Just drink the coffee.
I'm dreaming in color of driving dead friends like cargo through towns I don't know until I arrive home with their bodies. I don't know what to do when I get there, so I just leave the back windows open 4" or so and go back in my apartment. But once I'm inside, I'm obsessed … Continue reading Can I Extrovert Safely?
Although I've proclaimed the gospel of mind-body connection (as above, so below—my mental state and my physical body are not islands in the same stream, they're the water and the flow), I needed The Universe to teach me how it feels with a mallet, so I threw out my back a few years ago while … Continue reading Listening To My Body
From a bartender’s perspective, you’ll never beat John Prine, and although I’m a songwriter, a singer and a storyteller as well, I think the shit-bar matriarch’s point of view is the one Mr. Prine might have enjoyed the most from me, had I ever had the fortune to meet him. Trade secret: she who rules … Continue reading To John Prine, With Love From a Bartender
Here's a link to AA, because you just find trouble at Narcotics Anonymous. We were burned out on the Sunset Strip. We’d been through Reagan and most of the first Bush. The Berlin Wall was down, we’d Just Said No, then we said fuck it. The 90210 fantasy didn’t belong to us. We hated the … Continue reading All Apologies
I call it bloom because that’s not dying. We’re about to see the bloom, I told my friend. It’s growth but not a flower. Not canna not rose, not casket nor corpse; it just means something has opened. My friend draws blood. He says he cried last Sunday. Another counsels the sick and the doctors … Continue reading Pandemic Verse
I usually plant something on the equinox, but today I didn't. I stayed inside. No playing in the dirt. It rained and felt cold where I live, and I'm under self-imposed semi-quarantine because of lingering respiratory symptoms and sporadic fevers (but it's almost gone I think—hoorah!) and general social distancing for us all. When I … Continue reading Spring Sprung
It's time for the jesters and the minstrels. My mother called me this morning filled with contagious anxiety, and it took an anecdote from a friend for me to understand what I could do for both of us: make her laugh. I pulled out the big guns and sent her a Key & Peele skit … Continue reading Fiddlers Three
Tonight I'm reminded that in the face of unprecedented world events, regular life carries on. People are going to break their legs and give birth. We're still going to fall in love and die from all the same circumstances that assailed us before there was a COVID-19 assassin on the global prowl. I wish these … Continue reading Don’t Give Me More Than I Can Hold
I almost started this post with "Good morning," but I caught myself—it's one in the afternoon right now. We're only on day two or so of the officially requested shutdown and reordering of our lives—social distancing—and my concept of time and normalcy blurred a little bit on me. I think that's all of us right … Continue reading We Could Be Heroes
My fairy garden made it through most of winter standing, but I found it today in ruins. If I'd sat outside a few days ago, the ruined garden town might have felt like a heavy-handed metaphor. Today, it's just a thing. The destruction is likely the handiwork of my six-year-old and the neighbor boy, which … Continue reading 02.22.2020
