It’s been a long day. You’re the kind of drained where you can’t concentrate on much, but it’s too early to go to sleep. Or you’ll be up with the roosters. Then you’ll already be tired by the time your 10 or so on-the-clock hours come around again. The cycle will repeat and you’ve been trying to make fewer mistakes by not repeating the ones you’e aware of. Mindfulness and knowing thyself and what not.

So you’ll wait it out until you’re close enough to give yourself a shot at a solid eight hours.

To pass time in the interim, you opt to get into your recently acquired nighttime attire: A kimono, tank top that says “Perkins Power” and a pair of paisley-patterned baby-blue-and-white basketball shorts. They match your kimono. Not your tank top. But there’s nothing wrong with an occasional power clash. It’s not like you’re posing for GQ.

This haphazard outfit is one way to physically separate the realms between work and leisure. Can’t go full Severance yet, so you you make do with your own version of church-and-state separation.

Tonight, you opt to skip the shorts. You’re not going anywhere and no one is going to visit your domain.

It’s not that you’re feeling dangerous. It’s that you did laundry yesterday and couldn’t be fucked to fold it then. Promised yourself instead you’d do it today. But days can get away from you and you’ve already succumbed to this one. So you’re not going to get to that now. You cite errand fatigue as your excuse and although you have made this mistake many times—neglecting to fold your clothing right after it comes out of the dryer—you permit yourself to make this particular one again. It’s okay if you have a good excuse, you reason.

Rooting around the hamper of increasingly wrinkled apparel feels like a bridge too far.

You’re not going to Winnie-the-Pooh it and fully air it out down there. It’s not that you’re uncomfortable being naked. More that it feels ridiculous to be in the buff only from the waist down. Probably because it is.

Also, your couch is leather. And that gets sweat-sticky.

The boxer briefs stay on.

You have a vague recollection of shoving a couple slices of turkey lunch meat down while hovering over the sink between Teams meetings and are pretty sure you haven’t ingested additional calories. Also that memory might be of yesterday afternoon.

Since errand fatigue is systemic, you’re also absolutely not going to cook. Sustenance seems pertinent, however, and you don’t bother even pretending to fight the urge to fire up Uber Eats. You land on a buy-one-get one because who are you to pass up on double the Five Guys? (Not 10 guys. Two cheeseburgers.) You opt to get them without buns and pat yourself on the back pretty hard about it. Not that carbs are the enemy. You just want to consume them more in moderation than you have in, well, forever.

You should probably rescind the back pat because you add fries even though you know your eyes are always bigger than your belly, and you’ll be eating beef patties and re-air-fried frites for three consecutive days.

There are much worse problems to have.

Then you settle in for 30 minutes or so of trying to figure out what to watch, toggling from streaming platform to platform while you eagerly await your order.

Sometimes the anticipation of something is more elating than the payoff.

In your journey you land on the “continue watching” Disney+ with Hulu tab and are reminded you are about two-thirds of the way through Face/Off. It is, hands down, the most absurd film you have seen in recent recollection, if ever. It is It is so bad it is excellent—too much for you to take in in one sitting, so you have been saving the rest. You saw it as a kid (not sure how your parents permitted that one), but can’t remember the final outcome.

In preparation for your fast-food feast, you make two trips to and from the kitchen for a fork (it’s going to get messy), salt (never know when you’ll need some more and it’s not always evenly distributed among the fries) and a slew of condiments (you have loaded up the burgers with free toppings and sauces but sometimes they forget a crucial one).

Eventually, the call comes from your front desk. This is usually the doorman telling you your delivery driver is on the way up to your apartment. At which point you do a little Snoopy Dance, ending with a triumphant skyward fist pump and a “Fuck yeah!” out loud to no one.

Then they (tonight it is a man named Micah on an electric bike, per the app) get there and drop it off at the door, take a picture and book it back to the elevator.

You witness them do this, standing there and peeping through the hole designed specifically for peeping. Probably not this particular brand of it that they had in mind at the time, but still.

It’s not impossible that sometimes they see the shadow of your shifting feet and know you are watching them, separated only by a plank of finished wood.

You wait for them to get on the elevator and for the doors to close. Then you quickly open your door and snatch your wares like some sort of agoraphobic shadow goblin who is afraid of or unsuited for human interaction.

You wonder when this became not only acceptable, but the norm—how long you have been doing this. It made sense during the pandemic. Now it just seems unnecessary. But if they don’t knock, you’re not gonna fling the door open and scare the shit out of them.

Tonight, you will switch it up and greet Micah. Be standing with the door open sporting a welcoming grin on your face when he gets off the elevator. Like you’re about to invite him in to play some Magic: The Gathering. You’ll thank him for couriering your order to you at a later-than-responsible hour for someone to be consuming such copious amounts of grease.

Tonight, however, there is a Shyamalan-esque twist to the delivery-food supply-chain process you have come to rely on more often than you care to quantify or admit. Your Rocket Money dashboard has been on your case about this.

You answer the phone and the doorman says the driver refused to take the order up.

“He left it in the balcony and got out of Dodge,” he says. “Want me to bring it up?”

You decline. It’s not his job.

Grabbing your keys and slipping on your smoking slippers, you begrudgingly open the door and set out for the elevator, your kimono flapping against the chilling breeze of the hallway HVAC. A hero on a journey.

Usually on the way down, you check yourself out in the mirrors they have in there, trying out your latest Blue Steel, trying to discern whether or not your Invisalign is working yet, scouring for rogue nose hairs, etc.

But tonight there is an elderly couple boarded when you get on, also headed to the lobby. And of course you don’t lean in close and squint up a nostril illuminated by your phone flashlight when other people are around.

“Hi,” you say to no response. They may already have their hearing aids out at this time of night.

When the door opens you say, “Have a good night!” with as much enthusiasm as you can muster. Again, to no response.

You motion for them to proceed out the sliding doors ahead of you. But they are already on their way. Seems like they’re in a hurry.

Kind of rude, but you don’t know what kind of day someone is having.

You strut into the lobby, eager to claim your bounty, and clock it perched on the doorman’s desk, beckoning to you in all its soaked-bag glory.

Savory victory will soon be yours.

You exchange pleasantries with Bernard, the man on night shift, one of your favorite people you have met since moving to the area five years ago. You express interest in the baseball game he is watching on his phone and he’s giving you what is essentially the full box score so far when the desk phone starts ringing. Your queue to leave.

Before he picks up, he says, “You know your kimono is open.”

“Oh yeah, I know.”

“Okay. Have a good night…”

You walk back to the elevator as he answers the phone, and walk onto a car you have to yourself.

So you bout face to scope your figure.

You realize you neglected the shorts this evening.

Good thing you didn’t fully Donald Duck it.

Not great it was pretty cold from the air conditioning, though.

“Oh well,” you think. “Tomorrow’s another day. It all comes out in the wash.”

Which you will definitely fold first thing in the morning.

Recreate the iconic Burt Reynolds image where he is lying on a bearskin rug wearing only a sultry come hither look and nothing else. Except with a Taco Bell bag covering your genitals and a Crunchwrap Supreme in hand on its way to your mouth.

Hold up a Big Mouth Billy Bass like it is a real fish that you have just caught.

Get into your kimono (if you don’t have a kimono you should purchase one posthaste—it will change your life for the better). Grab a Thesaurus. Settle into a cuck chair. Open the Thesaurus. Caption it “Trying to learn more words to even come close to adequately describing the love I yearn to one day feel with someone, maybe even you.”

Get showered and blue blazer-d in your finest frock, enlist a female friend and head to a bar where they will allow you to simulate having a drink splashed in your face, with a caption about how approaching people in real life hasn’t worked out for you so you’re giving the world of online dating a college try.

Hold up your Costco card. Blur out the revealing details.

Bribe your niece or nephew to allow you to viciously dunk on them while they attempt to thwart your dominant drive to a hoop no higher than seven feet tall. Caption: “Varsity Letterman. 2005, 2006.”

If you have stuffed animals, stage a shoot where you are playing Scrabble with them.

Run in slow motion toward a China Buffet and have a friend capture you mid-stride.

Stand proudly outside of a defunct Quizno’s. Include a caption about how you enjoy franchising opportunities and are diligently searching for your one true partner in carbs.

Grab a friend or two you would say are objectively better-looking than you and make this your leading picture. Doesn’t matter what you do, really, because you’ll be using them as bait. Potential matches may enter hoping your profile belongs to one of the hots you consort with, and then you in turn can hold out hope that your extremely witty and insightful supplementary content makes up for the disappointment that comes with realizing you are not the pretty one but the broken-down sack of bones with what seems to be a great deal of sadness in his eyes. (This is of course foul play but it’s a common maneuver I am fully convinced people execute with intention. If you can’t beat them, join them or go ahead and do something else.)

Gaze despondently and deeply into the distance. Photoshop in something that looks like a portal to either the abyss or Hell. Caption it “Just another day livin’ someone else’s dream—or as I like to put it, enduring the perpetual night terror.”

“Why is he holding up a drink and smiling creepily at the camera like that? He looks like someone from the opening credits of Cheers. Also, is he sat in a hotel-room cuck chair?”

“How old is that third picture? He needs to update his photo rotation, stat. And while he’s at it, he should switch his leading pic to one where he’s not with a friend who is obviously objectively better looking. We know it. His friend knows it. You know it. He definitely knows it. And we all also know that’s dirty pool—something that misleads people from the jump. But I guess we’ve also all done it before. Right? Right?”

“It’s tough to put in words the kind of ick he immediately makes me feel, it’s visceral and crushing, but I’ll try: He looks like the kind of dude who would have a gradual breakdown captured publicly through increasingly unhinged LinkedIn posts.”

“This guy definitely aspires to have a podcast or desperately wants to at least be a regular guest on one.”

“He seems like one of those self-deprecating people who is clearly, deep down, his own and maybe only biggest fan. Totally in love with himself. Potentially even a low-level narcissist. I bet he’s really into existential philosophy, maybe solipsism.”

“He might want to spend less time swiping and more time dedicated to finding the true cure for male loneliness, whatever that is. The theme for his podcast could be all about this journey.”

“I don’t know why exactly but I would pay you back my fee for today if you happen to have any video footage of this man attempting to dance.”

“He could be the mascot for midlife crises.”

“You don’t wake up in the morning thinking you’re going to come across a profile where a guy mentions both Olive Garden and Celine Dion, and it’s jarring. May god or something similar help him. Truly.”

“I wonder how often he gets comments on his combover. My guy needs to book a trip to Turkey or just accept baldness and take a Bic or clippers to that dome. But then I guess he’d have to get all new pictures and have any of you ever had to do that? It’s a real slog.”

“There’s no way those plug earrings aren’t fake. This guy has absolutely not gauged his earlobes.”

“I hope he finds what he’s looking for. Whatever the hell that is. To do so, he’s going to have to really out-kick his coverage and probably endure some seriously excruciating nights, both alone and with others.”

“I don’t know. I kind of feel an instant connection with him.”

For the first time since I started seeing her a couple years back, I didn’t want to go hang out with my friend Dawn.

Friend may be a stretch, seeing as I pay her handsomely every six or so weeks to care for my dwindling follicles at a salon close to my apartment—but we always have some great banter and make each other chuckle. I’d never left her chair in low spirits. She also works magic with my burgeoning combover, and one of the best feelings in the world is having your hair washed by someone else. For these reasons, I looked forward to my appointments and felt they were worth the price of admission.

Last Tuesday, I contemplated canceling, but if you do so within 24 hours prior to the agreed-upon time you incur a fee that is certainly not negligible.

I probably could have begged out of the sum if I played the “One of my best friends has just been found dead and I’m grieving his unexpected loss” card. Seems a valid reason for postponing pretty much anything on that day’s calendar without punishment, but that also would have meant my having to explain, likely while crying, that, well, my best friend had just been found dead and I would be unfit for social interaction for a while. So I resolved to keep the appointment it and show up where I was expected—something I haven’t always been great at doing, regardless of the cost.

Besides, I had already played one of my dead friend cards (I’m unsure how many you get) in the early morning hours just after receiving the news to take the day off work. So I closed the laptop and settled in for some bereavement—the beginning of the grieving process where I will attempt to cope with a wound I’m told will never truly, fully heal. I wanted, and needed, to give myself some legitimate time to process the jarring news and not push it down to the depths of my psyche or disassociate from it—something I’ve done plenty in the past, regardless of the cost.

So from the time I got the call around 8:30 a.m. until the time I left my apartment for my appointment around 5:30 p.m., I passed the time by crying, talking with friends, trying to think of all the good times my pal and me had had together and also playing a soccer video game on XBOX. The first three because that’s what you’d normally do, and the fourth because that was what my friend Ryan and me did many of the nights we lived together in New York City. Instead of going out. We were poor. We were stoners. We had a good time. After the haircut, I would acquire street meat with extra white and hot sauce, a dietary staple of ours, and have a feast. While watching the film Definitely, Maybe—which we had watched together several times in rapid succession when we’d first moved into our Bushwick apartment and had only a sparse selection of DVDs to choose from while we waited for internet access to be established.

I was at a loss for what to do, so figured I’d default to some of our favorite things while I felt my way through a combination of several of the defined stages of grief in rapid succession, then simultaneously.

***

There were initial feelings of conflict as I made my way across the park to the salon. It seemed somehow ridiculous or insensitive or disrespectful to go and get a high and tight on a day like this. My friend was dead and I was moments away from reminding Dawn, like I do every time, that we do a #0 setting on the sides to lengthen the amount of time until I have to get another clipping. That sort of thing seems trivial on a normal day.

I reminded myself that in some ways Ryan and me were cut from the same cloth. The kind of person who wouldn’t want people to put their lives on hold too heavily or for too long in the name of us being gone. The kind that could appreciate sympathy and empathy but never wanted to be a burden—emotionally or otherwise—to the people willing to help us through life and miss us after death.

I don’t think he would have wanted me to skip a haircut. Would potentially laugh about it and say I was overthinking the whole thing. In his own artfully profane way.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing and am maybe just telling myself this to justify my decision. Maybe it’s not the case at all and he would have wanted his friends and family to sit some form of non-denominational Shiva. We never really talked about it. Most friends don’t.

