I am digging myself out of a hole.

I haven’t written here in months, not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t.

Before all these life changes happened, I spent years worrying over whether my job would end.1

I wasn’t immobilized, not really. I still taught classes, marked papers, got up in the mornings at a somewhat respectable hour. I still played with our kids and enjoyed vacations and time with friends.

But for those years, I had a kind of film over my experience, a bubble of worry.

When the bubble went away, I worried about everything.

Four years ago my therapist retired. We began meeting a decade before, when one of my books got a searingly bad review in a big publication. Such public humiliation, which ended any higher aspirations for literary stardom, seemed so public that I couldn’t leave the house for a week.

Gradually, I got back to writing. I made my next project writing about growing up and my father, who was a major figure in my life until he up and left our family when I was 17. Writing about my dad would help me figure out why the hurt he brought upon me and my family still had such a hold, all those years later.

All along, I met with my therapist, and wondered out loud if I was a good writer, or ever was.

My therapist, patient and kind, asked questions and I answered them. I sat in a deep-cushioned love seat from some college crash pad and wondered what other people thought of me.

I realized that yes, it is a big thing to deal with when one’s dad fucks off to Arizona just as you’re entering adulthood. And it’s not easy going into the creative writing industry when you are the first person in your family to go to college, let alone grad school. It makes sense to work in academia and not feel understood or respected when the overwhelming majority of professors come from super-privileged backgrounds.

Ten years later, after months of giving notice that the day would come, my therapist retired. Our last session felt like a graduation ceremony or exit interview. I was in a relatively good spot. The book I was working on had come out and, while it wasn’t a best-seller by any measure, it went out into the world. Maybe more importantly, it didn’t get any bad reviews.

As I walked to leave, we hugged for the first and last time. She was a tiny lady and I had to stoop down. I wiped away the beginnings of a teardrop.

“You give me hope for young people,” she said, smiling. I was 52 at the time.

She died a year later.

A link to her funeral notice popped up on Facebook. I could tell she was a badass, but not nearly as much of a badass as I would later learn. She grew up in a bumfuck Upstate New York town and worked as a counselor, raised two sons, knew French, and traveled all over the world.

The last couple of years as my college went into a death spiral, I was left to worry on my own.

Something I have learned in the past couple of years is that, when extreme things happen, they can offer clarity.

When college trustees or God or the cosmos determine how your career will end or when the life of someone close to you ends, these lead to events of hyperreality, moments you relive and reenact, over and over again. When that happens, you can re-run the game tape and analyze it.

I can sometimes needle-drop a memory and dive right back in.

It sounds cool. It’s not.

Virginia Woolf calls it “moments of being.” Most of our life is non-being, she writes: taking out the trash, going to work, the boring shit. Moments of being are her private shorthand for other moments that exist on a heightened plane, things you always remember that lead to an “avalanche of meaning.”

They don’t have to be these big-ticket events. For Virginia, her examples are, like, jumping puddles or giving toffee to a boy.

“I often wonder,” Virginia Woolf writes, “[whether] things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?”

OK, Virginia. Sure.

That sounds harsh. But it’s true. The Woolf words help, but that’s just not how memory, let alone grief, always works.

The way Woolf talks about it sounds downright pleasant, or at least intellectually pleasing. It’s seductive to look at a shitty life through a Modernist lens.

I’m only now realizing that what Woolf means by moments of being is something totally different—maybe even the opposite—of what I’m trying to get at. She’s talking about small, isolated moments that suddenly glow with meaning.

I’m talking about something else entirely, a word I’ve avoided because it feels like it doesn’t belong to me, like I’m not allowed to claim it.

I’ll just fucking say it: trauma.

I have a new shrink now. It’s fine so far, or getting better. We’re still feeling each other out. She’s really smart and has all sorts of ideas about taking a holistic approach to mental health. I’ve done blood work and other tests.

But here’s something I am really mad about regarding how I am spending my therapy sessions: instead of talking about the recent Big Events in my life that has led me down this path, or even re-retelling my whole life story, which will take more than a few sessions to get through, I’m talking about What Happened to Me the Other Day at Work. It’s my decision to do that, but I am reaching the point where I am frustrated that I can’t get back to normal.

Let me back up. I have a new job. It’s a 9 to 5—or to be more precise, 8:30 to 4:15.

Is it a career or forever job? No. It doesn’t have to be. This is because I am old AF. I am the oldest and most junior person in my office. It’s both less demanding and more terrifying than my previous career.

