The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet

I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.

Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.

I’d learned from Rock of Love that a diabetic’s rollercoaster blood sugar is a constant interruptor at best.

I was the only person in my family this level of depravity happened to.

I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.

No cheating; you've got to keep your fingers touching my fingers. Good. Remember to keep your hands flat. Flat and steady and ready.

When I broke up with you, I thought you might kill me, and somehow, I was bored.

Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months

You will read my restrained but subtly brutal birth story and finally recognize that we who give birth are dauntless soldiers returning to the fight and we are also the old men ignoring the bombs because we have animals at home we love too much to go on and we have never felt more alive than we do right now.

Like if I were at this apartment in 2009 I’d be talking to some guy with scraggly teeth and pockmarked skin and a hoodie but he’d also be like, unconventionally handsome, but you could tell the last time he talked to his mom he said some fucked up shit and probably beat up his siblings growing up, and I’d be thinking ‘this seems like…my only option…’ 

People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.

Being sleep deprived while in quarantine is like living in this dream I had a few days ago where I died but didn’t lose consciousness and for the rest of the dream I floated over a muddy creek with no ability to interact with the world in any way.

This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.

Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.

At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.

The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.

This will not work.

“How ‘bout it, Ronnie. Throw something Butch can hit. Try over the plate for once.”

I could have no path, no idea of what I should be or how I should live. I could skate through neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t find a Mormon church or anyone who knew I had strayed from the path I was raised to follow

In my head, dating women was a body competition.

Because let’s face it, boiled tea does not meet my privileged standards for heat. 

I remember being young and small and barefoot on the concrete floor: look closely and see how the cicada shells vibrate as the Texas Hill Country winds sift in.

If I’m going to be honest, my life has been running at something of a parallel to Husker Football for the last ten years, over which time I’ve tried to hack it as a musician, restaurateur, and writer.

My mother once jumped off a boat into a swarm of jellyfish. Why did she think they would not sting?