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Sometimes, something is so close, you can’t see anything at all. Like the arrow between the E and the X in Fed Ex. See it now? I’m not entirely sure how that applies to this post, but it seems to make sense. Like, how, sometimes everything’s fine, really good even, but the Big Drama overtakes…

Which came first, the music or the melancholy? Do I listen to pop music because I’m melancholy? Or am I melancholy because I listen to pop music? It has been (lovingly, I hope) brought to my attention that The Daily Journal is rife with mentions of melancholy. I gave this some thought as I walked…

The guy behind the Starbucks counter at Christopher & West 4th always wears eye shadow, lipstick, and a smile. This morning he asked me how my weekend was. “Miraculous,” I replied. “Yours?” “Interesting,” he said. “I learned a lot of valuable lessons.” Me too. Saturday was one beautiful moment after another. My cousins Brian and…

In my dream, a television news helicopter is hovering over a newly opened marine air terminal. As the reporter explains the dynamics of oceanic takeoff, a departing plane flounders, and sinks. After a dramatic pause in reporter commentary, the plane resurfaces, its passengers drowned. The next flight is mine. I step into a new type…

The countdown to 1980 is the first New Year’s I can remember. I was lying alone on a futon in the TV room of our Oak Park, IL, home, watching the ball drop, thinking, ‘This is significant. Nothing will ever be the same.’ A year later, my parents were separated. My mother, brother and I…

Why is love so often equated to fireworks? What is the quality of these celestial explosions, these ‘colored lights, smoke, and noise for sake of amusement’ that relates to the heart? Is it the temporal nature of fire and sky? The fleeting dynamism of explosions? Fierce beauty that sparkles and fades? Proximity to perceived danger?…