Anyway, I pulled myself together enough that I was confident I could make it through my session in the chair without breaking into heaving sobs.

And I went to get a fucking haircut.

***

Dawn needed a few minutes.

A woman had come in with her daughter who needed a bang trim, and she was the first hairdresser to free up. Theo, the receptionist, if that’s the correct title, had approached her in hushed tones just as she was finishing the client on the books prior to me.

I am not privy to the exact circumstances around what the bangs-centric emergency was—quick looks had not revealed any chewing gum in the hair of the girl, one of my only points of reference for a hair emergency—but it seemed urgent. The girl and her mother had been in the waiting area prior to me and tensions were high. You could feel nervous energy emanating from where they chose to stand while I sat in a luxurious chair and enjoyed a sparkling water. The girl, probably about 10 or so, seemed particularly agitated.

“Is it okay if I do a quick bang trim?” Dawn asked as she greeted me, almost as if she were afraid I’d say absolutely not and demand to have my hair wants tended to right that very second. “Five minutes, max.”

I recalled childhood times when I had to wait my turn to get a haircut, when the four kids would all go to my mom’s lady on the same day and have to occupy ourselves for what felt like hours to do something we dreaded, because the salon in the basement of her house was right next to a horse field and smelled like shit and because nobody at that age wants to spend the valuable free time outside school and homework completion that they’ve been looking forward to all day getting an amateur-hour bowl cut.

Mom’s lady was not great at bang trims. I was called Lloyd Christmas several times in my formative years and haven’t had bangs since. Not even during a crisis.

I said to take her time. I had nowhere to be and the Kindle app on my phone, several messages from friends I was mutually mourning with that I wanted to respond to.

Dawn then approached the girl and her mom.

While introducing herself she made the mistake of addressing the girl as “Keer-stin” and not “Kur-sten.”

This did not go well. The girl demanded, after pronouncing her name the “correct” way, that Dawn recite it back to her. This after she sounded it out to by syllable five times to coach her along.

I tried to hide the laughter that hit me hard and unexpectedly. I hadn’t anticipated much chuckle fuckery for a few days at least.

But when life seems absurd and unfair, what you need is some laughter.

Eventually Dawn nailed it or got close enough for the girl to trust her with her bangs. They headed to Dawn’s seat, Mom following close behind, poised to execute a proper bang-trim hover. As one does.

Accurately predicting that this task would take more than a few minutes, Theo, unbidden, topped off my seltzer.

“Do you have any popcorn?” I asked.

“I wish,” he said.

Apparently, the girl should not have trusted Dawn with her bangs because she went too short, according to the customer’s opinion. And there’s really no coming back from that until it grows back.

From my vantage point across the room, where myself and everyone else in the salon had been tuning into the abrasive earful Dawn was getting from the demanding family duo, I saw the girl make eye contact with her through the mirror and say, loudly, “You messed up my bangs.”

“Honey, I am so, so sorry,” said Dawn, who was already working to remedy the situation the best she could.

“You tell me,” Kur-sten said. “You tell me right now that you cut my bangs too short and messed them up.”

“What?”

“Say it.”

Dawn, looking like a deer caught in headlights, said, “I am so sorry. I cut your bangs too short and messed them up.”

The girl nodded with something approaching satisfaction. With a touch of deviousness.

I continued to clandestinely (I hope) and mirthfully lose my shit. I felt no schadenfreude in this situation, as I dearly love Dawn, but goddamnit was it a funny exchange. I hoped the outcome wouldn’t be a complete disaster to the point Kirsten would catch flack from her primary school colleagues, because that’s not something to laugh at, but she was also being a pretty colossal dick to Dawn—no way to treat another person, even if you’re experiencing some level of torment—and I would have laughed even harder if Dawn had opted to go too short on purpose.

They finally finished, 30 minutes after my scheduled appointment time, and it was more than worth the wait.

While checking out with Theo, the mom tried to haggle from $16 for a bang trim down to $15.

I continued to enjoy myself.

Dawn finally took me to her station, profusely apologizing along the way.

“This is seriously a no harm, no foul situation,” I said. “And the most enjoyable 20 or so minutes of my day.”

And it really was. Until she washed my hair.

***

They say the difference between a good and bad haircut is seven days.

I wish sometimes that was the difference between everything that starts out bad. But I also know well enough to know that some things never get better, exactly. They just become a part of you that you learn how to cope with.

And in my somewhat limited experience with really substantial loss that will grow as I do, unfortunately, I’ve found that a little bit of laughter, even especially when it comes as a complete surprise, helps.

And to keep laughing, you have to get out there and keep living.

When I walk in the apartment she takes a quick glance at me down the hall before turning her gaze back to the floor-length mirror she’s sitting legs folded in front of while she finishes applying a smokey eye or something like that.

“You look different when you’re not in your robe eating Fruity Pebbles and watching cartoons,” she says.

“I had a meeting, so, yeah, donned my finest frock,” I say, smoothing out my pocket T-shirt. “And it’s a kimono.”

I do not tell her this meeting was with my dentist so I could start Invisalign. My aligners are attached and my first trays are in. My mouth feels like you’d expect it to if it had more plastic in it than, well, ever before, and that plastic is just starting to move your teeth around. I am already starting to feel slight pain and am over-salivating even more than usual in reaction to the hardware I’ll be voluntarily shackled to for at least 23 weeks, probably much longer. But vanity always wins, and I want to return to my youthful glory. I won the Best Smile senior superlative in high school. I used to be somebody. I can be somebody again.

Dental work is just one element of self-improvement I’ve got planned for what I’m referring to as my “Rebuilding Season.”

“Well, it’s good to see you getting out and about,” she says as I turn sideways to do a defensive-slide shuffle past her in the narrow space, making my way toward my bedroom where I had big plans to change back into my kimono and ratty basketball shorts. I opt to stay in my hard pants until she leaves for wherever she’s going. “Can’t just sit around all day with the ghosts,” she says.

“It’s been what, a week, and you already think the place is haunted? I told you when you moved in—those weird noises are just pipes and the building settling or whatever. I think. Though the landlord has never taken me up on my offer to engage in an evening with a Ouija board.”

“I’m not convinced, but I’m talking more about the sordid ghosts of your past that haunt you, specifically, in this place, mostly. And the coffee shop you now refuse to step in to. And the additional places in this neighborhood you’ve sworn off due to, I guess, some sort of specter.”

“Among other places both near and far, but yes, okay, got it.”

“I was being metaphorical. Or was it a simile?”

“That was indeed a metaphor.”

“I always confuse the two.”

“That’s easy to do.”

She stands up and asks how she looks.

I smile my first Invisaligned smile and give her two thumbs up.

“Excellent smokey eye. Big date?”

“A date,” she says. “You never know when it’s going to be a big one. And it’s a halo eye, but close.”

“Smokey eye is the only one I know. Looks great, though,” I say as I toss the bag of mouth trays in the direction of my bedroom and take a load off on my side of the couch. She follows me into the living room.

“Why thank you. I hesitate to ask this but—what are you going to do the rest of the evening?”

I could tell her I have several new episodes of One Piece burning a hole in my kimono pocket (metaphorically), but if I say I have in fact been watching hours of anime, which is of course animated but not what I would really call a “cartoon,” while wearing a kimono, it will seem like I’m culture-jacking. And if I were then to try and convince her that the two are completely unrelated (which they are), it’s unlikely she will believe me.

I tell her instead that I’m going to begin redecorating, starting with the guest bedroom, now my bedroom. I more than willingly ceded the main bedroom to her as part of the subleasing deal. Sweetened it by giving her my—our—old bed, gratis. I was initially going to lug it down the two flights of steps and set it aflame in the street, something that would have likely gone unnoticed if I’d have done so the night of the unceremonious splitting of the sheets, but now a couple weeks had passed since the Knicks had won it all, which would make furniture burning an act more likely to be questioned, even in Bushwick.

“Love that for you,” she says. “Make it your own.”

She says she has to go change and I say I like what she’s already wearing but she counters with she doesn’t and needs to feel both sexy and comfortable with her sartorial choices to really bring her best with a guy who apparently, if his profile images are honest, resembles a mix between current-day Zach Galifianakis and in-his-prime Jack Nicholson. I say that sounds like an interesting combination and request to see his profile. She tosses her phone to me on her way into what used to be my room.

A quick perusal and I agree that this is a guy you would want to look good for. Even I wouldn’t throw him out of bed for eating crackers. I hold her phone in one hand and mine in the other, whispering voice notes inspired by this also disarmingly witty man’s prompt answers about how to construct my Hinge profile when I decide to build one. I have been told this is a rite-of-passage and one of the stages of grief for the newly single.

She re-emerges when I am in the middle of whispering, “And make sure you have friends in at least a couple pictures so you don’t seem like some strange loner,” gives me a look that is somehow quizzical and sadly knowing at the same time, does a quick twirl, then sits down next to me in a color variation of what she was wearing before. I hand her her phone.

“Okay, I’m gonna be late, but fashionably so, and there’s one more thing I like to do before a date,” she says.

“You could have just rubbed one out while you were in there, I don’t know how long it takes you to change.”

“Well, now I know what you’ll be doing while ‘primping’ before the dates that you will eventually go on.”

“Allegedly.”

“I’m keeping the faith. And for what it’s worth, showing that you have friends in a profile is generally a positive move. As long as your leading picture is not with a friend who is hotter than you. That’s misleading and everyone knows it, yet it’s an infraction that still runs rampant on good ole’ Hinge.”

“You—“

“Yeah, I heard. Anyway, I like to show up with pouty lips.”

“Same.”

“Seriously. Like, the slightly swollen ones you get after a makeout session.”

I ask how she achieves this. She says by making out.

“My former roommate and I used to before every date we would go on.”

“Your former roommate being the friend you’ve brought up a few times named Rose?”

“One and the same.”

“…Nice.”

“Thought you might think so. Anyway, I need your help. With the kissing.”

I am hesitant to assist here. I haven’t kissed anyone since the ex left. Thought I’d never kiss someone else again. So I’m slightly out of practice. I also do not know how my new plastic mouth accessories may or may not affect the quality of a full-blown makeout session, like metal braces once did. I am still over-salivating.

But when an attractive woman with something called a halo eye is offering to kiss you, you don’t turn it down. Even if she is your roommate and complications could theoretically arise.

And if she just lunges at you and commences the proceedings before you can think too much about it.

I don’t know how long it lasts. Could have been a couple minutes. Could have been an hour. I get kind of lost in it. It’s different than it was with she who shall no longer be named. Somewhere in the midst of it there’s the realization that somewhere along the line she and I just kind of stopped making out altogether. Something I could have done something about. One on a list of many things. I try to force those thoughts out and concentrate on tongue maneuvering, etc.

She eventually pulls away. I suppose her lips are sufficiently bee-stung. I could and would have gone all night—feel kind of like a kid in the back of a movie theater again. She gets up, grabs her clutch and makes for the exit, checking her visage in the mirror on the way.

“Before I close this door and you get to snapping one off, know that I have never actually made out with Rose,” she says as she looks back. “I just made that up. Well, except for the one time. But it was New Year’s. Anyway. I’ve found it’s good after a crippling breakup to get one out of the way. You’re welcome. Don’t wait up.”

She leaves. The door clicks. I exhale. “Well, that was…that was something,” I say out loud to nobody.

It is the first time since hearing that door click that I don’t think about how I now have an opportunity to weep in solitude.

So I have that going for me. Which is nice.

My roommate had made some changes to our space and the first thing I clocked was the couch.

It was impossible to miss in our tiny Bushwick apartment, which I’d just walked into on a Friday evening after I’d been sapped of some of my will to live by a long-ass week of late nights and vocational frustration, ready to plop down on my foldable camping chair to catch up on my stories until the wee hours.

But my canvas throne was folded and off to the side of the living/dining/mud/TV room, as was my roommate’s (we sat in them next to each other like Chandler and Joey’s recliners, but the poor kid version), and in their place was an old beaten-up taupe-colored couch upon which he was sitting, grinning like an idiot.

“Sup dude?” he said, all triumphant-like.

“What’s all this, then?” I said.

He draped his arm over the back of the couch, crossed his legs and said, “Found it on the street this morning. Snagged it before anyone could beat me to it.”

“You got this off the street? Where?”

“Couple blocks down, by the bodega.”

“Which bodega?”

“The one where you can buy loosies when you wanna rip a dart.”

“That doesn’t really narrow it down.”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember the cross streets.”

“Doesn’t matter I guess. Street furniture is street furniture.”

He nodded. “Pretty sweet, right? Feels like it goes well with the decor.” He motioned toward the replica Leg Lamp from A Christmas Story my mom had sent us back in November that we’d decided to just use year-round instead of purchasing or scavenging for another more appropriate one. It was now May.

“A high-quality item, to be sure,” I said.

He patted the cushion next to him. “Give Margaret a spin.”

“You named the couch?”

“Sure did, bud.”

“The couch that you got from the street.”

“Margaret. I named her that because she can be Marge for short. Marge the Barge, because boy is she a big couch!”

“Okay. Why do you think it—Marge—was on the street?”

“Someone didn’t want her anymore.”

“Or maybe Marge had bed bugs.”

He darted off the couch with a quickness.

“Fuck, I didn’t think about that. We better check.”

“You better check. I’m not coming anywhere near that thing until you check it and disinfect it,” I said as I took my backpack into my bedroom, which may have actually been smaller than the one Harry Potter grew up in, and closed the door as if that would help mount a defense against the potential infestation of tiny bugs.

“All clear out here,” he said a few minutes later, and when I came out of my room he was spraying the couch down with Downy Wrinkle Release, for some reason.

“Gonna freshen her up a little bit, and we’re out of Febreze,” he said.

I took a load off on the right side, my favorite side, my unofficially assigned side, with an old-man sigh, and it was pretty comfy—though my barometer for a satisfactory place to sit was admittedly pretty low, given that I’d spent the previous several months sitting in a camping chair for hours on end most nights. It was a little bit damp, which I hoped was attributable to the Downy mist all over it. I didn’t want to consider the other potential causes.

My roommate, Ryan, followed suit.

“This does beat the chairs,” I said, “by a rather significant margin.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

“Wait, you found this actual blocks away from here?”