It’s less demanding because I am writing, editing, and doing tech stuff that I can wrap my head around it. I work with words and communication. It checks boxes. I’m the entry-level person in my department. There is no other way to describe this other than strange. I am learning new crafts. That’s the job interview way of putting it. Another way of putting it: It’s been decades since I’ve sat in a cubicle.

It’s also terrifying because I am navigating a whole new emotional landscape of people and culture and interactions and backstories and ambitions and doublespeak and politics and expectations I’ve put on myself and my chest will sometimes just go gets aflame with anxiety over the smallest perceived mistake and I guess I am getting used to being not the best at what I do.

I don’t know if this is why my chest flames up. But I do know it’s why I can’t write.

Days go by before I feel short of breath and dry in the mouth. A headache sneaks in, some echo of fear wells up behind my eye sockets.

Is it from the new job? Some moment-of-being flashback?

The body sends smoke signals and I’ve been covered in smoke for years.

If you really want to hear about it, like Holden Caulfield, says, I have always experienced fight-or-flight, stress response, body-over-mind moments in ways that seem more than other people. When you lose one job you think you will lose all of them. It colors your world after that for some time, maybe even a lifetime after that. I’ll let you know.

What I do know is that it goes right into the body.

Days off, I’ll vape indica and CBD and listen to Yellowman or Cindy Lee.

I self-medicate and try to put sentences together.

All I come up with are dependent clauses.

Because my therapist retired and then died.

When I finally sit down to write about this.

Since my career went up in flames. Which sticks out in my mind.

If I think about it too long.

There are times when I feel I’m getting out of this hole. My oldest daughter is away at college and is blossoming into an impressive adult (despite her roasting my serious-toned Substacks; no DNA test needed). My youngest daughter is learning to drive and doing this thing I never did in high school called “studying hard.”

Other times, I fear I am approaching the acceptable time horizon of when I should have gotten over all of this.

Almost two years ago to the day, I sat down with a laptop at my local coffee place and wrote thousands of words in a single seating, processing how my career/calling/job was about to be over.

I don’t know how I did it. I don’t write stressed. I write when it’s over. I’m from the William Wordsworth emotion recollected in tranquility school.

I need some dust to settle. As I write this, it’s not over and there’s dust around me. And yet here I am. I am still here, writing this. See how much I sacrifice for you, dear reader?

I am digging myself out of a hole.

I’m glad you’re still here.

I’m glad you read this.

Stay with me. I’ll be back soon.

Thanks for reading.

I do apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

If you like what you’re reading, if you haven’t already please subscribe for free, share, and generally spread the word. If you’re into it.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

Earlier this year, I was invited to participate in Compass Roses: Maps by Artists, at Opalka Gallery on the campus of Russell Sage College in Albany, NY. The project consists of artists using maps to interpret their city in any way their wish.

If you’re in the area, come to the opening this Friday, September 12, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. I’ll be there, there will be music and a pop-up beer garden. The show is online at the Compass Roses website as well.

My entry adapts a campus map of The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where I taught as a professor for almost 20 years. In marked places--a building, street, or spot--I tell stories from my time there.

Along with the original map from the show, l include here for my Substack subscribers the map along with the legend and audio recordings.

1. Mandelbaum Hall (441 Western Ave)

My first office: the old dining room. I brought my own lamp and printer paper. Then they found it had its own parking lot and gave it to a vice president.

2. Unnamed Faculty Office Building (427 Western Ave)

Squirrels lived inside the walls. The day the college announced it was closing, a landlord left a note on my windshield, saying I couldn’t park there.

3. Dolan Hall (442 Western Ave)

Each September, when I picked up my first batch of mail, my department chair—a former nun—reminded me she wasn’t on the committee that hired me. She never skipped a year.

4. Albertus Hall (432 Western Ave)

Logging in over 12,000 hours of teaching here. If Malcolm Gladwell’s math checks out, I should’ve been a master by the end. I’m still not sure.

5. Events & Athletics Center (420 Western Ave)

Thursday nights, students read poems in the commuter lounge next to the Starbucks. The only time they ever looked nervous.

6. Saint Joseph Hall (985 Madison Ave)

Tried to book it once for a statewide high school poetry recitation final. This request was denied, since it conflicted with a dean’s favorite Zumba class.

7. Hubbard Interfaith Sanctuary (959 Madison Ave)

Named for a problematic bishop, yes. But still a favorite space—thanks mostly to Father Chris, who I called “Padre.”

8. Hudson Ave and Quail St

The heart of the “Student Ghetto.” My second office: a self-styled Russian pirate-run coffee shop, seized by the state in 2017.

