I hate the young man in the orange and blue baseball hat. He just left on his motorcycle. I hate his blond hair. I hate the haircut I think he paid for. I hate his ugly and probably fashionable baseball hat. I hate his spotless, shiningly bright plain white tshirt. I hate his backpack worn over one shoulder. I hate the cigarette he smoked at the wire table outside the coffee shop where I am trying and failing to work, hate thinking about the taste and smell and especially the simultaneously heavy and weightless feeling brought on by a cigarette smoked fast after a long time without smoking. I hate that he probably doesn’t read books and listens to the worst of contemporary pop music or that he has read more than is fair for his age, and understood it too, and is aware of or worse plugged into networks of creative music and visual art. I hate that he is thin and probably muscled, without...

My family were out doing something enriching and cultured, about which I felt smug, and in the best way, the way where I didn’t have to do any work to earn the self-satisfaction about whatever it was they were doing (something at the library, I didn’t ask). Further ensmuggening was the fact that I was cooking dinner. Since my wife is a full time parent and I often work late, I am not regularly the one who makes dinner. This means when I do so, it feels a bit like I have gone above and beyond. This kind of thing in general is one of the perks we feminist men get: praise, gratitude, and smugness for once in a while doing the sort of things women are regularly, thanklessly expected to do (I’ve been repeatedly told ‘what a great dad you are!’ and variants thereof while out with my kids at parks and museums and so on; I am a good dad and I always take the praise as grist for the smug-mill...

Like all parents I am sure my children are precocious. For instance, my three year old has a very grown up sensibility. The other night she whacked my older kid in the head with her toothbrush. When I took it away she tantrumed, crying and shouting “I want to hit SOMEONE with my toothbrush!” In another tantrum earlier in the week when she pushed a wooden dollhouse over the roof broke off. She stopped shouting and began sobbing big streams of tears, staring with her hands pressed over her open mouth. “Oh no, oh no, this was a big mistake!” While I hugged her then glued the roof back onto the dollhouse she continued to cry and repeat “this was a big mistake.” If it were possible to tell anyone anything and be heard I would tell her it never ends and you never get used to it.

I ever tell you bout when I sprained my ankle? I fell when rock climbing.

I love to say that. I think it sounds very… I don’t know, dashing. Do people still say “dashing”?

Full disclosure, I only fell about eighteen inches. Still, though.

I landed and felt a hot pain in my ankle, felt my stomach drop because I knew something had gone really wrong. I said something like “oh shit oh fuck oh fuck,” rolled onto my back, then my side, sat up, took the climbing shoe off right away and the ankle was already swelling. I stood up with help from one of my climbing partners, maybe both, I don’t remember. I put weight on both feet and the ankle gave away, I sat down hard. My friends were very nice about it. I don’t remember what they said. I felt embarrassed. I limped over to my regular shoes, said something like “you guys should keep climbing, we never have enough time to climb anyway, I’m...

Monday nights at Delilah’s, dollar beers, punk rock nostalgia. That’s a description of some my favorite times from my twenties when I lived in Chicago. It’s also the first line of a great song by the great band The Methadones. I had the Methadones on the other night while washing dishes and that song came on and I got all wistful for that time, texted some friends about it, the text a sober version of one of those drunken ‘I love you man’ moments.

My first time there I walked in, saw the sign that said one dollar American beer, walked up to the bartender and said “what’s the dollar beer thing?” “American beer.” “What, like Budweiser?” “No, American.” He held up a can. American was the name of the beer. It was watery. I’m sure it would make a great shower beer. For a buck a can I could buy rounds for my friends even when I was unemployed.

We went there most Mondays. It was punk rock...

I’m working upstairs. I hear glass shatter in the kitchen. I jump up. As I do the crying starts. I run down the hallway, shout “I’m on my way!”

A broken cup, no one’s hurt.

My three year old howls heartbroken pointing down at a shattered yellow frosted souvenir drinking glass for state of Kansas. She picked it out herself at a garage sale.

“I have a quarter! I’m paying with my own money! This is a Very Fancy Glass!” She asked for it every meal. “Can I have some milk and a straw Daddy? Please put it in my canvas cup.” She can’t say ‘Kansas’.

My older kid frowns, “oh sweetie, we can get you a new nice glass at the store, and we’ll get you a toy too, right Daddy, we can get her a toy too right, to help her feel better?”

“Sure,” I say. “But I need my canvas cup! I need one that has to be exactly the same as the one I broke!”

It’s just a glass. It’s silly to be torn up about this...

I’ve not written here in a while - probably the worst opening to a blog post ever, up there with quoting Jim Anchower’s Onion columns - but I decided to do so again after reading a book I didn’t like about a record I did like. I’m not naming names here because naming names seems like a jerk move given that I have nothing constructive or interesting to say, just that the book felt kind of light on content - so I learned little, if anything, from the author - and the prose wasn’t very compelling either. (I was in a band once that got a review sort of like that, they said we sounded like really bad Crimpshrine, which we were annoyed about but also were like ‘oh cool we sound like Crimpshrine.’ It just seems to me you don’t write bad reviews unless there’s a pay off. This isn’t quite the Thumper principle, really Thumper’s father’s principle, because sometimes it’s worth being negative but...

A loaf of bread right from the oven, or a cup of tea fresh poured out the kettle, that’s how warm she feels. She sits in my lap curled against my chest and I soon break a sweat. This is fever night four, and fever three since the start of June.

When I was a kid I was told I had a heart defect, a malformed valve. (“Never do coke, Nathan,” my mom told me, “you might have a heart attack with your heart.”) At thirty I hadn’t seen a cardiologist in ten or fifteen years and my wife was pregnant with our now-feverish oldest kid. We saw an ultrasound specialist to check if our baby had a similar heart defect. Nothing. Relief. The technician said “you should see a cardiologist too if it’s been a while, just to make sure everything’s okay.” So I did. And they found nothing. My cardiologist had since died, there are no records. The later cardiologist believed what I said and said “it’s a puzzle...

My mom had me young, divorced early, and spent a while as a single mom. I’m almost forty, am in a good marriage with a partner who is an awesome parent, and I often find raising my kids overwhelming. She must have found it even more so, but to be honest I’ve never asked.

At one point when we were broke and I was probably going to be jobless soon my wife’s mother said we could move in to her house if need be. It was nice to have that kind of fallback plan, but it wasn’t a pleasant idea. To lighten the mood I joked “we could move in with one of my parents!” My wife laughed and said “you’d hate that even more than I would.” Truth. The expansion of my independence from my parents felt slow and hard won. The idea of turning to them for help any time in my 20s any of the few times I couldn’t find or keep a decent paying job always made me feel nauseous.

When we moved out of my mom and...

We took our kids to the science museum. A friend joined us, brought his family along. It was fun and I learned a lot.

Just inside the museum a man and a woman in labcoats held snakes in front of them for children to pet. I showed great restraint and didn’t even consider making an off-color comment. I imagined the inverse of this image, two large snakes holding two humans for small snakes to crawl on. After snake handling we went into the children’s play area which was full of a school group. My wife looked around and reacted like they may as well have been snakes. Snakes would have been better, actually, because quieter. “We’re going upstairs,” she announced, “it’s crazy in here,” and walked off with the kids. Our kids, I mean, not the school group kids. That would be counter-productive, though it would have been a nice thing to do for me, so I could get a little peace and quiet.

I...