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July 11 - July 24, 2024
Pop knew that the best way to rid yourself of trauma was to bequeath it to your children. He was a generous man.
Most people go to marriage counseling when they’re at the precipice, but we’ve already gone over the precipice and discovered another precipice down below, from which we also fell, and another, then another, until all our bones were broken, our spines severed, our lungs punctured.
Christians are everywhere, man. It’s a cult.
I wanted the truth, but not, you know, that truth. I wanted kinder truth, truth I could work with, or at least a courteous lie. A lie would have been nice.
They pined in secret for years, he for her, she for him, but nothing happened, she said. Only if pining in secret is nothing.
The serious ones asked too much of me, I felt, though the truth is, we were vampires all, sucking what we needed from one another and moving on to the next victim.
Marriage is a partnership, the ministers and officiants of weddings tell us, a dance, duet, sun and moon, rain and shine, gin and tonic, Ali and Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle, and everybody wins, or nobody: some couples die in the ring of brain trauma and broken hearts.
Lauren had begun looking at me the way you look into a sack of fast food when the order’s wrong and you’re already two miles down the road.
I made a mental list of all the women I would probably make out with, which ended up being most of them, which seemed unwise.
This question of the apparent cruelty of a God who lets it happen is not original, I know, every Goth kid in your high school had the same question, but when you grow up in a system of belief that presumes to explain every jot and tittle of existence, and then you find a bag of tittles and jots in a chest buried underneath the church, you wonder why nobody told you about them.
Actions have consequences. Even witch’s covens and farmer’s markets have guidelines.
As ridiculous as my father’s public prayers could be, they were no match for the madness of praying wrought by social media, where distant high school acquaintances, people I hadn’t seen in years, would cryptically announce some malady of body or spirit and demand my petitions. “Unspoken prayer request,” they’d say. “Prayers comin’ your way!” everybody piped in. “Praying now, girl!”
The enemy was Now. Now was bad. Now would strip your family naked and turn your sons into rutting lizards and your daughters into childless foot models. Now would make your husband breed with poker machines and your wife do the Electric Slide. Now would raise your taxes and take your guns, and guns were important because your sons needed alternatives to the imaginary guns of video games, which melted their brains and could make them do terrible things, such as go looking for your guns.
I INTERRUPT others because I am blessed with a gift for telling more interesting stories than the ones currently being told to me, and which I cannot wait to tell, because I want to communicate to the person that while he or she is interesting, I once met Jim from The Office.
THE WORST
Rather, I play the drums, an instrument that has caused more divorces than any other musical instrument in world history, after the banjo.
It’s a sad thing to see your wife weep because she has to stay married.
I stopped mocking those lucky people who pretend to be married to their best friends, even though I worried they were pretending marriage isn’t an impossible riddle only solved by breaking both of you in half.
A woman’s insides are a chaos of Gaia energy that frightens mortals.
How humiliating, to communicate with your lover via LinkedIn messenger, the lowest form of communication developed by humankind. That ghostly digital wood haunted by robotic sales leeches.
I don’t believe in the idea of soulmates, not because I am unromantic, but because I am unstupid.
