The Lonely Live Goose
Silently soaring through the sky
Like a bird of prey hunting solo for breakfast.
But you won’t dive.
You only attack on the ground.
Chasing runners and bikers and preschoolers on a nature walk.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of September 15, 2024
I am not satisfied until my mosquito bites have been scratched into permanent scars. This is a literal and metaphorical commentary on the self.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of September 8, 2024
Get out. Out of your house, out of your head, out of the doom scroll, out of your way. Get out and go get it.
Running Through Your Past
I wound through parts of Flossmoor I didn’t even know existed, despite growing up there. Oh! That’s where Flossmoor Hills Elementary is. I just never had any reason to journey to that part of town. In the familiar parts, I found myself thinking about my childhood. Acknowledging all the landmarks with memories. That’s where I ditched school that one time and smoked cigarettes when I should have been in math class. This is where my high school friends and I would meet before school to smoke cigarettes. There’s where there used to be a church where I once tried to woo a girl by playing her punk songs as we sat in her car—it didn’t work—and would sometimes smoke cigarettes. I wasn’t a teenage smoker, but, apparently, when I did smoke, I did it all over town.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of September 1, 2024
Managing our expectations of others is the most humane thing we can do for one another.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of August 25, 2024
Always plan for the unexpected.
For Love of Inanimate Objects
I’m a curator of stuff. A collector of evidence. I struggle to throw anything out because so many things are artifacts that map out my life’s journey. Each relic has a story about a moment that informs the person. In the most egotistical way possible, I’m preserving my legacy. Shaping it, really. Creating my own Presidential Library for a guy who will likely never be president. (Likely… This mid-life crisis I’m in has endless possibilities.)
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of August 18, 2024
Considering how the DNC disrupted and shut down so much of Chicago, I’m left with this realization: Democracy is the greatest obstacle to progress.
While the Rest of You Slept
A prayer. Asking for the things I can no longer influence. Recognizing what I don’t and never will control.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of August 11, 2024
I don’t like bibliophiles. They’re right up there with vegans, Swifties, and born again Christians, and Disney Adults. Calm down. All of you. Your one-dimensional personality sucks.
A Rare Moment of Ease and Simplicity
Let me first tell you how much I hate running errands. It’s not due to laziness. Because I’m a guy who thrives off of immediate gratification.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of August 5, 2024
My favorite kind of art is Art of the Possible.
A Tumor in April
April and Ben met again years later. She was leaving an office building; he was boarding a train. They swooned and dated. But something was different.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of July 28, 2024
What makes it so hard to believe our kids are as old as they are is not because we don’t understand how calendars work. It’s because we get reminders from Time Hop and Facebook Memories, so it literally is just yesterday we saw them as infants. Social media fucks us in every hole in every way.
Drunk & Jaundiced
He showed up drunk. The stumbling, the slurring, the hitting on the bartender in a perverted, nonsensical way aside He looked good. His hair had thinned. His belly had grown. But there was a New Wave Confidence appeal to him.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of July 21, 2024
I just learned that Andrew Dice Clay is Jewish and not Italian. And now my life is different. I don’t know how yet, but I know the future ain’t what it used to be.
At the Intersection of Love & Hate
MAGAites are like ants. You see one or two and it’s not such a big deal. But when you see an army of them, it can feel a bit scary.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of July 14, 2024
One really good way to get angry at all of your exes is to officiate a really beautiful wedding for two people in their forties.
The Smug City Snob with Nothing to Show but Three Tattoos
Through the winding hellish passage from city to the Western Suburbs
I realize I must not be depressed enough.
With time to kill, I pull into a Wheaton Chilis for a drink.And there it is. The Feeling.
That empty feeling of mediocrity and directionless arrival in a place that could be anywhere
Where the people could be anyone
Where everyone is no one.
A Desperate Display of Nothingness
Your near-dead heart is running at a million miles an hour
Desperately trying to keep your head from collapsing in on itself.
Trying to prove you are valuable, interesting, worth the hassle.
Christmas is a time for giving, being with family and friends, and hating every other asshole out there in the shops and on the roads also trying to spread joy and share in the Christmas spirit. Similarly, Hanukkah is a time for Jewish people to desperately try to feel relevant during Christmastime.