“Yeah, by the bodega.”

“How the fuck did you get it back here and up the stairs?”

“Oh so that’s a pretty funny stor—“

He was interrupted by a series of chirps.

His eyes darted to our “kitchen table,” which was a semi-rusty high-top situation Ryan had brought home from one of his favorite bars that was shutting down. Apparently he’d just asked if he could have it, the bartender shrugged dismissively and so he had then taken it several stops on the M Train back to our neighborhood. The dude was nothing if not frugal and resourceful.

Upon the table was a cage with a cute little pale blue and yellow bird perched inside of it.

“What is it, lil’ guy?” Ryan crooned to this bird. “You hungry?”

He got up and walked over to the table, poured some feed into his hand and held it out by the cage so this bird could nosh if it so chose.

“Ryan, what the fuck is that?” I said.

“It’s a bird. A parakeet.”

“Why is it in our apartment?”

“I got him today, too!”

“Are you having some sort of manic episode?”

He paused to think for a second as the bird skittishly started dabbling in the feed he was offering from his palm.

“I don’t think so. I’ve just been stoned all day, but energetic. Productive. Even did some cleaning. Must have gotten sativa from our guy this time around. But if I were having an episode, I probably wouldn’t really know, right?”

“That’s a very fair point.”

“After I got the couch, this place really started to feel kinda cool, like it was coming together, and I thought a good home should have a good pet, but also that we shouldn’t have a dog because that’s a lot, and I know you’re allergic to cats. You always try and hang with that one that comes down the fire escape from the fourth floor to your bedroom window and then your eyes look like you’re stoned for days.”

“Did you get this bird off the street?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I went to a pet store. You know, the one by the other bodega. The one with the good deals on 40s.”

“Right, for sure. That one.”

I didn’t know which he was referring to, and thought maybe he should start using other landmarks.

“I was gonna get some fish, but tanks are expensive.”

“Gotcha. So this bird lives here now?”

“I guess. Don’t think he’ll pay rent. But yeah. Dude at the store said parakeets were cool because they were low maintenance and generally pretty chill, but that you could form a bond with them where they perch on your shoulder and stuff. Just gotta give him some time. He just needs to get acclimated.”

I’d yet to even attempt to keep a plant alive for any extended amount of time, but I figured a bird wouldn’t be all that tough. And since Ryan had (I think?) purchased him, he was the actual guardian or whatever, and I blindly assumed he would be the main caregiver. So I wasn’t at all opposed to this bird living with us. It was exciting, even. My makeshift Brooklyn family had grown, and I was excited to welcome a new member who could double as a sort of mascot for our personal brands.

“So it’s a him?”

“He’s a him. I think.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a vibe.”

“So you don’t, really?”

“Yeah, no, not really. Why? Does that bother you?”

“The gender of our new friend does not make a difference to me one literal iota.”

“Cool. Not like it matters anyway. I don’t think parakeets lay eggs or anything.”

“All birds lay eggs, dude.”

“Get outta here.”

“True story. Well, female birds, anyway. I’m pretty sure of this. Google it.”

“So if he lays eggs then we’ll know he’s not a he.”

“Maybe. But he or she might need a mate for that to happen. I can’t be positive.”

“How often does that happen?”

“I don’t know, man. You’re the one who got the fucking bird. You figure it out. Also, what is his name?”

“I thought we weren’t sure if he was a him.”

“Their name?”

“Haven’t given him one yet.”

“Them one yet.”

“Shit. Right. Sorry. But yeah, I don’t know. He looks kind of like a Bertram but I’m not really sold on that.”

“They look like a—“

“Goddamnit.”

“Wait, so you named a couch before you named an actual living being?”

“Oh, come on. Fuck you if you can say to me to my face, with sincerity, that that couch doesn’t look exactly like a Margaret.”

I honestly could not.

“When you’re right, you’re right.”

“The bird isn’t as easy, though. Doesn’t look like, say, a ‘Frank’ or something, you know?”

“Probably because the bird contains multitudes. And yeah, definitely not a Frank. I agree.”

“I’ve been thinking about this all day.”

“Burning a lot of brain cells, huh?”

“It’s like I’m trying too hard. I just have to let it come to me.”

“I have an idea.”

“A name idea?”

“Ptery.”

“Terry?”

“Ptery.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Terry.”

“I’m saying it with a ‘P’ in front, but the ‘P’ is silent.”

“What?”

“Ptery, like Terry, but short for Pterodactyl. Which was, like, bird adjacent. The P is silent.”

“Unless it splashes in the bowl.”

“What?”

“Think about it for a sec.”

“Ha. That’s actually a great dad joke.”

“I have my moments.”

“I like Ptery, though. For real.”

“It is unisex.”

“Oh yeah. Nice. Hadn’t thought about that.”

“Ptery it is,” he said and looked adoringly at the bird, who was still enjoying the feed-from-the-hand situation. “I love him already.”

“He does seem like a cool bird. Anyway. Want to play some FIFA?”

“Sure. I’m down for a couple games. Then you wanna watch Definitely, Maybe again?”

“I have, somewhat sadly, no place to be. Lemme change into my nightlies.”

By the time I had done my costume swap, Ryan had gone through a Google search on the topic of how to discern a parakeet’s gender. Something to do with beak color or some shit that I didn’t really care about, and he was confident that he was in fact a him. I took his word for it. Then the three of us, like the proud males we were, settled in for a viewing of one of the most underrated romantic comedies of all time.

We did our best to welcome Ptery warmly, treating him more as a roommate and friend than a pet that Ryan I guess technically owned, if you want to get semantical about it. (Who rescued who, though?) This adorable little bird quickly ingratiated himself and his companionship brought us plenty of entertainment and joy. We’d watch him do the simplest things and be totally enamored with them. He fit in well with our home dynamic, which was always congenial and very easy going, as Ryan and I had been best friends since we’d met in college, during which we’d already lived together for a summer before reuniting as chums who shared the same domicile when I made the move to Brooklyn a couple years after graduation. The only time either of us ever really irked each other was when I would leave the refrigerator door open for more than two seconds at a time, because, according to Ryan, it would let the cold out and jack up our electric bill. Soon as I realized this was something that rubbed Ryan the wrong way, I made a point of doing it just to mess with him, kind of like how I would always put the TV volume on an even number and watch him squirm until he finally gave in and switched it to an odd one.

The bird had a pretty solid thing going, I think. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he now lived in a building that almost definitely should have been condemned, and likely has been by now. I was worried he’d feel a little out of place or even lonely, given that he’d been separated from his pals at the pet store (if indeed he had any), but he seemed jovial enough being the only avian creature occupying the compound.

As the irresponsible and mostly ambivalent young adults we were, we quickly became pretty lax when it came to keeping Ptery in his cage, allowing him to really freely explore the railroad-style apartment space. Which was fun and fine, except for the fact that the dude could and would shit with wild abandon all over the place. But Ryan made sure he kept things clean-ish. The only time we’d really relegate him to his cage was if neither of us were going to be home, or it was bedtime for bonzos. The rats came out at night, rats larger than you’ve ever seen, most likely, and we wanted to protect him in case a turf war of some sort broke out.

Before long, he settled in and seemed more than comfortable with his two human comrades. Also generally pretty social. He’d perch on your pointer finger and let you tell him about your day without too much flack or judgment aside from the occasional inquisitive chirp. Sometimes he’d set up shop on your shoulder, like a parrot to a pirate, or even atop your head—which presented some nice photo opportunities but was also kind of a roll of the dice, as you knew he was liable to shit right on your balding crown at any moment. Like Ryan and I, he was also a big pop culture and media guy. He’d hang out on the coffee table while we watched shows or movies or played video games. But his absolute favorite place, it seemed, was the ceiling fan. He’d spend hours up there, flying around a little bit every now and then before returning. Sometimes, we’d turn the fan on low and he’d spin around for a while, just enjoying the ride.

The three of us had an excellent run, but as they say, nothing gold can stay.

Toward the end of our lease, Ryan decided it was time he make his exit from our dilapidated domain to share a home with the woman he had been dating, and I chose to stay if I could find another roommate. (I have extreme inertia, or laziness, when it comes to moving, unless it’s to another city.). A college friend of ours happened to be moving to town for work, and the timing worked out perfectly, so she took his room. And I began fielding questions from my grandma, who was having a very difficult time wrapping her head around the concept of my living with a woman I was not only not married to, but strictly platonic with.

I’d assumed Ryan would take Ptery with him, but his girlfriend was vehemently opposed to this, for some reason. (Talk about a red flag.) In hushed tones, we discussed what would become of Ptery, and I told him I’d gladly keep him around—that Ryan could come visit anytime he liked.

We broke the news to Ptery one night while he was hanging out on the fan, looking down at us.

“So, I’m not going to be living here anymore, little guy,” Ryan said. Ptery responded with what I believe was a bit of a despondent chirp. “But you’re going to stay here, with Scott.”

Ptery paced back and forth on his chosen ceiling fan paddle, digesting the information.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Ptery,” he assured him. “I just have to go, and I can’t take you with me.”

“Yeah, he chose a woman over you, basically,” I said, feeling that Ptery deserved at least enough respect to have it shot to him straight, no chaser. Didn’t need to sugar-coat it for my guy. “She’s apparently not a fan of birds—but don’t take that personally. I’m not sure she’s a fan of most humans, either. Or fun, joy, fulfillment, video games, the film Definitely, Maybe, etcetera.”

“Whoa, man,” Ryan said. “Comin’ in a little hot there.”

“I said what I said.”

Ptery chirped.

“Our friend Steph is going to be staying with us soon. You remember Steph? She’s good people,” I said.

Ptery chirped again and fluttered his wings.

Ryan left and Steph came. Ptery and I continued to flourish. Until Steph admitted that she was more than a little bit grossed out by Ptery’s penchant to poop all over the apartment. Which was, of course, more than reasonable. Initially, she was completely opposed to keeping him around at all. We’d both assumed that Ryan would take Ptery with him as he embarked on an adventure that was likely to conclude with him having his first ex-wife.

So, without telling Ptery, I wrote up a craigslist ad offering him up gratis to a good home—hopefully one with fellow parakeets around so he could kick it with his brethren. I got, unexpectedly, like, 30 responses from people who were interested, and I started to wonder how I’d go about finding the right fit.

But then I came home one night to find him perched on Steph’s shoulder. She was cooing to him, having a real deep conversation about something. Could have been they were plotting how to eradicate our unit of rats.

“I guess he can stay,” she said. “But he can’t just fly around willy-nilly all the time. He needs to be in a cage—and we should probably get him a better one.”

This was fair, as Ryan has come home very drunk one night and fallen into the kitchen table, mangling Ptery’s cage something fierce. (Luckily, Ptery was on the ceiling fan at the time his home within our home was decimated.) He’d managed to gnarl it in a way that it now had several bent spots that Ptery could wiggle his way through, and he never stayed in there of his own accord.

I deleted the craigslist post and ghosted the people who had emailed me to inquire about Ptery. Then I went on Amazon dot com, seller of books and other things, and found Ptery a brand new cage that emulated the design of a Brooklyn brownstone and cost more than a bird cage should reasonably set you back.

“Nothing but the best for my little man,” I muttered to myself as I added it to the cart.

Unfortunately, Ptery did not take kindly or all that well at all to his newly assigned digs.

He’d had many tastes of sweet, sweet freedom, and it tuned out he was a bird you cannot change.

I assume that to him, the brownstone felt something like a prison. Sometimes it goes that way.

His irritation and disgruntlement were not difficult to detect. He seemed to spend most of his time trying to figure out ways to get out of the cage and back to his beloved ceiling fan. Sometimes, when Sam wasn’t around, I’d let him out for a while, just like the olden days. This was not the best move if we were attempting to acclimate him to his space, because it gave him hope that things would return to the simpler free-range times he seemed to love so much, but I couldn’t stand seeing him locked up and so forlorn about it.

Then, one Friday evening when I returned to the apartment after I’d been sapped of some of my will to live by a long-ass week of late nights and vocational frustration, ready to plop down on our street couch to catch up on my stories until the wee hours, I found Steph in distress.

She’d come home to Ptery repeatedly butting up against the caged walls in which he was restricted, attempting with desperation to get out for a fly-about. He’d soar from the top of the cage straight into its side, like he was going to plow through it like the Kool-Aid Man. It was giving Kamikaze a little bit. There was no way to know how long he had been at this, but it was apparent that he had sustained some damage doing so, and had fully bought into the concept of “Live free or die.”

Not knowing what to do, Steph had let him out, but he was in really bad shape, shuffling around back and forth on the coffee table as if he were drunk. I offered him my finger and he managed to hop on. But he soon wavered and fell into my palm where he lied sideways, breathing faintly and gazing deeply into my soul.

Several moments later, a time that felt like years, Ptery died in my hand.

Steph and I both wept heavily.

Then I took him outside, where I buried him in the backyard of our building, using a garden shovel to dig up a spot for his final resting place.

Now I think of him every time I hear the song “Free Bird.”

He, in his own way, brought joy into my life for a short amount of time. That’s not something I’ll ever forget. And I’ll always miss him.

Made my space mine.

During what I’m calling “The Rebuilding Season: Part Who the Fuck Can Keep Count?” I’ve been making some improvements to the one-bedroom apartment in downtown Chicago (close enough to the Bean you can almost flick it) where I’ve been resting my head and quite honestly spending most of my life for the past four-and-a-half years.

Figured it was about time to make a house a home, as it’s the longest I’ve lived in one place since the house I grew up in.

A home with a shower curtain featuring a raccoon I’ve named Ortho “The Darkness” Stice who is wearing a shower cap, taking a bubble bath and washing himself with a loofah.

A home with a Wet Hot American Summer poster, an “I WANT TO BELIEVE” poster and a gigantic flag that says “Don’t give up the ship.”

A home with a light-up Ghostbusters logo and neon skull leafing through a novel that says “READ BOOKS / BE KIND / STAY WEIRD.”

And a chaotic bunch of quotes I enjoy that I have printed out and secured to the wall with green Painter’s tape. (I have not painted a thing though.) This includes “Yes, but my loneliness is mine,” part of a Toni Morrison banger that makes some people sad but helps keep me on an even keel when the whimsy starts to wane, which happens sometimes.

