Cardinal Post

  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...

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 ...

  A million years ago I started a series of fictional reports about books I'd never read.  I wrote one on  Jane Austen , then one about Moby Dick, which I never posted because my dog died and I moved four times and Donald Trump was elected and I stopped writing for a while because I thought I could only write well when I was sad, or drinking, or it was late at night and I needed to talk to myself.  Over the last four years I started going to bed much earlier, became much happier, and stopped drinking entirely. In that order, which is a weird order, but it worked. Somewhere in that reset I got really superstitious and wondered if writing sad fiction influenced a sad reality. Hence the pause. I no longer think that's true.  But I've still never read Moby Dick.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've never read Moby Dick. Six hundred pages of shattered ego and whale blubber. We wan...