Stop consuming and go DO.
The swelling opening music of Dennis Wilson’s “River Song” brought me to tears today. I have memories of a sacred river of my younger years, dyed brown with silt that clings to your skin when you swim. A place cool and vivid, where humanity could shed their skins and play as children, for a small time. The water was cool and the air muggy, buzzing with mosquitoes, but it was one of the last times I felt truly alive and connected with the human race.
“Breaks my heart to see the city/ Wonder why it ain’t pretty,” Dennis sings, and…
Casual addiction is more insidious than it looks.
I do not enjoy being drunk.
Don’t get me wrong: I have enjoyed being drunk before. But for the most part, drinking too much just makes my stomach hurt. I don’t seem to gain any euphoria from it — instead, I’m the person breaking down into drunken tears and calling my ex. I have very little control over my emotions and inhibitions when I’m sober, let alone drunk off my ass.
But I get it. I went to college too, a university known as one of the top “party schools” in the…
A story about a girl and a race.
The only time I ever won a race, I was not happy. I was baffled.
I was seventeen years old and obsessed with running. It filled my life the same way an addictive substance might — it was my every thought. Not getting faster, just sinking into that meditative place where my mind finally shut the hell up. That was bliss to seventeen year old Sam.
The race started out as any other. 5k or 3.1 miles, my favorite distance. After the starting shot, the faster girls pulled ahead and I settled into my normal pace. I was at the…
Bo Burnham is a jester-poet, a philosopher in an ill-fitting comedian’s suit.
The dazzle and bustle of summertime thrums in the air, laden thick already with mosquitoes and strands of white down torn from cottonwood trees and the crispy, meaty smell of someone grilling a steak downwind. Despite this array of sights and smells and wonder, the dazzle does not dizzy me. I sit instead bathed in another kind of glow — the otherworldly ultramarine light that emits from a curved computer monitor.
The heat of these prophetic summer days is oppressive, so I sit by the air conditioner that so assiduously fights the rolling waves of sunshine, consuming YouTube videos like…
Post-pandemic wisdom for the sorrowful soul.
I cannot help but think of the Before. Before the pandemic, before the world decided to show its ugly teeth to every man, woman, and child alive, before economies melted down and people’s lives and livelihoods were stolen from them while corporations danced with glee— before all of this, I had so much hope. So much naivety. It glittered like crystal in the sunlight, pushing me on to “follow my dreams” and “go after my heart”.
The After has aged me. I am no longer the bright, idealistic girl I was a little over a year ago, and even by…
Must I be old and gray to prove I’m childfree?
My neighbor’s child, an adorable round-cheeked girl always bedecked in dresses and costume jewelry, zoomed in front of me, giggling wildly. Her father brought up the rear, smiling in that “I’ve had enough of this shit but it’s still pretty cute” kind of way. “You want her?” he asked playfully.
I shook my head. “My cat’s hard enough.”
“You’ll want one someday!” he says as he follows his daughter down the outside railing to his apartment. This, from the man with a sticker that says “Big Knockers” on his Jeep. Just the person I need life advice from.
“Fat chance,”…
“It rips my life away but it’s the great escape…”
Finishing a book is a celestial event.
As you savor those last lines of a novel, there is a transformation going on within you. The culmination of hours upon hours of intense focus finally pops the bubble of fiction surrounding you and suddenly, you are yourself again. Only not just yourself — some new version, changed by the events you’ve experienced only in word form.
I remember vividly how scenes in books have affected me and changed me in both magnificent and minute ways. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is one of my all-time favorite works of literature for one…
A South Florida native moves to the Wild Wild West.
“Never drum on a white lady’s boobies at a big redneck dance. Got it,” Will Smith says. And at that line from an incredible cheesy movie from my childhood, I was hooked.
This isn’t your typical “girl moves from the big city to the country” story, where I fall in love with some wild cowboy who teaches me to lay down my big city ways and ride horses into the sunset. …
My best friend and I toked on a cross-country road trip.
“I’m always going to regret not buying that dub,” my best friend said, tension clear in her voice. We’d been on the road for just over 20 hours of our 4,000 mile trek from Florida to Colorado, and Emily was getting a bit antsy for us to arrive in a state where we could finally buy a damn joint.
After an unsuccessful and thoroughly disappointing stop at a dispensary in Oklahoma (where only medical was legal, but I had hoped to use my medical card from Colorado), Emily and I were both fiending a bit for something that would help…
If there’s no soul, your substance won’t shine true.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had a sacred spot.
It began because my sister, a budding Pagan and nature-lover, was always bragging about her “fairy spot” but would never take me there, citing its magical properties as dangerous and not for the unprepared. Rather than wait for her to reveal the secrets of nature, I decided to find my own spot within walking distance of my house, one that no one could hide from me.
There is a park close to the elementary school where I spent my fifth…