Guess that’s why I’m on a mission to make as much of my apartment a little booby trap of laughter that can do its little part to help ramp it back up. Whimsy is the cousin of calculated chuckle fuckery.

You may be shocked, but I have done all this on a budget. The most expensive thing I own in here is my desk chair and I stole that from an old job. Frugality opens up more discretionary funds for items and activities that promote even further whimsy.

Reignited my love for a harmless prank.

The other day a friend and I were putting the finishing touches on what I used to call The Mini Mansion but may change to Whimsy HQ. By friend I mean a handyman I found on Taskrabbit who has been in my apartment more than any other person aside from myself over the past two weeks. His name is Volodomyr. He has a badass neck tattoo and is extremely friendly and efficient, which makes what I assume is his decision to just fully embrace body odor more tolerable unless he’s around for more than one hour at a time. It has also given me several opportunities to talk about how there is an Eastern European man covered in tattoos in my bedroom “hanging curtains with a drill” and I’m not sure if I’m supposed to supervise. Everyone asks if you are shooting a porno. People on Threads seem pretty interested. Some even “Yes and” the scenario and provide some interesting additions that I would consider if I was indeed penning or acting in some smut. It’s a good time.

When he left I gazed upon my small but significant kingdom and felt a little melancholy that I really have no one to share it with.

So I figured I’d bother who I usually bother: My parents. And force them into a FaceTime tour.

Mare and Gare also happen to be the people I fuck with most often. They’re pretty chill and have an alarmingly high level of tolerance for nonsense if it comes from their children and not the government or, even worse, the godforsaken HOA. My siblings and I wore them down through the years. Exposure therapy to bewildering behavior will eventually put you on the road to whimsy or else you’ll perish.

My mind had one of those “What if I…” moments that I resisted for a second before reminding myself to stop being such a tightwad—that to apply resistance to the “What if I…” moment, in the rare instances that it’s not harmful (e.g. “What if I hadn’t wrecked the whole thing years ago?”) would be a disservice to myself and others. When you’re graced with one of those you wrap your arms around it because it’s statistically probable it’s going to lead to some sort of whimsical outcome.

But my brief hesitance lasted long enough that I couldn’t catch Volo at the freight elevator and see how much it would cost for him to come back into my apartment, hide in the closet and leap out screaming when I walked into my room with my parents on the line. And I don’t think you can book a same-day Task for that kind of thing.

Sometimes you have to pivot.

So I get them on the visual horn and start the tour of the new digs. There are five large screens in my apartment: a TV, two computer monitors, a bedroom TV and a projector pointed toward the ceiling above my bed because supine is one of my favorite positions.

You have all seen the man with the absolutely gigantic unit sitting on a bed looking at a camera with a “come hither” look at some point, right? Most of you enough times that you can conjure it in your head just by that description.

Well, I put that on every screen.

They didn’t react to any of them.

I thought for sure the projector would be the straw that broke the camel’s back—might even elicit a full government name from Mom.

But nothing.

And it was awesome.

How can you not feel whimsical about the fact you’ve joked with certain people enough that they know you so well that they’re ready for your shit and are not going to take the bait unless you really come with something way out of pocket?

It’s also entirely possible that they did not even notice.

Either way, I know I would have gotten them if I’d have had Volo make his cameo.

Even if you have initial resistance to whimsy, be it dispensing or digesting it, it’ll eventually worm its way in. May as well not hesitate to begin with.

Added a carabiner to my daily-wear wardrobe.

I live with neither a dog nor a baby. I cared for the former on my own for two weeks once and the latter on my own for two hours once. I learned a lot about being vigilant when it comes to making sure canines stay away from chicken-wing bones discarded on the street and also coloring inside the lines. Aside from that, I can’t say I retained or know much about how either goes about their daily lives.

But I have been absolutely killing with both audiences lately.

Because I have started wearing a carabiner with my keys and some knick-knacks on it secured by the belt loop in front of my right leg that jangles every time I take a step or make any movement whatsoever. (I did this to make pocket room for my Invisalign case.) And you know what garners a (usually) whimsical reaction from the youths and the hounds? The jangling of some goddamn keys. You could be having the worst day and if a dog comes up to you and solicits some skritches or a little lad or las looks up at you from a stroller and starts clapping, drooling and giggling simultaneously your mood is going to shift ever-so-slightly toward the light, even if only for a moment.

And a mere moment of whimsy can change everything.

Got this goose named Gladys. Not a real goose, but a seven-inch plastic bird that can hang out on my desk. That wears a gray hoodie. Reminds me of this light-up one my grandma had and loved that went by the same name. And Gladys is nothing if not a silly goose—so she constantly reminds me to make sure I’m being one too. That’s why I got her. What do nostalgia and silliness have in common? Both breed whimsy.

Gave the device formerly known as Alexa a name change. I briefly dated a woman named Alex. Then for an even briefer stretch I dated a woman named Alexa. So it felt like time for a change. Come to find you can switch the wake-up name and accent/regional dialect of your Alexa devices. So I am now telling an Australian dude named Ziggy to play thunderstorm sounds, hit me with news headlines and execute extremely simple math equations. (I also prompt him to say “Ooorrrr norrrr” pretty often.) Arithmetic is one of whimsy’s many enemies, but trying to move on and responsible delegation are absolutely not.

Spent a modest discretionary sum on a kimono. If I’m in for the night, I’m in for a treat. A light, breezy delicacy. Compartmentalization between on- and off-the-clock is crucial, and clothing is one way to signal to your mind and body (and whoever happens to have the luck to catch a glimpse of you when you’re in your nightlies) that you’re done at the salt mines and ready for some good times. Those two elements of my life often blur together, so I took it to 11 when it comes to setting them apart the day I snagged a sale-labeled kimono. Squirted sausage grease all over it in the midst of my first wear (that is genuinely what happened, not a euphemism) but stains aren’t going to sap my stoke reserves. I’ve got a Tide Stick and a dream in my heart. And if they don’t come out, well, the stains will remind me of the memories. Anyway. You ever read a book, do, or, more aptly, not do, anything at all whatsoever while clad in a kimono? You should try it. Fair warning, though: If you’re getting comfy, you better beware of whimsy. It’ll blow in right where I bet you’re imagining it will.

“When nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?” —Charles Bukowski

When you have a Friday night with no plans so you get in your jammies before dinner and set up your projector to screen the hockey game while your TV streams the basketball game and then get to contemplating what you want from Lao Sze Chuan (like it won’t end up being twice-cooked pork and maybe some potstickers for extra comfort), is it freedom or loneliness?

When no one sees the dishes in the sink that are mostly saved takeout containers that you’ve been re-using for years instead of just making one trip to IKEA for more real dish ware, and there’s nobody present to bear witness to the detritus left in the air fryer that has accumulated over months of diligent use without a single scrupulous washing and it is potentially becoming either a health hazard or a combination of materials that is going to give you some sort of superpowers if you keep making bacon in there, or judge the unmade bed, the pile of clothing on the bean bag chair that lives somewhere between clean enough to wear and beyond ready for your next dry-cleaning trip (who knows when that will be?), and you only tidy up in a half-assed fashion almost exclusively on the morning the cleaning lady comes—specifically to avoid embarrassment regarding how you choose to live in the mini mansion that undoubtedly deserves a better, more attentive and scrupulous tenant, is it freedom or loneliness?

When you start to feel like you may be stuck, quite possibly in a rut that you’ve been navigating for months, years even, but also consider that you’re not particularly unhappy—not nearly as melancholy as can be or have been—where you are, and there are worse places, so much worse, to feel the inescapable claustrophobic sensation of being kind of trapped, and there is no one to point out (or nag you about) the ways you can make tiny improvements to level up or at least get back to neutral, even eventually help find some brand of enduring peace and comfort, is it freedom or loneliness?

When Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” queues up on shuffle and so you start dancing like no one is watching because no one is and maybe you even go into the bathroom and watch yourself prancing around in that small space for a little while, maybe a full verse or so, and you know that no one ever has to know what moves you’re practicing that will likely never go public, and it becomes this moment just for you, a party for one, that brings a little rush of dopamine and a just-detectable ramp-up to your extremely precious balance of the ever-elusive serotonin, is it freedom or loneliness?

When you can transform your bed into a fort with as many comforters, blankets and pillows as you have on hand, situated so you’re cocooned in the middle of your Sleep Machine when you lie down to wind down and hopefully eventually fall into a fitful slumber, because there is no one there to crawl in next to you and make extra space for, turning the setup into a furnace with their body heat, and you turn two high-powered fans all the way up and ask Alexa to play thunderstorm sounds because you harbor a crippling fear of complete silence, is it freedom or loneliness?

When you can read in your special cuck chair for hours on end, potentially plowing through a full book in one sitting, and nobody interrupts you or wants you to pay attention to them, so you can enjoy for a while the nearly full escape from the overthinking that almost perpetually plagues your mind, a relief you can’t find many places other than books, and then you’re having so much fun that you immediately start another novel or head out to the store to shop for a new essay collection because you still have some time to pass in solitude, is it freedom or loneliness?

When you make some modicum of peace with the notion that you might end up just going ahead and going it alone in the long run, that maybe you’ll have to because of who you are, hard as who you are is to articulate even to yourself, and resolve to just try your best because, well, the alternatives aren’t all that appealing, is it freedom or loneliness?

I’m somewhere around half awake, writhing round in cold sweaty sheets, making my way through one of the hourly or so-semi lucid dreams I drift in and out of on a nightly basis. It’s like my psyche loves to taunt my circadian rhythm. Which has the same two left feet as my physical body does on the dance floor.

Part of me is trying to recall the specifics of the dream due to some morbid and uncontrollable curiosity I’ve yet to effectively attack with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The details are mostly lost but some synapses are still launching off remnants of the motifs that recur several times a week: My wallet kept falling out of my pocket; my teeth were tumbling from my mouth; I was contemplating quitting something (like the high school basketball team, not nicotine or Skittles); I was trying to get to some important location but so much was getting in the way; I was very worried I would not get a passing grade on something and fail a curriculum completely (even though my schoolin’ days are long gone).

The other half of my id, which I favor most of the time except when I’m trying to re-enter a sex dream—something that has never, ever worked—is trying to shake it off and eliminate whatever the dream was from my skull so I don’t fall back into the Lynchian-esque mindfuck my subconscious was ostensibly using to work through some shit.

Best way to do that is by getting up and lumbering to the commode to coax out a well-aimed pee. You gotta hear liquid hitting liquid. Especially here, in the idyllic Provincetown beach house owned my Uncle Mark and Uncle Mark. I’m staying here on a solo trip in early March, the midst of the dead season at the tip of the Cape. Many of the places Anthony Bourdain had on his show aren’t even open. But they have gifted it to me gratis for the week, so I want my stream to be immaculate. I respect their home away from home and will leave it as I found it, which means either splashing bowl or having to clean up after myself if my rig goes rogue.

This dark-part-of-the-night pissing ritual always gets me back to neutral for a minute or so, until I return to bed and instead of falling back to my partially asleep state I stay wide awake staring at the ceiling fan and thinking about all kinds of treasure-trove memories. Like harkening back to the one time I got real drunk on Canadian Club then told a woman I thought I might love her on our first night hanging out (shoutout Ted Mosby) then was so embarrassed I left to sleep in my car, which I had parked in a nearby Wal-Mart parking lot. I had planned to never see her again but when I woke with the roosters I went into the store to get a Gatorade and several crullers only to realize I had left my wallet at her apartment. So I had to return to retrieve it.

As I shake myself awake it takes me a moment to recall where exactly I have been snoozing. This is not my beautiful one-bedroom apartment. This is not my beautiful body pillow that I frequently spoon.

I regain my bearings and lope to the lav, where I turn on the light. I don’t know the layout as well as home and want to minimize the risk of stubbing a toe and maximize the potential of a splash-free zone as I hover over the toilet and ballast myself with my non-dominant hand against the wall behind it.

I’m about to get down to business when the brief abruptly changes. A No. 2 didn’t feel initially imminent, despite the slightly shocking amount of fried oysters and other seafood I consumed several hours earlier. It was just a matter of time till that feast started to get chatty. Sometimes even a few steps of movement encourages a movement.

So I take a seat and commence the proceedings with what I can already see is going to be a long pee. During the day I could put a small fire out. My stream is weaker at night. I have Googled this and it’s not not concerning. I’m not yet 40 but will probably see if I can get my oil checked when I see my doctor next. Can’t wait for that rite of passage.

I rip a warning-shot fart and say, “Excuse me!” even though I am alone. I do this all the time, and when I burp, too. Good practice I guess.

Then a third element enters the foray: I feel a sneeze coming on.

“Fuck yeah,” I think, because the sensation sneezing brings is one of my favorite things. The first few seconds of a bladder-at-capacity pee is up there too. I’m unsure I’ve ever experienced them simultaneously and wonder if this might rip some sort of hole in the fabric of my universe. But it’s not like I can stave off either one. So, buy the ticket, take the ride, and vaya con dios.

I cock my head back and achoo with aggression.

My head launches forward.

Everything goes dark.

I have never been in a particularly great spot when I find myself spending time with my cheek resting on the tile of a slightly chilled tile bathroom floor—the state I’m in when I once again cross the threshold to a somewhat-awake state.

Usually if I’m in this position it’s intentional and because I’ve been doing chin-ups on the toilet bowl due to drunkenness or illness, a classic move if you need to stay close by for another round of reps/wretches and want to feel the sweet relief of a cool surface kissing your face while you do.

It feels even worse when you open your eyes to see there is blood pooled on the floor near your head, don’t immediately recollect how you got there, why you are wounded, and are wearing nothing but the boxer briefs down around your ankles.

A reactionary tick I have when I don’t know exactly what to do is to purse my lips and nod my head slowly—acknowledgment in the midst of confoundment that buys me time to contemplate action.

The searing pain makes itself known, like Voldemort is trying to get in contact with me through the laceration on my forehead I discover when I gingerly touch my hand to where the throbbing is emanating. Blood is on my fingers. I do the head-nod thing again, in my horizontal position, like I’m giving a “You’re absolutely right that it’s turning out to be a weird night” to the bathtub.

