August, Princeton 

No work again today. I went to my old town and walked around. Sweating through my jeans. Whistlejacket in a soggy brown paper bag tucked under my arm from the used bookstore. Twenty five bucks down the tubes. I shaved my head again and my daughter cried. I think it makes me look tougher. I tried not to think about her red eyes and big salty tears as I kept stealing glances in shop window reflections. The sun cut through right after the rain and brought a wall of August humidity. This is where I usually get nostalgic about slow summer New Jersey afternoons. The stuff of legends. Lost to an endless scroll. Baseball on the front lawn. Stolen beers in the woods. Kissing a girl from another town in the cold darkness of the Regal on Route 130. The cold red vinyl of a booth at the Americana Diner at midnight. Cracked cement pavers and islands of cigarette butts and broken bottles cut out of the dead center of cul de sacs. But not this time. I swam down Nassau Street. I kept telling myself that I was taking control as I spiraled clockwise down the drain. On ripped jean knees wailing into the microphone. Bam bam bam. Verse chorus. Verse chorus. It all ends. You can live an entire life under two minutes. What’s the point of dragging the dead deer up the hill? Everything was still. This moment. Not the beauty of the past, not the creeping black terror future. The impending out of control. The sky, the trees hanging over that gothic architecture, the ivy, the beautiful girls and their beautiful college eyes behind their tiny college sunglasses. Linen wrinkled blonde hair. This town has never changed. It was shot out of a cannon and put in its place. Cemented in times everlasting covenant. Before me. After me. But the hospital I was born in is gone, in its place, hundreds of sleek condos. Sharp corners. Black and white. I entered the double doors of the record exchange to a blast of cool air and a Radiohead song I couldn’t stand. An airbag or an iron lung, a Sophie’s choice. I needed Bill Evans to calm my nerves, or to transport me to the unwired past and out of the technofuture. But it was my exit music for a film. I rubbed my head and I wished it were a watermelon then blew out the candles and fell to a billion pieces, right where I began. 

Comment

Subscribe

spectra

little lazarus by michael bible

black sun: the brief transit and violent eclipse of harry crosby

“Is this a Spanish station?” The old man said with his eyes closed.

Let the bodies hit the floor played loudly in the empty barber shop. Through the crackling speaker. It angrily filled the room, the drowning pool.

The small Guatemalan woman cut the old farmer’s hair. Brilliant white falling to the dirty floor slowly like heavy snow.

“I didn’t know you listen to headbanger music” he opened his bright blue eyes.

“I don’t even know what’s going on today” she said “it makes me feel mean, and bad” she said with cracked smile.

The snow kept falling.

Filling up the pool.

“One time I went to a concert like this. I don’t even know rock music. I went dressed for a regular concert, but everyone showed up and they were all dressed in black”

The phone rang, the past calling.

Ring.

She didn’t pick it up.

“Goth” the farmer said. “They call it goth. With the hair spiked up”

“Then they just started pushing each other”

“They call it a mosh pit, a gothic mosh pit” the old man laughed his plaid up and down.

She continued to cut. She looked down and her tiny feet were covered with white. The floor was covered. She was up to her ankles in white farmer hair.

“I don’t even know what’s going on today” a droplet of blood fell from her finger.

I had hoped listening to the song at maximum volume with my eyes closed would magically transport me to another time, like it had so many times in the past.

I like it here, now, but I’m dragging my feet. I’m safest behind the wheel of my car. Somewhere in a suburban metropolis, in a strip mall with nail salons, pizza places, and shuttered travel agencies. It’s better here than anywhere else.

Shot out of a cannon with high-speed goggles on, bending time and space, breaking barriers only visible to atoms and ants. But then I wonder, do they see or do they feel? It couldn’t be possible. They can’t feel like us. They can’t feel like I can feel.

I’m scribbling little poems into my phone while the truck idles outside gymnastics. Kids in sparkles flip figure eights above the bar. I’m squeezed between two G Wagons. Dads talking loudly with their hands. I can almost hear them through the volume of a song they would never listen to, by an artist they’d probably scoff at.

Rain pours down. The wipers are off. The windshield blurs a busy Pennsylvania road at the start of rush hour. They’re working on the concrete. Horns won’t stop. Brake lights smear into red streaks.

The song starts to peak, and I can feel a little more, like I used to. I fight the urge to air strum a beat up Fender, but there’s no one left to perform for.