9. It’s in this Parking Lot

where I learned grad students had filed a grievance over being assigned “The Pope’s Penis,” a Sharon Olds poem. “We wouldn’t read a poem called ‘The Ayatollah’s Penis,’” one wrote.

10. On the Walk Home to 49 Dove Street

if a class went well, I floated home. If not, I cursed myself and every life choice that brought me here, from leaving our apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn to the stupid shirt I wore.

11. Centennial Hall (930 Madison Ave)

Our final readings happened here. It took nearly 20 years to find a space where students could simply read their work aloud.

12. 105 South Main Ave

So much space in our first Albany apartment. I walked to work. My wife and I started thinking about having kids.

13. Lally School of Education (1009 Madison Ave)

One year, we spent convocation practicing on the new defibrillators, mounted in the walls like fire extinguishers. Another year, we blamed students’ lack of critical thinking on the death of cursive.

14. Campus Theatre (996A Madison Ave)

I finally booked this plum space for a poetry performance class in spring 2020. Then came COVID and the world went to shit.

15. 1002 Madison Ave

On this spot, I stood in the cold as the president read aloud the same email she’d sent the night before, the one that announced the college was closing.

16. It’s on this spot where,

two years after the Olds grievance, I learned I could keep my job. Well, sort of.

17. Human Resources (432 Western Ave)

May 16, 2024. I rang the bell to turn in my ID card and office keys. “And who are you?” she asked. She didn’t recognize me. After 19 years, I wasn’t surprised.

18. When I drive by the old campus these days,

memories flood in, uninvited. I spent a chunk of my adult life there. A whole career. The years blur together. I loved it. I cursed it at times. I miss the people. I miss the students. It was home.

Thanks for reading. If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe for free, share, and generally spread the word. If you’re into it.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

I guess I took the summer off, dear reader. I’d like to be able to say this was intentional and planned like applying for a sabbatical with a plan for travel and/or research. But the truth is several factors led to me getting blocked, and less sure-footed about putting words into the world.

Let’s state the obvious: I am not a confident writer. Hell, 99.9% of the time, I’m not a confident person. My way of dealing with the unconfident writer part it is just to work harder. I know I am not a great writer—maybe not even a good one. But I do work my ass off. Plus, I love writing. That helps.

The last couple of months other things have conspired to slow me down: Getting used to a new job where I am the oldest person in a new office, doing work I am still learning to do. De-coupling a self-identity as a professor of writing from the actual writing part. Grief from loss. Those are the big ones.

There’s also the fear that, on the page at least, I come off as a big ole whiner. People lose their careers all the time, right? And people lose their parents on the reg, too! Throw in the current president putting people far less privileged than myself in situations that are genuinely dangerous and threatening, while I’m just an old straight white dude wandering in a dark wood, the writer’s block deepens.

Writing my way out of blocks has been my solution. So let’s get on with it.

Flipping through notebooks again—the same ones I mentioned before—I came across a line I scribbled months ago, a reminder to write about certain subjects.

And here for your pleasure is a commonplace straight from the ole Moleskines.

The mailbox dress-downs

Every year, like clockwork, my department chair—a former nun—would say, "You know, Dan, the year you were hired I was on sabbatical and didn’t serve on the search committee," then walk away. Never missed a year.

Enrollment mis-managements

When people ask why recruitment lagged, I recall this one time when I tried to book the finals of a state high school poetry recitation competition in a big hall on campus. We’re talking hundreds of brainiac juniors and seniors from high schools across the state, an opportunity to show off the college, roll out the red carpet. I needed to get one big hall, and it was off-limits to the music folks only. Then I tried for the auditorium, and again the request was denied.

Why? It conflicted with a dean’s favorite Zumba class.

The Ayatollah’s Member

The parking lot where I found out students had filed a complaint against me—largely because I assigned Sharon Olds’ poem “The Pope’s Penis.”

In the class, one student ranted, “We wouldn’t read a poem called ‘The Ayatollah’s Penis.’” I wondered what Sharon Olds, my thesis advisor in my MFA program, would think about all this.

In the class, I replied, “There are many ayatollahs. And yes, if it were a good poem, we would totally read it.”1

Touhey Hall

This is where we had semester kick-off convocations. One year’s theme: student writing is terrible, bring back cursive. Another year, we practiced on the new defibrillators—on each other.

Another notebook scratch: HSP.

I remember the first time someone said that I was a Highly Sensitive Person. The person was trying to be nice.

I took it to mean I was a big pussy, a crybaby, or a drama queen.

I have come around to thinking I am a neurotic, self-centered drama queen with a dash of HSP. I contain multitudes!

Woman at bar with Mets jersey.

