Your last post (A love letter, on your birthday)
I don’t know exactly when I stopped writing about you. It feels like it’s been a long time, though it’s not like I ever made it official… it was just an instinct I followed, a dog with my nose hovering a half inch above the ground. I could probably go back through these archives and pinpoint just when, but I never do that and I don’t feel like doing that today. I’d rather sit right here at the kitchen table, steeping in the sweet wake you left when you gushed out of here this morning, a blur of freckles and elbows and anticipation. On your tenth birthday. I know that I used to write about you without apology.  Little things you’d said, or funny things you’d done,

TSA took my baby, @mybottlesup, and the trigger happy Internet
I was away from Twitter yesterday, or I probably would have re-tweeted it, too; Nic from My Bottle’s Up and her terrifying account of TSA agents separating her from her baby in the name of security. I logged on this morning, read Nic’s post, and expressed my sympathy for what she had endured. I believed her; partly because I’ve come to think of her as an Internet friend, and partly because I’ve been through something similar at the airport with my own children. Within seconds of my supportive tweet I received several DM’s alerting me t

Here it comes.
My computer cursor pounds, a telltale Hitchcock heartbeat, an unavoidable thudding, a steady command. I think about what I could be getting away with, and yet I can’t make myself peck it out. It’s never been this hard for me before, this weird, this arrhythmic. This jagged of a fucked up atrial beat, the writing, the words, the weather, the turn. I know this place. This is that awful purgatory, that space in time when I know where I have to go but these feet won’t listen, I stop stuck and there’s this tiny smidgen inside that still believes like a kid, a kick poof of dirt, that protests, that hopes that this season could be different, and why not? Why the h

Forgive me, blogosphere, for I have sinned
It has been sixteen days since my last post. I’ve let emails pile up and left all kinds of messages unanswered. I’ve only glanced at my feed reader on occasion, in between interviews here or on the way to a wedding there. Basically, I’m out of the loop. I’ve always told myself there’s nothing that can’t wait, that the world will not disappear if I look away from it for a while, but the truth is there are people doing amazing things out there every day–and I’ve dropped the ball. Kevin, I know I’m late on this, but if this post brings awareness for even one more person, then timing doesn’t matter, right? Pleas

Class Reunion
I am wearing a girdle. We are in the truck and I can barely move, each bump of the struts forcing my internal organs to spoon. It’s ridiculous, really, that I would wedge myself into this modern version of that old sadistic contraption, my hip and belly fat now resting uncomfortably near my neck. It’s ridiculous because I see so many of these people, these gentle people, pretty regularly on a day-to-day basis. It’s not like I traveled far beyond my bittersweet sticky hometown in the first place. It’s not like they don’t know what I look like now, how much older, thicker, quieter I’ve gotten. It’s not like Facebook hasn’t made our lives a high school Groundhog’s Day as i