Wretched Anniversaries

It’s been a year and a day since I ended my engagement. An exasperated restlessness punctuated by dry crying jags and a feeling of dreamlike hallucination runs through me right now. It’s not that I’m feeling nostalgic.
I’m still in shock.
And for some obvious reason, I’m wearing the one baggy gray t-shirt of hers that I [...]

Miseducation

I spent the most of my intellectual majority learning about government, totalitarianism, war, politics, technology, economics and journalism. I peppered that with literary and science fiction. I saw myself as a developing intellectual with a moral obligation to write against war and totalitarianism, in the mold of  Noam Chomsky. I had only vague dreams, without [...]

In the Ring

I went for a proper 9.8 mile run today for the first time since Christmas or so. My left hip feels like it belongs to an old lady, but I got some good thinking done, and the sun bounced off the snow enough that I stayed warm enough to stave off any organ loss. I [...]

Sturm und Drang

I had a thought a little while ago that I really felt a desire to write down. I don’t want to give my parents a single additional moment of my time. I’ve spent so much of my life reacting to them, trying to placate them, and then despairing when I became incapable of satisfying them. [...]

Reminders

After listening to 1257 earlier tonight, I felt the impulse to write some questions for myself out on separate sheets of paper in blue capital letters. I used some of my remaining double-sided tape to put them up on my door at eye level.
I feel like this was somehow a fateful decision for me. I [...]

Habits are Like Cement

Habits are quickly drying cement. The more radical the change involved, the greater the pain and challenge inherent in breaking free of the old habits. It is possible to make radical alterations in your behavior in short periods of time, but the more violent the change, the less likely that it is to stick.
I’ve been [...]

Anarchic Year

At around this time last year, I had no clue what I was in for over the next twelve months. I was on the way to a Dresden Dolls concert in Midtown with my ex-fiancee, utterly oblivious to the fact that in less than a month, I would fall through the rabbit hole.
I can expect [...]

Provincials

Adventurers require frontiers to conquer. I’ve always felt wanderlust, a desire to explore and conquer the unknown. My favorite stories when I was young were those that involved deep space exploration and colonization. I identified with the dreams of Isaac Aasimov, particularly his Foundation series, a collection of science fiction novels describing a future society [...]

Taking Pleasure

From cradle to grave, most of us allow ourselves to be pushed around by other people. We do what we “should” do. We go to school. We do our homework. We find a suitable career. We go to work, and place some of our savings in a government-sponsored retirement account. We pay our taxes. We [...]

From the Upper East Side to the BQE

Note to lawyers who might be reading this: the following is a complete work of fiction. I promise. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is completely coincidental. Totally. Not even joking.
I grew up in a very wealthy family. My father was an outlier in our broader family history. As far as I know, the [...]