Flight. Feel danger or pain approaching and retreat. Unless you’re evolutionary defective. Then you just lean right on into that pain. It’s a compulsion. Nearly out of my control. I feel it in my gut, a force tugging me from my center, off my feet and into the sharp end of whatever bad situation points at me. Especially…
My phone died, and when I plugged it into charge, I got texts from months ago. I don’t know what that’s all about. Where were they lingering? Inside a cord, stacked inside a cell tower, or embedded in the light? No matter. Point is, one of them was a piece of bad feelings from an…
Went to the doctor for the most routine visit; an obligatory check-in to keep my rainbow of medications bright and shining. Then my P.A, Kim, said I didn’t look right. “You’re off today, aren’t you?” Was I? Before she asked, I had just stopped mid-sentence and laid my head against the wall, because I couldn’t remember…
Older ladies, who still color and set their hair and know how to email, sure they’re fine. Whatever. But the Bills of the world, they do something to me. Cowboy shirt, faded, not worn ironically. Khaki shorts showing the white scars of his knee surgeries, and clean white socks pulled up the calf. Straw…
I only went because I thought I might be able to still see my parent’s house on the hill from the parking lot. Also I thought maybe the doors would be unlocked. And maybe I could sit alone in familiar stifled silence, rubbing my finger pads over those same those burnt orange- carpeted pews,…
You keep calling yourself fat and I keep yowling about it. “OHMYGOODDDDD You are not FAT!! Will you shut up???” Not anymore. I get it. I know why you do it. And you have every right to feel fat. Of course, I don’t think you’re fat. Because I am fat. My entire family was fat. We…
I wonder what I look like to that nicely put together pharmacist lady. She’s a graceful 45, long tidy braid, white coat. I give her the script for a fairly impressive dose of Klonopin. My skin is clammy with perfect circular drops of sweat pricking my upper lip, and lazier fat drops streaming down from my…
I Friended a sweet woman on Facebook who had gone to school with me in our tiny two-room schoolhouse. She’s a teacher now. “He inspired me to go into teaching.” I knew who she was talking about, and found it hard to believe. “How?” I asked. “Because I didn’t think teachers should be like…
Everything is changing. My house and yard are clean, so I feel happier every day. They are clean because I can pay someone to make them that way. I can pay someone because my writing is selling, as soon as I can type it. And the more my writing sells the more opportunities come…
I’m just an utter turd waffle sometimes Yesterday I literally accosted a woman, who did not know me, with details of her own private life that I’d learned through gossip. One of my friends had a book release yesterday, and I attended with an extremely foggy brain but a pridefully constructed “literary” outfit. And I…
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