America
Marty Crane would have voted for Trump.
Frasier is reminiscent of a time when it was just an unquestionable part of life to squabble with family members over wildly different political views.
My Writing
What's cooking in my head and heart. All posts are sent out via my newsletter, Somethingburger 🍔.
Family
Spend Time With Kids
Spending time with kids is inviting liberatory chaos into your life. The same kind of chaos that characterizes love, aging, illness — really anything rooted in the most vulnerable human experiences that make us feel deeply connected to one another.
Womanhood
Summer Makeover
Everyone’s trying to permanently dial back time through radical beauty procedures and self-harm. Fuck — I just want to lie to myself for a couple of hours.
Family
Letting the Oil Run Off
When we sold the food business my parents started in the early 1980s a few years ago, I was deeply concerned it would kill my father.
That’s because it was the truest expression of his undivided self.
America
Stand on Purpose
Standing on purpose and grief are one and the same. Those of us working in the trenches in our communities experience these in tandem, knowing that the blessing of purpose and the curse of grief are tightly interwoven.
Health
Suffering as Grace
Something I’m really grateful for, which having this eye condition taught me, is that when your body sends a distress signal, you need to stop and slow down against all conditioning.
Family
I was such an asshole.
Sometimes I randomly apologize to my mother for being a little shit and it makes her emotional, which confirms that I have indeed been, or still am, a little shit.
Memoir
The Backyard at Longview
In my silent picture memories out back in the old house at Longview, a few places stand out. The window above the sink overlooking the backyard. A walnut tree. An ornate altar to the Virgin Mary.
Memoir
Watermelon Girls
Justin Timberlake's recent run-ins with the law reminded of the watermelon girls who shared a table with me in art class. We had nothing in common, but a semester is long enough to forge lasting memories.
Family
Ode to a Creep
I credit my sister for all of our major family trips. While my parents and I are very dynamic people, we’re also a bunch of stick-in-the-mud homebodies. A recent excursion reminded me of a funny time we had together.
Memoir
A Useful Childhood
I’ve always seen going to school as a choice, even though it was compulsory and truancy was enforceable by law. Maybe that's because I had somewhere else to go that was steeped in usefulness.
Impact
Banana Season
In education we frequently hear, “It’s all about the kids.” But this is a profession like any other, and like all professionals, youth practitioners need to feel valued and fulfilled in their work. So here's some good stuff that happened recently.
Business
A Tale of Two Braids
Sometimes you have to get over yourself, as the hump standing in your own way, and just go for things. Trouble is, that's not how I was raised or what I was taught was right -- and I carry that in my hair.
Family
Daddy Stories
My life is full of my father’s stories. He is a delightful man, and rampant conversation dominator. He has travelled the world, seen life, built an empire, and he has a right to talk.
Work
A Self-Made Retreat
Being away helps me realize so much about myself and my anxiety-inducing behavior patterns that hobble me in my day-to-day life, such as my complete and utter inability to settle into swaths of unstructured time.
Business
Peace Through Commerce
In September 2023, I rage-launched Los Compas Coffee, a coffee roasting social enterprise that teaches opportunity youth about the liberatory power of small business entrepreneurship.
Community
The Fruits of Flipping Bitches
One sunny day in December 2022, I was barreling down the main road that runs through my neighborhood and zipped by a fellow smoking a cigar outside of his garage in a thoroughly 1990s windbreaker. A glint caught my eye.
Health
When Life Shakes You Down
In December of 2021, I languished in a hospital bed for nine days. An infection was carved out of my body. It was the scariest time, the medical trauma of which has only recently fallen off.