It’s hard to sit still. Numbness would suffice. Numbness or stillness, almost interchangeable.

I can’t imagine waking up with a drive to go to war. A drive to insert myself where I’m not wanted.

When it rains, the driveway fills with worms. I stopped trying to avoid them a long time ago. The bottoms of my shoes squish against the WeatherTech mats, gravel dragged in over months.

But I used to feel, hard, pulsing, red hot. The kind of feeling with the strength of a thousand suns. The kind that made you do something about it.

Maybe the ones who go to war still have that.

The fog gets so thick it feels better to just close my eyes and let the butterflies trace crooked circles on the inside of my eyelids.

I’m watching Kate Smith sing God Bless America on a Jumbotron in the seventies. I’m on a stage in New York City playing to an empty room. I’m in a basement with rats scurrying. I’m in that interview, scared. I’m getting pulled into the Atlantic by a riptide. I’m putting lemon in my hair, smoking weed out of a Coke can.
I’m sucking blood from my knee, watching my friend’s sister jump on a trampoline in a bikni. I’m saying something stupid to a girl while she laughs. My face is so red it hurts, like every eye that’s ever existed is on me. I’m lying face down on the ice after a hit from behind, waiting to find out if my spine still works.

I don’t know if any of it happened like that. Or if it happened at all. Or if these are just stories I sell myself.

I hug myself and whisper, to no one, that it’s all fine.

I turn the song up louder. The G Wagons growl back, offended by the unboxiness of my car.

I’m selling the dream louder than anyone here.

I flip on my phone’s voice note, something I can’t forget.

I’m selling the dream to myself. No one else is buying.

What happened to regret? That was a good thing, right? After tonight, everything is going to be the same. I can feel it coming, that tightness behind my nasal cavity.

I have to be a man. No one can ever see me like this. No one.

These sad songs and waltzes don’t sell anymore.

I got lost for awhile inside Tree of Smoke. Coming out the other side, I am a bit disoriented, like usual.

James Schuyler is known for his poetry, but his first novel Alfred and Guinevere is really special.

Shroud of the Gnome was released by The Ecco Press in 1997. What a year that was. I still remember it. Life was slower, maybe a bit more colorful and vibrant, things were felt a bit more than they are now. People bumped into each other doing things. They left their houses and loved harder. Passing pleasantries over digital devices was a practice in its infancy and the Flyers got swept by the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup final.

29 years is a long time for a book to sit in solitary. I feel for it. Not to project human emotions on to an inanimate object. But still, no one, or no thing deserves to be neglected for that long.

I finished the collection this morning. It opened up to me, and I gave it all I had. To the folks in beautiful Chicopee, Massachusetts. Sorry. You had your chance. You really don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

Leave a comment

If I were a Redditor(?) I could probably find a willing partner. I like this little recap. laudida has 81,000 karma points.

“I’m late to the party, but Lonesome Dove absolutely rocks.”

-laudida

My poem — American Water (Newark) — was published by Spectra.

In a moment of deep and shameful vulnerability, I asked ChatGPT for a book recommendation. I told the robot that I loved Richard Yates and how I was sad that, since he was dead, he wouldn’t be producing any more of his devastating fiction. For additional context I typed in that I had recently took up buying used copies of the first edition pressing of The Easter Parade — because its my favorite. The robot suggested I read Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegnar. So I did. In two sittings.

I was entranced by Justin Bieber singing Yukon in his boxer shorts at the GRAMMYS. Eyes closed, beaming his love song right to his wife, glowing in the front row. Moving stuff. The world seemed to stand still for a few minutes right there on CBS. I wish we could slow time like this more often. Manufactured vulnerability, sure. Lots of tattoos to manufacture some edge for Justin. Sure. But, I love it. Inject this into my veins. My entire youth played out behind my forehead right then and there. Singing love songs quietly to every girl I couldn’t get out of my head — right at myself in the mirror with my door locked. Slide city.

Leave a comment

tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world

tomorrow you may sing in paradise amongst the smoking ruins of your world’s cities

but tonight, I would think of one man, a lone individual

a man without a name or a country

a man who I respect

because he has absolutely nothing in common with you

the man is myself

tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am

-henry miller, 1934

This plane is definitely crashing. Please secure your air mask before helping your neighbor. I know you are reaching for something to grab a hold of, to stop the spinning downward spiral of a doom-scroll. The system owns the path of least resistance. Easy, mind numbing slop.

