On Thursday, my lovebird Sherbert passed away, as she was receiving medical care. I found her in the morning on the bottom of her cage, apparently having vomited and fallen from her perch in the night. I cleaned her up, gave her some breakfast, and drove her to the veterinarian’s office. She was being tested… Continue reading

If you’ve put your ear to the ground online, you may have heard people arguing that keeping pets is unethical. There are a lot of very serious points in favor of this argument, and I hope that anybody who wants to bring an animal into their home will strongly consider them before doing so. As… Continue reading

The last few weeks, I have made a strenuous effort to achieve optimal coziness when I get up to write each morning. I think it’s important to be comfortable in whatever you do, but comfort is one thing, and coziness is at the next level. When you’re cozy, you know you’re doing something right. There… Continue reading

It goes without saying that I am endorsing Kamala Harris and, once again, declaring Donald Trump unfit not only for the presidency but for decent human society. If that puts you off from reading this, it’s unfortunate, but I can live with that, as I have a longstanding policy of refusing to pretend that supporting… Continue reading

There’s no accounting for taste, they say. There is accounting for sales and streams and concert attendance and chart position and licensing and endorsements, and you can look a lot of those numbers up on the internet, or in a magazine if they still make those. You just can’t account for why two people can… Continue reading

This may require some context. As mentioned in last week’s post, I have been writing a novel. One of the ways that I have decided to add texture and variety to the story has been to mix in special chapters at regular intervals between the narrative ones. The narrative chapters are straightforward accounts of the… Continue reading

When I first wanted to be a teacher, I had a few specific motivations. Those motivations saw me through several years of hard work, of which I remain proud and which I mostly do not regret. (If this is already feeling like a Dear John letter, it probably can’t be helped.) I had many teachers… Continue reading

Picture all of the pop stars, every one as they appear today, or on the day they died, running naked through the Atacama desert (this is not an exercise in sexual fantasy) their bare feet blistering on the rocks and sand, backs and faces scorched and sweaty (I repeat, this is not an exercise in… Continue reading