We killed all the grass in our front yard. We did it on purpose, to make the ground more amenable to wild flowers. (Death to the discarded, life to the cultivated. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, a penny in the diaper.) I enlisted autumn leaves into my campaign to bring suffocating death to the plant life occupying what is officially my land. I raked them into heaps around my yard but it wasn’t enough so I gathered them from the gutter in the front of my house and across the street, carrying them by the armload over to my yard and mounding them up to ankle height.

Amid one of these gatherings I managed to grab a dead squirrel that had been laying in the gutter beneath all the leaves. I gave some mix of scream and grunt and howl. Something like “oooaaaaeeeaaarrgh!” I dropped the armload of leaves and went back across the street and into my house, spluttering the whole time. I...

I decided the walk would be warmer than standing still so I took off north from the second bus stop. I set an alarm on my phone set to go off at the time when the bus home was due, figuring when the alarm went off I’d be sure to get to the nearest bus stop and stay there.

On the walk I passed a man with a thin white beard and mustache and shaggy mutton chops. He looks like a hard-living fifty to me. He was standing in the sidewalk with a squared off stance, arms folded, feet hip width apart.

I saw him from about a half block away and heard him talking to another pedestrian, something about being late and missing the bus, or maybe he was saying the bus was late. I couldn’t hear him clearly. He had - has - a gravelly voice that suggests a medical issue with his throat. It has a tone that always make me think of steel wool.

I’ve seen him on at last three occasions prior. Once he walked...

A cold front has parked itself over the midwest. Climate change has altered the jet stream so literally arctic wind, frozen air from the north pole, has swooped down, bringing to the region a frigidity comparable to that of a multi-child marriage.

I agreed to pick up a friend from the airport months ago - I agreed, that is, months ago to pick him up today, I didn’t agree to pick him up on a date several months back and only now finally drive down to the airport to collect him, bearded, disheveled, stinking, with my rusted out ford taurus. I agree in the pleasant cool of fall, not realizing it would mean standing outside in the biting winter air, scraping at the quarter inch thick layer of ice coating my windshield. That SKSHHHH sound of an ice scraper is to me what the sound of nails on a chalkboard is to some others, and what the scratch of a spoon on the bottom of a certain kind of...

I had an idea that I forgot, it was an idea and a possible opening to introduce it and a change of direction then an ending, and the combination of scrubbing out the sink - between the time spent standing outside waiting for buses, especially with this latest cold snap, and all the immersing of my hands in water from dishes and from washing my hands after changing the baby’s diaper, my skin is cracked and bleeding in multiple places and it hurts a little and the thought of all these holes in my armor and all the germs that crawl all over every surface in my child-ridden home, germs carried in by the little traitors from the filthpens of public library children’s areas and the plaguefarms of play rooms at the science museum and the diseasepits of the 5th birthday we attend yesterday, all those germs gunning, leering, drunken and slapping each others’ backs, for the moist, warm pink holes...

When I was younger I didn’t realize how much of my adult life would be spent being bored. I’m bored by my job, by my health insurance paperwork, by waiting for the bus. Our society inflicts boredom on us so much, all the time, constantly and so we get really good at being bored. Like I’m bored right now. I’m so trained to be bored I can get bored instantly, during anything. And we’re constantly bored so we get used to being bored, constantly ready to be bored, but at the same time somehow it’s rude to be bored in a lot of settings. It’s like society sets us up to fail, it makes us bored all the time then makes us feel bad for being bored. I call it the boredom blackmail, where you’re gonna get bored but you’re gonna get in trouble if you get caught being bored.

Like you’re not supposed to say this but parenting is boring a lot. Parenting is supposed to be this cool amazing life changing...

A five year plan - a great leap forward?

I happened to glance tonight at part of my blog’s behind the scenes bits and realized it’s five years old. Now, the posts per year have declined greatly. I wrote 63 posts and 67,000 words in 2014. I wrote 27 posts and 47,000 words in 2015. I wrote 11 words and not quite 16,000 posts in 2016. I wrote 4 posts and 1600 words in 2017. I wrote one 1200 word post in 2018. I’m at two for almost 1500 words so far in 2019, which puts me on track for this to be the best year in a few, writing-wise. (The music writing I’ve done for myself follows a similar pattern, except shifted slightly - peak years 2016 and 2017, and very little in 2018.)

The point of the writing is a kind of self-making and skill-acquisition, and also just for the sake of the doing. I think some of it’s good, at least relative to my abilities and time, but above all it’s the quantity...

The snow finally came today, after months of my kids whining. In their minds winter means snowmen, snowball fights, sledding, and tracking animals. I’d grown scared that climate change might leave these expectations perpetually disappointed.

It packs well. I had the baby in the carrier so we didn’t throw many snowballs at each other. We used the side of our trash can as a target, aiming at the city logo on the side, then went to the back yard to build a snowman with spindly stick arms. My kids rolled handfuls of snow into boulders then called me to supervise as they lifted the boulders into place, bringing our snowman to identifiable form out of dispersed elements. I went it to collect a carrot to make a nose and poured a small glass of scotch to bring to our backdoor neighbor who was out shoveling. The kids gave the snowman a face and the baby laughed. I delivered the scotch and we...

Sometimes I worry I’ve stolen her dreams.

The other day she had one about us moving again. “I had a dream we moved again,” she said. “The house had lots of porches, like five of them, just porch after porch, but none of them had doors.”
“We bought a house with no doors?”
“It had doors but then someone stole them just before we moved in. Then when we were moving in people kept coming by who had been squatting there and they would just walk right in and we kept having to say ‘this is our house! get out of here!’ and they would say ‘this is Jane’s house!’ and we would say ‘this isn’t Jane’s house anymore! It’s our house!’”
“It sucks that we have to move now, since you dreamed about it.”
“They were like teenagers, just coming by to have a place to smoke and mess around.”
“Ugh! Teenagers!”

I stole that dream just now, and gave myself the last word. That’s how it works. I’m going meta to...

I’m tired and am pacing in the kitchen muttering to myself about unfulfilled and only partly articulated creative aspirations, muttering quietly because the baby’s asleep tucked into my hoody. She fell asleep to The Methadones. Fast rock drumming and percussive guitar lull her to sleep more quickly than anything else. I wonder if it’s sort of like a heartbeat or if she heard a lot of this music while still in utero or maybe she just hates the music and goes to sleep as a coping mechanism. I’ve lost that ability in the literal sense but can still occasionally deploy it in the spiritual sense. I walk to the living room and grab the laptop, set it on top of the stove, tuck the baby better into the hoody, spread my feet out like Dee Dee Ramone’s bass-playing stance - it drops my torso lower so I can type on the laptop without slouching further - and blink at the blank document. I haven’t...

I didn’t spend a lot of time with my grandfather and we weren’t close but I knew him as a friendly old man. He died when I was young. I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t get what ‘sick’ meant in that setting.

After one visit to see him my mom told me my dad had cried the whole way home. My dad had driven, I’d sat in the backseat. I didn’t know he’d cried. More than that, I couldn’t imagine it. Now, maybe thirty years later, give or take, I now know that of course my dad has certainly cried - case in point, I at first wrote ‘at some point in his life’ - but I still can’t imagine it.

My grandfather was a Marine. I’d only ever heard my grandfather mention this in passing once. I’d said something like “I want to be a jet fighter pilot in the airforce.” My grandfather had replied “That’s great. Just don’t ever join the Marines. All they do is teach you how to fight and hurt...