i have nothing for today.

On the second day of a UC Berkeley Extension writing class, when we had already read each other’s work, brainstormed, snacked and lunched, a woman, I’ll call her Susan, shared out about her childhood (I don’t remember what sparked it).…

Lonely, for no one really explains what I do that turns them off. Rejected! I have to figure it out for myself. Isaac, your rejection pushes me to examine the crimes I've done to you. Hurt! Frances, what am I…

On my battery’s . LOL

Jana puts down a teapot in the center of her perfectly round table. I move my chair closer and sit up straighter. Jana has a way of making me behave. The curtains she'd actually sewed herself hang lightly over the…

One compensation (I found at least one!) for getting old is that one can become lonely for no one. (And I just realized I used the word “one” three times in “one” sentence.) In another way, and totally contradictory, one…

When the Nazis arrested Jewish families and deported them to Camps or their death, the places where the Jews had lived were redistributed to good Germans. Germans with good connections got the fanciest ones, poorer Germans got other ones proportionately.…

i think shame is the most glorious purple oceans and oceans of orchids upon fuschias a million lilacs a thousand peonies lots and lots of grape lollipops so many blues and reds that's the combo of magic that's the combo…

You know the colors. Paint hues that are barely colors at all, like the pale green of a slightly nauseated face, or the pale yellow of sickly urine, or the pale grey of....well....grey! Walls painted so anemically, it's as if…

There was a man named Gil Dennis who spoke at writing conferences. I think I heard him for the first time at Tin House twenty or so years ago, and then again at Squaw Valley maybe ten or twelve years…

Amerlia's best friend always had the best housing karma. In Santa Barbara she lived in a cottage on the cliffs overlooking the sea. No other student lived within miles of her. In Berkeley before that she had a two story…

The color of shame is transparent. Like saliva, like pee in the pristine porcelain bowl when six glasses of water are what I happily manage to swallow. Like water in the goldfish tank in Biology class, shame is a total…