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“It shouldn’t make sense,” Crankensten said, staring quizzically at what I’d just shown her. Finally, with a bemused head shake, she concluded “But it does.” She was referring to this beautiful work of art I’d created years ago to illustrate the differences between IBD and IBS, which couldn’t be more disparate despite the frequency with […]

04.25.25: “Have a good day at school!” I texted a niece earlier, after she seized her mom’s phone to play a game. She replied with a video from the bus stop in which she cheerfully said “Have a good day at… life!” And so I did, organizing my backpack between chores and enjoying quality time

It’s lonely sometimes cohabitating with someone whose favorite music is mostly depraved old murder ballads and whimsical Celtic folk that sounds like an Irish Spring commercial. This afternoon, as Crankenstein restlessly roamed the kitchen in search of sustenance, I yanked a box from the freezer and asked “Want to try Aunt Patti’s mac ‘n cheese?”

As I fought my way through another day that felt, physically and mentally, like being trapped underwater, my thoughts kept returning to one thing: I miss being able to write. Not that I’ve lost the ability, obviously — I’m doing it right now — but it requires a greater effort than ever before. The slowdown

We use our home printer so infrequently that I don’t recall the last time its ink cartridge was replaced, so I’ve felt no sense of urgency over the past few months when my computer issued vague warnings about future OS updates being incompatible with it. Tonight, when another reminder popped up, I decided to read

The stranger my sleep’s gotten and the more active I’ve become during it, the harder it is to trust my perceptions immediately upon waking. If I consider how often, even 12 years ago, my ex sighed “I’ve been right here, there wasn’t a noise!” when I was startled awake by loud sounds I was absolutely

This won’t be edited (if you can call it that) until Tuesday morning. “If everyone else around you is an asshole…” Crankenstein often says, paraphrasing an aphorism that serves as an elegant solution to what Leonard Cohen might’ve called a popular problem: “If everyone else is always the problem, maybe the problem isn’t everyone else.”

“Something’s wrong,” I told Crankenstein this evening, after Muriel joined us on the couch and leaned against me. A half-hour earlier, when I’d gone upstairs to shower, she seemed fine. But there was an unmistakable disturbance in the force — i.e., her joie de vivre — by the time I returned. “What?” Crankenstein asked, glancing

If I don’t jump off the McCheese hamster wheel tonight, I’m not sure it’ll happen again this month, so here we are.* My writing time this evening was spent working on a review that remains unfinished, like almost everything else in my life lately. The problem isn’t depression, if anyone’s worried about that — the

We were again woken up at 4 am by street noise, but there wasn’t a coked-up deliveryman doing his best Sonja Henie in a balaclava this time around: the disturbance was caused by a plow that a neighbor apparently hired to clear her driveway. Four hours later, tired and exasperated, we were at the grocery