Category: Uncategorized

In some dreams, I’m on my porch not seeing anyone or hearing anything as if I’m the only one left. In others, I’m in an eight-story building searching for my coat. My searching leads me further from where I started—parking garage, outside the building, then on a mountainside without my jacket, when I wake up.…

A few days ago, I posted an essay about painting wooden frogs for my neighbors—Guiro frogs that croak loudly when you scrape them with a stick. The essay was about choosing presence over paralysis, making noise together instead of doomscrolling alone while the world burns. I wrote about how “knowing paralyzes” and how I’d rather…

Jim Brewer, the headmaster of Barlow, was an imposing figure despite his disability. Standing six-foot-five, he navigated the campus on crutches with a remarkable speed and agility that belied his condition, moving with a determined strength that reminded me of a sea lion. He could navigate the entire campus nearly silently except for the telltale…

My first memories of sobbing were in wet beds. When my wailing attracted my parents, their raging made me vomit. When they slammed the door, sometimes leaving me no choice but to sleep in my own mess, I learned to dissipate my frustrated energy by rhythmically moving my limbs. To this day, a jiggling ankle…

“And the women who let them,” my lesbian friend quipped when I mentioned starting Laura Bates’ book “Men Who Hate Women.” Her spontaneous response caught me off guard, and though we both laughed nervously, her words would haunt me through my journey with Bates’ unflinching exploration of modern misogyny. As a gay man approaching seventy,…

Cowardice and carelessness once shaped my nature like a sculptor’s hasty hands, leaving rough edges where definition might have been. I let fear whittle away at possibility until withdrawal became my art form. But sometimes, retreat opens unexpected doors. Since the election, I’ve been detoxifying from years of political addiction. Though I won’t avoid news…

Less than one percent of breast cancer diagnoses occur in males. I thought this statistical rarity would make it easier to approach with humor, to treat it all as some cosmic joke. But as I sat in my car outside the Imaging Center, the phrase “What the hell?” kept echoing in my mind. Not because…

The world first started spinning while I was pruning tomato plants. One moment I was reaching for a yellowed leaf; the next, I was face-down in the bush beans. The fall earned me a prescription for prednisone and a referral to physical therapy, where I arrived the day after the election looking like a deposed…