Repetition is god. lifting heavy things — up and down, up and down, until exhaustion. Running until your legs fall off. Reading until your eyeballs swell and the words start to jumble. This is all I am able to offer as an answer.

We are all trying to get lost. It’s the only way.

I believe in love and its power to vibrate through our lives, conversations and connections. Now more so than ever. Spending one hour with a friend, talking about whatever — laughing, knee slapping. Fuck. That is worth so much more than anything consumed on this little glowing screen.

Light a fire.

Stare into the sun.

Do too much.

Write a letter.

Fall in love with something that you forgot.

You can’t gate-keep the ocean if you are swimming in it.

So, just get into it for yourself.

I hope to see you soon.

At your house, or mine, or maybe even at a bar making a bad decision.

I will take that over whatever this is any day of the week.

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

I saw Built to Spill in the fall of ’06 at Higher Ground in Burlington, Vermont. From away, a few weeks into my freshman year at UVM. I didn’t last. I knew it right from the start. I knew it as I walked down Route Two to South Burlington past the Ramada Inn and the Texas Roadhouse, stoned and drunk on Stella with the tall girl from Manhattan who told me she was related to a founding father, or was it the one who would only make out with me to Cruel Intentions. Hard to say now. Time is a concept, and life is a blur.

I hightailed it out of that weed cloud as fast as I could. Back to New Jersey, where nothing could hurt me. Nothing gold can stay. The only kid I met up north got snapped up by the cops for dealing cocaine. Hook, line, and sinker. Rumors were that he was caught with a key and got ten years. I never believed it, but I also never saw him again. Lost to history. He was from New Jersey. Irvington. Maybe Maplewood. He felt a bit like home to me.

I went to a frat party with him once. He walked on air down the halls and high fived the brothers with bag filled palms. Carpets soaked while sneakers trampled and the cracking of Solo cups. Remix to Ignition in a concrete basement, bouncing off the walls in an echo. Glowing in the dark. It was something out of a movie, slow motion smiles and nods all the way down the hallways. Scorsese would have slowed it down and soundtracked it with a tired Rolling Stones song.

I left that party alone, dizzy, with a frozen face and a yearning heart. Can you make it real? Make it more than reel. More than just feel. We are on a ride. Pushing myself forward by Distopian Dream Girl rattling around in the cavern of my empty, numb skull. I knew I had to get the fuck out of Vermont. This is not what dreams are made of.

I get an uneasy feeling around hills or mountains or whatever you want to call them. Big rocks. The woods is not it for me. When I enter the Catskills or any place like that where people drive to peep leaves, I feel a great sense of darkness. Dread. Something heavy and lurking. Like a mountain of wet leaves pushing me down into the earth. Strangling me to a cold and breathless death.

I want the great wide open. Long open beach with the sun blaring on burning skin. Sunglasses leaving raccoon eyes. I would even take a wide open field. Everything out in the open. Vermont caved in on me with its fall colors and burning green. The bowl caked.

I heard Built to Spill in the car yesterday as the rain pelted down and the wipers picked up speed. I wanted to press down on the gas harder, past the speed limit on the slick, potholed river road. Snapping out of it, I parked the truck, killed the ignition and the song, and brought the groceries up the stairs and into my quiet home and the safety of my dream girls.

Recently read:

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

The Most by Jessica Anthony

Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run by Peter Ames Carlin

Let me sing you the saddest bedtime story.

I went through a phase in middle school where each night I listened to Scenes From An Italian restaurant by Billy Joel before I went to bed. Dark. I know.

My Dad installed an old record player of his in my room, and for some reason, I got into this strange little habit of dropping the needle perfectly into the groove of the last track of side A of The Stranger, crawling into bed, and letting Billy sing me to sleep with his sad story of hometown heroes, Brenda and Eddie.

In retrospect, deeply embarrassing, yet, I believe we need to dance with our demons. Much like Billy Joel — I have never been cool.

I have never felt more like the world has turned and left me here. My cultural touchstones are all thirty plus years old, and I am struggling to find the energy to be on my phone doing the cultural due diligence that is now required to be a functioning member of polite society.

I watched the new Billy Joel documentary, And So It Goes on HBO last weekend. It felt very now. Long and glowing. Scrubbed clean of the darkness. In short, no fun. I was hoping to see a bit of the dark side. Everyone loves seeing the underbelly of a suit and tie kind of guy. Right?

