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A1A Revisited
Around this time back in 2018, my friend Brenna and I took a trip to Florida. It was something we decided to do after she got an October 2017 email about a screaming deal on January flights in and out of Fort Lauderdale. Neither of us had been to Florida before and neither of us were doing great in the home stretch of 2017. In addition to being pals, we were…
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A Resurrectionist Streak
I’ve always had an uncomplicated affinity with the time of year I was born, but not for uncomplicated reasons. Although my birthday never falls exactly on winter solstice, it’s always within two or three days and feels like the most natural event to attach myself to for time-keeping purposes. And in the past few years, I’ve fashioned a loose mythology to explain (mostly to myself) how the timing and conditions of…
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The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeois Workplace
This past week a year ago was my last at my old job. If I can help it, it will remain my last ever in the bourgeois workplace. I’m a year removed from that gig, and I feel like anything approaching a full recovery is going to take another year or two. That’s like two to three years of rehab for every four years at a toxic job—the last three months…
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Born in a Bar
I visited Montana for the first time in over 13 months in September. Somehow, it’s the longest I’ve ever gone without setting foot in the state, and that despite living some 1,500 miles closer to a Montana border than any time in my adult life prior to 2019. I have a lot of feelings about traveling out of state on any non-essential terms these days. So, a September voyage to Montana…
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The Snags
I’ve been spending a lot of time with past versions of myself this year. It’s not a new development by any stretch, but it has taken a surprisingly healthy twist in 2020. In 2019, when I knew I was coming up on the end of an eight-year stint on the East Coast, I recall expressing to a friend that I’d be leaving behind a lot of dead versions of myself. At…
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Carrying Capacity
I still tend to fare better when there’s plain evidence of a complete living order, and not just the systems humans have imposed on it. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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USFS 2019
USFS 2019 is what it is. It's a love letter in overt terms to pop culture and dad jokes, and in sneaky terms to Montana (if you know, you'll know when and how). It's a recovery story and an attempt to narrativize family history under the guise of a century-later update of Norman Maclean's "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky." It's neurodivergent and millennial as…
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 1
I was 26 and I thought I was expired and I knew that was irrational, but I also wondered if there was a reason I was still alive and I just hadn’t figured it out yet. I said it wasn’t a big deal when a guy apologized from the window of his pale Isuzu Trooper for running down the pathetic estate sale sign I’d just pitched. That was before I realized…
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 2
We cached Dad’s Sasquatch trove in the garage, deciding that was the best spot to stage it so Pete didn’t have to haul it around in Mindy until he was headed back out to the Peninsula. Though there was plenty of daylight left after migrating the boxes downstairs, Pete and I called it a day soon after. We tried to battle furniture for a while, but didn’t last long on that…
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USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 3
I left the house around 6pm, still without any sign of Pete and Elliott, but I knew they couldn’t have been far from Challis at that point. Normally, I wouldn’t have felt the need to let anybody know where I’d be in the event that we might miss each other. And I suppose it wasn’t necessary in this case. Pete and Elliott were both acute observers and knew as well as…