I was at a local Irish bar with my wife a couple of weeks ago, slinging back some local beer as one does on a Wednesday night without papers to mark. And there was this person at the bar whose face was super familiar, and I couldn’t place it. As my wife and I talked, a lobe of my brain searched the memory banks.

And I finally placed it: This was one of the students who had plagiarized a poem.

It was the one and only poetry workshop I got to teach at my college. I was ever so cautious about putting in for teaching a poetry workshop, since my hiring slot was in creative nonfiction and I didn’t want to step on toes. Plus, as time went on, I enjoyed teaching memoir and essays workshop better, where people couldn’t just throw their hands up and say “it’s poetry, and there are no rules.”

I had to fill in for the instructor at the last minute, and so with two weeks’ notice, I was teaching an upper-level poetry workshop, using the same hippie textbook that had been ordered. Ten weeks in, we were on “villanelle week,” and as we workshopped our way through the first half of the class, I remember saying how impressive people’s attention to meter and rhyme was.

How, I asked Dorothy (not real name), did you arrive at those off-rhymes in the final quatrain? They’re so good! I should have known when Dorothy responded non-verbally with a shrug, as if to say, “What can you do? It just came off the top of my dome!”

The rhymes did not come off the top of the dome. Come the next week, we were doing sonnets, and I started to get suspicious. I did some Google searches and came up with matches for Poem-Generator.org.uk, a primitive, pre-AI website that uses a Mad Libs-type interface to come up with poems. Three students were plainly using it to write a sonnet. I had three students hand in sonnets with similar language.

I know, I know. You’re going to trundle out that old chestnut from T.S. Eliot: “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.” And if this were a class on conceptual writing, or if the students presented their poems as having come from this website and talked us through their process, I wouldn’t have been as thrown off as I was. I might have even let it slide. But as it turns out, we had two poem-generator-written villanelles that students had workshopped and discussed as if it were theirs and theirs alone, and now I had three sonnets.

The dead giveaways were many: the stanza breaks, the heroic couplet at the end, among others. For illustration purposes, here’s a sonnet I just “generated” from the site:

Ode to the Plagiarizer
Plagiarizer, you inspire me to write.
I hate the way you comment, lies and write,
Invading my mind day and through the night,
Always dreaming about the banal flight.

Let me compare you to a flowing prune?
You are more glowing, unknowing and big.
Tight sun heats the epic peaches of June,
And summertime has the Bermuda rig.

How do I hate you? Let me count the ways.
I hate your humble brain, finger and smell.
Thinking of your all finger fills my days.
My hate for you is the minute Adele.

Now I must away with a modest heart,
Remember my light words whilst we're apart.

So I had three people with “Ode to the [Blank]” sonnets, three instances of “let me count the ways,” three “Now I must away / Remember my” couplets, among other things. Were we really going to workshop all three and not note the similarities?

For the first time in my teaching career, I had to bring up plagiarizing creative work and figure out what to do.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but it ended with me having a conference with each student. I saw how each reacted, and whether they would admit to using the site. I had an academic dishonesty form all filled out with highlighted passages, just like we were told to do by the administration and my colleagues. Only with my forms, I added a line for the students to sign, admitting they had done what they did, and acknowledging that, if it happened again, I would bring it to the administration with another academic dishonesty form and also include the one about the sonnet.

I was letting them off the hook, in other words, but I was also covering my ass in case they did it again, or complained about being accused of writing a RoboSonnet.

The reactions ranged widely. The first was despondent—they wanted to go to law school and this would ruin their chances. So they admitted the obvious and promised to never do it again.

The second didn’t think it was a big deal. He rolled in 15 minutes late, his jacket off-gassing pre-legalization era weed. He wondered what should be done, to which I said something along the lines of, “I can’t make you a more honest person. All I can do is point out when you’re not.”

And then, the third—the one who was sitting at the bar—was the most unrepentant. I pointed out the highlighted, identical words. The response was denial, denial, denial, but also the threat of filing a grievance against me for even bringing up the possibility that there was some academic dishonesty going on. I hadn’t even gotten to the part where I said I wasn’t going to do anything, just sign this here form and I’ll file this away.

She calmed down somewhat, but the fact that this person was white and from the upper middle-class suburbs and the other two were not did not escape my notice.

Old students at bars.

Points on old campus maps.

Baseball caps.

We live with our ghosts, and we write to survive them, to make friends with them on the page, maybe, I guess.

Thanks for reading. If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe for free, share, and generally spread the word. If you’re into it.

I do apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Mom’s birthday came and went last week. Grief doesn’t follow a calendar, but still.

