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?

I awoke no more than ten minutes ago and already so much has been consumed

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Apart from all these violent events, Raziel, De Kuff, and the other cult members have been moving between Jerusalem, Safed (site of the ancient

The story of religious mania and the story of political violence look very likely to converge on each other.  Having consciously elected the first, Lucas keeps being drawn, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly, toward the other. Both feature his new inamorata, Sonia Barnes.

There is a universe of existence we have no words for, and maybe that is why we sequester ourselves in naturally quarantined cities: fear of the unknown and unintelligible.

If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)

“How do I know if it’s right?” I wrote. “How did you know?” “I just knew,” she texted back. 

I ain’t supposed to know about these woods. But I did know the coyotes.

Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...

I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.