There’s no way to tell how much time has passed since the sneeze and ensuing sequence of events that has me alone and lightly hemorrhaging, possibly if not probably concussed, on the bathroom floor. In a house by myself. In a beach town. During the off-season. Where I know no one and most houses in the area are second homes that are presently unoccupied, so knocking on a stranger’s door covered in blood to plead for help doesn’t even seem plausible. And the closest emergency room is at least a 45-minute drive south. That would be quite a sojourn in the red Kia Soul I’ve rented for the week (not by choice), and it’d be a horrible idea to get behind the wheel shortly after having been knocked out.

I look at my Swatch.

It is nearly 2 a.m.

Means I wasn’t out very long at all.

So I have that going for me. Which is nice.

Still—the situation is a bit jarring and worrisome.

I lie in the fetal position on the floor for a spell longer—the tile is still cool and comforting even if a little sticky with A-positive—mostly to gauge the pain level and grant myself a moment to orient before I give standing up the old college try. I use the tub for leverage and then sit down on the edge, facing the floor where I’ve lain and, slightly to my right, the throne upon which I had been somewhat merrily and groggily sitting.

It appears I have bled from my head in a circumference about the size of a slice of Canadian bacon. Not a perfect circle, though. My head nods smeared a bit of it up and down, like my jaw is a windshield wiper.

I gingerly and gradually get to my feet. I feel lightheaded, like I have just done a whippet or my blood pressure meds are working way too well, but not like I’m going to take a dive. My head is throbbing, but early indications are that I have most of my faculties about me.

I walk slowly across the floor to the sink next to the toilet, like a burglar in a cartoon, and take stock of my reflection in the mirror above it. The cut on my forehead isn’t too bad and doesn’t look like it will require professional medical intervention. I should be externally fine. It’s a relief countered by the intrusive, but not in this instance paranoid, thought that I am experiencing a brain bleed. I can tell you from experience the damage on the inside is often so much worse than what you can see with your eyes.

I think: “If I die out here, I wonder how many people’s first thought will be, ‘Wait, was he gay?’”

On the ground near the toilet there is, much to my chagrin, some pee on the floor.

I check the area where I had taken my tile nap. Somewhat surprisingly, I clock no urine. I have certainly pissed while unconscious before, but maybe the falling-down aspect shocked my urethra shut. I’ll never really know.

All told it’s nowhere near what had been on its way out when I sneezed, and the need to go still remains, so I sit down once again to finish what I started. The No. 2 of it all has ghosted, though, so, one less thing to worry about.

As I empty out, I notice blood on the bathroom doorknob. The door opens inward from the hall, with the toilet to the right. The operating hypothesis: I hadn’t opened the door the entire way, and when I sneezed the forward momentum jettisoned my forehead straight into the doorknob with significant force, at which point I tumbled to the right off the toilet, narrowly and luckily missing a double-whammy off the corner of the sink.

I tap, stand, wash my hands then sanitize and bandage the wound.

It’s time to decide how I want to spend the next few hours.

I’ve been sleeping upstairs but know bed is not the best place to lick my wounds. I’ve been concussed before and if I happen to be this early morning, sleep is my enemy. I snag my laptop and phone and navigate the stairs by sitting and scooting down them. Then I will set up shop in the living room until morning comes, at which point I will do what I need to do if things feel like they’re going south. I haven’t had a headache like this in quite some time, but the ibuprofen I popped is already showing some promise. The throbbing has waned, my anxiety ramping down with it, and the pain level is nothing near what comes with the migraines I deal with semi-regularly. Sometimes comparison is comforting.

I brew some coffee and prepare to play through. For better or worse, I am more well-versed in sitting alone and waiting out the night than I’d prefer to be—but sometimes it comes in handy.

And occasionally the best thing to do is stay put and try your best to take care of yourself.

At dawn I walk to the bay to see the sunrise. Seems like a good thing to do when you’re feeling happy and lucky to be alive—and I do, melodramatic as it seems given that it appears I’m going to make it out of this mostly unscathed, the residuals being only a scar and a story to tell. So often, one leads to the other.

Going it alone is a risk, sure—but what isn’t?

At least it’s one I can live with.

The one thing you should know about me is..

If you want the spark, you have to endure some smoke. / If you can’t handle me at my worst, well, neither can I. / I have love handles, but I can’t handle love. / I have used three consecutive tubes of lip balm to full completion, but I can’t seem to make a relationship last more than three dates. / I am doing heavy research into potential cures for male loneliness. / I’m kind of like a 56K modem during inclement weather: I move slow, make strange noises and sometimes completely stop functioning for varying spurts of time. / I’ve always wanted to be a pirate but I’m way too much of a coward. I can drink liquor like one, though. / I have never attempted to keep another living thing alive on my own—not so much as a plant—except for when I dog-sat for two weeks and the pup and me both made it out alive, but to say we did so unscathed would be a stretch. / My gums, hairline and little bits of faith and hope I’ve been somewhat desperately albeit futilely holding on to have one thing in common: They’re all quickly receding. / I’d just shave my head and be done with it for good but then I’d have to find someone to take all new pictures of me for this here app. / I have made peace with the potential of dying alone. I like to set the bar low. So if something works out I’ll be pleasantly surprised. If not, I’ll be less disappointed. / I am in the midst of the seemingly endless search for this nebulous thing I keep hearing about called a meaningful “connection,” which I can only assume leads to genuine and lasting love. / I wouldn’t say I’m living The Dream. It’s not necessarily The Night Terror all the time either, though. Probably more in the middle of things—best described as mostly just killing time. / I am the (self-appointed) Poet Laureate of the China Buffet—which is to say I eat garbage and sometimes write garbage. / I don’t go birding. I go people’ing. / I don’t default to the Oxford comma and I don’t really want to talk about it at length. / I’m not for everybody, but who is? I just hope I’m right for the right somebody sometime down the line. / I wouldn’t say I’m lost so much as taking the long way home, perpetually, and occasionally forgetting where it actually is—if I’ve even found it yet at all.

At this point I’m made up mostly of Mountain Dew, melodramatic moods, Skittles, the negative effects of too much screen time, whiskey, weed, a tiny bit of mostly carbonated water and several varieties of weakness. / In recent years I’ve found that the hair on my head feels a need to reallocate itself instead to my back and my chest, my nose and my ass. Seems pretty unnecessary. But sometimes things change when they were more than fine the way they were. / I’ve been left to my own devices for so long now that I’ve somehow managed to break most of them. / I’ve kept the same several pairs of pants for more than five years and when I initially purchased them they were not skinny jeans—but people change and grow, you know? / I’ve been in the midst of a rebuilding season since 1987. / The more I experience, the less I seem to know. The bigger my gut gets, the harder it is to trust. / I am an unreliable narrator who has completely lost the plot. I am my own captive audience and every moment is an act. My private life is a sitcom enjoyed at most by a dwindling few. And it’s always on the brink of being canceled. / Some men have calluses on their hands from doing honest work or lifting weights. I have them from constantly cracking open salt and pepper pistachios and tins of Wintergreen Zyn. / I get more texts to verify my identity than I do from actual people, and yet I still do not know exactly who I am. / I’m like a McFlurry machine: Great on the rare occasions when I’m working well, but also a pretty consistent letdown, often to the people who love me most. / I don’t really have the time or energy to craft an opening message that is more creative than a simple inquiry into your weekend plans. So maybe I don’t have the bandwidth or legitimate desire to be dating at all, now that I really think about it. But whatever. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Overthinking is a constant for me. / I’m a fiercely reluctant Hufflepuff who always aspired to be more of a Ravenclaw, and my Patronus is Eeyore. / I don’t really like exercising all that much anymore (I am lazy and have the spine of an 80-year-old former coal miner). But I’ll always make an exception when it comes to sprinting away from intimacy and commitment. / I have a cache of empty (prescribed, taken mostly as indicated) med bottles lying around and tonight I’m going to make a drum kit out of them and play “In the Air Tonight” with chopsticks. So my schedule is pretty flexible. / I just asked my Alexa what the meaning of life was and she danced around the question pretty well before landing on something that was essentially (I’m paraphrasing) “Just keep living and trying and see what happens,” and then played Robyn’s “Hang With Me” without skipping so much as a beat, and yes, this was influenced by the algorithm. What isn’t? / I often feel like I am a dusty video game cartridge that nobody ever bothered to blow out.

Anyway. Want to go out sometime?

At age 7 I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Not exclusively. I wasn’t that locked in. I also harbored aspirations to be a professional basketball player and/or an FBI agent working in the x-files department. I’ve always contained multitudes.

More than 30 years later (yikes, shit) I maintain that one out of three isn’t bad—and I’m glad I eventually chose the most realistic of the three options to truly pursue. If I’d been hell-bent on becoming a profiler who specialized in the paranormal, or a late-first-round draft pick, I’d have ultimately been severely disappointed.

If anyone aside from me is to blame for this (sort of) coming to fruition, the writing thing, at least from the jump, it’s my parents. Mom had me on this strict Hooked-on-Phonics regimen before I hit grade school, so I learned to read pretty well at a younger age than many. I hated every second of the lessons but I’ve hated most of the things I’ve had to do to get better at what I care about. I loved the results, though, and am now extremely thankful that I went through those arduous afternoon sessions. That old-school program shaped my life in some ways. The efficacy cannot be questioned. Hooked on Phonics worked for me, as they used to say.

If if was going to be so important for me to read, it follows there’d be enough material around to test out my burgeoning skills. My parents never skimped on book borrowing or buying. They instilled the habit and then they enabled it. Even though they weren’t huge readers themselves. Tough to be when you’re raising four kids that you’ve birthed in rapid succession. Mom mostly messes with Danielle Steele every now and then and Dad has read three books in the time I have known him. Two of them have been mine, so there was a sort of familial obligation there. The third was a John Wayne biography. (Getting Padre to read a poetry collection was, to me, quite an achievement. The pride I felt the day he showed me he’d saved some of his favorites in a phone photo album for quick reference is unmatched. It was also surprising that he knew how to create an iPhone album.)

The desire to write came with the reading. If people out there were spinning up ideas in their heads, putting them on paper and connecting with others by doing so, I assumed I could suss out how to follow in their footsteps. Since this was a bit before my inner monologue had developed the tendency to beat the shit out of me psychologically and interrupt incoming waves of optimism, I saw no reason why I couldn’t.

So when I found out about an anthology for young writers that anyone could submit to for a nominal fee, I penned one of my first poems and got Mom to send it in. The poem wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad—creativity being subjective and all. Better than some of the stuff I’ve written just this year, to be honest. Here it is:

LIFE IS WHAT YOU GET
Today, tomorrow, I give a shout.
Today’s the day, that I go out
To shout and pout.
Life is a good time
To shout and pout.

Pretty deep, despite the word repetition. I had done Hooked on Phonics but hadn’t yet cracked a vocab workbook. Though it is interesting how much of my life has been about both shouting and pouting.

My poem was accepted. I think they took pretty much every submission because the scheme was that people would pay for copies of the anthology so they could show off their own work, but I choose not to dwell on that too much and was glad to let my parents purchase several that I doled out to other family members. I have never been ashamed about foisting my work upon others.

So, yeah, I technically became a published writer at age 8, even got to do a reading in front of my class, and have been chasing that dragon ever since.

When you’re that young you’re naive enough to believe you can either do something or not do it, and it’s really simple as that. If you want to be an astronaut, you just figure you’ll find a way to make it happen. You’re poisoned (or empowered, depending on how you view it) with delusions of grandeur before you even know what that term means. Since I assumed writing would be a huge part of my life, I printed a bunch of business cards at this strange week-long summer school program my folks put my older brother and me in to teach us how to use computers. They featured clip art of a quill and inkwell, though I to this day have not used either. I gave them to family members and classmates, and found some freelance jobs creating greeting cards, helping with English homework and ghostwriting the occasional love note.

At school, I would clandestinely read all day, even when I was obviously supposed to be paying attention in class. (This partially explains why I cannot do simple math; the only reason I got into a decent college was because the SATs had just introduced an essay section.) I thought I was being sly and my teachers were none the wiser, but looking back it’s ridiculous to think I was tricking grown women. What’s more plausible is that they didn’t want to dim the spark in a kid who just really had a thing for Roald Dahl and the Goosebumps and Animorphs series. Or they weren’t paid enough to give much of a fuck. Either is valid and it was likely a combination.

Nerds, if you want to use that nebulous term for the bookish, don’t just recognize nerds. They respect them.

I did get called out on this illicit pleasure-reading practice once, in fourth grade, when Mrs. Garvin took me aside and said my grades had been falling a tad and it was time to get it together. But if I was able to do that she would turn a blind eye to me crushing the latest Bailey School Kids while she droned on about something useless like long division. A reprimand without discouragement is a tough line to walk, and I’m thankful she took that approach instead of quelling my desire to plow through pages.

I would often write in notebooks or on the family computer, just making shit up. My first cracks at fiction. I also kept a journal. Reading and writing were nice distractions from the daily anxieties and worries you have as a kid, when you still kind of operate under the premise that your life is a TV show and you are the main character, so whatever happening to and around you is of the utmost importance. (Sometimes I still think and behave this way. Maybe you do too.)

Before long I figured I was good enough to start submitting to major publications. (That optimistic naivety is an interesting combo.) This was at the ripe and seasoned age of 10. On one trip to Barnes and Noble I spent a significant amount of a gift certificate on a copy of Writer’s Market, the de facto guide to publications accepting queries (I did not really know what a query was) and manuscripts in any genre you could think of.

My family had just bought its first printer, a real game changer, and our latest Hewlett Packard took floppy discs so I could save my tomes and print out copies I needed for the mail. I’m unsure how many short stories I sent out and to where, aside from one case where I shot my shot at Ellery Queen. I didn’t hear back from most of them, but I did get an encouraging response from a horror zine when they rejected a romantic vampire story I thought was a sure winner. (Guess I was ahead of the curve on that one and the world wasn’t yet ready. Pretty sure it’s illegal to reject a submission in this genre now.)