The documentary was the visual equivalent of taking vitamins and going to bed at 8:30 on a Friday night. Or, leaving the house with your pajamas on. Lazy faux comfort. Smooth brain stuff.

Maybe my expectations were high considering Billy Joel has basically just been in the ether for the past fifty some odd years.

He’s like a rock in a stream, smoothed over by thousands of years of slowly passing water. If I want sex, drugs and rock and roll — I should probably reconsider my entertainment choices.

Anyway. Here we are waving Brenda and Eddie goodbye..

I recently read

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Disturbing The Peace by Richard Yates

I Lived To Tell It All by George Jones

I hadn’t read Kurt Vonnegut in over fifteen years. I don’t give him enough flowers for shaping, maybe even kickstarting, the reading habit I’ve developed over my lifetime. Truly. He was on one, and for most of high school I was heavily picking up what he was putting down. But like all first loves, you must move on to greener pastures.

Recently, I bought a dusty old copy of Dead Eye Dick — a title I hadn’t tackled in my youth. The binding glue of the paperback had long since dried out. It seems like this was fished out of the deep end of a pool. Left to try out, then shipped off to the local thrift.

You crash head first into adulthood. Jobs. Kids. Pressures and lows you’ve never experienced. No big explosions, no sharp turns. Just a long flat road. That’s Dead Eye Dick.

A kid makes a terrible mistake, and it ruins him. Not in the obvious way. No jail, no big fall from grace. Just a quiet slide into the lazy-boy. Pretty much like all Vonnegut, you read it at seventeen and think it’s strange and kind of dated. You read it at thirty seven and see your reflection staring back at you with this weird, menacing smile.

Dead Eye Dick doesn’t grow. He doesn’t fight back. He just accepts it all. Life moves around him, and he stays still. That’s the part that hurts the most. Not the crime, but the drift. The way he disappears into a life of small routines, polite conversations, unremarkable meals. That middle aged emptiness you don’t talk about, because there’s no headline in it. Just time passing, and you watching it.

Vonnegut doesn’t dress it up. He puts it out plain. Life’s strange. People fuck up. They fuck up all of the time. Most of us don’t get punished in public ways, we just end up forgotten.

Dead Eye Dick doesn’t ask for pity. It just shows you what it looks like when nothing much happens for the rest of your life. And if that hits too close, maybe that’s ok.

Sometimes the brutal nihilism of Vonnegut can be a bit heavy handed. But often times he is so dark that you kind of just have to laugh from fighting tears. I’m glad we’ve found each other after all this time. We can hold hands and watch it all burn while we smell the hydrangeas.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

What you highlight in a book is a window to your soul. It is cool to see the commonality. Man’s search for meaning, and how it has manifested itself through time.

The inside cover of this book was stamped APRIL 13th 1973.

What is better? Happy?

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

I don’t know, probably being more vulnerable, or maybe the act of highlighting with the intention of being happier is good enough — and therefore better. And the snake eats it’s own tail. Someone get me off this carousel.

☝️

Happiness is probably less an art, and more a skill to be honed. Sharpened. Sword to stone.. but it seems that generations upon generations have fallen prey to the self-help guru.

I don’t know. I am going to keep highlighting every book. Telling myself some sort of story and leaving a breadcrumb trail back to my soul. It will be a nice artifact for someone to stumble upon on a rainy Saturday morning.

In other news, Entrance to a Descent is still available for purchase. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy. I am saying this with peace and love.

Eighty miles an hour through a brick wall in a pickup. Shirtless with the radio up, pointed east on steel and gravel crunch.

The cowboy’s were speeding through the country, after they had all forgotten about John Wayne.

The Budweiser sweat through itself and slipped through a rope-worn grip showering the barefoot girls ankles sitting on the tailgate with the sweet spray of summer, then quit spinning in the dirt.

The cigarette smoke hung in the humid night mixing with the static flicker of a gas station sign, under a neon moon and a distant southern two-step from a jukebox supporting an old drunk with a fistful of quarters.

His gold chain hung underneath the ripped muscle tee, and her crooked tooth smile turned every boys head, and left them spinning until dawn and forever when they think of that night.

