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...

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...

 Originally Published July 5, 2016 I was raised middle class but I always knew I would be poor. In the broadest possible terms, my mom was from a poor dad and a poor mom so she was 100% poor, while my dad was 50/50, so that has me at 3/4 poor, not in precise math I guess but definitely in fractions as done through an emotional filter. So, maybe that has something to do with it.  In any event, when I went grocery shopping with my middle class dad and stepmom, it was usually to the Gelsen's in Marina del Rey, and in case you've never been there, let me describe the experience. For starters, the store resides withing spitting distance of a marina full of docked yachts and the top-shelf only bars where carefree, asshole-ish yacht-owners drink and dine (maybe not in precise geography but definitely in the Marina del Rey of my mind). Being in Gelsen's and knowing that all goods on display could be bought by this half of my family was a palpable relief. At this Gelsen's, if yo...

When he asked for a divorce my husband was strangely lucid. The past month though, he'd gotten obsessive about his fitness, mostly his abs. Protein powder and picking fights with customers at the working class grocery store he worked at and trying to insert himself into the social media orbit of his customers at the hipster upper middle class restaurant he was a server at. There was a black mother and daughter having a pleasant evening out and he was their server. I hear they were both attractive.  He looked up their non-profit's website and in the "contact us" function, he left some thoughts about a white boy's sensitivities, like what it’s like to be a chill white guy who wants to be accepted by black people.  At this point I thought,  “I am  in hell right now.”  He wouldn't talk to me at home. At the bar we spent almost every night at, but in shifts, toward the end, our mutual male friends would ask me questions that showed they knew things were worse than ...

  When I was in sixth grade I was still trying to listen to pop music to fit in, but one day my dead mom let me wear her Doors shirt, a bleach stained black t-shirt with Jim Morrison’s mug shot from Dade County Florida on it, and underneath that the words “charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness.”  I could have shown up to school that day in a disingenuous outfit of Body Glove gear, but instead I chose to celebrate a moment in history when a sexy rockstar got drunk and whipped his dick out.  I’d arrived. Within a few months the Guns N’ Roses albums Use Your Illusions I and II hit the shelves of Tower Records and the Wherehouse Music Store and my mom, who was born with the anarchistic aplomb, the witty or sometimes just brutal anger and the frantic creativity with which an outsider (punks, goths, metalheads,  angel-headed hipsters ) learns to deal with mainstream society, was right there with me, choosing...

  I am at a mental hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had never been to this city before. My room is right next to  the bay of telephones. I feel sad hearing so many patients start conversations with their friends or family and then so soon say,  "Oh, you have to go? Well...goodbye."

      Mikayla knew that Diana tried to listen for actual words among the riotous din that drifted over from the elementary school whenever the kids were on the playground. More than once, she’d say something like, “I know they’re having conversations, but with all of them talking at once, it just sounds like they're all yelling at the top of their lungs at the same time.”    Diana liked being able to faintly hear the morning announcements, but she didn’t like young children, and their playful noises sounded like seagulls aggressively squawking for the same pizza crust. Their family home growing up had been close to the beach, and they were currently sharing an apartment in a valley that was always hot and smoggy, with a sprawling building of U-Haul storage spaces, and the school of course, replacing the ocean as their view; hearing seabird noises out here felt like a taunt.     No matter how many knots even a casual glance from Mom or ...