I don’t know how many sentences I’ve read over the years that begin this way: “The thing about grief is….” But it’s a lot.

There are two kinds of humans: people who make generalizations about people, and people who don’t.

There are two kinds of writers: successful ones who make third-person-plural “we” statements, and the unsuccessful ones.

The sentences above are all attempts to begin this. None of them seem to work.

Call me an unsuccessful writer.

In my classes, I gave students models for their writing. “Make Your Own” assignments.

The one I like the best is “Make Your Own ‘White Album,’” which is modeled after Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” the title essay from her book with the same name. If you haven’t read it you should. It’s one of my all—time favorite.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is how it opens.

See? First-person plural,1 confident. I love that. If I couldn’t be confident, the least I could do as a teacher was for my students to feel that.

It was sometimes a battle to get students to write in the first person plural. It sounds oddly formal, for one thing. Do it one way, and you might sound like a priest giving a boring homily. Quite often, the early drafts would sound like Meredith’s voiceover narration in Grey’s Anatomy. “Sometimes, what we want is exactly what we need” or something like that.

I’m not yet used to seeing images of mom on Facebook or wherever and not reflexively sharing it or liking or making some funny comment about it.

One of the many shitty and cruel parts of being old and terminally online is that memories pop up of people who have gone: memories, throwbacks, “on this day” posts. Instead, my hand hovers over the phone screen or mouse, and I take a moment looking at the screen.

This will happen waiting in line for coffee or at work. And then I have to get on with whatever it is that I was trying to do.

Another Make Your Own assignment was modeled on “Variations on Grief,” an essay by Megan Daum. It’s been described as a “savage self-indictment,” but that only explains it in part.2

Reading “Variations on Grief” over the years has given me the courage to not be the hero in my own writing and to urge my students to do the same. Sometimes I really am the villain, or at least the antagonist as well as the protagonist, in my own stories. That’s just a fact.

It’s not just important to offer up all sides of oneself in personal narrative, I told my students. It’s absolutely necessary. You may find that, in making yourself unsympathetic, you will make more connections with readers than if you portrayed yourself as the perfect everyperson main character, so common in mainstream film.

Here’s the thing: I don’t feel like being unsympathetic when I write about mom. That’s just shitty.

What I will say is that me and mom had our battles over the years, but she and I stuck it out. That’s what matters.

When I was in my twenties, trying to figure out what to do after graduating college—a first in my family—I poked around at jobs. I was torn about defining myself as a writer, despite encouragement from teachers and other writers. I wasn’t even approaching being a capable writer back then, but I wanted to be a writer so badly, on a level I don’t think I’ve ever felt again. And I think that’s because I was trying to define myself as well as learn a whole craft.3

And so here I am, years later, a writer and writer alone, no struggle or hope, no ambition to speak of, writing about my dead mom.

My aunts and sister might be reading this and think it’s cruel of me to write “dead mom.” I don’t want them to feel that way.

It’s just that writing “dead mom” is the shortest, most effective and yes, maybe the most cruel way to get my point across. If you have a dead mom, you might get what I am saying here. If I wanted to let someone know I don’t feel so great or to leave me alone, I reserve the right to say “I’m just thinking about my dead mom right now—can you please buzz off?”

Mom would approve. Mom didn’t mince words.

Some specifics, from mom’s obituary, which I wrote:

Patti was known for many things: Jean Nate After Bath Splash, hot rollers, and prodding her sister Chrissy to wrap up long grace prayers before Thanksgiving dinner. She loved the taste of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, the hunkiness of Tom Selleck’s mustache, and the soulful sounds of Michael McDonald’s voice. She had a random dislike of actor Jeff Bridges and garlic. She ironed every outfit she ever wore and put on make-up every day. She called everyone “honey.”

This is not just about my dead mom, but how I am trying to get something out here, in these words, so I don’t have to carry it around all the fucking time.

A couple weeks ago, things were sucking in my day-to-day. I was piling on the worry about the future, worried about my kids in ways only catastrophizing parents can do, thinking about how so many items of my writing career wish list were gone. And then, my mind, aided by a little “Caroline No” on the car stereo, brought out the big one: mom isn’t here. There’s no one to call and have a meandering conversation that adds perspective to the day. The exhaustion. The eyes on the verge. The quivering mouth.

And then, next song, next red light. Gone.

This is about my grief. Or at least defining it for myself. When our dad died more than ten years ago, writing about that felt like working up myself into some sort of feeling, an approximation of what we could call grief. Grief as an absence, a man who I loved as a child and hated as a man. Trauma-dumping, as the kids say these days.

