In Conversation

Our New Bumper Stickers: Post Election Day, 2024 Beth and I were tooling up to Boulder to meet friends for lunch, when a guy in a pick-up with tyrannosaurus tires jackhammered his middle finger at us, until I slowed and slowed, forcing him to pass, with one last manual display of his hatred for our …

The Ted Talk They’re Never Going To Ask Me To Give  It’s titled “It Sucks To Be Crazy.” Ninety days ago I had a really productive appointment with my psychiatrist. I was drowning in darkness. I was on a max dose of my antidepressant, Wellbutrin, and it was becoming less effective. The Strattera that I’d …

Too Much or Not Enough We’re not bleeding yet, then we’re too bloody, then we’re dried out, thrown away. We’re too little or too big or nothing special. We used to be doll-like but kept growing bigger and older and closer to disintegration. Perhaps dolls are better because they can’t speak for themselves. When we …

Having Lived Past the Age of Reason “I’m really sorry I’m the one who has to be telling to this,” I tell my wife the other day. The tone of my voice doesn’t sound like I’m sorry, though. My wife who’s become a bit of an expert on my voice tones cocks a skeptical eyebrow. …

Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader edited by Dan Denton & Michele McDannold There’s something refreshingly unvarnished about Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader — a book that refuses polish in favor of presence. As the publisher’s note makes clear, this is not a curated “best of,” but a living cross-section of a small press …

class photo – 50th reunion You will probably never see any of these people in person again, only representations on a screen and it breaks your heart. Most of your class is absent by choice or circumstance or Facebook grudges. You wonder if anyone else’s heart aches at this. You wonder why you’re so different, …

Breakfast With Grandma The cafe likes to watch our little movie scene. Her smile, no act, decaf clutched tight like a blanket from this world that confuses her. Porcelain queen, the golden seams speak of a life before– “Are you visiting Lacrosse for Easter?” she’s so small now in the booth, looking down to cornfields …

Emily as a Play of Light Possessed by the porch she’s sitting on, discovered linear by Ohio’s version of the sun, Emily is asleep in the chair she bought that matches her eyes when they’re open. Some women can wear an entire house. Some women are a home. She’d look good regardless, but that goes …

Fukitol I read that it’s only in America and oddly one other country, New Zealand, that Big Pharma can advertise drugs directly to customers through TV ads, and I can’t speak for NZ, but here in drugged-out USA I can say the pharmaceutical commercials are awkwardly pervasive and farcical, showing people living their best life …

[transitions] summer rolling in soon mayday mirages of a greater escape on this saturday afternoon tending the low vibe of high noon hanged amidst the loved and the lost in cacophonous grandeur spun from the inside out tetherless and aloft having all that is needed from awakening to demise for the days are enough to …