The Writer's Notebook

I’m feeling tired tonight, run down, yawning through conversations. My eyes have been drooping all afternoon.  

The great news, my blood pressure is finally coming down—thanks to the medication, I suppose. But as my friend Luke insists, it’s probably the result of a combination of changes I’ve been making.

No one ever asks for my side of the story when I tell them I don’t really celebrate Father’s Day. They just jump to assumptions, accusations, and lectures. Every year, the same: I should forgive my father. I’ll regret it when he’s dead.

She told me she doesn’t expect me to ever make any money. Her love for me isn’t about that. That’s what she told me during one of our rides from the train station last week. She desperately wants me to let go of the feeling of failure that burns into the pit of my chest […]

I wholly accept that the occasional bad day is part of life. However, when my day is ruined by some bottom-feeding debt collector, that just makes me snap like an angry dog for the duration.   Of course, I’m blowing it out of proportion. I’m sure. One of the credit card debts I accumulated during an […]

I’ve been watching the shock of 9/11 ripple through my culture. I’ve been reading and writing and teaching whenever and wherever I can. Things are already much worse than I thought they would be almost thirteen years after 9/11. We have conversations that we would have never had before: legitimate rape and all the other offensive war on women talking points, and the spying, and the passive acceptance of the death of privacy, and on and on.

From the 2003 Television docudrama: George Orwell—A Life in Pictures.

Have you noticed this obsession with Edward Snowden’s income? They keep making the same point in the media. He claims he made $200K a year, but Evil Corporation says they were only paying him $120K a year. 

Is it possible for a detail to be more beside the point? His salary? Who gives a shit?

It seems one can’t avoid this Edward Snowden the NSA is spying on us story. People from every circle of my life, even my apolitical friends, are talking about it. There’s the usual banter from my social media crowd—outrage and the nuances of the story ignored by the mainstream media.

I wanted to write something hopeful tonight, because today’s visit to the doctor did not go well. My blood pressure is too damn high, and I am officially taking medication to bring it down. Alarm bells are going off in my head, I can assure you. My father has been hospitalized for high blood pressure. So has my mother. So has my sister. My aunt has high blood pressure. So did my late grandmother.

It’s been over a year since I stopped taking Lexapro. The withdrawal, after five years of dosing, has been nothing to joke about—severe dizziness, severe nausea, severe headaches, and a sensation that other withdrawing patients have dubbed “the brain zaps.”