Everyone was broken, but a fleeting comfort survives in numbers, and they all laugh together at the handshake of a promise — one to make a change, to call their mom, to think for once about the future, to set their compass for heaven, to make it right — when the morning comes.

cocaine country (2)

additionally:

• Cocaine Country (1)

• To The Wedding by John Berger had me in a trance

• Perfection by Vincenco Latronico flys close to the sun

• The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) is a thoughtful slasher movie

47 poems, written between 2021-2024. There are a limited number of copies. You, my dear readers, have the right of first refusal.

Thank you all for your continued support. Making art (failing) in public is not for the faint of heart. Peace and love.

ENTRANCE TO A DESCENT

buy a copy

Reading Pale Fire can do this to you, if you let it. It is a novel sold as a poem wrapped in a dizzying psychosis. You think you’re reading a man’s elegy for his daughter, but you’re really witnessing another man’s collapse — a footnote unraveling into really loud fucking scream into a void.

Nabokov doesn’t give you a story; he gives you a puzzle, burns the piece’s, then dances on the ashes.

Then the lineman releases his grip. You fall to the floor in a thud. Everyone at school points and laughs. But you are fine, because you know that you know something they never will. Tears slowly drip down your cheeks into the beautiful crack of a smile.

Leave a comment

I clicked the link immediately and removed myself from the party.. Jon’s cover was beautiful. Perfect even. He doesn’t know it — but i’ve listened to it an egregious amount since April 11th.

“Up The Junction” has owned prime real estate in my head since the moment I heard it — maybe fifteen years or so when I first discovered Squeeze.

Tempted, Pulling Muscles (From The Shell), Black Coffee In Bed — all wonderful songs, but lighthearted pop rippers. Up The Junction is something different entirely.

It’s not fun. In fact, it’s the opposite. Up The Junction is the saddest song ever written. An unrelenting downward spiral.

You now have seven days to share this song with someone — or else you are doomed to the fate of the songs protagonist. Enjoy.

I never thought it would happen
With me and the girl from Clapham
Out on the windy common
That night I ain't forgotten
When she dealt out the rations
With some or other passions
I said "you are a lady"
"Perhaps" she said. "I may be"

We moved in to a basement
With thoughts of our engagement
We stayed in by the telly
Although the room was smelly
We spent our time just kissing
The Railway Arms we're missing
But love had got us hooked up
And all our time it took up

I got a job with Stanley
He said I'd come in handy
And started me on Monday
So I had a bath on Sunday
I worked eleven hours
And bought the girl some flowers
She said she'd seen a doctor
And nothing now could stop her

I worked all through the winter
The weather brass and bitter
I put away a tenner
Each week to make her better
And when the time was ready
We had to sell the telly
Late evenings by the fire
With little kicks inside her

This morning at four fifty
I took her rather nifty
Down to an incubator
Where thirty minutes later
She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother
If there could be another

And now she's two years older
Her mother's with a soldier
She left me when my drinking
Became a proper stinging
The devil came and took me
From bar to street to bookie
No more nights by the telly
No more nights nappies smelling

Alone here in the kitchen
I feel there's something missing
I'd beg for some forgiveness
But begging's not my business
And she won't write a letter
Although I always tell her
And so it's my assumption
I'm really up the junction

Leave a comment

John Williams wrote four novels, one of which he does not recognize as a part of his cannon, for reasons unknown. Good things come in threes. Williams writing life was slow and methodical, and it left us three perfect novels that all grapple with the same subject matter — the arc of man. Some left to a middling existence, some left to conquer the free world — and the parallel lives they lead.

“He is a man like any other…. he will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.”

Reading Stoner upon its re-release by NYRB was de rigueur a few years back. There was even a rumored film adaptation set to star Casey Affleck back in 2017. Lucky for us it was shelved, hopefully never to see the light of day. It is a perfect slice of mid-century literature that has been out of fashion for so long, that it has come back around as something groundbreaking.

Butcher’s Crossing is a part of the American Western hall of fame. Right up there with Blood Meridian (notably one of the few books I have started and refused to finish in my lifetime), Lonesome Dove and True Grit.

Augustus is nothing like I have ever read. An epistolary novel about the coming of age of Julius Caesar Augustus — the founder of the Roman Empire.

All three Williams novels lead to the same ultimate conclusion — the friction that exists between the poles of “force of person” and “accident of fate” over time blur into one — leaving us in a state of utter confusion. Middling in mediocrity, numb to the elements. But. Such is life.

The Trinity is listed as a lot on eBay for your bidding pleasure.

