sweetheart redux

 July 2025 - August 2026 Picnic Benches at Henry Fine Park in East Lansing Late Summertime in the Pinecrest Neighborhood in East Lansing (above and below) Lansing a pink-tinged living room in Leslie Blanchette Drive Autumn Tree Christmas Lights Across the street from my Aunt's House Lansing Travelodge off W. Saginaw Highway, Where I Lived the Week before Christmas The Denny's next to the Travelodge U-haul Parking Lot in Williamston right before a Summer Thunderstorm Lansing Mall Cinema/Lansing Mall West (1984-2014) Former Sears Auto Center Service Station (built 1954) Transformed into Drive-Thru Lab Services Where I Got Blood Drawn   Late Summer in Williamston

Every time I get up, I get a little bit down. Every time I get up, I get a little bit down. I don't care what the butcher said, He killed my hog 'fore it was  Properly fed, Every time I get up, I get a little bit down.

There are a few distinct scenes I remember from my early childhood in the only house we ever shared, just the three of us. It was on Wagner Street, in Pasadena, California, only seven miles north of the two separate apartment buildings I split my later childhood and adolescence between, but I didn’t realize that for many years; I’d always assumed it must have become just the phantom of a house once we moved out, haunting a street that’d ceased to exist once we moved away. I remember hearing the Beatles “Hello, Hello,” and feeling sad because of how happy it made me. But I also remember overhearing the actors in this movie called “Sid and Nancy” yell, “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all you fucking, fucking brat!” – or something like that – and how gleefully startled, how strangely soothed I felt by those words. I recall entering the curtained guest bedroom and not being sure whether it was alright to be there. It was less than half full of short, open cardboard boxes stacked haphazar...

  save me love me kill me swallow me first published Feb. 15, 2013

In second grade I was very unpopular.  My only friends were 2 kids I only saw afterschool when we waited together on the schoolyard for our respective rides home, and one of them was a girl who was nice to everyone, so her friendship was less of a prize.  The other friend was a kid named Jason, so blonde and freckled he was like the personification of a Beach Boys song; there was also a melancholy that clung to him like the better Beach Boys songs that Brian Wilson wrote when he got more ambitious and crazy, and this was because Jason was poor, usually wearing the same red t-shirt every day.  Oh god, he had a crush on me.  How sweet to have a crush on me, when everyone else made fun of me all day, calling me a Gaylord because I was overly affectionate with girls I admired, and being such overly astute witnesses to all my little embarrassments, like the time I had to wear mom’s sagging underwear to school and everybody saw it when I sat down with my legs open.  J...