Author: OoD

20 years on, he didn’t know whether he should break down sobbing or smother her with a pillow. Probably both. He felt that way about most of his patients and it had worn him down. He was drinking too much, losing sleep and had developed a pronounced limp. Physician, destroy thyself.

With you, I feel like I do with myself. Like nobody.

Their rigorously maintained veneer of civility lasted 90 seconds into his birthday toast.

Sitting in this chair, trying to not piss anyone off.

“We liked drinking together, but even more than that we liked drinking alone.”

In an early draft she referred to him as “recessive to the point of nonexistent,” but then later edited him out.

We spent the next two decades holed up on the Cape in a drafty pink ranch house where I slammed out hundreds of short stories for low-paying sci-fi pulps. As it turns out, financial ruin and amphetamines make for a powerful muse. For a time we had a side line raising mushrooms in our basement, but it never paid off. That period finally ended when a collection of my writing marketed under the title The Unsound Mind of L. Rand Steiner met with modest success.

Listen—I never really made it out of there. The kids gave up on me long ago. Ann and I no longer speak. There’s a bad feeling lodged deep in my chest. The last time we spoke my son looked me in the eye and said well, Dad, it’s been weird. I didn’t know if he was saying goodbye, and was afraid to ask.

He was someone who could at the same time be held in the highest esteem and lowest contempt.

Few people are cruel enough to say what they’re thinking.

Another word for provocateur: asshole.

As they walked through their friends’ beautiful house, he was saddened to glimpse the exhaustion in his wife’s eyes. For her it had been for poorer, not richer, and in sickness, not health.

A contagion of insanity is loose in the land.

We all have those rare friends who seem to generate an irresistable force field that draws people to them. I have the opposite power; my side of the room is always dependably empty and silent.

All I can trust right now is this chair, bobbing between glaciers somewhere in the black North Atlantic.

Sorry, can’t stop; I have to push this rock up this mountain.

Going back to writing on tablets. Not electronic ones. Short pieces carved in stone.

Could you be a little less oracular? It’s irritating AF.

I still see them from time to time, taking their daily walk. How I’d hoped for that for us.

She said, everything is barely.

Far too finely wrought to be good.

Notes for a series of notes.

This big, beautiful world is made up of all kinds of people, and on a given day you might despise any one of them.

Really, I should be grateful; performing this mindless work spares me the burden of maintaining self respect.

I’m going to drag my shit hair and shit beard in my shit car over to my shitty ass apartment, think about your smug superiority and thank god that I’m not you.

Finally, she said, after all these years, I feel truly seen. At this point the problem is, I want to be unseen.

He mumbled something about having gone through “some stuff” and then proceeded with a horrific tale of his afflictions, bereavements, addictions and injuries in the ten years since I had last seen him. It was a miracle he was still alive. Nevertheless, I had to admit, he still looked better than I did.

She held up her hand and said, no photos. I don’t want to remember anything about this.

The best advice I ever got, although for a time I didn’t take it that way. It wasn’t offered in kindness—just a curt STFU.

As we threw out the remains of the litter box we realized this was the last vestige of his physical presence—a fittingly catlike form of scattering ashes—and cried like babies.

Like many spiritual leaders, he had a far higher asshole quotient than one would have expected from his public persona.

Over the years the simple act of finding the precise words had seemed to mitigate his inner collapse. But they weren’t the right words; he’d been a fool.

In his bewilderment he slept on her side of the bed, with a gun under the pillow.

A grey, windy, wet morning—beautiful and alive in a way a more perfect one could never be.

Every night you pray for their protection. You pray for their protection from you.

You learn something new every day. And yet you never learn it.

Watching in disbelief as the unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Shitting on a tablecloth, expecting it to sort itself into a menu and an eight course meal.

We miss you terribly, without the comfort of knowing our love and respect was reciprocated.

As ideas, opinions, and beliefs slowly metastasize into ignorance.

In the fullness of the bleakness of late November a nod of gratitude for this day.

Realizing gradually, then all of a sudden, all of the stuff that’s never going to happen.

I was young. I thought I was an artist, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Looking back, I’m embarrassed—even now, for what is obvious to others but not to me.

Courage when you have none
Endurance when you have none
Patience when you have none
Kindness when you have none

Always never not letting go.

The one thing you have in common:
desperation.

Walking past the house I hear Jerry yelling at Siri again. It’s that time of night.

Our lives flew by. Days piled up and were plowed under.

They consistently allowed themselves to be at their worst with each other, which when you think about it is kind of beautiful.

He said, with exaggerated sadness, as if embarrassed for me, your work is very earnest.