That writing-as-performance style is all over the bookstores these days, lyric essayists who think they’re chopping up experience like some J. Dilla. It often comes from a place of privilege, sidestepping real stories because it might expose the comfort underneath. I know I am being cruel, catty even. But when it comes to grief, my grief, it’s about telling stories. It’s a working class thing I grew up with, and I miss it. I hate that I broke from it so hard, dismissed it as some bullshit superstition.

That cardinal outside is mom giving us a sign.

I just talked to her in a dream.

She’s right here, at the bar, doing a shot with me.

Some more specifics:

Friends and family remember her as hilarious. She would mug for the camera next to statues and signs. She would often, at formal gatherings, contract a case of the giggles. From honors inductions ceremonies, funerals, and poetry readings to student concert recitals and one yoga class in the 1970s, Patti would often send others into suppressed, simpering laughter.

In the top drawer of my desk is the yellow procession flag from mom’s funeral. I clipped it to our car with FUNERAL facing the front as we auto-processioned from church to gravesite. I keep it in my desk folded in half to say FUN. Put the fun in funerals, she’d say. I’d like to think she’d get the joke.

Mom’s birthday landed on a workday, and because of that I tried not to think about it. It was impossible. After a particularly stressful day, where I navigated unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar office doing unfamiliar things, I would have called mom and wished her a happy birthday, and we would have talked about pretty much everything. I can’t say, hypothetically, that mom would have given great advice, but her response would have put whatever was riling me up into some sort of perspective.

She would give me an account of some of her celebrations. Her sisters would have taken her out, a diner or some place fancier. The group would include props, sight gags, pointing to some sign or menu item with a funny name. My sister might have dragged her out to Philly with Bill to get margaritas or happy hour karaoke thing in Philly, some situation in which Patti a bar full of people might sing “Happy Birthday.”

Photos would be posted of mom both in and out of her element. A statue of an animal or rodeo ride. These celebrations would begat stories of her interactions with the outside, non-mom world. Mom had this ineffable quality, one completely without any guile but also arch. Think Bea Arthur meets Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

Everything she said seemed like a joke set-up. It was never clear, for example, when she asked a waiter how big the sausage was, whether she meant to be funny or it just sounded that way. When one waiter responded I’ve never had any complaints, her generous laughter won over another human, who now had a story to tell, to dine out on.

I miss her, is what I am saying. The world is way less fun and less loving without her.

This is about defining grief and it is also about lying about it. I know, I know: whole books are written about grief. I get recommendations all the time. I am sure I will connect with one some day.

But right now at least, I feel selfish talking about myself, so much so that mom is obscured by my story.

When I wrote about growing up, I thought it would be all about my dad, this extraordinarily complicated man who left my life just as I was becoming a man myself. I thought of my hometown as the secondary character.

I thought I had my situation and my story, as Vivian Gornick calls it. I had the place and I had the ideas.

But I forgot about one thing: a hero.

And that hero was mom. It took my sister to shake that out of me. Allow me to quote from my own writing again:

“I guess I am still wondering how we turned out the way we did,” I said.

“You’re forgetting we had Mom. She filled in all the cracks and voids as best she could.”

As I type about my dead mom, I’m distracted by a New Yorker podcast playing in the background. David Remnick interviews a writer about his memoir on his family’s frozen vegetable empire they created in “Southern New Jersey.”

Nobody ever says Southern New Jersey except for people like David Remnick, bless his heart.

“There must be a sense of some profound satisfaction telling this story,” the editor asks, a softball if there ever was one. The writer, who seems like a nice person, demurs, then talks about the privileges his daughter has because of exploiting people of color while building a frozen vegetable empire.

I think about writing my own family’s story, how I would have this voice in my head, one echoed by agents and publishers, that would say no one really wants to hear about a blue collar family from South Jersey. They want to read about people they want to be.

For example, people from a rich family that ran a frozen vegetable empire in Southern New Jersey.

Would people really want to read about the woman who danced with one of the Righteous Brothers at the Latin Casino? Or as a 19-year-old typed 95 words a minute and dodged getting goosed in the hallways at a Center City Bank? Or the divorced mom who rubbed shoulders with Eric Lindros typing memos for the owner of the Philadelphia Flyers in a pre-gentrified Fishtown?

Hearing this interview reminds me of another book, one my old press put out. The memoirist, a scion of a beer brewing family, experiences “great privilege” and “shopping trips to London and New York” with their family, only to have it collapse after the people buying the beer lose their jobs. Drug habits and divorce follow.

