May 2012
4 posts
Collapse
In the future I will not try to be happy. Sadness is already too much of a burden. I cannot add loss to it again.
I just discovered that I have a large number of messages in some sort of Tumblr-inbox. I cannot, however, seem to reply to any of them. Tumblr claims that I do not have access to the ability to reply to my own messages.
Please accept my apologies and please send me an email. I will respond.
1 tag
Peace by Pieces
It struck him as somewhat maudlin, but he wished to himself that he had never written anything. He knew that she was out there, somewhere, disposing of the things that were now too hateful and heavy to keep around. He imagined her in different places, pushing memories into the sea, letting feeling deliquesce in the night, trying to let old and outmoded abstractions like love appear in her hands so...
March 2012
1 post
February 2012
2 posts
I have a twitter.
Talk to me.
Quitting
That is the fundamental problem with writing: If you want your words to have any life whatsoever they cannot be held onto. Writing is a private thing, and it is hard, but there comes a time when you must stop shielding your words from all of the terrible things the world will say about them and let them out into the air to breathe.
January 2012
2 posts
It Accumulates And Accumulates
Be suspicious of pretty words in pithy phrases.
Differing Degrees of Fine
“I have no interest in refining my tastes and affectations. I hope I never become one of those people who is in the business of teaching himself how to like things less. For my part, it would seem to me the greatest gift to be of no educated sensibility whatsoever, to spend the greater portion of my years teaching myself only how to confront my life in a manner that disturbs me the...
December 2011
1 post
Craft Demands Conflict
There’s a reason the author is so pessimistic about love: The men he writes about are too capricious and unkind with the hearts of women who love them, the women are the same with their men, and the rarefied pair of star crossed lovers has aligned against them a jealous god, a cruel and contemptuous world, or a universe bent upon their destruction.
Very, very close to being done with a piece of original short fiction taken from a chapter of an in progress novel.
November 2011
2 posts
How many of you out there in the wilderness of the Internet are from the Bay Area?
October 2011
2 posts
Theory
Part of the challenge of choosing a life of letters is resigning yourself to the fact that your personal tragedies will never appear to you like those of your characters: sublimely articulated, perfectly plotted, and with evident methods of redress.
Remembering Remembering: The Inherent Danger of...
Up on The Atlantic at: http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/remembering-remembering-the-inherent-danger-of-giving-a-eulogy/245703/
On September 10 I attended a funeral service for a member of my family who was a mother of triplets, all aged sixteen. As a part of the traditional Catholic mass, her two sons, her daughter, and her husband each devoted a brief eulogy embracing the...
September 2011
4 posts
I Have a Few Last Words on KQED
A reading of “I Have a Few Last Words” for KQED’s The Writer’s Block:
http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=68841
Intermission
Please pardon the intermission. Exciting things are happening.
August 2011
4 posts
The Damage to the Furniture in the Living Room
Always I am coming up with ways to forgive you. And always it comes so easy. I think that is enough evidence of love for me, thank you.
In Transit
Oh, how fast it becomes time to start again again.
Don't Be a Failure, Son
Time will not judge you fairly. You will not be remembered as a composite thing, full to spilling with a natural proportion of failings and accomplishments—splitting your life, as people do, between the pleasure of your triumphs and the misery of your disappointments. There will come a time when your energy is spent, and you fade from the earth, and history records whether the preponderance...
Where the Words Come From
On TC - http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/where-words-come-from/
July 2011
3 posts
Making Do
I am, of course, adept at losing things. Everything slips so quickly through my fingers. My grandmother once gave me a piece of jade, set in silver. It was on the most beautiful gold chain and she had engraved a message, just for me, on the backing. When I lost it I spent a large sum at a jeweler trying to have a facsimile made. I was so ashamed of myself—it was such a pretty and...
Where the Words Come From
I adopted Motorboat when my family emigrated from Hawaii to California to start over. It was fitting then, I suppose, that my cat waited to die until I returned from college a graduate. I had a few days with her when I arrived at home before she stopped eating, became inert, and remained in a closet in my bedroom until she passed. I say fitting because, as impressively sad as watching...
You Should Date an Illiterate Girl
A concerned reader sent this along. Apparently, “Illiterate” has started making a new set of rounds with a modified ending.
“http://mols.tumblr.com/post/7448177940” (Because I am Tumblr illiterate).
Here’s the original. http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/dont-date-a-girl-who-reads/
Something new for TC coming in the next week or so.
June 2011
5 posts
The Future Tense
For months he would sit there, undeniably apart from everything else. He would sit very still and clutch at the gas vents in the corner of his small room where it was warm or pick at the verdigris on the frame of his bed or dig his toenails into the floorboards. He would speak to his refrigerator and say “No, no, no.” And to the chairs at the table, “I can’t, I...
1:20 A.M.
When he looked inside of himself he saw no paths that led to his own happiness, so when the choice became letting her have her own or burying each other in the enormity of every unyielding misery that was presented before him, it wasn’t a very hard choice to make at all.
