We got divorced. It was a nightmare. She stood holding a suitcase by her side and with her hands on her hips she shouted at me all the reasons why and she packed all her things in boxes and all of her things meant all of the things in the house, it got emptier and emptier as she explained that she was never coming back and I didn’t say anything I just cried and stared at her and when I woke up I had tears on my face. This is before we had kids. I wiped my eyes and rolled over in the bed and put my hand on her side, watched her breathe, nuzzled her shoulder, fell back to sleep.

That dream echoed one of my earliest memories, related to my mom’s divorce from my biological dad - and I just realized that’s how I think of it, my mom’s divorce. I don’t know how old I was. Three? Four? It’s hard to know because it’s a memory of a time when I didn’t know my own age. Some of my aunts and uncles...

I ended up in the condom aisle. You see, my wife and I occasionally have sex, I’m sorry to say. I mean, I’m not sorry about the sex - except to her, it’s really none of your business but for the record I do apologize to her profusely, it’s not like I inflict my deeply flawed self on her without being aware I’m doing so, and frankly my sexual flaws are quite small (oh jeez) compared to my fundamental flaws as a person - I just said “I’m sorry to say” because I’m just sorry to say it here because, I mean, gross, you guys, seriously, no one wants to know about that, have you seen what I look like naked? Of course not, at least I sure hope not, but let me just assure, eww! blech! and more so ewwblech with each passing year. Entropy is the fate of all ordered systems and decay and death is the end of all human life and wait, where was I? Oh yeah. Condoms.

We have two kids, see, and really...

I was writing this thing, the details are boring, let me just say I was allowed about 3,000 words, maybe a few more. I wrote 2,000 and felt good about that. The content was okay and I was on track to not have the piece be either too short or too long. Life distracted me - groceries, bills, childcare, preparing for holiday travel - and to be completely honest I procrastinated out of fear, because that piece might be seen by some very smart people who I’m intimidated by. The combination of distraction and procrastination created a delay in the middle of writing this piece. I had a lot of ideas in that delay, but did no writing. A few days later I got back at it. I started from the new ideas, and I wrote another 3,000 words. That put me way over acceptable length, and with two incomplete drafts of different documents that needed to become one.

I went for a lot of long walks and started at...

I recently listened to an interview with Peter Hook, the former bassist for New Order and Joy Division. Hook pointed out that while Ian Curtis wrote dark lyrics – like “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through, I’m ashamed of the person I am” - Curtis lived energetically and enthusiastically, so that his suicide took his friends by surprise. The interviewer noted that Joy Division’s music and Curtis’s lyrics remain compelling to many people three and a half decades later, and suggested that music with this kind of staying power can’t be reduced to being simply a symptom of Curtis’s mental state.

As I listened I thought about how one of the appeals of music like Joy Division’s is that it resonates in that hollow and empty part many people feel aching in their chests. Music like this makes you feel less alone, makes you feel like someone gets it, someone’s been there like you...

“I had my first contraction!”
“Huh - you - what?” I open my eyes.
“I had-“
“Oh! Oh that’s-“ I sit up.
“- I’m in labor!”
“That’s wonderful!” I’m awake now, “Should we-“
“I think it’s going to be a while. You should go back to sleep, but I wanted to tell you.”

I’d been asleep about two hours. I went back to sleep for four or six hours. Other than a fifteen minute catnap in the delivery room I didn’t sleep again for about fifty hours and many of those were insanely intense emotionally. For her first two weeks our new daughter slept about one hour at a time. I felt constantly drunk.

I push my fingers into the space between the brick wall and the wooden cover, press my toes into the brick, push up hard with my quads, reach my left arm high overhead and back. I grab the hold, pick my right foot up to knee height, push with my right foot, reach with my right hand. My body spins off the...

“God!” my cousin kicks the back of the driver’s seat, “what is taking so long! He’s so slow!”
“Theresa, knock it off,” my aunt says from the passenger’s seat.
“It’s hot in here and he’s taking forever!”
“I said knock it off.”

A minute later my aunt gets out, walks into the gas station, walks right back out and gets back in the car.
“He was talking to the guy behind the counter.”
“I knew it!”

My uncle opens the gas station door, turns in the doorway, raises an arm and shouts “nice chatting with you!” and walks back to the car. We all crack up laughing.

*

Shortly after my first kid was born, in the phase where the sleeplessness was so bad it felt like being drunk most of the time, I went to a bakery near our house to get some bread and a treat for my dessert loving wife. I waited in line. After I ordered I said to the young woman and man behind the counter - high school? college? I...

The stairs to the second floor of the barn were good and solid and wide, leading from the tack room upward, the tack room where we often had kittens, and where the saddles and blankets hung, before my grandfather died. Up top, hay bales and an old wooden sleigh my grandfather meant to refinish, he wanted to have the horses pull it in winter. A project left undone.

Often cats lived among the hay bales. Whenever there were kittens the first step was to find where the mother cat had hidden away in the cracks and holes between the bales. On the other side of the barn’s second floor, more hay bales, and the trapdoors for dropping hay down into the horses’ stalls. To get to the other side I had to walk across a pair of planks stacked one on top of the other. I remember them being about a foot wide. I was sure every time that I would fall and probably die. I always appreciate the tack room...

As I walked to work in the snow today all I wanted was to stop at the deli for biscuits and gravy. Their warmth and heaviness would have been like climbing back into bed under a heavy blanket. And eating it would have knocked me the fuck out once I got to work, leaving my chin and eyelids drooping as I tried to type a reply to whatever pointlessness comes across my desk today.

“Stay strong,” I told myself, “resist your inclinations.”

The impulse to stop at the deli pulled all the stronger as I remembered yesterday: my kids had woken up in the middle of the night and again early in the morning. “Oh god, I… oh fuck, I just, I can’t.” I had mumbled to myself as I staggered to find and put on my jeans. Tired enough to be uninhibited but awake enough to be devious I remembered that my officemate would be out that day so I decided to sleep at work, put my feet on the desk or something.

...

I gulp the last of my second beer and clunk the glass on the bar top just as round three arrives. The bartender puts three brimming shot glasses next to the sweating pints. Tim hands a shot glass to me and to the other guy whose name I’ve already forgotten.
“Here,” Tim say, “because Jesus hates you.”
“Whiskey?”
“Yeah. Wild Turkey.” He picks up the third.
“It’s gonna be that kind of night, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I’m your drinking coach. It’s my job to make you push yourself.”
“Well then.”
We clink glasses, tap them on the bar top, and drink. My eyes begin to water from the fumes before I even pour the liquid into my mouth. A light burning and stinging in the eyes then the nose, on the lips, a mix of burning and warmth on tongue and inside of the cheeks, gulp and the heat slides down my throat into my belly. I grimace, grunt, set the glass down. Cool beer chases, tasting much sweeter now after...

I walk up the steps reading - Jimmy, Outspan and company trudge through mud back toward their tents - and down the hall toward the office kitchen. A man in a white shirt walks out of the kitchen past me. I close the book, set it on the counter, pick up a white styrofoam cup, pour it half-full of decaf. I had tea at home this morning and don’t really need a full coffee cup’s worth of caffeine. I reach for the pot of caffeinated coffee. A line of coffee pours from the spout and into the pot. White shirt guy must have made a fresh pot. I bet he’s a good neighbor. Then again, I ask myself, does making coffee for others get praise or is it a minimum standard?

I pour the cup the rest of the way full of decaf, pick up my novel again, put it back down, step toward the sink, then back to the pot of decaf where I pour half the cup back into the pot. I haven’t sipped any of it yet, I tell myself...