First comes the creepy feeling. Ominous. Nothing you can touch a finger to, just a vague sense of impending doom. You are yourself, yet not yourself. A menace stalks you.
Then it pounces. With the sniffles.
“The common cold is a surprisingly orderly little illness,” ChatGPT informs…
Why my interest in jackets? I cannot say, though others are taken by them too, a great tribe of jacket lovers. Of course, people are taken by all sorts of things—jeans, scarves, shoes, hats, suits, winter coats—but I have little interest in those things, except for
…
“Yeah, no.” There I go again. I do know my own mind, so why do I always sound so bloody indecisive? Yeah-no makes no sense. Yet I have caught myself saying it again and again for, what, twenty years now? Where did this verbal tic come from?
…
“Your daddy is in Purgatory,” my devoutly Catholic great-aunt informed me.
At three, I stumbled on the syllables.
At six, I wanted to know where it was.
Ignoring my mother’s frantic, angry attempts to wave her quiet, Aunt Kitty proceeded to explain the theology. Because my…
What a clever way to begin a program of poetry scored for song and instruments—and a season ahead of similar creative thrills. You have heard of a vicious circle? This was the exact opposite.
Self-talk, the practice is called, and after decades of research, shrinks now admit it can be quite healthy. We learn to speak, after all, by jabbering away in our crib, speaking to no one in particular, catching the rhythm and intonation before we have the vocabulary.
I think more about what else in my social life I should see, ask, remember, and do, even when I can do little. Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald: Relationships are the brutality that sustains.
We want to live in a world of our own choosing, want this so badly it hurts. So we take revenge on that secret desire by tagging our yearnings “nostalgia” or “romanticism.” But often we are taking our own wistfulness too literally.
Pay attention here, because you are about to lose your soul. What you are told, from this point forward, will largely depend on what someone who hopes to profit from you has decided you want to hear.
When the music started from behind us without any musician ever setting up a music stand on the altar in front of us, I realized I had not thought this thing through very far.