Nina and I tried to celebrate New Year's Eve. We really didn't love the holiday, but we made an effort. There was the year we made a reservation with friends at a fancy new place downtown with a big group of friends and at least three of us went home before the end of dinner …
Month: December 2018
The Introvert’s Dilemma (or Nothing Fails Like Prayer Beads)
I like people. Actually being around them can be nice, too, though preferably only one at a time. Maybe a small group if I’m feeling particularly centered. Anything more is likely to result in social anxiety and a night long marathon session of what Nina used to call the Recrimination Circus. It’s the mental place …
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A List of Good Books about Death, Grief, Loss, and Related Issues
It's almost Christmas, so many of you are probably wondering: "what gift can I buy that will devastate my loved ones to the point of tears while simultaneously affirming their basic humanity?" Right? Well, look no further: I’m building a little bibliography / reading list on grief, loss, mortality, terminal illness, and the like. It's …
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The Abyss
Sometimes when I’m trying to get my bearings it helps to borrow a specific structure or image. There’s the Stages of Grief, bequeathed on us for better or ill by Kubler-Ross, by which we can gauge our progress and feel badly about our failure to achieve proper staging; or if you’re more visual than schematic, …
Prologue to Afterword
I’ve been slower to post here lately. I thought it was just a symptom of life's relentless pace. The more I think on it, though, it seems the nature of the blog has shifted, or maybe I have. Initially, the writing was primarily an outlet for me, a coping and processing mechanism, and only secondarily …
Holiday Arrangements (non-edible variety)
https://youtu.be/dgxI3PT9IN8 Neil Young famously wrote that it’s hard to make arrangements with yourself. I‘ve always found this to be true. Of all the things I loved about being in a long term committed relationship, the dialectic was maybe my favorite. You are always bouncing things off one-another, and even when you don’t do so overtly, …
Afterword 