Leave a comment

Bob Dylan wrote propaganda Songs. Well, most of them. My two favorite Dylan songs are cocaine fueled sha-la-las. The Man in Me and Sarah Jane. All of this Bob Dylan talk is seemingly inescapable, or maybe it is just my algorithm that has me trapped in a Dylan doom loop.

I will not watch the Chalamet/Dylan movie, not to be a contrarian, but because it is really just all kind of sad. Seriously, all music biopics are embarrassing. But it had me thinking. I’m not ready for the Springsteen one — Deliver Me From Nowhere, that hits this year.

Based on the recently released Warren Zanes book that recounts the most lusted after Springsteen era, post The River and pre-Born in the U.S.A. — when Bruce, most notably, went off the deep end — shunned the spotlight, and fell in love with the band Suicide. From there he retreated to a rented suburban home in Colts Neck, New Jersey to record the bleakest album ever put to tape, Nebraska.

It is fashionable to say Nebraska is your favorite Springsteen album. Truthfully, it’s how you spot a fraud. It is a perfect album, but it cannot be your favorite, although reportedly, it is Springsteen’s. But that tracks, it is the most direct and honest reflection in a period of intense longing.

Jeremy Allen White is going to be portraying Bruce Springsteen and it is inevitable, New Jersey will be the center of the universe once again. There is nothing you can do.

In other news:

We all need to party more.

I just read two Nabokov novels, Despair and Laughter in the Dark. Super entertaining, maybe the most stylish writer ever. I can’t get enough, 75 years late. That’s the breaks.

My second poetry collection Entrance to a Descent will be out in March, here are a few that did not make the final cut.

I am reading Butcher’s Crossing, and I am about to go Skiing. Wish me luck.

Go birds 🦅

Leave a comment

Peace and love to you all.

Once again I start at the “why?”

This yearly exercise of recounting the past — I know I have come to this same juncture before. All I need to do is go back to past year-end musings.

So what do we do it all for? I’m not talking about the meaning of it all. Boring. Why talk about what we watched or what we read at all? Like consuming is some all-knowing, righteous act. To better ourselves? Or to fill the big super-unknown of time and space? To enlighten the uninitiated — the non-seekers? Or to signal our learnedness and breezy intelligence? Maybe a smattering of each. The latter if we are keeping it fully one hundred.

Maybe the point is to fill our lives with beauty. Babies. Puppies. Flowers. Sunrise. Sunset. Poetry and literature. And to encourage the next generation to fall in love with beauty and to make art of their own. And the wheel goes round and round. Maybe. Just maybe.

“Just Another Year End Reading List (12.21.24)”

I remember reading Paterson at the beach in Cape May this summer. It felt wildly out of place, and I found it incredibly hard to follow.

Ask The Dust went quickly, likely how Fante intdended. Maybe a few hours sitting in my chair next to my reading lamp. I drank maybe two bottles of wine during that sitting. I probably should have read this one when I was Nineteen.

Couples by John Updike blew me away. I started it, and read a good chunk after a day of Skiing at Hunter Mountain in New York. Legs jellied, laid up on the bed of a nice hotel room as I watched the day fade away into night while big, chunky snowflakes fell inaudibly outside.

I recounted my experience with reading The Turn of The Screw in Naples, Florida in this post.

I hated Intermezzo.

Death of the Black Haired Girl appeared to me at Sheafe Street Books in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I have bought multiple Robert Stone Books at this used shop — and each time I do the owner and I have a nice little conversation. I look forward to my next trip.

Molly by Blake Butler was easily the most bleak book I have ever read. Passages were shared multiple times in texts back and forth with friends. Equally gutted. Not for the faint of heart.

Heat 2 is going to be a great movie.

More Stephen King in 2025. This was a down King year. Regrettably.

The Lead singer of Thursday wrote a visceral recovery novel titled Someone Who Isn’t Me — I remember telling a lot of people to read that one.

I will be writing more, and making physical copies of a new poetry collection this year.

I gave a ton of books out this year. I buy books to read them and hopefully give them to someone who lingers longer than usual at a book shelf in my home, or genuinely asks me what they should be reading next. This brings me joy and I hope to do more of giving in the future. Presents are for children. I want to live in a world where adults are passing books back and forth, tattered and beaten — and talking about something that made them feel.

Leave a comment

How do people see us? Do we have the right friends? Are we beautiful and handsome enough? Are the clothes just right? The car? The bank account? There is a sick self consciousness that undercuts our sense of aboveness — the gap slowly widens, as we age, between our ideas of ourselves as special people and the reality of being just like everyone else. But the widening gap is where all the fun exists.