Mom got the mail the day the “thanks, but no thanks” letter came with my paper manuscript re-attached and was very surprised to find I had been schlepping to the mailbox every now and then to try and get a byline—but she was supportive. Didn’t even give me shit for using valuable printer ink. She was a bit taken aback at the subject matter when she read it, and probably wondered a lot about how I was finding out certain things I was writing about as if I truly understood them (there were some attempts at steamy parts that I’d love to go back an re-read today if I could find this manuscript, but it is lost to time). But she neither censored the content I was reading or watching, aside from The Simpsons for some reason, nor told me anything that made me feel uncomfortable letting my freak flag fly via milky gel pen.

She didn’t treat having a kid with a vivid imagination as something that should be worried about all that much, but encouraged instead. She hadn’t read it and been like, “I don’t know, maybe you should become a stock broker or attorney?” It’s entirely possible that my parents hadn’t thought that deeply into it and just let me go about my voracious reading and writing because when I was doing either I was not babbling or sobbing, which have always been two of my favorite pastimes. Either is valid and it was likely a combination.

One day in the fifth grade during indoor recess brought on by inclement weather, I was passing the time working on something new. Freddy Kreuger was the antagonist, even though I had seen none of the Nightmare on Elm Street films.

One of my friends asked me what I was doing.

“Writing a story,” I said.

“We have to write a story?” he said, now panicked that he had missed an assignment that was soon due.

“I’m just doing it for fun.”

“Why?” He looked at me like I might be a psychopath.

I’ve gotten that look several times through the years when people realized I was reading or writing for the pure joy of it. During study hall in 10th grade a math teacher asked me, quite seriously and quizzically, why I was reading something that was clearly not assigned for a class. I was baffled. I mean, I was in a place of learning, and most of the other kids in the room had their hoodies up and were passed out at their desks. I was reading Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman. It wasn’t like I was nodding manically while highlighting passages from Mein Kampf.

“I just like it,” I said.

Sometimes I still have trouble articulating a cogent answer to this question. Electively being a writer without any sort of book deal, etc., is kind of like giving yourself homework every day of your life, unless you sell out and find a way to write for money so as to have the freedom to work on what you genuinely love—like posts for a Substack that boasts fewer than 100 subscribers—occasionally to the detriment of your relationships, social life and personal life in general.

That math teacher and I are still friends on Facebook, a forum where he has posted some very kind comments about my writing as it has progressed through the years. I’m skeptical as to whether he has ever actually read any of it, but maybe he finally started to dig that reading is achieving.

Anyway, my friend went from horrified to intrigued, knowing now he hadn’t neglected an assignment. He asked what I was going to do with the story and I said I didn’t know. His idea was send it off to the Butler Eagle, our local daily.

I was familiar enough with that rag to know they probably wouldn’t take a story about a boy somehow stranded on Mars and trying to get fresh with one of the locals. (I was going through a heavy Ray Bradbury phase at the time and have been going through a romantic longing phase my entire life.) If I ever saw this aspiring novella through it’d probably go to some offbeat science fiction magazine that would deny it without response. Then it’d go into a file folder and a desk drawer.

“Well, why don’t we make our own newspaper?” he asked.

It was in this way that I made my first foray into self-publishing. (Again, ahead of the curve.)

If people who ran actual content outlets weren’t going to give me my flowers, I’d do it myself. And maybe even make some cash in the process. If we came out with a periodical that covered the inner happenings of the elementary school, surely fellow students would fork over some allowance.

So that’s what we set out to do. It wasn’t tough to put together a staff. It was a harebrained scheme for sure without much planning at all behind it, but when the lads I consorted with heard there might be some earnings in it they came aboard without further cajoling. These days I’d have to make a whole business plan and present it in Google Slides. It was a simpler time.

As the only one in the group who arrogantly thought he had an idea of what we were gonna do and should do, and as the one who had the printer and computer at home, I was a shoe-in for editor-in-chief. I assigned out beats for different sections, we had a loose editorial meeting and then the crew got to work, marching toward their deadlines.

I do not recall what we called our little paper or how much we proposed selling it for. Probably something corny. Definitely something too expensive to demand for what we were delivering. But I do know we didn’t approach the project from an ethical (or otherwise) lens of what you would call “hard journalism,” which was a thing that did actually still exist back then. The paper was to be filled with nothing if not subjective pieces, mostly of the gossipy variety. Along with my short story about holding hands on the third planet and some further content we peppered in about local UFO sightings that may or may not have been fabricated. We were on some Orson Welles shit and we didn’t even know who that was.

We’d started to become interested in girls and swearing and cared pretty much only about those things, along with a sports section of course, and wrote accordingly, as we assumed our audience would be into that type of thing too. To establish a base, we had to play to what we thought would make up said base. And sometimes you write what you know. Other times you write what you think you know.

Of course, my hack-ass friends blew their deadlines out of the water and I lost faith in them being able to come through with anything at all on any kind of reasonable timeline. I realized early on that managing people is extremely difficult, and yet I have decided to try and do that with my career anyway.

Since I had been promising eager classmates a copy, I took it upon myself to do the lion’s share of the writing (that’s all it was; there were no interviews conducted or diligent research done), along with everything else the first issue entailed. Even the printing and collating, a job that should have been below a soon-to-be-esteemed editor like myself. Delegating is a soft skill I am trying to hone to this day.

I was left to my own devices to get this done, as my parents were wrangling three other young children and I was the most well-behaved, or at least the least disruptive, of the brood. Had they known what I was up to they would have definitely given it a first pass and then nipped the whole thing in the bud. Or at least demanded heavy rewrites, because there was no way they were going to allow me to move forward with such filth.

And filth it was. There was a certain element of shock value to it, as the words within the pages were profane and suggestive to an extent I’m sure many would have thought had to have been beyond my years. The cringeworthy specifics escape me for the most part, though I do recall the word “fuck” was used several times. I had an older brother in middle school who had been training me on vulgar words and phrases and what they meant, and regaling me with tales of debauchery I could hardly wrap my head around. The dude had, according to the narrative he spun, tongue-kissed a girl at a school dance while Aerosmith’s “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” played in the gym. Absolute legend.

Before bedtime, I loaded my backpack with all the copies I’d printed out and stapled together, tucked into a manilla file folder, so they’d be ready to dole out to paying customers during the next day’s recess—which again took place inside because the weather in western Pennsylvania is mercurial at best.

I set up shop toward the back of the classroom and kids stopped by to exchange their fee for the tabloid-slash-zine.

I probably looked like I was selling drugs. Or was definitely up to some sort of variety of “no good.”

Which is likely why the recess monitor, a woman named Mrs. Davis who was mostly around to watch groups of kids at certain times of day while the teachers took a much-needed break to lung Virginia Slims outside, took notice and asked to see a copy.

I had somehow not taken into account the possibility of this happening—and knew if she or any adult got their hands on it it would be very bad. The stuff I was shilling had the potential to get me in some truly deep shit. Maybe I’d gotten so into the idea and the writing that I neglected what kind of havoc or something similar the final product might wreak. Or maybe knowing I was coming in hot with something salacious that would turn heads was part of the thrill.

I declined to proffer one.

Turns out this was not exactly an option.

She then demanded she see a printout and as I handed it over I watched my life flash before my eyes. My tough-ass teacher, Mrs. Frederick, was bound to maim me before my parents chose to kill me.

The shock factor I’d been going for had an effect, albeit an unintentional one, especially for the non-target audience. You could see it in Mrs. Davis’ eyes.

I’m unsure she made it through the first page before she was completely taken aback by what had come from my perverse and profane brain (don’t bury the lede, baby) and decided she had to round up the copies that had already made it into circulation and then escalate it to Mrs. Frederick and maybe even the principal. This shit was out of her pay grade and I truly believe she would have been more prepared and much less surprised if I had been handing out Playboys from my backpack.

Fuckin’ narcs, man.

Soon as recess ended, the tail end of which saw me going through what may have actually been an actual full-blown panic attack (one of the first of many), Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Frederick convened and I was swiftly called out in the hall, where it became apparent I had totally ruined the latter’s nicotine buzz. My teacher was appalled and frankly out of her element just like Mrs. Davis—this was a first for her, as not many grizzled newspapermen came through her fifth grade classroom peddling something similar to smut—so she called in the big guns:

Mary Ann Muska.

A woman not to be trifled with.

She probably had a reputation around the district of being a real Karen, because she spent so much of her time advocating for an Individualized Education Program (IED) and other reasonable care and early intervention accommodations for my little brother, who is on the spectrum. Because back then you were a Karen if you stirred the pot and tried to get the educational system to do such things. You were a Karen for doing anything that attempted to coax people into doing their job. Sometimes, this still holds true.

Mare sure scared the absolute hell out of me, I’ll tell you that for free.

She’s real chill now though, so that’s cool.

I have dealt with crippling anticipatory anxiety for as long as I can remember, and the evening before she came in for a parent-teacher conference was one of the longest nights of my life so far (there have since been many) and one of the first actual examples I can give of that particular brand of angst making its unwelcome way into my bones.

I gave Mom the Cliff’s Notes of what she was in for, but refused to reveal any names of my co-conspirators. No need to drag them down with me. They hadn’t done much anyway and she knew all my friends, so was aware of who was involved without me snitching, though she never divulged any of them.

Then I went into class the next day and sat through the first couple lessons before I was held in from recess while I awaited what would come next. Even on a nice day I couldn’t make it out for some much-needed Vitamin D and a rousing game of Red Rover.

For 25 years, I was not made privy to what was said in the meeting between Mrs. Frederick and Mary Ann, and to this day I don’t know where it took place. I wouldn’t be surprised if they caucused outside so they could rip thin mentholated darts together while they spoke about how much of a miscreant I’d become.

Afterward, I was called out to the hall where I had a talk with Mom. I don’t recall the actual specifics, but she did cry a little bit, mostly because she was appalled by what had come out of my brain through my fingertips.

What I remember most is that she was not nearly as pissed as I’d been mentally preparing for her to be. She didn’t even hit me with the “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” line that would have brought me to shambles with a quickness.

She seemed to understand that my intent wasn’t nefarious—that starting my own paper was far from a bad idea, even if the conceptual execution had been woefully misguided.

I sincerely thought I’d be forbidden from writing for fun.

But I wasn’t. She gave me a big hug, sent me back into class and no further punishments were levied.

That was the day I found out that words could get you attention—for better or worse—and that it was important to learn how to wield them in certain ways. What I’d written had had an ephemeral, but vivid, effect.

Within a few days I was back to writing my own shit and reading fiction while Mrs. Frederick attempted to instill in the class some sort of appreciation or at the very least vague understanding of arithmetic.

I wondered what else I could do with words. How far I could take it.

I still do.

A couple weeks back while aimlessly bullshitting on the phone with Mare, I randomly asked her what if anything she remembered about this occurrence. I would not have been surprised if she didn’t have much of a recollection—a testament to all the things she and Dad had to deal with that were more pressing than a kid writing a few swear words and other missives that indicated he might be some kind of burgeoning pervert carrying a borderline obsession with the extraterrestrial. My big brother was such a bad kid that it was like I had an invisibility cloak to put on when I was doing mischief, and his often heinous actions provided a weighted scale for how my more occasional infractions are less-permanently seared into their skulls.

It took a minute but the memories began to make their way back. Mom told me that during her conference Mrs. Frederick had not been particularly disparaging or discouraging of my recreational activities—had, in fact, been the opposite. She’d been forced by protocol to call in the parental front because curse words had been printed, which was more or less reasonable, but she had found some promise in the bootstraps publication—if not in the craft itself at that point, in what it could potentially lead to.

“Yes, he used some choice words—but I have to hand it to him: It was damn creative,” Mrs. Frederick said. I’m told a laugh accompanied this statement.

Nerds don’t just recognize nerds. They respect them.

She asks me about the first time I ever got my heart broken and I start to talk about a girl I was sweet on in kindergarten.

But then I really think about it and pivot—say it was when I was pretty young and someone told me that professional wrestling, one of my favorite things in the world, was fake. This while I was leafing through a magazine from the early 80s that covered the sport or performative art or combination of the two or whatever you want to call it.

They went on to enlighten me to the fact that it wasn’t just the fights themselves, either, but the rivalries, the things the wrestlers said and did to one another, too. None of it was real. I pointed to a photograph of Rowdy Roddy Piper bleeding profusely from his nose and glaring menacingly at the camera mid-shout, said, “Even the blood?” and she said, “Especially the blood. Corn syrup and food coloring, most likely.”

“It stands out as the first time I ever really felt like i was being lied to,” I say. “It hurt my feelings in a way I don’t recall experiencing before that.”

“You didn’t believe the person telling you this?” she asks.

“No, I mean, I didn’t think my grandma was lying to me. This was way before I grasped that someone I loved—like someone I actually knew, not Sting or The Undertaker—could be someone who lied all the time. It was that I was being lied to by these people I watched on TV who I idolized. When my brother and I tried to replicate their moves, launching ourselves off couches and trying to make each other pass out with chokeholds, we weren’t faking a damn thing. We were committing legitimate acts of actual assault. Then I find out these guys were just putting on something like a play? I felt like a fool.”

“I’m going to go ahead and acknowledge that must have been a tough time, but am also going to point out that your first heartbreak involved roided-out, oiled-up men.”

“I’ve never thought of it in that way before, but that is correct.”

“Well, same, man. More or less.”

She sends a shuffleboard disc down the table, gutters it, mutters “Fuck,” turns back to me and asks how I reacted to this sudden, out-of-nowhere deluge of negative emotions.

“Well, I immediately started weeping.”

“As one does.”

“I guess she figured she’d just keep going with some more details, really rip the Band-Aid off or whatever—Grandma was not big on bedside manner unless you were one of her dogs—and proceeded to tell me that there were writers who decided what each wrestler had to do. They’d sit around typing up stories that the aforementioned oiled-up men would act out on a weekly basis. I stopped crying then.”

“Why would that information be soothing?”

“Well, I was young enough to have not really contemplated that most of the things I consumed didn’t just magically appear and were actually created by people who weren’t always or even often characters in what you were seeing or what was being read to you. That you could make stuff up and somehow make it believable—something people would really pay attention to.”

“Ah, yes, okay.”

“Seemed like an appealing thing to do.”

