Let me tell you a story. In the past week, I have said the exact same thing to two people. I have been told so much context, seen so much anguish. These people talk themselves down, they have posited they are unlovable. They believe they are punished, perhaps divinely, perhaps
Let me tell you a story. In middle school math, there was a system. There was a prompt. Then there was a box to the right of it. You worked through the problem, and then when you reached a solution some way down the page, you copied that into the
Let me tell you a story. I say this on every post as a centering ritual, but this is specifically about a story. In my life I hang out with a lot of trans people. Though I feel at a distance from a "trans community" at present, I
Let me tell you a story. Several years back, I was listening to a history podcast, Mike Duncan's excellent Revolutions, who mentioned a euphemism for the execution of Charles I in the English Civil War. The final act was the crowning mercy. The first post of this blog
Let me tell you a story. I am not really one for ritual. There have been valiant attempts to get on the ritual train. I light candles, place them in the chalice, say words of beginning, of transition, of finality and oblivion. It all means very little to me. Though
Let me tell you a story. As we age from adolescence into the temporal soup of not-yet middle age , we become experts. Our limbic system and amygdala construct a gauntlet not all that different from the Ninja Warrior game show. We run it over and over, during sudden sounds and
Let me tell you a story. It is interesting when a proverb, assumed to be primordial, is exceedingly contemporary. One 'ancient Chinese' proverb reads something like "the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now." I love that quote,
Let me tell you a story. My history of writing poetry is two decades of the exact same process. Going back to high school, people read what I produce and proclaim what I write to be "good." This (I believe) means that I seem to know what I&
Let me tell you a story. Over the past decade, I have read vanishingly little fiction. The fifth and thus far final volume in A Song of Ice and Fire in 2012 (good god) was finished in 2012. A couple Ursula K. Le Guin stories perhaps. Mostly it has been
Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I met someone. We swiftly began dating, it was nice to be around them. However, soon after we started, they informed me that they had a long-term boyfriend. They were not telling him about this, so for about the six months
Let me tell you a story. Clinical depression is a beast of a thing. An unique mix of symptoms and lived experience as it grinds on, week after week, year after year. It is the trenches, it is a war of pure attrition where there is no love lost. No
Let me tell you a story. I live an ambiguous life. There are many people in my orbit, a weak pull of my gravity holding them where they are. People disappear, sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes the rest of our natural lives. Planning a schedule, having aspirations for the