It is where living happens.

This is why the works of Yates were always critically lauded but never commercially viable. Evidenced by the fact that none of his seven major works were able to sell more than 12,000 copies in hardcover. The dude produced, exclusively, commercial flops.

The mirror image of Americans was a bit too crisp. It was shocking, the ease with which he was able to crawl inside the brains of the middle class and feel their lonely heart beat may have been off putting to the workaday reader. These are the same folks twenty years later who would fall victim to the likes of Star Wars-Harry Potter-Comic Book nonsense and other escapist, infantilized, belly-rubbing popcorn classics. It tracks.

Challenging the roughness of existence fell out of favor, and it has never returned.

When I posted the above image to an Instagram story last week, the ‘hearts’ started to pour in. The edges were bleeding.

Little did everyone know that this was a picture of a page from an Elizabeth Gilbert book. Eat Pray Love, baby..

It made me feel like, maybe we really are all on self-island, but..together? Now more than ever, we may need an injection of people talking about Richard Yates. Realism. Blunt reality. And stillness in the face of it.

We are all the protagonist in our own story, and likely the villain in someone else’s. Painfully alone. Even in the midst of the deepest hug, or most romantic kiss. We are front and center, at the middle of the stage with the lights burning the makeup off our faces.

Let us do what we want without fear or recourse. Remove yourself from the microscope — the prying eye of the public — because, remember, nobody is thinking about you.

Leave a comment

Share Weekend Guide

Take a minute to listen to Simplicity Is Beautiful by Juliana Hatfleid, or watch Timothee Chalamet dance on a New York City pier to Visions of Johanna. Both are cool. The Skeleton Key by Roc Marciano is an album I have been enjoying this week. I am currently halfway through Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and I am enjoying it, but her poetry is better. I will post about all of the 2024 reading stuff next week. In the meantime, peace and love.

Spotify Wrapped day is essentially a holiday for people on social media — music lovers, etc. It is common for people to share their most streamed songs and artists across all of their properties. Screaming from the rooftops to be respected for their just right musical inclinations.

It is en vogue to hate on these folks. I get it. But we all want to be seen right? Why else would I be writing these posts and pumping them out into the void? I see both sides, but like many other social media fads, I keep my visions to myself.

Every year I view a lot of these posts and my main takeaway is that we are not as unique as we like to think. The mono culture is real — music taste, or maybe, music in general is ran over, run through, or whatever the de rigueur turn of phrase for rode hard and hung up wet.

Music has become, like everything else, a passive activity. One that requires no passion, or hard work. Something easily accessible and evergreen.

No one is sitting next to their radio, on the edge of their seat, waiting to hear the opening few bars of their favorite song. They are dialing it up on Spotify and putting it on repeat. The pendulum has swung a bit too far.

In my humble opinion, there is nothing more deeply uncool than quantifying music taste. How does it feel when music doesn’t make you feel anymore?

How will Gen Z ever hear War Pigs If they are streaming Tommy Richman 85 Billion times? Their algorithm may be lightyears away from Pictures of You. Who knows.

The first time I heard Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks was on the radio, in the car with friends in Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania. It was a foggy fall night in 2004. I don’t remember who was driving, it could have been me, either way, it was impossible to see — all that existed was wall of gray against the black of night. We might as well have been driving blind through outer-space. The car was filled with smoke and hot teenage breath. I was so high I think I started to cry.

If I put on Waterloo Sunset now, which I currently have playing (on Spotify)— I feel. Old. Sure. That is true. But I feel a great big something. A great big unexplainable something that I will never stop chasing.

My mother has never been cooler than the time she was dosed at Yes concert at RFK Stadium. My father, never as cool as the time he was struck by lightning playing electric guitar on his front porch during a rainstorm, most likely trying to figure out a Rolling Stones riff. Music used to define people, bring them together. It was mythical and sexy.

These are likely all my machinations on my part — but I am having a hard time seeing through the matrix. I sure as shit hope there are people out there, in basements of punk houses, slamming their fists through amps and screaming into a microphone. I am there in spirit, eyes red and high life in hand.

I hope the flattened, digital wall of sound we call music is able to continue to encourage bad decisions. I feel like there may still be hope. If you are curious, my most played song of 2024 was Are You Looking Up? By Mk.Gee

Leave a comment