All tagged non-fiction

When we returned for breakfast, she watched with surprising disinterest as dog food bowls were filled on the counter. I guess she’d never been fed from a bowl. But when it was her turn to eat, she devoured it as though she’d never been fed at all. I noticed when we were outside that she ate dirt, and wondered if this is how she’d been surviving. “What a life,” I told Bill. He just stared quietly.

On election night, November 7, 2016, when ABC Election coverage announced that Donald Trump took Florida, I actually went into the bathroom, closed the door, lowered the toilet lid, sat down, and cried. I know quite a few of us who did the same; we knew something we could not explain, something hitherto unprecedented had just happened. When North Carolina and Ohio went red and finally, Iowa, I wretchedly watched George Stephanopoulos, clearly nonplussed, ask his co-anchoring panel of pundits, “How could this happen when a solid majority of Americans said that Donald Trump wasn’t qualified for the job?”

In today’s society, we often take great pleasure in putting down our enemies. One especially fun way to do that is to compare them to despised or disgusting things. If a teacher is too strict, the he or she is like a boring BDSM master or mistress. If a roommate is lazy, then he or she is a useless pile of crap. Because both of my parents worked in education, my natural enemy is the Republican Party. And so, to get in on the fun, I will say that the current Republican Party is like Keyser Soze from the film The Usual Suspects.

Hi, other white guys. I know that we see each other all the time, but we don’t really talk about stuff, you know? Rock music, maybe, football, sure, but not serious stuff. I know that that sounds weird or like I’m going to hassle you, but it looks like a lot of us have made a mistake. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a hard time about slavery. That was bad, for sure, but it’s not really my place to talk to you about that.

Pets and a garden work wonders as allies through transitions. I don’t mean large ones, like a death or a move or a birth, though I’m sure they’re good during those too, I mean quotidian ones to which you’d think you’d be able to adjust all by yourself, but in fact, without soft allies, you don’t.

We wade in the middle of the still blue waters of Capo Caccia. Vivienne, who has taken a break from preparing lunch, tells me the story of the island’s most notorious brothers. She and her husband George have lived on their yacht in Bosa for the past fifteen years, and they have taken us out, Nick and me and three other couples, to spend the day exploring the island’s surrounding caves and capes. We are in unchartered territory.

At the end of winter, I was looking to blow some money on something fragile and undemanding. I bought the Instant Back with my Diana camera because I knew no one had patience on St Denis street after 6pm. I wanted to be as happy as the faces on the instax mini fujifilm, rainbows and bears screwing without prejudice inside my hair. I wanted that. You said, Lomography is a scam run by straight, white, billionaire men and I said, how me something that isn’t.