Why I've Been Away
Punctuate This! is not a blog, but I’ve been receiving a lot of emails asking why my long-form pieces have disappeared and why this has been updated less frequently. The answer is simply that I’ve been moving and have started working more seriously on submission-ready fiction. I always intended for this space to be a forum for words that needed to be put down, and it will continue to...
Why I Didn't Choose You
There’s nothing good in contentment. When you stop wanting things it’s time to die.
May 2011
3 posts
Choosing To Say Nothing
How do you tell someone about your greatest loss? How could I relate losing my son? How do you tell that like it’s a story? Where is its beginning? How do you point out the exact moment when your anger turns into the knowledge that you’ll never be happy again? And does it have an end? Was I supposed to say that it never has stopped happening to me? How do you say that? You can’t. You can’t...
Inkwell
That’s what I admire about you. You fuck like you write. What a wonderful quality.
I Think It Is Time To Go
His daughter was asleep on his lap, having exhausted herself from another bout of crying, and still had one hand clutched at the left of his chest around a crease of his hospital gown. That was the terrible thing about dying a prolonged death like this one. It subjected the to-be-deceased to so many of these awfully beautiful moments while never forgetting to remind them that that was exactly...
April 2011
4 posts
Moorings
There are two species of desperation: The one that continues to hope, and the one that doesn’t. Please stop doing this to me. Please, don’t remind me that there are beautiful things here. I have lost everything. I am worn and irresolute and I can feel the passing of time in my body, I can feel it pull everything out of me, I can hear it, it sounds like someone beating my skull on an...
Des Moines
That, of course, was the greatest myth he ever told anyone, or told himself. I am happy. But secretly, in the part of the brain that does not lie, was a library of all the choices he could have made differently, an interminable vault filled with all of the lives he might have lived. And so, when the evening came, and the course of his day was laid in front of him like a map, he explained the...
The Crisis Of The Missing Body
He knew that the most debilitating species of loneliness wasn’t the kind that came in fleeting stabs, but the kind that grew quietly and unobtrusively, settling like a thin film over the earth.
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Catafalque
Agency is the one redeeming thing about being the subject of someone’s great unhappiness. If I had been the one to do this to you, if I was the weight that bore down upon your shoulders, then at least I could be of some use. I swear, I would wrap my arms around the whole of your infinite sadness and I would bury it in the bedrock, or I would be the anchor that dragged it to the bottom of...
March 2011
7 posts
Bricks
Writing doesn’t alleviate grief. Writing sharpens it.
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Living With Compromise
The saddest thing about watching my father pass was that it was inescapably obvious that the he wanted to have died as a result of being filled to bursting with all of the living that he had done. And yet there he was, wasting away, deflating in front of our eyes, sinking into the air and getting lost among the folds of his bedsheets.
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I Need Somewhere To Sleep
I was so certain for so long that you were the great mystery I had to solve—that the instant I put all of your pieces together the world would unfurl and I would stand at the foot of you and everything would be right and everything would be clear. But now I know exactly who you are, and I am confident that the moment I understood was the most unhappy of my life.
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O'Hare
I saw a woman crying on the plane this weekend. She was looking at her ticket. I didn’t know if she was going home, or leaving. And I didn’t know which was sadder.
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I Have A Few Last Words
I Have a Few Last Words
404
It’s a noble goal to die content with the last things you said to the people you love.
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I Am The Lapse
Now that we’ve parted ways, I do want you to be happy. But I would be lying if I said that I ever wanted you to find someone who was better for you than I was.
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February 2011
6 posts
Night And Night And Dawn
For all of its hardships, winter will teach you things as you age. It will teach you how to boil water for baths, how to salt driveways, and how to make expedient compromises with nature. It taught you and I to make love on those sorts of nights. I learned how to know when you climaxed by the extent to which I could see your breath and by how hard you would pull the comforter down around us,...
Disuse
You and I made a promise to never talk about the past. So on nights like that night we grabbed at the edges of the air and stretched it as hard as we could, trying to lengthen the moments, trying to make them porous and thin. It’s so easy take for granted the life you have created before someone else comes into it. But you and I didn’t have that, we carefully thought who we had been before each...
Beigones
The first time we made love we weren’t sleeping together so much as we were sleeping apart from everything else, which is ok, because that is one of the greater objectives of loving someone, to put yourself between them and everything bad in the world.
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Of Course
“I have a question,” “Yes?” “Is forgiving something that you do yourself?” “I don’t know.” You had such small hands, I could cover your entire fist with my palm. “Apologizing is something you do yourself.” “Of course.” “What do you mean of course?” “I mean, you’re right.” I imagined what it would be like if the walls and the doors closed up until long after we were gone. How long would...
A Slightly Less Than Emphatic Answer
Is it disingenuous to try and make up for lost time that you deliberately misplaced?
The Greatest Love Stories Have Never Been Told
Who really wants to be written about? I hope that I never find it within myself to ever write a thing about you. What a strange and sad paradox—love so immense that it fits on the page and finds a home in words.
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