“Are you telling me you have aspirations to get staffed in the WWE Writer’s Room? It’s never too late.”

“Well, I haven’t tried to go that exact route. But the experience had a pretty big effect on me, tangentially speaking.”

“I guess you do learn a lot from heartbreak.”

“More than you do from most things.”

Fantasy football season is over, leaving a gambling void among my degenerate friends who will generally throw down hefty wagers on anything. To keep the group chat going through the offseason, the action has turned to prop bets regarding what I do with my slower freelance days when I am left mostly to my own devices in the middle of a frigid Chicago winter. Here are a few from a recent sheet:

How many times will Scott open and then close the Uber Eats app as he fights an epic inner battle between fiscal responsibility and ill-advised immediate gratification?

How many carts from different eateries will Scott build within the Uber Eats app while digital window shopping for the culinary adventure du jour he is valiantly (and likely futilely) attempting to deny himself?

How many blinkers from the vape pen will it take for Scott to completely and impulsively disregard frugality and dismiss the knowledge that he has perfectly fine chicken fingers in the freezer he purchased for a nominal fee that he can air fry in minutes, then convince himself that currency is an illusion while hitting the “place order” button on a gluttonous Raising Canes bounty and muttering, “I was powerless all along, and nothing can save me now?”

When he places his order, will he spring for the jug of sweet tea that he will have one glass of and then keep in his refrigerator for the next fiscal quarter?

How many extra cups of Cane’s Sauce will he tack on?

Regardless of the quantity placed, will the delivery arrive with or without the accurate amount of sauce?

Will Scott attempt to cancel the order immediately after placing it, not due to immediate crushing guilt or buyer’s remorse, but because he is suddenly in the mood for The Halal Guys instead?

Will he be successful in this order audible or will he have to make peace with his initial from-the-growing-hips choice to dance with the Caniacs?

Either way, he will inevitably pose this question to the group chat: “What’s better? Halal Bros’ White Sauce or Cane’s Sauce?” Which will win the vote? (Reminder that collusion is strictly prohibited.)

Will anyone in the group chat call him out for mistaking The Halal Guys for Halal Bros, or will everyone just tacitly agree to let this slide because they obviously know which restaurant chain he is referring to?

Will he overtip (out of a sense of pride and false confidence that he will find full-time employment again) or undertip (as if throwing another buck or two is going to do much to make his already irresponsible financial and caloric decision much worse)? Mind when wagering that he cannot do math because he is arithmetically illiterate, so there is no point in listing “tipping appropriately” as an option.

Will Scott change from the jeans he put on this morning to create the illusion that his life is compartmentalized between freelance work and solitary dicking around and into his comfy eating shorts he has not laundered in quite some time (that stain is actually month-old mayonnaise, get your mind out of the gutter) before or after his order arrives?

Once the order is in his domain and unpacked, will Scott choose (it’s sad that these are the choices) to consume his initial portion of the feast ravenously over the sink, or while watching Alf sat on the couch hunched over his coffee table?

How long will Scott remain in the living room before retreating to his bedchamber to watch Alf while attempting to fall into a fitful slumber?

How many times throughout the night will he get out of bed to consume more food in the dark, like a goddamn trash panda?

How many times will he tell himself that tomorrow is going to be the day he gets it together?

She walks into the room first, takes in the two twin-sized beds, both made up with quilts decades older than the two of us combined.

She surveys the scene, walks into the bathroom, comes back, tosses her overnight bag on the bed closest to the window that overlooks an actual graveyard where for some reason goats seem to roam freely (I don’t understand the country) and says, “You trying to send me some sort of message here? I love having a sleeping bed and eating bed as much as the next guy, but these are a bit on the small side.”

It’s not like I picked the joint because of its promise. My hand was forced. The bride and groom are going to get some serious shit from me for making us stay in this quaint place instead of the Marriott a few miles away, where there is more non-goat civilization. And not just because I missed out on Bonvoy points.

Our first wedding weekend plus-one experience will entail us sleeping in separate beds. This is far from ideal for obvious reasons. There are some things you can’t come back from. Even if you end up laughing about them later.

“It must be a mistake,” I say. “This is absolutely not what I booked. I’ll go down and ask them to switch rooms.”

She giggles and accurately points out that she thought I hated confrontation of any kind, says, “It’s probably gonna be no dice on that one anyway. This is the last and final room they have available.”

“And you know that...”

“Because this is indeed absolutely what you booked.”

“Why would I book a room with two twin beds?”

“Beats me, buckaroo, but I clocked that you had when you emailed the reservation to me.”

I had done this because she wanted to forward it to her mom, who was wary of her daughter going to some podunk town with a relative stranger, which seems reasonable. Especially if you consume a copious amount of Dateline reruns, which the three of us (four if you include her dad) do with startling regularity. The caution didn’t bother me. It comforted me, in a strange way. Game recognizes game and all that.

She scrolls through her phone and presents me with the evidence. It is damning.

“I called yesterday,” she says. “And this is all they got for the weekend. Two weddings. It’s that season. So we’ll just have to make do.”

She leaps onto the other bed and starts jumping up and down.

“Why didn’t you, like, let me know I had fucked up?”

“I wanted to see the look on your face, and it’s always a delight to see you squirm a little bit,” she says.

“Right, but now…”

“We’ll make it work,” she says just before she conks her head off the ceiling. She stops, briefly rubs the spot that what will turn into a goose egg, then starts jumping again, this time more lightly. “I’m unsure how you didn’t catch it, though, as this room is labeled the ‘Twincess Suite’ on the website.”

“Your ability to internet is the most beautiful and frightening thing about you.”

“I knew enough about you to have had you murdered by a hitman if I so chose before we ever even came close to meeting in real life.”

She has reminded me of this several times in our somewhat brief tenure together and it never becomes less unsettling. It seems somehow even more menacing than usual, as she’s just brought it up nonchalantly while jumping on a small bed and giggling.

I say what I do pretty much every time (this comes up way too often), which is that I hope she doesn’t consort with hitmen. I know (or at least think I know) that she doesn’t. But I like the reassurance.

“I haven’t as of yet but I know how to dark web,” she says.

“Are relationships, at their core, about living in constant fear?”

She does one final jump, falls to the bed on her back, then bounces off it and into an upright standing position. Somehow this looks graceful.

“Sometimes.”

I want to find a solution to this issue, as I have, at long last and in spite of my expectations, come to enjoy sleeping with her more than sleeping alone. And to be clear, I mean in the same bed. Not in the same room where there are six feet separating us. For three consecutive nights.

I insist on going down to the front desk to see if there is anything they can do. My journey bears no fruit and I have no leg to stand on, given that I made and double-confirmed the reservation.

My attention to detail needs some work.

I return to find the beds pushed together.

“They weren’t bolted down,” she says, shrugs.

“You know, I could have helped with the grunt work here.”

“With your ailing old-man spine? Doubtful. Just accept that your’e not exactly spry at the moment. Plus, I got restless. You were down there for a while and I felt a nudging to do some rearranging. And I took some quilts to put on top of the crack between beds, so we won’t fall through down to where the monsters live or whatever.”

“Thank you. And yeah, they made a show of checking for other rooms but, well, nothing.”

“I appreciate their diligence and assume you put up one hell of a fight.”

I think about lying but admit that after a brief interaction with a dude named Claude at the front desk I took a lap around the perimeter to quell my frustration and to make it seem like i had spent more time arguing with valor for a shared bed for myself and my guest.

“Glad you copped to that, because I saw you out the window, wandering around in a huff, head hung low and hands in pockets while you passed the cemetery. It all looked very emo.”

“I’m so sorry I messed this up.”

“Your lone saving grace is that you did not, at least from what I saw, pet any of the goats without me.”

Shit.

“I um—I did pet one goat. It came up to me and was pretty friendly, so I gave him some skritches. Please don’t have me murdered.”

“That was a test. I watched that go down. It was cute. Wanted to see if you’d come clean.”

“I’m…extremely sorry? For petting a goat in your absence?”

“Just don’t do it again.”

“I’ll never touch a goat again if you won’t cast me away to a twin-sized mattress.”

“Deal,” she says and offers her hand for a shake. I take it and she pulls me down to the makeshift bed. “We should test this out.”

In one swift motion her shirt is gone.

I decide this is not the time to say I really should be working on my speech.

You might know the one. Off Route 8 going west but if you hit the Olive Garden on the left you’ve gone too far. Just a stone’s throw from the 5 Below. Inexplicably excellent mushrooms stuffed with god knows what that go down great in bulk every time. Yep, with the koi pond people for some reason always throw pennies into. That’s the one: The place she chooses to bring things to an abrupt end.

It’s a calculated tried-and-true move, picking a public mostly neutral ground (I introduced her to the place which kind of makes it “mine” but whatever). Mitigates the potential for a full-blown freakout. What am I going to do here around all these (marginally) happy people? Throw a gelatinous blob of sweet and sour sauce in her face?

I’ve been summoned here immediately after my shift and have been looking forward to it all day, not because it’s a big night out but because of those stuffed mushrooms mostly, thinking maybe my girlfriend just feels like noshing heavy in public instead of in our stretched-out cotton-based evening garb, syphoning whatever we’ve got from the coffee table we’re hunched over in the comfort of our own home (I think I can call it that despite my name not being on the lease; squatter’s rights and all).

She likes to do that from time to time. I can take it or leave it. This has been one of several points of contention—a collection of red flags that were initially ignored out of an optimistic (and/or vaguely desperate) mindset that the good would ultimately outweigh the bad. Apparently this ultimately did not pan out to her satisfaction.

“This isn’t working for me anymore,” she says before we even get cups of green tea and empty red tumblers with faded Pepsi-Cola logos to fill at the soda fountain with whatever the hell we want, as much and often as we desire. Just one trait of this place that makes it a magical one in my eyes.

“Oh, okay,” I say, wondering why she would propose coming here if she didn’t want to come here. Though moods, they do change. Sometimes on a dime. “Are you afraid you’ll find a hair in your soup dumplings again? We could bounce right now and do Olive Garden.”

She reminds me that she found a hair in her linguini last time we went there as well (I wonder if she might be shedding or planting follicles in hopes of free meals) and then says it’s not that, not that at all.

“I mean, all this,” she says, pointing at me then back at herself several times across the table.

“The…the…our…relationship,” she continues, for clarity. Her voice wavers and the tears commence.

This is of course right when the waitress shows up with the steaming tea and decades-old cups, which fulfills the bulk of her duties in this type of setting. One could argue having a waitstaff on hand at a place like this is generally superfluous. A cafeteria-type situation where you bus your own table and bring your plates up to a spot to be disposed of for dishwashing would likely be more efficient and cost-effective. We’re gonna get the buffet. Everybody does. After that, her only responsibility is cruising by to snag some discarded plates, often trying to take ones still piled with food and I have to say something like, “We’re still working on that,” which is a level of confrontation that brings me more-than-slight discomfort. So you can imagine how I’m feeling being unceremoniously dumped in the middle of Jade Garden (formerly Fortune Star before new management took over; the stuffed mushrooms have remained the same).

I would like to crawl out of my own skin and take my spirit to the nearest corner where I can default to a rocking-back-and-forth fetal position situation.

It’s going to take many dumplings and potentially a lobotomy for me to even begin to recover from this.

While the woman I love who is quickly becoming the woman I used to be in a relationship with weeps across the table, I slap a hopefully congenial look on my face and briefly engage with the waitress, confirming it’ll be straight to the buffet. Her discomfort is palpable. She shares a look with my latest ex as if to tacitly confirm that this is not some sort of hostile situation, then leaves us to our conversation.

This is certainly not something I didn’t see coming. You can love someone pretty deeply while still knowing they’re not exactly right for you, and you can keep trying to convince yourself otherwise until you realize that the feeling is mutual—that they know it too—which creates a quorum in the “it’s not gonna work out” category. Then you both cling for a while to the not-exactly-right thing you have because you’re scared of what’s out there and even start to entertain the notion that you might have to settle before it’s too late, whatever and whenever too late is. Eventually something has to give. One of you has to break out of the inertia and take some serious action. Or else you’ll end up building a life together during which you constantly wonder what else could have been. Sounds horrifying.

I knew she was going to be the one to at some point take said action, because we were both well aware I was the one who’d be more prone to just keep riding things out, adding seasons to the sitcom when the series finale should have happened many episodes ago.

But I’m far from prepared for today to be the day.

Not just because I am wearing a T-shirt that says “Take me to a China Buffet and tell me I’m pretty,” which happened to be balled up in the back of my car when I got out of the salt mines and checked my phone to see my doomed invitation to this hallowed ground, so I threw it on after a quick smell check. Nor due to the fact that I ripped a couple big ole’ blinkers in the parking lot to stoke the appetite before coming in and will soon be nearly incapable of coherent speech. (I thought it was going to be a fun evening.)

It’s because I’m afraid to be alone again.

And that’s not a reason to stay with someone.

We talk for a while, mostly sorting out logistics (one of the many enemies of love) regarding our living situation. She apologizes for the way things didn’t work out. I express that the culpability is nothing if not shared, and actually say, “No harm, no foul,” like it’s a version of Love & Basketball where the two main characters don’t work out in the end.

Then she leaves.

I shrug.

Sit at the table for a moment. Sip some tea. Gather myself.

“Welp,” I say as I slap my knees and shimmy out of the booth, “I suppose it’s high time for a comfort crab rangoon.”

I approach the smorgasbord with a gluttonous appetite and a new dream in my heart.

I have never come lightly to a buffet line. And I’m not going to start today.

While I pack it away, I text some friends. I’m going to need a place to stay.

I ask them if they want me to get them anything to go.

I was absentmindedly playing background music videos on YouTube when a live performance of Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs” ended and the algorithm automatically served up a KEXP in-studio recording of a song I didn’t know by a band I’d never heard of. I took a brief break from updating my resume and clicked over to find that the song was called “You Let My Tyres Down” by a band named, no joke, Tropic Fuck Storm. The name was enough to put a smile on my face but the fact that I’d discovered a band that is absolutely fantastic that is literally called Tropical Fuck Storm kept it on there for a stretch.

