I've been a sleepwalker for as long as anyone in my family can remember. I talk in my sleep, sometimes at length, and usually in a sort of slow-motion narrative or series of questions posited to a sleepy bed-mate who'd almost certainly rather not
In the waning days of emptying out my old house, I was looking at the old electric kitchen clock from my grandmother's Baltimore rowhouse, wishing that it still worked, despite having gone still twenty-some years earlier, and, on cue, the sweep second hand started sweeping again. It
I drifted into a disorganized philosophy of enough over decades out of a sense that everything we're supposed to be maximizing just makes our lives into a business endeavor to be managed and guided by the diseased principles of maximal efficiency and maximal profit, after like I was
I woke from a sad dream this morning. I was a supernumerary again, back at the Kennedy Center, playing a bit part in a big production, and it felt so warm and cozy to be back in that place again, back where I spent twenty years doing the underloved grunt
A thing that always feels a little funny to me, in retrospect, is that I started raiding my grandmother's record collection as a counterpoint to the prevalent music of my youth, which I haaaated hated hated like fire in my earholes. I mean, I hated the banal, stupid
I stepped down from the train platform at St. Denis to my waiting car, the old Citroën that is my main pretense in my otherwise shambling, overly casual existence, where it sat with only one car in a parking lot meant to hold thirty or forty cars. Remembering my morning
I've been in grand and magnificent structures, from palaces to cathedrals to the halls of power and the seats of education, and it's fair to see them with some degree of awe or wonder, since they're built to impress and overwhelm the visitor with
There's something about motels. Maybe it's the condensation of that high lonesome feeling I get when I'm traveling alone, just my thoughts falling to a natural state of rest and rhythm. Sometimes, it's the endless unfolding of farmland around a thin strip
It's fair to point out that it shouldn't have taken so long, and yet, it's still taking so long, clearing out the ruins of my old place, which I've held onto in a numb instinct that I've joked is me
I find it a little funny that a new Thanksgiving tradition seems to have come into being in which news outlets of varying degrees of quality and political bent tackle the red-hot anxiety-producing question of how to avoid those tricky holiday conversations with family. Thing is — I just
The funny thing about all those minimalism blogs/vlogs, books, motivational speeches, promotional franchises, philosophical frameworks, and cultural trends is that they're always seemingly rooted in the same origin story. "I was so caught up in the rat race, until…" The thing that gets me every
I love motels. In my adult life, I've finally graduated to an income bracket that allows me to upgrade my lodging options so I could, if I wanted, hole up in fancier digs, with niceties like a pool, all-you-can-eat breakfast, as many pillows as one