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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 coworkers and shared an office then. I recall possibly being squatted on the floor in our office and trying (with little success) to regulate my breathing to avert an…
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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 my birth translated into some of the dispositions that started crystallizing in my adult life. The first I noticed was a clear attachment to the opposite solstice. I didn’t…
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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 of which I even worked remotely after relocating. If I had to start this process from the top, even if I could somehow survive it a second time, nothing…
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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 was something that I had been wringing my hands about since June. I didn’t want to be a vector tracking in coastal cooties that the landlocked parts of the…
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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 the time, the tenor of that statement was similar to the kind somebody would use to describe an estranged person in their life as dead to them. The implication…
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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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The Stony Remains of Shantyville
If my theory about bars being a proxy measure for livability in Montana has any teeth, it seems like the path forward to an improved Shantyville that’s livable for regular folks is paved with, yes, residential housing, but also bars.
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The South of It All
In the past few weeks, something north of a dozen cities have either removed or approved the removal of Confederate monuments. That might sound like good progress at first blush, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), as of last year, there were still almost 800 Confederate statues nationwide. And that was just a fraction of the more than 1,700 total monuments, place names, or other symbols memorializing the Confederacy. That SPLC number includes 103 public K-12 schools and colleges named for Confederate icons, but it doesn’t necessarily include the dozens of schools in 41 states that have…
