In another life and with another brain I would have made myself master and pupil of language – instead… I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. In the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I’ve fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate the film … More Otherwise Known as REM Sleep
10 years ago, I attempted suicide. On a summer night in 2008, my parents drove me from the house where I was raised to the emergency room in an effort to save the life of their 21-year-old son. My action was built on several years of mental turmoil and anguish, of unchecked thoughts and words … More Surviving Suicide: What I’ve Learned After 10 Years
I used to worry about a great many things, existentially. I am learning to reel it back. You let your mind get such a lead on your heart that it casts a shadow over those who belong in the latter.
I attended a concert of classical music this evening. The final piece, “Ode to Lord Buckley,” composed by David Amram, was written after the death of the titular entertainer. Amram knew him well. What follows is a scant account of the performance’s sublimity, composed by myself. The saxophonist scoops notes penned in memoriam and hurls … More On Hearing Notes Composed in Mourning
Chivalrous courtship, (in the elementary-school-aged-male sense of the word) isn’t dead, but it took a major hit during the latter half of the first decade of this millennium. It started when households began doing away with their home phones and choosing to exclusively use cellular phones. With that one decision, the family itself lost a … More Landlines: One Reason the ’90s Were the Best Decade for Elementary School Romance
You’ll reach a point where you cannot blame your mistakes on your parents’. In the early years of your second decade, you’d determined they were the reason you wore a hero’s mask over your villain face and fought for both sides. A double life, your father called it. When you were alone you spat at … More Forgiveness.
The falsities I signify as memories lie in stacked planes, pierced by a needle, threaded taut at the most peculiar points; each day is an involuntary setting off of previously lived remembrances, bounded in touchstones I’ve symbolically mythologized in my psyche. One past moment bounds into another: full submersion in a wormhole of past occurring … More Memory Wormhole (An Opening)
“I am the place in which something has occurred.” — Claude Lévi–Strauss What is here labelled as “something,” must be aggrandized. “Something” is too broad a descriptor. So, is it more direct to say I am the place in which many a thing has happened? Is this a better means of explaining in a single … More The Sieve Bored Holier
Find no purpose here!—unless purpose can be distilled from the peculiarities of the sights and sounds of one man’s collection of lines taken down while pretending to send text messages or at a urinal during a summer evening out in an eclectic Philadelphia neighborhood. Frankfort Hall. Beer garden. Biergarten? I’ll settle on the former. … More An Evening Out in Fishtown, or the shabbily doctored-up bits of observation I typed into my phone on the evening of August 19, 2016.
Breathing comes naturally. You launch from of your mother’s insides—POP!—equipped with innate survival skills, preprogrammed to do something you will do until the last day you are alive. How peculiar (because the action is automatic) are those moments when you are aware of the ebb and flow of the air you are filtering? You can … More Breadth of Breath