I took some mental photographs of the look on several people’s faces in the seconds right after I told them that my new favorite band is called Tropical Fuck Storm and they couldn’t tell if I was being serious or not. I will cherish these in my mind forever.

Sometimes when I have some bandwidth I do these things called “Kimono Days” where I do whatever I want, within reason, within the confines of my apartment, for the entire day. Wearing only a kimono. And boxer briefs. (The boxer briefs are so I don’t catch a draft and because my couch is leather so if you sit on there in the buff for a while things are gonna get slippery.) To kick off my most recent one I knocked out a bunch of pages of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, and his vivid descriptions of what many would consider mundane, including food consumed, got me in the mood for some Japanese cuisine. I generally don’t leave the domicile or don more clothing on Kimono Days (not even to purchase or fry bacon) but I also am not one to kowtow to loose rules that ain’t law. So I threw on some jeans, gloves and my winter coat and set off to Mariano’s, where they have a decent sushi bar for the Midwest. I procured a couple rolls and some seaweed salad, along with a Bota Box of Pinot Noir. The kimono was on the entire time and nobody knew it but me and, eventually, Dawn. Dawn is my favorite person at Mariano’s, due to her tough brand of congeniality and penchant for giving me shit about what I am purchasing. You’d think this would be a relationship built over time, but it began the first time I went through her checkout line when she called me out for buying four boxes of stuffing in July and she has been getting cheekier and cheekier since. As she rung me up she said, “Looks like someone is going to have quite a…Tuesday afternoon.” I nodded, then unzipped my coat to reveal the teal kimono with several species of fish printed on it, a Koi pond with a peninsula made up of a man’s upper torso and chest hair jutting into it. I said, “Dawn, my friend, you don’t know the half of it.” “Honey, I don’t know if I could handle it if I did,” she said. Then she winked and scanned the shopper discount card she keeps at the register for people like me who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram of patrons she likes who also always forget their own cards.

The time was 1:24 a.m. I had just gotten off the Blue Line and was embarking on the last leg of a Hero’s Journey to McDonald’s then home to eat in bed while attempting to not spill sweet and sour sauce on the duvet cover. This following a night spent uptown, playing Magic: The Gathering with some new friends. As I passed by a bar on Lake Street I saw among the smokers and several bleary-eyed people impatiently awaiting their Ubers a man and woman who were furiously making out. It looked to me as though they’d never kissed another human being and were really trying to get their money’s worth because they believed they may never get to do so again. That’s real first kiss—probably on the first date—energy that cannot be easily replicated. They didn’t see me do this, but I grinned and nodded my approval, like Robert Redford in that one gif, as I trudged past. Several hundred steps later I got the kind of text I thought I’d never get again: “You up?”

I strolled into my building around 7:30 a.m. looking more than slightly disheveled, clutching a McDonald’s bag (I had to close the loop) in one hand and a Magic: The Gathering play mat in the other and one of my favorite doormen just said, “Looks like somebody’s officially back” and then reminded me I had a package.

I was in the gym for the first time in a long time trying to tame a wild elliptical before I made a feeble attempt to become The StairMaster when the woman on a treadmill a few machines away from me’s headphones disconnected from Bluetooth and for a few seconds I got to listen to “Mmmbop.” Then I listened to it twice in its entirety later on in the day. Three smiles.

Lying in bed one evening having some existential thoughts, I said, “Hey Alexa: What’s the meaning of life?” She meandered on for a little bit but her conclusion was ultimately (I’m paraphrasing slightly) that it’s about choosing your own adventure and seeing what happens. I found that to be comforting. Even if it came from AI.

I was taking a pee when I came up with an idea mid-stream that I got excited about. I thought it was so good and had to be recorded immediately. So I pushed a little harder to speed up the evacuation process so I could get to a device or notebook and jot it down before I forgot it. There was a point I thought about grabbing my phone and one-handing it, but cooler heads prevailed, I remembered the idea, it is now in a notebook and may one day be pursued.

Predicting a somewhat trying day that would end with me not wanting to cook anything, I put some baked beans and sliced hot dogs into the crock pot then went about my business. Forgot all about it till I started to smell it wafting throughout my apartment, which didn’t get a smile so much as a little literal pat on the back to myself for having such brilliant foresight. I went ear-to-ear a few hours later when I dug into those beanies and weenies, though.

In a near moment of weakness I fired up UberEats and filled up my cart with wares from my favorite Chinese restaurant that was still open. I got so far in the process that I had actually hit the order button and canceled just before it went through and I could be charged. I smiled and patted myself on the back for my self-control and also gained a tangential understanding of the appeal so many find in edging.

Walking along the lake I made a move to pass an elderly couple who were moseying along while bickering rather animatedly about something. This didn’t make me smile. The fact that they were holding hands the entire time did.

My friend texts to ask me what I’m going to do with my Saturday night.

“I don’t know. Probably ripping several blinkers in rapid succession and listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘I Am a Rock’ on repeat while I scroll through a Chinese food delivery menu.”

“Again?”

“I have a routine.”

“Jesus. I should check in on you more often. Also, I’ll remind you that I am living vicariously through you.”

“Right. Single in the big city and all that.”

“The road less traveled.”

“Have you considered that route’s got fewer tracks for good reason?”

“We all lament our lot in life from time to time.”

“Amen.”

“What?”

“Seemed like you were rehearsing a sermon.”

“Probably just the 50 gummy kicking in.”

“Fifty?”

“It’s true.”

“It’s 3 p.m.”

“Sure is. I got no place to be. We live on geriatric time over here these days. Dinner is in approximately one hour and I want to be fully zooted for a Saturday feast. Been lobbying for KFC all day and I think me and the boys have effectively worn down the opposition.”

“I’m deeply proud of all of you. If that’s not righteous implementation of a united front I really don’t know what is.”

“We’re also gonna build a bed fort later.”

“Make sure you wait at least 20 minutes after consuming fried chicken.”

“We probably won’t. Seriously though. Go out. Do something. Don’t wallow.”

“I’m kind of beat, though, and will remind you that 90% of my friends here are married.”

“You can hang out with married people. Crazier things have happened.”

“Sure, but I would’ve had to have scheduled it two weeks ago, at minimum, and who can tell what kind of psychological state they’ll be in a fortnight from when they make plans?”

“Alright, but no emo music.”

“Fine. Casual reminder that The National is not technically emo.”

“You fucking know what I mean. No Simon & Garfunkel either. Nothing emo adjacent. None of your goddamn loopholes.”

“Fine.”

“You’re not going to adhere to that, are you?”

“We’ll see.”

“Alright. I love you either way.”

“Love you too. Keep fighting the good fight.”

Later on I’m listening to Bright Eyes, not as a flagrant “fuck you” to my friend, but because I’ve made the decision to encourage Jesus to take the iPod, let the communion wafers fall where they may (which is to say Spotify is on shuffle), while I meticulously rearrange my kitchen.

I’m alphabetizing my spice rack to “Take it Easy (Love Nothing)” when my friend sends me a photo of the bed fort that he and his family have constructed.

And look, I get that everyone is a critic and it’s not a good look to approach life through that lens, but the craftsmanship on what they have the audacity to call a fort is shoddy at best.

“I could do better than that on my own,” I mutter to myself and then I black out and come to in my bedroom an indeterminable amount of time later.

It appears I have, in something of a fugue state, opted to construct a bed fort.

It is not what I would call immaculate. But it is serviceable, to be sure. A great place to rest one’s head, in my humble opinion. It looks ultra-cozy and if I’m not careful I might find myself several days from now having not left, like one of the grandparents from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

These sorts of things tend to happen to people who should not be left to their own devices for extended periods of time.

What’s interesting is I seem to have built the fort so the only place to lie down flat is by yourself and in the middle of the bed.

For a long time, I slept on the left side.

Why, though? Was I keeping it unoccupied in hopes she might come back?

Almost definitely.

But hope is a dangerous thing that should occasionally be fully abandoned.

And sometimes you have to accept your current lot in life on a Saturday night.

Building a bed fort: 3.5 STARS

1. You can have what you need without getting what you really want. I assume this applies vice-versa.

2. You can spend the bulk of your life trying to succeed. And when you kinda do, it might feel after a while like you haven’t done much at all, so you can develop a tendency to keep moving the goal posts hoping someday you will be happy and satisfied. Then, though, nothing seems good enough and you remember the failures much more vividly than the victories. (My therapist calls this having “Unrelenting Standards.”) This should maybe be taken as a sign that you’re looking at success in a flawed way and need to get back to neutral. That it’s time to re-examine some values, burn some brain cells considering the “Death Bed Quotient.” This is a thing I made up where you think about what you’d be proud of and/or remember the most when your time around these parts is coming to an end and you’re reflecting on what you’ve done and what you were never able to do. Nobody likes to think of this ahead of time, but it can be pertinent and a bit of a guiding light.

3. Living to work is mostly a fool’s errand unless you’re doing something that is actually important and vital in the grand scheme of things, like saving lives. Though even then, you’ve got to have a life outside of it or you’ll lose yourself. For what it’s worth, to date, I have experienced nothing worse than losing myself. And I am no stranger to awful occurrences. By the time you reach 38, you probably won’t be either.

4. Being your own toughest critic has its merits sometimes. Long as you have to have some compassion for yourself every now and then.

5. Love means so many different things to so many different people. It’s holistically undefinable. Some are looking for someone to fall in love with and build a life with. Over time, they may start to believe that this is likely to be forever out of their grasp. Yet they continue the search anyway. Others are looking for someone they can (potentially) love who fits the mold of a life they’ve already envisioned for themselves. Then there are those who never look at all. They choose to let it find them. Sometimes it does. These are just three varieties. Neither one is really a right or wrong way to live. I’d recommend not settling, but maybe there’s merit to that at a certain point too. Hell if I know. It’s strange to age and feel like you have even less of an understanding now as you did when you were young and somewhere near innocent.

6. Perspective is important. So is remembering that what someone else is going through doesn’t really minimize your personal experience.

7. No episode of the TV show that is your life is worth skipping, though, god, wouldn’t it be nice to have the option every now and then?

8. You can love someone very much without being right for each other. I suppose the trick is finding the person that feels love in a similar way you do, or at least one that matches how you experience it. And then experiences it in an equally reciprocated way that you do. You can fall in love without having mastered this trick. I’d say you should be wary of this, but there’s really nothing you can do about it. We don’t get to choose when we fall in love. Or with whom.

9. If you live long enough you will lose many things (in addition to yourself here and there, potentially), and the longer you get to stick around the more the losses will accrue. Nobody goes through this whole thing without dealing with some shit they’d much rather have not had to ever even think about. Sometimes the losses come because of who you are. That’s a tough pill to swallow for a while. Though you might get used to it. But two parts of yourself you cannot afford to part ways with are your sense of humor and capacity to be kind. Life is inherently completely fucking absurd and so much of it is out of your control that sometimes the only real way to cope with it is through tear-inducing laughter or simply being a nice human being. These facets of a personality are crucial, and will help you get through the often painful process of making peace with what you’ll never get back—and they’ll also aid you in moving forward. Any day where you have or elicit some laughs and/or are truly good to someone else is far from a total wash. Even and especially when everything else seems to be fully going to shit. Which, *looks around*, sure seems to be the case.

10. Chances are high you probably won’t make a drastic impact on a macro level—though you should never be faulted for trying. Doesn’t mean you can’t change the world by making even the tiniest of differences within your realm or perimeter of influence. You can do what you can to do more good than bad, care for the people you love and have some sort of positive effect on what you’re able. If everyone did this the world would be a better place. And if you give it a shot you might find it’s not all that difficult—often doesn’t cost you a thing except a little effort.

11. Nostalgia can have its beneficial and even joyful moments, but it can also really mess with you. When the past fucks you, it always fucks you from behind. Best to keep your head on a swivel—to learn from what’s happened so far and leave it at just that: a learning experience.

12. It’s important to acknowledge what you cannot do, but even more important to acknowledge what you should not do, especially when it goes against the grain of what you for some reason think people expect of you.

13. It’s astounding (if you have vaguely narcissistic tendencies, which many of us do) to realize how few people really expect anything from you or care what you do with your life. The ones you’re losing sleep over are probably sawing logs and not thinking of you at all. If you find a way to accept and embrace this, it can be extremely freeing. Should that happen, please get in touch with me and share your secrets.

14. You’ve got to be careful who and what you pretend to be. The more you polish a mask, the tougher it gets to maintain, but the more it becomes a genuine part of you.

15. At a certain point it’s pretty crucial to learn the difference between impulsively doing something for immediate relief or gratification and calculatedly doing something you’re hopefully not going to regret in the long run. Then when you find yourself in that type of situation, you have to choose between being a coward or summoning something at least vaguely similar to valiance.

16. Sometimes, the best way to win is to quit. Quitting is often maligned, but some of the greatest decisions I’ve made that have altered my life for the better have been because I have left a situation. It’s often seemed stupid at the time—and the bigger my gut get the harder it seems to trust—but sometimes you have to roll the dice and see what happens. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Jesus take the keyboard. Etc.

17. Confidence and trust are both tough to gain and easy to lose.

18. Sadness, depression, anhedonia, anxiety, etc. are not the kind of bullies that go away if you ignore them. You have to lean in, feel a lot, go through some shit. Passing through some dark nights alone in a contemplative state with your own (sometimes horrifying, even if they’re banal) thoughts can help in dealing with the hand you’ve been dealt as far as temperament and sensitivity—and the decisions you’ve made because of those things.

19. Sometimes forgetting is an absolute blessing. The people and experiences truly worth remembering will stick with you for a long time, maybe forever. There are, I assume, reasons for that.

20. There are worse things than being alone. One is probably getting so caught up in and set in your ways that you don’t let anyone else in. Because then you might never meet someone and make things work with them, get to truly enjoy the time you get to spend with someone who you’d rather be with more than you’d like to be all by yourself.

21. Dry spells build character. Try not to let it get you down. Keep the faith that one day you may taste lipstick again.

22. If someone is trying to change you, you don’t have to follow their lead. You may want to think long and hard about why they would want to, though.

23. What makes you genuinely happy changes over time.

24. Hope is a dangerous thing. But so are so many of the things that keep us going.

25. Nothing has been the end of the world. Yet.