I crossed the Atlantic on my way from Boston to London in a haze of drunken nervousness. God, I hate the plane. The invasive thoughts pour in, crashing and slamming down into the abyss. Every jolt of turbulence bouncing my soul around in my body. Just look at me up there. Up in there […]
I went into the woods. Here I am with the swamp maples and towering pines growing defiantly out of the sandy soil. I know these forests and the roads that take me here. I’ve known them all my life. In my memory they were dark green and haunting. Some strange juxtaposition of comfort and peril […]
Out on the street, I know how to hide. I move quick, flickering from pub to traffic signal under the yellow glow of streetlights and the muffled sounds of bass pulsating out of salt-caked Honda Civics and Ford Explorers. A blast of icy winter air whipping my face. Stress and anxiety is soldered into this […]
Writing is work. Hell, reading is work. I appreciate your eyeballs. I like to lie to myself and say I love the labor involved, but watching a movie or going out to dinner sounds a lot better than parking my ass in front of the blue glow of a computer screen, knocking out a […]
Our classics and great traditions are a corpse that we resurrect every time we engage with them. If neglected, they remain a corpse—rotten, dead, forgotten—to our eternal detriment. The collected wisdom of the ages, disposed with like so much refuse. When engaged with properly, they are made new and live once more to illuminate the […]
Chris Cornell’s work has always been soaked in death. The first time I caught a glimpse of the guy, he was lurching around on a cloudy beach with Eddie Vedder in the video for Hunger Strike, the lead single off Temple of the Dog—a tribute album dedicated to the memory of Cornell’s friend and ex-roommate, […]
I was five years old when I became obsessed with the cesspit in back of my great-grandmother’s house. I grew up in that house. It was 1985. I was piled in there with my great-grandmother and her son, my grandfather, who was also my legal guardian. Everyone was old. Everything was old. If I wanted […]
Keeping track of our personal affairs often seems to be like maintaining a great dam with walls that must frequently be patched and tended to. How many people do you know who are at an impasse in their lives? How many relationships teeter on the precipice of oblivion? How many individuals are trapped in careers […]
Terrifying World 