These books feel familiar—they hook us with a romance of capitalism, a reminder to readers that they, too, might have been rich once. We see versions of ourselves in writers warped by self-assurance and the need to impress no one but themselves.

That these books by robber baron descendants get published at all makes me shrug. It’s the way mom would after hearing about people who never worked a day in their lives.

I write this on a weekend, yet another day that drives home that she is not around any more. Another idle Sunday afternoon where I’d call and check in. She was the last person I would have an epic phone conversation with. There were times when, as I said goodbye to her after talking about everything under the sun, I’d say goodbye and look at the total call time.

She’s still in my phone contacts, so I can give you selected dates and times: February 29, 2024, 20 minutes, 9 seconds; August 17, 2023 33 minutes and 34 seconds; July 21, 2023: 36 minutes, 48 seconds;

Mom was a storyteller. She’d give a debrief on the family goings-on in ways that connected back generations. She’d invoke my dad, who I didn’t speak to in the last 20 years of his life, in the oddest of moments, and was the only time I would hear about him and, instead of wincing from rejection, add to a memory, laugh.

Putting the “fun” in funeral. It’s the only way.

For her birthday, I shared a photo on Instagram of mom with our girls from ten years ago. The photo, taken in a rental in Sea Isle City, is filled with white furniture and prints of seagulls. Both girls climb on top of Grandma Patti like a jungle jim, no doubt asking about going to the custard stand or a trip to the boardwalk. Patti sits in full makeup and hair done up, a queen in all her glory. When I think of mom I think of her in this state, surrounded by grandchildren, ready to hit the boardwalk and stand in the smoking zone with a Marlboro Light 100.

I don’t have a metaphor for mother-son relationships. Our relationship petered out with Husband Number Two and blossomed with Bill, Husband Number Three. What all three husbands had in common is they had their own nerdy interests. They had and have past pain in their lives, and coped with routine and keeping themselves busy with hobbies, collections. Sound familiar? It does as I look around at a roomful of books and records and several thrift shop amateur paintings by a retired lawyer from Connecticut I love to show off to visitors.

Mom took in men and took care of them, myself included.

What I mean to say: I miss her so much I don’t know how to end this sentence.

Maybe that’s what grief is: a fragment, a dangling modifier looking for a subject.

Or maybe grief is a gerund. Grieving: too slippery to be a noun, too never-ending to work as real action. And I fucking hate gerunds.

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I do apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.

One of the writing prompts I liked to use with my students is called “Place Us in the Room Where You Are Writing.” Wherever you’re writing—a dorm room, Starbucks, food court—look around and describe it. Take notes. Let people know where you are, and how it relates to what you’re trying to write about. The most famous example I can think of, although there are many, comes from Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”:

For about 15 minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary.

Do you want to read more? I ask my students. I know I do!

This writing prompt did so many things at once. It draws readers in. It tells students their everyday lives are worth writing about. It offers a frame for their stories. It helps them make connections between their surroundings and how they’re reacting to their subject matter—be it nostalgia, longing, trauma, or joy. And, my favorite: it lets them talk about notebooks and pens and keyboards if they want to.

I’m sitting here at my desk at home, looking at my random notes for what I want to write about next. Examples:

• People still call me professor. I don’t know what to think about that.

• My hair is going. It’s time to just buzz the poof off the top of my head.

• Why, oh why, is our local ice cream truck called “Mr. Ding-A-Ling”?

There are a lot of items like these—unactionable, at least as far as expanding them into essays. I mean, I can summon up 2,000 words on Mr. Ding-A-Ling, but I am not sure it’d be worth disseminating.

The Technics 1200 plays a “Dear God”-less edition of XTC’s Skylarking.1

It’s raining. Again. Every weekend for the past seven months, we’ve had a weekend without sunshine. Here in Albany—where, as my old student Abby once wrote, “even the sky seems angry”—this does not go unnoticed. People are pissed. It feeds into the narrative that Albany can’t catch a break. And they’re not wrong.

You might even be able to tell what’s going on by the publication dates of these posts. I’m trying to bang this out before the month turns. I promise you, dear readers, that I do have a work ethic—it just kicks in at the end of each month.

“You have to post something before the month ends,” the work ethic whispers. “Some people actually pay for this.”

One note reads “Content Hustle.”

I’ll try to unpack that here, since I think it relates to what I am trying to say sometimes.

During the week, I sit at the desk of my job and sometimes think back to my past life. I stole the “English Department” sign from my office and have it in my cubicle as a joke. I jot down notes for topics to cover, vignettes from two decades teaching at what I used to call the Historically Catholic College in Upstate New York.

