I managed not to do it. I beg you not to do it too. Don't do it. It's easier right now not to do anything, so do that Do nothing. Just lay there in your bed and cry or don't cry if you are out of tears, But I beg you stay put, don't do it. stay here. Don't go. Stay put. Tomorrow might suck but it might not. And a week from now might not suck too. And there are sunrises and sunsets and puppies. Also flowers, music, and the smell of sweet grass. Really, those things are worth living for. It's the small stuff. There's lots of small stuff. Much of it beautiful. Even some of the ugly small stuff is beautiful. Some people...

I changed most of the posts on The Unicycle to draft before I said goodbye the last time a couple years ago. But after making an effort to write The Unicycle again, and in an effort to get some inspiration, I decided to check out some of my past posts and drafts. Seems like I'm always depressed. That's the one thread that holds everything together.  It seems I'm always depressed and have always been depressed. I cannot think of a time in my life when I was not, to some degree, depressed. It is tedious living like this, and I can only imagine that it's tedious reading about someone living like this.  Maybe that's why I can't think of anything to write about.  My recent major depressive episode was severe and though I now find myself sort of able to cope I still carry with me the weight. It's a lighter burden, no doubt about it, a lighter weight, but it's still draped over my shoulders like a heavy wet wool shawl. It's a weighs on m...

Here's a little something I wrote recently that I have no recollection of writing: Why is poetry monopolized by academic fuckers who make their poems mercury elusive or slick like a noodle you can't pierce with your fork?

I wrote this blog a long time ago. Then I quit writing, I just ditched the whole thing. Recently I thought, hey, I wrote more when I had a self imposed and semi-public deadline, so maybe I should jump on the Unicycle again. But I couldn't log in, so I just let it go and started Remedial Gym. For someone not interested in fitness or sports my choices of titles are silly, but moving on. Now, for whatever reason I can not log into my new bloggityblog. So, here I am again. Frankly, I missed the Unicycle and I am happier to be out of Remedial Gym. I wrote some pretty funny things here, and I'm glad to have access to it. The stuff on the other blog was lackluster and tiresome. So that's the long way around a very boring topic. Hopefully I can pick up some of the old momentum I had when I first started Stationary Unicycle. I worry that my last depressive episode ate my brain, sort of like emotional syphilis, which is not, by the way, a sexually transmitted disease. Ju...