Posts

Roe v. Wade/Heart v. Spade

                                                                                 ( Obviously this is old.) Spontaneous abortion . That’s the paperwork term for a miscarriage. “It sounds harsh,” the doctor warned me. It sure did. I had a positive pregnancy test on April Fools Day; May Day morning I miscarried in my bathroom. I knew it was coming: the day of the Roe v. Wade leak, an ultrasound confirmed that my nearly eight-week fetus was measuring closer to six weeks, no cardiac activity detected. I remembered the tech from my first pregnancy, and I knew something was wrong as soon as she stopped talking. She had the screen facing me, and I was looking for the thing I couldn’t hear, the little lub-dubs from a heart that never beat. Samuel Alito was appointed to the Supreme Court during ...

Heroes Act/Hope You Don't Get Famous

Image
My son took his first dance steps the other day. A dip and clap, a bent-kneed baby shuffle, copying his dad. I don’t remember the song, but you can guess what we like: his middle name is Coltrane, a girl's would have been Holiday. It’s not all gloom and jazz, but there might be a day he asks why so much of what I love reads like a list of the sad and the dead: Amy, Billie, Etta,; Carson, Sylvia, Emily; Donny, Marvin, John. We could have a conversation about death and genius and illness. Or, we could talk about luck and fate; the danger in realizing your dreams, the consequence of deferring them.  Amy Winehouse drank herself to death at 27. Our birthdays are two days apart; I dressed as her for Halloween the October I was 26. I'd thought the resemblance was passing, in retrospect, the photos are arresting. After she died, I made one of the Sharpied-on tattoos permanent.  In an old interview, Amy shrugs at fame, “I don’t think I could handle it,” she says, this early prophetess ...

Undid/Destroy My Sweater

Image
I initially wrote this simply to process my anger, but since HBO neglected to immediately release a new series to distract me and work is slow this week, allow me to present you with this belated rant on the finale of the HBO limited drama series  The Undoing .  ********* Spoilers abound ********** The Undoing is based on a book, called You Should Have Known . (If this somehow implies that the adaptation is actually a satire of Prestige Dramas this is hilarious! Hats off to all involved, send me your address and expect an Edible Arrangement if that is still a business.) Anyway, I didn’t read the book. In the series, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are a wealthy Upper East Side couple with a tweenaged son and a super involved father-in-law played by Donald Sutherland’s eyebrows.  In the first episode, Nicole attends a Private School Mom’s fundraiser meeting, where a new Scholarship Mom, Elena, breastfeeds while making direct eye contact with Nicole. Later, Elena is pr...

All of the Lights/Requiem for a Grinch

Image
I've been trying to tell a holiday story about the ghosts of seasons past, but it's not cooperating. Like a lumpy box of lights I shoved in a closet last January, every memory I pulled out was tangled into another. And excuse the metaphor, but it’s the lights I keep coming back to.  I like lights. Blame it on the Celts, but I feel them in my soul this time of year. The aesthetic, the ritual, the skeleton outline of spindly branches across a darked town common; when they’re done right they bring me to a place of real, quiet joy. When they’re done wrong, I take it a little personally.   December 2006, the last weeks of the sheer-luck three month sublet I'd found across from Boston's Arboretum. All week was the screech of the T grinding into Government Center, the endless ring of the City Hall phones, the anxious buzz reminding me I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in this job and the clanging certainty that the disclosure of my fraud was imminent. The mornings, th...

Boobie Movies

Image
As per my last post, I actually did write reviews of the movies I watched that first week home with Keanu. In an effort to post semi-regularly, I thought I'd share them, edited and expanded somewhat, while I finish up my next two pieces. Hustlers :  I was disappointed by this and went in REALLY wanting to like it. It starts strong and fun: Cardi B is there in giant pasties; a pre-ubiquity Lizzo rocks a cowboy hat and duct tape on her nipples. JLo is a physically impossible human being, and watching her be 50 is worth the whole movie, but halfway through it totally loses you*.  For whatever reason they needed to remind us this movie was based on a magazine article, so the whole thing is inexplicably structured like Interview with the Vampire and Julia Stiles is weirdly cast in the Christian Slater role. (The fact that's it's Julia Stiles is really distracting. How did she get here? Where has she been? Is this also a late 90s Shakespearean adaptation? Could they not get actua...

Sleep to Dream

Image
  Sleep used to be my superpower. When I was young I barely needed it, I could say yes to every invitation, attend every weird event and still show up to work in the morning. Most mornings. Sometime in my mid 30s I decided I was done going places and doing things and sleep became a priority. After so many years of playing hard to get, we settled into a very committed relationship that went undisturbed until the early morning hours of April 18, 2020. Keanu was born at 10:09am Friday, and at 2:00am Saturday I was still awake, watching him sleep in his little cot, suspended in a misty awe in that silent hospital, when my baby started to spit up. I rolled him onto his side and he expelled a mouthful of birth gunk without opening his eyes. It moved me like a flash flood: how fragile this little creature was, how responsible I am for the whole life of this tiny human. I thought of all the baby sea turtles flapping their way down the beach, how many of them get picked off before they make...

Me and Julio Down by the Boneyard

Image
It’s October, and it’s been a spooky year, so I wanted to write you a ghost story. Since all the scariest things are true, I thought I’d make it a real one.  But it turns out, I have to tell you twice.  Part One Fifteen years ago, I moved to New Orleans with my friend, D.   We spent three days in a rental car with my mom, cold calling apartment listings out of the Gambit weekly, visiting one wrong place after another. We briefly considered a big two bedroom near campus, across from a graveyard. We thought: it’s New Orleans, the whole city is a graveyard, why be picky - but kept looking anyway.  Then we found the Palmer Avenue house: one side of a shotgun, about half a mile up from St. Charles. It had a low front porch with a swing, up the steps and inside to a living room, a den with a brick fireplace, a bedroom, the bathroom, another bedroom, the kitchen, all in a row. A shotgun: open the front door and shoot, your bullet sails right out the back without hitting a ...