I shirk—if that’s the right word—from the idea of talking about my “writing practice,” at least in the way I see it presented on Substack and elsewhere. I know, I know: I should get over myself. But this idea of Making a Living as a Writer, at least in the way it’s sometimes pitched, seems both unreasonable and dishonest.

Can you SEO your addiction tales into low-level riches and a modest book advance? Complain about gentrification in Upstate New York while also gentrifying Upstate New York? Run writing workshops for other gentrifiers who miss the buzz of Brooklyn? Live with your parents well into your thirties and not mention it until your third book? Charge aspiring writers just to tell them to run from MFA programs that you yourself attended?

There are actual business models for all of the above. And it’s exhausting. Maybe what I’m saying is that, at times, I’m leery about cannibalizing my own tales of professional failure for clicks. Nevertheless, I persist.

“Moments of Being.” [in quotes, as in the original notebook entry]

It’s all a bit of an acting job, really. Most days, my life is what Virginia Woolf calls “non-being,” a “fog of routine and surface impressions,” as I move through my shelves of vinyl to play, coffee to make, family to enjoy and savor. Life is life—and to be honest with you, I wish it were always a sequence of non-being.

That’s because those “moments of being,” as Woolf calls them, spring from instances where life leaves an impression. For me, they represent a double-edged sword: moments of being are often painful, but they are also ones I want to remember and write about. Moments of being most worth writing about have some conflict involved. Do they leave the pain/conflict unresolved or let it continue? Sometimes. But those moments—I can’t write about. Only the ones that have cycled through to some kind of end.

Emotion recollected in tranquility and all that jazz, as William Wordsworth liked to say.

I loved Wordsworth’s definition of poetry for years, probably because I took it as an excuse not to write until tranquility set in. When would that happen, exactly? When I retire to the Berkshires? Win the lottery with a scratch-off? Attend some writing-themed canoe weekend?

MTHFKR

As a sidebar, I will say to you, dear reader, and by way of some reassurance that I am attending to self-care, that I am looking for a new therapist. Back in my teaching days, I had a good thing going. I could walk up the street to see Dr. P, who would listen to me go on about my failures and sadness and daddy issues, and I’d walk back to campus. I remember when I worked as a freelance proofreader in midtown for this crazy lady, and she would be put out that I had to take a break from copy editing cell phone ads to see my therapist. She was in love with her first cousin, so I didn’t really take her seriously.2

Working regular business hours nowadays means going the telehealth route. I will try that eventually, but hold out for seeing someone in-person.

I did start seeing a therapist for face-to-face appointments, and we’ve had a couple at night. They’re an MD and all we talk about is vitamins and blood work. I’m not feeling it so far. Maybe after a couple appointments—after we determine if I have a variant in the MTHFR gene and whether I should go with folic acid or methylfolate—we’ll finally fucking talk about my dead mom or my loss of professional and personal identity after two decades. Stay tuned!

Lipstick Day

I remember when I had an op-ed published in The New York Times—ten, maybe twelve years ago. Sunday opinion section. A humorous piece, but still maybe my highest-profile byline. I thought it would erase the sting of the terrible review they gave my last book—the one that sent me to therapy.

I shared the link with the college’s offices, hoping they’d celebrate it. A professor published in the Old Gray Lady! But instead, the publicity team posted about National Lipstick Day across all platforms, complete with a red lips image and a caption: “What’s your favorite lipstick? Leave it in the comments!”

Ghost Signers in The Sky

I’m looking at the notes at home, and this one was a head scratcher. What the hell did this doodle mean? Then it hit me.

It references a Times Union story on how highway signs still point to the campus of my now-shuttered Historically Catholic College. The angle was obviously click-baity: local governments can't even get it together to take down a few signs, right?

My reaction was personal, since one of these signs—each and every time—triggers me. I almost muscle-memory my steering wheel to whichever off-ramp it points to.

Honestly, it wasn’t always with joy that I drove to my old job. Lately, in classic former professor fashion, I’ve been giving myself pop quizzes in my head. Here’s one.

Which one of the statements below best describes my current mood:

A. I really liked my job.

B. I was riding it out.

C. I trapped there, afraid of what would come next, unsure if I could work outside academia?

D. The “golden handcuffs” of tenure turned me into someone both underappreciated and complicit in the exploitation of adjuncts and students?

E. I just I loved teaching and was willing to suffer through everything to be able to do it.

Answer key: Trick question! The answer is F. All of the above.

I flip Skylarking over, “Dear God” still missing from side 2.

Thanks for subscribing, and for reading.

I have another post in the back, so look out for that one sooner rather than later.

I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.

Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.