Stationary Unicycle

April I walk through the rundown neighborhood to the rundown neighborhood market to buy a bottle of soy sauce. Soy sauce for the dinner I was preparing to make. Because I forgot to buy it earlier when I was at the grocery store. Earlier, when the sun was warm and bright and the dirty snow shone with drops of water held suspended for a shimmer of a moment only to fall and be replaced by another quivering globe of bright shimmering melting. But now, it's later. I walk past dirty snowbanks, refrozen. Dirty puddles filmed with ice. Old bags and discarded papers catch in the wind like tails or wings. The gray pink early spring sky that earlier had offered warmth like a kindness cools as the sun slides smoothly away like the well manicured regretful wave of a newly wed princess leaving the balcony and the adoring crowds below. Inside the dirty little store, smells sweet, oily, smells of boiled coffee. Stale cigarette vapors off the jacket of...

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.

I took a Buzzfeed quiz to figure out what sort of tattoo I should I have. I trust Buzzfeed and I have faith in the validity of their quizzes. I trust BF quizzes like my mother, a Leo, trusted her daily horoscope, the one printed in the back of the daily paper between the Jumble puzzle and Ask Doctor Donahue. Buzzfeed really knows the REAL ME, for real. The real me who needs a tattoo at the age of getting awfully freaking close to 50. Plus my skin is getting that weird dry skin thing going on so that a tattoo will nicely draw attention to my weird old skin. A tattoo, oh yes. I must have one. Buzzfeed peered into my very soul and determined based on my Starbucks cup preference and Pixar movie preference that I want need should must have a typography tattoo. No pictures for me. Forget the Celtic knots,  retro blue birds and cliche butterflies. Emblazon upon my creepy old lady skin the unambiguous word. I looked up examples of typography tattoos and found many people ha...

My son will be turning 11 in April. He's already a giant fellow at 5' 3". He looks soft and round and he is but he's also very strong. One of his favorite games right now is, Can I Pick it Up? Anyway, I digress. In my family, boys get softer and rounder before they grow into broad shouldered giant manly men. True story. This morning, my big little boy stared pensively into his cereal bow. I asked him what was up and he said he was worried about going through puberty. I asked it there was something specific about puberty that was troubling him. He told me he didn't want to grow a beard and was afraid to shave for fear he'd cut himself with a razor. I looked at his sweet smooth face and imagined him with facial hair. Huh. Wow! OH MY GOD. I didn't say that though, because when your kids come to you with this stuff you have to be placid as a pool of water, you have to remain as cool as goddamn cucumber and as you must appear to be as serene as something r...